Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  Beale had one other observation about a Principal Secretary’s duties that he had gleaned from his long observation of Mr. Secretary Walsingham’s methods.

  “A Secretary must have a special cabinet,” Beale wrote, “whereof he is himself to keep the key, for his signets, ciphers, and secret intelligences, distinguishing the boxes or tills rather by letters than by the names of the countries or places, keeping that only unto himself, for the names may inflame a desire to come by such things.”

  This was ground Burghley had also silently but thoroughly trodden before—Burghley, with his relentless hunger for knowledge and his remarkable capacity for keeping it to himself once he got it. It was ground that Walsingham now was equally drawn to by his respect for Burghley’s genius, and his own instinct, and his gnawing sense of England’s precarious position in a dangerous world.

  Knowledge is never too dear: and from places obvious and places strange Walsingham saw to it that he was well supplied. There were the official “searchers” at the ports, who would always be curious about travelers arriving on the packet boats from France, and about any written letters they were carrying; there were patrols of horse along the wilds of the Scottish border, always on the lookout for strangers.

  Most of his less official suppliers were men who lived in the fissures of Elizabethan society, but respectably, or at least somewhat respectably: men more unconventional than shady. Travelers, merchant adventurers, Scottish exiles living in Italy, Portuguese exiles living in London, English soldiers of fortune in the pay of the Dutch, ships’ captains, expatriate traders, a few famous men of letters and science of the day; the playwright Christopher Marlowe, perhaps; the astrologer, alchemist, and charlatan John Dee, perhaps.

  They kept their eyes open and reported news; a fleeting trace of the vast net he threw out survived in a curt memorandum drawn up after his death. “The names of sundry foreign places from whence Mr. Secretary Walsingham was wont to receive his advertisements”; a laconic title, a stark list of names: Paris, Rouen, Bordeaux, Rheims, Lyon, Calais, a half-dozen other towns in France; Hamburg, Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna, and a half-dozen others in Germany; ten places in the Low Countries; five in Spain; Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Rome; Denmark; Barbary; Constantinople, Algiers, Tripoli; “some in Ireland”; “upon the Borders and in Scotland at least 10.”

  Their letters, some frank, some guarded, came by messengers carried no faster than ships could sail and horses could trot, but they came steadily, week after week, telling of court gossip and trade news and naval preparations and movements of troops. This was no “secret service”; most of these men of affairs and men of the world were not even paid for their troubles; they were less spies than reporters.

  But there were other men, too, men of a kind Walsingham had already begun cultivating during his time in France, men who lived deeper in the shadows, men who could be bought and sold and flattered into betrayal, men who, out of desperation or vanity or a longing to believe in their own importance—or, the cooler ones, out of simple businesslike calculation of what they possessed and what someone else would be willing to pay for—were prepared to undertake more shadowy tasks.

  Some of these were simple enough transactions for a neophyte spymaster. Ambassador Walsingham once sought to bribe one of the French Ambassador’s men for news from Spain, a commonplace enough transaction: a good many hangers-on about the courts of Europe were the beneficiaries of such “pensions” from foreign princes. But even in those early days, Walsingham set afoot some more elaborate and dangerous games. There was a charade aimed at neutralizing the intrigues in France of a worrisome Irishman, Maurice Fitzgibbon, the former Archbishop of Casel; Walsingham sought out for the job a certain Captain Thomas, a mercenary who had fought for the King of France in the civil wars, an Irish émigré himself, a man presumed to be a good Catholic, and known to be well connected in the French Court. The deposed Archbishop was plainly seeking the help of the Guises for an Irish rebellion against their Protestant English rulers; Thomas offered his services to Casel in the convincing role of supportive fellow countryman. He then brilliantly poisoned the well, arranging an audience for Casel with the Cardinal of Lorraine, to which he ostentatiously accompanied the Archbishop. “Two days after,” Walsingham reported, recounting the tale with obvious satisfaction to Burghley, “the Captain was sent for by the Cardinal; and being demanded, what manner of man the Archbishop was, of what estimation in his country, answered to every point as I required him. Since that time, I learn, that the Cardinal maketh not that account of the Archbishop that he looked for at his hands.” So much for the Archbishop and his dreams of glory.

