The Watchers (40 page)

As Robert Beale well knew, the key to Walsingham's method was money. Beale used the word ‘liberality', with regular demands for cash, pensions and patronage by spies, informants and merchant and
diplomatic contacts abroad. Reporting directly to the queen, Walsingham kept his own secret accounts, explained by wonderfully vague phrases like ‘to be employed according to her Highness's direction given him'. But the days of such liberality had, for the time being, passed.

On Walsingham's death the queen did not appoint a new secretary. Instead Lord Burghley took on Walsingham's reponsibilities, a painful burden for a man of sixty-nine years who suffered terribly with what he called gout. Yet Burghley had worked for a lifetime at the edge of his physical endurance. Powerful and grand, he had served Elizabeth once before as her secretary, occupying that office for over a decade, and by 1590 he had been Lord Treasurer of England for eighteen years. There was no area of government in which Burghley's influence was not felt. Just before his death, when he was too sick to carry out his duties (probably in early 1590), Walsingham handed to Burghley his official papers on diplomacy, with special reference to England's relations with Spain. There was also ‘The book of secret intelligences'. The contents of Walsingham's secure cabinets moved to Burghley's own.

He lost no time in reviewing the system for gathering intelligence he had inherited from Walsingham. Within at most three weeks of his protégé's death Burghley looked at the work of five ‘intelligencers' who had served Sir Francis in continental Europe. Burghley wrote out their names in his graceful italic handwriting. They were Chasteau-Martin, Stephen de Rorque, Edmund Palmer, Filiazzi and Alexander de la Torre. Henri Chasteau-Martin, a Frenchman whose real name was Pierre d'Or, acted on behalf of English merchants trading out of Bayonne. For reports on Spanish news he received an annual salary of 1,200 Spanish escudos (something around £300 sterling), a very handsome sum of money, paid to him quarterly by the London-based international merchant and financier Sir Horatio Palavicino. Edmund Palmer was placed in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Stephen de Rorque worked in Lisbon. Filiazzi was close to the Duke of Florence. One Alexander de la Torre, who used the alias of Batzon, had moved from Antwerp to Rome in February 1590. This was not a large network of foreign spies and intelligencers, but it was an effective one,
for these five men were placed at key ports and cities in France, Portugal and Italy.

Lord Burghley names his secret intelligencers in Europe, 1590.

The days of generous subventions for government espionage were over. Elizabeth's exchequer was dry: there had to be cuts. As if to lead by example, Burghley only once claimed the secretary's allowance of money for secret work, in May 1590, the month following Walsingham's death. After that, Burghley either wanted to cut back on the work of Sir Francis's agents and intelligencers or, more likely, asked them to sing for their suppers more sweetly – and more cheaply – than they had done before. Spies and informants had grown used to fairly rich pickings of cash and patronage. Ahead were leaner times.

For Burghley, agents' salaries raised the matter of their reliability. It was the eternal question of value for money. With the help of the vice-chamberlain of the queen's household, Sir Thomas Heneage, Burghley conducted a review, wanting to find out if the money paid to agents actually brought about useful intelligence. Drawing up secret accounts with Heneage, Burghley noted the size of Chasteau-Martin's salary. Another agent, one sent by Sir Horatio Palavicino to Lisbon, received over £94. This agent was a great rarity: she was a married woman, the wife of one David Roures; she had received the money from Francisco Rizzio, Palavicino's business agent.

But if Chasteau-Martin and the elusive Mistress Roures were worth the expense, then Edmund Palmer of Saint-Jean-de-Luz was not. After
reading Palmer's letters to Walsingham, Burghley's audit exposed the amounts of money he had ‘pretended' to use ‘for Her Majesty's service'. Burghley also had doubts about another merchant, Edward James in Bayonne. James produced a copy of what he said were Walsingham's instructions for two secret missions. One was to Madrid to secure information about the health of King Philip and the activities of Sir William Stanley, the rogue English military commander in the Low Countries who had defected to Spain in 1587. James's second mission was to make a reconnaissance of the coastline of the Bay of Biscay. Whether or not Burghley was in the end convinced by Edward James and his work, he must have wondered about who could be relied upon to provide useful information, what they should be paid for it and whether espionage could be carried out on a much tighter budget than it had been by Sir Francis Walsingham.

But although Lord Burghley was the advocate of efficiency, he was also the most experienced of Elizabeth's advisers, and knew probably better than anyone else the dangers to queen and country. For thirty years he had made it his business to get to know his mistress's enemies. A couple of months after his audit, Burghley drew up his own report on the Catholic exiles and émigrés, making a special note of their Spanish pensions. Two were Charles Paget and Hugh Owen, chief intelligencer to the Spanish authorities in Brussels. Now dead, Burghley noted, was Lord Paget, that unwilling and melancholy exile, party to the Duke of Guise's planned invasion of England in 1583, who had left behind him a vast fortune.

For Thomas Phelippes some of the old certainties were disappearing. Walsingham, his master, was dead. To whom now was he responsible? Already he was feeling the strain of paying the expenses of Thomas Barnes from his own purse, careful to keep the signed receipts. His family circumstances were changing, too. In 1590 William Phelippes, Thomas's father, died at his house near Leadenhall in the city of London. To Thomas he bequeathed his gold signet ring and all his books, but not yet his fortune, which went to his mother, Joan.

