WRITING SPIES, TREATIES AND RAMPAGE

Some stuff for the 18th May:

The playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested on the 12^th May 1593 for heresy and grassed up Christopher Marlowe. Both writers may have been involved with Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. There is quite a performance in the short lives and writings of these two characters.

Marlowe (maybe)

In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel", written in blank verse, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed, "Tamburlaine". On the 11^th  May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a fragment of a heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been writing "in one chamber" some two years earlier. It is believed that Kyd was tortured brutally to obtain this information. At that time they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A warrant for Marlowe's arrest was issued on the 18^th May, when the Privy Council apparently knew that he might be found staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580’s and a man more deeply involved in state espionage than any other member of the Privy Council. Marlowe duly presented himself on the 20^th May but, there apparently being no Privy Council meeting on that
day, was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary". On Wednesday the 30th May, Marlowe was killed. He was 29 years old. Thomas Kyd died 15 months later aged 35, a broken man.

The Treaty of Amiens was entered into to end hostilities between the French Republic and the United Kingdom during the French Revolutionary Wars. It was signed in the city of Amiens on 25 March 1802 (Germinal 4, year X in the French Revolutionary Calendar), by Joseph Bonaparte and the Marquess Cornwallis as a "Definitive Treaty of Peace". It was, of course the usual carve up of the world. England withdrew, not for the first time, from Egypt and obtained possession of Trinidad, Tobago and Ceylon.

Cornwallis

Joseph Bonaparte
(Napoleon's older brother)

The treaty, beyond confirming "peace, friendship, and good understanding", called for:

▪   The restoration of prisoners and hostages.

▪   The United Kingdom to return the Cape Colon to the Batavian Republic.

▪   The UK to return most of its captured Dutch West Indian Islands islands to the Batavian Republic.

▪   The UK to withdraw its forces from Egypt.

▪   The ceding to the UK of Trinidad, Tobago and Ceylon.

▪   France to withdraw its forces from the Papal States.

▪   The borders of French Guiana to be fixed. 

▪  Malta, Gozo and Comino to be restored to the Hospitallers and to be declared neutral, although the islands remained under the British Empire.

▪  The island of Minorca be returned to Spain.

▪  The House of Orange-Nassau was to be compensated for its losses in the Netherlands.

Two days after signing the treaty, all four parties signed an addendum specifically acknowledging that the failure to use the languages of all of the signatory powers (the treaty was only published in English and French) was not prejudicial and should not be viewed as setting a precedent. It also stated that the omission of any individual's titles was unintentional and also not intended to be prejudicial. The Dutch and French representatives also signed a separate convention clarifying that the Batavian Republic was not to be financially responsible for the compensation paid to the House of Orange-Nassau.

All of which brings us to the 18^th May 1803 when the United Kingdom revoked the Treaty of Amiens and declared war on France. This ‘definitive treaty of peace’ lasted just over one year,

Shawn Timothy Nelson was a U.S. Army veteran and unemployed plumber who stole an M60 Patton tank from a United States National Guard Armory in San Diego, California and went on a rampage on the 18^th May 1995, destroying cars, fire hydrants, and an RV before being shot and killed by police