Of all the ruling families of England none has been more accomplished at projecting its majesty than the Tudors. As usurpers with a tenuous claim to the English throne they had to be. Seizing the crown from the Yorkist King Richard III in 1485, the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, based his grab for power on the royal ancestry of his mother’s noble family, the Beauforts, and his father’s connection by marriage to the Lancastrians Henry V and Henry VI. The first of these fifteenth-century kings was a warrior and a model of chivalry, the second posthumously a saintly worker of miracles. Out of these rich and complicated threads of family and history the Tudor kings (Henry VII, Henry VIII and the boy-king Edward VI) and the Tudor queens (Mary I and Elizabeth I) wove a pattern of power and dynasty that is as vibrant and recognizable today as it was five hundred years ago.
Certainly the Tudors still dazzle. Their magnificent buildings are stunning in scale and grandeur, from the solidity of Hampton Court Palace to the splendid gothic traceries of St George’s Chapel in Windsor and King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. As remarkable is the Tudors’ mausoleum in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, first intended by Henry VII as a shrine for his saintly Lancastrian forebear Henry VI. In royal propaganda the early Tudors never lost an opportunity: even a badge as simple as the double rose of the rival houses of Lancaster and York, the red and the white united, expressed so clearly and neatly the bringing of peace to a kingdom divided in the fifteenth century by civil war.
Henry VIII, who ruled between 1509 and 1547, continued his father’s ambitions in the stone and stained glass of palaces and chapels but also through the printing press and the pulpit. At Henry’s court Hans Holbein the Younger, a German painter of spectacular talents, produced masterpieces of minute detail, showing members of the royal family and leading courtiers in portraits that have the immediacy of photographs. More obviously political in purpose was Holbein’s great mural for the audience chamber of Whitehall Palace, so powerful a representation of Henry VIII, massive and regal, that it made visitors who saw it tremble.
This Henry was the king who changed English history in a way no other monarch had done before. He set England upon a path strikingly different to most of the countries of Europe. Refused an annulment of his first marriage by the Pope, in 1530 Henry’s eyes were opened to new possibilities. He broke away from the Church of Rome. Recognizing the insistent calls of God and history, he proclaimed himself an emperor, magnificent in his power, supreme head of the Church of England on earth next under God. These facts of Henry’s kingship were pressed home unceasingly from the pulpits and the printing presses. In a beautiful woodcut on the title page of the official translation of the Bible from Latin to English Henry was shown to be in direct communication with God, with no need for the intercession of priests or popes; the interests of the king in his palace and God in his heaven were identical. This whole edifice of projected authority was inherited eleven years after Henry’s death by his daughter Elizabeth, who ruled the kingdoms of England and Ireland between 1558 and 1603. And Queen Elizabeth, as her subjects and enemies alike well knew, was very much King Henry’s daughter, unbending, wilful, at times severe, a magisterial presence in government.
The impression of Elizabeth’s England is fixed firmly in the popular imagination. It was a glorious Renaissance kingdom distinguished by its self-confidence, its wealth, the imperial exploits of its royal navy and its aggressive determination to succeed. Courtiers sparkled, poets and dramatists wrote, and audacious sea captains harried the Spanish enemy. We have to be impressed by the Elizabethan roll call of brilliance: Sir Francis Drake, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, Sir John Hawkins, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Gabriel Harvey, Francis Bacon, William Camden. Presiding over her kingdom was a queen who in her last speech to parliament, in 1601, said: ‘your sovereign is more careful of your conservation than of herself, and will daily crave of God that they that wish you best may never wish in vain.’
Portraits of Elizabeth are as eloquent an expression of that commanding authority. In the ‘Ditchley’ portrait of 1592, which hangs today in the National Portrait Gallery in London, Elizabeth has an almost supernatural presence. Standing against a storm-racked sky giving way to sunshine, she wears a bejewelled white dress; her feet are planted firmly upon a map of her kingdom; three times the size of England she towers above Europe; she is dazzling, radiant and serenely powerful. The earlier ‘Armada’ portrait celebrates the royal navy’s famous victory over the great invasion fleet sent by King Philip II of Spain in 1588. Here once again the political statements are insistent. The queen is magnificently dressed, her right hand resting upon a globe of the world. Her imperial crown sits next to her, while framed in the background of the painting are two images, the first of Elizabeth’s navy sailing in calm waters, the second of the Spanish fleet being dashed against rocks by a terrible storm. These are only two of many portraits. Their message was always consistent: touched by God, unmovable, majestic, serene, Elizabeth was a queen for whom the motto Semper Eadem, ‘Always the same’, was superbly appropriate.
