The Watchers (27 page)

But the execution of Throckmorton at Tyburn on 10 July was only a temporary end to the story of the Duke of Guise's plans for the invasion of England. In
A discoverie of the treasons practised … by Francis Throckmorton
Elizabeth's government gave at best half an account of what had happened. What forced its hand to say something further in defence of the queen's good name was the suicide in June 1585 of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, one of the
principal conspirators. There were, predictably, open rumours and suspicions of a political murder in the Tower of London, where the earl was still being held in custody eighteen months after being arrested. The government knew full well that Northumberland's death looked like the convenient disposal of a traitor. So his case – his suicide and the treasons and conspiracies that in the view of the authorities had led to it – was put to Star Chamber by the crown's lawyers on 23 June. The full story was printed and published, once again by Elizabeth's official printer, Christopher Barker.

The pamphlet related how on the evening of Sunday, 20 June one of Northumberland's gentleman servants in the Tower served supper to his master and saw him to bed at about nine o'clock. He went to an outer chamber, leaving the door to the earl's room ajar. Northumberland got up and bolted the door himself, saying that he could not sleep without the door locked shut. At midnight the servant, who was fast asleep, awoke to a very loud and sudden noise. ‘My lord,' he shouted through the door to the earl's chamber, ‘know you what this is?' Northumberland did not reply. He knocked on the door, calling out ‘My lord, how do you?' At last he sent for the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Owen Hopton.

On Hopton's instructions, the door to Northumberland's chamber was broken down. Hopton found Henry Percy in his bed, dead. Sir Owen realized that the earl's bedsheets were covered in blood. He quickly discovered a wound in the earl's breast, thinking at first that it had been made with a knife. It was only later, after first ordering the chamber to be locked and then writing to the Privy Council with news of the earl's death, that he went into Northumberland's room and found the pistol lying on the floor about three feet from a table. Sir Owen said that he had not noticed the pistol before because it lay in the table's shadow.

The dag had been hidden in the chimney of Northumberland's bedchamber. On the evening of 20 June the earl had taken no chances. He charged the pistol with three bullets and a heavy amount of gunpowder. He removed his waistcoat. Lying on his back, he had taken the dag in his left hand putting the muzzle of the pistol against his chest. The shot, which badly scorched the earl's shirt, more importantly left a large wound in his left breast. A surgeon removed the bullets from
under the earl's right shoulder blade. After entering his body they had torn his heart into pieces, shattered three of his ribs, and broken his spine into two. That, at least, was the official story.

Northumberland's treasons, said the government, explained the desperate manner of his self-destruction. In the official pamphlet the authorities gave in plain, vigorous Elizabethan prose a public summing-up and a narrative of the treasons of Charles Paget and his comrades and the plans of the Duke of Guise. At last they told the full story of the most audacious attempt yet by England's foreign enemies and Catholic fugitives to topple the government of Queen Elizabeth.

Francis Throckmorton had been recommended to Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, who told Throckmorton about the invasion plans of the Duke of Guise. Throckmorton provided Mendoza with maps of suitable landing sites on the south coast of England and with the names of English noblemen and gentlemen who would be willing to help in Guise's plan.

Throckmorton said that the main purpose of the expedition was to force Elizabeth to grant toleration of religion to England's Catholics. If this toleration could not be achieved without altering the government, then it should be toppled and the queen removed from power. An important element of the project was the liberation of Mary Queen of Scots from English captivity; the Duke of Guise told his cousin about his plan to free her by military force. Throckmorton and Mendoza had together discussed how this could be achieved.

The ambassador said to Throckmorton that a man calling himself Mope had come secretly into England to talk to the Earl of Northumberland and other important men in Sussex. Mendoza later explained to Throckmorton that Mope's real name was Charles Paget, and that he had come not only to talk to Northumberland but also to spy out the land for an invasion, to view landing places and ports, and to consider provisions. Local men content to join Guise's invading army would levy troops in the name of the queen but then use them to help the invaders. Thomas, Lord Paget agreed to this proposal.

