When Sir Robert Cecil accepted Thomas Phelippes’s offer of service he had in place already a formidable network for gathering foreign intelligence. Phelippes joined a system of espionage that had not been rivalled since the time of Sir Francis Walsingham, set up by Sir Robert with care, ingenuity and imagination. But Master Secretary Cecil’s apparently easy dominance of the Elizabethan secret world was (as Phelippes once wrote of a difficult cipher) won out of hard rock. As Phelippes found to his cost, the 1590s were troubled and difficult years blighted by the intense political competition between Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and the great political dynasty of the Cecils.
In 1593 Essex joined the Privy Council and he was zealous, as the Sterrell affair shows, to prove his prowess in matters of secret intelligence. Recognizing Lord Burghley’s dominance of politics and patronage at Elizabeth’s court, the earl recruited experienced advisers and threw money at sources of information throughout Europe. Feeling that he was the natural successor to Burghley as the queen’s leading adviser, Essex wanted to build for himself an unrivalled expertise in foreign affairs. Given what appeared to be Burghley’s failing health in 1593, the earl imagined that the great flowering of his career in Elizabeth’s service would come very soon.
If Essex underestimated Burghley’s tenacious constitution, he saw plainly the lord treasurer’s ambitions for Sir Robert Cecil. With an eye upon the secretaryship, Burghley did everything in his considerable power to prepare his son for office; often from his bed or couch, besieged by government business, he was the exacting master of a gifted apprentice. Kept away from court by sickness, Burghley reminded Elizabeth of his long faithfulness. ‘Even now,’ he wrote to Sir Robert in February 1594, ‘I received your letter, wherein you report Her Majesty’s care for my health, for the which I most humbly thank her, hoping that her good wishings shall help to return me to strength for her service, which I esteem the service of God, whose place she holdeth on earth.’ The contrast with Essex could not have been greater. Burghley saw it as his duty to serve the queen, to prove his loyalty and constancy as her oldest adviser. Upon that depended his power and the future prospects for Robert Cecil. In contrast to this grave and elderly councillor, Essex had risen in Elizabeth’s favour with spectacular speed, quickly finding a position at court in 1587 as Elizabeth’s companion and master of the royal horse, an office which gave him regular access to the queen. The young earl needed royal favour: his family was heavily in debt. There was an urgency to his political ambitions that only grew and became more intense as the years passed. Essex, too, had something to prove. As a boy, left an orphan by his father’s death in Ulster, he had been made a royal ward. He grew up for a time in Burghley’s house, sharing a table and a classroom with Robert Cecil and his siblings. Who knows what challenges or grievances of childhood were being settled in the 1590s?
Against a family that felt it was born to rule – against a father and son so well entrenched at Elizabeth’s court – the Earl of Essex pushed and pressed. He sought power and credibility; he wanted his moment of glory at court. Between the straining ambition of Essex and the formidable power of the Cecils something had to give. The year of crisis was 1594 and it was one of blood and betrayal. A huge price was paid for the competitive vanities of powerful and ambitious men at Elizabeth’s court.
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We men are of life short, of constitution frail, of thoughts vain, of words rash, and of knowledge unperfect, taking the shadow for substance …
The disposition of this quarter will be indifferent, yet will there be many unkind storms with sudden lightnings, and terrible thunder-claps. Sickness this quarter will not be many, but passing dangerous, hot, and fervent agues, great distemperature of men’s brains, with immoderate heat, whereby many will become frantic.
An Elizabethan almanac was a store of information: a calendar, a reference book of astronomical data and a guide to astrological forecasts – a companion in uncertain times. But whatever its other virtues, the Almanac for 1594 failed to predict that it would also be a year of peculiar and disturbing intensity in the history of Elizabethan royal murder plots, though the prognostications of sudden storms and fevered brains captured something of the dangerous and unpredictable political intrigues at the court of the queen. Between January and August Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex squashed three murder plots directed against Elizabeth. It seemed that the two most powerful of the queen’s councillors had a remarkable nose for treason, and surely no observer in those eight months of 1594 could fault the energy of Burghley and Essex in hunting down Her Majesty’s enemies.
