The Watchers (23 page)

While William Parry was in Venice vaunting his pre-eminent abilities to disrupt the queen's enemies, the considerably more able Phelippes was engaged on a mission for Walsingham. He was a linguist and a mathematician, a talented young man in his late twenties. Above all, he was discreet and careful. In the coming years – from 1585 especially – Thomas Phelippes would prove himself to be Walsingham's most secret and trusted servant, truly a man of the shadows.

William Parry, in contrast to Phelippes, enjoyed the light of attention and praise. He was a man who bored easily. He was worried that he heard very little from England, which meant that he was not sure ‘what to write or how to send' it. To Burghley, Parry was a man of marginal significance, useful enough to cultivate but safe also to ignore. In Parry's mind, however, he was his lordship's faithful servant in Queen Elizabeth's ‘special services'. He wrote: ‘I have presumed that your lordship hath ever esteemed me for a true man to my prince and country. So much whatsoever do come to your ears, I beseech you to promise for me and I will not fail to perform it God willing.' To the world, William Parry was a poor and heavily indebted gentleman and a pardoned felon. In his own mind, he was a secret servant of great
ability. This is why, in the early spring of 1583, he offered himself, without Burghley's knowledge, as a double agent in Elizabeth's service. He decided upon a great plan: to use the Pope's ambassador to the government of Venice, the nuncio Cardinal Campeggio, to infiltrate the Church of Rome and prevent their conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth.

Parry first made contact with Cardinal Campeggio, to whom he was introduced by Jesuits in the city. Parry was certainly conferring with one Jesuit, Benedetto Palmio, with whom he discussed Robert Persons's
Persecution
. Campeggio also received a good account of Parry from an English doctor living in Venice. He is likely to have been John Bradley, a man with a wife, children and property in the city whom Parry certainly knew.

Campeggio was Parry's route to Rome, or so Parry hoped. The nuncio wrote to the Cardinal of Como, the cardinal secretary of state, in March 1583. Campeggio enclosed with his own a letter from Parry to the cardinal. It read:

I, William Parry, an English nobleman, after twelve years in the service of the Queen, was given a licence to travel abroad on secret and important business. Later, after pondering over the task committed to me and having conferred with some confidants of mine, men of judgment and education, I came to the conclusion that it was both dangerous to me and little to my honour. I have accordingly changed my mind and made a firm resolution to relinquish the project assigned to me and, with determined will, to employ all my strength and industry in the service of the Church and the Catholic faith.

Only Parry could have written with such style and abandon. He asked permission to come to Rome for a secret audience with the Pope.

Parry was overjoyed at the success of his secret approach to Campeggio and Como. He left Venice for Lyons, unable to stay in Italy, though whether on Burghley's or Walsingham's orders or because of money is unclear; Parry wrote of being ‘overruled by the necessity of my departure'. But nothing could tarnish his great secret coup. He wrote to Burghley, flourishing his talents, feeling victorious:

If I be not deceived I have shaken the foundation of the English seminary in Rheims and utterly overthrown the credit of the English pensioners
in Rome. My instruments were such as pass for great, honourable and grave. The course was extraordinary and strange, reasonably well devised, soundly followed and substantially executed without the assistance of any one of the English nation.

Parry, the master spy, was preening himself. He wrote to Burghley that he would either discover and prevent all ‘Roman and Spanish practices' against England or lose his life trying. This, he said, was a testimony of his loyalty to the queen and his duty to the honourable friends who had protected him. He wrote: ‘If it please your lordship to confer with Master Secretary touching my letters herewith sent, to advise and direct me, I am ready to do all I shall be able and am commanded.'

It seems very unlikely that either Walsingham or Burghley knew what Parry was up to in any precise way. In his letters he said nothing at all about his contacts with Campeggio, Como and Palmio. It could have been fatal for Parry to mention in his letters to London the approaches he had made to Rome. He never used code or cipher. As he wrote to Walsingham, ‘the miscarrying of my letters to you may cost me my life'. Parry – in seeking an audience with Pope Gregory XIII or indeed in working without the direct sanction of Burghley or Walsingham – was taking the greatest risk of his uncertain life.

Parry went from Venice to Lyons with the idea of building a network of agents. He was not shy in asking Walsingham for money. Whatever he spent, he said, he thought ‘well bestowed'. To recruit agents cost money: the cheapest of Parry's contacts, so he claimed, was a secretary. Not surprisingly, Parry's espionage, which reflected social rank and status, was expensive. One of his sources, a gentleman in Venice, came highly recommended: ‘This man (in my opinion) is well worthy Her Majesty's entertainment in Venice where his credit and acquaintance amongst the nobility is very great. He is prepared already if it please your honour to use him.' He came with Parry's highest praise, ‘a very sufficient man to be entertained in Venice', an ambassador to some of the greatest princes in Germany, and very honest.

In Lyons in the summer of 1583 Parry picked up the rumblings of a minor political scandal. Edward Unton, an English gentleman whose
family connections extended to the Earl of Leicester and to Walsingham himself, had been imprisoned by the inquisition of Milan in late 1582 or early 1583. By June 1583 Unton was free and in Lyons, where Parry got to know him. ‘Master Unton speaketh very great honour of your lordship,' he wrote to Burghley. He was, Parry wrote, a very proper and thankful gentleman, full of devotion to his prince and country: ‘I would to Christ England bred no other.'

