Elizabeth's Spymaster (13 page)

In May 1574, the Scottish government detained an eighteen-year-old
boy called Steward who turned out to be a carrier of Mary’s letters to her supporters in Scotland. The youth had received the packages from the Scotsman Alexander Hamilton at Doncaster. Hamilton was tutor to the children of George Talbot, Sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, then ‘keeper’ or jailer of the Scottish queen at Sheffield.

Hamilton was dispatched, under guard, to London and interrogated personally by Walsingham. He vehemently denied any involvement in handling Mary’s clandestine messages. Eventually, more information arrived from Scotland and the trail led to a London bookseller, Henry Cockyn. He was immediately arrested on suspicion of being a go-between for Mary with some of the greatest in the realm of England. On 5 February 1575, Walsingham wrote despondently to Burghley about the progress of his investigation:

This day we examined Cockyn from whom we can draw nothing. He has been three times imprisoned before and always so mildly dealt with as he takes no account of [threats]. I think the show of torture (the fellow being so resolute as he is) will little prevail, but rather make him more obstinate – seeing himself but dallied with.
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Walsingham tried another tactic – secretly offering Cockyn both a royal pardon and a bribe in return for his full confession. Most importantly, he guaranteed his anonymity as a source. He grimly assured the bookseller that if he refused the deal ‘he would be made to confess the bottom of the matter by torture’.

The ploy worked. Cockyn duly wrote out his confession, admitting that he had agreed to a request from Mary’s London representative John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, to deliver his letters to the Scottish queen, and that he had regularly supplied her with information about events at court. Cockyn further acknowledged that he had carried messages from Mary to Lord Henry Howard, the younger brother of the executed Duke of Norfolk, and his nephew Philip (later Earl of Arundel), and implicated five of Shrewsbury’s servants and one of those working for the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de la Mauvissière, in handling the Queen of Scots’ letters. He also mentioned the name of Lady Cobham,
one of Elizabeth’s own ladies-in-waiting, as being part of the chain of treachery.
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Although shocked by the startling disclosures of disloyalty so close to home, the cautious queen predictably hesitated, prevaricated and finally did very little, apart from what any government does when faced by such a quandary – appoint a commission of inquiry. Exasperated, Walsingham told Leicester:

Her majesty’s strange dealings in this case will discourage all honest ministers that are careful for her safety to deal in the discovery of the sores of this diseased state, seeing her majesty bent [inclined] rather than cover [disregard] them than to cure them.
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It was not the first time his patience was sorely tried by Elizabeth and it would not be the last. But he remained resolved to be ever vigilant for conspiracies against her life and her state.

In 1579 Walsingham purchased the manor of Barn Elms in Barnes, Surrey, close to the River Thames. He spent much of his last decade there, when he needed to be removed from the noise and gossip of court, although he could reach the Palaces of Whitehall or Greenwich relatively quickly by boat if the tide was in his favour. He maintained close contact with his office in London at such times, however, through a system of mounted couriers. His stables at his country home accommodated sixty-eight horses for such a purpose and he maintained another twenty-three elsewhere around London.

His new network of ‘intelligencers’ was nearing full operational capability by 1580. He now had agents based in twelve towns or cities in France, nine in Germany, four in Italy, three in the Low Countries, four in Spain and others within the huge Turkish Empire in Algiers, Tripoli and Constantinople.

Anxious to flex his muscles overseas, Walsingham conceived an audacious project early that year that not even the modern CIA, in its wildest flights of fantasy, would dare to consider today, let alone implement. Walsingham planned to boldly kidnap the Papal Legate to France, Cardinal Alexander Riario, whilst he was en route to Paris. Huguenot pirates from La Rochelle were to be paid to seize the Legate, so
that he could be questioned about the Vatican’s scheme for a possible military expedition against Ireland involving Spanish troops. Although some planning was put in place, the daring abduction was never mounted, for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps Burghley stymied the plot – or it may have been vetoed by the always cautious Elizabeth.

Undeterred, Walsingham employed an agent called Best in France to masquerade as a disaffected Englishman in order to discover the extent of the papal plans. Best’s source was the secretary of the Spanish ambassador in Paris, but before he was up and running in the role, he was brutally killed in July 1580 in a suspiciously convenient street brawl in the French capital.

As so often happens in intelligence-gathering, one door opens as another closes. The spy master was told that a papal agent in Bologna was willing to sell information to the English government. Walsingham immediately sent one of his private secretaries – Lawrence Tomson
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– to the northern Italian city, who, after handing over the requisite bribe, was told that Pope Gregory XIII intended to raise an army under Jacomo Bonacampanini. This general, with the assistance of Henry, Duke of Guise, was to invade England and dethrone Elizabeth. Frustratingly, the informant refused to part with any details about the all-important dates, timings, places and numbers of troops.

Most of Walsingham’s agents were motivated purely by money. They had a commodity to sell – information – and the spy master was only too ready to purchase it, despite the hardly generous budgets allocated to espionage by Elizabeth. As Sir Edward Stafford perceptively told him in 1581: ‘If there were no knaves, honest men should hardly come by the truth of any enterprise against them.’

By July 1574, Walsingham was employing a David Jones in London to seek out information about priests hiding in the capital. It was a short-term employment, as it was for many of his spies – either because their cover was soon blown or he harboured doubts about their honesty or reliability. Many were hard up, like the Magdalene College scholar James Welsh who became a spy for the Bishop of London because he could not find work as a schoolmaster. Such situations often led to exaggerated or
distorted intelligence being supplied in the hope of greater reward, and Walsingham must always have been fully aware of this danger.

