The Watchers (41 page)

Robert Cecil was very much his father's heir in the family business
of Tudor government. Burghley's eldest son, Sir Thomas Cecil, was a distinguished soldier and an accomplished courtier, but he was not obviously cut out for the office of a royal secretary or privy councillor. Robert, twenty-one years younger than his half-brother, showed every inclination to follow his father's distinguished career.

Robert Cecil was schooled for high political office, educated at home by private tutors, in Cambridge and at Gray's Inn. He visited Paris at the age of twenty-one, where he went to lectures in the Sorbonne, the theological school of the city's university. He studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as mathematics, cosmography (the study of the universe) and music. His father's palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire was itself an education for a future royal servant. Its rooms were decorated with the genealogies of the English nobility, the pedigree of the Cecil family and portraits and busts of emperors, kings and noblemen of classical and contemporary history. In the Great Gallery of Theobalds Robert could make sense of the history of Rome, the politics of the Spanish Netherlands and England's own civil wars of the fifteenth century. This was for Burghley the expression of the authority and knowledge he had built up over years of service to the queen, and one of its purposes was to fit Robert Cecil for just such a career himself.

In May 1591, a month short of his twenty-eighth birthday, the queen knighted him. A few weeks later she appointed Sir Robert to her Privy Council. It was at exactly this time in his new political career, which showed such promise, that Cecil worked with Burghley on a highly secret case. Together, father and son recruited two men who were sent off to mainland Europe to spy on Cardinal William Allen. Their names were John Snowden and John Fixer. This was Robert Cecil's apprenticeship in espionage, one that helped to make him quite as formidable as both his father and Sir Francis Walsingham in the pursuit of his country's enemies.

John Snowden was a subtle, intelligent and self-assured man who presented himself to Lord Burghley as a volunteer in the cause of his native country against its enemies. His real name was John Cecil, though if he was a kinsman of the first political family of the kingdom it was by a very distant connection. In May 1591, when he came to
Burghley's close attention, he was about thirty-two years old and a former fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He had a companion called John Fixer, who was his college contemporary. No physical description of Snowden survives, but we know that Fixer was a tall man with a ruddy complexion and dark features. Both men were scholars, spoke foreign languages and had travelled in Italy and Spain. Also both men were Catholic priests. Snowden, indeed, was a member of the household of Cardinal William Allen.

Snowden and Fixer were spies, sent secretly to England by Robert Persons, the forty-five-year-old Jesuit priest who with Allen was always energetic in engineering plots against Queen Elizabeth. Their mission never happened: the two priests were captured even before they landed at an English port. They had set out from Portugal for Amsterdam. On the voyage their ship,
The Adulphe
, was intercepted by
The Hope
of Elizabeth's royal navy. Taken prisoner, Snowden and Fixer found themselves confined to Lord Burghley's grand townhouse on the Strand in Westminster. There they must have contemplated their futures: any priest found to be in England was guilty of high treason.

Burghley was away from Westminster, busy with the queen's ten-day visit to his great house of Theobalds. But he saw in Snowden and Fixer at least the spark of a possibility. Thrown back at the enemy as double agents, they could prove to be valuable weapons against Cardinal Allen. Of course they had to be tested, and they might be found wanting. To be sure, Burghley began to examine them by correspondence. Snowden and Fixer wrote out statements which, once they arrived at Theobalds, Burghley read with very great care. The two priests first put pen to paper on Friday, 21 May. It happened to be the very day that Queen Elizabeth knighted the clever and ambitious Sir Robert Cecil.

The first of their statements gave Burghley hope. Fixer seemed to know a great deal about two traitors in the pay of the King of Spain, the veteran rebel and conspirator Sir Francis Englefield and the turncoat military commander in the Low Countries Sir William Stanley. Snowden was close to Cardinal Allen. Both priests knew Robert Persons and had (so they claimed) valuable information about his secret plans.

But could they be trusted? It was plain from the beginning that Fixer was very nervous, more obviously so than Snowden. Fixer's statement had about it a note of self-doubt; he was anxious that he had left out something Burghley was looking for. But he seemed keen to be of help to Elizabeth's government. ‘My memory is fragile and this time is short,' he wrote:

if there be anything that hath passed or doth pass either in France or Italy or Spain whereto my small experience of those countries can reach, I beseech your honour to enquire it in particular and I will answer what I know with all truth and sincerity.

