The Watchers (39 page)

In fact a whole generation of Elizabeth's first advisers was dying away, leaving new men to navigate old and difficult problems of war and foreign adventure. Sir Francis Walsingham died in 1590, and along with him went his system of espionage, which was much too expensive to maintain in times of crippling government expenditure on war. Thomas Phelippes was left without a master, having to make the best of uncertain times. For the first time ever in his life Phelippes faced professional failure, even humiliation, in his espionage work. He continued to operate his own secret agents at home and abroad. But, experienced as he was, he found employment in the young Earl of Essex's fledgling intelligence service a precarious business.

The great constant of the Elizabethan political world was Lord Burghley, who, though he said he wanted to retire, found it impossible to release the mechanisms of power and patronage. Ever the dynast, Burghley was training as an apprentice his son, Robert, a young man of immense ability and talent. In 1591 Sir Robert Cecil, together with his father, recruited a secret agent called John Cecil, alias John Snowden, a priest close to the circles of Robert Persons and William Allen. For Sir Robert it was an early chance to practise the technique he would later perfect as the queen's secretary, for by the end of Elizabeth's reign in 1603 he oversaw an intelligence system probably even more formidable than Sir Francis Walsingham's had been.

These were years of war, strain and uncertainty. More than ever before we begin to hear in the 1590s the sharp notes of paranoia and anxiety as men like the Earl of Essex, Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil fought their political battles at court with their spies and agents.

The queen's pursuivants pulled Thomas Barnes out of bed late at night on Thursday, 12 March 1590. They found him in his lodgings at the Saracen's Head on Carter Lane, close to St Paul's Cathedral. They suspected that he was a Catholic priest. He was in fact one of Sir Francis Walsingham's most prolific spies.

Barnes was still at the Saracen's Head the next morning; it seems that somehow he was able to talk his way out of arrest. Having no idea of who had denounced him, he took up his pen and a sheet of folio paper to compose a letter to Thomas Phelippes. He wrote quickly and heavily, correcting his mistakes as he went along, blotting some words; he was not bothered by elegant penmanship. In fact Barnes was seriously annoyed: ‘You know how prejudicial this kind of trouble may be to the pretended proceedings and therefore I beseech you with all speed seek the redress.' He was meant soon to meet his émigré contact, but if that gentleman found out about the pursuivants' raid, he told Phelippes, ‘alls were in dust'. Barnes signed the letter with his full name, sealed it and addressed it to his very good friend Master Thomas Phelippes.

Barnes was by now an agent of two years' experience. Walsingham and Phelippes had formally recruited him in 1588. Before that, from the spring of 1586, he had unknowingly worked for Phelippes, carrying letters secretly to and from the Queen of Scots. He was Gilbert Gifford's cousin and Gifford's substitute courier, though he knew nothing about Phelippes's operation. So when in 1588 Walsingham and Phelippes presented to Barnes the facts of what he had done for the Scottish Queen, he found himself wrongfooted and vulnerable to a charge of dangerous espionage. His future was in the hands of
Walsingham and Phelippes. They came to an agreement Barnes felt it prudent not to refuse. To Walsingham he offered his service to God and queen ‘by discovering or bringing to light any of the treacherous intents towards the state' of fugitives and traitors at home and abroad.

Thomas Barnes writes to Thomas Phelippes from the Saracen's Head on Carter Lane, March 1590.

And that is exactly what he went on to do. When Thomas Barnes wrote without ceremony to Thomas Phelippes from the Saracen's Head he was working as Phelippes's agent. His task was to discover the Catholic émigrés' plans and conspiracies. His contact on the continent was Charles Paget, that most dangerous of exiles, who sent Barnes letters and questions about conditions in England. Phelippes was by now an artist of double-cross, drafting reports that Barnes communicated back to Paget in his own hand using the cipher they, Paget and Barnes, had agreed between themselves. When he was not in London, Barnes's familiar territory was Antwerp and Brussels, from where he wrote to Phelippes in cipher. To cover any association with Phelippes, Barnes addressed his packets to John Wytsande, a London merchant. A man of order and habit, Phelippes had a mark to
preserve the secrecy and anonymity of Barnes's reports. It was the Greek letter alpha with a dot placed carefully over the top.