And yet there was much more to these plots and apparently miraculous discoveries than at first meets the eye. To begin with, we have to review the bare facts of each conspiracy and then consider the politics behind them.
The first plot to be discovered, and the most startling of them all, was that of one of the queen’s physicians, Doctor Roderigo Lopez, to poison Elizabeth. It was Essex himself who in January 1594 made the charge of treason against Lopez, though he had been unpicking the evidence in Lopez’s case for three months before that. It seemed at the time a wild charge to make against a respected doctor. A Portuguese Jew who had converted to Christianity, Lopez had lived in London for thirty-five years; in that time he had built an enviable medical practice at court. Yet Essex was absolutely convinced that Lopez was a traitor. In January he made a very plain statement of his accusation, writing:
I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was Her Majesty’s death. The executioner should have been Doctor Lopez. The manner by poison. This I have so followed that I will make it appear as clear as the noon day.
Essex was consumed by the interrogations of Lopez, to which the earl, showing extraordinary tenacity, gave every particle of his time and energy. By the end of February he had accumulated enough evidence against Lopez to have him tried for high treason as a Spanish agent who had agreed to murder the queen by poison for the sum of 50,000 crowns paid by the King of Spain. Doctor Lopez was found guilty. A few months later, in June, he was hanged, drawn and quartered on the gallows at Tyburn.
The second plot to be discovered, in February 1594, involved an Irish soldier in the regiment of Sir William Stanley, the turncoat English military commander who fought for the King of Spain. In October 1593 Stanley, his deputy Giacomo de Franceschia (who was known simply as Captain Jacques) and the Jesuit priest William Holt were supposed to have recruited Patrick O’Collun to murder Queen Elizabeth. We do not know when O’Collun arrived in England or how he was captured, but he was questioned in the Tower of London in early February 1594. Two witnesses testified to his mission. One of these was William Polewheele, himself a soldier of Stanley’s regiment who also admitted to having been sent by Stanley to assassinate Elizabeth.
One of Patrick O’Collun’s interrogators was Justice Richard Young of Westminster. On the day of O’Collun’s first examination, another Irishman, called John Danyell, came to Justice Young to reveal the existence of a plot to blow up the Tower of London with its own supplies of gunpowder and brimstone as well as a conspiracy to burn ships and houses in Billingsgate and to set fire to inns and woodstacks throughout London. With Danyell was Hugh Cahill, yet another Irish soldier of Stanley’s regiment. Cahill’s examination at Lord Burghley’s house in Westminster revealed that, like O’Collun and Polewheele, Cahill had been approached by Jesuit priests, at Stanley’s behest, to assassinate Elizabeth.
Acting upon the prisoners’ interrogations and examinations, Lord Burghley himself took great care in ordering the arrest of suspicious persons coming into England, with special precautions to be taken against Irishmen in London and near Elizabeth’s court. He gave a particular warning against any man who had served in Sir William Stanley’s rebel regiment. Burghley’s orders were enforced by a royal proclamation, which said that some men had come secretly into the kingdom ‘with full purpose, by procurement of the Devil and his ministers, Her Majesty’s enemies, and rebels on the other side the sea, to endanger Her Majesty’s noble person’.
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The third great murder conspiracy discovered in these remarkable months of intrigue and danger involved Edmund Yorke, for three years a captain in Stanley’s regiment. In late June 1594 Yorke sent a letter to the Earl of Essex. Having left England without a licence, he sought the earl’s help in seeking a reconciliation with the queen. Yorke wanted to be forgiven for aiding her enemies and to prove himself her loyal subject. He wrote to Essex:
I most humbly beseech your honour to stand my gracious lord and master in obtaining pardon for me and the gentlemen with me [including Richard Williams, his companion] the which if it may please your honour to do you shall find both me and them ready to do Her Highness service in what we know against her estate next unto your honour, as in duty we shall be bound till death.