  These kinds of services did not come for free; this was new territory, and it was a fight to get the Captain the reward Walsingham had promised him. Captain Thomas “hath been a very good instrument for the discovery of the practices against Ireland, which he hath done with the hazarding of his life, if his dealings with me … were known,” Walsingham implored Burghley. “Surely, my good Lord, if when we promise in these causes consideration, and no regard be had thereto, neither can those of my calling promise reward; nor they to whom we promise give credit to our words, when no fruits follow. I beseech your Lordship, therefore, deal earnestly with her Majesty in this behalf.” In the end, Captain Thomas offered to settle for an office under her Majesty “in Ireland his native country, or elsewhere.”

  Sometimes Walsingham probably paid such men out of his own pocket and hoped to be reimbursed later, or not even that; any great gentleman maintained a household establishment of servants and messengers and secretaries and clerks, and the line between private and public duties was ever blurred. In France he had had an Italian servant, Jacobo Manucci, who kept working for him for years afterward, doing curious little jobs, keeping in touch with other Italians in Paris, and Milan, and the Azores, traveling to odd places—once to Constantinople, even.

  And then some of the more genteel forms of practicing against the Queen’s enemies Walsingham could just keep in his own hands. For years he strung along some of the Catholic gentry who, implicated in the 1569 northern rebellion, had sought refuge on the Continent. Most settled in the Low Countries; some became pensioners of the King of Spain; all were a source of vague anxiety and worry, certainly a group of men who bore watching. Walsingham found it an easy enough matter to play them like a trout on a line, giving them just enough slack to keep them from spitting out the hook, all the while reeling them slowly in with vague promises and false hopes that their lands in England might be returned to them; returned to them as long, of course, as they foreswore any more-nefarious schemes for regaining their estates and position. Two of them, Thomas Copley and Charles Paget, apparently quite confused as to which end of the line held the hook, offered the Secretary bribes. A psychological opportunity not to be missed: Walsingham replied with indignation. “If you think me mercenary, you mistake me,” he wrote back to Copley. The man then, of course, had to explain and backtrack and apologize; he was distantly related to Walsingham’s wife, and was merely proposing to grant “his cousin” as a favor a pension of a hundred pounds per year from the income of his restored property. This was good for another year of backing and forthing, another year when powerful men in exile who might have spent their time plotting revolution and revenge instead spent their time fretting over their future income.

  But for the rougher and darker stuff there was no substitute for cash on the barrelhead, and men hungry enough or low enough to do what the more genteel neither would nor could. It was all well and good to rely on merchants and travelers for casual news, but when he wanted specific information about an Irish adventurer seeking Spanish help for an invasion and rebellion, Walsingham sought out a man to pose as a merchant, provided him with a ship and a cargo of corn, and dispatched him to Portugal: not a cheap enterprise. When it came to a scheme to kidnap the papal legate as he traveled to France by sea and interrogate him about papal plots, Walsingham thought that Huguenot pirates might do; i
n the end, he dropped that idea, but his reading of the men required for the task was right enough.

  And though any Englishman abroad might pose as a malcontent Catholic refugee, an easy enough disguise, and thereby hope to work his way into the confidences of the Spanish and French and Italian and English-émigré circles, it was also easy enough to get killed in the process, and in ignoble enough ways that appealed to few idealists or well-born. A man named Best, in Walsingham’s service, befriended the Spanish Ambassador’s secretary in Paris under such a pretense; one night a suspiciously staged fracas erupted outside the embassy, and when the man went out into the street to investigate he was killed, the perpetrators vanishing into the night.

