A Dangerous Trade: An Elizabethan Spy Thriller

by Steven Veerapen

  During the first year of her imprisonment, Mary was put under the guardianship of George Talbot, 6th earl of Shrewsbury and his countess, Elizabeth Cavendish Talbot (popularly known as Bess of Hardwick). Bess’s life is masterfully recounted in Mary S Lovell’s Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth (Abacus, 2005). During the first months of their custody of the Scottish queen, relations between the Shrewsburys and their charge were largely congenial. However, Shrewsbury soon tired of her tears, and Bess engaged in spying on Mary (which Mary seemed to realise, writing to Elizabeth in October 1569 to beware the countess’s ‘scheming and accusations’ during the latter’s visit to the royal court). Joining Mary in her shadow royal court were a number of women, from ladies-in-waiting to friends and lower servants. Rosalind K Marshall’s Queen Mary’s Women: Female Relatives, Servants, Friends and Enemies of Mary, Queen of Scots (John Donald, 2006) is an excellent resource for those interested in figures like Mary Seton, the queen’s long-time friend and hairdresser, and the countess of Moray.

  Mary did not engage in plotting during her first year of captivity. Instead, she conspired at marriage with the 4th duke of Norfolk, England’s premier peer. This appears to have been an open secret amongst Elizabeth’s privy council, with members divided on when and how to tell the queen. Mary, however, seems to have been convinced by Norfolk that Elizabeth would approve the match between Protestant peer and Catholic queen, likely believing that the parsimonious English monarch would welcome a transfer of responsibility for a deposed queen to someone else. When Elizabeth found out, however, in September 1569, she was furious and ordered Norfolk’s arrest. He was sent to the Tower in October, though later released (whereupon he resumed his marriage plans with Mary, not content until he actually lost his head in 1572). These events are covered in detail in Jane Dunn’s study of the queens’ strained relationship, Elizabeth and Mary (Harper Collins, 2004) and David Templeman’s exhaustive study of Mary’s captivity, Mary Queen of Scots: The Captive Queen in England 1568-97 (Short Run Press, 2018).

  During that first year, too, dissatisfaction spread in the largely-Catholic north of England. The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland and a number of lesser gentry raised arms in November, having been spooked by the privy council’s quizzing of the two magnates (and Norfolk’s arrest; they had swung behind the marriage plan). This resulted in the only real revolt of Elizabeth’s reign: the northern rising (or revolt of the northern earls). More detail on the rising can be found in George Thornton’s The Rising in the North (Ergo Press, 2010); Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Tudor Rebellions (Pearson, 2008); and Krista Kesselring’s excellent The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics, and Protest in Elizabethan England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). It was from the latter that I drew the names of Philip Heydon’s network of contacts, as well as a sense of the uncoordinated and stuttering nature of the revolt. It should be noted that Mary Stuart did not approve or endorse the rising, seeing it as a potential roadblock to her marriage plans.

  Mary’s marriage plans were apparently initially endorsed and then rejected by her brother, Moray. Having told the duke at Hampton Court’s park that he would support his sister’s marriage, the earl betrayed him in the summer of 1569. He not only did not wish his sister restored to authority (which Norfolk would have wanted, desiring a reigning rather than a deposed queen for a wife) but he wanted her kept in England. Elizabeth, to his chagrin, toyed with the idea of sending Mary back during the same year. There is no evidence, of course, that Moray wanted either his sister or Elizabeth dead – although, if that had happened, there is a real possibility that the baby James could have been sent south to be raised as England’s king, with his Anglophilic uncle as his guardian. Nor was there a secret document, written by Margaret Tudor or anyone else, which proposed that Scotland was a vassal country of England. However, the idea is inspired by Henry VIII’s frantic searches for exactly such a document when he was pressing those claims himself (which he did intermittently during his reign). Work on this area is currently being undertaken by Professor Lorna Hutson, with a proposed monograph entitled Shakespeare’s Scotland. The project promises to ‘reconceive the question of Anglo-Scots relations in the period before James VI’s succession, not as a “succession problem”, but as a complex transformation, through English literature, of the older Anglo-imperial claim to sovereignty over Scotland by means of the medieval legendary “British” history of Brutus and King Arthur’. At any rate Moray himself was assassinated by gunshot – the first in British history – in January 1570.

