Flushing (or Vlissingen) was a small, overburdened port, controlled by the English, at the mouth of the Schelde river - a 'cautionary town' ceded by the Dutch as security for loans and military support against the Spanish invaders. It was astir with the business of war, infested with profiteers, overrun by soldiers and refugees, and seething with spies. Bright young men marched through on their way to the wars; damaged, rotting, soured ones were spewed back home. Food was scarce and rents were astronomical. Fresh salt breezes from the open seas were soon swallowed up in the sullen stink of an insanitary, overcrowded, angry town. Locals resented the English governor; the English garrison pushed up prices and wreaked havoc in the streets. 'We beginne,' wrote one Englishman, 'to grow as hatefull to the people as the Spaniard himself who governeth his townes of conquest with a milder hand than we doe our frends and allyes.' Treachery mushroomed in this dung of discontent. Strangers spoke secretly in the darker recesses of St Jacob's Church; men left small packages with Elisabeth Brandt, who ran a letter-drop at the sign of De Gheit [the Goat]; seditious books found their way past the 'watchers' and into ship's holds; traitors slipped off to join renegade armies inland.
Kit was swimming deep in all this by Christmas of 1591. Sir Robert Cecil, who already had him marked as an informer in the retinue of Lord Strange, had sent him as a 'projector' to sniff out conspiracy around Strange's cousin Sir William Stanley, who was camped with his rebel force near Nijmegen. Stanley, who had originally fought under Leicester but then gone over to the Spanish, was at the heart of Catholic intrigues to persuade Strange to exercise his claim to the throne. Strange himself may very well have been innocent of subversion, but Lord Burghley was aware of pro-Strange plotting as early as the summer of 1591, and Sir Robert was set on infiltrating and sabotaging the intrigue. Exploding a Catholic conspiracy would stand him in good stead in his ambitions to be Secretary of State.
Kit materialises in Flushing when he is arrested for 'coining' (counterfeiting) in January 1592. For centuries nothing was known of this incident, until in 1976 Professor Robert B. Wernham extracted a single letter from deep within the maw of the Public Record Office at Kew. It was to Lord Burghley from the Governor of Flushing, Sir Robert Sidney (a younger brother of the soldier-poet Sir Philip, recently killed in fighting in the Low Countries), and was written to explain the dispatch back to England of two prisoners, 'Christofer Marly, by his profession a scholar' and Gilbert Gifford, a goldsmith. Sir Robert also sent their erstwhile 'chamber-fellow', who had reported them for coining. His name was Richard Baines.
The antagonism between Kit and the wheezing, sybaritic Baines, in the cramped room they shared with Gilbert, crackled beneath a fragile shell of civility. Baines had loathed Kit for more than a decade, but had no proof of his suspicion that it was Kit who had betrayed him at Rheims. Kit knew it was Baines who had tried to scupper his Cambridge career, but to give voice to this would bring Rheims to the fore and imply his guilt. Besides, he had just lampooned Baines's attempt to do away with the seminarists by poisoning their well water, in a parallel incident in The Jew of Malta. Baines had seen this, and it rekindled his fury for revenge. Claiming Sir Robert Cecil's authority, the former Walsingham spy had wheedled his way into sharing the chamber with Gilbert and Kit, and at this distance from England Kit could not counter him. But both could smile and smile and yet play the villain. We can be sure that Kit had some revenge in mind, but it was Baines who pounced first.
He waited until the counterfeiters' first coin was 'uttered' issued in public - then calmly walked down to the governor's residence beside the inner haven and accused Kit not only of 'inducing' the goldsmith to forgery, but of being an avid student of the craft, and also intending 'to go to the enemy, or to Rome'. Bundled off to the governor for questioning, Kit admitted the crime, protesting that it was done 'only to see the goldsmith's cunning'. Kit's panic and venom is evident in Sir Robert's letter to Lord Burghley, as a spat develops with Baines, and 'they do one accuse another to have been the inducers' of the hapless goldsmith, and 'do also accuse one another of intent to go to the enemy, or to Rome, both as they say of malice to one another'. Sir Robert appears to wish to distance himself from the whole difficult affair. He seems to believe the goldsmith, but remains sceptical about Kit and his accuser. Wisely, he decided not to 'deliver them into the town's hands' as in that rather hostile environment I know not how it would have been liked', but instead sends all three (with Kit and Gilbert under guard) to the higher authority of Burghley. He does wryly remark that their efforts were somewhat inept, that the Dutch shilling they uttered would not convince many 'for the metal is plain pewter and with half an eye to be discovered'.
