Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  He hath sought to understand how the Catholics of this realm stand affected in case any foreign prince should seek to invade this realm

  There hath been plots delivered unto him to that purpose

  He hath sought to draw the affections of her Majesty’s subjects unto the Scottish Queen

  He hath daily intelligence and is a cherisher of such of her Majesty’s subjects as are traitorously affected toward her and her state

  He receiveth letters daily from Thomas Morgan, Thomas Throgmorton and other practicing traitors in France: doth convey their packets and letters to the Scottish Queen and hers to them

  And then the whole matter was quietly dropped. For there remained the question of the French Ambassador’s secretary, who had provided such good value for money, and who still was in precarious risk of being exposed for his troubles; and there was the even greater value that was arguably to be had in keeping Mary and her friends ever guessing just how their secrets had been betrayed.

  In late April 1584, yet another large parcel arrived on Mr. Secretary’s desk filled with copies of correspondence between Mauvissière and Mary from this still-reliable source. At the top of the heap of two dozen letters was one that had caused the French Ambassador’s secretary a new panic. From Mary to the ambassador, dated the 15th of February 1584, it had been sent by a roundabout route, not by the same courier who had brought a recent letter from the ambassador to her, and it expressed her suspicions about a leak in the embassy:

  It has not been possible for me to send my reply by the way your letters came because the gentleman has been informed that spies have been set day and night around your house to watch all those who come and go. And also, by the discovery of all my secret contacts with your house many are greatly suspicious that someone among your servants has been corrupted; and in truth I am not without doubts myself. I beg you earnestly that from now on you deal with any others I send you using servants you know to be faithful, and not in your house but rather in or outside the town at rendezvous you can easily set for places and times without any others knowing of it. Otherwise I will never be able to find a man again willing to take the risk on our secret correspondence.

  The ambassador’s secretary himself had scribbled a frantic note to Walsingham on the bottom of this copied letter:

  I humbly beseech you Monsieur to keep all of this as secret as possible, so that Monsieur the Ambassador does not perceive anything of it, which I know you know very well how to do. I would not for all the gold in the world want to be discovered, because of the dishonor I would receive; not only the dishonor but the life which hangs thereby, though of that I do not care as much as the dishonor, since I will have to die sometime.

  The ambassador’s reply to Mary a few weeks later, also contained in the bundle of copies, contained a reassuring indication, however, that Mr. Secretary’s source had not been exposed. “I beg you most humbly to believe that there is not a single man in my house who has knowledge of my dealings with Your Majesty,” Mauvissière wrote—none, that is, except his secretary, “who never budges from my chamber and who writes everything in front of me and in my presence, and Courcelles who carries the packets from one place to another and speaks to those of your party. Thus neither the Queen of England nor her Council have ever known anything genuine about it, only what has been imagined by various spies who go and come.”

  From Paris came reports that in zealous Catholic circles there the ambassador himself was the one suspected of having betrayed Mary’s cause. A convenient outcome; reinforced when the Privy Council quietly instructed Mauvissière that if the charges against him were not to be pursued further he must mend his ways, cease representing Mary’s interests, openly show Mr. Secretary all letters he received for Mary henceforth. Mauvissière hastened to give his assurances. And so awkward publicity was averted, and Mauvissière was quietly but quite completely defanged: blackmailed into good conduct and, for good measure, poisoned in his reputation among Mary’s followers.

  Thus at Throckmorton’s trial in May there was no mention of the secret correspondence or of the French Ambassador; the indictment dropped entire portions of Throckmorton’s confessions that had referred to Mauvissière, or that had hinted at his deeper involvement in, or at least awareness of, the plot.

  Throckmorton was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in July 1584. “I would I had been hanged when I first opened my mouth,” he declared at one point that spring. “I have disclosed the secrets of her who was the dearest thing to me in the world and whom I thought no torment should have drawn me so much to have prejudiced.”

  In November, the French Ambassador’s now much-reassured secretary sent Walsingham a brief note confirming that secret communications between Mary and the embassy had indeed ceased in the wake of the none-too-subtle pressure that had been applied: “As for Monsieur the Ambassador, he has received not a thing on this side for a long time.”