He added a caveat and a defence, saying that he would tell the truth ‘notwithstanding the cardinal [Allen] and Persons do trust such matters upon my self': in other words, he could reveal only what the two men had revealed to him of their plans and conspiracies against England, which may not have been much. Seeing all too plainly the precarious situation he found himself in, Fixer put his life and death in Burghley's hands.

Snowden wrote with greater self-confidence. His statement was certainly the work of an intelligent, experienced and subtle man: too subtle, perhaps. Snowden's cleverness may have worried Burghley just as much as did Fixer's diffidence. There was no hint of fear in what he wrote. In offering his service to Burghley, he was even plainer than Fixer had been, saying without hesitation that he would give Elizabeth's government information on plots, treasons and conspiracies. But he maintained a conscientious scruple as a Catholic. Snowden distinguished absolutely between Catholics whose loyalty to the queen held firm and those, like Robert Persons, who planned for England's invasion by the foreign power of Spain. Snowden explained to Burghley in his statement that he would betray only Elizabeth's enemies, not the Catholic faith.

If Snowden was to be believed he had intended from the time of his recruitment by Persons to make an offer of service to Burghley by sending ‘informations of such poor intelligence I had'. Snowden had a very long way to go before convincing Burghley of the truth of his claim. The only condition he had expected as Burghley's agent, Snowden wrote, was liberty of conscience and the freedom to practise his
Catholic faith. And so with a surprising confidence given the circumstances of his capture, though with hope now of recommending himself as Burghley's agent, Snowden gave a full account of the nature of the mission Persons had recruited him to.

Persons wanted to infiltrate small groups of priests into England and Scotland. Snowden and Fixer were two of six. Four of the group travelled on the King of Spain's passports, leaving the port of Seville in two Scottish ships; two of the priests were bound for London, the other pair to Scotland. Snowden and Fixer, by contrast, had set out from Portugal for Amsterdam. Once in London their cover was to have been trade, and their contacts were one Tayler and one Payne in the Poultry, both of whom presumably were merchants. Persons had given Snowden and Fixer a cipher for their letters, the key word of which was DEUS.

More important than the nuts and bolts of travel and communication was the object of the mission, which was, as Snowden explained it, to make contact with English Catholics. The two priests were in effect agents of Spain, returning to their homeland to spread the message that King Philip did not want to conquer England but sought instead (to use Fixer's words) ‘to reform religion'. Persons wanted the two priests to draw up a list of names of everyone who would help the Spanish liberators when the day of invasion came. And here Snowden wanted to emphasize for Burghley an important point. Persons had instructed him to inflate the numbers of Spain's supporters in England. This, said Snowden, was the bait that Cardinal Allen and Father Persons fed to the King of Spain – the promise of an enthusiastic welcome for the Spanish forces.

Burghley was gripped by Snowden's paper: he wrote all over it, noting, cross-referring, underlining. And it was no wonder. On the face of it, Snowden seemed to have excellent information on how Robert Persons was trying to open up a new channel for intelligence from England. Persons's methods were revealed. Even more than this, what Snowden had to say offered proof of the continuing efforts of Spain to launch a successful invasion of Elizabeth's kingdoms. After all, King Philip was only temporarily depressed by the failure of the Great Armada in 1588. Quickly Spain had built a new fleet whose purpose after 1589 was, in Philip's words, to ‘wage war in the enemy's own
house', combining both navy and army in the assault upon England. Though the years 1590 and 1591 were strategically difficult ones for Philip, thanks to Spanish involvement in religious civil war in France and the political conditions of the Low Countries, experienced advisers to Elizabeth like Burghley were well enough aware of the imperial ambitions of Philip of Spain.

Perhaps, however, Snowden's intelligence was just too convenient, possessing, for all the rich and compelling detail, a suspicious relevance. It was clear to Burghley that some pieces of the priest's story did not fit together very neatly. For Snowden, Burghley's willing volunteer spy, being taken prisoner was a lucky chance. How, Burghley wondered, would Snowden and Fixer have gone about their mission, living as Catholics in England? And for all of Snowden's first protestation of loyalty to the queen, Burghley wondered how he could reconcile that with his Catholic faith. When true allegiance to the queen meant conformity to the English Church, to profess one without the other hardly made sense.