What Kit was up to (no doubt with Baines at first playing along) was preparing his access to Sir William Stanley. As Charles Nicholl points out, the one thing that the Catholic exiles lacked - conspirators and soldiers alike - was money. A chest of assorted coins was the perfect passport to Sir William's inner circle. And if beneath the glittering gold and silver at the top of the chest, things were bulked up a little with pewter, so much the better for Kit - especially if Sir Robert Cecil had provided him with a full coffer.
On the surface, everything Baines said to the governor was true. Kit chose to risk the consequences of arrest rather than reveal his status as an agent, mainly because that would have blown his cover back home with Lord Strange (who was, after all, the patron of the company that at the time was performing his plays). On the contrary, arrest as a Catholic coiner would reinforce his position in Strange's household. It is significant that in his statement to Sir Robert Sidney he 'says himself to be very well known both to the Earl of Northumberland and my Lord Strange' - Catholic nobles both - rather than claiming the protection of Lord Burghley, who had come to his aid before, and would have been a less risky option in the situation Kit found himself in. It is also curious that Kit gave himself over as a 'scholar', rather than a playwright, but that might have been further to obscure his tracks. Intriguingly, Robert Browne and John Bradstriet, with whose company of players he had travelled before while on missions on the Continent, were granted a passport to travel to the Low Countries that February. It is highly possible that Kit was planning to join them. They journeyed through the war zone to Arnhem (just a few miles from Sir William Stanley's camp at Nijmegen) with a licence granted by the Dutch commander Prince Maurice of Orange, and were later at the book fair in Frankfurt, where they gave Gammer Gurton's Needle, and plays by the 'celebrated Herr Christopher Marlowe'.
Besides, the surfeit of spies was giving the Flushing authorities dangerous indigestion - later in 1592 a Burghley informer, Ralph Birkenshaw, was denounced as a double agent, held close prisoner and later taken 'fast bound like a thief to the marketplace, where his ears were nailed to a gibbet, and then sliced off. Far rather that Kit take his chances and hope for deportation, so that Cecil and Burghley could quietly intervene. His bluff paid off. Although coining was a capital offence - it was classed as petty treason - once back in England, Kit was discreetly released. Apart from an entry in Chamber accounts of payment to Sir Robert Sidney's ensign for delivering the coiners to Burghley's charge, there is no record anywhere of Kit's punishment or imprisonment, and by May 1592 he is on the streets of London once more. Yet again Richard Baines had to fume and bide his time.
In May 1592, two Shoreditch constables, Allen Nicholas and his ageing sidekick Nicholas Helliott, appealed to Sir Owen Hopton at the Middlesex sessions that 'Christopherus Marie' of London, 'generosus' (gentleman) be bound over to keep the peace towards the Queen's subjects in general, and themselves in particular (Kit must have been pleased by the 'gentleman', having had to suffer the 'yeoman' label in Newgate). As with the Hog Lane affray, biographers have been quick to point to this as proof of Kit's violent nature. But such an injunction was nothing out of the ordinary in the lively quarter of Shoreditch, where the tearaway antics of actors and poets often riled stodgy officialdom. Being jailed for debt, for 'rude brawling', or for other minor misdemeanours was so common that far from having any social stigma attached, it seemed a positive recommendation for a poet. Tom Nashe opined that there was no place on earth like jail to make a man wise, and that 'a gentleman is never thoroughly entered into credit till he hath been there; that poet or novice, be he what he will, ought to suspect his wit, and remain half in doubt that it is not authentical, till it hath been seen and allowed in [jail]'. Nearly every popular playwright of the time - including Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger and Ben Jonson did a stretch inside. Complaints like that made by con stables Nichols and Helliot were commonplace - Kit's neighbours were bound over a few months later - and this one points to no more than Kit's boisterousness and untamed temper. His own Quip Modest (or perhaps Reply Churlish) to the affair was to lampoon the blusteringly inefficient Nicholas and his inept assistant in the characters of Dogberry and Verges in Much Ado About Nothing.