Charles Paget visited the Earl of Northumberland's house near the Sussex coast, Petworth, for a secret meeting with the earl. Late at night he was taken into the long gallery at Petworth and there spoke
to Northumberland for an hour or more. For over a week he stayed secretly in a lodge on the estate. Lord Paget came to Petworth and talked to his brother and Northumberland several times.

During his stay in England, Charles Paget said that:

Foreign princes would seek revenge against Her Majesty of the wrongs by her done unto them, and would take such time and opportunity as might best serve them for that purpose, and said that those princes disdained to see the Scottish Queen so kept and used here as she was, and would use all their forces for her delivery: that the Duke of Guise would be a dealer therein, and that the Earl of Northumberland would be an assistant unto them … saying further, that the Earl of Northumberland was affected to the Scottish Queen, and would do what he could for her advancement.

[And] That the Duke of Guise had forces in a readiness to be employed for the altering of the state of religion here in England, and to set the Scottish Queen at liberty.

The Earl of Northumberland had sought to protect himself. He was privy to the activities of Francis Throckmorton and he was a confederate of Charles Paget and his brother. It was Northumberland who, on hearing of Throckmorton's arrest and torture, decided to get Lord Paget out of England. Throckmorton had confessed to Charles Paget's visit to Petworth. Only Lord Paget could say what he, his brother and Northumberland had talked about there. Thus the safety of Northumberland rested on Paget's swift departure from the kingdom. So it was that the melancholy baron was now an exile in Paris.

At first even the arrest and interrogation of Francis Throckmorton in November 1583 did not deter the Duke of Guise from executing his invasion of England. Although King Philip of Spain dragged his heels over its funding, absorbed by the military efforts of Spain in the Low Countries, the arrival in Paris in 1584 of Philip's former ambassador to Elizabeth, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, gave Guise an important ally. The duke was confident of success as late as the spring of 1584. What diverted his attention, however, was the death in June 1584 of the Duke of Anjou, King Henry III's brother, which threw open the succession to the French throne. Important as England and the
liberation of the Queen of Scots were, the vast energies of the Duke of Guise were from now on consumed by a French civil war of succession and religion that would last for thirteen years. Guise himself would die in the cause: after the duke stormed into Paris in 1588 King Henry ordered his powerful rival's assassination. Henry, Duke of Guise was stabbed to death in the chamber of the royal council in December of the same year.

The efforts of the Catholic émigrés to topple Elizabeth's government and free the Queen of Scots suffered only a temporary setback in 1584. Of all the English conspirators only Francis Throckmorton and the Earl of Northumberland were dead. The Earl of Arundel, only partly involved in the plot, was in the Tower of London, and there would remain until his death in 1595. But the Paget brothers and Thomas Throckmorton, Francis's conspiring brother, were free. In August 1585 one of Walsingham's spies reported that Charles Paget was in Rouen writing a book to answer the English government's account of Francis Throckmorton's treason. A few weeks later the same spy said that Thomas Throckmorton was about to meet Lord Paget in Genoa. Lord Henry Howard, that most extraordinary Elizabethan, remained in England, managing to profess loyalty to Elizabeth's government while at the same time maintaining contacts with Spain.

So there were traitors left to conspire, who still waited for their moment to come. Without the Duke of Guise they hoped for the support of the King of Spain and the Pope in mounting an invasion of England. One particular treason had been quashed by the Elizabethan authorities. But the busy minds of men like Charles Paget were rarely at rest.

When it came to loyalty two factors – money and flattery – directed the flow of William Parry's mercurial mind. Parry, the gentleman spy, was a snob; he enjoyed nothing more than a comfortable life mingling with important men. To Parry espionage was a means to secure for himself material comfort and influence, though he had few doubts that he was very good at it. Probably no other character in this book was as accomplished as he at self-deception. Taking an extraordinary risk, in 1583 he wrote to one of the Pope's cardinals with an offer of service for the Catholic cause. Then, just as heroically, he reported to Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham his solo work as a master spy for queen and country.

