The Watchers (30 page)

The strictness of the Queen of Scots's restraint was not the only one of Thomas Morgan's difficulties. He knew that even in the Bastille he was watched by servants of the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford. Morgan saw, too, as Elizabeth's government did also, that the city's English Catholics were at one another's throats, dividing themselves into factions. Charles Arundel, Lord Paget's fiery companion, had even drawn a dagger on Charles Paget, Morgan's great friend and comrade in Mary's cause. And yet in spite of all this Thomas Morgan persisted in his work. In the strange unreal world of the Catholic exiles he tried his best to provide the Queen of Scots, otherwise cut off from her allies and supporters in Europe, with the lifeline of information.

Morgan needed couriers to carry his letters and reports to Mary. These couriers had to be trusted intermediaries who could cross the English Channel from France, safely enter the ports of the English south coast and then travel on to London. Letters were delivered to the house of the French ambassador at Salisbury Court, not far from Fleet Street, where the packets could be taken on to Mary's household, kept under tight security, in Staffordshire. That at least was the theory; in practice it was immensely difficult to make this postal system – essentially conceived in two parts, each as challenging as the other – work successfully.

Not surprisingly, the recruits were few. But in October 1585 one English gentleman of about twenty-six years of age seemed especially suited for Morgan's difficult and important task. His name was Gilbert Gifford. He was a young man from a family of Staffordshire Catholics, and in fact a kinsman of Francis Throckmorton; this last fact, in the months after Francis's execution and his brother Thomas's exile abroad, seemed to carry a special cachet. Gilbert Gifford had been educated at the English College in Rome (where in 1579 Charles Sledd the spy had noticed him) and later at William Allen's seminary in Rheims, from where, in the autumn of 1585, he travelled to meet Morgan in Paris. Morgan, assured of the young man's faith and honesty, briefed him on how to be a courier and instructed him in methods of secret writing. Morgan was sure that Gilbert Gifford would solve all the problems of communicating with the Queen of Scots in England.
In Paris at the same time as Thomas Morgan and Gilbert Gifford was Nicholas Berden, one of Sir Francis Walsingham's most trusted and prolific secret agents. He knew of, and may have even known, Gifford. Berden's keen eyes did not miss the fact that in December 1585 Gifford had set out from Paris for England.

Berden was a modest kind of gentleman, the son of a citizen of London comfortably in business. First suggested for secret service by Sir Horatio Palavicino, a wealthy international merchant who also did intelligence work for Walsingham, Berden wrote regular ‘secret advertisements'. He was in London between March and May 1585 but went over to Rouen in early August. By late August he was in Paris, where he stayed till the early months of 1586, alert to the business of the Catholic exiles. With a busy pen, Berden noted rumours of the plans of the Duke of Guise and news of the movements of William Allen, the Paget brothers and Thomas Throckmorton. He was a useful spy.

In London Berden's reports were noted and filed by Thomas Phelippes, the young man who been in Bourges and Paris in 1582 on a mission for Walsingham, a careful and discreet member of Sir Francis's household staff and a skilled breaker of codes and ciphers. By hard work, application, ingenuity and cunning, Phelippes was Walsingham's trusted right hand in all secret matters and operations.

So it was Phelippes who from one of Nicholas Berden's reports learned in late December 1585 that Gilbert Gifford had left Paris. Berden's news was that Pope Sixtus V had published a ‘new excommunication' of the queen to reinforce the bull of his predecessor Pius V in 1570, denouncing Elizabeth as a bastard heretic schismatic. The rumours circulating in Paris said that this new excommunication had been smuggled into England; it was ‘gone already about five weeks past, and that either Gilbert Gifford or some of the priests that went in about the same time did carry it'. Gifford, it was said in Paris, had been arrested in England. Phelippes wrote on the outside of Berden's secret report the following words: ‘New proclamation to go into England. Gilbert Gifford's apprehension in England known.' Within weeks, however, the news in Paris had changed. Berden reported to Walsingham: ‘Here is great joy made that Gilbert Gifford did escape your honour's hands so easily and he hath certified hither that
England is in great fear to be invaded.' Once again, Thomas Phelippes calmly noted the fact, giving the packet from Berden a special cipher mark.

