Lord Burghley was the most formidable politician of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Only once, in the early months of 1587, did he temporarily lose Elizabeth’s trust and favour: over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. That was a price worth paying: Burghley had for many years made it his business to destroy the political and dynastic influence of the Scottish Queen. His return to political favour was swift, and by the spring of 1590, at the age of nearly seventy, he was carrying the administrative weight of practically the whole of Elizabethan government as the queen’s lord treasurer and her acting secretary. Miraculously, his fragile health bore the strain.
As a courtier and politician of forty years’ experience, Burghley’s political instincts were finely tuned. He knew what lurked in the shadows of Elizabethan politics. He kept papers on England’s enemies, the Catholic émigrés and exiles. He read their intercepted letters and understood the very real danger they, with the formidable help of Spanish power, presented to Elizabeth’s kingdoms. For many years, he had made his own digests of intelligence from abroad. After Walsingham’s death he took charge of his former protégé’s espionage network. He was never complacent about England’s security.
Burghley longed for peace and retirement in the 1590s. He felt old, weary and sick. Possessed, however, of an obsessive need to direct and control the instruments of power and patronage, he found it impossible to let go of government business. He served Elizabeth from a profound sense of duty. As he wrote to his son Robert Cecil a few days before his death: ‘Serve God by serving of the Queen, for all other service is indeed bondage to the Devil.’
Robert Cecil was very much his father’s heir in the family business of Tudor government. Burghley’s eldest son, Sir Thomas Cecil, was a distinguished soldier and an accomplished courtier, but he was not obviously cut out for the office of a royal secretary or privy councillor. Robert, twenty-one years younger than his half-brother, showed every inclination to follow his father’s distinguished career.
Robert Cecil was schooled for high political office, educated at home by private tutors, in Cambridge and at Gray’s Inn. He visited Paris at the age of twenty-one, where he went to lectures in the Sorbonne, the theological school of the city’s university. He studied Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as mathematics, cosmography (the study of the universe) and music. His father’s palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire was itself an education for a future royal servant. Its rooms were decorated with the genealogies of the English nobility, the pedigree of the Cecil family and portraits and busts of emperors, kings and noblemen of classical and contemporary history. In the Great Gallery of Theobalds Robert could make sense of the history of Rome, the politics of the Spanish Netherlands and England’s own civil wars of the fifteenth century. This was for Burghley the expression of the authority and knowledge he had built up over years of service to the queen, and one of its purposes was to fit Robert Cecil for just such a career himself.
In May 1591, a month short of his twenty-eighth birthday, the queen knighted him. A few weeks later she appointed Sir Robert to her Privy Council. It was at exactly this time in his new political career, which showed such promise, that Cecil worked with Burghley on a highly secret case. Together, father and son recruited two men who were sent off to mainland Europe to spy on Cardinal William Allen. Their names were John Snowden and John Fixer. This was Robert Cecil’s apprenticeship in espionage, one that helped to make him quite as formidable as both his father and Sir Francis Walsingham in the pursuit of his country’s enemies.
John Snowden was a subtle, intelligent and self-assured man who presented himself to Lord Burghley as a volunteer in the cause of his native country against its enemies. His real name was John Cecil, though if he was a kinsman of the first political family of the kingdom it was by a very distant connection. In May 1591, when he came to Burghley’s close attention, he was about thirty-two years old and a former fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He had a companion called John Fixer, who was his college contemporary. No physical description of Snowden survives, but we know that Fixer was a tall man with a ruddy complexion and dark features. Both men were scholars, spoke foreign languages and had travelled in Italy and Spain. Also both men were Catholic priests. Snowden, indeed, was a member of the household of Cardinal William Allen.
Snowden and Fixer were spies, sent secretly to England by Robert Persons, the forty-five-year-old Jesuit priest who with Allen was always energetic in engineering plots against Queen Elizabeth. Their mission never happened: the two priests were captured even before they landed at an English port. They had set out from Portugal for Amsterdam. On the voyage their ship, The Adulphe, was intercepted by The Hope of Elizabeth’s royal navy. Taken prisoner, Snowden and Fixer found themselves confined to Lord Burghley’s grand townhouse on the Strand in Westminster. There they must have contemplated their futures: any priest found to be in England was guilty of high treason.
