fully to accept it. After his arrest Babington sent Poley a letter saying "Farewell sweet Robyn, if as I take thee, true to me. If not adieu, omnius bipedum nequissimus [of all two-footed creatures the vilest]." Babington also asked him to return a diamond ring. Poley spent the next two years imprisoned in the Tower of London, during which time Sir Philip Sidney died from wounds he had received at Zutphen in the Netherlands, and Mary Queen of Scots was tried and executed. He was released late in 1588, having nevertheless kept in touch with both Blount and Walsingham during his incarceration. Messenger of the Court His cover as a Catholic agent now blown, Poley moved into a more administrative role in Walsingham's service, apparently acting as more of a case officer and messenger. He was credited with creating complex ciphers in order to deliver his messages without fear of interception. Records of payments to him between December 1588 and September 1601 show travel with important and secret documents to and from Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Scotland for members of the Privy Council. Sir Francis died in 1590, but payments continued to be made to Poley mainly by the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage or the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, until Heneage's death in October 1595, and after that mainly by Burghley's son Sir Robert Cecil. The killing of Christopher Marlowe It was in the course of one of these trips that the killing of Christopher Marlowe occurred in the house of a widow, Eleanor Bull, in Deptford. Poley had left England on 8 May 1593 with messages for The Hague. The warrant for his payment, dated 12 June, tells us that he had delivered the reply to the court at Nonsuch Palace on 8 June and that he had been "in her Majesty's service all the aforesaid time." In 1925, however, Leslie Hotson discovered details of the inquest on the death of Christopher Marlowe, the famous poet/dramatist, at which Poley was one of the three witnesses. The report itself tells us that Ingram Frizer killed Marlowe in self-defence, by stabbing him over the right eye in a scuffle started by Marlowe in a dispute over payment of the bill (the "reckoning") for the room and board provided for them. Poley and another man, former government agent Nicholas Skeres, were sitting on either side of Frizer when Marlowe allegedly attacked