  Religion loomed large in the 1560s, as it would throughout the early modern period. Scotland had been reformed along Calvinist lines at the start of the decade, while the English lived in varying states of tolerance under Elizabeth’s 1559 settlement. The latter was a genuine attempt to foster a peaceful compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Unfortunately, tolerance was an ugly word in the period. Catholics were dissatisfied (as evidenced by the northern rebellion) and staunch, Calvinist-leaning Protestants thought the settlement an exercise in appeasement. Later in the queen’s reign, ‘hotter’ Protestants would evolve into Puritans. In early 1570, the pope would declare Elizabeth excommunicate and issue a papal bull releasing those who killed her from any spiritual punishment. This largely ended the ‘nudge and wink’ policy that the queen had tried, with the best of intentions, to maintain up until that point.

  In this climate, spies flourished. However, the famous network and elaborate system made famous by Sir Francis Walsingham was in its infancy in 1569. Walsingham himself was a relative ingenue in the art of what was called spiery. His life and career are well told in John Cooper’s The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (Faber and Faber, 2012). My favourite biographies of the queen he served are Anne Somerset’s Elizabeth I (Phoenix Press, 1991) and Alison Weir’s Elizabeth the Queen (Random House, 2011). A shorter, highly enjoyable biography can be found in Helen Castor’s Elizabeth I (Penguin Monarchs, 2018).

  What made people turn to spying, and what kind of people did it? Answers can be found in Stephen Alford’s The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I. It was Alford’s recognition that ‘servants made the best spies’ that gave me the idea for this book. Service itself is an overlooked part of the well-thumbed pages of early modern history. A good overview of how servants were considered, how they dressed, what they ate, and how important they were to their masters and mistresses’ image, can be found in Jeremy Musson’s Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant (John Murray, 2009). Servants were people. They listened, they helped, and they were privy to all kinds of secrets.

  The idea of the gentleman spy has died hard, if it had ever died at all, but many of the tales of Tudor-era spies do involve disaffected or wandering gentlemen. A gentleman, however, might expect to have serving men about him, and those serving men often had wives and families of their own. The Renaissance is often considered to be the first great age of self-fashioning – or constructing public personae. The period coincided with a blossoming in self-reflection and examination of the soul and conscience. Whether nobleman or playwright, queen or laundress, early modern people began to consider themselves as individuals with a duty to make the most of their own humanity, of their own consciousness, and of their own abilities. I find it conceivable that some would become lost in this cultural shift, especially in service, where identity continued to be tied to the master of the household. The seminal text on this idea is Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (University of Chicago Press, 1980), albeit recent scholarship has widened its horizon beyond the confines of the great personages of the age.

  For the geography and layout of various places in the novel, I drew upon Liza Picard’s Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabeth’s London (W&N, 2013) and Ian Mortimer’s The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (Vintage, 2012). Simon Thurley’s Houses of Power: The Places that Sha
pes the Tudor World (Random House, 2017) was also invaluable, particularly in providing floorplans. Any errors made are my own.

  Jack and Amy Cole are last seen starting a new life on the continent, away from the faction and drama of Britain’s reigning and captive queens. Unfortunately for them, Europe was itself in the throes of religious and civil strife. The 1570s would see the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in France, the battle of Lepanto, the succession of Pius V, the siege of Sancerre, the death of Charles IX of France, and a plot to assassinate John of Sweden. Whether the Coles – or whatever they end up calling themselves – will become entangled in any of these events, or simply retire to a shop in a rural town, remains to be seen.

  If you enjoyed their story or would like to question anything – from customs to character – feel free to get in touch on Twitter @ScrutinEye.