Burghley was away from Westminster, busy with the queen’s ten-day visit to his great house of Theobalds. But he saw in Snowden and Fixer at least the spark of a possibility. Thrown back at the enemy as double agents, they could prove to be valuable weapons against Cardinal Allen. Of course they had to be tested, and they might be found wanting. To be sure, Burghley began to examine them by correspondence. Snowden and Fixer wrote out statements which, once they arrived at Theobalds, Burghley read with very great care. The two priests first put pen to paper on Friday, 21 May. It happened to be the very day that Queen Elizabeth knighted the clever and ambitious Sir Robert Cecil.
The first of their statements gave Burghley hope. Fixer seemed to know a great deal about two traitors in the pay of the King of Spain, the veteran rebel and conspirator Sir Francis Englefield and the turncoat military commander in the Low Countries Sir William Stanley. Snowden was close to Cardinal Allen. Both priests knew Robert Persons and had (so they claimed) valuable information about his secret plans.
But could they be trusted? It was plain from the beginning that Fixer was very nervous, more obviously so than Snowden. Fixer’s statement had about it a note of self-doubt; he was anxious that he had left out something Burghley was looking for. But he seemed keen to be of help to Elizabeth’s government. ‘My memory is fragile and this time is short,’ he wrote:
if there be anything that hath passed or doth pass either in France or Italy or Spain whereto my small experience of those countries can reach, I beseech your honour to enquire it in particular and I will answer what I know with all truth and sincerity.
He added a caveat and a defence, saying that he would tell the truth ‘notwithstanding the cardinal [Allen] and Persons do trust such matters upon my self’: in other words, he could reveal only what the two men had revealed to him of their plans and conspiracies against England, which may not have been much. Seeing all too plainly the precarious situation he found himself in, Fixer put his life and death in Burghley’s hands.
Snowden wrote with greater self-confidence. His statement was certainly the work of an intelligent, experienced and subtle man: too subtle, perhaps. Snowden’s cleverness may have worried Burghley just as much as did Fixer’s diffidence. There was no hint of fear in what he wrote. In offering his service to Burghley, he was even plainer than Fixer had been, saying without hesitation that he would give Elizabeth’s government information on plots, treasons and conspiracies. But he maintained a conscientious scruple as a Catholic. Snowden distinguished absolutely between Catholics whose loyalty to the queen held firm and those, like Robert Persons, who planned for England’s invasion by the foreign power of Spain. Snowden explained to Burghley in his statement that he would betray only Elizabeth’s enemies, not the Catholic faith.
If Snowden was to be believed he had intended from the time of his recruitment by Persons to make an offer of service to Burghley by sending ‘informations of such poor intelligence I had’. Snowden had a very long way to go before convincing Burghley of the truth of his claim. The only condition he had expected as Burghley’s agent, Snowden wrote, was liberty of conscience and the freedom to practise his Catholic faith. And so with a surprising confidence given the circumstances of his capture, though with hope now of recommending himself as Burghley’s agent, Snowden gave a full account of the nature of the mission Persons had recruited him to.
Persons wanted to infiltrate small groups of priests into England and Scotland. Snowden and Fixer were two of six. Four of the group travelled on the King of Spain’s passports, leaving the port of Seville in two Scottish ships; two of the priests were bound for London, the other pair to Scotland. Snowden and Fixer, by contrast, had set out from Portugal for Amsterdam. Once in London their cover was to have been trade, and their contacts were one Tayler and one Payne in the Poultry, both of whom presumably were merchants. Persons had given Snowden and Fixer a cipher for their letters, the key word of which was DEUS.
More important than the nuts and bolts of travel and communication was the object of the mission, which was, as Snowden explained it, to make contact with English Catholics. The two priests were in effect agents of Spain, returning to their homeland to spread the message that King Philip did not want to conquer England but sought instead (to use Fixer’s words) ‘to reform religion’. Persons wanted the two priests to draw up a list of names of everyone who would help the Spanish liberators when the day of invasion came. And here Snowden wanted to emphasize for Burghley an important point. Persons had instructed him to inflate the numbers of Spain’s supporters in England. This, said Snowden, was the bait that Cardinal Allen and Father Persons fed to the King of Spain – the promise of an enthusiastic welcome for the Spanish forces.