On returning to England, Yorke gave himself up to the Privy Council and was promptly sent to the Tower. Essex, far from looking leniently upon Yorke’s years away from England, helped rigorously to examine him. Also interrogated were Richard Williams, Captain Yorke’s friend, and a witness to their conspiracy called Henry Young. Quickly Essex discovered a plot against the queen involving Captain Yorke and Williams.
Young said that Captain Yorke had planned with Sir William Stanley and the Jesuit William Holt to raise a rebellion in north Wales. Captain Yorke made a counter-accusation, saying that it was in fact Young who had been recruited by Father Holt to kill Queen Elizabeth. Richard Williams, Yorke said, had volunteered to do just the same thing for money for his family: ‘he could find in his heart to do it so as he might have great store of money that his house might be advanced for he himself was sure to die’.
Pressed by his interrogators, Yorke changed his story. Before the lieutenant of the Tower and Essex’s friend Francis Bacon, he made a full and voluntary confession. Offered 40,000 crowns by Holt, Captain Yorke had agreed to return to England to kill the queen. Three times Yorke met Stanley, Holt and Charles Paget, that most dangerous of English émigrés, to talk about the mission. They gave special attention to the weapons Yorke and Williams would use in London. Though some of the group spoke of the merits of using a small steel crossbow with poisoned arrows, Yorke agreed instead to shoot the queen with a small pistol. Williams would carry a rapier tipped with a poison concocted of bacon, garlic juice and juniper.
For another week Francis Bacon and other interrogators pressed Yorke for more information about plots laid out by Stanley and his fellow conspirators against the queen. Compelling evidence against Yorke and Williams was gathered with remarkable speed. The two men confessed to their guilt and went to the gallows some time before February 1595.
Three plots, three revelations of terrible danger to the queen, the strenuous investigations of treason led by the Earl of Essex in the cases of Lopez and Captain Yorke and by Lord Burghley in the mission of O’Collun and the conspiracies revealed by John Danyell and Hugh Cahill. Each one of these murderous projects involved conspirators and assassins motivated by a cause as well as by money; behind each was a shady network of highly dangerous and organized English émigrés and exiles, or in the case of Lopez Portuguese agents working for Spain. Each conspiracy had been close to its execution: only the swift and energetic actions of Burghley and especially Essex, who barely left the Tower of London between January and March, saved the queen from destruction.
The plots of 1594 seem at first glance very similar to the Throckmorton, Parry and Babington conspiracies of the years 1584–6. And certainly they did have features in common. Murder conspiracies had always called for urgent action, stimulating great passions and provoking ferocious official denunciations of the traitors. But what had changed over a decade was the tone of the investigations, and even to some extent their methods. Patient gathering and sifting of evidence had given way to quick confessions; other documentary evidence seemed to have a marginal significance. Only in the case of Lopez were there papers to make sense of, though the Earl of Essex, soon tiring of the slog of investigation, chose the more direct route of open accusation followed by an unforgiving routine of interrogation. In 1594 everything seemed just a little out of proportion: frenetic, urgent, panicked and strained. The political atmosphere seemed especially charged.
Each of the three plots of 1594 was in fact a game for advantage in a visceral political contest between the Earl of Essex and the Cecils. They played for the highest stakes of power and royal favour. Essex and Burghley sought conspicuously to save the queen, and so the kingdom, from destruction. An organized enemy dedicated to Elizabeth’s destruction; the dispatch of assassins; the work of English Jesuits in commissioning and blessing these murderous missions; the queen poisoned or shot: these were not new terrors in Elizabeth’s reign, but they were still very immediate anxieties, and in the fraught war years of the 1590s they spoke to old fears of massacre and invasion. The Elizabethan imagination was always haunted by the memory of the mass killings in Paris in 1572. The nightmare was real: at the end of 1593 Londoners could see for themselves on stage the horrors of Catholic conspiracy when Christopher Marlowe’s play about the shocking events in Paris on Bartholomewtide twenty-one years earlier, The Massacre at Paris, was performed at the Rose playhouse in Southwark.