But the Dogberries of Shoreditch were the least of Kit's worries in 1592. Despite his careful machinations in Flushing to disguise his role as an informer, he found when he returned to London that he was slipping from Lord Strange's favour. The dramatist Thomas Kyd (who was by now 'wrytinge in one chamber' with Kit in Shoreditch) puts this down to Kit's 'reprobate' ideas. In a letter to Lord Strange he hastens to acknowledge that 'never could my Lord endure [Kit's] name or sight when he had heard of his conditions' and assures the noblemen that, as for himself, he 'left & did refrain' from Kit's company, not only out of aversion to Kit's life and thought, but 'as well by my Lord's commandment'. But Kyd wrote this the following year, when he was trying cravenly to distance himself from Kit and ingratiate himself with Strange. Lord Strange would have known of Kit's views and behaviour. The reason for his cooling towards him was that he began to suspect he had a spy in his midst.*
Warily, Kit began to draw back a little. He did not want to endanger a good source of income - Lord Strange's Men were by far the leading theatre company of the day. Doubly cautious of the effect his tainted name might have, he stepped behind Will Shakespere, whom we may remember was working with him on the simpler scenes of the Henry VI plays, allowing him momentarily to move forward in the players' (and patron's) eyes as the chief author. This was easily done in the collaborative blur that characterised the way theatre was made. Indeed, in Pierce Penilesse Tom Nashe appears not to know who the dominant dramatist behind Henry Wis, even though he may well have had a hand in it himself.
Will grabbed the opportunity. This was the moment he had been working and waiting for, and he made great show of his 'arrival' as a poet. His strutting did not go unnoticed. Within months, the sarcastic pamphlet Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance was in the stationers' stalls in St Paul's Churchyard, bearing the now famous passage:
. . . there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's hart wrapt in a Player's hide supposes he is well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in the countrey.
The 'Tyger's hart wrapt in a Player's hide' is a direct echo of a line from the most recent work in which this 'upstart Crow' of a do-it-all actor was posturing in the brighter plumage of a poet, the play now known as 3 Henry VI. After the Battle of Wakefield, as Queen Margaret taunts the Duke of York with a handkerchief dripping with his dead son's blood, he berates her with; 'O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide!' (3 Henry VI I iv 137). The player-tiger showed its claws. Puffed by his own conceit, Will Shakespere complained to the printer of the pamphlet, Henry Chettle, and seems, rather unpleasantly, to have found a powerful friend to twist the thumbscrews. Under pressure from 'divers of worship' (we do not know whom) Chettle, in an exaggerated apology, praises Shakespere's actingskills, and though he admits no first-hand experience, says he has been told of the man's honesty and his 'facetious grace in writing'. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the Chettle phrase to illustrate the meaning of 'facetious' as 'polished and agreeable, urbane' in style. Norlet Boyd argues that Chettle is not referring to Shakespere's work as a dramatist (which in Henry Wean hardly be termed 'agreeable' or 'urbane'), but is side-stepping cleverly into ambiguity as the 'writing' he praises is instead Shakespere's polished, graceful Secretary Hand.* But this is purely conjecture, since the only certain examples of Will's handwriting to have survived are a few shaky signatures.
Kit had deeper concerns in the summer of 1592 than Will Shakespere's bumptiousness and Lord Strange's suspicion. While he was in Flushing, something had happened that put him 'past cure . . . past care,/And frantic-mad with evermore unrest' (Sonnet 147). His 'fairest and most precious jewel', the ravenous, raven-haired Emilia Bassano (who apparently had a taste for older men) had secretly seduced Tom Watson, his closest friend and poetic mentor, his 'next self. The betrayal that bored through so much else of Kit's life had infected the friendship he held most dear. A pang of despair pierces the Sonnets, as he addresses the rival poet ('by spirits taught to write'), who outdoes him in artistry and now in love. He changes the story of de Montemayor's Diana Enamorada, the romance that is the primary source of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to introduce the hero's most intimate friend as his rival in love. We can still hear blank resignation years later in:
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love;
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues.
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch
Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
(Much Ado About Nothing II i 154-9)
Loath to admit disloyalty on Tom Watson's part, Kit quite squarely blames Emilia for the affair:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. . .
[who] would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
(Sonnet 144)
Tom Watson is exonerated, he is the 'gentle thief whose robbery can be forgiven; what agonises Kit is the strain it puts on their friendship, and for that Emilia is the culprit:
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!
