There were two English spies in Paris in April and May 1580, the clever and elusive Charles Sledd, playing the part of a useful and humble courier of letters, and a man whose social pretensions were a good deal grander. His name was William Parry and for a number of years he had travelled in Italy and France. When Sir Henry Cobham dismissed Sledd and directed him to London, Master Parry was also using the queen’s ambassador at the French court to send secret intelligence to Lord Burghley in England.
At the beginning Parry was a volunteer, writing in May 1577 to offer his service to Burghley. He was, he said, a traveller ‘somewhat wearied with a long journey’, and on those travels he had visited both Rome and Siena. He felt he could be useful to the lord treasurer. His letter to Burghley was an example of fine penmanship, for Parry wished to impress the most powerful man in Elizabeth’s government with the elegance of his handwriting. Parry would have been relieved if he had been able to read the words Burghley’s secretary used to endorse the packet: ‘Master William Parry to my lord’. William Parry was a gentleman – a master, a man of ‘worship’, of land and status – and he strained every fibre of himself to prove it.
But that was not the whole of Parry’s story and situation. He was a Welshman, born in Flintshire, but when is not quite certain. His early years are obscure, though he claimed a long gentlemanly lineage. He had problems with money. The modest marriage he made for land, to the widowed daughter of a Welsh knight, was not enough to meet his costs and so Parry sought employment and patronage. He was not too proud to borrow money at interest, nor was he shy about sending letters to Lord Burghley.
Parry sent a report to Burghley a week after Sledd’s dismissal by Sir Henry Cobham. It was 1 May 1580. Parry had a confidence about him that day; he felt bold in the usefulness of his service, and he stressed his loyalty in the queen’s cause against her Catholic enemies in Paris. ‘My lord,’ he wrote,
the name and title of a true subject have been always so dear unto me, that I cannot but hold him and his religion for suspected that practiseth anything against Her Majesty, whose government and fortune have been no less comfortable to all good men at home, than strange and fearful to her enemies abroad.
Parry had opened up two ways of communicating with the lord treasurer from Paris. The first was by the ordinary post, carried by couriers across the English Channel, sending perfectly innocent letters to show anyone who might intercept them that there was nothing suspicious in his writing to Burghley. But he felt the ‘best assured’ way was to communicate by a second means. Parry was by now taking his confidential letters to Sir Henry Cobham to go in the ambassador’s post, as he had done a week before. He was, he wrote with confidence, in credit with the best men of England and Scotland in Paris and Rome, ‘by the hope conceived of my readiness and ability to serve them’. Exaggerated self-belief was a familiar mark of Parry’s mercurial personality, writing of the English Catholics: ‘I doubt not within few months to be well able to discover their deepest practices.’ There was, of course, a price, though a reasonable one: a few trifling gifts for his new friends, ‘rather of pleasure than price’, to be sent to him from London. Parry, always conscious of his address, used to the Lord Treasurer of England plainer words than courtesy expected, and he knew it: ‘As I said before, so I say again; if I be less ceremonious than I should be in writing unto you, I trust you will pardon me, who had rather serve you in deeds, than please you in words.’ He would send the books Burghley requested from Paris – Burghley was a great bibliophile – but only those that should in his opinion ‘be very necessary for divers respects’. He gave his letter a special mark and told Burghley that following letters would bear the same mark also.
And so on the first day of a new month in the spring of 1580 William Parry, confidently in charge, was feeling very happy indeed in the business of his spiery.
Of Sledd’s whereabouts on the day William Parry wrote his letter to Lord Burghley it is impossible to say. Certainly he was somewhere in or near Paris. Did Parry know him? It seems somehow doubtful that Parry, dazzled by the brightness of his own talents and his high social contacts, would notice a man as menial as Charles Sledd. But if by some chance he did, then he may have known that Sledd, the trusted courier of the émigré Catholics, was once again off on his travels.
