Unfortunately for him, however, he confided to a fellow-seminarist his rejection of the Catholic faith and his plans to return to England to report to the queen's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham about the various plots being hatched in Rheims.
In May 1582 he was imprisoned in Rheims town gaol, but a year later was back at the seminary, still a prisoner, where he wrote a lengthy confession of his offences.
[6] Walsingham died in 1590, and Baines was next heard of in early 1592, when he was in Flushing, at that time an English possession in the Netherlands, apparently sharing a room with Christopher Marlowe.
A year later, in May 1593, it seems that Baines was instrumental in getting the playwright Thomas Kyd wrongly accused of an offence for which he was imprisoned and tortured[9] and shortly after this Baines was called upon, apparently by the Lord Keeper, Lord Puckering, to provide an account of what he knew of the heretical views of Christopher Marlowe.
Before any action could be taken against Marlowe, however, an inquest reported him dead, stabbed in self-defence by Ingram Frizer—a man with whom he had been dining—in a dispute over payment of the bill or "reckoning".