Elizabeth's Spymaster (15 page)

Estimates of exactly how much Walsingham’s espionage operations cost Elizabeth’s always hard-pressed exchequer vary wildly. The cash was paid out by warrants of the Privy Seal ‘for such purposes as the queen shall appoint’. The earliest surviving record of payments is for July 1582, when he was paid £750 for secret services for the year (£120,000 in today’s money), remitted in quarterly payments. More detailed records survive from 1585 onwards, citing £800 for that year and
£1,100
for 1586.
Thereafter, with the Catholic sedition and the emerging threat of the Spanish Armada, payments increased to at least £2,000 per annum, although some calculations put the total received by Walsingham as high as £30,000 (or £4,800,000 at current prices) for 1588-9.
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Perhaps a better indication of the steadily growing funds available for the queen’s secret services are the estimates prepared in 1610 by one of Walsingham’s successors, Sir Robert Cecil, another royal civil servant. In modern spending equivalents, these show payments of £946,502 for 1583-4; £1,646,171 for 1584-5; £1,357,883 for 1585-6 and £1,825,915 in 1586-7.
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One thing is certain: the budget was never enough, as it had to cover the costs of both overseas and domestic intelligence-gathering. And Walsingham was never afraid to spend money if the necessity arose. In 1580, faced with a potential threat in Scotland, Walsingham instructed Sir Robert Bowes, the English agent in Scotland, and Sir Henry Cobham, then English envoy in Paris, to ‘spare no cost’ to gather information. Typically, after the threat from the Armada was lifted, Elizabeth quickly reduced the secret-service budget down to £1,200 in 1589. No wonder the spy master frequently had to dip into his own purse.

Indications of a new international plot against England emerged in May 1582 when retainers of Sir John Forster, Warden of the Middle Marches of the border with Scotland, stopped and detained a man disguised as a dentist, or less exaltedly, a tooth-puller. He carried all the gruesome instruments of his trade, including a small looking glass. The man was released, but in making a hasty departure he left his mirror behind. Concealed beneath its silvered glass was a batch of folded documents from Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, to a Jesuit priest, Father William Creighton, based in Scotland. The tooth-puller was, in reality, using this cover to conceal his role as a secret messenger.

Walsingham received the documents in London the following month and, to his delight, they clearly indicated a conspiracy involving Mendoza, his master Philip II of Spain, Mary Queen of Scots and Esmé Stuart – Seigneur d’Aubigny, Earl of Lennox and a favourite of the young Scottish king, James VI. New intelligence from Scotland indicated that Castelnau,
the French ambassador in London, was the clearing house for all communications with the Scottish queen.

Now everything that went on at the French ambassador’s home in Salisbury Court, a few yards south of bustling Fleet Street on the western edge of the City of London, was of interest to Walsingham. In February 1583, there was a curious attack on Castelnau’s reputation that smacks of an officially inspired whispering campaign against the envoy, perhaps instigated by the spy master himself.

Spluttering with indignation at being so assailed, Castelnau wrote to Walsingham angrily complaining that

several in your court and throughout the kingdom who would like, in attacking my honour, to charge the French in general; [have] incited a good-for-nothing hussy of a woman to make wicked statements about me and of my actions, [which are] highly honourable and God-fearing.

I have had her forbidden my house, not wishing to hear the thousand slanderous lies which she told [to] everyone and in recompense, they take pleasure at your court and elsewhere in using her as a trumpeter to accuse all France under my name ..

It seems to me that the least that can be done is to put a stop to these rumours and give the hussy the whip and pierce her tongue with a hot iron; first making her declare who had incited her and taken pleasure in making her utter such slanders, as she would not otherwise have done for the sake of the alms she has received at my house.
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Black propaganda aside, the spy master searched around for an agent to insert into the French embassy. He found his man in the Scottish theologian William Fowler, who arrived in England after being expelled from his studies in France that autumn and was immediately imprisoned. In return for his freedom, Fowler agreed to spy for Walsingham. He persuaded the French envoy that he could supply intelligence on Scottish affairs and, in turn, told the English government about Castelnau’s dealings with the Scots.