Or so we may think. Lurking in fact behind these clever and persuasive projections of political stability, empire, self-confidence and national myth is a much more complicated and fascinating story. It is a darker story, too, set against the background of a Europe divided and oppressed by religious conflict, civil war and the ambitions of kings and princes. Its themes are faith, loyalty, treason, martyrdom, espionage and a ferocious contest for dynastic pre-eminence.
Elizabeth’s England was in fact anything but stable. There were, after all, few secure foundations for stability. As a family the Tudors held on to power rather precariously. After the death of Henry VIII in 1547, the English royal succession swerved unexpectedly between all three of Henry’s children: a boy too young to rule for himself and two women, one a Catholic, the other a Protestant. Between 1530 and Elizabeth’s accession as queen in 1558 Tudor England experienced a political, religious and social revolution. Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church and destroyed the monasteries, ploughing the money he raised from their suppression into war against France. This was followed in the reign of young Edward VI, between 1547 and 1553, by the final obliteration of Catholic worship in England. After Edward’s death his half-sister Queen Mary returned the English Church to Rome and set about suppressing Protestant heresy. For the six years of Edward’s reign Protestants had ruled England: a few years later under Mary they fled into exile or were burned at the stake for heresy. These profound changes were punctuated by foreign wars, domestic rebellions, the emergence of corrosive theories of political resistance and for many ordinary men and women economic misery. In 1558 Queen Elizabeth inherited a shocked and shattered nation.
It was no wonder that Elizabeth and her government became so adept at masking these harsh realities. Elizabethan propaganda was not a thing of luxury: it was an essential anaesthetic. Elizabeth found an empty treasury and a country sick of war. Yet still the revolution continued. Against the conservative inclinations of many of her own people and to the anger of Catholic princes and potentates in Europe, she and her ministers built a Protestant Church modelled upon that of her father and younger brother, in which the queen exercised the authority to govern. Catholics throughout Europe found this proposition both incomprehensible – how could a woman place herself at the head of Christ’s Church? – and deeply offensive.
One thing that Elizabeth did not do, famously, was to marry. She resisted practically every effort to find her a husband; even when a marriage looked possible, the negotiations were scuppered by political and religious reservations. There was no plausible candidate to succeed her. Without either a legitimate heir or a named successor backed by the political elite, England faced ruin. Upon Elizabeth alone rested Protestant England’s survival or catastrophe. That is one of the great underlying themes of this book. True, England survived the dynastic ambitions and military might of King Philip of Spain as well as the claim to Elizabeth’s throne of a dangerous pretender, Mary Queen of Scots. One mark of Elizabethan success is that the queen survived to die in her bed in 1603. But it was a near-run thing.
A bullet, a dagger or a dose of poison – or equally a fever or disease – could have changed things for ever. And then how easily the Elizabethan world would have come crashing down. Indeed, how contingent upon the fragile life of one woman is the history we know. So let us, for a few pages, imagine the possibilities.
On a morning late in the summer of 1586 the sound of gunfire was heard in St James’s Park, the royal hunting ground between the great palaces of St James’s and Whitehall in Westminster. It was a volley of fire quite different in sound to that of the cannon which came weekly from the artillery ranges near the Tower of London. More to the point, the sound was unexpected and thus troubling. Quickly it was clear to the officials and servants who ran out from Whitehall that the queen, who had been travelling near the park in her coach, was badly wounded. She was the victim of assassins who, with some planning and a good deal of luck, had at last taken their chance.
Suspicions of murder plots were common in her reign, yet Elizabeth had always seemed oddly unconcerned by threats to her life; after all, she was a queen touched by God, and she had the assurance of divine protection. Some conspirators had plotted to kill her while she walked in her palace gardens with a few of her ladies and gentlewomen, though even the most desperate assassin was disconcerted by the queen’s sense of presence and her aura of power.
Firearms, though less effective than a rapier or dagger to the body, put at least some distance between a killer and his victim. And on that late summer’s morning this is how fifteen men, some carrying heavy harquebuses, others armed with lighter pistols, had set about killing the queen. Taking her light escort by surprise, they had fired accurately enough into her coach to wound her. The attackers, all young Catholic gentlemen who saw Elizabeth’s death as the only way to prevent their families’ financial and social ruin, dispersed, galloping quickly away into the countryside surrounding Westminster and London. They left their queen with bullets lodged in her stomach and shoulder. As hurriedly as they could manage, her servants carried Elizabeth to Whitehall, where she was given over to the care of her physicians and ladies. The royal chaplains began to pray earnestly for her safe delivery. Servants and officials in her private chambers had seen her desperately ill before, with sicknesses, fevers and once even smallpox. She had always made a miraculous recovery; surely she was indeed in God’s protection. But this, they knew, was different. Those princes and noblemen who had been shot in Europe’s wars of religion had struggled against the loss of blood, infection or crude surgery. Few had survived. Elizabeth was alive, for the time being.
