The Watchers (3 page)

By instinct the councillors wanted to keep Elizabeth's death a secret for as long as they could. Before announcing it publicly they would move to the Tower. As they, their servants and palace staff went through London, armed and vigilant, they noticed the first signs of panic on the streets: disbelief and anger at the sight of Elizabeth's courtiers removing to the Tower, the bells of a hundred parish churches ringing slowly and deliberately, and crowds gathering, some Londoners arming themselves as best as they could.

An hour after the gate of the Tower had been closed and barred, city officials read the government's proclamation on the streets of the city. The Council of State explained the heinous circumstances of Elizabeth's murder, the existence of a treasonous conspiracy, the resolution of loyal subjects to hunt down the queen's assassins, and the overriding need to protect England's religion, Church and national boundaries.

The first reports of trouble on the streets arrived at the Tower at midday. There was a swirl of news: constables and city officials over-matched by the crowds; Catholic gentry and noble families already raising their tenants to fight; foreign ambassadors, using the disorder on the streets as an excuse not to present themselves to the Council
of State at the Tower, urgently dispatching their servants to Dover with news of Elizabeth's death. Locked away in the Tower, the new rulers of England wondered for how long they could suppress the violence that was bound to come before – in days, weeks or months? – the King of Spain's troops fought their way to London.

Within a week Mary Queen of Scots was brought to the Tower. She was tried by a hastily convened commission and executed in the precincts of the fortress. For Europe's Catholics only Philip of Spain, whose ancestry went back to the house of Lancaster, presented a credible claim to the English throne. Even though Mary's son, Protestant King James VI of Scotland, tried to advance his blood claim as Elizabeth's nearest living royal kinsman, he was no match for Spanish power. Indeed, even if Mary had survived to become Queen of England, her kingdom would still have been a Spanish protectorate and satellite. Even France, divided by a war of royal succession, could not compete with the European dominance of King Philip.

That power was clear when the invasion came. Winds, tides and luck favoured Spain; ferrying troops from the Low Countries, the Spanish fleet was little troubled by Elizabeth's navy. The English militias crumbled in skirmishes with troops seasoned and hardened by Spain's long war in the Low Countries of the Netherlands. Supported by German mercenaries, they had marched through Kent to London. Many Englishmen, poorly trained and armed, had defected to the invaders. The far peripheries of England, north and west, were in disorder. Though many loyal English Catholics, horrified by the prospect of foreign domination, fought the invading army, the old Catholic nobility and gentry had seen their chance; for too long they had been fined and imprisoned by Elizabeth's government. Supporting the Spaniards and in hope of positions at the English Habsburg court, they had acquiesced in the inevitable assault on London. It was a city with only ruined ancient walls and it fell within a week. With the fires still burning, the Council of State at last surrendered, isolated and embattled in the Tower of London. It remained for the King of Spain and the Pope to decide how to try the criminal clique of heretics for their crimes.

And so it was that parliament dismantled Elizabeth's religious laws. England was reconciled to Rome; the painful schism was once again
healed. Heretics were tried and burned, the shops and printing houses of London's booksellers raided for suspect works. Officials suppressed heretical books: Protestant theology, the dozens of pamphlets printed by Elizabeth's government to justify its actions, Protestant translations of the Bible and John Foxe's
Acts and monuments
, the ‘Book of Martyrs', which had celebrated Protestant heroism in the face of Catholic persecution.

And what would the modern history books say about this violent episode in English history? Probably that the regime of Elizabeth I had for many years survived on borrowed time, lamed by a self-destructive policy of crushing religious dissent and incapable of resisting the military might of Catholic Europe. The Elizabethan story would be a peculiar one: a strange aberration in English history when, against prevailing patterns of royal dynasty and religion in Europe, England struggled alone as an isolated pariah state for nearly thirty years. The epithets ‘glory' or ‘golden age' could never be used of the Elizabethan experiment. They were more properly reserved for the magnificent Christian heroism of King Philip of Spain, the ruler of Habsburg England, in saving Christendom.

