Ingram Frizer - Biography

Biography

We have no definite information regarding Frizer's origins, but he may have been born in or near Kingsclere in Hampshire, and the not always reliable International Genealogical Index does in fact show the baptism there of a female child called Ingram Frysar on 26 September 1561.

Surviving legal records show Frizer to have been a fairly well-to-do business man profiting from buying and selling property. At the time of Marlowe's death the landowner Thomas Walsingham was Frizer's "master", but this does not imply that Frizer was a servant. As well as acting on his own behalf, Frizer appears to have been Walsingham's business agent. Walsingham was a young relative of Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham; both Walsinghams had been heavily involved with intelligence work a few years earlier but there is no evidence that Frizer ever had any connection with it.

Not all of Frizer's business dealings were honest. In 1593, collaborating with Nicholas Skeres (who was also present at Marlowe's killing), he was involved in lending money to one Drew Woodleff. Woodleff signed a bond for £60 in exchange for some guns that Frizer supposedly had in storage. Frizer then claimed to have sold them on Woodleff's behalf, but for only £30. The effect of this was that Frizer, who had never offered any guns for sale, had made Woodleff a loan of £30, to be repaid by the redemption of the £60 bond, an interest rate of 100%. Woodleff later signed a bond for £200 in favour of Thomas Walsingham, agreeing the forfeit of land to him in default of payment, to extricate himself from his bond to Frizer.

A few years later, when King James ascended the throne, Frizer received numerous benefices from the crown, through the action of Audrey Walsingham (Thomas's wife and a friend of James's Queen, Anne of Denmark). He moved to Eltham, about three miles from the by then Sir Thomas Walsingham's estate at Scadbury. He became a churchwarden in 1605 and a parish tax assessor in 1611. There was a daughter named Alice Dixon, who lived in London, and another who married a man called John Banks. A "Mrs. Ingeram" who was buried at Eltham on 25 August 1616 may perhaps have been his wife, and he remained there apparently in genteel respectability until his death, being buried in the church there on 14 August 1627.