Sledd left Paris for the large provincial city of Rouen on 5 May and stayed there till Ascension Day, Thursday, the 12th. He was at the port of Dieppe on the 13th, where, blessed by the luck of favourable winds, he joined a ship straight away to sail for England. He had been very busy in Paris and Rheims and was even now in Rouen, noting the names and recording the conversations of English exiles and collecting or copying their letters. And so the poor servant of Nicholas Morton in Rome, the trusted courier for William Allen, the companion of Catholic priests, the English ambassador’s informant and above all the spy, was at last ready to meet Sir Francis Walsingham.
Sledd’s ship took a day to cross the English Channel, arriving in the bustling port of Rye on the evening of 15 May. Resting overnight, he set out for London the next day. He arrived in the city on Tuesday morning. He was now able to direct his energies quite differently: the watcher would become the pursuer. On the afternoon of the 17th he went to Elizabeth’s court. He spoke first to one of Sir Francis Walsingham’s private secretaries, Francis Mylles, and then he met Walsingham; we have to imagine the exchange of the secret token of Sir Henry Cobham’s seal. It was a short meeting but to the point: Sledd wrote that ‘he showed to his honour such business as I then thought meet’. Either at Walsingham’s request or on his own initiative, Sledd began to write a long dossier of intelligence from the notes he had brought with him from Rome.
On the Tuesday Sledd had come to London, a priest and three nuns arrived also, helped and guided by a Catholic gentleman. Two days after his first interview with Walsingham, Sledd asked Richard Young, a Middlesex magistrate who became one of the keenest official pursuers of Catholic priests in London, for his help in arresting them. The law was plain enough. Anyone in England foolish enough to communicate on paper or by speech the belief that Elizabeth Tudor should not be queen, or that anyone else should be King or Queen of England, was, if convicted, guilty of high treason. Exactly the same was true of any of the queen’s subjects who called her a heretic, a schismatic, a tyrant, an infidel or a usurper of the crown. If a priest sent by William Allen secretly to England avoided all talk of politics but in his pastoral work absolved anyone from obedience to the queen or reconciled them to what the law called the ‘usurped authority of the See of Rome’ by means of a papal bull or document, he was likewise guilty of treason. The obvious loophole in this act – that a priest who reconciled or absolved any of Elizabeth’s subjects without using a bull or instrument from Rome might escape the law – was closed by a new statute in 1581. Four years after that it was made high treason for any Catholic priest – in the government’s view, a stirrer of rebellion and sedition – to be in England. Yet even when Charles Sledd set to work hunting priests on the streets of London in 1580, his quarry, if captured, were certain to forfeit their liberty by being thrown into one of London’s jails; they might be banished from England or they might be hanged. With the information he possessed, and now with official backing, Sledd was a dangerous man to be walking the streets of London and Westminster.
Sledd met Walsingham again on Thursday, 26 May. In a longer interview than the first, he presented Sir Francis with a paper he called ‘the intelligence of the affairs of Englishmen in Rome, and other places’. He also brought to their meeting a long bulletin of foreign news and letters (or copies of letters) written by Catholic émigrés in Rome, Rheims, Milan, Paris and Rouen. As well as working with Justice Young to find priests hidden in London, he had been busy writing and preparing for the meeting. Sir Henry Cobham in Paris had sent on some of Sledd’s information a few weeks earlier, but now the time had come for Sledd to reveal everything personally to Sir Francis.
Sledd’s surviving dossier is an extraordinary compilation of facts. In a first part he set out the names of nearly three hundred English and Welsh Catholics abroad and the pensions they received from the Pope, as well as the physical descriptions of the priests he knew. The second part was his diary of meetings, dinners, conversations and events in Rome and on his journey through Italy and France back to England. It is likely that he wrote it up in London from the notes he had kept abroad. The paper he used was French, made, as the water-marks show, by two different manufacturers. It was the kind of paper that Sledd could have bought for himself in London or have been given by one of Walsingham’s staff. Sledd gave his dossier, at which he must have worked doggedly, a grand title. It runs on like the beginning of an essay:
Charles Sledd’s dossier, with Edmund Campion’s name inserted, and the identity of an informant on Campion’s fellow Jesuit Robert Persons inked out.
A general discourse of the Pope’s Holiness’ devices invented and devised first by his English branches, enemies to this Her Majesty’s royal estate, concluded and agreed on by his college of cardinals, with the aid of other princes adjoining to His Holiness, which doth pretend the disturbance of the Queen’s Majesty and not without murders and many slanderous speeches, divided into several books.
