Authorship of the 1593 Dutch Church Libel

Abstract

On 5 May, 1593, a poem was fixed to the Stranger Church on Broad Street in London,1 threatening violence against the congregations of the Dutch Protestant church and the neighbouring French Protestant churches. These churches were for merchants and refugees of the Religious Wars on the Continent, who were given exemptions from the dictates of the Church of England bishops. They were founded in 1550 with the help of William Cecil, who in 1593 was one of the few remaining puritans in the Privy Council. These churches were a conspicuous instance of tolerance for the congregations of separatist Protestant churches, similar to that advocated for Lutherans and Puritans, as well as Huguenots, in Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris just months before, in January, 1593.2 These Nonconformist churches were also a model of churches functioning without bishops. The poem was supposedly by an anonymous poet, but the author left some overt clues suggesting he was Kit Marlowe. He threatened to spill more blood than the ‘Paris massacre’, the author’s pseudonym was ‘Tamburlaine’, and the text was in iambic pentameter, Marlowe’s favoured meter.