It was exactly this scenario – or a close variation of it – that haunted the political deliberations and imaginations of Elizabeth's advisers for nearly half a century. To imagine so catastrophic an end to Elizabethan rule was neither fanciful nor far-fetched. Every feature of it was etched into the government's emergency plans. The queen's ministers recognized this nightmare. Indeed only by doing so did they steel themselves for the great battle they believed was necessary to avoid it. The weapons they used were espionage, relentless interrogation, surveillance, the suppression of dissent, robust treason law, torture and propaganda. This book explains why, how and with what consequences an often ruthless campaign was conducted.

Yet the heightened vigilance of Queen Elizabeth's advisers was in fact potentially corrosive of the security they craved. It is a cruel but perhaps a common historical paradox. The more obsessively a state watches, the greater the dangers it perceives. Suspicions of enemies at home and abroad become more extreme, even self-fulfilling. Balance and perspective are lost. Indeed such a state is likely as a consequence
to misconceive or misunderstand the scale of any real threat it faces. Seismic political change – in the form of wars, invasions, coups, popular uprisings – has happened throughout history right under the noses of those who should have seen it coming but did not: those who were paid to watch, and who sometimes built great bureaucratic systems to do so. Such bureaucracies, especially in the twentieth century, very often became self-justifying, cumbersome and sclerotic, strangely distanced from the world around them. In those rare cases where states have managed to destroy their opponents by repression, they have often destroyed also the foundations of a healthy and vital body politic, and been consumed by a destructive institutional paranoia. Rational behaviour has little to do with any of this. Reason, after all, so rarely governs politics. This is particularly the case for governments nervously fingering the hair trigger of emergency.

A danger to any state is the powerful and often circular logic of conspiracy. It is pronounced when fear translates into a sense or feeling of national vulnerability, something very dangerous when it is institutionalized by any government that possesses the coercive means to make its will felt. This is especially true of countries where a narrow or isolated governing elite puts its own political survival before everything else, and where the instruments of the modern state can be used to subdue opposition at home or even abroad. These elites tend to see as identical their self-interest as a governing group and the welfare of the public body. They invest in propaganda. They promote a fear or hatred of outsiders. They feel beset by their enemies. We see regimes like this governing today. All of this may have been true of Elizabethan England – readers of this book will be able to judge that for themselves. Certainly the Elizabethan state was busily fashioning the tools of modern government in conditions of war and emergency in Reformation Europe.

There is no simple way to explain how all this happens. Conspiracy theorists will have their own view; historians, however, have to attend more prosaically to evidence. True, there have always been (and surely there always will be) politicians who pursue their own private interests at the expense of public ones. In Elizabeth's reign the charge of ‘Machiavel' was thrown at powerful men in government by enemies who themselves were just as disingenuous and unscrupulous. Some of
Elizabeth's advisers had read the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, others had not, but it hardly matters. Political historians sometimes have to cut through a formidable thicket of self-justifying obfuscation and insinuation to make sense of politics and political actors. At the court of Elizabeth in the 1590s, for example, panics over plots and conspiracies against the queen, stimulated and even manufactured for very cynical reasons, became a form of political currency to buy favour and reputation and to damage court rivals. It would be difficult to describe this as anything other than corrosive and distasteful politics.

More interesting and subtle, however, is when an overwhelming fear of danger becomes part of one's routine mental landscape, shaping the contours of the mind in powerful and sometimes disturbing ways. This is the attitude of the witchhunt, but it is more potent still in politics and government when tangible enemies – with plots and plans, objectives and opportunities – really do exist. Here, it is easy to see danger everywhere. This was the mindset of many of Queen Elizabeth's advisers, intelligent, able and sometimes gifted men. Yet still they were caught up in a terrible accumulation of fear and anxiety. This had some roots in reality. But it also assumed a grim logic of its own: survival at all costs, even to the extent of subverting the will of the queen they sought to serve. At times Elizabeth's ministers acted upon their own authority. The first of the two most stunning examples of this ‘monarchical republican' (the phrase is the late Patrick Collinson's) tendency in Elizabethan politics came in 1587, when the Privy Council dispatched the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots; and the second in 1601, when Elizabeth's secretary secretly negotiated a mechanism for the smooth accession of a foreign king to the English throne in the event of her death. The talent of the English and then British state to preserve and protect itself has its origins in Tudor politics.