Jones had acknowledged to Francis Milles, one of the spy master’s confidential secretaries, that he had made confession to a priest in the Marshalsea Prison ‘with two other persons, Mr Blewitt of the Hanging Sword [tavern] in Fleet Street and David Sadler’. Jones’s career as an informant seems to have lasted just over a month; his third letter to Milles reported him being saved from starvation by a Mrs Cawkins, ‘a notorious Papist’, and the stonehearted and rapacious Jones requested: ‘I pray you [to] desire my master that I may have the benefit of what she [will] lose by statute, even if it be [only] the chain she wears.’
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So much for Christian charity. The informant’s last letter, a month later, pathetically sought a loan of two shillings ‘to be left at the George’ tavern.

Robert Barnard, alias Robert Woodward, was a man of some education who became a very active agent in rooting out fugitive priests and recusants. He submitted reports – always signed with the codename or pseudonym T. H.’ – for more than three years, beginning on 5 January 1581 with a letter, as an aperitif for his talents, providing full details of the fugitive Earl of Westmorland’s movements in Europe and his receipt of 500 crowns from the Pope. He went on to supply more meaty information about a Mr Gardiner and his wife of Uxbridge, Middlesex, who were sheltering a priest called Gimlet.

That October, Barnard was working in London and was desperately short of cash. He begged Walsingham:

I must humbly beseech you to consider of me. I owe my host above
£4,
who threatens to have me in prison for the same. I have not received anything from you in three months past. I beseech you to give me order whereby I may, with less trouble to your honour, receive monthly that which it may seem good to you to bestow upon me.

I was never in better credit with the papists, nor of some great acquaintance among them, for I have attained the means to have access to all the prisons in London, the Tower only excepted, whereby there is nothing that comes over or goes over, nor anything be done here within our country but I am assured to hear thereof.
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No doubt the spy master had heard such boasts before from others anxious to tap into his secret-service funds. But Barnard produced a stream of reports that helped Walsingham keep his finger on the ever faster-beating pulse of English recusancy. Here are two from 1582:

19 April:
There is no probability of rebellion this spring or summer. The Papists have no hope of aid from the Pope and the King of Spain. [The Jesuit] Persons is at present in Rouen to write a book in answer to the one against Campion.

Very few priests in London now. One, Mr Vaine, a priest at the Temple. One other in Gray’s Inn named Lyell. Another, a Mr March, at the sign of the White Swan in High Holborn.
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17 November:
Information sent of a letter from Dr Henshawe,
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a seminary priest to a friend, stating that he, with Father Holt
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and Father Heywood,
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the Jesuits, had spent three months in Staffordshire and had converted 228 persons to the Catholic faith. If it please your honour, that I may go down, I doubt not to meet them all, for my acquaintance there is such as I shall have access among them all.
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Walsingham will have swooped on these priests and in at least one instance he may have been successful: John March is recorded as a seminary priest still being held in a London prison in September 1588. In July 1582, Barnard exposed John, First Baron Lumley, who had been caught up in the original plot involving the Florentine banker Ridolphi and imprisoned in 1569–73. The spy told Walsingham that he had been talking with the wife of a man called Carter
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who had been jailed several times for distributing Catholic pamphlets. Now he had been rearrested that day in a raid on his home in the parish of St Olave’s Hart Street and taken to the Tower. His wife, walking along a road in Lambeth with Barnard, confided to him that she was going to talk to Lumley ‘whom I wished to God I had never known … to tell him that all in our house is taken away’ – books, vestments, crosses, chalices and other accoutrements of the Mass. These belonged to Lumley ‘and by the means and entreaty
of Mr Smith and Mr Caines, two of my lord’s gentlemen, my husband was made to take them in’. Barnard suggests to Walsingham:

If it please your honour to cause both Smith and Caines to be apprehended forthwith and these being led to their charge as confessed by Carter and Carter’s wife to be taken who knows as much as her husband, not only in this but in all other affairs and causes concerning the dealing of the Papists …

If this be ripped to the bottom, there will be such matter revealed as [has] long been full secret …
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Carter was ‘nearly killed on the rack, but nothing could be drawn from [him] but the name of “Jesus’“.
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Lumley escaped the state’s retribution and led a curiously charmed life, blatantly holding regular Catholic Masses at his huge and grand mansion Nonsuch, between Cheam and Ewell in Surrey,
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complete with his own choir to sing sacred music especially written for him by the composer William Byrd.
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Later, Barnard became a kind of roving double agent, using his contacts to uncover priests. He regularly sent in details of obdurate Catholics he had discovered while travelling up and down the realm. In December 1584, he sent a list entitled ‘secret advertisements touching Mass priests’ covering suspects in the counties of Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Northumberland and Yorkshire, listing nearly 100 recusants and priests in this still disaffected region of England. He begins with:

The Lady Warberton at Congleton [Cheshire] keeps an old priest who calls himself Walkens but his name is William Worthington. He is her butler when he is there [but] at times he goes abroad for a month or six weeks and he has been at Rome.

Then, near York:

Mr Gail at Acame Grange. His wife had the resolution of me.
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He has been eight years married and yet never come [to] the church. He was married at a Mass. He has six children who were all christened by the old law. She is Sir Richard Stapleton’s daughter. Mr Graves, a
notary at Tickell. His house was searched by Cootes, an officer of the town and certain books with other things were found but he remains yet without further trouble.

Barnard also informed on corrupt officials:

There is one Gilpin, who is [an] official for Derbyshire, who refuses no bribe and [nor] does his man who has to deal for him, whose name is Lye … In like case, has Munday, who has been in [many] places where I have passed, whose dealing[s] have been very rigorous and yet very small [in effect]… but [has caused] much hurt, or in one place … under pretence to seek [for an] Agnus Dei … he carried from a widow £40 [which he] took from a chest. A few of these … [?incidents may] either raise a rebellion, or cause your officers to [be] murdered.