The Watchers (49 page)

So the servants of the Elizabethan state, trained by long experience to govern whatever the crisis or emergency, guarded the continuity of monarchical rule, upon which, significantly, their own power rested. What is more, these extraordinary political negotiations of 1601 were made necessary by the methods and old habits of a controlling and authoritarian royal dynasty. Like her father, Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth refused to her dying moment to relinquish power. It is a wonderful Tudor paradox: the more tightly monarchs tried to have their own way, the more inventive their advisers became at setting to one side royal whims and prejudices in the interests of continuous, secure government. This, after all, was the birth of the modern state.

There was no more adept a servant of the state than Sir Robert Cecil, of whom Lord Henry Howard wrote: ‘upon the multiplicity of doubts his mind would never have been at rest, nor he would have eaten or slept quietly; for nothing makes him confident, but experience of secret trust, and security of intelligence'. This was a habit of mind, a mode of thinking, an essential way of governing: there could be no other means in dangerous times. Or so Sir Robert Cecil – or Lord Burghley or Sir Francis Walsingham – might have said. Secretary Cecil, following the same path as other ministers and royal officials before him, found the safest way to be a secret one.

As well as in the Council chamber, the private apartments of royal palaces, the grand houses of important courtiers and the residences of foreign ambassadors, secrets were kept and lost in taverns and inns, bowling alleys and gardens. Many otherwise unimportant Elizabethans were caught up in matters beyond the common experience. Characters of a skewed brilliance and cunning found in the shadows merchants, tailors, household servants and yeomen – curious meetings of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the innocent and dangerous. They did not play games in an age of carefree romance. Such adventures did not suit the tastes of Elizabeth's advisers, the rectors of seminaries who sent priests to their deaths, or the commissioners who put prisoners on the rack. All around the Tower of London and the gallows at Tyburn everyday life carried on. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote for a modern age of horror:

… even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

What may seem to us terrible about life in the later sixteenth century could be justified at the time, for God, queen, Pope, country or Church. Many of the Elizabethans upon whom we can turn for a time the bright light of investigation quickly enough disappear into the shadows. In going about their business they left small but valuable marks on the historical record. For all the grand aims and objectives of the politicians espionage was, like so much else, transitory. Life carries on; pain passes away, memories eventually heal.

Spying even in the sixteenth century had the glamour of secrecy and technique. Thomas Phelippes wrote of his methods to Sir Robert Cecil. To Phelippes espionage involved manipulating both allies and enemies to pursue the object of deception. Phelippes's friend Francis Bacon wrote: ‘The best composition and temperature [temperament] is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.' He might have been describing the perfect spy. Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Robert Cecil and Phelippes himself (at least when he was at the height of his powers) came near to Bacon's ideal. Few others did. But there again Francis Bacon was ever the theorist, offering perfection in the neatness of an aphorism, with all the unforgiving cleverness and narrow imagination of the Cambridge scholar. There was nothing in Bacon's words of the untidiness of life, the temptations, weaknesses and compromises; he saw little of the unremarkable and the ordinary, of those passing trials in the shaded borderland between loyalty and treachery.

1. The ‘Rainbow' portrait of Queen Elizabeth I,
c
. 1600, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Elizabeth's golden cloak is decorated with the eyes and ears of her attentive subjects. The art historian Sir Roy Strong notes an early seventeenth-century verse by Henry Peacham:

Be serv'd with eyes, and listening ears of those,

Who can from all parts give intelligence

To gall his foe, or timely to prevent

At home his malice, and intendiment.

2. The union of the royal houses of Lancaster and York, bringing peace out of civil war, from an engraving of 1589 by Jodocus Hondius. The great Tudor rose is topped by the crown imperial of the Tudor monarchs.

3. Four expensively dressed men of high rank play the popular card game of primero. Not all games were conducted in grand society. One Elizabethan writer on dice play, Gilbert Walker, warned his readers against the taverns and gaming houses that would have been familiar to the spies and intelligencers of London: ‘now such is the misery of our time, and such the licentious outrage of idle misgoverned persons'.

4. The rack, used here to torment a Protestant in the reign of Queen Mary I, from John Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
.

5. Sir Francis Walsingham,
c
. 1585, attributed to John De Critz the Elder.

6. Anthony Babington and his gentleman accomplices, from a late seventeenth-century engraving, accompanied by the verse: ‘Here Babington and all his desperate band / Ready prepar'd for royal murder stand'.

7. The reverberations of treason: Catholic conspiracies from Elizabeth I's reign to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, from
Popish Plots and Treasons
, engraved in the late seventeenth century.

8. William Parry's attempt to kill Elizabeth I in 1584, from a later engraving. This is an imaginative fiction: Parry never drew his dagger on the queen, though according to his co-conspirator Edmund Nevylle it was his preferred weapon: ‘“As for a dag [pistol]”, said Parry, “I care not: my dagger is enough.”'