The Watchers (43 page)

Snowden understood that he lived a dangerous life; he had been anxious for his own safety even on the streets of London in June and July 1591 and he was a good deal more exposed in Spain or Rome. He knew that even a chance remark by Cecil in London could put his life in danger. He wrote to Sir Robert: ‘For this I assure you, at my last being in Spain words were laid to my charge spoken by you of me at
your table to a kinsman and confident friend that had like cost me my life.' He feared the withdrawal of Cecil's favour, thinking back to his recruitment by Sir Robert and his father, and their earliest doubts about his loyalty: ‘If you reposed (when I first met you) that credit in me as I deserved, I had not passed so much trouble as I have done for the performance of my promise to you.'

By a combination of skill, luck and brazenness Snowden survived. He reported to Sir Robert on Spanish political and military thinking and the efforts of the Catholic exiles in Scotland. He forwarded letters he had intercepted, these by some of Queen Elizabeth's most formidable enemies. Catholic rumours of Snowden's disloyalty never went away. In 1597 reliable sources of news in Antwerp said that Snowden was under the protection of certain English noblemen. Two years later he was even named publicly in a pamphlet as Lord Burghley's spy; in print he defended himself robustly, appealing for the truth of his story to God in heaven. And yet he continued to be trusted in Spain and Rome, all the way through to the death of Elizabeth in 1603.

But what, apart from luck and ability, was the key to John Snowden's longevity as a spy? How was he able to cope with the strains of his secret life? The answer, most probably, lies in his conscience. What he wrote to Lord Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil and William Allen was perfectly consistent. He believed that he did not betray Catholics and their faith, only the enemies of the queen. He believed what Burghley himself found it impossible to imagine: that a Catholic, even a priest, could be a loyal subject to Elizabeth; that it was possible to separate religious faith from political allegiance in a way that challenged the very notion of Elizabethan England as a confessional state. Snowden's enemies were those of his queen, Lord Burghley and Sir Robert: ‘those which are the principal agents against our estate and country'.

In 1591 William Sterrell pestered Thomas Phelippes to recommend him for service in the household of Robert Devereux, the young and ambitious Earl of Essex. Sterrell was convincing and plausible and soon found himself in the earl's employment. Phelippes was less willing to join Essex but, left by Walsingham's death without a patron, he had few other choices open to him. After some months of courtship, Francis Bacon, Essex's great friend, at last recruited Phelippes and his vast experience of operating secret agents.

Essex wanted to dazzle the queen with a great intelligence coup against Her Majesty's enemies. He had high expectations and he wanted results. But Sterrell's mission in Flanders, which was launched by Phelippes in the spring months of 1592, failed, at a cost to Essex's purse and also his patience. It was the ruin of Sterrell. And it damaged Phelippes's reputation for skill in espionage, most importantly of all in the eyes of the queen herself. In fact, it was the greatest failure of Phelippes's long career in the shadows of Elizabethan government.

The setting for the mission was Europe: Antwerp, Brussels, Liège and London. Nothing of the whole paraphernalia of Elizabethan espionage was missing from the Sterrell case. There were aliases (Sterrell alone used at least two), plausible cover stories, secret postal addresses in three European cities, a cipher and meticulous arrangements for the exchange of money. At first one and later two couriers worked for Phelippes and Sterrell, both Yorkshiremen, Reinold Bisley and Thomas Cloudesley. Both men were believed by the Catholic exiles to be their agents, but they were deceived by Phelippes's arts of double-cross. To each and every aspect of the mission Phelippes gave time and
effort. A startlingly accomplished man himself – the best breaker of code and cipher in western Europe, a Cambridge-educated mathematician, a linguist fluent in five languages, a shrewd judge of men – he was supported in Sterrell's mission by Francis Bacon, one of the most prodigious intellects in Elizabethan England. And yet for all this, so technically brilliant an operation produced no worthwhile intelligence on émigrés in the pay of the King of Spain. What should have been a wonderful success for the greater glory of the ambitious Earl of Essex became for reasons of personality, circumstance and politics a confused tangle of misunderstanding and bitter recrimination.

