Riggs believes that the order to get Marlowe came from the very top. The conclusion of Baines’s report was that ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped’. On reading this, the Queen said, ‘Prosecute it to the full.’ A few days later, Marlowe was invited to a ‘safe house’ in Deptford where he met with three men who were up to their ears in espionage and racketeering: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley. Frizer stabbed Marlowe just above the eye. The blade entered his brain and killed him instantly. With suspicious alacrity, Frizer was acquitted on the pardon of the Queen herself.

The evidence is too murky and contradictory for it to be said that Riggs has decisively solved the case, but his reading of events is cleaner and more persuasive than that in Charles Nicholl’s wonderfully atmospheric but historically flawed The Reckoning, which turns on rivalry between different court factions. As a firm believer in the cock-up as opposed to the conspiracy theory of history, I still don’t believe that a contract was taken out on Marlowe’s life. I think it is more likely that he was being very closely watched with a view to subsequent internment, and that the official story of his death — a brawl about money at the end of a long day’s drinking — may come close to the truth of what happened. I suspect that Frizer was pardoned because it was convenient that Marlowe was dead, not because he had been acting under orders.

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