The items of news and gossip Berden reported were both true and false. The first report, which said that Gilbert Gifford had been captured, was correct. He was arrested at the port of Rye trying to enter England and on about 20 December he was interviewed by Walsingham. The second report, of Gifford's freedom, was false. It was, however, essential to Walsingham's purpose, for Sir Francis had recruited Gifford as a double agent to work against Thomas Morgan and Mary Queen of Scots. The rumour in Paris of the young man's freedom was either a lucky coincidence for Walsingham or may have been planted in émigré circles and nourished for a definite purpose. Whatever the truth, one fact was startling: Walsingham and his servant Phelippes now possessed a potentially devastating weapon against the cause of the Queen of Scots. Her new trusted courier – Thomas Morgan's great hope for the service of his mistress Mary – was Walsingham's spy.

Walsingham knew from long experience exactly how to persuade Gifford to work for Elizabeth's government. Probably Gifford's motivations were, in order of necessity, freedom, continued protection and money. One point of vulnerability may have been a confused sense of loyalty and identity common in English Catholics, formed by the strange unreality of exile, the idealisms, hopes and anxieties, always strained, never achieved. Leaving behind him an émigré community in Paris divided against itself, in Walsingham and Phelippes Gifford met an absolute steadiness of purpose. Perhaps also he enjoyed the prospect of living on the dangerous edge of conspiracy.

So Gifford, Mary's supposedly loyal courier, was a gift to Walsingham. If Gifford behaved himself – and if of course Walsingham and Phelippes played a clever game – he could carry the letters Morgan wanted him to and allow Elizabeth's government access to them. For a long time letters had been piling up at the French ambassador's house at Salisbury Court; now, with a new courier in place, they could be taken to the Queen of Scots. Thomas Morgan's relief at finding so ideal a man was Walsingham's chance to penetrate Mary's correspondence. Gifford became the bridge between Thomas Morgan, the
new French ambassador in London, Guillaume de l'Aubépine Baron de Châteauneuf, and Mary Queen of Scots. No wonder that under Phelippes's watchful eye Gifford was quickly put to work.

Morgan did the best he could to keep Mary informed of what was happening in Europe. With the help of other émigrés Morgan was able to get letters out of the Bastille. Each one of them was long and intricate, consisting of many folios of dense cipher; Morgan must have been a very patient man. There was no guarantee that the Queen of Scots or her secretaries would ever read Morgan's letters, and probably little chance that any reply by Mary would leave Chartley, let alone reach Paris. Morgan knew that sometimes letters were intercepted, though of course he would have been horrified to know that those reports on which he had worked for hours were now being handed by Gifford to Walsingham and Phelippes.

As well as Gilbert Gifford, Morgan had another agent in England. He was a poor English gentleman called Robert Poley. Poley's name, like Gifford's, is one to remember: he would play an important part in the Babington Plot. Also like Gifford, Poley was a volunteer for the cause of the Queen of Scots. He knew the ways from England into Scotland, and Morgan felt that this geographical knowledge made him a good man for ambassador Châteauneuf to know about.

As well as working as a courier, Poley spied for Morgan in England. Morgan placed Poley in the household of Sir Philip Sidney and his wife Lady Frances. She was Sir Francis Walsingham's daughter, and so it seemed to Morgan that Poley was in an ideal position to be able to give valuable information. But Robert Poley, like Gilbert Gifford, was Walsingham's man. Without knowing it, Thomas Morgan was helping once again to set the spring of the trap that within months would catch and hold Mary Queen of Scots fast.

In the early months of 1586 Thomas Phelippes worked tirelessly with Gilbert Gifford. He gave Gifford tasks and supervised the quality of his agent's work. Doubtless, too, he acted as his adviser and perhaps also his friend, while always keeping the kind of distance that was necessary in so delicate a professional relationship. Always a careful and discreet man, Phelippes referred in letters to Walsingham only of his work with ‘the party'. This was in late February 1586, when Gifford
had brought to Phelippes twenty-one packets ‘great and small' from the house of ambassador Châteauneuf. Now, thanks to Gifford, coaxed and coached by Phelippes, the letters began to move again.

Phelippes and Gifford seem to have worked well together. Phelippes had the rare ability to combine the mastery of fine detail with a profound sense of the object of a task. Above all, he possessed imaginative cunning. There can be no doubt that Gifford did what he was told to do, but he had initiative and sense. The two young men were in many ways an enviable pairing.

