Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  Stafford himself was Burghley’s man for sure; and so when, in 1583, Stafford had been put forward for the ambassadorship, much against Walsingham’s desire, Mr. Secretary had coolly, with almost surgical detachment, done his best to slice such a potentially dangerous rival to ribbons. Walsingham, by now a master of bureaucratic back-stabbing, hastened to seek out Stafford, all earnest goodwill, and assure him that he had done his best to put in a good word with the Queen in his behalf, singing his praises more than he deserved, in fact; but he had to confess that the Queen had replied that Stafford was “fit but very poor” for the post of ambassador and she much preferred one of the other names that had been proposed. Nonetheless, Mr. Secretary smoothly continued, he would return and press his case with her Majesty again if Stafford wished. Stafford spurned the opportunity to be beholden to Walsingham, and put his faith in Burghley’s patronage instead, and got the appointment; even so, Walsingham had done a bit of brilliant hazing.

  Once Stafford took up his post, the hazing only intensified. Stafford’s predecessor, Lord Cobham, strangely left Paris without turning over any of his files to the new ambassador. Mr. Secretary ostentatiously neglected to send along to Paris routine reports of developments at home. Stafford complained; Mr. Secretary replied that he had meant to mention one other thing, which was that the ambassador really must stop spending so much money on postage; indeed, Mr. Secretary confessed, he had personally had to conceal from her Majesty some of the ambassador’s reports because she was already so vexed at what it must have cost to send them all.

  And then there was the matter of the ambassador’s wife, and some stories that Mr. Secretary had heard of the ambassador’s contacts with the exiled Catholic lords in Paris: “Her Majesty hath willed me to signify to you,” Mr. Secretary instructed, “that she is assured that the alliance that my Lady, your wife, hath with them, shall not make you to be more remiss to perform your duty.”

  Stafford, peevish, now became furious; he became more apoplectic over what happened next, an incident that reflected not only Walsingham’s growing distrust of Stafford but, no doubt, his desire to remind the ambassador that a man with Mr. Secretary’s resources at his command could not be successfully crossed. Mr. Secretary’s searchers at Rye, it appeared, had opened a packet containing the ambassador’s private letters, and read them, even those to his wife. “In truth,” Stafford protested to Walsingham, “I think it is a thing has never been done to one in my place.”

  Mr. Secretary smoothly apologized: “The commissioners did so far forget themselves”; it had been a mistake; in the future the ambassador should place “all your letters in a packet by themselves directed to me and subscribe it with your hand, as I will likewise take the same order with those private letters that shall be sent to you from hence, if your man may be directed to bring them unto me for that purpose.” Stafford privately fumed to Burghley that Mr. Secretary must “think I am a child” not to see through such an obvious ploy.

  And then Mr. Secretary promptly sent another reminder: the ambassador should really please try to remember to send dispatches only on matters “of very great importance.”

  So, when Chérelles delivered Morgan’s secret papers a couple of months after his arrest in March 1585, Stafford clearly imagined he had an opportunity at last to carry off a coup of his own that would pay Mr. Secretary back, and on his own turf at that. Among the documents were nine cipher keys. The symbols and characters matched those of some intercepted letters of Mary’s that Stafford already had in his possession, and with great excitement the ambassador at once set to work attempting to decode them. Alas, he got nowhere. In May, he was forced to admit as much in a letter to Mr. Secretary.

  It was only considerably later that Chérelles, in a letter to Mary herself, explained what had happened. There had in fact been thirty-two cipher “alphabets” included among Morgan’s papers. Chérelles removed them. In their place he substituted cipher keys of his own devising that used the same symbols but completely scrambled the definitions of which symbols stood for which letters. “After having broken his head for some days upon the said ciphers,” Chérelles reported, the ambassador “could never get a word of intelligence” out of the letters. “Meanwhile, having returned to the gentlemen of the council, I laid all these proceedings before them, whereat they laughed very much.”

  Luckily for the cause of England, there were men available who were more adept in the matter of ciphers than a prickly and proud ambassador of less than completely certain loyalties. The possibilities had been known to Walsingham as early as 1577, when a French Huguenot general, François de La Noue, intercepted in Gascony some coded letters of Don John of Austria, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands. La Noue turned the matter over to a Flemish nobleman who had a reputation for being able to work wonders with such puzzles.