Within an hour of the attack Elizabeth’s Privy Council, her board of senior advisers, had gathered in emergency conference. They were powerful and experienced men equal to what they were about to do. They were not particularly surprised by the attack; they had expected something like it for some years. And yet there was a feeling of unreality about their meeting, a sensation of nightmare. They knew that they would soon have to meet the extraordinary challenge of rebellion, insurrection, even a civil war. If the queen died, the result would be catastrophe: she had no successor. Controlling their anxieties around the Council table, Elizabeth’s ministers were quietly gripped by fear.
But things had to be done, instructions to be sent out, resolutions to be made. They ordered watches to be put on every road and highway out of London and Westminster. There was some hope that the queen’s attackers could be captured. Then they prepared their orders. Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s cousin and a dangerous claimant to the Tudor throne, though already in English custody was to be put under even heavier guard and restraint. Any attack on the queen, the councillors agreed, would certainly be coordinated with an effort to free Mary by force. For years English Catholics in exile and foreign Catholic princes had planned for such a mission. The queen’s secretary gave a report to the Council on the activities and movements of prominent Catholics, Catholic priests and suspected conspirators in London. The Council ordered London’s prisons to be made secure and all Catholic prisoners to be held in close confinement. They instructed the mayor and aldermen of the city to raid the lodgings of everyone under the observation of the secretary and his informants. None of this, they knew, would be easy in a city crammed with people, where the slightest provocation could spark disorder and panic.
As they had done many times before, the Council prepared England for war. In the ‘Narrow Sea’ of the English Channel Elizabeth’s small navy was put on alert. Military orders were sent to the governor of the large garrison at Berwick-upon-Tweed on England’s border with Scotland. If the King of Scots tried to take advantage of political instability in England then at least Berwick, whose defences could resist a heavy artillery assault, would hold. Orders went out also to York, to the Welsh border country and to Ireland. Rebellions almost always began in the outlying parts of England where, as the Council well knew, many of the queen’s subjects had never fully reconciled themselves to Elizabeth’s Church, sympathizing with the imprisoned Queen of Scots. Ireland had been in a state of rebel insurgency for years. Even London in these new and dangerous circumstances was unpredictable, and so the Council sent out instructions for mustering the city’s militia. As a precaution the Tower of London was made ready to house the royal court, its lieutenant alerted to the need for vigilance and defence.
While the clerks went off to prepare the Council’s letters for their lordships’ signatures, Elizabeth’s advisers turned their thoughts to the solemn business of hunting down those responsible for the murderous assault upon the queen. They were sure that the attackers worked on behalf of greater powers, probably Spain or perhaps France, certainly the Queen of Scots. That, simply, was the evidence gathered over years of discovering and frustrating plots. They had a law to deal with this kind of emergency, the Act for the Queen’s Surety, passed by parliament only the previous year, which gave the Council and queen the authority to summon a commission to bring the traitors to justice. Every councillor in the chamber had also put his signature and seal to an oath of association in which he had promised to hunt down and to kill anyone who tried to murder the queen or threaten her kingdom on behalf of a pretended successor. Once again, those who sat around the Council table thought of the pernicious influence of Mary Queen of Scots. They deliberated, sending for the queen’s attorney-general and solicitor-general. For the moment they held off summoning foreign ambassadors to court. How and when they did this would depend upon the queen’s health in the coming hours. Soon enough, however, they would have to act.
News and rumour of the attack on the queen’s coach, spreading quickly through Westminster, soon reached the crowded streets and narrow alleyways of London. There was anxiety, even a little panic. Some shopkeepers closed their shops, and prudent householders ordered their servants to bar gates and lock doors. Young apprentices looking for excitement and probably also trouble congregated in small groups along the thoroughfares near St Paul’s Cathedral. Crowds quickly gathered in the two most important meeting places of London, the churchyard of the great gothic cathedral at the heart of the city, and a little further east at the Royal Exchange, the bourse where English and foreign merchants and businessmen met to make deals and enjoy themselves at the taverns near by. Some Londoners said that the queen had escaped without harm; others reported that she was already dead. There were mutterings about Catholic traitors and a rumour of Spanish agents. Sensible foreigners in London – religious refugees from France and the Low Countries, Germans, a few Italians – felt it was wise to stay away from the crowds. The mood of the city was only excited by the groups of aldermen and parish constables moving slowly through the lodging houses and taverns looking for potentially dangerous Catholics.
London was quiet but tense overnight. A few bonfires burned, the crowds at St Paul’s and the Royal Exchange had been reluctant to go to their homes and lodging houses. The night watch dealt with a few minor scuffles. Still there was no proper news.