In January 1594, when Burghley was weak and ill, the Earl of Essex struck quickly and powerfully with his charge of treason against Lopez. Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil hardly expected it to be taken seriously, but Essex was tenacious. In his efforts to impress the queen with a sensational political revelation, the earl’s remarkable gamble paid off. With no way to avoid a full investigation of the facts, Burghley found that he had to throw himself behind Essex’s efforts to expose Doctor Lopez’s treason. He did so reluctantly. It was purely a tactical move in the political game.
The fact was that Burghley had been aware for a long time of Doctor Lopez’s Spanish contacts. He knew that Lopez was a Spanish agent who had been in communication with one of King Philip of Spain’s ambassadors, Don Bernardino de Mendoza. Between Lopez and Mendoza there was an intermediary, a Portuguese (like Lopez himself) called Manuel de Andrada. In 1591 Andrada was captured in England, and Burghley had him thoroughly examined. Burghley wrote very detailed instructions on how the interrogation should be conducted: friendly at first but then ending with a blunt offer: either Andrada could cooperate and tell his interrogators everything he knew or he could lose his life. Burghley, who was aware of the correspondence between Lopez and Andrada, sent Lopez to help with Andrada’s interview.
So by 1594, three years after Andrada’s capture, Doctor Lopez’s work as a Spanish agent was old news to Burghley. More than this, Burghley had used Lopez to penetrate Spanish efforts at spying in England and encouraged him in his work as a double agent. In 1594, however, thrown off balance by the intensity of Essex’s assault, Burghley felt compromised by his own association with Lopez. He did nothing to frustrate the energetic investigations of Essex and his men. In fact quite the opposite: Burghley threw himself aggressively at the Lopez case. With the aid of Thomas Phelippes (who helped to write a narrative of Lopez’s treasons) Burghley controlled the government propaganda on the case, levering it away from Essex. Burghley, who only three years before had recruited Andrada as an English spy with Lopez’s help, was ferocious in his public denunciation of Lopez and his treasons:
Lopez the physician who should have committed the fact by poisoning Her Majesty under colour of physic [medicine], confesseth that he was of late years allured to do service secretly to the King of Spain, which he did by the means of one Manuel [de] Andrada a Portingale [a Portuguese] much used in France by the King of Spain’s ambassador there Don Bernardino, by whom Lopez received a jewel of gold of good value garnished with a large diamond and a large ruby.
It was all very unlikely. Lopez indeed had secret connections with Spanish spies, though in the end with Burghley’s knowledge. His plot to murder Elizabeth, however, was improbable in the extreme. Yet the ingredients of the case against the physician were mixed powerfully together: Essex’s nakedly political campaign, the febrile worries at court about Spanish espionage and the fact that Doctor Lopez’s father was a Jew. The effects were toxic. Far from defending Lopez, the Cecils threw themselves behind the campaign to expose and try him as a traitor. Sir Robert Cecil, who by February was one of the investigative team with Essex’s men, was present at Lopez’s trial. Justice, he felt, was done. Of the ‘vile Jew’ he wrote: ‘the most substantial jury that I have seen have found him guilty in the highest degree of all treasons’. Sir Robert, like his father, was complicit in the destruction of Roderigo Lopez in the interests of family and politics.
The panic over Irishmen in London in 1594 played on the fearsome reputation of Sir William Stanley’s regiment of desperate renegades, who, recruited by their officers, bribed by great fortunes of tens of thousands of crowns and blessed by Jesuit priests, came secretly to England to murder the queen. Now it may have been that some of Stanley’s men were willing to take on so desperate a mission, but if they did it was not because Sir William’s regiment operated as a kind of crack unit of Catholic storm-troops. Beset in the early 1590s by dissent and internal tensions, it seems highly unlikely that in 1593 Stanley and his advisers dispatched assassins to England practically every other week, as worried courtiers believed they did. Certainly he and his men fought for the King of Spain, at least after a fashion; certainly Sir William was the queen’s enemy. Perhaps men like Patrick O’Collun and William Polewheele, with an eye on a fortune, were willing to try their luck as assassins: desperate times could encourage desperate measures. But it is a considerable stretch of the imagination to believe that Stanley and his regiment were organizationally capable of mounting a sustained campaign to murder Queen Elizabeth.
