The Watchers (14 page)

Sledd met Walsingham again on Thursday, 26 May. In a longer interview than the first, he presented Sir Francis with a paper he called ‘the intelligence of the affairs of Englishmen in Rome, and other places'. He also brought to their meeting a long bulletin of foreign news and letters (or copies of letters) written by Catholic émigrés in Rome, Rheims, Milan, Paris and Rouen. As well as working with Justice Young to find priests hidden in London, he had been busy writing and preparing for the meeting. Sir Henry Cobham in Paris had sent on some of Sledd's information a few weeks earlier, but now the time had come for Sledd to reveal everything personally to Sir Francis.

Sledd's surviving dossier is an extraordinary compilation of facts. In a first part he set out the names of nearly three hundred English and Welsh Catholics abroad and the pensions they received from the Pope, as well as the physical descriptions of the priests he knew. The
second part was his diary of meetings, dinners, conversations and events in Rome and on his journey through Italy and France back to England. It is likely that he wrote it up in London from the notes he had kept abroad. The paper he used was French, made, as the water-marks show, by two different manufacturers. It was the kind of paper that Sledd could have bought for himself in London or have been given by one of Walsingham's staff. Sledd gave his dossier, at which he must have worked doggedly, a grand title. It runs on like the beginning of an essay:

Charles Sledd's dossier, with Edmund Campion's name inserted, and the identity of an informant on Campion's fellow Jesuit Robert Persons inked out.

A general discourse of the Pope's Holiness' devices invented and devised first by his English branches, enemies to this Her Majesty's royal estate, concluded and agreed on by his college of cardinals, with the aid of other princes adjoining to His Holiness, which doth pretend the disturbance of the Queen's Majesty and not without murders and many slanderous speeches, divided into several books.

The purpose of this title (which is typically Elizabethan in its ponderous style) was to impress upon Walsingham and his inner circle the significance of the intelligence Sledd had gathered and set out so carefully. One of Walsingham's staff, a clerk of the Privy Council called Robert Beale, gave it a simple abbreviated title, pointing to its significance for the government: ‘Priests and seminaries beyond the seas'.

It was obvious that Sledd had produced the most complete reference work then available on Queen Elizabeth's enemies. He surely knew how important his dossier was. The English Catholic exiles of Bologna, Cambrai, Douai, Florence, Lyons, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rheims, Rouen and Venice, but above all Rome and Paris, were stripped bare. Working for months as the trusted courier of Catholic laymen and priests, he knew the names of the émigrés, something of their families, situations and circumstances and often what they looked like. He had a record of treasonous words spoken against Elizabeth and her government. Now his discourse was in the hands of Sir Francis Walsingham and his men, and Sledd had official support in making his investigations in London and Westminster. No wonder that for English Catholics Sledd quickly became one of the most hated and feared priest-hunters in England.

William Parry, still in Paris in June 1580, had nothing like Charles Sledd's fire and passion or Anthony Munday's talent for the printing press. He was a gentleman, discovering information about the English Catholic exiles of the city in his own leisured way, a spy who enjoyed dinners in the company of very important men. On 4 June 1580 he wrote to Burghley. The high prose style and the elegant penmanship were very much Parry's; so too was the seal, the small signet of a lion rampant he pressed into the dark-red wax.

Parry had information on the progress of the former Bishop of St Asaph in Wales, Thomas Goldwell, who had at last arrived in Rheims from Rome. Elderly and claiming ill health, he was a reluctant traveller, hardly filled with the missionary spirit to return to his homeland. Parry believed that Goldwell would either go back to Rome or stay in Rheims in the hope of better fortune.