  Philip van Marnix, Baron de Sainte-Aldegonde, was William of Orange’s right-hand man. He and Walsingham were soon in close contact; the two had much in common. A contemporary called the baron “the most constant anti-Catholic in the world, more than even Calvin himself.” He was eloquent in speech; he knew well “the finer points of dealing with people.” He was a phenomenal linguist, a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, conversant in French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, Scots.

  It took Sainte-Aldegonde less than a month to solve Don John’s cipher messages, even though the Spanish nomenclator that had been used included not only a cipher alphabet but also a vocabulary of some two hundred special words, plus symbols that separately stood for two-or three-letter syllables. In July, Orange presented the results with a flourish to the English envoy in the Low Countries: they revealed a scheme by Don John to have his Spanish troops land in English ports under the pretext of seeking shelter from a storm.

  Almost as remarkable as Sainte-Aldegonde’s way with ciphers was the refusal of the Spanish to believe that their codes could be read by any mortals: they would hardly be the last to be so deluded. Philip, when finally presented with proof a number of years later that the French had broken one of his codes, told the Pope that it must have been done by “black magic.” The Pope, whose Vatican cryptographers had been reading Philip’s codes for years, presumably smiled quietly to himself.

  Soon after the remarkable feat with Don John’s letters, Walsingham began sending Sainte-Aldegonde other cipher messages to be decoded. By early 1578, there was a regular traffic back and forth: a letter from the Portuguese Ambassador in March; a whole packet of letters in April; a “letter written in cipher, wherein may be matter of great moment,” in June.

  In fact, the methods for solving an unknown cipher were perfectly straightforward. No black magic required; all it took was a knack for discerning patterns, a familiarity with language, an endless capacity for concentration, and a bottom made of iron to withstand the long hours sitting at a desk poring over it all. With time and patience there were ways around all the code-makers’ dodges. The symbols that stood for whole words could be guessed from context, especially since they were likely to appear repeatedly, even in a single message. The use of different symbols to stand for a single high-frequency letter gave itself away through the appearance of rhymes in the cipher: a decipherer who came upon several occurrences of the ciphered words 8// 7H and 8+ 7H could conclude they both probably stood for the same common word, with // and + standing for the same high-frequency letter.

  Walsingham’s secretary John Somers occasionally tried his hand at some of this work; several of the earlier intercepted letters of Mary’s in Walsingham’s files appear with notes to Somers requesting his services in this matter. But soon Walsingham had a local man more or less dedicated to the job. Thomas Phelippes was one of Mr. Secretary’s middling scoundrels: his father was Customer of London, a lucrative enough post; Phelippes himself was well enough educated, proficient in Latin, French, and Italian, passable in Spanish. He was well traveled; he had done the usual sorts of odd and shady jobs in France and elsewhere for Mr. Secretary, carrying messa
ges from informants, delivering money to Protestant rebels, trying to draw out Thomas Morgan with vague hints of offering to serve the Catholic cause. The Queen of Scots herself left the only known physical description of Phelippes from the one time she would meet him later on. Though slanted no doubt from her knowledge by then that he was “Walsingham’s man,” it was true enough, and ever so slightly unsettling enough: “Of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head and clear yellow bearded, eated in the face with small pocks, of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance.”

  By late 1578, Phelippes was stationed at the English embassy in Paris, and increasingly now it was he to whom Mr. Secretary turned when intercepted letters needed deciphering. The files were soon full of them: proficient, swift copies in a clear hand, lists of symbols and the letters or words they stood for worked out in the margins; and always the neat endorsement, a practice code-breakers would still scrupulously be following five centuries later, noting the date the message was originally written, the date it was deciphered. On his return to England, Phelippes continued his work with the same efficiency and zeal.

  For those occasions when it was necessary to return the original without the sender’s suspecting its interception, Mr. Secretary had another man now, too, Arthur Gregory. “Ingenious,” as he was said to be, he had perfected “the art of forcing the seal of a letter, yet so invisibly that it still appeareth virgin to the exactest beholder.”