The statements of O’Collun, Polewheele and others present a very confused tangle of lies, evasions, half-truths and muddle. Under close examination in the Tower of London the prisoners’ stories changed daily. As instruments of a ruthless plot to kill Elizabeth these men made a very poor showing. They appear to have made no serious effort to get anywhere near the queen. Polewheele was duped out of his money before he left mainland Europe; even to make the sea crossing to England seemed at the very limit of his abilities. What seems oddly disproportionate is how these shambolic hired assassins caused such a panic in government in February 1594. Their examinations and confessions had the crown’s law officers scurrying to and from the Tower and a man as busy as Lord Burghley personally putting in place mechanisms to close Elizabeth’s court to intruders.
Once again, however, there was a strong political angle to the Irish panic of February 1594, and this is at its clearest in the roles played by John Danyell (the man who went to Justice Young with the report of the plot to blow up the Tower) and Hugh Cahill (another supposed assassin). It looks very much like Danyell’s emergency was planted by Lord Burghley himself. Cahill’s mission to kill the queen was long known to Burghley: Danyell had told the lord treasurer about it eighteen months before the emergency of February 1594. The chronology of Danyell’s whole story shows that it was pretty stale by the time he went to see Justice Young. Cahill met Danyell in Brussels in May 1592. Though promising to Stanley, Holt the Jesuit and Hugh Owen that he would kill the queen, the young soldier had already sworn an oath to Danyell ‘never to perform it, for it is a wicked deed, and abhominable before God to do it’. Cahill went off to London. In June, from Calais, Danyell wrote to Burghley saying that he had ‘intelligence of causes of great importance’. Burghley sent Danyell a passport to allow him to cross the English Channel. By August Danyell was in England. In September 1592 he met Burghley and told the lord treasurer all about Cahill’s supposed mission to kill the queen.
So everything to do with Cahill’s plot, which the young Irish soldier confessed to in February 1594, had happened nearly two years earlier. He and Danyell were lodging in Westminster for some months before Danyell went to the authorities in February 1594 with his report of the plot to blow up the Tower of London and burn the city. So at just the moment when Burghley by his strenuous labour defended the queen from desperate Irish assassins, his old informant Danyell happened to come forward to offer evidence of an imminent and probably deadly fire attack upon London. Neither Danyell nor, more significantly, Cahill was held under lock and key in February 1594. Cahill, the commissioned assassin, was left to Danyell’s care with Burghley’s full knowledge. More intriguing still is the very strong suggestion that one of the men who planned to blow up the Tower of London had three years before sent intelligence to Burghley.
How providentially fortuitous was the timing of Danyell’s information in February 1594 and how politically convenient for Lord Burghley. Fear became a political currency that Burghley and Essex could use to secure Elizabeth’s favour. And both men had it. The earl’s ambitions only grew in 1594, and in the summer progress of that year the queen visited Burghley’s palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire, the house of Sir Robert Cecil on the Strand in Westminster and the estate of Sir Robert’s elder brother Sir Thomas Cecil at Wimbledon. For the time being at least, the queen was prepared to accept for her courtiers’ sakes the cost of so many treasons.
The Earl of Essex leaped upon the conspiracy of Edmund Yorke even more swiftly than he had moved against Doctor Lopez. Captain Yorke was dangerous to Essex. He had asked specially for the earl’s help in reconciling him to the queen and he had come into England carrying a passport signed by Essex himself. Why, a hostile observer may have asked, did Yorke expect to find in Essex so sympathetic an intermediary? But if Yorke presented a risk to the earl’s reputation, his case was also an opportunity. As the campaign against Doctor Lopez had shown so brutally, there was no better way for Essex to prove his political credibility than by exposing a murderous plot against Elizabeth’s life. When it came to the English émigrés and exiles the case was more straightforward still. Essex’s friend and confidant Francis Bacon called it ‘the breaking of these fugitive traitors and filling them full of terror, dispair, jealousy and revolt’. And so, sensing a conspiracy easy to reveal, and following on so naturally from the panic over Stanley’s assassins only a few months before, Essex and particularly Bacon moved in for the kill. Both men were present for the most important of Yorke’s and Williams’s confessions.