Burghley was gripped by Snowden’s paper: he wrote all over it, noting, cross-referring, underlining. And it was no wonder. On the face of it, Snowden seemed to have excellent information on how Robert Persons was trying to open up a new channel for intelligence from England. Persons’s methods were revealed. Even more than this, what Snowden had to say offered proof of the continuing efforts of Spain to launch a successful invasion of Elizabeth’s kingdoms. After all, King Philip was only temporarily depressed by the failure of the Great Armada in 1588. Quickly Spain had built a new fleet whose purpose after 1589 was, in Philip’s words, to ‘wage war in the enemy’s own house’, combining both navy and army in the assault upon England. Though the years 1590 and 1591 were strategically difficult ones for Philip, thanks to Spanish involvement in religious civil war in France and the political conditions of the Low Countries, experienced advisers to Elizabeth like Burghley were well enough aware of the imperial ambitions of Philip of Spain.
Perhaps, however, Snowden’s intelligence was just too convenient, possessing, for all the rich and compelling detail, a suspicious relevance. It was clear to Burghley that some pieces of the priest’s story did not fit together very neatly. For Snowden, Burghley’s willing volunteer spy, being taken prisoner was a lucky chance. How, Burghley wondered, would Snowden and Fixer have gone about their mission, living as Catholics in England? And for all of Snowden’s first protestation of loyalty to the queen, Burghley wondered how he could reconcile that with his Catholic faith. When true allegiance to the queen meant conformity to the English Church, to profess one without the other hardly made sense.
So there were the difficulties in the priests’, and particularly Snowden’s, papers. There were evasions and questions as yet unanswered. But already Burghley’s mind was moving to the future deployment of Snowden and Fixer as spies. He wanted them to explain, first of all, how they could aid the arrest of the other priests of Robert Persons’s mission without betraying themselves.
Snowden’s reply, in his second statement for Burghley, was suitably brisk and businesslike. He seemed clear in his motives. He had wanted to live peaceably in his own country with the free exercise of his religion. His plan had been to write to Burghley from Amsterdam, sending the letter, along with documents he possessed, through the governor of the town of Brille. He had also intended to write a long essay on how, by granting religious freedom to those who opposed the practices of Spain, Burghley could recruit priests for Elizabeth’s service. For the time being Snowden entirely avoided Burghley’s question about how the other priests could be apprehended without compromising Fixer and himself.
Snowden told a tale whose facts he cleverly selected to give a certain version of the truth; his evasions were those of a careful man playing a risky game. On 23 May he made a fresh statement, writing with a touch of self-deprecation that he would set out ‘confusedly yet I assure you confidently’ what he could remember of the essential points of Spanish ‘practices’, or plots and conspiracies, against England. He again stressed his loyalty and affection to his prince and country. But he continued to press his point about loyalty. He wrote that he wanted to show Burghley ‘that it is not a matter so impossible as it is commonly taken to be a good subject and a good Catholic’. And it was from this point on in his third statement that he proposed how he might work as a spy against England’s enemies, William Allen and Robert Persons.
Snowden confronted head on the policy of Elizabeth’s government. He suggested that to force Catholics to act against their consciences achieved nothing. Putting men to death for their faith only pleased England’s enemies, giving Allen and Persons more martyrs for religion as well as justifying political action against Elizabeth. Of martyrdom Snowden wrote: ‘they [the Catholics] print it and paint it and publish it in their books and pulpits and so with pretext to move princes and the world to compassion; they work the web [that] hath been so long on the loom’. His meaning was plain: martyrdom was the inspiration as well as the sustaining fuel of the international Catholic cause against Elizabeth’s England. Snowden’s ambitious proposal was to bring the foreign Catholic seminaries under Burghley’s control, thus neutering the powerful influence of Cardinal Allen. Volunteering himself for the task, he wanted to recruit Catholics in Burghley’s cause, to use them against the true enemy. But necessary to this was ‘wonderful secrecy’. Snowden wanted no betrayal from the inside to wreck his plan.