Whitehall Palace was barred to all outsiders. Councillors met in small groups for urgent conversations; their household servants worked through the night to prepare for the likely removal of the court across London to the Tower. Hidden behind the doors of her privy chamber, Elizabeth was mortally sick, in a deep fever, unable even to talk to her secretary. In the presence of her ladies, chaplains and most intimate advisers, she died very early in the morning.
Not even the most experienced ministers had known anything like this. The memories of some of them went back to the coup staged on behalf of Lady Jane Grey in 1553, the effort by the Protestant government of Edward VI to deprive Catholic Mary of her right to the throne. At least then they had had a monarch, however inadequate she had been, to proclaim to the people.
Where did authority now lie? England was a monarchy without a monarch. As the lawyers’ maxim had it, when the king died, the law died: government ceased, to be taken up the instant the breath was out of the monarch’s body by his or her successor. But there was no successor, nor was an acceptable one likely to be found any time soon. This was more than a constitutional knot of technicalities. Facing the prospect of riot, rebellion, civil war and invasion, government could not be allowed merely to crumble away.
Visibly shocked, the councillors gathered themselves in the Council chamber at Whitehall to plan what to do next. They would style themselves as the Council of State, to rule and govern temporarily till a monarch could be found. They would call parliament, a complicated thing to do without the queen’s personal authority. More urgently they would move government to the security of the Tower of London. They would send, too, for Mary Queen of Scots to be brought under heavy guard to London to be tried for her treasons by Commission. On Mary they prepared to take drastic action. The instructions to the Scottish queen’s jailer would be plain: if Mary or members of her household resisted in any way, or if an attempt were made by armed force to free her from custody, she was to be killed under the terms of the association. The Council of State indemnified Mary’s jailer against prosecution for a necessary act of state in a time of emergency.
By instinct the councillors wanted to keep Elizabeth’s death a secret for as long as they could. Before announcing it publicly they would move to the Tower. As they, their servants and palace staff went through London, armed and vigilant, they noticed the first signs of panic on the streets: disbelief and anger at the sight of Elizabeth’s courtiers removing to the Tower, the bells of a hundred parish churches ringing slowly and deliberately, and crowds gathering, some Londoners arming themselves as best as they could.
An hour after the gate of the Tower had been closed and barred, city officials read the government’s proclamation on the streets of the city. The Council of State explained the heinous circumstances of Elizabeth’s murder, the existence of a treasonous conspiracy, the resolution of loyal subjects to hunt down the queen’s assassins, and the overriding need to protect England’s religion, Church and national boundaries.
The first reports of trouble on the streets arrived at the Tower at midday. There was a swirl of news: constables and city officials over-matched by the crowds; Catholic gentry and noble families already raising their tenants to fight; foreign ambassadors, using the disorder on the streets as an excuse not to present themselves to the Council of State at the Tower, urgently dispatching their servants to Dover with news of Elizabeth’s death. Locked away in the Tower, the new rulers of England wondered for how long they could suppress the violence that was bound to come before – in days, weeks or months? – the King of Spain’s troops fought their way to London.
Within a week Mary Queen of Scots was brought to the Tower. She was tried by a hastily convened commission and executed in the precincts of the fortress. For Europe’s Catholics only Philip of Spain, whose ancestry went back to the house of Lancaster, presented a credible claim to the English throne. Even though Mary’s son, Protestant King James VI of Scotland, tried to advance his blood claim as Elizabeth’s nearest living royal kinsman, he was no match for Spanish power. Indeed, even if Mary had survived to become Queen of England, her kingdom would still have been a Spanish protectorate and satellite. Even France, divided by a war of royal succession, could not compete with the European dominance of King Philip.
That power was clear when the invasion came. Winds, tides and luck favoured Spain; ferrying troops from the Low Countries, the Spanish fleet was little troubled by Elizabeth’s navy. The English militias crumbled in skirmishes with troops seasoned and hardened by Spain’s long war in the Low Countries of the Netherlands. Supported by German mercenaries, they had marched through Kent to London. Many Englishmen, poorly trained and armed, had defected to the invaders. The far peripheries of England, north and west, were in disorder. Though many loyal English Catholics, horrified by the prospect of foreign domination, fought the invading army, the old Catholic nobility and gentry had seen their chance; for too long they had been fined and imprisoned by Elizabeth’s government. Supporting the Spaniards and in hope of positions at the English Habsburg court, they had acquiesced in the inevitable assault on London. It was a city with only ruined ancient walls and it fell within a week. With the fires still burning, the Council of State at last surrendered, isolated and embattled in the Tower of London. It remained for the King of Spain and the Pope to decide how to try the criminal clique of heretics for their crimes.