The purpose of this title (which is typically Elizabethan in its ponderous style) was to impress upon Walsingham and his inner circle the significance of the intelligence Sledd had gathered and set out so carefully. One of Walsingham’s staff, a clerk of the Privy Council called Robert Beale, gave it a simple abbreviated title, pointing to its significance for the government: ‘Priests and seminaries beyond the seas’.
It was obvious that Sledd had produced the most complete reference work then available on Queen Elizabeth’s enemies. He surely knew how important his dossier was. The English Catholic exiles of Bologna, Cambrai, Douai, Florence, Lyons, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rheims, Rouen and Venice, but above all Rome and Paris, were stripped bare. Working for months as the trusted courier of Catholic laymen and priests, he knew the names of the émigrés, something of their families, situations and circumstances and often what they looked like. He had a record of treasonous words spoken against Elizabeth and her government. Now his discourse was in the hands of Sir Francis Walsingham and his men, and Sledd had official support in making his investigations in London and Westminster. No wonder that for English Catholics Sledd quickly became one of the most hated and feared priest-hunters in England.
William Parry, still in Paris in June 1580, had nothing like Charles Sledd’s fire and passion or Anthony Munday’s talent for the printing press. He was a gentleman, discovering information about the English Catholic exiles of the city in his own leisured way, a spy who enjoyed dinners in the company of very important men. On 4 June 1580 he wrote to Burghley. The high prose style and the elegant penmanship were very much Parry’s; so too was the seal, the small signet of a lion rampant he pressed into the dark-red wax.
Parry had information on the progress of the former Bishop of St Asaph in Wales, Thomas Goldwell, who had at last arrived in Rheims from Rome. Elderly and claiming ill health, he was a reluctant traveller, hardly filled with the missionary spirit to return to his homeland. Parry believed that Goldwell would either go back to Rome or stay in Rheims in the hope of better fortune.
William Parry’s information was certainly useful. It corroborated Sledd’s intelligence and it helped Elizabeth’s government to prepare for the coming of William Allen’s missionary priests. But Parry was too keen to dabble in gossip and he was easily bored. He needed a serious project to keep himself busy. So when Charles Nevill, sixth Earl of Westmorland – the outlawed rebel who had raised an army against the queen in 1569 – arrived in Paris in the last week of June, Parry took it upon himself to reconcile Westmorland to Elizabeth. He was not invited to do this: indeed only William Parry, the gentleman spy who dined with the English exiles and dangerous foreign ambassadors and then wrote elegantly self-confident letters to Lord Burghley, had the nerve to set about the negotiations with such style and abandon. He sought to impress Burghley with his skills and subtlety. It was, as Parry’s story will show very clearly, a dangerous game for him to play.
Anthony Munday, Charles Sledd, William Parry: three Elizabethan spies, three very different men. Each in his own way was elusive, well practised at keeping his own secrets hidden. Each left behind evidence of his activities in Rome and Paris: Munday his books and pamphlets, Sledd his intensely written dossier, and Parry his over-courteous letters to Lord Burghley. These documents say something about their personalities. Munday was the reluctant scholar, used to flouting authority. He was a skilled writer with a gift for telling exciting tales. He knew his audience and he could both enthral and horrify them with the secrets of his ‘English Roman life’.
Sledd appears to have been a quiet and unassuming man, trusted as a responsible servant. That is precisely what made him so very dangerous. More than this, he was a plausible spy. His command of detail was devastating. No one could honestly hope to fabricate every detail of his extraordinary dossier and be able to fool Sir Francis Walsingham. This helps to explain why Catholic exiles as important as William Allen turned upon Sledd such venomous hatred. He was Judas; he betrayed absolutely. And yet did he betray for money? There is no obvious evidence that he became a wealthy man by writing his dossier or by hunting down priests in London. At best he probably scratched a living by relying on Walsingham’s patronage. In fact, for someone so passionately driven in his official work in England, there is a curious absence of obvious motive. He opened his dossier of intelligence by stating that he had at the beginning set out on his travels ‘desirous to learn languages and also to see the natural inclinations and dispositions of strange and foreign countries’. Any subject who left England without a passport from the queen said that, just as he also stated (as Sledd did) that he was a good Protestant. It was a very thin story, and it said nothing of why, after months of working as a servant in Rome, he turned so strongly against men he knew very well. Probably only Walsingham, in their interviews, got the full measure of Charles Sledd. Sir Francis was a penetrating student of human nature, especially human frailty.