Snowden’s proposal, robustly set out, went against the grain of over thirty years of Elizabethan thinking. Burghley had long viewed all the English priests trained in the seminaries of France, Italy and Spain as conspirators and traitors. And yet he took Snowden seriously, once again working through his papers and setting out even more questions for the priest to answer. In the case of Snowden Burghley sacrificed time, a precious thing for the most powerful man in England, and something he was very loath to waste.
Now Burghley began to push Snowden very hard on the facts he had stated so far. Setting his prisoner’s ambitious proposal to one side, Burghley wanted to find out whether Snowden was telling the truth. The key to this lay in the elements of his story; this he told with great confidence, but it had to be rigorously examined, the facts and circumstances tested. If each one of Snowden’s claims was found to have substance, then perhaps Burghley could trust the man and his motives.
The first thing to recover was the collection of papers Snowden had had with him aboard The Adulphe, the ship whose Flemish skipper lived in Amsterdam. The papers, Snowden told Burghley, were sealed in three packs of cork. Here potentially was evidence of Snowden’s goodwill and honesty in saying that he had intended from the start to offer his services to Burghley, for among the papers (so he said) were packets of letters addressed to the lord treasurer, all ready to be sent to England by Snowden when he reached Amsterdam, which contained notes and ciphers. Snowden had copies of sensitive documents from Paris as well as papers concerning the business and personnel of the English seminaries. Snowden kept also a note by the Jesuit Robert Southwell on the executions of priests in England, and a manuscript of a book by Persons on the persecution of English priests of the newly founded seminary of Valladolid in Spain. There was a letter from Persons to Snowden and Fixer, as well as a number of letters from a Flemish merchant to the man with whom the two priests had proposed to lodge in Amsterdam.
If Snowden was indeed telling the truth about these papers, aboard The Adulphe was a substantial cache of material valuable to Elizabeth’s government. Of their books, Snowden explained that he and Fixer had given them to the ship’s cook. Snowden told Burghley that he would recover the books and papers by writing to the ship’s master. If he would not or could not help, then a member of his crew and a fellow passenger on The Adulphe knew where Snowden had put them. And so Snowden wrote to the master in Amsterdam, while Burghley, careful to keep and mark every piece of paper, dated and endorsed his own copy of the letter.
On 25 May, the fourth day of Snowden’s questioning, Burghley set out to test every part of the story so far. He wanted facts; he was looking for corroboration, and evidence that Snowden knew what and whom he was talking about. There was nothing in Burghley’s hard and pressing questions about freedom of worship for English Catholics or ambitious plans to control the seminaries. He was not bothered about grand designs. Burghley wanted the physical descriptions of all the priests of Persons’s mission and of the Englishmen who served the King of Spain. He wished to know more about Snowden’s journey from Spain and Portugal; indeed he wanted from Snowden a full report of where he had been and how he had lived since leaving England years before. Snowden had said that he had once written to Sir Francis Walsingham using the alias of Juan de Campo: exactly when was that? Who were Snowden’s kinsmen in England? Burghley asked Snowden what name he had intended to use when he came on his mission to England and how he was able to make a cipher alphabet out of the word DEUS. What did he know of the plans and dispositions of King Philip to invade England?
Here we begin to find the real John Snowden. The truth behind the self-confidence was a young man cut off from his family in England, of whom he knew nothing: it was almost nine years since he had heard from them or they from him. His two brothers were dead, killed fighting Spanish soldiers in Flanders. He had not seen his father for twelve years. Snowden had left England for Rheims in 1582 and begun to study divinity in William Allen’s seminary; he was one of the priests of Allen’s mission to save England. He became close to Allen, who employed Snowden as his Latin secretary.