The proposition, which employed Phelippes's familiar method of using a double agent, looked at first so promising. William Sterrell, a veteran of espionage in the Low Countries during the time of Walsingham, would work in Brussels and Antwerp to gather intelligence on the queen's enemies in Flanders, offering himself as a likely agent for Catholic émigrés who wanted to recruit an English spy. Sterrell's reports, carried by the courier Thomas Cloudesley, would be delivered to the Swan inn on Bishopsgate, just outside the city walls of London. Phelippes, who had a network of contacts in the city, would collect them from the Swan.

So convinced was the Earl of Essex of certain success, he briefed the queen on Sterrell almost before he was launched; he wanted to lose no time in showing to Elizabeth the impressive skills of his men. Even Phelippes, by nature a cautious man, was hopeful of being able to get good intelligence on important exiles. Of the émigrés three were especially dangerous: the renegade military commander Sir William Stanley; the clever Catholic intelligencer Hugh Owen; and Henry Walpole, a Jesuit chaplain in Stanley's regiment.

Phelippes wrote a passport for Sterrell that would allow him to pass easily through ports on both sides of the English Channel. His cover was trade; he was supposed to be the agent of a London merchant. Phelippes gave him £10. Essex was at first relaxed about the sums of money he would need to provide to fund the mission, though Phelippes well knew that these were more modest than Sterrell had hoped for. The earl nevertheless felt generous. As he wrote to Phelippes: ‘I would wish to have full contentment in these things with no
pity of my purse.' He was making an investment, expecting a quick return on his money.

Sterrell's first reports seemed very promising. He took his cover seriously, and wrote to Phelippes as a merchant's factor might write to his master. But woven into the letters were passages of cipher. Surely it was no surprise to have confidential matters of business protected in this way. In fact, Sterrell was making his secret briefings to Phelippes. One of the first of these hidden messages concerned a plot to kill the queen. Sir William Stanley, Sterrell wrote, had sent into England ‘one Bisley by [i.e. by way of] Flushing, sometime a soldier there, a little short black fellow, a red face, his father an officer in York.' This was not, however, the major revelation Sterrell may have imagined it to be. As it happened, Phelippes already knew of Master Reinold Bisley, whom he had kept under close surveillance for some little time.

Phelippes's subtle mind was thinking of Bisley and the uses to which a soldier-assassin might be put. Sterrell, however, was much more preoccupied with the hardships of his new secret life abroad. He was bothered about money, feeling that he could not live in Brussels for less than £140. For a start, he was not yet dressed in the Spanish fashions of the city's elite, which he felt hindered his gathering of intelligence.

Soon he left Brussels for Liège and then he went to Antwerp. There the factor of the merchant who had been approached by Phelippes to exchange Sterrell's money said he knew nothing about the agreement; Sterrell instead made his own arrangements with a merchant from Cologne. There were difficulties, too, of communication. Phelippes, who understood the risks of sending letters from England to mainland Europe, was going to the trouble of cutting his letters to Sterrell into two halves and sending each part separately. Sterrell, however, received only some of the packets. Knowing there was a valuable market in Antwerp for intercepted letters, Sterrell wrote to Phelippes:

Send me word always how many letters you receive with the date, that I may know if any miscarry. Let me know what was in your letter sent to the master of posts in Antwerp for it is intercepted; there is no letter can pass under any known name but will be filched by one or other; here is such extreme emulation or envy. Write all matter of importance in cipher.

The secret report on Reinold Bisley written for Thomas Phelippes, 1592.

And yet in spite of all this trouble Sterrell told Phelippes that he was sure he could find out valuable intelligence. He wrote that he could even intercept the letters of Cardinal William Allen, that most influential of English exiles working for Spain: if only, of course, he had some more money.