Is't not enough to torture me alone
But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed:
Of him, myself, and thee I am forsaken,
A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed.
(Sonnet 133)
To some extent Kit could console himself with his 'fragrant Rose', the clever, coquettish Lord Southampton, whose burst of petulance at Kit's long absence in Flushing and his devotion to Emilia Kit had allayed with a sonnet: 'O, never say that I was false of heart,/Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify!', assuring the beauteous and lovely youth that 'If I have rang'd [been unfaithful],/Like him that travels, I return again . . . For nothing this wide universe I call/Save thou my [R]ose; in it thou art my all' (Sonnet 109). But Wriothesley was not only 'fair friend', he was also rich patron, and he liked to pull rank something that irked and humiliated Kit, who knew that 'Being your vassal [I am] bound to stay your leisure.' He had to accept the complicated position, within a rigid Elizabethan class system, of being a lover who was also a suppliant, an older man in the role of an ingle - for in harsh social terms, he was barely a step up from one of the young nobleman's many minions and had to endure Wriothesley's dalliances without complaint:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require . . .
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave stay and think of naught
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
(Sonnet 57)
As for Emilia Bassano, she was still (in as far as such things are ever official) the mistress of Lord Hunsdon. Within a few months it was discovered she was pregnant by the ancient peer, and she was married off for good form to Alphonso Lanier, a member of another family of court musicians. She continued an energetic and interesting love life (her conquests included the astrologer and physician Simon Forman), and later underwent a religious conversion, which inspired her to pen a long though not unpraiseworthy poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. To Kit she remained an ideal, albeit a tarnished one, and continued to colour his sonnets, and to emerge in his plays. But she was lost to him.
Worse was to come. By the autumn, Tom Watson was dead. 'Witty Tom Watson', dramatist, philosopher, scholar of science, 'dearly loved and honoured' by the literary set and one of the most admired poets of his time, had never really recovered from his spell in Newgate. Though just seven or eight years older than Kit, he had played a fatherly role to the young poet, nurturing Kit's art and introducing him to the London literary world. Even Emilia Bassano had not wrenched this bond apart; but 'Death's ebon dart' had done what Cupid's arrow could not.
Kit did not write an elegy for his 'gentle thief. Instead, he wrote a dedication to the Countess of Pembroke for Watson's posthumously published Amintce Gaudia, acknowledging the poet as his 'dying father' and speaking of the 'breathings of lofty rage' of his own rude pen. Interestingly, he also implies that the countess (who was the cultured and generous sister of Sir Philip Sidney) had become his patron, referring to himself as 'thine adoptive son'. Perhaps he was seeking alternatives to income from Lord Strange's troupe. The countess certainly seems to have had a word with her husband. In the winter of that year, the short-lived 'Earl of Pembroke's Men' (of whom nothing is heard before the early 1590s) performed not only Edward II, but also Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and two parts of Henry W - though it is not certain that Kit would have derived any financial benefit from this. Money was still a problem. In June plague had broken out - one of the worst ever to hit London, causing 15,000 deaths in the city that year alone. Those who could afford it, or who had the right connections, left for the safety of the countryside. Apart from two short winter seasons, the theatres were closed for a ruining twenty-month stretch. Theatre companies dispersed, some breaking into smaller groups to tour the provinces (the Earl of Pembroke's Men appear to have gone bankrupt).
Kit was becoming increasingly reliant on support from Southampton, and, bereft of a theatre, seems to have devoted his time to writing longer poems, two of which would later be dedicated to the earl. Fleeing the perils of pestilence in Shoreditch, he spent considerable periods in Kent - at Scadbury, the family home of Thomas Walsingham. They had long been friends, and before he retreated to the life of a gentleman at Scadbury, Walsingham had been Kit's superior at the London spy headquarters at the house in Seething Lane. But Kit's presence at Scadbury also owed something to the late Tom Watson. Like Kit, Tom had been a part-time spy, reporting to his friend the younger Walsingham at Seething Lane. It was he who wrote Sir Francis Walsingham's elegy. His knowledge of the dangers of this secret life, as well as remorse over the affair with Emilia, led him before he died to enjoin Thomas to safeguard Kit. It was a request he repeated to his brother-in-law - a man who was rapidly rising in the secret service - 'Sweet Robyn' Poley.*
Robert Poley lived near Kit in Shoreditch. His Catholic cover had been blown during the Babington affair, but he had moved from being a spy into a supervisory role, reporting directly to the Cecils. He had taken over some of Thomas Walsingham's agents and was now running a network in the Low Countries. He had been in charge of Kit's activities in Flushing, and in September 1592 he can be found together with Kit in Canterbury.