So there were the difficulties in the priests', and particularly Snowden's, papers. There were evasions and questions as yet unanswered. But already Burghley's mind was moving to the future deployment of Snowden and Fixer as spies. He wanted them to explain, first of all, how they could aid the arrest of the other priests of Robert Persons's mission without betraying themselves.

Snowden's reply, in his second statement for Burghley, was suitably brisk and businesslike. He seemed clear in his motives. He had wanted to live peaceably in his own country with the free exercise of his religion. His plan had been to write to Burghley from Amsterdam, sending the letter, along with documents he possessed, through the governor of the town of Brille. He had also intended to write a long essay on how, by granting religious freedom to those who opposed the practices of Spain, Burghley could recruit priests for Elizabeth's service. For the time being Snowden entirely avoided Burghley's question about how the other priests could be apprehended without compromising Fixer and himself.

Snowden told a tale whose facts he cleverly selected to give a certain version of the truth; his evasions were those of a careful man playing a risky game. On 23 May he made a fresh statement, writing
with a touch of self-deprecation that he would set out ‘confusedly yet I assure you confidently' what he could remember of the essential points of Spanish ‘practices', or plots and conspiracies, against England. He again stressed his loyalty and affection to his prince and country. But he continued to press his point about loyalty. He wrote that he wanted to show Burghley ‘that it is not a matter so impossible as it is commonly taken to be a good subject and a good Catholic'. And it was from this point on in his third statement that he proposed how he might work as a spy against England's enemies, William Allen and Robert Persons.

Snowden confronted head on the policy of Elizabeth's government. He suggested that to force Catholics to act against their consciences achieved nothing. Putting men to death for their faith only pleased England's enemies, giving Allen and Persons more martyrs for religion as well as justifying political action against Elizabeth. Of martyrdom Snowden wrote: ‘they [the Catholics] print it and paint it and publish it in their books and pulpits and so with pretext to move princes and the world to compassion; they work the web [that] hath been so long on the loom'. His meaning was plain: martyrdom was the inspiration as well as the sustaining fuel of the international Catholic cause against Elizabeth's England. Snowden's ambitious proposal was to bring the foreign Catholic seminaries under Burghley's control, thus neutering the powerful influence of Cardinal Allen. Volunteering himself for the task, he wanted to recruit Catholics in Burghley's cause, to use them against the true enemy. But necessary to this was ‘wonderful secrecy'. Snowden wanted no betrayal from the inside to wreck his plan.

Snowden's proposal, robustly set out, went against the grain of over thirty years of Elizabethan thinking. Burghley had long viewed all the English priests trained in the seminaries of France, Italy and Spain as conspirators and traitors. And yet he took Snowden seriously, once again working through his papers and setting out even more questions for the priest to answer. In the case of Snowden Burghley sacrificed time, a precious thing for the most powerful man in England, and something he was very loath to waste.

Now Burghley began to push Snowden very hard on the facts he had stated so far. Setting his prisoner's ambitious proposal to one side,
Burghley wanted to find out whether Snowden was telling the truth. The key to this lay in the elements of his story; this he told with great confidence, but it had to be rigorously examined, the facts and circumstances tested. If each one of Snowden's claims was found to have substance, then perhaps Burghley could trust the man and his motives.

The first thing to recover was the collection of papers Snowden had had with him aboard
The Adulphe
, the ship whose Flemish skipper lived in Amsterdam. The papers, Snowden told Burghley, were sealed in three packs of cork. Here potentially was evidence of Snowden's goodwill and honesty in saying that he had intended from the start to offer his services to Burghley, for among the papers (so he said) were packets of letters addressed to the lord treasurer, all ready to be sent to England by Snowden when he reached Amsterdam, which contained notes and ciphers. Snowden had copies of sensitive documents from Paris as well as papers concerning the business and personnel of the English seminaries. Snowden kept also a note by the Jesuit Robert Southwell on the executions of priests in England, and a manuscript of a book by Persons on the persecution of English priests of the newly founded seminary of Valladolid in Spain. There was a letter from Persons to Snowden and Fixer, as well as a number of letters from a Flemish merchant to the man with whom the two priests had proposed to lodge in Amsterdam.