The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

It was the Catholics’ dream – the dream of Charles V and Francis I, of Bloody Mary and Philip of Spain – to get rid of the Protestants by exterminating them. They all had to learn that it was impossible – just as the English under Elizabeth had to learn that it was impossible to get rid of the Catholics by executing them. Death by martyrdom merely fuelled the flames, and twice as many heretics sprang up as before. The massacre of St Bartholomew also led to another bloody civil war – for Henry of Navarre managed to escape and lead his Protestants against the Catholics. Eventually, he became king of France – Henry IV – and issued the Edict of Nantes declaring that Huguenots were free to worship in their own way. That satisfactory and logical solution was, of course, the last thing that anybody wanted; twelve years later Henry was stabbed to death by a fanatical Catholic, and the bloodshed in the name of religion continued.

To the eye of the historian, the situation is replete with irony. An orthodox Jew suffering from the delusion that the world is about to come to an end creates a new form of Judaism. His followers, who have now put off the end of the world to the year 1000, go on to conquer half the world. In the process, they become as corrupt and tyrannical as their early persecutors and are finally routed by a neurotic German monk who suffers from constipation. The result is a long-drawn out religious war that causes more misery and more deaths than the conquests of Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamurlane put together. And the only thing that is clear is that all this has nothing whatever to do with the teaching of the Jew who started it all.

HISTORY CHANGES ITS RULES

At ten o’clock in the morning on 30 May 1593, four men sat down to a meal at a tavern owned by Mistress Eleanor Bull, overlooking the river Thames at Deptford: a notorious swindler, a robber, a government spy and a great dramatist. The dramatist was twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe, who had achieved fame with his Tamburlaine the Great at the age of twenty-three. His Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus had been equally successful; he had even tried his hand at a play about the St Bartholomew Day slaughter called The Massacre at Paris.

On this day in May, Marlowe must have been feeling a certain anxiety; two weeks before, his friend Thomas Kyd had been arrested by officers of the queen, who had searched his room. They were looking for ‘treasonable materials’ – verses inciting Londoners to riot against foreigners. What they actually found among Kyd’s papers were certain ‘atheistical’ writings, ‘vile heretical conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ’. Kyd was taken to Bridewell prison and tortured on the rack. This consisted of a powerful oak frame, rather like a table with its top removed, with rollers attached to the legs at both ends. The prisoner was stretched out on the floor, ropes tied around his wrists and ankles, then the rollers were turned so he was drawn up level with the ‘table top’. If he still refused to talk, the pulleys were turned still farther until his arms and legs came out of their sockets. Under this torture, Kyd confessed that the ‘vile heretical conceits’ belonged to his friend Christopher Marlowe. Kyd was then released, a broken man – he died about a year later. Marlowe was arrested at Scadbury, the country home of his patron Thomas Walsingham, where he had fled to escape the plague in London. He was taken to prison, but quickly released on bail – undoubtedly due to the influence of powerful friends. (Walsingham, who was the cousin of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, was virtually the government’s spymaster general.) But the case was by no means at an end. Marlowe was due to appear in front of the Star Chamber, a kind of Inquisition whose interests were political rather than religious.

Marlowe and his friends spent the day eating and drinking, and probably discussing the business of spying – all four had been at some time employed by Walsingham. They may have walked along the bank of the river, which would have been pleasantly green and open to the fields. Then they went back to the room and did some more drinking. Around six in the evening, they decided to pay the bill, and a dispute arose between Marlowe and a man called Ingram Frizer. According to the evidence given at the inquest, Marlowe was lying on a bed, behind the other three, who were sitting at the table. Marlowe grabbed Frizer’s dagger and slashed at his head, inflicting two wounds on the scalp. The others then grappled with Marlowe to disarm him; Frizer got possession of the dagger, and stabbed Marlowe above the right eye. It penetrated about two inches, and Marlowe died instantly.

Many Marlowe scholars have raised doubts about this story. Marlowe’s wound would have been consistent with a man who was attacked as he lay with his eyes closed. It would then have been easy enough to inflict the scalp wounds on Frizer and concoct the story of the quarrel – Frizer was, in fact, acquitted and taken back into Walsingham’s employment. And why should Marlowe have been murdered? He was certainly something of a liability to his friends. Four years before, he had been involved in a fight that ended in the murder of a man called Bradley. In the previous year he had been arrested on a charge of coining – an extremely serious matter in the Elizabethan age, when coining was regarded as petty treason, and the coiner could be hanged, drawn and quartered. He escaped by pleading that it was merely an experiment ‘to see the goldsmith’s cunning’, and since only one coin had been made, Burghley – Elizabeth’s chief adviser – decided to take a lenient view.

A week after Marlowe’s second arrest, an informer named William Baines prepared a document for the queen ‘containing the opinion of Christopher Marlowe concerning his damnable opinions’, which lists various heterodox opinions on religion – such as that Moses was a conjuror, that Jesus deserved to be crucified, and that all Protestants were hypocritical asses. In another document, Baines speaks of ‘the horrible blasphemies uttered by Christopher Marlowe’, and goes on to state that ‘in every company he cometh he persuades men and women to Atheism, willing them not to be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins and utterly scorning both God and his ministers’.

Even fifty years earlier, such opinions would have been unthinkable. Frederick II, the ‘wonder of the world’, is reported to have said that Jesus, Moses and Mahomet were imposters; but then, he had the advantage of personal acquaintance with one particularly bigoted pope, as well as with many Moslems. As Hugh Thomas pointed out in his Unfinished History of the World, he is the only man reported to have held such views between 400 and 1400 A.D. Even men of classical culture – like Petrarch – would never have dared to think such a thing. They took the existence of God and the devil so completely for granted that it would have seemed a very poor gamble to harbour such thoughts – after all, if hell really did exist, you might find yourself in it as a punishment for doubting its existence. The undermining of the Catholic faith by Luther caused intellectual shock waves all over Europe. It seemed that the unthinkable, the impossible, had happened. It was as if a mountain had collapsed and revealed that it was made of painted cardboard. Even the efforts of Ignatius Loyola and the Council of Trent made no real difference. Calvin and Bloody Mary could go on burning as many heretics as they liked: Humpty Dumpty could never be put back together again. We can see this new attitude of irreverence in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, where someone says: ‘Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.’

That is why, when we read the Elizabethans, we feel that their minds are akin to our own. Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, even Malory, seem to be strangers, inhabitants of another universe. They accepted that there was some great scheme of things, of which they were a tiny part. The Elizabethans were the first generation to grow up in a new climate of religious scepticism. The English had never really been interested in religion. As Conyers Read says, ‘in thirty years they accepted five distinct changes in their religion without any great fuss about the matter.’ (The Tudors p. 138.) A people who could accept these swings from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again as a matter of course were not likely to feel that either had a monopoly of religious truth. They might not be in the least inclined towards atheism, but the new religious climate was bound to make them willing to discuss such questions as predestination – the doctrine upheld by Calvin – and the immortality of the soul. (Marlowe’s contemporary Sir Walter Raleigh acquired a reputation for atheism because of his eagerness to discuss such topics over the dinner table.) And men who cease to feel that such subjects are forbidden have begun to take responsibility for their own consciences. They are thinking and behaving like individuals.