The French ambassador was having a torrid time. In March 1583,
another Jesuit, Father William Holt, alias Brereton, was detained as he was boarding a ship for France at Edinburgh’s port of Leith,
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after being betrayed by another of Walsingham’s agents, Roger Almond, alias William Vavasour, described as a ‘renegade papist’.
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A number of letters in cipher were found on the priest, which were speedily and covertly copied. When interrogated by the Scots, Holt acknowledged that there was ‘a purpose in hand by the Pope and diverse Catholic Princes to make war on England in the cause of religion and for the benefit of the Queen of Scots’.
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It was clear that he was an agent working for Mendoza. Walsingham chafed at the slowness of the Scottish investigation of the conspiracy and wrote to Bowes on 16 April that Elizabeth earnestly desired that Holt might be ‘substantially examined and forced by torture to deliver what he knows’. But before any more information could be extracted, Holt had escaped and gone to ground.

Fowler had also reported that Castelnau was sending some letters via a ‘gentlewoman’ who was about to sail to Scotland. As soon as he received the report, Walsingham ordered the ship to be detained at Gravesend in the Thames Estuary and searched. Three letters from the French envoy to François de Roncherolles, Seigneur de Mainville, his opposite number in Scotland, were found and forwarded on to the spy master. No doubt the skills of Arthur Gregory were deployed to open them, record their contents and reseal the packages. Mainville received an apology for the delay in his mail and was earnestly assured that the letters had not been tampered with. Bowes, the English agent in Edinburgh, said the Frenchman was ‘partly satisfied’ with the apology, because ‘he found the seals of the letters unbroken’.

The true extent of the plot and the means to prove Mary’s involvement in it continued to elude Walsingham. A month later, in April, he managed to insert a second spy into the French embassy in London, known by the alias Henry Fagot. As recent research conclusively demonstrates, he was an Italian house guest there called Giordano Bruno.
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The garrulous after-dinner conversation at the genial Castelnau’s table was a rich source of intelligence, worthy of the risks. Bruno told of a letter from the Duke of Guise encouraging the ambassador to continue
his clandestine activities on behalf of Mary Queen of Scots. On 28 April he even mentioned the arrival of the double agent William Fowler ‘who haunts the ambassador’s house practically every day … whence the ambassador knows everything that goes on in Scotland’.
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The following night, Bruno reported that a Monsieur Throgmorton had dined with Castlenau, who had ‘recently sent the Queen of Scots 1,500
écus sol
[golden crowns] which is on the ambassador’s account’.
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Walsingham’s eyes must have gleamed when he read this. He immediately put twenty-nine-year-old Francis Throgmorton under close surveillance by his agents in London. His target was a known Catholic zealot and a nephew of the spy master’s one-time friend Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, who had died in 1571.

Still the spy hidden within the embassy churned out his messages – all written in French and all carrying a sign, used as a symbol in astronomy or astrology to denote the planet Jupiter, to establish their authenticity. Fowler reappeared on 4 May and

dined at the ambassador’s house. He brought two gold rings, set [with jewels] but I do not know the stones. They went to the Queen of Scots by the Duke of Lennox and the ambassador has charge to convey them to her. This day the ambassador received letters from [his wife] in which she mentions that she hopes to return to this realm shortly and she strongly begs that [he] will be as secret as possible in these matters. Today I heard the ambassador say that he was almost afraid to be in this realm as he saw some things which are making ready in Scotland. Some marvellous things would be seen before very long … as there are several lords who are at great enmity and that the Duke of Guise and the Duke of Lennox have the password (
mot de guet
) of all this. This story passed between him and an English lord whose name I could not get.
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Walsingham’s agent also suborned the ambassador’s secretary Nicholas Leclerc, Seigneur de Courcelles, into becoming a mole for the English government. Probably sometime in early June 1583, Bruno told Walsingham:

