Resume: Setting the Letters in Context
(a)- Appendix A – the Privy Council letter to Cambridge University.
The letter from the Privy Council has been probed intensively, but the core issue has remained obscure – why did Cambridge University authorities block the award of Marlowe’s MA when the college had signed the form of authorisation, meaning the obstacles to awarding the degree were not academic?
However the process of awarding a degree required something more than academic proficiency – it required a pledge of allegiance to the Queen as head of the Church of England. The universities were open to Catholics, but they could not get a degree unless they swore the oath of allegiance to the Crown before Commencement, and Catholics habitually refused to do so so left university without degrees A notable example was Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder plot, who did not take the oath and did not get a degree. As Marlowe did, he could not be a Catholic. The point of decision was taking the oath of allegiance to the Queen. Marlowe clearly did so.
Yet the belief Marlowe was a Catholic surfaces repeatedly in sketches of Marlowe’s defining characteristics at this stage in his career, which is assumed to have forced action by the authorities, the university being fearful of becoming a staging post for enemies of the Elizabethan government. Nicholl endorses this possibility in his ODNB entry discussing the letter arguing:
“This document seems to offer two contradictory accounts of Marlowe’s behaviour….reports circulating at Cambridge that he is a militant young Catholic intending to defect…. on the other hand, there is the council’s assertion that he really had ‘no such intent’…” (emphasis added) (34)
Nicholl glosses one interpretation that “Marlowe had been moving in Catholic circles as a spy or intelligencer for the government, an activity increasingly common in the 1580s, typically (but not exclusively under the aegis of Sir Francis Walsingham”. (2 yes 2) It is certainly possible Marlowe moved in Catholic circles, and later he was to be friendly with Thomas Watson, who was a Catholic, but something happened in the summer of 1587 which triggered action by the university. While he may not yet have taken the oath the very fact that the Privy Council supported him showed they had every expectation he would do so. This summer was only a year away from the expected Spanish Armada. The Privy council was not going to support a man who might convert to a religion which was hostile and intent on imposing that religion through a successful invasion force if the Armada landed.
Do reports on Marlowe’s Catholicism exist? Hardly in what the Privy Council writes, but even if he was a Catholic it is unlikely the university authorities refusing the degree would have any effect. It is unlikely that they could stop Marlowe going abroad if he chose to go. Cambridge, unlike the government, had no powers of arrest.