William Parry’s character may be easier to read. Parry, whose sense of his own importance could be overpowering, loved to dine grandly with knights, earls and ambassadors. He was a social climber and something of a snob, captivated by a life he could not afford to pursue without the dubious help of moneylenders. He lived dangerously on credit, hoping no doubt for Lord Burghley’s generous patronage but never receiving it. In his life and in his spying he was, as later chapters of this book will show, perilously self-deluding. If ever there was an Elizabethan spy born for self-destruction, it was William Parry.
In the summer of the year 1580 Elizabeth’s advisers watched and waited for the invasion of England by the powers of Catholic Europe. After all, the Pope and King Philip of Spain had already sent five hundred troops to Elizabeth’s kingdom of Ireland under the command of James Fitzmaurice. When the force arrived at Smerwick in County Kerry, in the far south-west of Ireland, Nicholas Sander proclaimed a just war against the ‘she-tyrant’ Elizabeth. Fitzmaurice’s men fortified an Atlantic promontory and called to Catholic Europe for reinforcements. That support never arrived. In September 1580 they were surrounded by the queen’s troops and navy and, in spite of surrendering, all but twenty-three of Fitzmaurice’s men were massacred. Sander survived to die more obscurely. Lord Burghley, sensing the work of providence, later wrote that ‘wandering the mountains in Ireland without succor, [he] died raving in a frenzy’. Smerwick was utterly symbolic of a war that was fought with fierce hearts and courageous words but with few resources.
This was not the glorious Catholic crusade that Charles Sledd had heard William Allen celebrating in Rome months earlier. But in the summer of 1580 the queen’s ministers were neither celebratory nor complacent. Sir Henry Radcliffe of Portsmouth, one of whose men had returned from a reconnaissance of the Spanish coast, sent news to the Privy Council that great naval preparations were being made in Spain. Other reports by travellers suggested military activity in the western Mediterranean. Surely a Spanish fleet was on the way to England.
The truth was, in fact, that in 1580 King Philip of Spain could not commit troops and ships to the invasion of England. He had neither the military resources, which were deployed elsewhere, nor really the inclination to depose Elizabeth. But in the perception of Elizabeth’s government the danger was real and imminent. And perception in politics is a powerful thing. Sledd, and before him Anthony Munday, spoke to deep fears in England of political conspiracy in Rome. They showed something of the passion and organizing intelligence of the leading English exiles. Thanks to an intercepted letter, Elizabeth’s government knew only too well the words Nicholas Sander had written in 1577 to William Allen: ‘The state of Christendom dependeth upon the stout assaulting of England.’ It was a sentence used over and over again by Elizabeth’s advisers to justify a state of profound emergency.
And it is here, in the anxious days of July 1580, that we can begin to see how the espionage of Charles Sledd and William Parry and Anthony Munday’s lively books influenced the most powerful men in England. At the very least they helped to create and sustain a political mood, though in the case of Sledd the evidence is even stronger: his dossier, presented to Sir Francis Walsingham and filed safely away for reference in the royal secretariat, was hugely significant. Munday’s revelations of Roman conspiracy may have been gently encouraged by the authorities. It was very easy for Elizabeth’s Privy Council to suppress books it found inconvenient and through long-established relationships with London’s printers to support certain writers. There was much of what Sledd and Munday had discovered in the royal proclamation published in July to suppress dangerous rumours of an invasion and to reveal to honest subjects ‘the traitorous and malicious purposes and solicitations’ of rebels living abroad. The proclamation was written by Lord Burghley, who, as ever, paid careful attention to his words, labouring over the text of the proclamation, working to achieve precision. He defended Elizabeth’s rule as queen and her resolve to withstand her enemies; on this last point she expected her subjects to do the same. The proclamation speaks to the experience of Sledd, of those quiet observations, of the reports of malicious conspiracy believed by powerful men in Westminster. Joined to rebels and traitors already living in foreign parts were
others that are fled out of the realm as persons refusing to live here in their natural country, both which of long time have wandered from place to place, and from one prince’s court to another, but especially to the city of Rome, and therein have falsely and traitorously sought and practised by all means possible to irritate all estates against Her Majesty and the realm, and therewith as much as in them might lie to move hostility, wherein by God’s goodness and special favour to this realm their designs have been hitherto frustrate.