  And as for Fagot, his farewell to Mr. Secretary came a year later, in September 1585, when Mauvissière was recalled and Fagot wrote Walsingham to warn that the new French Ambassador, Guillaume de l’Aubépine, baron de Châteauneuf, was made of much sterner stuff than his predecessor. Immediately upon his arrival, Châteauneuf had closely examined Fagot about various people in the house, demanding to know whether they were spies. “Monsieur Châteauneuf swore to me and promised,” Fagot reported, “that he would never tolerate in his house any men who are not of his religion and that he knew perfectly well that Seigneur de Mauvissière had some of them about who were betraying him and this was a great evil and a great scandal for him.”

  Fagot may or may not have been the same person as a certain lapsed Dominican friar named Giordano Bruno, later to achieve renown as a freethinking philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, and known to have been a resident of Mauvissière’s house in London at a time that closely corresponded to Fagot’s activity as Mr. Secretary’s spy. Much fit in the two men’s personalities: both were malcontents, intellectuals, possessors of a sly sense of humor, believers in the clever use of dissimulation for justifiable ends. Bruno throughout his life had a disdain for conventional ways and the conventional threats of authority: he once humorously rewrote the line about turning the other cheek from the Sermon on the Mount to say that if someone strikes your cheek you should strike his other one. And when he returned to Italy in 1591, this tactless tendency immediately landed him in the hands of the Inquisition. In February 1600, he was burned alive by the authorities in Rome: simply for heresy, not treason.

  The ambassador’s corrupt secretary faded smoothly away. Among Mauvissière’s three secretaries, Claude de Courcelles, Jean Arnault de Chérelles, and Laurent Feron, the last appears the most likely to have been the spy, since the first two, despite having been suspected from time to time in the centuries since, seem not to have been in London at the relevant time, nor does their handwriting match that of the relevant documents. About Feron little is known; he seems to have been nervously in it for the money, pure and simple, and did his job, and that was an end of it.

  And as for Mauvissière, his career was forever ruined by the rumors about him when he returned to France. But he continued to write affectionate letters to Walsingham, his “inseparable friend,” for the rest of his life. He was sure to let Walsingham know of his considerable satisfaction, a few years after his return home, when the King of France finally arranged to have the Duke of Guise assassinated, in 1588.

  Mary had been sufficiently circumspect in her own letters to Mauvissière that had fallen into Walsingham’s hands. She greatly lamented Throckmorton’s persecution for having been a member of her “party”; she did not repeat the mistake, which she had made in her letter to Norfolk a dozen years earlier, of directly endorsing treasonous acts.

  It was a few months after Throckmorton’s execution, in July 1584, that there came into Mr. Secretary’s possession the most complete and authoritative account yet of the Duke of Guise’s attempted “enterprise.” An agent o
f Mr. Secretary’s in France reported that the Jesuit Creighton was about to sail for Scotland; in September, the merchant vessel upon which he was traveling as a passenger had the remarkable misfortune to run right into a ship that had been dispatched by the Admiral of Zealand, of the Dutch Protestant forces. Creighton, though in disguise, was immediately identified, captured, and brought back to Ostend. The Dutch wanted to hang him on the spot, but instead—as Creighton later wrote in his memoirs—he was “made a gift to the English Queen.”

  When Creighton was taken, he was found to have about him a “plot set down in the Italian tongue,” which he attempted to destroy on the spot. “Although it was torn to pieces and divers parts thereof lost,” one of Walsingham’s men reported, “we gathered the same thereof which I send you herein enclosed.”

