PLEASE NOTE. Since writing this, I have learned exactly who Monsieur Le Doux was, and it certainly was not Christopher Marlowe. I have left this chapter in place, however, partly for historical interest, and partly as an excellent example of confirmation bias in action!

The earliest mention of Monsieur Le Doux that I have managed to find is in a letter to Anthony Bacon from Jean Castol, minister of the French Church in London, dated October 1595. (1) From this we learn that Le Doux was by then employed at Burley on the Hill, in Rutland, as tutor to the son of Sir John Harington. The boy was still very young, born in April 1592, so Le Doux must have only recently been appointed, and there is in fact good reason for thinking that he had arrived in England around the beginning of May, as I explain (under 'Montanus') later.

Of considerable interest, therefore, is part of a letter written to Anthony Bacon not long after this (3rd September) from Edward Selwyn, who had been one of Bacon's agents right from the start, and who had been in France with Bacon and his friends. He says:

"... I commit you to God, desiring you to commend me to your brother and to Mr. Standen and Mr. Lawson and the rest of your good company there. And to give William his welcome home for me, for the which I am the more glad for that he is come, when we all despaired of his return by reason of the false news we heard of him long ago, as you know." (2)

It's worth taking a moment or two over that one. Two years or so after what was Marlowe's highly suspicious 'death', "we all despaired of his [William's] return by reason of the false news we heard of him long ago." Selwyn is writing from Sussex, so he is clearly referring to someone coming 'home' to England. We know of brother Francis and of Anthony Standen (Monsieur La Faye), also that Thomas Lawson was a servant of Anthony Bacon, but who was this William? Fortunately, there is an answer to that as well.

William - his surname is never used - was one of Anthony Bacon's servants during his last three or four years in France, among other things travelling between Bacon and Lord Burghley, perhaps acting as a messenger. In particular, he was in Bordeaux at the same time as Edward Yates, another of Bacon's servants, and Anthony Standen, both of whom are listed as correspondents of Le Doux. He was also there at the time of something called the de Lussan affair which figures prominently in Le Doux's papers. There is, of course, no mention whatsoever of a Le Doux at that time, so it seems very likely, given Selwyn's welcome, that William and Le Doux were one and the same person. (3)

William was mentioned on several occasions by Anthony Standen, who, imprisoned in Bordeaux until October 1591, was released mainly through the efforts of Anthony Bacon. He appears to have been used by Bacon as a contact with Standen during this period, although they never seem to have trusted Standen enough at that time to reveal that William was in fact English, as the letter from Selwyn indicates. (4) Shortly after his release, Standen crossed into Spain as a spy for Bacon/Burghley, using the La Faye identity. On 9th of December, 1591, not far from the Franco-Spanish border, he wrote:

"This night I am to set my doubtful steps on Spanish ground, God speed me well. William shall remain in France, with whom I have left special order that, if within four days he hear not from me, that he fail not to dislodge, and that all goeth not current with me. My good Angel, I hope, will not abandon me. I have nothing left to give William for his return, which grieveth me full sore; of the cat, but her skin." (5)

From that moment, until Selwyn's letter, welcoming him home, William disappears; but less than seven weeks after Standen's departure, on 26th January 1591/2, Bacon has returned to London for good, (6) and Marlowe (back with Burghley?) is under arrest in Flushing, on suspicion of conspiring to counterfeit and 'utter' a Dutch shilling. (7)

Before his two years in Bordeaux, Bacon had spent about five years at Montauban, in the Languedoc, and we know from a letter written to him on 17 August 1589 (8) that, for at least some of the time that he was there, he had had William (referred to as Guilliaum) in his service. Guilliaum had accompanied Francis Allen - the writer of the letter - from Montauban to London, where they had visited Lord Burghley, and was being sent back to Montauban with the letter. We also learn that Bacon's formidable mother, Lady Ann, held him to be her son's "one honest and trusty man". Given that she hadn't seen Anthony for many years, how could she have discovered this? One obvious answer would be that her brother-in-law and old friend, Lord Burghley, had told her so; in other words, that Guilliaum was someone he had commissioned to serve his rather wayward nephew, while also acting as their go-between. As Macbeth puts it (III.4.130/1) "There's not a one of them but in his house / I keep a servant fee'd".

