Elizabeth's Spymaster (32 page)

Shortage of cash, therefore, forced Philip to turn to the Vatican in 1587. His ambassador there, Henry de Guzman, Count de Olivarez, was not sanguine about the prospect of obtaining financial support from Sixtus V: ‘When it comes to getting money out of him, it is like squeezing his life blood,’ he reported despondently to his royal master.
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The Pope, one of history’s great reformers of Vatican finances, no doubt wanted to preserve its riches. Moreover, although an implacable opponent of everything Elizabeth stood for, politically and religiously, there are indications in some of his letters and pronouncements that he held a sneaking regard for her courage and single-mindedness. Perhaps he also had serious doubts about the chances of success for the Spanish plans. Eventually, however, on 29 July Sixtus signed a treaty with Spain, promising Philip one million gold ducats, or
£40,
000, 000 in today’s money, to help fund the ‘Enterprise of England’.

Despite the ambassador’s efforts to obtain a munificent advance, the final canny agreement was that one half was to be paid when Spanish forces actually landed on English soil and the remainder in equal instalments every two months thereafter. Lawyers today would recognise the deal as a ‘no win, no fee’ arrangement. In return, Philip could bestow the crown of England on anyone he wished, providing that the new monarch pledged that the defeated realm would be restored to the Catholic faith.
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One would not expect the Pope to reject outright appeals for help to reclaim a recalcitrant nation back into the Catholic fold, but the terms and conditions he imposed were less than generous – and hardly immediately helpful to Spain.

A correspondent in Rome told Burghley that the Spanish plan was to capture Elizabeth and send her triumphantly as a prisoner to the Vatican:

He heard the cardinal say that the King of Spain gave great charge … to all the captains that in no way they should harm the person of the queen; but upon taking her, use the same with reverence, looking well to the custody of her. And further … take order for the conveyance of her person to Rome, to the purpose that his Holiness the Pope should dispose thereof in sort, as it should please him.
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Pleasant dreams of success aside, Philip of Spain was still left with an immediate cash-flow problem in paying for the Armada preparations. This was partially solved in August when the Spanish Plate Fleet arrived safely from the West Indies with sixteen million gold ducats on board, of which twenty-five per cent, or
£1
60, 000, 000 at current prices, went straight into the king’s depleted coffers in his exchequer.

Elizabeth still clung obstinately to her fond hopes of peace, and an irritated Walsingham wrote to Leicester on 21 September complaining of her failure to appreciate the dangerous reality England and her throne were now confronting:

To think that the king of Spain, having his treasure now come home in greater quantity than ever he had, his forces doubled in those countries [Holland] when the levies made in Italy and Germany shall be arrived and the Pope ready to back him with three million crowns
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and all against England, will make a peace but with such conditions as will work then [to the] overthrow both of her majesty and of those countries [the Low Countries] is but a mere vanity, for always the strongest gives law to the weaker.
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Soon after Drake’s return from ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’, as his exploits were now popularly labelled, Walsingham sat down and drew up plans to gather more timely and accurate intelligence out of Spain. He could no longer rely on the serendipity of a report being sent casually by a merchant in that country as this extracurricular activity was
becoming more and more risky for such amateur informants in the face of heightened Spanish security.

In April 1587, Mendoza wrote to King Philip that he had heard

from a good quarter that a Scots merchant, who says he is the King of Scotland’s banker, is in Spain with twelve well fitted English boats freighted with merchandise from [England] – the mariners also being English. It would be well for your majesty to send orders to the ports to have this merchant arrested. His name is Hunter.
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Hunter was based in Lisbon and was quickly arrested, put on trial as an English spy and supporter of heretics, and imprisoned in the city. A later letter from him, still in the British Library, confirms Mendoza’s suspicions as fully justified. In the correspondence, Hunter describes his incarceration, but boldly adds details of the armaments and munitions stored in the city. He appends a crude sketch of a horn as his signature in cipher, but the true provenance is confirmed by Walsingham’s marginal note, written safely back in London: ‘From Mr Hunter of Lisbon.’
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His motivation for undertaking this dangerous work can only be guessed at – perhaps he was a fervent Scottish Protestant?

Another brave man was the Englishman Nicholas Ousley, who resided in Malaga and who smuggled his intelligence out of Spain hidden in wine casks. Again, it was Mendoza who identified his clandestine work in a note to the Spanish king on 12 July 1587:

Ousley… sends advertisements [news] to the queen [Elizabeth] and on Walsingham receiving certain letters from him, he said he was one of the cleverest men he knew and the queen was much indebted to him for his regular and trustworthy information.
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Ousley was captured, then bribed himself out of jail, and was still sending reports to London as late as April 1588. He later served as a volunteer soldier aboard the
Revenge
in the skirmishes against the Armada up the English Channel. Lord Admiral Howard wrote of him to Burghley:

It has pleased her majesty, in respect of his good service heretofore in Spain, in sending very good intelligence thence, and now since in our late fight against the Spanish fleet, to grant him a lease of St Helen’s in London.
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Back in 1587, Walsingham needed a more reliable intelligence network to counter the threat of the Armada and his scheme to achieve that end demonstrates his customary methodical planning. He wrote a document to plan his way out of the problem of a dearth of information on military capabilities and intentions, entitled
A Plot for Intelligence out of Spain:

1. Sir Edward Stafford [Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris] to draw what he can from the Venetian ambassador.
   

2. To procure some correspondence with the French king’s ambassador to Spain.
   

3. To take order with some at Rouen to have frequent advertisements [news] from such as arrive out of Spain at Nantes, Newhaven [present-day Le Havre] and Dieppe.
   