  The document, when pieced together and translated, proved to be primarily of historical interest, since it dealt with the first iteration of Guise’s enterprise, the one from 1582, which had envisioned the dispatch of troops to Scotland to assist Lennox and ensure the ascendancy of the Catholic faction around James. Even so, there were telling points. Already in this first version, the ultimate objective was unmistakably to have been a surprise attack upon England. The eight thousand “good and trained soldiers of strangers … so soon as they arrive are to make no stay in Scotland but pass into England before the Queen may suppose.” The aim of the enterprise was nothing less than “to depose her Majesty and set up the Scottish Queen” in her place, and thereby reinstitute Catholicism in both England and Scotland. Great importance was laid upon the use of propaganda to prepare the ground; the conspirators had “most infamous and slanderous libels” about Elizabeth “ready made, but not yet printed.” It was also “very needful that the Pope do again send forth his Bull of Excommunication against her Majesty,” showing how patient and forbearing he had been in the hope that she would mend her ways.

  Walsingham’s translator noted that the document “was not a discourse only, or devise how such a thing might be brought to pass, but the plot and design set down and agreed upon to be put in execution, whereby the Scottish Queen was made privy, as it is confessed.”

  Mary’s complicity in a conspiracy to secure her freedom by force was not, strictly speaking, news. The involvement of her followers in a plot directly against Elizabeth’s life was, however: together these developments represented a sharp escalation in the undeclared war that the Council faced as autumn passed into winter of 1584.

  One plot to assassinate Elizabeth had come to light earlier in the year from the zealous efforts of one of Walsingham’s least reliable and most unsought agents. Dr. William Parry was not only disreputable but erratic; he had in his earlier life barely escaped hanging for burglary, had squandered the fortunes of two wives, and had then set out for the Continent, where he professed to become a Catholic. He may actually have been sincere in so doing, though he also was in touch with Mr. Secretary at the time.

  And then he had returned to England in January 1584 with the rather sensational news that, having befriended Thomas Morgan in Paris, Mary’s agent had personally persuaded him to take a holy oath to kill the Queen of England. Parry confessed the matter to the Queen herself, and in March was able to corroborate it with a letter he had by then received from Cardinal Ptolomeo Gallio, the papal Secretary of State, in answer to one he and Morgan had written. The Cardinal offered the Pope’s absolution and encouragement for putting his “most holy and honorable purposes into effect.”

  The Queen pardoned Parry, accepting his story that he had gone along with the conspiracy only to expose it. Parry met an unfortunate end a year later, when, apparently still hard up for cash, he sought to repeat this successful performance and once again entered into loose talk about killing the Queen; this time his would-be accomplice beat him to the draw and denounced Parry before Parry could denounce him, and no one was quite ready to believe Parry’s protests of innocence a second time: he was tried and hanged.

  With or without the erratic Parry, assassination was in the air that autumn of 1584. The Protestant leader of the Dutch rebels, William Prince of Orange, had been mortally wounded by a crazed Catholic assassin in July 1584. Against this tightening fear, the Council took an extraordinary, and almost certainly extralegal, step in October to ensure the Queen’s safety. The Bond of Association, which all members of the Council signed, pledged that if the Queen was killed the signers would personally “prosecute to death” not only the murderers but “any that have, may, or shall pretend title to come to this crown by the untimely death of her Majesty so wickedly procured.” The latter threat was to be made good even if the beneficiaries of the Queen’s title were completely innocent of the crime themselves. The Bond was immediately published and a copy pointedly presented to the Queen of Scots. Within days, thousands of men throughout the realm had added their names, some standing in line for hours for the privilege of signing their pledge.

  And once again the guard about Mary was tightened. Mr. Secretary had been continually dismayed by her loose keeping. Elizabeth’s stinginess in reimbursing the Earl of Shrewsbury for his expenses had been a particular vexation; a few years before, Walsingham had complained directly to Elizabeth, “Pray God the abatement of the charges towards that noble man that hath the custody of the bosom serpent hath not lessened his care in keeping her.”

  Now the last vestiges of courtly consideration toward Mary were dropped for good. Early in the year 1585, Shrewsbury was replaced with Sir Amias Paulet, a no-nonsense Puritan—certainly no nobleman; indeed, barely a gentleman in some people’s book. He had served Mr. Secretary as ambassador to France; he was loyal, tough, and utterly immune to the charms of a Catholic queen. To him Walsingham delivered a meticulous set of instructions: Mary was under no circumstances to be permitted to travel more than two miles when taking the air. She would no longer be allowed to speak to anyone when abroad or distribute alms to the poor. Paulet was to keep a particular watch over Mary’s laundresses and coachmen, who “have heretofore been used as principal instruments for the conveying of letters.”