All of this was difficult and delicate work to which Phelippes brought care, patience and his customary eye for detail. The stakes were high. In these years of heavy and expensive European war it was clear that for Spain the defeat of the Great Armada of 1588 was a temporary failure. Open warfare between the Tudor and Habsburg monarchies was a fact. The seriousness of Barnes's espionage can be measured by the fact that one of his contacts abroad was Hugh Owen, the chief émigré intelligencer to the Duke of Parma. Paget and Owen and their paymasters wanted to make sense of England's capacity to withstand the military power of Spanish forces and to prepare for another armada. Phelippes sought to play Paget and Owen at their own game, trying with Barnes's help to discover what the émigrés knew and, important also, to plant false information. Always the subtle master of deliberate calculations, Phelippes misled and disinformed Elizabeth's enemies.

Phelippes understood the human factor of his secret work. He had to keep Barnes on the straight and narrow path, all the time watching Paget and Owen, through their letters to Barnes, for any suggestion of suspicion or double-dealing. As Phelippes wrote some years later: ‘the principal point in matter of intelligence, is to procure confidence with those parties that one will work upon, or for those parties a man would work by.' In other words, it was an exercise in skilled manipulation. And in the case of Phelippes and Barnes the collaboration lasted for years longer than probably either man ever expected. Over a decade later, in January 1602, Phelippes's younger brother Stephen happened to come across both men hard at work writing a secret paper.

Three weeks after the pursuivants had found Barnes at his lodgings in the Saracen's Head, Sir Francis Walsingham died at his house on Seething Lane near the Tower of London. His health had been poor for many years, and he had taken frequent long leaves of absence throughout the 1570s. He suffered with a urinary complaint; he may have had a kidney stone. One of his spies, Robert Poley, suggested it was a venereal disease. In an unguarded remark Poley said of his
employer: ‘Marry, he hath his old disease the which is the pox in his yard [penis] the which he got of a lady in France.' It was a scurrilous and unwise thing to say about a man as powerful as the queen's secretary.

Walsingham's health began to fail for the last time in 1589. His work as secretary was overwhelming and he was pushed to the limits of his physical ability. His office was punishing enough for a healthy man. He failed to attend meetings of the Privy Council between February and June 1589. Though rallying a little at the end of that year, he made his last will and testament on 12 December.

He died an hour before midnight on Monday, 6 April 1590. On the following day Walsingham's office staff retrieved their master's will from a secret cabinet. A few hours later, at ten o'clock that Tuesday night, he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. Walsingham wrote in his will that he wanted his body to be buried ‘without any such extraordinary ceremonies as usually appertain to a man serving in my place'. This says something of his austerity: Walsingham was a powerful man, but he had never played the flamboyant courtier; he was ever the queen's loyal servant.

His will was short and compact, a sparse record of a man's life and loyalties. In it Sir Francis was concerned only with his wife and daughter. Of the bequests to charity or gifts to household servants common in the last testaments of his colleagues there was nothing, other than £10 of plate left to each of the three overseers of the will. Thomas Phelippes was nowhere mentioned.

Walsingham was disciplined, controlled and vigilant, ever watchful for the queen's security. Lord Burghley wrote of his death as ‘a great loss, both for the public use of his good and painful long services, and for the private comfort I had by his mutual friendship'. He continued in the heavy language of divine providence:

we now that are left in this vale of earthly troubles, are to employ ourselves to remedy the loss of him hath brought, rather than for grief of the lack of him that is dead, to neglect of actions meet for us, whom God permitteth still to live.

