Thomas Walsingham (literary patron) Thomas Walsingham (literary patron) Sir Thomas Walsingham (c. 1561 – 11 August 1630) was a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I and literary patron to such poets as Thomas Watson, Thomas Nashe, George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe. He was related to Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham and the employer of Marlowe's murderer Ingram Frizer. This connection is one of the reasons offered for suggesting that Marlowe's death may have been linked with intelligence work, and not a dispute over a bill for food and accommodation, as in the coroner's verdict. Walsingham was the third son of Sir Thomas Walsingham (1526–1584), an important
Francis Walsingham disrupted a range of plots against Elizabeth and secured the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Francis Walsingham was born in or about 1532, probably at Foots Cray, near Chislehurst, Kent. His parents were William and Joyce Walsingham. William was a successful, well-connected and wealthy London lawyer who died in 1534 and Joyce was the daughter of courtier Sir Edmund Denny and the sister of Sir Anthony Denny, who was the principal gentleman of King Henry VIII's privy chamber. William Walsingham served as a member of the commission that was appointed to investigate the estates of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in