The Watchers (25 page)

On either 5 or 6 November, royal officials visited both Dame Margery Throckmorton's house in Lewisham and Throckmorton House at Paul's Wharf on the River Thames, a few streets south of St Paul's Cathedral. Francis, it seems, was almost caught in the act of treason, ‘taken short at the time of his apprehension' in composing a letter in
cipher to Mary Queen of Scots. He was led away and his house was searched. Officers found in Throckmorton's chamber two papers that listed the names of English Catholic noblemen and gentlemen and gave the descriptions of havens for the safe landing of foreign troops. Also found were twelve genealogical pedigrees of the ancestry of the English royal family supporting the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to Elizabeth's throne.

The searchers at Throckmorton House missed, however, one vital piece of evidence. It was a casket covered with green velvet that, thanks to the quick thinking of Francis Throckmorton's wife Anne, was spirited out of the house by their servants and taken to a friend of Throckmorton who lodged in Cheapside. The following day he handed it to one of the Spanish ambassador's servants.

Francis Throckmorton had no time to make his dispositions. His wife and servants had to cope as well as they could. Throckmorton had visited Lord Paget the evening before his arrest. Recognizing the danger he was in, Paget, from his lodgings on Fleet Street, not very far away from Paul's Wharf, began to prepare to leave England.

The day was Thursday, 7 November. Throckmorton House had been searched; so had the house of Dame Margery Throckmorton at Lewisham. Lord Paget wrote to a servant on his estates in Staffordshire: ‘for that I have occasion to use money … presently send me as much money as is any ways come to any of your hands to be here the 16 day of this month, for there I shall have occasion to use it'. He instructed his servants Twyneho and Walklate ‘and such other as you shall think meet come with all, but let them keep it very secret'. There was urgency here but no rush: Lord Paget believed he had just over a week to get his affairs in order. Clearly he was beginning to sense a very serious change in his fortunes, and this only a few weeks after his stern lecture to his brother Charles about loyalty.

As Francis Throckmorton was led away to custody and his house searched, two very experienced and rather tough privy councillors, Sir Ralph Sadler and Sir Walter Mildmay, interrogated Lord Henry Howard. Howard held out for as long as he could, asking to be allowed to speak to Sir Francis Walsingham personally. Both Sadler
and Mildmay knew the importance of Lord Henry's examination. Through Robert Beale, a clerk of the Privy Council, they asked to meet Walsingham on 10 November, after which they would brief the queen on their suspicions of Howard's questionable activities.

Francis Throckmorton was taken first to the house of the master of the royal posts on St Peter's Hill, one of the neighbouring streets to Paul's Wharf. Throckmorton was kept there for two or three days before going to the Tower. He was allowed to meet ‘a solicitor of his law causes', who brought to him papers and books. Throckmorton used the meeting to slip a note into one of them. Denied pen and ink, he wrote on one of his lawyer's papers with a piece of coal the words ‘I would fain [gladly] know whether my casket be safe'. He took a fantastic risk. And so too did his lawyer, who after leaving Throckmorton went straight to Throckmorton House – down St Peter's Hill, a right turn on to Thames Street, then the first left towards the river and Paul's Wharf – and opened up his papers. He found the note, which he gave to one of Throckmorton's household men.

On Friday, 15 November, William Herle, Lord Burghley's long-serving intelligencer, his eyes and ears in London, wrote to his master. Herle was lodged at the Bull's Head just outside the city walls at Temple Bar, close to Lord Paget's house. On the very same day Paget, if his instructions were being followed, should have been expecting the arrival within hours of the servants and money he needed to leave England secretly.

Herle was interested in conspiracy. He knew of a great international plot that involved the Duke of Guise, the Throckmorton brothers and Lord Henry Howard:

The chief mark that is shot at, is Her Majesty's person, whom God doth and will preserve, according to her confident trust in him. The Duke of Guise is the director of the action, and the Pope is to confer the kingdom by his gift, upon such a one as is to marry with the Scottish Queen.

