The Watchers (4 page)

Persecution is a powerful theme of this book: the persecution of Protestants in Europe by Catholic kings and princes, and likewise the persecution of English Catholics by Elizabeth's government. Both sides claimed truth and justice in a bitter religious and theological contest that fractured sixteenth-century Europe. This was strongly reflected in the balance of international politics and military power. Or rather it was an imbalance, for Elizabeth's Protestant kingdom was small, isolated diplomatically and, except for the fact that it was surrounded by sea, practically defenceless against a serious military assault.

To the Catholic powers, especially to Spain, England was a rogue
state. Using the common metaphor of the human body, they thought that England's disease of heresy should be cut away to restore the health of Christendom. To many English Catholic exiles and émigrés, the rule of the queen and the government of her ministers was a blasphemy. The émigrés looked instead to the Pope and the Church of Rome for leadership and spiritual guidance. In their eyes, Tudor England's heresy had deep roots in Henry VIII's schism with Rome in the 1530s and his marriage to Queen Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn. As the child of this unsanctioned and offensive marriage, Elizabeth Tudor was for most Europeans a bastard as well as a heretic, and thus her rule was tainted and illegitimate.

As early in Elizabeth's reign as the 1570s some exiles pressed the Pope and the King of Spain for a crusade against England and the forcible removal from power of Elizabeth and her government. English émigrés wrote plans for invasion and worked with foreign powers to topple Elizabeth's government. That they were never successful does not mean that the plans never existed – they most certainly did. Many were wildly implausible, concocted by men whose organizational ability was lamentable. Some, however, were truly threatening. All were dangerous because, put into practice or not, they reflected the imagination of, and potential for, treason.

This book shows how the Elizabethan state, in which loyalty to the queen and the Church of England were bound together as one, fought for its survival politically and morally. Elizabethan writers naturally claimed that providence favoured the queen and her country. The account by John Foxe in the ‘Book of Martyrs' of Elizabeth's miraculous preservation from harm in Queen Mary's reign was taken up by all the major English historians and chroniclers of the later sixteenth century. But if we want properly to understand the mindset of Elizabeth's enemies, we have to imagine that there was an opposing narrative to the nationally self-congratulatory one we are used to.

And there was a
very
different narrative, one that sparked with anger and resentment. The English Catholic exiles in Louvain, Antwerp, Rome, Rheims, Rouen and Madrid wrote passionate books about Elizabeth's government of atheists suppressing God's Church as cruelly as the Romans had persecuted the first Christians. The queen was, in this view, a wicked apostate bastard tyrant. The Catholic
émigrés planned England's rescue from heresy and damnation, by invasion if necessary, in a cause worth their martyrdom. Elizabeth's government, defending what it saw to be God's true Church of England and their queen chosen by heaven, used every means to defend itself. It is no wonder that throughout these years so vicious a secret war was fought in the shadows.

The war was conducted in England by Elizabeth's government. The motor of government was the queen's secretary, the cool organizing intelligence at the centre of things, the spider who knew every thread of the Elizabethan web.

The secretary met the queen in daily audience. He was always on call. He supervised Elizabeth's correspondence, worked as the point of contact between the queen and her Council, briefed her ambassadors, negotiated with foreign embassies and drafted royal proclamations. He moved with his staff from one royal palace to the next and between his house in London or Westminster and his estate in the country. Information was at his fingertips: his notebooks were packed with items of government business to complete. He was an expert who knew every feature and detail of the Tudor kingdoms from maps and plans and great compilations on the topics of which he needed to be a master: on Church and religion, military matters, foreign affairs and diplomacy, English trade and the queen's enemies both within and outside the kingdom. The most skilled secretaries were practised courtiers who knew that it was wise before a royal audience to know Elizabeth's mood and who understood that when she had to perform the dull business of signing documents it was a good idea to divert her with entertaining and accomplished conversation. A secretary had to be able to steer through often choppy political waters, navigating Elizabeth's notoriously variable changes of mind and direction and the robust and sometimes fractious views of her advisers. It was an exhausting job; even the most gifted of the queen's secretaries complained of the anxiety and physical and mental strain of it. The often febrile intensity of the secretary's work sounds as a sharp recurring note throughout this book.

The royal secretariat produced mounds of documents. There must have been paper everywhere: in the clerks' rooms, in the bound volumes and other archives carried by the Privy Council from palace
to palace, as well as hundreds of documents littering the secretary's private chambers at court and those of his houses in London and the country. His clerks were men he trusted, middle-ranking officials whose fierce Protestantism was beyond question, bound to the governing elite by ties of background, education and sometimes even marriage. They worked furiously at administration. While some of the most important and useful government documents were put into reference books, many of the dozens of letters and reports that arrived every day for the secretary were opened, given a short summary by one of his clerks, neatly refolded and put into a filing index. This is how the secret reports and other papers upon which this book is built – very many hundreds of them – were archived and used in the sixteenth century.

The secretary kept the most sensitive documents to himself, though he generally allowed his most trusted staff (often his own private secretaries) to work with them. At the time of Sir Francis Walsingham's death in 1590 there existed ‘The book of secret intelligences'. This no longer survives, but from other papers we know that it would have held the names of agents, the aliases and the alphabets (or keys) to the codes and ciphers they used, and the money they were paid. These highly secret papers were locked away in the secretary's secure cabinets.