This is what both Anthony Munday and Charles Sledd had perceived in Rome. The strands of their experiences and narratives could be woven together to make a taut cord of treason. To the readers of Munday’s books and for those few Sir Francis Walsingham trusted to read Sledd’s dossier, any talk by William Allen or his confederates of an innocent holy mission to save souls was nonsense. In their minds Allen and his agents had a single political objective: to destroy Elizabeth’s Church, to bring down her government and to push her forcibly from her throne.
This was war. Allen himself, explaining the nature of the mission, wrote of it in those terms, though he meant not a war waged by armies for political control but one fought by priests for English souls. It was clear to Elizabeth’s advisers in 1580 that the danger came not only from Spanish troops and sailors or the Pope’s money for an invasion, though that danger felt very real. Thanks to the intelligence given by Sledd, the English authorities waited for the priests from Rome and Rheims. They were the agents of foreign powers, conspirators, stirrers of sedition and rebellion. They were traitors. Sledd’s dossier undoubtedly helped to catch some of them. Robert Johnson and the lawyer Henry Orton, with whom Sledd had travelled from Rome, were arrested within weeks of returning to England. John Hart, who had preached the incendiary sermon Sledd had heard in Rheims, was picked up as soon as he landed at Dover. He was taken first to the royal court at Nonsuch Palace and then to the grim Marshalsea prison in Southwark. Johnson, Orton and Hart were early casualties of a very dangerous mission.
In June 1580 the Jesuit priests Robert Persons and Edmund Campion waited to cross from France to England. They had followed in the footsteps of Sledd on the roads from Rome. Campion was forty years old, a former scholar of Oxford University and a teacher at William Allen’s seminary at Douai. In 1573 he had gone to Rome on foot to become a Jesuit, and then taught philosophy and rhetoric in Moravia and Bohemia before being called by Allen to Rome in 1580 for service in England. Now, preparing to sail across the English Channel, he disguised himself as a jeweller of Dublin. It was an effective cover, for Campion had spent a little time in the city. Persons, whom Anthony Munday had known in the English College, went first, dressed as a captain of soldiers: it was an extrovert gesture worthy of Munday himself. When Campion knew that Persons had crossed safely, Campion followed him.
For Campion it was a close-run thing. He came within a whisker of disaster. The searcher of Dover, the official whose job it was to check incoming ships and their passengers, had special orders to look out for Gabriel Allen, Doctor Allen’s brother, who was understood to be travelling home to Cumberland. The mayor of Dover had a description of Allen, surely provided by Charles Sledd: about forty-five years of age, ‘of reasonable stature’, with a flaxen-coloured beard. At first the mayor believed Campion to be Allen. But then without explanation he set the Dublin jeweller free. He must have been unsure. Sledd’s description of Gabriel Allen was after all pretty meagre, or perhaps another ship had arrived carrying other likely suspects. Whatever the reason, at Dover Campion had a very lucky escape. He and Persons were now free, for the time being, able to disappear into the Catholic underground of London. In its desperate efforts to track them down, Elizabeth’s government began to chase shadows.
Neither Munday nor Sledd had ever met Edmund Campion, and it seems very unlikely that Sledd knew what he looked like. Sledd may have heard rumours, of course, though he made no report of ever having talked about Campion in Rheims, Paris or Rouen. True, Campion’s significance was not yet clear. He was, like Persons, one of a number of missionary priests whose secret work in England would be immensely dangerous. But Edmund Campion, pursued for many months by the Elizabethan authorities and only captured by chance, would soon become the most powerful symbol of William Allen’s war for souls.