Edward Unton's companion in the inquisition's prison had been an English Catholic called Salamon Aldred. This Aldred was once a tailor of Birchin Lane in London but by 1579 he was living in Rome. In fact, he was the same man who knew Charles Sledd, the spy whose evidence had helped to convict Edmund Campion and other priests in 1581, and helped to lodge Sledd in Rome. Aldred, like Sledd and now Parry, played a little at espionage. In 1582 he had offered to supply the Cardinal of Como with letters stolen from English diplomats abroad. Como had refused the advance. A few months later, one of Walsingham's agents reported that ‘there is also at Lyons one Aldred, who hath a pension of ten crowns a month of the Pope, and he doth advertise Rome of all Englishmen that pass'. Aldred would soon come to the notice of Walsingham. In early 1583 he visited the English seminary in Rome. Parry and Aldred were by now men of the same world, of shady contacts, suspicion, and uncertain and divided loyalties. We have to wonder whether they fully understood the consequences of so tangled a life.

In the summer months of 1583 Parry was still alert to intelligence, though with what kind of critical filter it is hard to tell, especially given his continued contact with Campeggio. On 18 August he wrote: ‘I am advertised by more than an ordinary man that there is some great practice in hand in the north part of England. How true it is God knoweth.' This was a short note to Burghley in Parry's hand but without a signature. At the foot of the sheet of paper Parry wrote ‘Burn'. He rarely underplayed the dramatic aspects of his work. Still in Lyons, he reported on the movements of Salamon Aldred and Edward Unton. But by now he wanted to become a scholar as well as a spy. He suggested the idea was Walsingham's: ‘The liberty that
I have long desired to withdraw myself to some university is at last (by Master Secretary's advice and favour) granted.' He told Burghley that he would now spend the rest of his time abroad in Orleans and Paris, to return to England with ‘reasonable contentation' – ‘if', he added, reflecting upon his difficult times at home, ‘I be not to blame'.

A secret report by William Parry for Lord Burghley, 1583.

And so William Parry – spy, gentleman, debtor, convicted felon, prisoner, recruiter of agents and aspiring scholar – went off to Orleans. He hoped to spend the winter there, but was driven on to Paris by the threat of plague. In the city he had the good fortune to meet his old associate Master Stafford, now Sir Edward Stafford, the queen's resident ambassador at the French court, and to make the acquaintance of Lord Burghley's grandson, seventeen-year-old William Cecil, ‘whose good nature and towardness [aptitude or promise] beginneth to make a very good show already'. As ever he wished to show how grateful he was to Burghley: ‘I will do my best to make it appear how much I am bound to your lordship,' he wrote. ‘And for my lord ambassador if anything come to my hands worthy his knowledge I have promised him the preferment.'

For all these flattering professions of service, it is clear that Parry's
contacts with Rome in autumn 1583 were just as strong as ever. Parry's secret was that he had betrayed Burghley and Walsingham. Deluded by his own cleverness, he had proposed to the Catholic authorities a plan to betray Elizabeth's government. Only the events of the coming months, when that plan matured into a plot to kill the queen, would show where his double loyalties really lay.

In 1583 the Duke of Guise, cousin to Mary Queen of Scots, gave money, time and men to a plan for the invasion of England. English historians have long known it as the Throckmorton Plot, thanks to the small but significant part played in its planning by Francis Throckmorton, a young English Catholic gentleman. The cast of principal English characters is a fairly narrow one: Throckmorton himself, who worked as a courier for the Spanish ambassador in London; Charles Paget, an English émigré and one of Guise's men; his brother Thomas, Lord Paget, an English nobleman whose support for the invasion was sought by the duke; the Catholic earls of Northumberland and Arundel, both of whom had convenient strongholds near the coast where the invading army would land; and finally Lord Henry Howard, an elusive and subtle man, a Catholic and a supporter of the Queen of Scots.

The story begins in two very different places and with two quite different men: in the busy French port of Dieppe with a Sussex shipmaster, and then, some miles to the south-east, in Paris with the great Duke of Guise himself.

The man who called himself Wattes made his approach to John Halter in Dieppe on the feast day of Saint Bartholomew, 24 August, in 1583. Halter was the master and part owner of a bark, a small ship out of Arundel on the coast of Sussex. He was working for a London merchant, carrying a cargo of wooden boards to Dieppe, and in late August he was getting ready to return with nine fardels of cards and writing paper. Wattes told Halter that he lived in Rouen. He asked the shipmaster to take a gentleman over to England and then to bring him back
to Dieppe. The price they agreed for this mysterious passenger was £7; once safely returned to France Halter would ‘stand to the gentleman's reward'. A condition of the arrangement was absolute anonymity for the passenger, who, Halter later remembered, was earnest in requiring of him ‘in no wise neither in England nor in France to ask his name'. Halter knew him only as ‘the gentleman'. When he was later examined the shipmaster of Arundel gave no physical description of the man.

The shipmaster John Halter's account of Charles Paget's secret journey to England, December 1583.

In the first week of September a favourable wind blew, and John Halter's bark set out from the harbour of Dieppe. The crossing to England took fourteen hours, and they went ashore at Arundel haven. The gentleman asked Halter to take him to the house of one William Davies at Patching, some four miles north-east of the haven, where they arrived at two o'clock in the morning of probably either Sunday, 8 September or Monday the 9th. Halter left the gentleman with Davies and returned to Patching about ten days later, where they had to
wait three or four days for the wind and tide. When he was ready to sail, Halter spoke to Davies ‘to call the gentleman to come on board at the haven mouth'. On 25 September, the Wednesday before Michaelmas, Halter, the gentleman and his manservant, as well as a servant to William Shelley of Michelgrove and a man Halter did not know, went down to the haven. With only the gentleman and his servant as passengers, Halter's bark landed at Dieppe on Friday, 27 September. It was a quiet crossing: the shipmaster and the gentleman did not speak on the return voyage because, as Halter later said, his passenger ‘was so sick at sea'. The gentleman stayed at Dieppe for a whole day, probably to recover from the rigours of his journey, before returning to Rouen.