As the sixteenth century wore on, secret communication became much more sophisticated than it had been even thirty years before – a sure mark of how busy were Europe's spies. Simple codes, in which a symbol stood for a name or a topic in letters written in plain prose, were replaced by complicated ciphers. In these, characters stood for letters of the alphabet and false characters (called ‘nulls') were inserted to fool anyone who tried to break the cipher. Even using an alphabet, it was a painstaking business to unpick a fully enciphered letter; one of the conspirators in this book found it so tedious, in fact, that he asked a friend to help him do it. To break an unknown cipher took mathematical skill, great patience and a deep understanding of Latin and all the major European languages, with their differing frequencies of letters and words. In the secretary's office secret ciphers were kept in a special cabinet, organized by drawers marked only with a letter of the alphabet, to which the secretary held the key.

By the 1580s, the most plot-ridden decade of Elizabeth's reign, the secretary had working for him a small team of secretive men. One was an expert breaker of code and cipher who also kept equipment for secret writing. Another was a skilled forger of documents and of the seals used to secure packets of letters. The secretary's archives make plain another fact. Elizabeth's government was able to intercept dozens of letters passing between England's enemies on the roads of mainland Europe, obtained from couriers or postal officials in towns and cities. In the interests of God, queen and country theft and bribery became necessary instruments of the state.

It would be wonderful to have the papers of the secretary and his staff just as they were left at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Instead we have to make do with tantalizing fragments, scattered pieces of a great documentary puzzle that keep historians on their toes. A stunning exception is the surviving archive of manuscripts belonging to Robert Beale, a clerk of Elizabeth's Privy Council. Beale was a powerful character, a plainly spoken man of passionate Protestantism and high intelligence, an experienced bureaucrat and a master of government business. Over his long career, Beale collected the kinds of papers he and his colleagues needed to use every day, organized by themes and topics. Though rebound in the seventeenth century, Beale's volumes in the British Library in London allow us to understand an Elizabethan archive, to touch it and feel it: the stiff pale animal hide spines and covers, the leather ties to keep the books closed, the indexes for speedy reference, and Beale's explanatory notes in what, after the frenetic scrawl of Sir Francis Walsingham or the impossibly compressed minute writing of Walsingham's most secret servant, Thomas Phelippes, is one of the vilest hands of sixteenth-century England – uncompromising and bluntly effective, like, indeed, the man himself.

Unfortunately Beale's papers are exceptional. Time, damp and hungry rodents quickly set to work on the piles of old government papers that lay in heaps in the Tower of London for centuries. Most of what survives today was preserved for us by the enterprising Victorians who, with their rigorous and tidy methods, went through the chaos of papers they found in government and family archives and gave them order. They dated the manuscripts, sorted them into topical categories and bound them into large volumes. They published
selected summaries and notes of their contents in austere calendars printed by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. It was a magnificent, even imperial, achievement that brought the fine texture of Elizabethan history to the Victorian libraries of London's private clubs, the public schools and universities, and the country houses of the landed gentry and nobility.

So in fact for many years the work of Elizabeth's secretary and his staff and the world they knew has been viewed through the lens of the Victorian imagination: efficient, measured, self-assured, correct. One of the joys and challenges of writing this book has been to start from scratch, to put the story together piece by piece from the Elizabethan archives, to go deeper and further than the printed histories have ever allowed us to, to look and examine with fresh eyes. What we find is an intense and anxious time in English history, one about as far removed from the comfortable certainties of Victorian professional London as it is possible to imagine. Turning the pages of letters and papers written nearly five hundred years ago is an extraordinary privilege; it is difficult to imagine being able to get closer to the sources than to see the precise moment an Elizabethan spy, rushing to finish his report in Paris, dipped his pen in ink or signed a false name. These are the kinds of sources, some of the most interesting and intriguing of the sixteenth century, stripped to essentials and read afresh, which we can use to understand the secret history of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to discover what for so long has been hidden.

Here in this book you will find a world shaded in tones of grey rather than drawn clearly in white and black. It may seem at first to be a very different world from our own, yet there is also about it a strange familiarity, and I have often wondered how much the behaviour of human beings has really changed in nearly half a millennium. Elizabethans had hopes and fears, passionate beliefs and long anxieties, points of common reference and understanding, as well as deep hatreds. Many were divided people who lived in fractured countries, trying to find ways to survive, to reconcile belief, action and conscience. Some of the Elizabethans you will read about here acted according to deeply held principles; others sold what they had for money. Many survived while others went to the gallows. Most were
caught up in events over which they had no control. Nothing could be more different than the conventional story of Elizabeth's reign, the glamour of court, the heroic quest for a national destiny of peace, stability and empire. This book explores a darker and more disturbing world.

The Spanish ambassador came to St James's Palace in Westminster on 9 November 1558, a Wednesday, in time for dinner. Briefed by his master, his sacred Catholic royal majesty Philip, King of Spain and Jerusalem as well as King of England, the ambassador had set out from Arras on the 5th. After a brisk sea crossing to Dover he and his party set off for London with no time to waste. Their speed marked the urgency of the mission, which was a special and difficult one. King Philip's wife, Queen Mary of England, the daughter of King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, was dying. At issue were the English royal succession and the Tudor inheritance. Just as important to Philip was the now uncertain future of England's relations with Spain and the other countries of Catholic Europe.

The king's emissary was Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Count of Feria. He was thirty-eight years old, the captain of Philip's guard, a close royal adviser and a man who used plain words. He said he was unsuited to the intricacies of diplomacy, knowing that he lacked the suaveness of a professional ambassador. But Philip trusted Feria. It was impossible for the king himself to travel to Westminster to visit his wife, for he was busy with the funeral obsequies of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and absorbed by peace negotiations with France. Philip had to know what was happening at Mary's royal court, and Feria was to be his king's eyes and ears in England, a task Philip knew the count would perform without a career diplomat's evasions and circumlocutions.