  Robert Poley was another thirty-or-so-year-old scoundrel of the middling classes doing Mr. Secretary’s duty. Like so many of the others, he was a dubious but nominal Catholic; like so many of the others he had been cast into prison, the Marshalsea in his case, on Mr. Secretary’s orders. Through a year of often harrowing confinement, he ingratiated himself among the four dozen other Catholic prisoners, posing as a fellow sufferer of Anglican persecution. He got information; he also, much more successfully than the hapless Walter Williams, managed to get a genuinely good reference from one of the imprisoned seminary priests he befriended there. Upon his release in May 1584, and with that introduction, Poley wrote to Mary’s agent Thomas Morgan in Paris offering his services. He received an encouraging reply.

  Walsingham in truth had had his doubts about Poley at first. In early 1585, he ordered Poley rearrested and brought before him; for two grueling hours Mr. Secretary personally questioned Poley about his apparent role in distributing banned Catholic books, among them the brilliantly successful propaganda tract Leicester’s Commonwealth. A product of the English Catholic exiles in France, the pamphlet offered enough sexual titillation to ensure wide readership of its slanders against the leader of the English Puritan faction. Among other things, it alleged that there were not “two noblewomen about her Majesty” whom Leicester “hath not solicited to potent ways,” and that, having run out of ladies of his own class to rut with, Leicester was now offering £300 a night to the waiting gentlewomen of the Queen’s chamber.

  A search of Poley’s lodgings turned up more seditious books and the encouraging letter from Morgan. Poley explained he had been planning to show the letter to Mr. Secretary in the hopes of being employed by the English government to advance a “plat” against Morgan, the groundwork for which he had already, at so much hardship to himself, laid. Walsingham remained suspicious about both the books and the letter and for now decided not to avail himself of Poley’s offers.

  Poley was released, however, and now he pressed Leicester himself to employ him where Mr. Secretary would not: “in some course of discovery and service, either abroad or at home, but rather I wish with Morgan, because my plat being laid that way, my credit is both enough with him and also with some of them which were last sent over.” By accomplishing something “worthy to her Majesty’s and Your Honor’s acceptance,” Poley pleaded, he hoped he might “countervail and recompense any offences and misbehaviours of my youth past and lost.”

  In June 1585, he was given his chance by Leicester. Thomas Morgan was still in prison in Paris, but the French authorities were all but openly winking. A steady stream of visitors and messages came and went; the Queen of Scots’ business was conducted with scarcely an interruption from Morgan’s cell in the Bastille.

  Poley arrived in Paris and at once began working the network of Catholic contacts in whose “credit” he stood so well. He said he carried a message from a Catholic gentleman in England who was prepared to re-establish the secret conveyance of letters to and from Mary; he insisted, however, that he could deliver the message to none but Morgan personally. After some initial suspicions, Morgan agreed and “found the means to have him conducted as near as might be to the window of the chamber where I am prisoner.” Along with his letter Poley had brought a cipher-key alphabet from the “gentleman” to be used in the correspondence with Mary.

  By July, Poley was heading home with a pocketful of gold to cover his expenses and many words of encouragement from Morgan and Charles Paget for his efforts. Early in the new year of 1586, Phelippes was handed the first packet of letters Poley had received from Paris to be delivered to Mary.

  Among them was one from Morgan urging Mary to “entertain Poley who … by my advice is placed with the Lady Sidney, daughter of Secretary Walsingham, and by that means ordinarily in his house and thereby able to pick out many things to the information of your Majesty.”

  An extraordinary coincidence.

  Walsingham’s daughter, Frances, had married Sir Philip Sidney two years earlier, on the 20th of September 1583, when she was barely sixteen. Sidney was Leicester’s nephew: a valuable cementing of political alliances. He had first met his future wife eleven years earlier, when he had taken refuge in Walsingham’s house in Paris during the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres; she was then not quite five years old, he seventeen.