But the story I tell is much more than the sum even of these two exciting political moments. War, surveillance, espionage, religious faith, politics and torture are all themes of this book. Only the most determined conspiracy theorist could believe that Elizabeth's ministers were driven by solely selfish motives. As well as fighting their own internal political battles, they sought the good of the state (as they
saw it) and the protection of queen and religion. Some of their fears were real. Elizabeth might indeed have been killed: the world they had built might have come crashing down around them. We know that Elizabeth survived; we have to set that knowledge aside, engaging imaginatively with the past. And yet still, for all the uncertainty and unpredictability facing Elizabeth's England, it seems plain that the queen's ministers hypnotized themselves with fear. For those readers who want to learn from history, there may indeed be a lesson here in the nature of the fearsome potential of government and state, of the mystifying dynamics of politics and of the power of perception balanced against a reality. It is not a pretty story – but certainly it is a fascinating one.

Espionage was a thriving trade in the sixteenth century. In war-torn Europe spies did a healthy business of selling news and intelligence mostly for money, sometimes out of religious conviction, but often for both.

Certainly the men and women who rubbed shoulders with one another on the densely crowded streets of Elizabethan London knew what a spy was. If they read books, or had books read to them, so much the better. The translator and teacher John Florio, whose work was well known to Shakespeare, wrote in 1598 of ‘a spy, an espial, a scout, a prier, an eavesdropper', and of the spy's business ‘to espy, to peer, to pry, to watch or scout with diligence, to ask or enquire for'. In the Geneva Bible, the most popular Protestant English translation of Christian scripture in the sixteenth century, Elizabethans found in the Old Testament (Numbers 13:1–2) a telling verse: ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men out to search the land of Canaan which I give unto the children of Israel.' These chiefs of the tribes were, said the Geneva translators, ‘The spies': the two words were printed in large letters at the head of the page. So it was plain to Elizabethans that a spy belonged to one of the oldest trades in the world. He was a watcher, a reporter, a listener. He sought out, for advantage and for service. They called his trade spiery, leaving it to their heirs and successors of the eighteenth century to use the French word espionage.

Elizabethans spied for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to put food
on a family's table or to buy a new suit of clothes. It was simply a job and not often a very glamorous one. They played the game of patronage, hoping that in return for information their political masters would pay their expenses and find them bits and pieces of preferment. Given the urgency of England's situation in Europe, the queen's secretary, who ran her government, needed eyes and ears throughout the kingdom and beyond. The secret trade grew to meet a political need.

There were few rules and no vetting of volunteers, and so if some spies and informants were brilliantly effective, others were derelict as well as dangerous, spying out of greed or spite or for private revenge. Others wanted adventure, a chance to play a dangerous secret game: they thrived on the excitement. Visceral hatred of the enemy was another motive. Most ‘espials' and ‘intelligencers' (to Elizabethans the two words meant much the same thing) wrote at some time of their patriotic calling: they spied for God, queen and country. Religious identity was critical. In a book by one Protestant theologian,
An harborowe for faithfull and trewe subjectes
(1559), his printer added by way of emphasis three significant words in the margin of the text: ‘God is English'. So it was easy enough to fuse into one the interests of kingdom, government and heaven. Elizabeth's England was often likened by Protestants to Israel of the Old Testament, suggesting that Elizabethans were a people special to God. This important and very powerful sense of self-identity was given its most compelling expression in the ‘Book of Martyrs', John Foxe's
Acts and monuments
(1563–83), which told the many stories of the persecuted but in the end triumphant Protestant faithful.