4. To make choice of two especial persons, French, Flemings or Italians to go along the coast [of Spain] to see what preparations are a making there. To furnish them with letters of credit.
   

5. To have intelligence at the Court of Spain, one of Finale,
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   one of Genoa.
   

6. To have intelligence at Brussels, Leiden
   ⁴²
   [and in Denmark].
   

7. To employ the Lord Dunsany.
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The plan capitalised on the spy master’s experience and knowledge won in his younger days in Europe, and no doubt exploited his surviving contacts in the Low Countries and Italy. How much of this plan Walsingham managed to put in place remains unknown. Elizabeth grudgingly made grants of £3,300 (£574,800 at current prices)
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in March and June 1587 towards the cost of the spy master’s secret services, which probably proved insufficient for his intelligence-gathering needs, and a further £2,000 the following year. There seems little doubt that he was forced to supplement this budget out of his own pocket, in fulfilment of his own maxim that the acquisition ‘of knowledge is never too dear’.

His pressing need to improve intelligence on Spain came at a time when he was still running a secret police operation against what he saw as the subversive seminaries in England. Leicester’s military campaign against the Spanish in the Low Countries – and more importantly, its expense – was also preoccupying the queen’s attention.
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Despite the mountain of tasks facing a Secretary of State, Walsingham recognised the bigger issue and drew up his plans accordingly.

Total reliance on informants in Spain seemed far too risky, although Walsingham continued to receive titbits from a range of sources, and in June 1587 he made arrangements for two ‘intelligencers’ to be inserted into the Spanish court and two more to spy on the Spanish preparations on the coast. He looked more to cosmopolitan Venice, Florence and Rome as the most fruitful areas to exploit. Walsingham already had a substantial network of agents in Italy, watching the English Catholics there, and it would have been an easy and cost-effective matter to redirect their energies rather than set up a new, purpose-built ring of spies. However, he did dispatch one Stephen Paule to Venice in early 1587 who sent weekly reports for more than a year of the gossip and rumour he picked up in that thriving, cosmopolitan city. In November, Paule reported that Michael Giraldi, a ‘Bergomase’,
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has set sail for England, pretending to be a merchant. It is thought that for several reasons, [he is] to poison her majesty at the instigation of the Pope. The Pope, under pretence of supporting the war against the heretics and for performing some great enterprise, has enriched himself exceedingly.
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Walsingham’s best overseas agent was the reckless Catholic Anthony Standen, alias Pompeo Pellegrini, alias ‘B. C.’,
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who in 1565 was a member of the household of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots’ second husband, and later lived and worked in Tuscany. He was a great friend of Giovanni Figliazzi, the Duke of Tuscany’s ambassador in Madrid, and his dispatches, many routed through Walsingham’s agent Manucci, began to tap this useful friendship. Standen was also proactive in his intelligence-gathering. In May 1587, he reported that four galleys from
the Genoese fleet had sailed for Spain and the Armada and he had heard that four more were to leave Naples. He added in cipher:

Since your last [letter], in which you desire intelligence on Spanish matters, I have borrowed 100 crowns and dispatched to Lisbon a Fleming who has there a brother in service with the [Spanish Grand Admiral] marquis of Santa Cruz and of his chamber.

I have given him [the] address for his letters to me at the [Tuscan] ambassador’s house in Madrid who straight will send them to me.

He is a proper fellow and writes well and I sent him away with these four galleys.
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What a triumph of espionage! Walsingham now had an agent within the household of the Spanish naval commander-in-chief, although the route necessary to retrieve the vital information was lengthy and time-consuming and Santa Cruz himself died on 9 February 1588, his demise said to have been caused by Philip II’s constant reproaches over delays in readying the Armada. One of the first fruits of this new agent was a copy of the grand admiral’s most recent order of battle, dated 22 March 1587, complete with the fleet’s wages bill, signed by Santa Cruz himself and Navy Secretary Barnaby de Pedrosa.

Three months later, Standen informed Walsingham of his firm belief that the Spanish could not be ready in time that year to take advantage of good weather to dispatch the Armada. He also reported Spanish reactions to Drake’s punitive expedition:

The attempts of Sir Francis Drake upon the Spanish coasts make these people tremble. If upon him entering the port of Cadiz he had immediately landed, he might certainly have plundered that rich town, though [as] it was the mischief he did them came to 1, 000, 000 crowns.

The spy master passed on his letter to Burghley with the comment: ‘I humbly pray your lordship that Pompey’s letter may be reserved to yourself. I would be loathe [sic] the gentleman should have any harm
through my default.’
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Security over the identity of sources was as vital then as it is now, to protect their cover.

On 28 August 1587, Standen sent in more intelligence, partly in cipher. He reported that the city of Ragusa had promised to provide Philip of Spain with eighty ships and 4, 000 sailors.

The king’s … enterprise upon England proceeds not so much out of his inclination, as for the necessity he has … of preserving the Indian navigation, being the fairest flower in his garland. The Pope bends his whole thoughts upon the invasion of England.
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The Spanish already had substantial land forces on England’s doorstep – across the southern North Sea in the Low Countries. Reports in 1587 from spies watching the Duke of Parma’s headquarters confirmed their plans to use these troops in the invasion forces after the Armada had neutralised Elizabeth’s navy in the English Channel.

An example of Walsingham’s espionage methodology is provided in a report by two Spanish prisoners of war in England, Francisco de Valverde and Pedro de Santa Cruz.
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In late February 1588, they informed Mendoza about the espionage ring operated by relatives of Dr Hector Nunez,
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a distinguished Portuguese physician in London who was one of Walsingham’s correspondents, or in modern spy jargon a dead letter box – receiving letters from abroad on his behalf. The two prisoners told the Spanish ambassador: