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 who forwarded them to Walsingham. The letters indicated a conspiracy among the Catholic powers to invade England and displace Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots. By April 1583, Walsingham had a spy, identified as Giordano Bruno by author John Bossy, deployed in the French embassy in London. Walsingham's contact reported that Francis Throckmorton, a nephew of Walsingham's old friend Nicholas Throckmorton, had visited the ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. In November 1583, after six months of surveillance, Walsingham had Throckmorton arrested and then tortured to secure a confession—an admission of guilt that clearly implicated Mendoza. The Throckmorton plot called for an