There is one other mention of Guilliaum, long after his disappearance, which throws an interesting light upon him. It is in a letter to Bacon from Anthony Standen, dated 13th September 1594, in which he tells of having been very unwell. He continues:

"I am not yet, Sir, strong enough either to go backward or forward, and therefore must perforce stay here, where I have found another Guilliaum; a Nurse that will by her good diets and kitchen inventions soon set me on my feet." (9)

After nearly three years, Guilliaum was clearly remembered as an expert in medicinal herbs and remedies. It is therefore worth noting that one of Le Doux's most expensive books is Wecker's Medicinæ, consisting of over 700 tightly packed folio pages of medicinal information.

To summarize the information we now have about Le Doux and William:

Premise 1: that William (or Guilliaum) was Marlowe

• Marlowe's 'death' was in May 1593, which would precisely match when Anthony Bacon's friends heard 'false news' making them despair of ever seeing William again.

• Both Marlowe and William were agents at the same time, again most probably for Lord Burghley.

• Bacon's mother thought Guilliaum to be his 'one honest and trusty man'. This would be explained if she knew of his having been appointed as Anthony's 'servant' by Burghley, her brother-in-law and, as he put it, her 'old friend'. (10)

• The gap in our knowledge of Marlowe's intelligence work between 1587 and 1592 perfectly well accommodates what we know of William's movements, which in turn fit everything that is known about Marlowe's life at the time. (11)

• Marlowe did seem to have a propensity for getting involved in street affrays, and we find William, with Edward Yates, engaged in just such an incident in Bordeaux. (12)

Premise 2: that William (or Guilliaum) was Le Doux

• William was 'welcomed home' by Edward Selwyn just when Le Doux was making his first appearance in England.

• Both of them had a 'servant/master' relationship with Anthony Bacon, and both were, apparently, Englishmen hiding behind a French identity.

• Le Doux's correspondents, Standen and Yates, were very well known to William, the Lord Treasurer, Faunt and Berauld almost certainly, and Perez and Rolston most probably too.

• Le Doux's own papers show him to have been in the Bordeaux area in 1591, and connected with Anthony Bacon. Although this certainly applies to William, there is in Bacon's papers no mention whatsoever of Le Doux having been there at the time.

• Guilliaum was remembered as an expert in 'good diets and kitchen inventions' to cure illness. Matching this, one of Le Doux's most costly books was Wecker's Medicinæ, an amazing 700-page 'syntax' of what appears to have been almost the total medicinal knowledge of the time.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES (WILLIAM)

1 LPL Bacon Papers MS.652 f.105

2 Ibid. MS.653 f.271. The sense is clear, so I have taken the liberty of updating the spelling and punctuation.

3 It is possible that the name 'Will' had been applied to Marlowe by Thomas Nashe in his Strange Newes of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (1593). In this he refers to a meal with Robert Greene, at which "I and one of my fellows, Will. Monox (has thou never heard of him and his great dagger?), were in company with him a month before he died". Knowing Nashe, 'Monox' was most probably a pseudonym, and the nearest word to it seems to be monoculus (a one-eyed person). We are therefore concerned with a friend of Nashe and Greene, whom Nashe would prefer not to name, and who is associated in some way with a dagger and only one eye. If written any time from June on, perhaps for the second edition, there could be very little doubt who Nashe meant!

4 There is a rather nice irony in the letter quoted below, where Standen describes how he fooled three Englishmen into believing that he was French, while himself being fooled in exactly the same way by William, who was there with him at the time.

5 LPL Bacon Papers MS.648 f.133, again with the spelling and punctuation modernized.

6 Ibid. MS.648 f.147

7 PRO State Papers SP84 / 44 / 60. Sir Robert Sidney's letter from Flushing, dated 26th January 1591/2.

8 LPL Bacon Papers, MS.647 f.245-6

9 Ibid. MS.650 f.275, with spelling and punctuation modernized.

10 Ibid. MS.649 f.276

11 Marlowe was in London on 18th September 1589, described as 'lately [nuper in the original Latin, i.e. recently] resident in Norton Folgate'. Perhaps a quick trip back to London to deliver his newly written Doctor Faustus and to help get it up and running at one of the theatres in that neighbourhood? In May 1593, Thomas Kyd referred to "some occasion of our writing together in one chamber two years since" which has the sound of a similarly short-term arrangement. In each case Marlowe could have taken temporary lodging with a friend: Watson in 1589 and Kyd in 1590/1.

12 LPL Bacon Papers, MS.648 f.123, speaks of William, with Edward Yates, being attacked in the street. Yates received a dagger injury to the head very much like the injury sustained 18 months later by Ingram Frizer, which allowed Frizer to plead self-defence. Did Marlowe recall this occasion when his faked death was being planned?