  Such men might of course still claim to work for noble purposes; one Thomas Rogers, alias Nicholas Berden, wrote Walsingham’s secretary a protestation of his motives that has become famous in the annals of hypocritical high-mindedness. “I profess myself a spy, but am not one for gain but to serve my country,” Berden proclaimed. “Whensoever any occasion shall be offered wherein I may adventure some rare and desperate exploit such as may be for the honor of my country and my own credit, you shall always find me resolute and ready to perform the same.” Fine words. On another occasion, Berden was ingenuously describing how he had arranged to shake down two Catholic prisoners in English jails, one for £20, one for £30, if his Honor saw fit to arrange their release: “The money will do me great pleasure, being now in extreme need thereof, neither do I know how to shift longer without it.”

  Berden, to be sure, displayed a certain genius in his role as scoundrel. An ordinary spy might seek the confidence of his marks by feigning innocence, but Berden instead chose to parade his corruption: he sought to pass himself off as a man who could do them a good turn by knowing the right people to bribe at Court; and so every pound he took increased his credit with them, even as it lined his purse.

  But most of Walsingham’s paid scoundrels of this ilk had the decency to drop the pretense of high-mindedness; it was money they wanted, and there was not much they wouldn’t do to get it. If the exile community abroad offered one route to penetrate the English Catholic malcontents, then the cesspool of the English prisons offered a shorter and fouler one, and there were ever men ready to dive in for a few pounds here and there. One Maliverny Catlyn, a soldier who had gotten in trouble with his commander, fled to France in fear of his life, and was scrounging for his survival, had himself cast into prison in Portsmouth, and then in the Marshalsea in Southwark; from both he sent Walsingham diligent reports of the gossip and confidences of the Catholic prisoners there. Walter Williams, who had been a servant of the very Thomas Copley who had tried to bribe Walsingham, was induced to enter the prison in Rye on a similar errand. “I have been a long time upon bare ground in my clothes and at night lodged among thieves and rovers in a place not fit for men but dogs,” he wrote Walsingham, promising results—and pleading for money.

  They all pleaded for money. “I and mine are like to keep the coldest Christmastide that hitherto we ever tasted,” Catlyn wrote; Walsingham sent him £5. “I owe my host in London above £4 who threatens to have me in prison for the same,” begged one Robert Barnard, who boasted he “was never in better credit with the papists” than he was at the moment. A David Jones who haunted various London prisons seeking information about Catholic priests revealed that a Mrs. Cawkin, who had saved him from starvation, was nonetheless a “notorious papist”; he beseeched one of Walsingham’s secretaries, “I pray that you desire my master that I may have the benefit of what she doth lose by statute even if it be but the chain she doth wear.”

  Mr. Secretary had no delusions about the quality of the work such men provided in their venal bargains; he had seen enough of men and their motives to know what money bought and what it did not buy. And so he was never particularly shocked or disappointed. Certainly he took none of it personally: he wasn’t looking for friendship or devotion or idealism. His idealism he carried within; from the world, all he looked for was realism.

  And so he had no reason to expect subtlety or finesse from these men. The waters needed to be covered, and he covered them with the material available, and he made of it what he could. “Hear all reports but trust not all; observe them that deal on both hands lest you be deceived”: those were Robert Beale’s words of advice from his observation of the master at work. Mr. Secretary knew the men who would do these jobs; they were lowlifes, they could also be fools, they could also be playing a double game; he took nothing for granted but sought ways to take the measure of each for what he was worth. Walter Williams was one fool: in the prison in Rye, he had been placed in a cell with a Catholic priest he hoped to ferret out, and Walsingham later got his hands on a mock letter of recommendation that Williams’s cellmate had smuggled out to warn his fellow Catholics in Paris against him. “His devotion towards the good ale is very substantial,” the priest gravely reported; “for his honesty, if it be true as is reported, he never toucheth maid but from the knee upward. His qualities are such as if I should write them, I should be too tedious unto your reverence, whose wisdom is such that you can see, by these few, conjecture and judge of the rest.” So could Secretary Walsingham.

