Elizabeth's Spymaster (12 page)

Middleton was still alive when the executioner threw his heart into the brazier on the scaffold.

The task of hunting down Catholic priests was much aided by a network of spies and informers. One of the most useful was Charles Sledd, who, masquerading as a Catholic, infiltrated the English College in Rome in 1579 and stayed at the home of the tailor Solomon Aldred, who later became another of Walsingham’s agents. On Sledd’s return to England in May 1580, he wrote out long lists of Catholic exiles and priests, some with physical descriptions, all of whom he had met on his travels in France and Italy. These he supplied to Walsingham, together with a curious diary of his time in Rome that still exists, bound in a vellum folio volume in the British Library.
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When he arrived at the English College on Saturday 11 July 1579, he was shown around by Luke Kirby –
a priest who fell into Walsingham’s hands in 1581 and was later executed. Sledd saw

all the scholars in their several chambers, placed three or four … very finely decked and everyman his bed appointed … Last of all Kirby brought me into the chamber of John Pasquall, gentleman, accompanied by three others, George Martin, George Birke and Edward Ristone, priests

who questioned him closely regarding his reasons for coming to Rome – clearly fearing he was a spy.

On the Monday he confessed his sins to the Jesuit Thomas Derbyshire, was absolved and was given a certificate in Latin demonstrating that he was a good Catholic – although, as he assured Walsingham later, I never consented to it in [my] heart.’ That certificate was an ‘open sesame’ to the heady world of the English Catholic exiles in Rome:

Every man which [was] in doubt before he speak to me or be seen [with] me was afterwards familiar with me … they all assure themselves that I am of the same faction and belief as they are [and are] read[y] to pleasure me in anything they may … [and] with many friendly preservations wish me to be a priest.

He attended an after-dinner meeting of English Catholics on 29 November when plans for the invasion of England were discussed:

They appointed their landing place … to be Milford Haven [in Wales] where they estimated that there might be three or four hundred sailors [on] ships [lying] at [anchor].

Then they looked at what forces could be mustered to oppose them:

The able and warlike men … in the city of London, which they all agreed could not exceed twelve or twenty thousand men at the most … and of all the land else could not make sixty thousand able men more.

The Tower of London held munitions for 30,000 men and as regards
gunpowder ‘they were certain of no great store to be in England and daily sent out of the land into Flanders’. The conspirators also decided that their supporters amongst the nobility were ‘more in number than the queen’s majesty had on her side’ and very well ‘furnished with horses and armour’.
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It was pure, self-deluding cloud-cuckoo-land.

Sledd also passed on useful tactical intelligence gleaned from the English College, such as the ‘watch-’ or passwords used between missionary priests – including the rather obvious
‘Jesus Marie’ –
and the means by which secret letters were smuggled into England: pasted between the covers of books that could be lawfully imported, mainly through Dover.

He arrived back in London on the morning of 17 May 1580 and wasted no time in seeking an interview with Walsingham. That afternoon Sledd went to court, and through the good offices of Francis Milles, one of the Secretary’s officials, saw the spy master. Nine days later he had another interview, arranged by the London magistrate Richard Young, and he passed over his treacherous notes and various letters he had acquired or copied.

His career as one of Walsingham’s best informers had been launched.

CHAPTER THREE

Her Majesty’s Secret Service

‘Advice from Rome says the Pope has got fourteen or sixteen Jesuits to go [to] England and has hallowed and charmed their persons so that no harm can come to them. They should be looked for in time, before they do any mischief.’

INTELLIGENCE SENT TO WALSINGHAM FROM NUREMBURG, 17 JULY 1582.
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On his appointment as a Principal Secretary of State in December 1573, Sir Francis Walsingham became responsible for the government’s intelligence-gathering operations in a number of areas: the growing Catholic threat, both internally and externally; the religiously inspired plans to invade England; and the intentions and policies of the governments of the major players on the European political stage. His appetite for information was voracious. Eighty years after his death, his reputation as a clever and devious spy master lived on: ‘He outdid the Jesuits in their own bow [at their own game] and over-reached them in their own equivocation,’ David Lloyd wrote admiringly in his
State Worthies.
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The loosely organised intelligence network he inherited from Lord Burghley was only patchily effective. John Lee, one of Burghley’s agents who had been shadowing the fugitives from the 1569 Northern Rebellion, was caught in Antwerp in November 1572 where he was spying on the
Spanish forces in the Low Countries. Two years later, Burghley asked Walsingham to intercede on behalf of the spy Thomas Bath, alias Tomazo, who had been arrested in Flanders and now was ‘in danger of death’.
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Such casualties in the field – by capture, assassination or subornation into treachery – were almost inevitable, and consequently greater depth of coverage was required in the number of active agents available. It was also clear that Walsingham needed to insert more spies in the areas of specific danger to his sovereign and state: the new English seminary colleges in France and Rome; the Vatican; the Netherlands; the French court; Spain; and the Baltic. He also required agents who would be ready to be deployed on an ad hoc basis to root out information on various issues and events – what today’s CIA euphemistically calls ‘episodic employment’.

International intelligence was already flowing into London through normal diplomatic channels and domestically from the Lord Lieutenants of the counties and from the bishops, who employed spies against the Catholic recusants. Some of Walsingham’s fellow Privy Councillors, like Leicester, also operated their own small private groups of ‘intelligencers’. The system of customs searchers at the major English ports was very much in the front line. They were responsible for stopping and questioning travellers from abroad and searching them for hidden messages and letters. By and large, this system worked well, although there were sometimes accusations of corruption levelled against them. Indeed, the English ambassador in Paris Sir Edward Stafford complained that his personal correspondence was being intercepted and read by the searchers at the Sussex port of Rye. Walsingham told him that in order to avoid ‘such inconvenience’ he should put his private letters in an official packet – the equivalent of today’s diplomatic bag.