But, like any gentleman with servants to pay, Phelippes needed money. Given the dangers as well as the costs of his secret work, he
also needed a patron at Elizabeth's court. His purse was only so deep, and he was too clever to leave himself exposed to the charge that he did freelance espionage without official sanction. He once made a tantalizing reference to the queen's knowledge of his secret life: he had always gone about his business, he wrote, ‘not without the Queen's privity [private knowledge] and approbation'. At first he may have tried to catch the eye of a patron with a sharp political essay on the ‘Present perils of the realm'. Here, like other clever men who wanted to show off their talents, Phelippes set out the evidence of the international Catholic conspiracy faced by Elizabeth and her kingdoms. Phelippes may indeed have looked to Burghley's support, though given the fashion for austerity he did not get very far in receiving it, at least as a permanent employee.

But in the spring of 1591 there was another likely patron at Elizabeth's court. He was twenty-five years old, aggressively ambitious, fashionable and rich. For long he had lived in the shadows of older men, especially the particularly large shadow of Lord Burghley, in whose household he was raised and educated as a royal ward after the death of his father in 1576. This young nobleman's name was Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and he wanted desperately to impress the queen. He knew nothing about intelligence work, a fact that made him the perfect patron for an old hand like Thomas Phelippes. Each man could do the other a favour. Essex could give Phelippes a job; Phelippes, the skilled spy, could give in return knowledge of the queen's dangerous enemies.

The effort to recruit Phelippes to Essex's fledgling intelligence service came from one of Phelippes's obscure contacts, a man called William Sterrell, whose career (like many of Phelippes's acquaintances) had so far in Elizabeth's reign been a secret one. Sterrell wanted a job in the earl's service and he needed Phelippes's help to secure it. He threw himself at both men in the hope of preferment, attaching himself limpet-like to Essex. Phelippes, however, was a harder man to persuade. He was not really convinced either by Sterrell or for the moment by Essex. Not to be put off by Phelippes's coolness, Sterrell pushed and pressed. He even invited Phelippes to dine with the earl at home. By
May 1591 Sterrell was talking personally to Essex: ‘I had some little talk with my lord about you,' he wrote to Phelippes, ‘which proceeded from himself.'

The proposal that formed within Essex's circle over a few weeks was to use Sterrell to penetrate the network of English Catholic exiles in Flanders. The man who sought to negotiate the terms of this mission with Phelippes was the brilliantly polymathic Francis Bacon, thirty years old, the nephew of Lord Burghley, and a close friend of the earl's. Moving in the same political circles, Bacon and Phelippes had known each other for a long time. Bacon had once been the companion of Phelippes's younger brother Stephen. Bacon courted Phelippes, recognizing his abilities, acting as intermediary between Phelippes and Essex, proposing a meeting between them. Bacon wrote to Phelippes of their prospects for success: ‘I know you are very able to make good.'

The risks of joining the Earl of Essex and his men would have been plain to Phelippes. The reality of this new world of Elizabethan politics was vicious competition between Essex and other courtiers. Ambition, power and the scramble for royal patronage stimulated political faction. But after the Great Armada of 1588, in the hard years of war against Spain in the 1590s, intelligence work became more unstable and unpredictable than it had been before. Tied up with money and political standing it mirrored the politics of the Privy Council. True, the espionage system of Walsingham and Burghley was not perfect. Political agendas lurked even at the easiest of times, though there were precious few of those in Elizabeth's reign. But at least there had been something like a clear organizing intelligence behind the government's clandestine work; it was effective by its own standards and methods; and Walsingham and Phelippes, who rarely rushed even at times of high anxiety and emergency, delivered results. Essex was different. Espionage became for Essex an instrument for his political advancement. Phelippes surely knew that ahead lay danger.

In this world where loyalties were tried and tested, made sure of or found wanting, Essex had to know where Thomas Phelippes's allegiance lay. Lord Burghley, too, put his trust in Phelippes's expertise, writing in 1593 of a letter in cipher and appealing to Phelippes's loyalty. The packet, dispatched in Dieppe, came from ‘a bad affected
person resorting often times to the enemy'. It was addressed to Phelippes. Burghley's test was to send it to Phelippes unopened. It was an act of faith on Burghley's part, using Phelippes's skill to decipher the letter and relying upon Phelippes's honesty to alert him to any significant piece of intelligence contained in the packet. As Burghley wrote: ‘I would not open the same, being assured of your good and sound affectation to the state and Her Majesty's service, that if there be any matter therein, fit to be discovered, that you will not keep it secret.'

How would Thomas Phelippes conduct himself in treacherous times without the safety and security of his service to Sir Francis Walsingham? To this question the Sterrell case would within months suggest the answer.

Lord Burghley was the most formidable politician of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Only once, in the early months of 1587, did he temporarily lose Elizabeth's trust and favour: over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. That was a price worth paying: Burghley had for many years made it his business to destroy the political and dynastic influence of the Scottish Queen. His return to political favour was swift, and by the spring of 1590, at the age of nearly seventy, he was carrying the administrative weight of practically the whole of Elizabethan government as the queen's lord treasurer and her acting secretary. Miraculously, his fragile health bore the strain.

As a courtier and politician of forty years' experience, Burghley's political instincts were finely tuned. He knew what lurked in the shadows of Elizabethan politics. He kept papers on England's enemies, the Catholic émigrés and exiles. He read their intercepted letters and understood the very real danger they, with the formidable help of Spanish power, presented to Elizabeth's kingdoms. For many years, he had made his own digests of intelligence from abroad. After Walsingham's death he took charge of his former protégé's espionage network. He was never complacent about England's security.

Burghley longed for peace and retirement in the 1590s. He felt old, weary and sick. Possessed, however, of an obsessive need to direct and control the instruments of power and patronage, he found it impossible to let go of government business. He served Elizabeth from a profound sense of duty. As he wrote to his son Robert Cecil a few days before his death: ‘Serve God by serving of the Queen, for all other service is indeed bondage to the Devil.'