Christopher Marlowe/Marlor/Marlerus

1602, July 4/14. I thought it the part of Her Majesty's loyal subject in these my travels to forewarn the Council of certain caterpillars, I mean Jesuits and seminary priests, who, as I am credibly informed…are to be sent from the English seminary at Valladolid, in the kingdom of Castile in Spain, to pervert and withdraw her Majesty's loyal subjects from their due obedience to her…In the said seminary there is…one Christopher Marlor (as he will be called), but yet for certain his name is Christopher, sometime master in arts of Trinity College in Cambridge, of very low stature, well set, of a black round beard, not yet priest, but to come over in the mission of the next year ensuing.

- William Vaughan to the Queen's Privy Council

The college register records (in Latin) the admission of John Matthew, alias Christopher Marlerus of Cambridge, on 30 March 1599; he was made a priest in 1602 and sent back to England "for the first time" in 1603. A "Christopher Marlowe, alias Mathews, a seminary priest" was a close prisoner (in solitary confinement) in the Gatehouse Prison, Westminster, from 25 June to September, 1604.

Christopher Marlowe, the dramatist, was a scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, not Trinity - there was another Christopher Marlowe at Trinity. However, the Trinity Marlowe, like his more infamous Corpus counterpart, may have been dead by 1602 when the spy Vaughan penned his incriminating letter to the Queen's Privy Council (a will that may have been his was proved in April 1596). So who was the "caterpillar" using the names John Mathew and Christopher Marlor/Marlerus/Marlowe, studying at the Royal College and planning to reenter England in order to shepherd Elizabethan souls back to the Roman Catholic fold?