[1] Poley is particularly noted for his central role in uncovering the so-called Babington plot to assassinate the Queen in 1586,[2] and for being a witness of, and even a possible party to, the reported killing in self-defence by Ingram Frizer of the famous poet/dramatist Christopher Marlowe in May 1593.
There is no known record of Poley's birth and early education, the first information being his matriculation as a lowly sizar at Cambridge University's Clare College in the Michaelmas trimester of 1568.
He was sent as a 'special messenger' – in other words a Catholic sympathiser – to Paris to contact Thomas Morgan, one of the main conspirators working on behalf of Mary, Queen of Scots, and to deliver a letter from Blount.
[12] Poley spent the next two years imprisoned in the Tower of London, during which time Sir Philip Sidney died from wounds he had received at Zutphen in the Netherlands, and Mary Queen of Scots was tried and executed.
His cover as a Catholic agent now blown, Poley moved into a more administrative role in Walsingham's service, apparently acting as more of a case officer and messenger.
Records of payments to him between December 1588 and September 1601 show travel with important and secret documents to and from Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Scotland for members of the Privy Council.
Although some biographers still accept the story told at the inquest as a true account,[16] the majority nowadays find it hard to believe, and suggest that it was a deliberate murder, even though there is little agreement as to just who was behind it or their motive for such a course of action.
[17] The Marlovian theory even argues that the most logical reason for those people to have been there at that time was to fake Marlowe's death, allowing him to escape almost certain trial and execution for his seditious atheism.
Why, after the inquest, there was a week's delay before Poley delivered to the Privy Council the replies to the letters concerning "special and secret affairs of great importance" he had carried, is one of the several mysteries concerning this event.
[18] There was another probably much longer period of imprisonment for him in the Summer of 1597, when it seems that he was placed in the Marshalsea to spy on the playwright Ben Jonson whose play, The Isle of Dogs, written with Thomas Nashe had upset the authorities.
He sends information concerning Jesuits and their means of entering the country, but also indicates that his relationship with Cecil is now rather strained, saying, "How, half offended, you said to me I never made you good intelligence, nor did you service worth reckoning, is the cause I have not since presented myself with offer of my duty, although I much desire my endeavours might please you, my necessities needing your favour.