And so it was that parliament dismantled Elizabeth’s religious laws. England was reconciled to Rome; the painful schism was once again healed. Heretics were tried and burned, the shops and printing houses of London’s booksellers raided for suspect works. Officials suppressed heretical books: Protestant theology, the dozens of pamphlets printed by Elizabeth’s government to justify its actions, Protestant translations of the Bible and John Foxe’s Acts and monuments, the ‘Book of Martyrs’, which had celebrated Protestant heroism in the face of Catholic persecution.
And what would the modern history books say about this violent episode in English history? Probably that the regime of Elizabeth I had for many years survived on borrowed time, lamed by a self-destructive policy of crushing religious dissent and incapable of resisting the military might of Catholic Europe. The Elizabethan story would be a peculiar one: a strange aberration in English history when, against prevailing patterns of royal dynasty and religion in Europe, England struggled alone as an isolated pariah state for nearly thirty years. The epithets ‘glory’ or ‘golden age’ could never be used of the Elizabethan experiment. They were more properly reserved for the magnificent Christian heroism of King Philip of Spain, the ruler of Habsburg England, in saving Christendom.
It was exactly this scenario – or a close variation of it – that haunted the political deliberations and imaginations of Elizabeth’s advisers for nearly half a century. To imagine so catastrophic an end to Elizabethan rule was neither fanciful nor far-fetched. Every feature of it was etched into the government’s emergency plans. The queen’s ministers recognized this nightmare. Indeed only by doing so did they steel themselves for the great battle they believed was necessary to avoid it. The weapons they used were espionage, relentless interrogation, surveillance, the suppression of dissent, robust treason law, torture and propaganda. This book explains why, how and with what consequences an often ruthless campaign was conducted.
Yet the heightened vigilance of Queen Elizabeth’s advisers was in fact potentially corrosive of the security they craved. It is a cruel but perhaps a common historical paradox. The more obsessively a state watches, the greater the dangers it perceives. Suspicions of enemies at home and abroad become more extreme, even self-fulfilling. Balance and perspective are lost. Indeed such a state is likely as a consequence to misconceive or misunderstand the scale of any real threat it faces. Seismic political change – in the form of wars, invasions, coups, popular uprisings – has happened throughout history right under the noses of those who should have seen it coming but did not: those who were paid to watch, and who sometimes built great bureaucratic systems to do so. Such bureaucracies, especially in the twentieth century, very often became self-justifying, cumbersome and sclerotic, strangely distanced from the world around them. In those rare cases where states have managed to destroy their opponents by repression, they have often destroyed also the foundations of a healthy and vital body politic, and been consumed by a destructive institutional paranoia. Rational behaviour has little to do with any of this. Reason, after all, so rarely governs politics. This is particularly the case for governments nervously fingering the hair trigger of emergency.
A danger to any state is the powerful and often circular logic of conspiracy. It is pronounced when fear translates into a sense or feeling of national vulnerability, something very dangerous when it is institutionalized by any government that possesses the coercive means to make its will felt. This is especially true of countries where a narrow or isolated governing elite puts its own political survival before everything else, and where the instruments of the modern state can be used to subdue opposition at home or even abroad. These elites tend to see as identical their self-interest as a governing group and the welfare of the public body. They invest in propaganda. They promote a fear or hatred of outsiders. They feel beset by their enemies. We see regimes like this governing today. All of this may have been true of Elizabethan England – readers of this book will be able to judge that for themselves. Certainly the Elizabethan state was busily fashioning the tools of modern government in conditions of war and emergency in Reformation Europe.
There is no simple way to explain how all this happens. Conspiracy theorists will have their own view; historians, however, have to attend more prosaically to evidence. True, there have always been (and surely there always will be) politicians who pursue their own private interests at the expense of public ones. In Elizabeth’s reign the charge of ‘Machiavel’ was thrown at powerful men in government by enemies who themselves were just as disingenuous and unscrupulous. Some of Elizabeth’s advisers had read the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, others had not, but it hardly matters. Political historians sometimes have to cut through a formidable thicket of self-justifying obfuscation and insinuation to make sense of politics and political actors. At the court of Elizabeth in the 1590s, for example, panics over plots and conspiracies against the queen, stimulated and even manufactured for very cynical reasons, became a form of political currency to buy favour and reputation and to damage court rivals. It would be difficult to describe this as anything other than corrosive and distasteful politics.