If your excellency wishes, I have made the ambassador’s secretary so much my friend, that if he is given a certain amount of money, he will let me know everything he does – including everything to do with the Queen of Scots and the cipher which is used with her.
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Walsingham jumped at the opportunity and made the funds immediately available. Courcelles began passing copies of correspondence to Bruno the following month. The spy’s message ends with another intelligence
coup de theatre:

The chief agents for the Queen of Scots are Monsieur Throgmorton and Lord Henry Howard.
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They never come to bring things from her except at night and the ambassador does the same (when he is sending to her).

His postscript must have made Walsingham smile: ‘Keep a close eye, I beg you, on a Scot called Fowler: he is extremely treacherous. The ambassador’s secretary told me to tell you this.’

The spy master diligently collected evidence against Throgmorton and pounced early on 4 November: two gentlemen of ‘no mean credit and reputation’ were sent to arrest him at his house near Paul’s Wharf on the banks of the Thames, just east of Baynards Castle. As he was carried off to the Tower, his home was searched and papers discovered that named a number of Catholic noblemen, as well as plans of harbours ideal for use by invading foreign forces. There were also twelve copies of an illegal pedigree of the descent of the crown of England, demonstrating the justice of Mary’s claim to the throne. Lord Henry Howard was arrested at the same time.

Throgmorton’s second spell on the rack was enough to persuade him to talk, despite his earlier oath that he would ‘endure a thousand deaths rather than accuse anyone’.
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The Duke of Guise, he blurted out through the cold sweat of pain and fear, was to command the invasion, planned to come ashore at the port of Arundel in Sussex, which would liberate Mary Queen of Scots and reintroduce Catholicism to England. It had been held up by lack of finance, despite the promises of the Pope
and Philip II of Spain to underwrite the costs of the expedition. His confession made it obvious that the real centre of the web of conspiracy was the cunning and devious Spanish ambassador in London, Bernardino de Mendoza.

On 19 January 1584, the Spanish envoy was summoned to meet a committee of Privy Councillors at the London home of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Bromley, amongst them Walsingham. After all had assembled, the dour Secretary of State stood up, his face grim and determined. He clutched a piece of paper in his hand containing six accusations against the ambassador, which he listed in turn in his fluent Italian whilst Mendoza, his face darkening with rage, was forced to listen:

1. That he had secret intelligence with the Scots Queen.
   

2. That he conspired with certain of her majesty’s subjects for her delivery [rescue].
   

3. That he sought to [sound out] the Catholics in this realm whether they would join with foreign forces if the Catholic Princes should send any.
   

4. That he put them in comfort that the king [of Spain] would assist them and contribute half the charges.
   

5. That he was privy to the coming into this realm of Charles Paget,
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   a fugitive out of this realm and a servant to the Scots Queen who was sent hither, both to [sound out] the Catholics’ minds and to view the ports and landing places.
   

6. That he received a [green velvet] casket containing the plans and papers of the conspiracies … sent to him by Francis Throgmorton.
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The queen, said Walsingham pointedly, preferred his room to his company and was graciously pleased to give him fifteen days to depart the realm.

Blustering under the accusations, Mendoza angrily challenged Walsingham to support his claims with some proof. He arrogantly thundered: ‘Don Bernardino Mendoza was born not to disturb kingdoms but to conquer them.’
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Nonetheless, he quietly departed England within a few days, closely shadowed by Walsingham’s agents,
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and became Spanish ambassador in Paris the following November.

In London, fears of conspiracies and assassination attempts upon Elizabeth’s life were heightened by the murder of the Dutch Protestant leader William of Orange in Middleburg in early July 1584. Walsingham wrote to Stafford in Paris: