In 1593, indeed, we find atheism formally charged against two famous men, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh, of whom the first is documentarily connected with Kett, and the second in turn with Marlowe. An official document,[30] preserved by some chance, reveals that Marlowe was given—whether or not over the wine-cup—to singularly audacious derision of the received beliefs; and so explicit is the evidence that it is nearly certain he would have been executed for blasphemy had he not been privately killed (1593) while the proceedings were pending. The “atheism” imputed to him is not made out in any detail; but many of the other utterances are notably in keeping with Marlowe’s daring temper; and they amount to unbelief of a stringent kind. In Doctor Faustus[31] he makes Mephistopheles affirm that “Hell hath no limits ... but where we are is hell”—a doctrine which we have seen to be current before his time; and in his private talk he had gone much further. Nashe doubtless had him in mind when he spoke of men of “superabundance of wit.” Not only did he question, with Raleigh, the Biblical chronology: he affirmed “That Moyses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots” [i.e., Thomas Harriott, or Harriots, the astronomer, one of Raleigh’s circle] “can do more than he”; and concerning Jesus he used language incomparably more offensive to orthodox feeling than that of Hamond and Kett. There is more in all this than a mere assimilation of Machiavelli; though the further saying “that the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe”—put also by Greene [if not by Marlowe], with much force of versification, in the mouth of a villain-hero in the anonymous play of Selimus[32]—tells of that influence. Marlowe was indeed not the man to swear by any master without adding something of his own. Atheism, however, is not inferrible from any of his works: on the contrary, in the second part of his famous first play he makes his hero, described by the repentant Greene as the “atheist Tamburlaine,” declaim of deity with signal eloquence, though with a pantheistic cast of phrase. In another passage, a Moslem personage claims to be on the side of a Christ who would punish perjury; and in yet another the hero is made to trample under foot the pretensions of Mohammed.[33] It was probably his imputation of perjury to Christian rulers in particular that earned for Marlowe the malignant resentment which inspired the various edifying comments published after his unedifying death. Had he not perished as he did in a tavern brawl, he might have had the nobler fate of a martyr.
Concerning Raleigh, again, there is no shadow of proof of atheism, though his circle, which included the Earls of Northumberland and Oxford, was called a “school of atheism” in a Latin pamphlet by the Jesuit Parsons,[34] published at Rome in 1593; and this reputation clung to him. It is matter of literary history, however, that he, like Montaigne, had been influenced by the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus;[35] his short essay The Sceptick being a naïf exposition of the thesis that “the sceptick doth neither affirm neither deny any position; but doubteth of it, and applyeth his Reason against that which is affirmed, or denied, to justifie his non-consenting.”[36] The essay itself, nevertheless, proceeds upon a set of wildly false propositions in natural history, concerning which the adventurous reasoner has no doubts whatever; and altogether we may be sure that his artificial skepticism did not carry him far in philosophy. In the Discovery of Guiana (1600) he declares that he is “resolved” of the truth of the stories of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders; and in his History of the World (1603–16) he insists that the stars and other celestial bodies “incline the will by mediation of the sensitive appetite.”[37] In other directions, however, he was less credulous. In the same History he points out, as Marlowe had done in talk, how incompatible was such a phenomenon as the mature civilization of ancient Egypt in the days of Abraham with the orthodox chronology.[38] This, indeed, was heresy enough, then and later, seeing that not only did Bishop Pearson, in 1659, in a work on The Creed which has been circulated down to the nineteenth century, indignantly denounce all who departed from the figures in the margin of the Bible; but Coleridge, a century and a half later, took the very instance of Egyptian history as triumphantly establishing the accuracy of the Bible record against the French atheists.[39] As regards Raleigh’s philosophy, the evidence goes to show only that he was ready to read a Unitarian essay, presumably that already mentioned, supposed to be Kett’s; and that he had intercourse with Marlowe and others (in particular his secretary, Harriott) known to be freethinkers. A prosecution begun against him on this score, at the time of the inquiry concerning Marlowe (when Raleigh was in disgrace with the Queen), came to nothing. It had been led up to by a translation of Parsons’s pamphlet, which affirmed that his private group was known as “Sir Walter Rawley’s school of Atheisme,” and that therein “both Moyses and our Savior, the Old and the New Testaments, are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backwards.”[40] This seems to have been idle gossip, though it tells of unbelief somewhere; and Raleigh’s own writings always indicate[41] belief in the Bible; though his dying speech and epitaph are noticeably deistic. That he was a deist, given to free discussion, seems the probable truth.