More interesting and subtle, however, is when an overwhelming fear of danger becomes part of one’s routine mental landscape, shaping the contours of the mind in powerful and sometimes disturbing ways. This is the attitude of the witchhunt, but it is more potent still in politics and government when tangible enemies – with plots and plans, objectives and opportunities – really do exist. Here, it is easy to see danger everywhere. This was the mindset of many of Queen Elizabeth’s advisers, intelligent, able and sometimes gifted men. Yet still they were caught up in a terrible accumulation of fear and anxiety. This had some roots in reality. But it also assumed a grim logic of its own: survival at all costs, even to the extent of subverting the will of the queen they sought to serve. At times Elizabeth’s ministers acted upon their own authority. The first of the two most stunning examples of this ‘monarchical republican’ (the phrase is the late Patrick Collinson’s) tendency in Elizabethan politics came in 1587, when the Privy Council dispatched the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots; and the second in 1601, when Elizabeth’s secretary secretly negotiated a mechanism for the smooth accession of a foreign king to the English throne in the event of her death. The talent of the English and then British state to preserve and protect itself has its origins in Tudor politics.
But the story I tell is much more than the sum even of these two exciting political moments. War, surveillance, espionage, religious faith, politics and torture are all themes of this book. Only the most determined conspiracy theorist could believe that Elizabeth’s ministers were driven by solely selfish motives. As well as fighting their own internal political battles, they sought the good of the state (as they saw it) and the protection of queen and religion. Some of their fears were real. Elizabeth might indeed have been killed: the world they had built might have come crashing down around them. We know that Elizabeth survived; we have to set that knowledge aside, engaging imaginatively with the past. And yet still, for all the uncertainty and unpredictability facing Elizabeth’s England, it seems plain that the queen’s ministers hypnotized themselves with fear. For those readers who want to learn from history, there may indeed be a lesson here in the nature of the fearsome potential of government and state, of the mystifying dynamics of politics and of the power of perception balanced against a reality. It is not a pretty story – but certainly it is a fascinating one.
Espionage was a thriving trade in the sixteenth century. In war-torn Europe spies did a healthy business of selling news and intelligence mostly for money, sometimes out of religious conviction, but often for both.
Certainly the men and women who rubbed shoulders with one another on the densely crowded streets of Elizabethan London knew what a spy was. If they read books, or had books read to them, so much the better. The translator and teacher John Florio, whose work was well known to Shakespeare, wrote in 1598 of ‘a spy, an espial, a scout, a prier, an eavesdropper’, and of the spy’s business ‘to espy, to peer, to pry, to watch or scout with diligence, to ask or enquire for’. In the Geneva Bible, the most popular Protestant English translation of Christian scripture in the sixteenth century, Elizabethans found in the Old Testament (Numbers 13:1–2) a telling verse: ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men out to search the land of Canaan which I give unto the children of Israel.’ These chiefs of the tribes were, said the Geneva translators, ‘The spies’: the two words were printed in large letters at the head of the page. So it was plain to Elizabethans that a spy belonged to one of the oldest trades in the world. He was a watcher, a reporter, a listener. He sought out, for advantage and for service. They called his trade spiery, leaving it to their heirs and successors of the eighteenth century to use the French word espionage.
Elizabethans spied for all kinds of reasons, sometimes to put food on a family’s table or to buy a new suit of clothes. It was simply a job and not often a very glamorous one. They played the game of patronage, hoping that in return for information their political masters would pay their expenses and find them bits and pieces of preferment. Given the urgency of England’s situation in Europe, the queen’s secretary, who ran her government, needed eyes and ears throughout the kingdom and beyond. The secret trade grew to meet a political need.
There were few rules and no vetting of volunteers, and so if some spies and informants were brilliantly effective, others were derelict as well as dangerous, spying out of greed or spite or for private revenge. Others wanted adventure, a chance to play a dangerous secret game: they thrived on the excitement. Visceral hatred of the enemy was another motive. Most ‘espials’ and ‘intelligencers’ (to Elizabethans the two words meant much the same thing) wrote at some time of their patriotic calling: they spied for God, queen and country. Religious identity was critical. In a book by one Protestant theologian, An harborowe for faithfull and trewe subjectes (1559), his printer added by way of emphasis three significant words in the margin of the text: ‘God is English’. So it was easy enough to fuse into one the interests of kingdom, government and heaven. Elizabeth’s England was often likened by Protestants to Israel of the Old Testament, suggesting that Elizabethans were a people special to God. This important and very powerful sense of self-identity was given its most compelling expression in the ‘Book of Martyrs’, John Foxe’s Acts and monuments (1563–83), which told the many stories of the persecuted but in the end triumphant Protestant faithful.
Persecution is a powerful theme of this book: the persecution of Protestants in Europe by Catholic kings and princes, and likewise the persecution of English Catholics by Elizabeth’s government. Both sides claimed truth and justice in a bitter religious and theological contest that fractured sixteenth-century Europe. This was strongly reflected in the balance of international politics and military power. Or rather it was an imbalance, for Elizabeth’s Protestant kingdom was small, isolated diplomatically and, except for the fact that it was surrounded by sea, practically defenceless against a serious military assault.
