Audrey Shelton (* 10 June 1568; † May 1624) was distantly related to Elizabeth I (her great-grandmother had been an aunt of Anne Boleyn.) She married Thomas Walsingham, but the date of the marriage is not known. (According to Charles Nicholl (Nicholl 2002), the marriage did not take place until 1597, whereas Constance Kuriyama (Kuriyama 2002) assumes the marriage took place in the early 1590s). In 1600, their son Thomas was born, who later married Elizabeth Manwood, a granddaughter of Roger Manwood. The year before, George Chapman had dedicated the completion of Hero and Leander to her.
She was a lady of the bedchamber to Elizabeth I, but did not appear in the court records until 1599. Under Anne, the wife of James I, she gained influence and is said to have had an affair with Burghley’s son Robert Cecil.
In 1603/04 Marlowe’s murderer Ingram Frizer represented her in a leasehold matter.2
To this day it is uncertain whether there was ever any connection between Audrey Walsingham and Christopher Marlowe. As she is not mentioned anywhere before 1599, it is assumed that she only married Thomas Walsingham around this time. However, 31 was a very advanced age for a first marriage at that time.
- Urry (1988)↩︎