  Paulet was the man for the job; no doubts on that score. In reply he swore to carry out Mr. Secretary’s orders with “preciseness and severity.” He assured Mr. Secretary, “I will never ask pardon if she depart out of my hands by any treacherous slight or cunning device.” He was preparing to replace Mary’s servants with more trustworthy ones of his own choosing; “this alteration will breed (no doubt) great storms and marvelous unkindness,” Paulet wrote, “which shall trouble me nothing at all.”

  A few months later, Paulet reported with satisfaction that the isolation of the Scottish Queen from the outside world was complete. “The residue of this Queen’s train watched and attended in such precise manner as they be,” Paulet informed Mr. Secretary, “I cannot imagine how it may be possible for them to convey a piece of paper as big as my finger.”

  9

  LETTERS IN CIPHER

  Among Thomas Morgan’s many duties as Mary’s factor in Paris—besides, that is, fomenting conspiracies, suborning murder, and controlling, to his own considerable power and advantage, the 30,000 crown per year “French dowry” to which the Queen of Scots was still entitled—was devising the ciphers that his employer required for her secret communications. Over time he sent out dozens of them; they showed some awareness of the abilities of possible decipherers, but not very much. Morgan’s ciphers were all basically of the type known as a nomenclator: letters of the alphabet were replaced by symbols, numbers, Greek letters; a few especially well-used words—proper names, articles, conjunctions, you, which, my, of, because, say, send, Majesty—had their own numbers or characters assigned to stand for the whole word. Mary’s ciphers usually had more than one possible symbol for each vowel or other commonly employed letter, a standard twist to make things harder for a decipherer; they usually contained a few “nulls,” characters that stood for nothing whatever, to throw off the scent; they were generally written in a continuous stream, n
o breaks between words, to avoid giving away obvious clues.

  They were about as good as most ciphers of the day; in other words, not much better than the ones that the Neapolitan scientist and magician Giovanni Battista Porta—but who had ever heard of him?—had dismissed in a treatise on codes he had published in 1563 as fit only for “rustics, women, and children.”

  No one particularly liked Morgan. He had meddled relentlessly in the English-Welsh feud at the Douai seminary (Morgan was Welsh); the Papal Nuncio in Paris thought he was a “knave.” The English government now thought he was patently a criminal, and once his direct involvement in the Throckmorton and Parry plots was clear, Elizabeth demanded of the French with great vehemence that he be arrested and turned over.

  A French farce ensued. On the 1st of March 1585, Morgan was arrested at his lodgings in Paris and marched off to the Bastille. His papers were seized, but when the English Ambassador insisted that both Morgan and the documents be delivered up at once, the French King temporized. At last it was decided that Morgan would be held but not turned over to the English; his papers were handed by the French Council to a Court secretary by the name of Jean Arnault de Chérelles: the same who had worked in the embassy in London, who spoke English, who had even recently sent a courteous letter to Mr. Secretary Walsingham from Paris enclosing a gift of quince marmalade and wishing his diplomatic colleague perfect health and long life. Chérelles was instructed to deliver the documents to the English Ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford.

  Stafford was a problem. He was well connected, of a family with noble ancestry; his mother was one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting at Court; he was touchy, insecure, full of resentments. He had recently remarried, taking as his wife the Lady Douglas Sheffield, whose major points of distinction were that she had recently been cast off by Leicester, who was rumored to have secretly married her—probably untrue—but by whom he had certainly had an illegitimate child; that, and the fact that she was of the Howard family, which had so distinguished itself of late with its Catholic leanings and involvement in Mary’s plottings. There were questions about her religious loyalties and her influence on Stafford; there was no question of her hatred for Leicester, and by extension all of his party.