To Burghley’s question about his cover name in England Snowden gave a prickly response. He had, he said, never had any intention of carrying out the mission. The DEUS cipher was a simple substitution, moving the alphabet along so that D gave a, e gave b and so on; it was a cipher that would have troubled Thomas Phelippes for minutes at best. The King of Spain’s intention, Snowden said, was to persist in the Enterprise of England, the invasion of Elizabeth’s kingdoms and the queen’s deposition. He ended by speculating on how he and his companion Fixer might be able to spy for Burghley, to ‘go unknown and keep our intelligence secret’. But beyond the suggestion Snowden was uncharacteristically guarded: that would have to rest upon Burghley’s wisdom and experience.
Perhaps he seemed to be losing some of his self-confidence, beginning, after five days of questioning, to feel the wear and tear of close examination. But Snowden quickly bounced back. He made a new and confident statement of the conspiracies of Cardinal Allen and Father Persons and gave a sure-footed technical analysis of Spain’s military capabilities. For a man whose interests may have been served by exaggerating King Philip’s power, Snowden’s judgement was perhaps surprising: ‘His domestical forces are wonderful poor and pitiful, more than can be imagined.’ He believed Spain was painfully short of naval captains, soldiers, sailors, gunners and munitions. He gave the names of Cardinal Allen’s principal supporters and agents in Rouen, Paris, Madrid and Flanders. He provided a long list of those priests who quietly opposed Allen’s aggressive policy. And he named those of Elizabeth’s subjects who favoured the Spanish. At the head of the list was the renegade English military commander Sir William Stanley, followed by Sir Francis Englefield and the Duke of Parma’s intelligencer Hugh Owen.
Burghley had wanted facts: Snowden gave them willingly. The young priest who had for days been questioned very closely by the most powerful man in Elizabeth’s government, still hidden away in Burghley House in Westminster, had now only to wait to hear what use would be made of him.
Burghley decided to use Snowden and Fixer as spies. The deal was done by 31 May 1591. On that Monday night Snowden met Sir Robert Cecil, to whom Burghley now left the practical arrangements of getting Snowden and Fixer safely across the English Channel to mainland Europe. Sir Robert, Fixer and Snowden talked that evening about the gathering of intelligence from Spain and Italy.
Snowden wrote to Sir Robert the following day. He was not quite satisfied with their passports and safe conducts. He received a prompt reply from Cecil: Snowden could send his own wording for the passports, and Burghley would read and consider it. Sir Robert, though now in charge of the day-to-day handling of the priest-spies, by habit and experience deferred to his father’s judgement.
So it seemed that only ten days after making their first statements to Burghley Snowden and Fixer were free at last to travel. Cecil reminded the two priests that their freedom came with an obligation not to be forgotten. They were being set free for a purpose, to gather intelligence for Lord Burghley or, in Sir Robert’s elegantly grand phrasing, to ‘bring forth good fruit with profitable correspondency for Her Majesty’s service’. Snowden was too clever to misunderstand Cecil’s meaning. He wrote to Sir Robert on 4 June acknowledging Burghley’s ‘most benign and bounteous offer of warrant and protection, the reserving of the knowledge of us, our case and cause to his honour only’.
Soon enough, Snowden got from Burghley the passport he wanted. Its wording suggested an important mission, and no port official who saw the lord treasurer’s signature would have dared to hold the two agents: ‘You shall let the bearer hereof pass without trouble or vexation, for that the knowledge and examination of his cause and person I have reserved to myself for divers occasions.’ Snowden promised faithful and good service. He wondered whether the ‘good’ Catholics they came across would be subject to England’s ferocious penal laws. Snowden, like any Catholic priest, was acutely conscious of the law he and John Fixer had been so fortunate to escape, which declared any Jesuit or seminary priest in England to be guilty of high treason. Once this point was resolved, Snowden wrote, they would do good service in Italy or Spain. He sent another letter to Sir Robert on the same day with descriptions of priests. Snowden left his letter unsigned: ‘Your worship knoweth the heart and hand of the writer.’
The days passed by, but for Snowden and Fixer there was no quick dispatch across the English Channel. Their mission had suffered a false start. Burghley or Sir Robert (or both father and son together) had had second thoughts.