It is known for certain Kit was in Canterbury in 1592 because he was involved in a scuffle with the tailor William Corkine, a fellow former cathedral choirboy. On 10 September Corkine had launched an assault on Kit and 'did there and then beat, wound and maltreat' him, inflicting other atrocities [enormia]. Yet again, biographers cite this incident as proof of Kit's violent nature. But when Kit takes his revenge five days later, though armed with staff and dagger, he does not injure Corkine in any way, merely causes him to 'suffer loss and incur damages' amounting to £5. Walter Hoochspier is still on his mind. Probably - like the skilled duellist Tybalt, who was the 'very butcher of a silk button' (Romeo and Juliet II iv 23), or like Cutpurse who snips the gold buttons from Mugeroun's cloak in The Massacre at Paris - Kit effected nothing more than sartorial outrage, as a cheeky symbolic revenge on the bullying tailor. There followed a flurry of suing and counter-suing, but in the end the case was dropped by mutual consent. Amd far from thoughts of violence or malice, Kit even persuaded the town serjeant to press the bud of a late-summer rose between the leaves of the appeal book where the case is recorded, perhaps as a symbol of reconciliation. It can still be seen in the library of Canterbury Cathedral.
It is all too easy to cast Kit in the role of perpetual rebel and malcontent. The young man who had made a tumultuous transition from Puritanism to Catholicism, whose aspiring mind 'climbing after knowledge infinite' had then toyed with atheism and danced with the strangest ideas of science, who cut a fashionable dash and mixed with the most glittering of friends, who tore through Italy and revelled in Shoreditch, was nearly thirty. By Elizabethan standards that was a time for the follies of youth to fall into sharper focus, under the more penetrating beam of contemplative late adulthood. He had killed a man, and it produced remorse of conscience in him. The minor deceptions that Sir Francis Walsingham had amply rewarded in the 1580s had grown by degree into more serious betrayals, each somehow easing the duplicity of the next. And the agony of the affair between Emilia and Tom Watson had given him a keener view on loyalty. An unease creeps into his dealings with Sir Robert Cecil. It would lead to a crisis of conscience. We can hear an echo of this in a speech he wrote not long afterwards:
What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by,
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No - yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie, I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
(Richard IIIY iii 182-95)
Like the stage characters to which he was giving an unprecedented inner life, Kit was wakening to new self-awareness. He uses the word 'myself more frequently in this play than in any other. (For those who like to count these things, the word occurs eighteen times in Richard III, seventeen in the almost contemporaneous The Jew of Malta, and eight times in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which he wrote during the affair between Tom Watson and Emilia. Subsequently he used the word just twice in Much Ado About Nothing, then once each in only three other plays.) The sneer that threatens in the Cambridge portrait slides from his face. The sardonic distance he once kept from the figures that peopled his plays is replaced by a penetrating psychology, as he grows up and questions his own integrity. Worse was to happen to trouble his conscience.
Kit's visits home were rare. There is only one other record of a return to Canterbury - in November 1585, while still a student at Cambridge, he was in town for a fortnight, and one Sunday morning 'plainely and distincktly' read the will of his father's neighbour, Widow Katherine Benchkin of Stour Street. Perhaps, though, there is more subtle evidence of another visit, in that it was a taste of his sister Anne, 'a scowlde' and 'comon swearer', who was known 'for a malicious contencious uncharitable person, seeking the unjust vexacion of her neighbours' that inspired his depiction of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.