  It was probably Walsingham who had first proposed the match to Sidney, and there were advantages to both. Sidney was from a distinguished but financially embarrassed family; Walsingham had no son of his own but had wealth and connections. Sidney had made a name for himself as a sort of dashing Puritan, at once a literary prodigy and a glittering courtier: champion jouster, writer of love sonnets, ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire at the astonishing age of twenty-two. But he was still dogged by some curiously Catholic ties of his youth: Philip II of Spain was actually his godfather, after whom he was named, and his family had offered its protection to Edmund Campion when the future Jesuit priest had first come under suspicion as to his religious allegiances. Marriage to the family of so firm a Puritan as Mr. Secretary would not hurt an ambitious family desirous of proving its loyalty to the new establishment.

  At first the Queen furiously opposed this match of one of the stars of her court to her Secretary’s daughter. So did Sidney’s father: there had at one time been talk of Philip’s marrying a German princess, or the daughter of William of Orange, or some other great prize. But both eventually gave in. For the Sidney family there was the unmistakable fact that, however grand they were, they were also flat broke. Sir Henry, Philip’s father, wrote Walsingham a letter of woe in March 1583 in which he denied that he had ever been “cold” to the prospective marriage, and then went on to catalogue his debts and losses and his “decayed estate”: if he were to die tomorrow, he would leave his three sons £20,000 worse off than his father had left him. Walsingham agreed to cover £1,500 of his future son-in-law’s debts and to provide board and lodging to the married couple—and to leave all of his lands to them.

  In October 1585, Frances had given birth to a daughter, Elizabeth; by the time of her christening, a grand occasion that took place on the 15th of November at Saint Olave’s church near Walsingham’s house in London, the Queen herself present as godmother, Sidney had gone to fight with the Dutch against Spain in the Low Countries. Lady Sidney remained at Barn Elms, Walsingham’s estate, where the couple had indeed made their home since their marriage.

  Whether it was truly Morgan’s “advice” that had originated the idea of Poley’s entering Lady
Sidney’s retinue at Barn Elms, it would have been hard to ask for a better cover for a double agent: it fabulously increased Poley’s credit with Morgan while solving the vexatious problem of explaining why he was seen consorting with Mary’s self-sworn “mortal enemy.”

  Among the other news Poley passed on to Mr. Secretary via this ever-so-convenient arrangement was that Morgan had asked him to make contact with the English Catholic party and see that they “be encouraged and put in hope.” Morgan was also desirous that some scheme for disgracing or possibly even assassinating Leicester should be put in train; and that Poley should get in touch with Châteauneuf, the new French Ambassador, and see if he had any messages he wished conveyed to the Queen of Scots, or to her supporters in Scotland.

  Poley was a luxury. Mr. Secretary had inherited him from Leicester, but he had his own men already working to the same purpose.

  The business of infiltrating Catholic circles was practically down to a routine by now. There was nothing like a spell in prison to establish one’s bona fides; it could almost have been a joke now, the way they were mass-producing Catholic spies and shipping them off to Paris and getting them into Thomas Morgan’s and Charles Paget’s good graces. Close on the heels of Poley came Mr. Secretary’s ever-resourceful prison spy Nicholas Berden, who arrived in Paris in August 1585, also bearing a glowing reference from a well-known Catholic prisonmate. He was also soon introduced to Morgan, and Morgan began sounding him out, too, about helping to open a channel of secret correspondence with Mary.

  And a third infiltrator: the best yet. It was hard to say exactly when Gilbert Gifford had decided to jump sides. He was a member of a well-known Catholic family; his father had been imprisoned for recusancy; in 1579, Gifford had traveled to Rome and entered the seminary for English priests. It was just at the time that tensions between the Welsh and English students there led to the Jesuits’ takeover of the college. Gifford was soon expelled for his unmanageable conduct. He may or may not have hinted to an acquaintance at the time—an acquaintance who undoubtedly was one of Mr. Secretary’s agents at the English College—that he would be willing to enter into secret work for the English government at some time in the future. He then showed up penniless at Rheims, where the Douai seminary had moved, and begged to be admitted there. But soon he had fallen out with Dr. Allen, too, and in the end was ordained a deacon by the Cardinal of Lorraine. In October 1585 he was on his way to Paris.