In passing sentence at the close of Raleigh’s trial for treason in 1603, in which his guilt is at least no clearer than the inequity of the proceedings, Lord Chief Justice Popham unscrupulously taunted him with his reputation for heresy. “You have been taxed by the world with the defence of the most heathenish and blasphemous opinions, which I list not to repeat, because Christian ears cannot endure to hear them, nor the authors and maintainers of them be suffered to live in any Christian commonwealth. You know what men said of Harpool.”[42] If the preface to his History of the World, written in the Tower, be authentic, Raleigh was at due pains to make clear his belief in deity, and to repudiate alike atheism and pantheism. “I do also account it,” he declares, “an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms.”[43] And he is no more tolerant than his judge when he discusses the question of the eternity of the universe, then the crucial issue as between orthodoxy and doubt. “Whosoever will make choice rather to believe in eternal deformity [=want of form] or in eternal dead matter, than in eternal light and eternal life, let eternal death be his reward. For it is a madness of that kind, as wanteth terms to express it.”[44] Inasmuch as Aristotle was the great authority for the denounced opinion, Raleigh is anti-Aristotelean. “I shall never be persuaded that God hath shut up all light of learning within the lantern of Aristotle’s brains.”[45] But in the whole preface there is only one, and that a conventional, expression of belief in the Christian dogma of salvation; and as to that we may note his own words: “We are all in effect become comedians in religion.”[46] Still, untruthful as he certainly was,[47] we may take him as a convinced theist of the experiential school, standing at the ordinary position of the deists of the next century.
Notably enough, he anticipates the critical position of Hume as to reason and experience: “That these and these be the causes of these and these effects, time hath taught us and not reason; and so hath experience without art.”[48] Such utterance, if not connected with professions of piety, might in those days give rise to such charges of unbelief as were so freely cast at him. But the charges seem to have been in large part mere expressions of the malignity which religion so normally fosters, and which can seldom have been more bitter than then. Raleigh is no admirable type of rectitude; but he can hardly have been a worse man than his orthodox enemies. And we must estimate such men in full view of the low standards of their age.
The belief about Raleigh’s atheism was so strong that we have Archbishop Abbot writing to Sir Thomas Roe on Feb. 19, 1618–1619, that Raleigh’s end was due to his “questioning” of “God’s being and omnipotence.” It is asserted by Francis Osborn, who had known Raleigh, that he got his title of Atheist from Queen Elizabeth. See the preface (Author to Reader) to Osborn’s Miscellany of Sundry Essays, etc., in 7th ed. of his Works, 1673. As to atheism at Elizabeth’s court see J. J. Tayler, Retrospect of Relig. Life of England, 2nd ed. p. 198, and ref. Lilly makes one of his characters write of the ladies at court that “they never jar about matters of religion, because they never mean to reason of them” (Euphues, Arber’s ed. p. 194).
A curious use was made of Raleigh’s name and fame after his death for various purposes. In 1620 or 1621 appeared “Vox Spiritus, or Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost; a Conference between Signr. Gondamier ... and Father Bauldwine”—a “seditious” tract by one Captain Gainsford. It appears to have been reprinted in 1622 as “Prosopoeia. Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost.” Then in 1626 came a new treatise, “Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost, or England’s Forewarner,” published in 1626 at Utrecht by Thomas Scott, an English minister there, who was assassinated in the same year. The title having thus had vogue, there was published in 1631 “Rawleigh’s Ghost, or, a Feigned Apparition of Syr Walter Rawleigh to a friend of his, for the translating into English the Booke of Leonard Lessius (that most learned man), entituled De Providentia Numinis et animi immortalitate, written against the Atheists and Polititians of these days.” The translation of a Jesuit’s treatise (1613) thus accredited purports to be by “A. B.” In a reprint of 1651 the “feigned” disappears from the title-page; but “Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost” remains to attract readers; and the translation, now purporting to be by John Holden, who claims to have been a friend of Raleigh’s, is dedicated to his son Carew. In the preface the Ghost adjures the translator (who professes to have heard him frequently praise the treatise of Lessius) to translate the work with Raleigh’s name on the title, so as to clear his memory of “a foul and most unjust aspersion of me for my presumed denial of a deity.”