Reinold Bisley, named by Sterrell as an assassin on the way to England to kill the queen, was certainly a suspicious character. In the weeks before Sterrell left for Brussels Phelippes had had him watched; perhaps even then Phelippes had imagined a use for him in Sterrell's mission. Phelippes's watcher found Bisley at his lodgings near Bedlam. It was a house owned by an Italian who kept a bowling alley, one of those haunts of bawkers, gripes and vincents – Elizabethan underworld slang for players, gamblers and dupes – that so offended the high standards of Elizabethan moralists.

Phelippes's informant spent time and effort gathering as many facts as he could about the mysterious Bisley. The watcher's information was that Master Bisley had been sent to London by Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen. He had arrived in London in the middle of the night and in conditions of great secrecy. Moving between Antwerp and London, Bisley worked as a courier who carried the letters of Stanley and Owen ‘in his buttons' – that is, strangely, without any effort to conceal them. The subject of one of these letters, so the watcher reported to Phelippes, was the murder of Queen Elizabeth.

In fact Reinold Bisley was an English spy who worked for Lord Buckhurst, one of Elizabeth's privy councillors who knew a great deal about the Low Countries. Bisley was not, in other words, a dangerous Catholic: he carried a paper signed by Buckhurst and was employed secretly in the queen's service. All of this Phelippes discovered when he interviewed Bisley in July 1592, two months after Sterrell had left for the Low Countries. Bisley told Phelippes that he was a simple courier, bringing letters from the émigrés and then delivering them in London and Southwark. Certainly he knew Sir William Stanley and Hugh Owen. They believed that Bisley was posing as a spy for Elizabeth's government: that, in other words, he was their double agent. His allegiance, however, was to Lord Buckhurst, and Owen and Stanley were convinced by the deception.

Phelippes's careful account of his interview with Bisley shows that he was wary of the dark-haired Yorkshireman. One of Phelippes's sentences is particularly pungent. He wrote of Bisley: ‘He will as others have done make his profit of me at one time or other.' And yet for all the warning he gave himself, Phelippes chose to take the risk of employing him. An excellent second courier for Sterrell, one who was trusted by the very men Phelippes wanted to spy on, had fallen into his lap. It was the kind of double-cross Phelippes relished.

By late summer 1592, only a few months after he had set out for Brussels, Sterrell and his mission were in trouble. Exactly why is a mystery, but it seems he panicked. Francis Bacon wrote to Phelippes that ‘Mercury' was returning home in alarm, the news was known at court, and the Earl of Essex had been informed. Bacon's allusion to classical myth and astronomy was an ironic play upon Sterrell's cover
in Brussels and Antwerp as an English businessman. The planet Mercury was specially associated with feats of skill, eloquence and success in commerce, and to the Romans Mercury was both a messenger and a god of trade. Sterrell, however, was proving himself considerably more inadequate than a god of the pantheon in his abilities as Essex's master spy.

For some time now, Bacon had been working closely with Phelippes, though Bacon's references to the time they spent together have all the elegant ease of a scholar only passingly aware of the world around him. In August he invited Phelippes to call on him. ‘You may stay as long and as little while as you will,' Bacon wrote. ‘And indeed I would be the wiser by you in many things, for that I call to confer with a man of your fulness [prosperity, affluence].' We can be sure that there was a very definite sense of purpose to a visit by one of the most cunning men in England to probably the kingdom's most intellectually gifted.

Bacon said that Sterrell had returned so unexpectedly to England ‘upon some great matter'. Probably this was fear, for from the beginning of his mission he had felt exposed in enemy territory, short of money and very worried about the interception of his letters. ‘I pray you meet him if you may,' Bacon wrote to Phelippes of Sterrell in September. Bacon suggested that he and Phelippes should lay their heads together so that they could save Sterrell's reputation, satisfy the demands of the Earl of Essex and ‘procure good service'.