Burghley, though he had nothing to do with the investigation of Captain Yorke’s treason, had a specific reason to be interested by it. There was evidence that his own life had been in danger. The queen’s attorney-general witnessed and signed a short statement made by Captain Yorke saying that Henry Young, the man who had denounced Yorke as a traitor, had written to Father Holt with an offer to kill the lord treasurer. Burghley, keen no doubt to see what Essex was up to, had his own summary of the case compiled from the evidence of the traitors’ confessions.
At no point in the interrogations, however, was Captain Yorke’s connection with Burghley mentioned. In the lord treasurer’s archives there were two letters by Yorke, one Burghley had received in 1591, the second, of 1594, from Yorke to a close friend in military service: ‘Sweet Will, thy absence is more grief unto me than you can imagine.’ The first letter was an offer by Yorke of military intelligence to Burghley on the taking of Rouen. The second was simply endorsed by Burghley ‘Young Edmund Yorke’s letter’.
The letters may suggest a certain closeness between Captain Yorke and Lord Burghley which could never be guessed from Yorke’s service with Sir William Stanley’s rebel regiment. There is just the possibility that, in destroying Edmund Yorke, the Earl of Essex destroyed also Burghley’s once or future agent. It was, however, a matter upon which Burghley seems to have kept his counsel. After nearly half a century of Tudor politics, the old lord treasurer knew when it was necessary to make sacrifices.
When Sir Robert Cecil was appointed secretary to the queen in 1596 he found a system of espionage put under extraordinary strain by the factional ambitions of the Earl of Essex and the power games of his own family. The habit of infighting and intrigue, shown so brutally in the first eight months of 1594, encouraged everyone involved in the struggle to look inwards instead of outwards. Vicious court politics corrupted any pretence at measuring foreign intelligence accurately and intelligently. Certainly Essex recruited many foreign experts and sources, though more for ornament and self-aggrandizement than for anything else. In the end, the easy task of exposing half-baked assassination plots was a poor substitute for a serious effort to understand the enemy’s political outlook and military dispositions. In the field of foreign intelligence work the Cecils had for some time lagged behind Essex.
Quickly the Cecils recovered their political initiative at court. Driven on by rumours in 1595 of Spanish preparations for another armada, Essex had pressed successfully for the joint command with Lord Admiral Howard of a naval expedition against the coast of Spain. The earl’s plan, which he concealed from the queen, was to seize a Spanish port and to hold it against the enemy. The fleet sailed in June 1596. The focus of the assault was the port of Cadiz, where Essex, going ashore in the first boat, led English troops through the streets. The action in Cadiz was followed by a raid on Faro; there the plunder was considerable, including nearly two hundred books looted from the bishop’s palace, which Essex later donated to Thomas Bodley’s library in Oxford University. But the earl was not welcomed back at Elizabeth’s court as a hero. Quite the opposite in fact: Burghley and Robert Cecil began an official investigation of Essex’s plunder, and Elizabeth was furious that Essex had subverted her authority by attempting to ignore her orders. He, in turn, was mystified by the queen’s lack of gratitude for his heroism.
In October 1596 King Philip of Spain did indeed launch a new naval armada against England. It was as great in size as that of 1588. To Elizabeth’s government – and especially to Sir Robert Cecil – it was a timely warning of their very serious failure properly to understand the intentions of Spain. Broken by a storm off Finisterre, what remained of the fleet limped into port ten days before reports of the armada’s departure from Lisbon arrived in London. Intelligence was hopelessly late. Sir Robert’s agent in Bayonne, the brother of an English merchant, sent a very accurate account of the Spanish fleet but could not at first find a ship preparing to return to England skippered by a trustworthy man. Weeks after the armada’s failure English coastal forces were still mobilized. The lesson to be learned was that even excellent and necessary intelligence was useless if it could not be dispatched to Sir Robert in time.
