Thomas Kyd has been in the service of an unidentified noble from 1587 to 1593, since, after his imprisonment in 1593 (see below), he wrote to have lost "the favors of my Lord, whom I haue servd almost theis vi yeres nowe".
Proposed nobles include the Earl of Sussex, the Earl of Pembroke, and Lord Strange.
He may have worked as a secretary, if he did not also write plays.
Christopher Marlowe had also joined this patron's service around 1591, and for a while Marlowe and Kyd shared lodgings, and perhaps even ideas.
Several bills are posted about London in early May 1593, threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who have settled in the city.
One of these, the "Dutch church libel," written in blank verse, contains allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and is signed, "Tamburlaine".
The Privy Council issues an order on May 11, 1593, for the arrest of the authors of the "divers lewd and mutinous libels".
The next day, Kyd is among those arrested; he will later believe that he had been the victim of an informer.
His lodgings are searched and instead of evidence of the "libels" there is found an Arianist tract, described by an investigator as "vile heretical conceits denying the eternal deity of Jesus Christ found amongst the papers of Thos. Kydd (sic), prisoner ... which he affirmeth he had from C. Marley (sic)".
It is believed that Kyd had been tortured brutally to obtain this information.
Marlowe is not in London, but is staying with Thomas Walsingham, the cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580s and a man deeply involved in state espionage.
Marlowe is summoned by the Privy Council and, while waiting for a decision on his case, is killed ten days in Deptford in an incident involving known government agents, stabbed to death, perhaps accidentally, by one Ingram Frizer.
Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.
Given the murky inconsistencies concerning the account of Marlowe's death, a theory has arisen centered on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare.
Kyd is eventually released but is not accepted back into his lord's service.
Believing he is under suspicion of atheism himself, he writes to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, protesting his innocence, but his efforts to clear his name are apparently fruitless.