To the Catholic powers, especially to Spain, England was a rogue state. Using the common metaphor of the human body, they thought that England’s disease of heresy should be cut away to restore the health of Christendom. To many English Catholic exiles and émigrés, the rule of the queen and the government of her ministers was a blasphemy. The émigrés looked instead to the Pope and the Church of Rome for leadership and spiritual guidance. In their eyes, Tudor England’s heresy had deep roots in Henry VIII’s schism with Rome in the 1530s and his marriage to Queen Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. As the child of this unsanctioned and offensive marriage, Elizabeth Tudor was for most Europeans a bastard as well as a heretic, and thus her rule was tainted and illegitimate.
As early in Elizabeth’s reign as the 1570s some exiles pressed the Pope and the King of Spain for a crusade against England and the forcible removal from power of Elizabeth and her government. English émigrés wrote plans for invasion and worked with foreign powers to topple Elizabeth’s government. That they were never successful does not mean that the plans never existed – they most certainly did. Many were wildly implausible, concocted by men whose organizational ability was lamentable. Some, however, were truly threatening. All were dangerous because, put into practice or not, they reflected the imagination of, and potential for, treason.
This book shows how the Elizabethan state, in which loyalty to the queen and the Church of England were bound together as one, fought for its survival politically and morally. Elizabethan writers naturally claimed that providence favoured the queen and her country. The account by John Foxe in the ‘Book of Martyrs’ of Elizabeth’s miraculous preservation from harm in Queen Mary’s reign was taken up by all the major English historians and chroniclers of the later sixteenth century. But if we want properly to understand the mindset of Elizabeth’s enemies, we have to imagine that there was an opposing narrative to the nationally self-congratulatory one we are used to.
And there was a very different narrative, one that sparked with anger and resentment. The English Catholic exiles in Louvain, Antwerp, Rome, Rheims, Rouen and Madrid wrote passionate books about Elizabeth’s government of atheists suppressing God’s Church as cruelly as the Romans had persecuted the first Christians. The queen was, in this view, a wicked apostate bastard tyrant. The Catholic émigrés planned England’s rescue from heresy and damnation, by invasion if necessary, in a cause worth their martyrdom. Elizabeth’s government, defending what it saw to be God’s true Church of England and their queen chosen by heaven, used every means to defend itself. It is no wonder that throughout these years so vicious a secret war was fought in the shadows.
The war was conducted in England by Elizabeth’s government. The motor of government was the queen’s secretary, the cool organizing intelligence at the centre of things, the spider who knew every thread of the Elizabethan web.
The secretary met the queen in daily audience. He was always on call. He supervised Elizabeth’s correspondence, worked as the point of contact between the queen and her Council, briefed her ambassadors, negotiated with foreign embassies and drafted royal proclamations. He moved with his staff from one royal palace to the next and between his house in London or Westminster and his estate in the country. Information was at his fingertips: his notebooks were packed with items of government business to complete. He was an expert who knew every feature and detail of the Tudor kingdoms from maps and plans and great compilations on the topics of which he needed to be a master: on Church and religion, military matters, foreign affairs and diplomacy, English trade and the queen’s enemies both within and outside the kingdom. The most skilled secretaries were practised courtiers who knew that it was wise before a royal audience to know Elizabeth’s mood and who understood that when she had to perform the dull business of signing documents it was a good idea to divert her with entertaining and accomplished conversation. A secretary had to be able to steer through often choppy political waters, navigating Elizabeth’s notoriously variable changes of mind and direction and the robust and sometimes fractious views of her advisers. It was an exhausting job; even the most gifted of the queen’s secretaries complained of the anxiety and physical and mental strain of it. The often febrile intensity of the secretary’s work sounds as a sharp recurring note throughout this book.
The royal secretariat produced mounds of documents. There must have been paper everywhere: in the clerks’ rooms, in the bound volumes and other archives carried by the Privy Council from palace to palace, as well as hundreds of documents littering the secretary’s private chambers at court and those of his houses in London and the country. His clerks were men he trusted, middle-ranking officials whose fierce Protestantism was beyond question, bound to the governing elite by ties of background, education and sometimes even marriage. They worked furiously at administration. While some of the most important and useful government documents were put into reference books, many of the dozens of letters and reports that arrived every day for the secretary were opened, given a short summary by one of his clerks, neatly refolded and put into a filing index. This is how the secret reports and other papers upon which this book is built – very many hundreds of them – were archived and used in the sixteenth century.
The secretary kept the most sensitive documents to himself, though he generally allowed his most trusted staff (often his own private secretaries) to work with them. At the time of Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590 there existed ‘The book of secret intelligences’. This no longer survives, but from other papers we know that it would have held the names of agents, the aliases and the alphabets (or keys) to the codes and ciphers they used, and the money they were paid. These highly secret papers were locked away in the secretary’s secure cabinets.