  This was still no secret service, these scrapings of the dregs of society, but it still took money, and by the end of his first decade in office, Mr. Secretary would be getting the government to provide it, first a drop, then torrents: warrants for £750 on the Exchequer in 1582, increasing year after year until it reached the prodigious sum of £2,000 a year a few years later.

  The money, as the Secretary’s office ledger simply noted, was to be delivered “to such persons as Sir Francis Walsingham shall name.”

  7

  ADVERSARIES AND MOLES

  In the realm over whose depths and breadths Francis Walsingham now bore so heavy a responsibility in his post of Principal Secretary, peace reigned: but an uneasy peace.

  From the north came strange reports of omens that were soon on everyone’s lips. In Northumberland, a white Saint Andrew’s cross was seen in the sky, and on the ground near it a wolf, chasing the largest among a great herd of deer; the wolf was an animal no longer known in England. Though the predator did not reappear after that first sighting, each day the lone deer returned for two or three hours to the same place, where it was seen running about in terror. The general opinion, reported the Spanish government’s agent in London, was that these appearances were “portents of some great occurrence.”

  In Scotland, the regent Moray had been assassinated; the same miasma of clan and family and blood and power sucked in the pro-English and pro-Mary factions alike. Ever unstable, ever venal, ever susceptible to foreign intrigues, an ever shifting coalition of lords sought the mantle of the regency and the personal custody of the very young King James. Scotland, Walsingham had once said, was the “postern gate” from which trouble was always threatening to sally forth; his hopes of shutting it up once and for all now seemed destined to fail.

  Queen Elizabeth and the monarch of Spain continued to exchange messages filled with courtly civilities; their ambassadors sent back reports filled with suspicion and bile. Even the outward façade was becoming hard to maintain. Burghley still hoped to preserve amity or at least neutrality with Spain; he worked to keep English aid to the Dutch rebels to a level of plausible deniability, nothing more than an adroit turning of a blind eye to the English “volunteers” who went to fight by their side; he patiently negotiated with the Duke of Alva for three years to smooth over yet another trade war that had erupted between England and the Spanish Netherlands. But it proved impossible even to keep a regular English ambassador in Spain, so palpable was the religious enmity now. Walsingham, dismissing a proposed treaty with Spain in 1575, insisted that no true reconciliation was ever possible as long as the two countries disagreed on religion: “Christ and Belial can hardly agree.”

  Philip, ordering one more English emissary home a few years later, chose a somewhat different allusion
to their religious differences. The man had better leave as quickly as possible, the Spanish King observed, “before he commits some indiscretion which will force us to burn him.”

  In the mid-1570s the stench of Saint Bartholomew still hung in the air, and the poison of the Ridolfi plot; the ground below had meanwhile shifted, too. On the 25th of May 1570, a bill had appeared on the garden gate of the Bishop of London, nailed there anonymously in the night. The text was a papal bull that had been issued by Pius V three months earlier, news of which had not yet reached England.

  The title was Regnans in Excelsis, “The Lord Who Reigns on High.” Its words thundered with Old Testament promises of vengeance; it was, in short, a declaration of war, of religious war, a declaration that aligned the fault lines of religion and politics for England, and for Europe:

  The Lord who reigns on high instituted a Church which should be one, and gave its government to Peter, and his successors. We labor with all our might to preserve that unity, now assailed by so many adversaries. Among them is that servant of infamy, Elizabeth, who styles herself Queen of England, the refuge of wicked men.

  Having taken possession of the kingdom, she monstrously usurps the chief authority in the Church and fills the royal Council with heretics.

  We declare the said Elizabeth a heretic, and a fautor of heretics, and that all who adhere to her incur the sentence of anathema, and are cut off from the unity of the Body of Christ.

  Moreover, that she has forfeited her pretended title to the aforesaid kingdom, and is deprived of all dominion, dignity, and privilege. We declare that nobles, subjects, and peoples are free from any oath to her, and we interdict obedience to her monitions, mandates, and laws.