him from behind. Although some biographers still accept the story told at the inquest as a true account, the majority nowadays find it hard to believe, and suggest that it was a deliberate murder, even though there is little agreement as to just who was behind it or their motive for such a course of action. The Marlovian theory even argues that the most logical reason for those people to have been there at that time was to fake Marlowe's death, allowing him to escape almost certain trial and execution for his seditious atheism. Why, after the inquest, there was a week's delay before Poley delivered to the Privy Council the replies to the letters concerning "special and secret affairs of great importance" he had carried, is one of the several mysteries concerning this event. Later career For the next eight years Poley was fairly regularly employed by the Privy Council either as a messenger, agent provocateur or spy. It was presumably in one of the latter two categories that in September 1593 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Netherlands accused of activities "amounting to treason", but after a couple of weeks he was released without charge. There was another probably much longer period of imprisonment for him in the Summer of 1597, when it seems that he was placed in the Marshalsea to spy on the playwright Ben Jonson whose play, The Isle of Dogs, written with Thomas Nashe had upset the authorities. Jonson attacked Poley and a second informer, named Parrot, as "damned villains" and later wrote a poem praising convivial company without spies, including the line "we shall have no Poley or Parrot by". The last payment known to have been received by Poley was 5 September 1601, when he was paid £10, by Sir Robert Cecil, for carrying post from and to Paris. This is the last heard of him except for a letter he wrote to Cecil on 18 July the following year. He sends information concerning Jesuits and their means of entering the country, but also indicates that his relationship with Cecil is now rather strained, saying, "How, half offended, you said to me I never made you good intelligence, nor did you service worth reckoning, is the cause I have not since presented myself with offer of my duty, although I much desire my endeavours might please you, my necessities needing your