As the sixteenth century wore on, secret communication became much more sophisticated than it had been even thirty years before – a sure mark of how busy were Europe’s spies. Simple codes, in which a symbol stood for a name or a topic in letters written in plain prose, were replaced by complicated ciphers. In these, characters stood for letters of the alphabet and false characters (called ‘nulls’) were inserted to fool anyone who tried to break the cipher. Even using an alphabet, it was a painstaking business to unpick a fully enciphered letter; one of the conspirators in this book found it so tedious, in fact, that he asked a friend to help him do it. To break an unknown cipher took mathematical skill, great patience and a deep understanding of Latin and all the major European languages, with their differing frequencies of letters and words. In the secretary’s office secret ciphers were kept in a special cabinet, organized by drawers marked only with a letter of the alphabet, to which the secretary held the key.
By the 1580s, the most plot-ridden decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the secretary had working for him a small team of secretive men. One was an expert breaker of code and cipher who also kept equipment for secret writing. Another was a skilled forger of documents and of the seals used to secure packets of letters. The secretary’s archives make plain another fact. Elizabeth’s government was able to intercept dozens of letters passing between England’s enemies on the roads of mainland Europe, obtained from couriers or postal officials in towns and cities. In the interests of God, queen and country theft and bribery became necessary instruments of the state.
It would be wonderful to have the papers of the secretary and his staff just as they were left at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Instead we have to make do with tantalizing fragments, scattered pieces of a great documentary puzzle that keep historians on their toes. A stunning exception is the surviving archive of manuscripts belonging to Robert Beale, a clerk of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. Beale was a powerful character, a plainly spoken man of passionate Protestantism and high intelligence, an experienced bureaucrat and a master of government business. Over his long career, Beale collected the kinds of papers he and his colleagues needed to use every day, organized by themes and topics. Though rebound in the seventeenth century, Beale’s volumes in the British Library in London allow us to understand an Elizabethan archive, to touch it and feel it: the stiff pale animal hide spines and covers, the leather ties to keep the books closed, the indexes for speedy reference, and Beale’s explanatory notes in what, after the frenetic scrawl of Sir Francis Walsingham or the impossibly compressed minute writing of Walsingham’s most secret servant, Thomas Phelippes, is one of the vilest hands of sixteenth-century England – uncompromising and bluntly effective, like, indeed, the man himself.
Unfortunately Beale’s papers are exceptional. Time, damp and hungry rodents quickly set to work on the piles of old government papers that lay in heaps in the Tower of London for centuries. Most of what survives today was preserved for us by the enterprising Victorians who, with their rigorous and tidy methods, went through the chaos of papers they found in government and family archives and gave them order. They dated the manuscripts, sorted them into topical categories and bound them into large volumes. They published selected summaries and notes of their contents in austere calendars printed by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. It was a magnificent, even imperial, achievement that brought the fine texture of Elizabethan history to the Victorian libraries of London’s private clubs, the public schools and universities, and the country houses of the landed gentry and nobility.
So in fact for many years the work of Elizabeth’s secretary and his staff and the world they knew has been viewed through the lens of the Victorian imagination: efficient, measured, self-assured, correct. One of the joys and challenges of writing this book has been to start from scratch, to put the story together piece by piece from the Elizabethan archives, to go deeper and further than the printed histories have ever allowed us to, to look and examine with fresh eyes. What we find is an intense and anxious time in English history, one about as far removed from the comfortable certainties of Victorian professional London as it is possible to imagine. Turning the pages of letters and papers written nearly five hundred years ago is an extraordinary privilege; it is difficult to imagine being able to get closer to the sources than to see the precise moment an Elizabethan spy, rushing to finish his report in Paris, dipped his pen in ink or signed a false name. These are the kinds of sources, some of the most interesting and intriguing of the sixteenth century, stripped to essentials and read afresh, which we can use to understand the secret history of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, to discover what for so long has been hidden.
Here in this book you will find a world shaded in tones of grey rather than drawn clearly in white and black. It may seem at first to be a very different world from our own, yet there is also about it a strange familiarity, and I have often wondered how much the behaviour of human beings has really changed in nearly half a millennium. Elizabethans had hopes and fears, passionate beliefs and long anxieties, points of common reference and understanding, as well as deep hatreds. Many were divided people who lived in fractured countries, trying to find ways to survive, to reconcile belief, action and conscience. Some of the Elizabethans you will read about here acted according to deeply held principles; others sold what they had for money. Many survived while others went to the gallows. Most were caught up in events over which they had no control. Nothing could be more different than the conventional story of Elizabeth’s reign, the glamour of court, the heroic quest for a national destiny of peace, stability and empire. This book explores a darker and more disturbing world.