The School of Night

The School of Night or School of Atheism was the name given to a supposed circle of radical thinkers, writers, and courtiers in Elizabethan England. First denounced in 1592 by the Jesuit polemicist Robert Persons, the group was said to include figures such as explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, playwright Christopher Marlowe, translator George Chapman, mathematician Thomas Harriot, and later other intellectuals who dabbled in forbidden knowledge: atheism, alchemy, atomism, and heterodox philosophy.

The court, if it ever existed at all, was never formalised and left behind no charter or manifesto. Yet its place in the historical record, and its persistence in later academic writing, tells us something fascinating about the status of heresy, blasphemy, and atheistic ideas in intellectual Elizabethan circles. As a conspiracy theory, it spoke to a deep unease within a changing culture: that unorthodox ideas might be circulating at the highest levels of power, and that the bounds of acceptable thought were not as secure as they seemed. Whether historical or interpretive, the idea of the School of Night points us toward the shifting intellectual currents of the late 16th century.

Acheson’s claims were speculative but influential. By the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, there was growing fascination with religious doubt, scientific dissent, and the prehistory of secular modernity. The Elizabethan heretic became, for some, a symbolic ancestor of the Victorian doubter or the Edwardian rationalist. Recasting figures like Marlowe and Raleigh as members of a secretive school of unbelievers offered both a cautionary tale and a kind of genealogy for modern freethought.

Individuals alleged to have been members of a so-called School of Atheism include:

Others such as Matthew Roydon, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, and George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, have sometimes been mentioned by 20th century writers advancing theories about the group’s precise nature and membership. However, all that connects these figures in reliable sources is a shared intellectual heritage and a degree of willingness to explore ideas outside the bounds of orthodoxy.

To be suspected of atheism in Elizabethan England was not merely to hold private doubts. It was to be cast outside the legal and moral order. Irreligion was linked to sedition and disorder. The consequences could include interrogation, the loss of patronage, or death. Even the hint of association with unorthodox views was enough to damage a career or reputation. That any speculative, scientific, or sceptical work was produced under such conditions is a testament to the determination of those who pursued it.

The conspiracy theory of a ‘School of Atheism’, circulated in 1592, may have anticipated the events of 1593, when playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested, allegedly heretical papers were discovered, and Christopher Marlowe was killed shortly after being accused of blasphemy in the Baines Note. Others linked to the same intellectual milieu, including Walter Raleigh and Thomas Harriot, were drawn into suspicion in the years that followed. Whether or not the School existed, the fear that it might was enough to turn speculation into state action.

Whatever the School of Night was — real or imagined — its resonance with later writers testifies to the shift in English intellectual life that took place during this period. There was, for a devout religious conservative, much to fear. George Chapman’s translations offered alternatives to Christian moral frameworks, Christopher Marlowe’s dramas explored ambition, fatalism, and doubt, and Thomas Harriot’s observations helped lay the foundations for a scientific worldview grounded in empirical inquiry. Whether Persons invented the group or whether it existed in some loose or formal way, his tract expresses real anxieties about prominent thinkers moving from revelation to free inquiry and from scriptural authority to philosophical and experimental methods. Even if viewed as part of a Catholic strategy to discredit the Elizabethan court, the text highlights real contemporary fears that corrupt figures risked pulling English culture toward atheism.

Today the conspiracy theory is helpful for emphasising just how much remains unknown, and fundamentally unknowable, about the private lives and inner beliefs of alleged heretics. Those suspected of blasphemy in Elizabethan England left behind only fragments alluding to their heretical beliefs, often remembered primarily through hostile accounts. The mere discovery and the mere allegation of heretical writings contributed to the downfall of top dramatists like Kyd and Marlowe, while later writers like Richard Barnfield faded from popularity to obscurity because they did not conform to the moral and religious standards of later literary gatekeepers. By necessity, any freethinking or secular movements in the period – schools of atheism – really would have been schools of night: obscured in total darkness.

Equally, the fears underpinning the ‘School of Atheism’ did not end in the 16th century. From conspiracy theories about the Bavarian Illuminati through to the prosecution of 19th century pamphleteers like Richard Carlile or 20th police surveillance of humanist meetings in London, the idea of a hidden circle of heretics or rationalists exerting covert political power has often served as a stand-in for anxiety about the erosion of religious authority. Such conspiracy theories have flourished in the vacuum of information created by the historical sanction (and sanitisation) of non-religious and humanist thinkers. One consequence has been that the history of irreligion, atheism, and humanism remains fragmented and poorly understood — a legacy the Humanist Heritage project exists to help draw out of the shadows.

The Free Thinkers | The Marlowe Society

The School of Night: a Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh by M. C. Bradbrook (1936)