The excitement of the first week of June quickly passed. Confident Snowden, stuck in London, began to fret about his safety. By now trusted to leave Burghley House, he walked around the city, trying to make sense of what Catholics were saying about him and Fixer. At the busy public meeting places at St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Exchange he heard the rumour that the two priests had been arrested but then quickly released, mistaken for soldiers returning home from the wars in the Low Countries. Snowden was terrified that Catholics would get wind of any suggestion that he was now Lord Burghley’s agent. So he was very relieved to have bumped into an old school friend on 12 June who gave him no suggestion of any suspicious or malicious rumours. Snowden wrote with relief that he and Fixer ‘stood free from all impediments that might arise in the opinion of Catholics by our apprehension’. But quickly a new worry came to occupy his mind. Because Catholics in London had seen him walking the streets of the city, he was known to be at liberty; it followed that sharp eyes could observe he was in correspondence with Burghley. He wondered to Sir Robert whether he should be sent into the country for the sake of secrecy and security.
Snowden, brimming with a subtle self-confidence when he had first been brought with Fixer to Burghley House in Westminster, was a nervous man. On the evening of 19 June he met Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil. The meeting was not a happy one. Snowden apologized the next day for his ‘sharpness’ and even his ‘shamefulness’. Clearly Snowden recognized that he had behaved very badly. Days of worrying about who was watching him on the streets of London and Westminster, and the feeling that his offer of service was not being taken seriously, led him to lose his temper. Burghley was provocative, probably deliberately so. He told Snowden to his face that what he had given so far, or promised from his papers in Amsterdam, amounted to ‘vulgar and trivial intelligences and to no great purpose’; these may have been Burghley’s exact words. Snowden robustly defended his own honesty and goodwill. And he did not back down: once again he offered to do good service for his country, whatever the perils or dangers. He wanted Sir Robert to ‘perceive my forwardness and desire to do something of importance’.
If the meeting on the 19th was for Snowden a bruising encounter, it also seems to have done something to release the building pressure of anxiety. But still the weeks passed while Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil waited for Snowden’s books and papers to come from The Adulphe of Amsterdam. Some of them had arrived in Westminster by early July, for on the 3rd Sir Robert had Snowden’s copy of Josephus Acosta’s history of the Jews (a rare book, said Snowden) and Robert Persons’s manuscript on the new martyrs of England. Also among the papers were a letter by Persons to the rector of the seminary at Rheims and Persons’s letter to Snowden and Fixer dated a few weeks before they had left the coast of Portugal.
From the beginning, Burghley had wanted to be sure of the papers from Amsterdam. At first he had doubted Snowden’s story; he wanted evidence of its authenticity. There had been a false start to the priests’ mission in late May and early June. After leaving the details of platforms and passports to Sir Robert, Burghley was still not as sure of the priests as he needed to be. But now, with the proof he wanted from Snowden, the lord treasurer was content for his son to send the priests to Europe as spies. With the right sort of handling, they could prove to be significant weapons against the queen’s enemies.
In July Snowden and Cecil began to work out the precise details of the mission. At first these had been vague. Sir Robert saw that a more precise objective was necessary. He proposed for Snowden and Fixer a difficult mission: to cause the King of Spain to doubt sources of Spanish intelligence on England. Snowden, considering this proposition carefully, applied himself to the details of how this might be done. And he offered to Sir Robert three principles by which he proposed to operate clandestinely. Firstly, he said, he would communicate with England through one man only, who would believe that he, Snowden, worked to free Catholic prisoners. Secondly, only Burghley and Sir Robert should read his reports. And thirdly, he would work for Sir Robert alone, with whom he felt he could talk openly. Burghley, he thought, was too busy to discuss and examine every aspect of Snowden’s secret work. Besides, Snowden pleaded timidity and ‘insufficiency’ in talking to Burghley – the bruises from their fractious meeting had not entirely healed.
By now Sir Robert and Snowden were settled upon the mechanics of the mission. They had met and talked. Snowden’s contact was in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a port town close to Spain in the Bay of Biscay; he was Cecil’s man and the representative of a London merchant. There was, if necessary, a second intermediary in Calais. Sir Robert and Snowden made arrangements for Snowden’s passport, a cipher and an alias he could use in his reports. And of course there would be further instructions: in Snowden’s words, ‘the most principal and necessary points whereof you would be advised from time to time’.