Life and politics – and espionage – carried on without Walsingham, though in a quickly changing world.

He had always possessed a passionate sense of mission. He apprehended a war between God's people and the forces of the Devil. Walsingham had seen with his own eyes the massacre in Paris at Bartholomewtide in 1572. It was clear to him that Elizabeth's Protestant England fought for its survival against enemies at home and abroad. There was no distinction in Sir Francis's mind between the political efforts of the Queen of Scots, the Duke of Guise, the Pope and the King of Spain and the work of their agents, Charles Paget, Francis Throckmorton, Anthony Babington and many others. Catholic priests and Jesuits were traitors, for in their eyes Queen Elizabeth was a heretic and a bastard. When William Allen and other priests spoke of their pastoral mission to save England from heresy and schism, Elizabeth's advisers knew that they sought to do so by force and treason. This would have been as obvious to Walsingham as it was to Burghley when both men read Allen's violent denunciation of Elizabeth's tyranny weeks before the Great Armada set sail in 1588. Walsingham's sharp eyes would not have missed Allen's allegation of the ‘Machiavellian' and godless methods used by Elizabeth's government:

she hath by the execrable practices of some of her chief ministers, as by their own hands, letters, and instructions, and by the parties' confessions it may be proved, sent abroad exceeding great numbers of intelligencers, spies, and practisers, into most princes' courts, cities, and commonwealths in Christendom, not only to take and give secret notice of princes' intentions, but to deal with the discontented of every state for the attempting of somewhat against their lords and superiors, namely against His Holiness and the King of Spain His Majesty, whose sacred persons they have sought many ways wickedly to destroy.

He may have been grimly amused at Allen's charge of Machiavellian dealing.

Certainly Walsingham had used any instrument or method he believed was necessary to defend God, queen and country. One of these was the rack in the Tower of London. He called torture by its name: he did not hide behind euphemisms. He acted with absolute surety of purpose; he had few doubts. At her trial Mary Queen of Scots accused Walsingham to his face of working against her. Sir Francis
replied: ‘I protest before God that as a man careful of my mistress's safety I have been curious.' This was a masterful piece of wordcraft, for though ‘curious' meant in one sense attentive and careful, it also gave a meaning of something hidden and subtle. After many years of fighting a secret war against an unforgiving enemy, Walsingham captured his profession in a single adjective.

Walsingham knew full well the cost of his service, to which there is a sharp reference in his will. When he set out his wishes for a plain and simple funeral it was ‘in respect of the greatness of my debts and the mean state I shall leave my wife and heir in'. He had spent private money on public business, hoping for royal patronage to offset the burden. In Walsingham's case the size of the debt was immense. When he died he owed to the crown the extraordinary sum of about £42,000, though it was established a few years later (thanks to the tenacity of his widow) that Elizabeth's treasury owed him an even greater sum.

Walsingham committed a great amount of this money to espionage. His brother-in-law Robert Beale, with whom he worked closely in the royal secretariat, maintained that Walsingham paid over forty spies and intelligencers throughout Europe. He had agents in the households of the French ambassadors to Elizabeth's court, from whom he gathered intelligence on France and Scotland. With money, Beale wrote, Walsingham ‘corrupted priests, Jesuits and traitors to betray the practices against this realm'. He ran a very efficient system of intercepting letters passing on the post roads of Europe.

Elizabeth's government never entirely suppressed the exiles; that would have been impossible. But Walsingham's efforts to disrupt and confuse them had a definite psychological effect. In February 1590 Sir Francis Englefield, one of Elizabeth's most determined enemies, wrote of the ‘doubt and fear' of his missing letters: ‘I have lost so many, and received so few, as the want of them disjointeth much my poor affairs'. Those letters can be read today in Walsingham's papers. He and Phelippes may have taken a professional pleasure in knowing something of the confusion and uncertainty they could cause, frustrating and confounding the enemy.