With these foundations set down, Walsingham began to move other pieces into place. In early March Gifford's father John, a recusant Catholic who had suffered heavy fines and imprisonment, was licensed by the Privy Council to leave London to take the waters for his health. He was even allowed to visit his house in Staffordshire. All of this may have been a discreet favour for Gilbert, but it also opened up new possibilities for his journeys into the English midlands. Not surprisingly, Phelippes and Walsingham did everything they could to facilitate the easy carrying of letters between Morgan in Paris, ambassador Châteauneuf in London and the Queen of Scots at Chartley.

Like any example of the subtle art of double-cross, it was a delicate business. Certainly Gilbert Gifford's work was most secret – so secret, in fact, that any danger to Gifford came not from Morgan or the French ambassador but from zealous English officials who knew nothing of whose side he was really working for. Phelippes, protective of Gifford and his work, was worried about the informants that Richard Young, a zealous justice of Westminster with a nose for Catholic conspiracy, had positioned close to the French ambassador. He feared they would compromise Gifford as a courier of letters, something Phelippes felt would prejudice their task of trying penetrate the Queen of Scots's correspondence. Phelippes wanted Walsingham to be firm with Young: ‘it may please you to limit him by some peremptory speech'.

By the spring of 1586 Walsingham had his best informants hard at work. The two most prolific were Maliverey Catilyn, long used by Walsingham to spy on Catholics in England, and Nicholas Berden, the agent who had worked for Walsingham and Phelippes in Paris in the later months of 1585.

Using his many local contacts, Catilyn wrote a long paper giving the names and descriptions of Catholic men and women throughout England. Thomas Phelippes, who read the report, called it Catilyn's ‘observations touching corrupt subjects'. In early summer, Catilyn was sent off to spy on Catholics in Portsmouth with ‘a pair of writing tables' (a ‘table-book' was a notebook or memorandum book) hidden in the padding of his doublet.

Berden, returned from Paris to London, was busy in April scouring the streets and lodging houses of the city for dangerous Catholics. Berden informed Walsingham of the espionage of one of Thomas Morgan's spies in the royal household, a man who kept company with Catholic priests living secretly and illegally in London, and who was on familiar terms with Walsingham's servants. Berden kept a record of where many of the priests lodged in London. Among many suspicious Catholics in London, he noted the name of one ‘Fortescue alias Ballard'. Berden probably as yet knew very little about him. Yet he soon would: John Ballard, another of the enterprising Thomas Morgan's agents, quickly became one of the most wanted men in England.

In spring 1586 Nicholas Berden's contacts in Paris were paying off handsomely. To his surprise, he found himself recruited as a courier for Charles Paget, Charles Arundel, William Allen, Robert Persons and other Catholic exiles. True, the terms of his employment were a little uncertain, though there was nothing so unusual in that. He had no precise idea of what he was expected to do. Berden wrote to Walsingham: ‘From Charles Paget I have only received a cipher without any other directions whatsoever, except that he prayed me to promise him to receive letters hereafter when he should send them to me.' Their arrangement was that, fearing Berden's arrest, Paget would send nothing till he knew of his safe arrival in England and the hope of Berden's ‘quiet continuance' as a free man.

Berden had the promise of more enemy ciphers than he knew what to do with. One was for letters to and from Charles Paget. Another would allow him to communicate with Charles Arundel. Reflecting bitter arguments among the émigrés in Paris, Arundel did not know that Berden was in contact with Paget, while Paget believed that Berden wrote only to him. Even Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the King
of Spain's ambassador in Paris, had intimated to Berden that he too might use Berden's services.

This, as Berden recognized, was potentially the means to unlock the secrets of some of the most dangerous men in Europe. To have the cipher keys, or ‘alphabets', of the enemy meant that their increasingly complex systems of secret communication could be easily broken. A skilled cryptographer like Thomas Phelippes could see immediately the symbols chosen for important international politicians and churchmen, and begin to make sense of the three or four cipher characters that could be used for each letter of the alphabet. He could also avoid the traps of ‘nulls', symbols or characters of no significance that were inserted to mislead and confuse an enemy trying to crack the cipher. So it seemed that Berden had stumbled across a treasure trove of secret cipher: the alphabets of Charles Paget, Robert Persons, the émigré Catholic printer Stephen Brinkley, as well as the texts of Brinkley's letters to Jesuit priests. As the Elizabethan scholar and politician Francis Bacon wrote: