The Watchers (47 page)

Sir Robert's agents did serious work, something that is clear from the meticulous accounts of expenses prepared by one of his intelligencers in Spain and France. He was the merchant Thomas Honiman, who claimed for the voyages he had made between Dover and Plymouth, the messengers he had dispatched to reconnoitre a Spanish
fort in Brittany, and at least three agents sent into Spain. It was Thomas Honiman's brother, Philip, who reported on the Spanish armada of 1596.

Sir Robert Cecil's intelligence network, 1597.

Thomas Phelippes was right to say in 1600 that Secretary Cecil commanded so many ‘spirits and endeavours'. So expertly trained by his father in every aspect of government business, Sir Robert was a practical man as well as theorist: he decided what information he needed to know and the best ways he could devise to discover it. He had at his fingertips all the resources of his father's libraries: books and papers sent out of continental Europe over many years, the best maps and atlases available. As a young scholar in France in 1584 Cecil himself had compiled a survey of the kingdom's provinces and a list of the most important nobility and officials. He possessed above all a shrewd intelligence and an eye for political information.

With all of this experience and ability, it is no wonder that by January 1598 Sir Robert had put in place a formidable network of agents. He set it all out on paper in a remarkable document that exists simply because Cecil was going on an embassy to France and a trusted official needed to know how to pay the agents and receive their reports. Fascinating today, in 1598 the document would have been priceless to England's enemies.

Some of Sir Robert's agents were residents while others, he explained, ‘go and come'. All were paid, though with a close eye for their importance; the highest paid worked for Sir Robert in Lisbon and Seville. Some wrote personally to Cecil, though reports from a single city often went to England through different ports, a prudent protection against accident or interception. Agents working in the same locality probably knew nothing of each other's work. Of the two agents in Seville the best paid, Massentio Verdiani, one of Sir Horatio Palavicino's men, got his letters to Sir Robert by way of the city of Rouen. The second agent in Seville posted reports to London through a merchant in Waterford in Ireland. Discreet merchants in London acted as a postal service for secret reports from Lisbon and Bayonne; they also sent money out to Sir Robert's agents. Trade was a perfect cover for secret service. It was fairly easy for an intelligencer to pass himself off as a merchant's representative. Real merchants like Thomas Honiman worked as Sir Robert's agents: what a serious businessman needed to know by sending out his servants was always useful intelligence for a busy secretary in London.

Employing a method that had been used by Walsingham, Sir Robert gave instructions for the fitting out of a ship whose purpose was to visit the ports of Spain to discover intelligence. Thomas Honiman and Cecil each bore half of the total cost of a thousand ducats. One of the sailors on the boat had ‘all languages, is of good wit and discretion'. He was paid sixty ducats for his expertise and for sending reports to Sir Robert.

Enemy Europe was covered: Bayonne and the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Seville, the coasts of Spain, and Rome. But Sir Robert also had spies ‘in such states as are friends to us', from Scotland to Holland and Zeeland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Like Walsingham, Cecil maintained important contacts in England. He used ‘spies and false brethren [likeliest] to know of any practice against Her Majesty's person'. One of these ‘false brethren', a man who pretended to be a Catholic, performed two tasks for Sir Robert. Firstly, he kept up a correspondence with the important émigré intelligencer Hugh Owen. Secondly, on his travels to Normandy he collected émigré Catholics' letters and brought them back to England, showing them to Cecil before posting them on. Other informants brought news to Sir Robert.
In London an Irishman called James Patrick ‘remaineth daily where Irish do resort' and he went every day to the River Thames to report on passengers arriving at the private quays of the city.

So comprehensive a service as this was not cheap to run. Sir Robert, like his father in so many ways, did not in matters of intelligence share Lord Burghley's taste for austerity. The secret budget from Elizabeth's treasury was revived, though Sir Robert was cannier with money than Walsingham had been. The salaries of his agents came to well over 4,500 ducats or (very roughly) nearly £13,000 a year in Elizabethan money. There were other expenses on top of this: extra payments, inducements and rewards, and at least once the heavy cost of fitting out a ship to spy on Spanish ports. But for regular and sound information he knew and trusted it was a price worth paying. When armies and navies could so easily run up huge debts for Elizabeth's government it was in fact a modest investment of money and energy.

And there were results. Intelligence on the Spanish armada of 1596, though too late to be of use in England, was of high quality. Reports from Lisbon on the weaknesses of Spanish forces in 1598 were likewise accurate. True, the secret information Sir Robert received was no guarantee of success, especially in military expeditions. Raw reports were only pieces in a jigsaw whose composite picture was always changing. The secretary's skill, as Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Burghley had known, was to sift the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the unlikely, and the plain facts from the suppositions. As Robert Beale, an official of government close to Walsingham, wrote: ‘Be not too credulous lest you be deceived; hear all reports but trust not all; weigh them with time and deliberation and be not too liberal with trifles; observe them that deal on both hands lest you be deceived.' This was the instinctive talent of a man like Sir Robert Cecil.

We can be sure that behind the formal structures of Sir Robert Cecil's intelligence system – the postal systems, the money and the arrangements with London merchants – was the human factor of espionage. In the years after 1600 Thomas Phelippes brought to Cecil's service his understanding of the characters and motivations of spies as well as his formidable attention to detail. We can well imagine that Phelippes saw in Sir Robert what he had once found in Walsingham's
service: a centralizing and processing intelligence at work in secret matters, seasoned with cunning and imagination. Sir Robert was ambitious, not for obvious private or political gain, but for the service of the queen and the security of the state. As a Cecil long trained for politics and service he saw neither difference nor distinction between his family's good and Elizabeth's best interests; they were identical.

By the time Thomas Phelippes was in Secretary Cecil's service, there were new recruits abroad. The few surviving records of their work give only the smallest hint of what they saw and did for God, queen and country. Together George Kendall and George Weekes spied for Sir Robert in Brussels and Dunkirk. They had generous allowances of money. When Kendall visited England in May 1601 he was given armour worth over £5. Master Douglas, a gentleman of Scotland, worked for Cecil at the Spanish court and in Lisbon for a quarterly allowance of 100 crowns. Master Fox, an Englishman, served in Venice for a yearly salary of £40. Grander still was Thomas Bradshaw, ‘employed in the court of Spain' and paid £100 a year for his information. At least two agents were discharged from service, one, Robert Luff, taken prisoner in Spain, the other, Francis Lambert, in Bayonne. When they returned to London both men were pensioned off.

Perhaps one day the stories of these spies will be told. Certainly they deserve to be. In 1600 the prognostications suggested that in a new century espials and intelligencers would be kept as busy as fellow members of their profession had been for forty years.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth, which had begun early on a Thursday morning in November 1558, ended with her death at Richmond Palace on another Thursday, 24 March 1603. She was sixty-nine years old. In the course of nearly half a century so many characters had walked on to the stage of Elizabethan politics, played their parts both great and small and then moved to the wings either to make no further appearance or to wait for a future part in the drama of a new reign. Elizabeth's successor was King James VI of Scotland. His accession went remarkably smoothly. But what seemed from the outside to be an effortless transition of power rested upon the skills of men long trained in the secret arts. It is a story to be told later in this chapter.

Elizabeth outlived many of her most eminent and powerful courtiers. Two were Sir Francis Walsingham, who died in 1590, and Lord Burghley, who died eight years later. Even the dazzling Earl of Essex was dead before the queen, though not by natural causes. Essex's head was taken off by the executioner's axe in 1601 when his frustrated ambitions had boiled over into a sorry attempt at a rebellion on the streets of London. Feeling that he had never received the full recognition he deserved from the queen, at thirty-five the brightest star of Elizabeth's last decade burned himself out. Sir Robert Cecil, in the sharpest possible contrast to Essex, prospered and became as essential to the efficient running of royal government as his father had been before him.

Of the spies in government service, many disappeared into obscurity. Walsingham's informants were always shadowy men, and so it is not surprising to find that Robert Wood or Woodward and Maliverey
Catilyn, both of whom spied on Catholic families, vanish from the archives. Charles Sledd, the spy in Rome whose secret dossier helped to send so many priests to the gallows, likewise disappears. With Nicholas Berden, Walsingham's spy in Paris in the middle 1580s and one of the players in the Babington Plot, we have better luck. In 1588 he wrote to Walsingham to say that he wanted to follow ‘a more public course of life' and, with Sir Francis's help, he seems to have secured a position at Elizabeth's court as the purveyor of poultry. Berden's father was a London poulter, and so after a career in espionage Berden himself set out in the family business. He swapped the uncertain life of a spy for a secure living and a regular income.

Much less fortunate was Gilbert Gifford, the double agent who worked with Walsingham and Thomas Phelippes to break the Babington Plot. He spied in Paris till his arrest in one of the city's brothels in 1587. His father wanted to have nothing to do with him, and only by Phelippes's efforts was he able to pay his prison bills. But Gilbert Gifford was never set free. Having lived with all the intensity of a man who led a secret life, he was dead at the age of thirty in 1591, mourned only by his brother Gerard, who went once to Paris to secure his freedom.

Two of the spies in this book went on to have literary connections, one distinguished, the other probably criminal. Anthony Munday, the young Londoner who went to Rome in 1579 and came back with a spy's tales of the conspiracies and treasons hatched at the English seminary there, became a popular author. He wrote prose and verse, translated from French, Italian and Spanish and by 1589 was distinguished enough a writer of plays to appear in a list of playwrights that included the name of William Shakespeare. The compiler of the list called him ‘our best plotter', which, given Munday's life as a young spy, has a rather wonderful ring to it. Munday was one of the group of talented dramatists associated with the theatrical impressario Philip Henslowe at the Rose theatre in Southwark. The only surviving manuscript of his play
The Book of Sir Thomas More
, from about 1593, has kept Shakespearean scholars busy for nearly a century, for it seems to contain one of the very few samples of Shakespeare's handwriting. The manuscript shows that Munday, Shakespeare and other actor-playwrights worked together to perform the play.

There was a considerably darker association between Robert Poley and Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary in the playhouses of Southwark. Poley, who played Anthony Babington's special friend in 1586, went on to work secretly for Elizabeth's government throughout the years of the 1590s. To some scholars of English literature, this has given a special meaning to the fact that Poley was one of only three men present at the killing of Marlowe in Deptford, some miles outside London on the banks of the River Thames, in 1593. In view of some very hazy suggestions that Marlowe was abroad on secret government business in the later 1580s, he has been cast as an Elizabethan poet-spy. Where in truth Marlowe was a playwright who got into an argument over a tavern bill and was stabbed in the eye for it – certainly a nasty and probably a criminal business – Poley really was a spy. Where for Marlowe the evidence of secret service is sketchy and circumstantial, for the unliterary Poley it is overwhelming. In thirteen years he went on twenty-six missions for Her Majesty's ‘special affairs', to France, the Low Countries, Scotland and the northern border county of Northumberland. Poley was a courier, though one important enough to have cipher alphabets and secret postal addresses in Antwerp.