Stabbed by a Catholic assassin at the end of The Massacre at Paris, the dying Henry III of France commands his favourite Epernoun to 'Go call the English agent hither straight', and then begs this 'Agent for England' to return to London and tell 'What this detested Jacobin hath done . . . Salute the Queen of England in my name, / And tell her, Henry dies her faithful friend' (5.5.50- 107). There is a tradition that the mute 'English Agent' in this scene is, in fact, the author's self-portrait in his guise as 'Mr Merlin', the English envoy to Henry of Navarre, and so what he has to tell can be interpreted as the play itself, which therefore ends where it begins, restaging for Londoners the perfidies of the French Wars of Religion. And since the text, which dates from late in 1592, may be the last he wrote, this scene in which he might have depicted himself has an uncanny relation to Marlowe's final mission, which, as retraced by Charles Nicholl, seems to have been an attempt to infiltrate the Brussels headquarters of England's Catholic exiles, so as to 'turn' one of them against their candidate for Elizabeth's throne: Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who happened to be patron of the company then performing the dramatist's works - including The Massacre at Paris - on Bankside.