Rumours in London said that the elusive Lord Henry was a priest, even (more fancifully but a mark of a surprising man) that he was
secretly one of the Pope's cardinals. And Herle knew all about Francis Throckmorton, for earlier that year he had told Secretary Walsingham of Throckmorton's secret meetings with the French ambassador in London, ‘what long and private conferences, at seasons suspicious, and of his being at mass thereat several times'. Indeed one of Throckmorton's kinsmen had dined with the French ambassador only that Sunday, 10 November (‘if I mistake not the day'). Francis Throckmorton, Herle wrote now to Burghley, was ‘a party very busy and an enemy to the present state'. Herle wrote again the next day to Burghley: ‘the world is full of mischief, for the enemy sleeps not'.

Under interrogation Francis Throckmorton's story was that the incriminating papers found in his chamber at Paul's Wharf were not really his. They had, he said, been the work of one ‘Rogers alias Nutteby'. To support this fabrication Throckmorton ‘found the means to get three cards', on the back of which he wrote secretly to his younger brother George: ‘I have been examined by whom the two papers, containing the names of certain noblemen and gentlemen, and of havens, etc. were written.' He had said that they were in the handwriting of a household servant, and hoped that George would confirm the fabrication. Unfortunately for Francis, however, the cards were intercepted. On 13 November Walsingham made an entry in his notebook of the order for George Throckmorton's arrest.

Though Francis Throckmorton may have been offered a pardon for information on his serious crimes, at first he made a plain denial of any knowledge of treason. In the Tower of London, interviewed by privy councillors, he resisted examination. Thus refusing to talk, he was handed over to a number of commissioners with a warrant ‘to assay [attempt, try or test] by torture to draw from him the truth of the matters'. In the official account of his examination on the rack, the phrase used was ‘somewhat pinched, although not much'. The verb ‘pinch' could mean a range of physical discomfort from irritation and annoyance to torture and torment.

Throckmorton was taken to the rack on 16 November. Still he refused to speak. He was given three days to recover physically, but quickly the decision was made to rack him again. On the 18th Walsingham sent the Council's torture warrant to the Tower. Pragmatic
and unflinching, Walsingham was blunt: ‘I suppose the grief [pain, torment] of the last torture will suffice without any extremity of racking to make him more conformable than he hath hitherto showed himself.' To one of the interrogators he offered a grim reflection, writing that he had seen men as resolute as Throckmorton stoop – to submit or yield under coercion – ‘notwithstanding the great show that he hath made of a Roman resolution'.

Throckmorton spoke at last on 19 November. Walsingham, knowing the rack from experience, was correct: this time merely the threat of torture was enough to make him talk. He made a confession on 20 November, explaining how Sir Francis Englefield, in the government's view one of the queen's most dangerous enemies, had recruited him to carry letters to and from the Spanish ambassador in England. Throckmorton admitted that he had encouraged Englefield to press King Philip of Spain to invade England. He confessed, too, to having told his brother Thomas about the Duke of Guise's earlier projected invasions of Scotland. When these plans had fallen through in 1582, Guise began once again to look to England:

if there could be a part found in England to join in the action and convenient places and means for landing, and other things necessary, there should be a supply for Guise of foreign strength. And [Throckmorton] said the Spanish ambassador in France called Juan Bautista de Tassis was acquainted with this matter.

On the day Francis Throckmorton was continuing to confess to his contacts with Sir Francis Englefield, William Herle, Lord Burghley's intelligencer, wrote to his patron of his devotion to ‘public security', while Thomas, third Baron Paget left London ostensibly for his estates in Staffordshire but actually heading for the coast of Sussex.

After leaving London on the 23rd, Lord Paget and his party of servants and gentlemen were on the coast of Sussex near Ferring on 25 November. On that Monday, ‘almost an hour within night', a yeoman farmer was inspecting his land. He saw eight men on horseback riding on the highway towards the sea. One man rode ahead with his sword drawn. Six of the others followed, riding two-by-two. The eighth man came behind, though the farmer could not tell whether his
sword was in or out of its scabbard. They were riding ‘for the most part all big horses or geldings'. He saw none of the men or their horses come back up the highway.

In this way, Thomas, Lord Paget left England secretly without the queen's licence. It was a month to the day since he had warned his brother Charles in Rouen of the duty and loyalty he owed in England, threatening to forget him as a brother. With Paget was Charles Arundel, the son of a knight and through his mother a kinsman of the noble house of Howard – another Catholic gentleman, another exile.