A few days or weeks later (he gave neither date nor place) Snowden wrote to Sir Robert once again. He wondered whether he might have another passport in his own name. It was just an idea: ‘But in this and all other my affairs as your wisdom shall determine, whose hands I most humbly kissed and take my leave of your worship till I write from the port.’
And so it was that John Snowden alias John Cecil, the priest-spy, and one of the first of Sir Robert Cecil’s many secret agents, set out upon his career in espionage. He was a volunteer and he cost nothing other than Lord Burghley’s and Sir Robert’s time, patience and hospitality at Burghley House. That at least satisfied the Lord Treasurer of England’s taste for economy.
Snowden pursued his new career with skill and subtlety, able to convince of his loyalty men as experienced and perceptive as Robert Persons and William Allen. He continued to work and travel with John Fixer, with whom, months after taking his leave of Sir Robert Cecil, he sought to re-enter England. As before, they were captured, though this time it was probably by prearrangement with Sir Robert. In 1592 Snowden was in Rome, and then Cardinal Allen sent him to Scotland. Already there were rumours of his duplicity, and from Scotland in October of that year he sent to Allen a passionate defence of his actions. He wrote of his interview by Lord Burghley: ‘But this I know and this I professed upon my salvation, that there never passed from me anything prejudicial to my faith or function … I always had this firm resolution, rather to be torn into one thousand pieces than to hurt willing the least hair of the meanest Catholic head in the world.’
Snowden remained in Scotland till early 1594. He set out for Rome, but in February he was again captured at sea by the great Sir Francis Drake. As he later wrote to Sir Robert: ‘I discovered myself to Sir Francis Drake and Master Edgecombe [probably Richard Edgecombe, a Cornish gentleman], charging them as you willed I should in Her Majesty’s name to keep me secret and take no other notice of me than as of a Scottish man till they heard from you.’ To Drake he gave letters by Robert Persons and Sir Francis Englefield.
Snowden understood that he lived a dangerous life; he had been anxious for his own safety even on the streets of London in June and July 1591 and he was a good deal more exposed in Spain or Rome. He knew that even a chance remark by Cecil in London could put his life in danger. He wrote to Sir Robert: ‘For this I assure you, at my last being in Spain words were laid to my charge spoken by you of me at your table to a kinsman and confident friend that had like cost me my life.’ He feared the withdrawal of Cecil’s favour, thinking back to his recruitment by Sir Robert and his father, and their earliest doubts about his loyalty: ‘If you reposed (when I first met you) that credit in me as I deserved, I had not passed so much trouble as I have done for the performance of my promise to you.’
By a combination of skill, luck and brazenness Snowden survived. He reported to Sir Robert on Spanish political and military thinking and the efforts of the Catholic exiles in Scotland. He forwarded letters he had intercepted, these by some of Queen Elizabeth’s most formidable enemies. Catholic rumours of Snowden’s disloyalty never went away. In 1597 reliable sources of news in Antwerp said that Snowden was under the protection of certain English noblemen. Two years later he was even named publicly in a pamphlet as Lord Burghley’s spy; in print he defended himself robustly, appealing for the truth of his story to God in heaven. And yet he continued to be trusted in Spain and Rome, all the way through to the death of Elizabeth in 1603.
But what, apart from luck and ability, was the key to John Snowden’s longevity as a spy? How was he able to cope with the strains of his secret life? The answer, most probably, lies in his conscience. What he wrote to Lord Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil and William Allen was perfectly consistent. He believed that he did not betray Catholics and their faith, only the enemies of the queen. He believed what Burghley himself found it impossible to imagine: that a Catholic, even a priest, could be a loyal subject to Elizabeth; that it was possible to separate religious faith from political allegiance in a way that challenged the very notion of Elizabethan England as a confessional state. Snowden’s enemies were those of his queen, Lord Burghley and Sir Robert: ‘those which are the principal agents against our estate and country’.