Elizabeth, Queen of England and Ireland (1533–1603), the daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who succeeded her sister Queen Mary I to the English throne in 1558.
William Allen (1532–94), founder and rector of the English seminary in Douai (which later moved to Rheims), the moral and spiritual leader of English Catholics in exile in Europe, a formidable pamphleteer and polemicist, and a keen supporter of England’s invasion by the Catholic powers of Europe.
Robert Beale (1541–1601), an official of Elizabeth’s Privy Council close to Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham, a determined Protestant, and an experienced investigator of conspiracies and interrogator of state prisoners.
Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520–98), the first of Queen Elizabeth’s secretaries (1558–72) and later her lord treasurer (1572–98); Elizabeth’s most influential adviser for forty years, and the mentor of Sir Francis Walsingham.
Sir Robert Cecil (1563–1612), Lord Burghley’s son, privy councillor and secretary from 1596, who ran a formidable network of secret agents in the 1590s.
Mary Queen of Scots (1542–87), the daughter of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise, great-granddaughter of the Tudor king Henry VII, pretender to Queen Elizabeth’s throne; deposed in Scotland in 1567 and kept in English custody from 1568 until her execution by Elizabeth’s government in 1587.
Thomas Morgan (1543–c. 1611), Mary Queen of Scots’s chief intelligencer in Paris, whose influence lay behind many of the plots against Queen Elizabeth of the 1580s.
Charles Paget (c. 1546–1612), a Catholic émigré, the son of an influential family in Tudor politics and an inveterate plotter against Elizabeth’s government.
William Parry (d. 1585), a spy for Lord Burghley in Italy and France who in 1584 conspired to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
Robert Persons (1546–1610), Jesuit priest, writer and Catholic propagandist, and a collaborator with William Allen on plans for the invasion of England.
Thomas Phelippes (c. 1556–?1626), Sir Francis Walsingham’s trusted right hand in secret matters, a gifted linguist, mathematician and cryptographer, whose fortunes fell severely after Walsingham’s death.
Philip II of Spain (1527–98), the husband of Queen Mary of England (d. 1558), politically and militarily the most powerful king in Europe, ferocious in his campaign against Protestant heresy, who sent the Great Armada against England in 1588.
Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532–90), diplomat and privy councillor, Queen Elizabeth’s secretary (1573–90), possessed of a keen eye for security and secret intelligence; a protégé of Lord Burghley, to whom he wrote in 1568: ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little’.