In 1583 he had enjoyed himself in Venice, Lyons and Paris. By the time Parry returned to London in the summer of 1584, he was doctor of laws of the University of Paris. Whichever side he chose ultimately to serve – Rome or England – would rest on who gave him the patronage he felt he deserved and how effectively they tickled his vanity. Within months Parry's life unravelled in an extraordinary way when, falling victim to his own deviousness, he sought and then failed to put into action a disastrous plan to kill Queen Elizabeth.

All through his career as a spy for Burghley and Walsingham, William Parry had consorted with Elizabeth's enemies, seeking to reconcile them to the queen. The communications he had opened up with Rome in spring 1583, through the Pope's nuncio in Venice, Campeggio, were on a very different scale; it was an elaborate and dangerous deception. This was probably why before his return to London he had told Sir Edward Stafford in Paris that he had intelligence for the queen's ears only.

Parry was playing, in other words, a double game, but neither Lord Burghley nor Cardinal Campeggio knew whom he really served. Parry, in fact, was on no one's side but his own. He played his double bluff so successfully that he found himself tangled up in a deception he could not control. On balance, however, he was probably Rome's spy, for when he was in Paris in September 1582 he was secretly reconciled to the Catholic Church. More extraordinary still is that in 1583, influenced by the prospect of money and fame, he made a genuine offer to murder Queen Elizabeth. On this mission he blew hot and cold all the way through 1584. Probably if Lord Burghley had given Parry the patronage he wanted so desperately, then his bizarre story may not have ended on the gallows. Parry might then have preferred to forget his solemn promises to cardinals and priests. But this never happened. The cold welcome he found in London and the fear of financial ruin only fixed in his mind a desperate mission to assassinate the queen.

When Parry was reconciled to the Catholic Church in 1582, he was advised to live quietly in Paris. Few of the English émigrés in the city trusted him; they knew that he was in contact with Lord Burghley. From Paris, Parry went to Lyons and then Milan, where he satisfied the local inquisitor that he was a Catholic. He was in Venice by February 1583 at the latest. It was there that Parry (as he himself wrote) ‘conceived a possible mean to relieve the afflicted state of our Catholics, if the same might be well warranted in religion and conscience by the Pope'. At this time he read Robert Persons's account of the vicious persecution of Catholics in England, which he discussed with a Jesuit priest, Benedetto Palmio. Palmio introduced Parry to Campeggio, the Pope's nuncio to the Venetian government. Campeggio in turn wrote of Parry to the Cardinal of Como, the papal secretary of state.

Parry's primary motivations were money and the desire to impress powerful men, though as a scholar he was interested too in ideas and arguments. He read dangerous books. To Burghley, in 1583, he mentioned Robert Persons's polemic on the persecution of Catholics in England. A year later he read
A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholicques
, William Allen's answer to
The execution of Justice
, Lord Burghley's account of the government's lawful prosecution
of Catholic priests as traitors. Allen's
Modest Defence
was a particularly pernicious book to the Elizabethan authorities, strictly prohibited in England by royal proclamation. In just over two hundred pages, Allen condemned the persecution of English Catholics by Protestants under the pretence of treason charges, setting out also the authority of popes – indeed even of priests – to depose kings, calling them ‘judges and executors' of the divine will. No prince, even a Catholic one, was beyond the Pope's justice. Parry found in Allen's powerfully persuasive book arguments that spoke directly to his conscience.

Parry wanted permission and papers to be able to travel from Venice to Rome, but for some weeks there was no clear idea of what kind of passport he should have. Nothing had been decided before Parry set off from Venice to Lyons. The fact that Parry had left for Lyons caused Campeggio to doubt whether Parry was sincere. Parry, however, was jubilant. It was only a fortnight later that he wrote the letter informing Burghley that he had shaken the foundation of the English seminary in Rheims and overthrown the credit of the Pope's English pensioners in Rome.