The latest documentary evidence as to the case of Marlowe is produced by Mr. F. S. Boas in his article, “New Light on Marlowe and Kyd,” in the Fortnightly Review, February, 1899, reproduced in his edition of the works of Thomas Kyd (Clarendon Press, 1901). In addition to the formerly known data as to Marlowe’s “atheism,” it is now established that Thomas Kyd, his fellow dramatist, was arrested on the same charge, and that there was found among his papers one containing “vile hereticall conceiptes denyinge the divinity of Jhesus Christe our Saviour.” This Kyd declared he had had from Marlowe, denying all sympathy with its view. Nevertheless, he was put to the torture. The paper, however, proves to be a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds, and is much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than by Marlowe. In the MSS. now brought to light, one Cholmeley, who “confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become an Atheiste,” is represented by a spy as speaking “all evil of the Counsell, saying that they are all Atheistes and Machiavillians, especially my Lord Admirall.” The same “atheist,” who imputes atheism to others as a vice, is described as regretting he had not killed the Lord Treasurer, “sayenge that he could never have done God better service.”
For the rest, the same spy tells that Cholmeley believed Marlowe was “able to shewe more sound reasons for Atheisme than any devine in Englande is able to geve to prove devinitie, and that Marloe told him that he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others.” On the last point there is no further evidence, save that Sir Walter, his dependent Thomas Harriott, and Mr. Carewe Rawley, were on March 21, 1593–1594, charged upon sworn testimonies with holding “impious opinions concerning God and Providence.” There was, however, no prosecution. Harriott had published in 1588 a work on his travels in Virginia, at the close of which is a passage in the devoutest vein telling of his missionary labours (quoted by Mr. Boas, art. cited, p. 225). Yet by 1592 he had, with his master, a reputation for atheism; and that it was not wholly on the strength of his great scientific knowledge is suggested by the statement of Anthony à Wood that he “made a philosophical theology, wherein he cast off the Old Testament.”
Of this no trace remains; but it is established that he was a highly accomplished mathematician, much admired by Kepler; and that he “applied the telescope to celestial purposes almost simultaneously with Galileo” (art. Harriott in Dict. of Nat. Biog.; cp. art. in Encyc. Brit.). “Harriott ... was the first who dared to say A=B in the form A – B = 0, one of the greatest sources of progress ever opened in algebra” (Prof. A. De Morgan, Newton, his Friend and his Niece, 1885, p. 91). Further, he improved algebraic notation by the use of small italic letters in place of Roman capitals, and threw out the hypothesis of secondary planets as well as of stars invisible from their size and distance. “He was the first to verify the results of Galileo.” Rev. Baden Powell, Hist. of Nat. Philos. 1834, pp. 126, 168. Cp. Rigaud, as cited by Powell; Ellis’s notes on Bacon, in Routledge’s 1-vol. ed. 1905, pp. 674–76; and Storojenko, as above cited, p. 38, note.
Against the aspersion of Harriott at Raleigh’s trial may be cited the high panegyric of Chapman, who terms him “my admired and soul-loved friend, master of all essential and true knowledge,”[49] and one “whose judgment and knowledge, in all kinds, I know to be incomparable and bottomless, yea, to be admired as much as his most blameless life, and the right sacred expense of his time, is to be honoured and reverenced”; with a further “affirmation of his clear unmatchedness in all manner of learning.”[50]