Elizabeth's advisers learned of Lord Paget's flight less than a week after he and his men had ridden down to Ferring. They guessed that Paget and Arundel would make for Paris. On 1 December Walsingham wrote to Sir Edward Stafford with the queen's order for her ambassador to keep a watchful eye on them. They had lately left England without leave; Stafford should seek very carefully to learn what they practised against the state.

In London there began a strenuous investigation of the facts. In the Tower Francis Throckmorton admitted that his ‘plat' – his ‘platform' or plan – of the harbours of Sussex was taken from maps. He had not scouted the coast for himself: that task was left to others. On 2 December he confessed to the involvement of Charles Paget in the Duke of Guise's project to land fourteen or fifteen thousand troops in Sussex. Paget ‘was thereupon sent into Sussex in September 1583 to sound some noblemen and gentlemen there therein, and to view the havens'.

Although by the end of 1583 some pieces of the puzzle were still missing, it was clear that Walsingham and the Privy Council had discovered a major plot for an invasion of England. Elizabeth's government knew from at least two sources – the interrogations of Francis Throckmorton and the information of Burghley's intelligencer William Herle – that behind the plan was Henry, Duke of Guise. Both the French and Spanish ambassadors appeared to be involved. Lord Henry Howard was suspected of complicity, though the evidence against him was not yet conclusive. Lord Paget had left England without a licence in a great hurry. His brother Charles Paget was already deeply suspected of conspiracy. There was, in other words, a great
tangle of suspicious activity: by Francis Throckmorton and his family and accomplices, by the Paget brothers and by Lord Henry Howard, on the streets of London and in the villages and hamlets of Sussex. In the weeks that followed, Walsingham and his men spared no effort to get to the root of one of the most pernicious conspiracies ever engineered against Queen Elizabeth and her government.

From the city of Paris Thomas, third Baron Paget, the new exile, wrote two letters. One was to Lord Burghley. The second was to his mother, the dowager Lady Paget, which contained a note for his sister Anne. To all three people, in quite different ways, Lord Paget had to explain why he had arrived so unexpectedly in Paris.

It was a week to the day since he and his party of armed men had secretly left the Sussex coast. Lord Paget, using the new calendar of Pope Gregory XIII, which gave ten days' difference between England and France, reckoned it to be the 12th. But for Paget there was no easy acclimatization to new surroundings. Without a proper complement of his servants, and above all without any warning of his flight from England even for his family, he found himself an unlicensed émigré and exile. From now on he would live a strange and disjointed sort of life, suspected by Elizabeth's government of conspiracy and treason.

Paget chose to make his explanation to Lord Burghley, firstly because Burghley was the most powerful man at Elizabeth's court, and secondly because Paget believed (though wrongly) that Burghley would give him a sympathetic hearing. Thirty years earlier Burghley had been something of a protégé of Paget's father, William, the first Baron, a tough and experienced politician very different in character and temperament to his son. In 1582 Burghley had been a mediator in Lord Paget's domestic difficulties with his wife, with whom, the baron complained, he lived ‘with continual jars'. So now from Paris he set out his position in a letter that was a masterpiece of deliberate understatement. Lord Paget quite understood that Burghley would believe he had ‘taken in hand a very unadvised enterprise in coming into these parts'. Not so, he wrote: he had long wanted to travel, claiming as
reasons the treatment of his gout (‘with the which I am many times so miserably afflicted': Burghley was a fellow sufferer) and (a more sensitive matter) his conscience. Paget wrote that he needed the spiritual food of the Catholic sacraments.

To his mother, who was known to shelter Catholic priests, Lord Paget was more candid. Clearly he felt there was no choice for him but to leave England, where the conditions in which he found himself were intolerable. He asked the dowager Lady Paget to consider his disgrace at home, the protection he required from the ‘entrapping of mine enemies', and his conscience. It had been no sudden decision, he said, but one of ‘long time and deliberation'. He said nothing explicitly about the treason of Francis Throckmorton. Paget's letter had the tone of a man trying to convince himself against good evidence of the rightness of what he had done: ‘Surely this journey that I have begun is by God's appointment and for his service and therefore it cannot be but for the best.' There was about it, too, a feeling of aggrieved melancholy.