The Secretary of State began to build an overseas network using, initially, the tried and trusted Italian agents he had employed when he was ambassador in Paris. He must also have built up many personal contacts during his earlier travels in Europe who now became useful in his new role. On 4 March 1571, he had told Burghley of information ‘a
spy of his had obtained from one Darbyshire, an English Jesuit, of a plot contrived against Elizabeth’.
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Just before his appointment as Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, he wrote again to Burghley recommending two of his men for intelligence work:

If your lordship has any suspicion of any unsound meaning in the Low Countries towards her majesty, I think [Captain] Sassetti
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would be a very good instrument to decipher the same, having as he has, great familiarity with Chiapin Vitelli.

Vitelli, Marquis of Cetona, was a Spanish general and Sassetti would have been aware of the military and political personalities and issues involved in the Low Countries. This type of knowledge is vital in deciphering, when it can be used to identify frequently mentioned places or names as clues to cracking codes. In addition, Walsingham offered up for secret work another of his favourite Italians, Jacomo Manucci:

Your lordship wrote unto me to find out one to be employed in Spain. If you think such employment presently necessary, I think I could find the means to place my old servant Jacomo in the French king’s ambassador’s resident’s house in Spain.
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This Florentine worked for Walsingham in Lyons and elsewhere in France in 1573–4 – his letters written in Italian – but he was later imprisoned by Catherine de Medici. He eventually returned to London, living in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft, controlling part of the English network of agents in Europe and acting for Walsingham on particularly delicate missions, often passing on the Secretary’s instructions verbally rather than in writing.

At home, much information about covert Catholics and sedition was casually supplied by the busybodies present in any society: the nosy neighbour, the man living around the corner nursing a grudge against you. From such a source we have the examination and confession of Alice Lake, wife of the vicar of Ringwood in Hampshire, who was interrogated in late December 1586 after Edmund Eaton reported her declaration that the queen’s ‘days should not be long’.
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There was also the Welshman
named Griffiths who knew of a cave ‘three fathoms deep’ used to hide missionary priests who had just landed from the sea. Alexander Barry saw William Edmonds reading out of his ‘Papistical catechism’ along the pew from where he was kneeling to pray in the church at Great Torrington in Devon.
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In the disaffected county of Westmorland, the ‘substantial’ yeoman John Warrender reported ‘the great increase of seminary priests and Jesuits’ and attached a list of names to be apprehended. He added: ‘The only means to take the Papists and priests must be by parish search, under a commission [by] one or two trusty gentlemen.’
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Walsingham noted passages of importance in these documents by inking his private mark in the margin: a trefoil or cloverleaf device.

Walsingham also utilised the good offices of English merchants abroad, often in return for his diplomatic favours in resolving local trade disputes. One example was the cloth and kersey
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trader Thomas Beckner, whom the spy master helped in Rouen over legal disputes ‘that have been a great burden to me these twelve years’. In 1584, he wrote to Walsingham promising that ‘for your friendly remembrance of my suit, I and mine shall ever be bound to you’. He thereafter regularly sent intelligence to London about what he saw or heard. In August that year, Beckner reported the activities of

James Penson … who haunts the company of Papists and has been seen at Eu and other suspicious places, transporting money to and fro. There are to go from hence for England and Scotland, English seminary [priests] daily. There is now a son of Sir John Sotherhet of Lancashire, going over with a priest.
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The following year, he wrote regarding unusual security measures at Rouen and added:

It is also said that the king will have all strangers void this town and that diverse noblemen levy forces at sundry places and mean this summer to besiege Geneva … It is said the king has determined to have but one religion in his realm.
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In addition to this gossip, patriotic Englishmen overseas contacted
Walsingham with snippets of information, such as Richard Stallynge in February 1584, again from Rouen in France:

I pray you pardon my boldness, as one unknown to your honour … but I cannot tell of what effect this letter I have received from my friend … from the straits in the furthest part of Spain [may be]… My friend writes that there is coming [to] Flanders a great number of soldiers …
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Others wrote to him to volunteer for ‘gentlemanlike service that may be grateful to her majesty’, such as Humfrey Jenney in August 1583 from Milan:

You are thought in Spain, France and Italy to govern that noble ship [the queen] and guard her from danger of shipwreck, which navigation may God maintain and prosper. Although your honour knows me not, I am bold to pray you to accept me for your poor friend and servant.
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Further profitable sources of potential agents were disaffected Catholics and especially captured priests, who faced the lonely duress of solitary confinement in a stinking prison, the agonies of torture and almost certain death. An example from December 1581 concerns the priest John Hart, then held in the Tower, who wrote to Walsingham offering his services as a spy in return for a pardon. Hart pleaded that he enjoyed ‘intimacy with Dr Allen [the de facto leader of the English Catholic exiles]… [which would enable him] to discover all his designs and to know the very secrets of his whole heart’.
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There were others whose previously steadfast faith was broken by fear and pain.

Walsingham’s chief concern now was the threat posed by Mary Queen of Scots, that ‘bosom serpent’, as he graphically described her. Therefore, his most urgent task was to discover the secret means she used to communicate with the world outside her various prisons, so that he could tap into her correspondence and monitor what he saw as treasonous machinations.