But Kit was not in Canterbury in September 1592 to visit his family. Not only was Robert Poley in town, so was Paul Ive, the young engineer and spy whose military know-how had helped with technical details for the second Tamburlaine. And Oliver Laurens - shipwreck survivor, former stationer's apprentice and budding spy - was there too. After making his way back to England with Kit, he had resumed his old position at the stationer's in St Paul's Churchyard but, using the name William Hall, began increasingly to work as a secret courier. The first glimpse of him in this role is in June 1592, when 'Will Hall' is paid a handsome £10 for services to the Archbishop of Canterbury's pursuivant Anthony Munday. A former boy actor and also once a stationer's apprentice, Munday was a writer and a spy, and had been an agent provocateur at the English College in Rome before turning his attention to anti-Anglican Puritans. At the time he was operating against the clandestine authors of the extreme-Puritan 'Martin Marprelate' tracts. He later wrote plays for the Admiral's Men. Once Oliver's credentials had been established, missions to the Low Countries and Denmark, and more importantly to Prague for the Cecils, followed.
The very presence of these men in the same place at the same time is enough to raise an eyebrow. Canterbury was a convenient contact point for agents crossing the Channel to liaise on their way to or from elsewhere in the country. This little group gives a glimpse of the tangled interconnections of an Elizabethan spy network. Paul Ive, who was working on the Canterbury canal, ran a letter-drop. Robert Poley had just been in the Low Countries and was on his way to Scotland. He had been north of the border four times in the previous year, and had carried letters there as early as 1586, when he was recommended as a man who 'knoweth the best ways to pass into Scotland'. Catholic lords in Scotland played a major role in Sir William Stanley's deliberations to place his cousin Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, on the throne, which brings Kit (one of Lord Strange's proteges) into the picture, and also one Matthew Roydon. A fellow poet and spy, Roydon, too, was in Lord Strange's circle, a friend of Kit's ('such as he conversed withal'), and had known Tom Watson (he wrote a poem in praise of Watson's sonnets). Like Poley, Roydon had dealings in Scotland - and not only because of the Stanley connection. Elizabeth had still not named a successor, and political tension over the question was agonising. She was already sixty, and there was every probability she would soon die. Sir Robert Cecil was particularly interested in having a peephole on the Scottish court, where James VI was a legitimate heir, especially as Cecil's rival Essex favoured the Scottish king and relations between the two were warming daily.
Kit's missions to Scotland possibly went as far back as his last long absence from Cambridge in 1586, and went on through the 1590s, probably as a double agent in Cecil's employ. Karl Elze points to the similarity between the incantation of the First Witch: 'But in a sieve I'll thither sail/ And, like a rat without a tail,/ I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.' (Macbeth I iii 8-10) and the witches who bore witness against one Dr Fian in Edinburgh in 1591, who said among other things 'that they all went to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve'. Thomas Kyd, in his toadying letter to Lord Strange the following year, accused Kit of persuading 'men of quality to go unto the K of Scots, whither I hear Roydon is gone'.
In addition to missions in Scotland, the Cecils employed Roydon to carry letters to Prague, a task also assigned to Oliver Laurens, alias William Hall. The recipient of many of these missives was the alchemist Edward Kelley, former assistant to the great Dr Dee - which takes us directly back to the intrigues surrounding Ferdinando Stanley. Kelley was at the heart of a Prague group of English Catholics that included one Richard Hesketh, who was very soon to be associated with a plot to place Stanley on the throne. This plot is as tangled and perplexing an affair as only Elizabethan politicking can create. At its heart, albeit unwittingly, was Ferdinando Stanley, also known as Lord Strange, eventually to become the 5th Earl of Derby. Its chief dupe was Hesketh, not to be confused with Hickman, a peripheral protagonist. Edward Kelley played a part also, Cecil pulled the strings, and Lord Strange's father, the fourth Earl of Derby, never quite made it out of the wings. (Appendix IV lays out the relationship between the main players.)
This criss-crossing complexity was a legacy of Sir Francis Walsingham's checks and counter-checks, his spies who spied on spies, confidants who kept secrets from each other, bit players who knew only their roles and never comprehended the whole drama. In the clandestine world, information was power. It was the agent's currency, secrets were his armoury. But stolen knowledge, or knowledge mishandled, was perilous - and conscience, far from making cowards of us all, can sometimes incite recklessness. From his privileged position linking the realms of spies, players and aristocrats, Kit caught a glimpse of three separate currents of a winding intrigue set in motion by Sir Robert Cecil. He had tumbled to something that would put him in mortal danger.
* Zelle, Bare Truth, p. 119.
* Boyd, Two's Company, p. 53.
* Gertrud Zelle, Bare Truth, p. 140.