William Parry's information was certainly useful. It corroborated
Sledd's intelligence and it helped Elizabeth's government to prepare for the coming of William Allen's missionary priests. But Parry was too keen to dabble in gossip and he was easily bored. He needed a serious project to keep himself busy. So when Charles Nevill, sixth Earl of Westmorland – the outlawed rebel who had raised an army against the queen in 1569 – arrived in Paris in the last week of June, Parry took it upon himself to reconcile Westmorland to Elizabeth. He was not invited to do this: indeed only William Parry, the gentleman spy who dined with the English exiles and dangerous foreign ambassadors and then wrote elegantly self-confident letters to Lord Burghley, had the nerve to set about the negotiations with such style and abandon. He sought to impress Burghley with his skills and subtlety. It was, as Parry's story will show very clearly, a dangerous game for him to play.

Anthony Munday, Charles Sledd, William Parry: three Elizabethan spies, three very different men. Each in his own way was elusive, well practised at keeping his own secrets hidden. Each left behind evidence of his activities in Rome and Paris: Munday his books and pamphlets, Sledd his intensely written dossier, and Parry his over-courteous letters to Lord Burghley. These documents say something about their personalities. Munday was the reluctant scholar, used to flouting authority. He was a skilled writer with a gift for telling exciting tales. He knew his audience and he could both enthral and horrify them with the secrets of his ‘English Roman life'.

Sledd appears to have been a quiet and unassuming man, trusted as a responsible servant. That is precisely what made him so very dangerous. More than this, he was a plausible spy. His command of detail was devastating. No one could honestly hope to fabricate every detail of his extraordinary dossier and be able to fool Sir Francis Walsingham. This helps to explain why Catholic exiles as important as William Allen turned upon Sledd such venomous hatred. He was Judas; he betrayed absolutely. And yet did he betray for money? There is no obvious evidence that he became a wealthy man by writing his dossier or by hunting down priests in London. At best he probably scratched a living by relying on Walsingham's patronage. In fact, for someone so passionately driven in his official work in England, there
is a curious absence of obvious motive. He opened his dossier of intelligence by stating that he had at the beginning set out on his travels ‘desirous to learn languages and also to see the natural inclinations and dispositions of strange and foreign countries'. Any subject who left England without a passport from the queen said that, just as he also stated (as Sledd did) that he was a good Protestant. It was a very thin story, and it said nothing of why, after months of working as a servant in Rome, he turned so strongly against men he knew very well. Probably only Walsingham, in their interviews, got the full measure of Charles Sledd. Sir Francis was a penetrating student of human nature, especially human frailty.

William Parry's character may be easier to read. Parry, whose sense of his own importance could be overpowering, loved to dine grandly with knights, earls and ambassadors. He was a social climber and something of a snob, captivated by a life he could not afford to pursue without the dubious help of moneylenders. He lived dangerously on credit, hoping no doubt for Lord Burghley's generous patronage but never receiving it. In his life and in his spying he was, as later chapters of this book will show, perilously self-deluding. If ever there was an Elizabethan spy born for self-destruction, it was William Parry.

In the summer of the year 1580 Elizabeth's advisers watched and waited for the invasion of England by the powers of Catholic Europe. After all, the Pope and King Philip of Spain had already sent five hundred troops to Elizabeth's kingdom of Ireland under the command of James Fitzmaurice. When the force arrived at Smerwick in County Kerry, in the far south-west of Ireland, Nicholas Sander proclaimed a just war against the ‘she-tyrant' Elizabeth. Fitzmaurice's men fortified an Atlantic promontory and called to Catholic Europe for reinforcements. That support never arrived. In September 1580 they were surrounded by the queen's troops and navy and, in spite of surrendering, all but twenty-three of Fitzmaurice's men were massacred. Sander survived to die more obscurely. Lord Burghley, sensing the work of providence, later wrote that ‘wandering the mountains in Ireland without succor, [he] died raving in a frenzy'. Smerwick was utterly
symbolic of a war that was fought with fierce hearts and courageous words but with few resources.