No wonder, then, that Cecil set to work with energy. Dead wood was cut away. Henri Chasteau-Martin in Bayonne, long used as a source by the Cecils (and before them by Walsingham), was found in 1596 to be in the pay of Spain. Lord Burghley had for six years doubted Chasteau-Martin’s usefulness. It was the governor of Bayonne, finding a Spanish spy in his town, who had him executed. (It is hard to know whether the governor knew that Chasteau-Martin had spied for England too.) So it was obvious that Sir Robert had to start from scratch. Using the contacts of the merchant and international financier Sir Horatio Palavicino and the assistance of one of the clerks of the royal secretariat, William Waad, that is exactly what Secretary Cecil did. By about 1597 he had agents in Lisbon, Brussels, Calais and Seville, and throughout Spain more generally, Flanders and Scotland.
Sir Robert’s agents did serious work, something that is clear from the meticulous accounts of expenses prepared by one of his intelligencers in Spain and France. He was the merchant Thomas Honiman, who claimed for the voyages he had made between Dover and Plymouth, the messengers he had dispatched to reconnoitre a Spanish fort in Brittany, and at least three agents sent into Spain. It was Thomas Honiman’s brother, Philip, who reported on the Spanish armada of 1596.
Sir Robert Cecil’s intelligence network, 1597.
Thomas Phelippes was right to say in 1600 that Secretary Cecil commanded so many ‘spirits and endeavours’. So expertly trained by his father in every aspect of government business, Sir Robert was a practical man as well as theorist: he decided what information he needed to know and the best ways he could devise to discover it. He had at his fingertips all the resources of his father’s libraries: books and papers sent out of continental Europe over many years, the best maps and atlases available. As a young scholar in France in 1584 Cecil himself had compiled a survey of the kingdom’s provinces and a list of the most important nobility and officials. He possessed above all a shrewd intelligence and an eye for political information.
With all of this experience and ability, it is no wonder that by January 1598 Sir Robert had put in place a formidable network of agents. He set it all out on paper in a remarkable document that exists simply because Cecil was going on an embassy to France and a trusted official needed to know how to pay the agents and receive their reports. Fascinating today, in 1598 the document would have been priceless to England’s enemies.
Some of Sir Robert’s agents were residents while others, he explained, ‘go and come’. All were paid, though with a close eye for their importance; the highest paid worked for Sir Robert in Lisbon and Seville. Some wrote personally to Cecil, though reports from a single city often went to England through different ports, a prudent protection against accident or interception. Agents working in the same locality probably knew nothing of each other’s work. Of the two agents in Seville the best paid, Massentio Verdiani, one of Sir Horatio Palavicino’s men, got his letters to Sir Robert by way of the city of Rouen. The second agent in Seville posted reports to London through a merchant in Waterford in Ireland. Discreet merchants in London acted as a postal service for secret reports from Lisbon and Bayonne; they also sent money out to Sir Robert’s agents. Trade was a perfect cover for secret service. It was fairly easy for an intelligencer to pass himself off as a merchant’s representative. Real merchants like Thomas Honiman worked as Sir Robert’s agents: what a serious businessman needed to know by sending out his servants was always useful intelligence for a busy secretary in London.
Employing a method that had been used by Walsingham, Sir Robert gave instructions for the fitting out of a ship whose purpose was to visit the ports of Spain to discover intelligence. Thomas Honiman and Cecil each bore half of the total cost of a thousand ducats. One of the sailors on the boat had ‘all languages, is of good wit and discretion’. He was paid sixty ducats for his expertise and for sending reports to Sir Robert.
Enemy Europe was covered: Bayonne and the Bay of Biscay, Lisbon, Seville, the coasts of Spain, and Rome. But Sir Robert also had spies ‘in such states as are friends to us’, from Scotland to Holland and Zeeland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Like Walsingham, Cecil maintained important contacts in England. He used ‘spies and false brethren [likeliest] to know of any practice against Her Majesty’s person’. One of these ‘false brethren’, a man who pretended to be a Catholic, performed two tasks for Sir Robert. Firstly, he kept up a correspondence with the important émigré intelligencer Hugh Owen. Secondly, on his travels to Normandy he collected émigré Catholics’ letters and brought them back to England, showing them to Cecil before posting them on. Other informants brought news to Sir Robert. In London an Irishman called James Patrick ‘remaineth daily where Irish do resort’ and he went every day to the River Thames to report on passengers arriving at the private quays of the city.
So comprehensive a service as this was not cheap to run. Sir Robert, like his father in so many ways, did not in matters of intelligence share Lord Burghley’s taste for austerity. The secret budget from Elizabeth’s treasury was revived, though Sir Robert was cannier with money than Walsingham had been. The salaries of his agents came to well over 4,500 ducats or (very roughly) nearly £13,000 a year in Elizabethan money. There were other expenses on top of this: extra payments, inducements and rewards, and at least once the heavy cost of fitting out a ship to spy on Spanish ports. But for regular and sound information he knew and trusted it was a price worth paying. When armies and navies could so easily run up huge debts for Elizabeth’s government it was in fact a modest investment of money and energy.
And there were results. Intelligence on the Spanish armada of 1596, though too late to be of use in England, was of high quality. Reports from Lisbon on the weaknesses of Spanish forces in 1598 were likewise accurate. True, the secret information Sir Robert received was no guarantee of success, especially in military expeditions. Raw reports were only pieces in a jigsaw whose composite picture was always changing. The secretary’s skill, as Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Burghley had known, was to sift the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the unlikely, and the plain facts from the suppositions. As Robert Beale, an official of government close to Walsingham, wrote: ‘Be not too credulous lest you be deceived; hear all reports but trust not all; weigh them with time and deliberation and be not too liberal with trifles; observe them that deal on both hands lest you be deceived.’ This was the instinctive talent of a man like Sir Robert Cecil.
We can be sure that behind the formal structures of Sir Robert Cecil’s intelligence system – the postal systems, the money and the arrangements with London merchants – was the human factor of espionage. In the years after 1600 Thomas Phelippes brought to Cecil’s service his understanding of the characters and motivations of spies as well as his formidable attention to detail. We can well imagine that Phelippes saw in Sir Robert what he had once found in Walsingham’s service: a centralizing and processing intelligence at work in secret matters, seasoned with cunning and imagination. Sir Robert was ambitious, not for obvious private or political gain, but for the service of the queen and the security of the state. As a Cecil long trained for politics and service he saw neither difference nor distinction between his family’s good and Elizabeth’s best interests; they were identical.
By the time Thomas Phelippes was in Secretary Cecil’s service, there were new recruits abroad. The few surviving records of their work give only the smallest hint of what they saw and did for God, queen and country. Together George Kendall and George Weekes spied for Sir Robert in Brussels and Dunkirk. They had generous allowances of money. When Kendall visited England in May 1601 he was given armour worth over £5. Master Douglas, a gentleman of Scotland, worked for Cecil at the Spanish court and in Lisbon for a quarterly allowance of 100 crowns. Master Fox, an Englishman, served in Venice for a yearly salary of £40. Grander still was Thomas Bradshaw, ‘employed in the court of Spain’ and paid £100 a year for his information. At least two agents were discharged from service, one, Robert Luff, taken prisoner in Spain, the other, Francis Lambert, in Bayonne. When they returned to London both men were pensioned off.
Perhaps one day the stories of these spies will be told. Certainly they deserve to be. In 1600 the prognostications suggested that in a new century espials and intelligencers would be kept as busy as fellow members of their profession had been for forty years.