This was not the glorious Catholic crusade that Charles Sledd had heard William Allen celebrating in Rome months earlier. But in the summer of 1580 the queen's ministers were neither celebratory nor complacent. Sir Henry Radcliffe of Portsmouth, one of whose men had returned from a reconnaissance of the Spanish coast, sent news to the Privy Council that great naval preparations were being made in Spain. Other reports by travellers suggested military activity in the western Mediterranean. Surely a Spanish fleet was on the way to England.

The truth was, in fact, that in 1580 King Philip of Spain could not commit troops and ships to the invasion of England. He had neither the military resources, which were deployed elsewhere, nor really the inclination to depose Elizabeth. But in the perception of Elizabeth's government the danger was real and imminent. And perception in politics is a powerful thing. Sledd, and before him Anthony Munday, spoke to deep fears in England of political conspiracy in Rome. They showed something of the passion and organizing intelligence of the leading English exiles. Thanks to an intercepted letter, Elizabeth's government knew only too well the words Nicholas Sander had written in 1577 to William Allen: ‘The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assaulting of England.' It was a sentence used over and over again by Elizabeth's advisers to justify a state of profound emergency.

And it is here, in the anxious days of July 1580, that we can begin to see how the espionage of Charles Sledd and William Parry and Anthony Munday's lively books influenced the most powerful men in England. At the very least they helped to create and sustain a political mood, though in the case of Sledd the evidence is even stronger: his dossier, presented to Sir Francis Walsingham and filed safely away for reference in the royal secretariat, was hugely significant. Munday's revelations of Roman conspiracy may have been gently encouraged by the authorities. It was very easy for Elizabeth's Privy Council to suppress books it found inconvenient and through long-established relationships with London's printers to support certain writers. There was much of what Sledd and Munday had discovered in the royal proclamation published in July to suppress dangerous rumours of an
invasion and to reveal to honest subjects ‘the traitorous and malicious purposes and solicitations' of rebels living abroad. The proclamation was written by Lord Burghley, who, as ever, paid careful attention to his words, labouring over the text of the proclamation, working to achieve precision. He defended Elizabeth's rule as queen and her resolve to withstand her enemies; on this last point she expected her subjects to do the same. The proclamation speaks to the experience of Sledd, of those quiet observations, of the reports of malicious conspiracy believed by powerful men in Westminster. Joined to rebels and traitors already living in foreign parts were

others that are fled out of the realm as persons refusing to live here in their natural country, both which of long time have wandered from place to place, and from one prince's court to another, but especially to the city of Rome, and therein have falsely and traitorously sought and practised by all means possible to irritate all estates against Her Majesty and the realm, and therewith as much as in them might lie to move hostility, wherein by God's goodness and special favour to this realm their designs have been hitherto frustrate.

This is what both Anthony Munday and Charles Sledd had perceived in Rome. The strands of their experiences and narratives could be woven together to make a taut cord of treason. To the readers of Munday's books and for those few Sir Francis Walsingham trusted to read Sledd's dossier, any talk by William Allen or his confederates of an innocent holy mission to save souls was nonsense. In their minds Allen and his agents had a single political objective: to destroy Elizabeth's Church, to bring down her government and to push her forcibly from her throne.

This was war. Allen himself, explaining the nature of the mission, wrote of it in those terms, though he meant not a war waged by armies for political control but one fought by priests for English souls. It was clear to Elizabeth's advisers in 1580 that the danger came not only from Spanish troops and sailors or the Pope's money for an invasion, though that danger felt very real. Thanks to the intelligence given by Sledd, the English authorities waited for the priests from Rome and Rheims. They were the agents of foreign powers, conspirators, stirrers
of sedition and rebellion. They were traitors. Sledd's dossier undoubtedly helped to catch some of them. Robert Johnson and the lawyer Henry Orton, with whom Sledd had travelled from Rome, were arrested within weeks of returning to England. John Hart, who had preached the incendiary sermon Sledd had heard in Rheims, was picked up as soon as he landed at Dover. He was taken first to the royal court at Nonsuch Palace and then to the grim Marshalsea prison in Southwark. Johnson, Orton and Hart were early casualties of a very dangerous mission.