Elizabeth's Spymaster (33 page)

We understand that your lordship has friends in the city [London] from whom [you] can learn more about the forces and armaments here than we can tell you. All we can say is that they are simply a mob of riffraff, with but few leaders, and they are more cunning at banquets than at war.

We are sure they are not as diligent [as] the Portuguese Geronimo Pardo in Lisbon and Bernaldo Luis in Madrid,
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who are relatives of Dr Nunez, who lives here. They carefully report hither everything that passes at Madrid and Lisbon and transmit their news by ships which they send from Spain …

[Pardo] brought… two packets of letters in cipher, giving a
full account of the warlike preparations which were being made by Spain. After translating them, he carried them to Secretary Walsingham…

[Another vessel brought] full accounts of the ships, men and stores for the Armada in Lisbon. The dispatches were delivered to Dr Nunez whilst he was at a dinner … He rose in great haste and went direct to Secretary Walsingham’s house.
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The prisoners questioned Nunez’s servant and relative Francisco de Tapia regarding whether there were any more letters from Pardo, and he told them that the Portuguese had been arrested in Lisbon on suspicion of being a spy and being traitorously in the service of England. Despite this, he had apparently persuaded the master of a German ship to take back letters to London, telling him:

It is a matter of life or death to him that you should carry this letter to Dr Hector Nunez …

The shipmaster hid the packet in a feather bed and on coming up the Channel in a storm, he ran ashore and lost everything but the lives of his crew.

This Tapia may be captured in Lisbon as he is going thither in a ship bound for Brazil. She must call at Lisbon and will be taken from there by Tapia, Pardo or by one Pero Freire of Lisbon.

She will also land in a port of Galicia or Portugal a man well disguised in the garb of a pilgrim. The ship and cargo are entirely English property, nothing belongs to the Portuguese who ostensibly own her … Another English ship, called the
Black Crow,
is also going to Spain carrying a false deed of sale and transfer in favour of certain Flemings. We have all the information set down here from good Catholics and we swear upon this cross [†] that we are writing it in all zeal for the service of God and our king.

It seems inconceivable to us now that two prisoners of war should either enjoy enough freedom in their place of captivity to gather such useful intelligence, or have the means to send it out of the country. Finally,
how could they be allowed free access to ‘good’ Catholics, given the paranoia about the dangers posed by recusants in London? They were apparently not even held under lock and key: Valverde and Santa Cruz were lodged with two London merchants, Simon Borman and James Naunton, and they had been told by the English authorities that ‘unless certain Englishmen in Seville were released, we should not be set at liberty’.
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Walsingham also sought professional advice about the size and type of forces that the Spanish would require for a successful invasion, to enable him to quantify the intelligence he was receiving. Sir William Winter, the English naval commander in the Low Countries, had been asked about the technical problems of amphibious operations and establishing a bridgehead on an enemy shore:

It seems from your honour’s letters that the Prince of Parma’s intention is towards [the Isle of] Sheppey, Harwich or Yarmouth, two of which I know perfectly as Sheppey and Harwich, the other not so well…

Whereas it is said the Prince’s strength is 30, 000 soldiers, then I assure your honour, it is no mean quantity of shipping that must serve for the transporting of that number [of men] and that which doth appertain to them, without the which I do not think they will put forth: 300 sail must be the least…
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The English were anticipating a Spanish landing somewhere along the south coast: Portsmouth or Southampton, perhaps, or even on the Isle of Wight – ‘the place for which the enemies of this realm have principally desired’.
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Some experienced army commanders, knowing the dire problems of resupplying an invading force on a hostile beach, suggested that the Spanish might seize a large harbour, and Plymouth, as the nearest major port to Spain, was suggested as the Armada’s probable first military objective.

In Madrid and Lisbon, the Spanish were also building up an intelligence picture of their adversaries. It was not always accurate, influenced at times by wishful thinking. Philip II advised the new
Armada commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, reassuringly that

the ships of the enemy are all old or small – different from those we make here in quality and soundness, leaving aside the advantages our men have in their numbers and in the experience many of them have.
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They also considered the kind of welcome they would receive. In 1587, they drew up a lengthy list of Englishmen, county by county, who were known practising Catholics and who might be relied upon to support, or even join, the invasion. It was not information collected or assessed altogether objectively. For example, under the list of Catholics living in Norfolk, we have:

Sir Henry Benefield,
who was formerly the guardian of Queen Elizabeth the pretended queen of England, during the whole time that his majesty was in England. Sir Henry kept her by order of King Philip and Queen Mary.

I wish to God they had burnt her then, as she deserved, with the rest of the heretics, who were justly executed.

If this had been done, we should be living now in peace and quietness.

In the County of York:

Sir Richard Stapleton

Sir Brian Stapleton,
who would risk his life for his majesty [Philip II]

Edward Clerker
of Risby

Henry Constable
of Holderness

William Babthorp
of Babthorpe

Robert Clerker
of Clerker, and many other gentlemen.

Others listed were likely opponents – a ready-made schedule of those to be arrested in the event of the Armada’s victory and Elizabeth being toppled from power.
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The document is naturally headed by the Privy Council, led by Leicester with Walsingham last, all of them named as ‘the principal devils that rule the court’.

The document urged a landing not on the south coast but in the restive North of England, in Northumberland or Westmorland where Catholicism was still endemic:

If his majesty [Philip II] intends to send a fleet… it will have to encounter strong resistance if it does not come to one of these counties. The way by Ireland is dangerous.

It would therefore be safer to enter and disembark at Kirkcudbright in the territory of the earl of Morton, who is now in Lisbon and would be glad to accompany them.

If the force be landed there, they might enter the rest of England with less risk than elsewhere.
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This was not sound tactical advice and it would have been unwelcome reading for Philip and his naval and land commanders. Not only would a voyage to the North of England increase considerably the logistical problems of the invasion fleet, but it would provide better opportunity for the English ships to split up the Armada and pick them off, one by one, en route. Moreover, they would face enough problems invading one country, let alone a second – Scotland.

As well as controlling England’s foreign and domestic espionage and counter-insurgency, Walsingham was also heavily involved in spreading disinformation, or black propaganda, amongst the enemies of England and his queen. Mendoza describes one such operation in a dispatch to King Philip in July 1587:

Some newsletters, in English, have been sent to me from Rome, which letters have been received, addressed to an English gentleman who had died here. The count de Olivares had seen them and thought they should be sent to our majesty.

I know of these letters … they were written by one of Walsingham’s officers who is the son of a Spanish friar who fled many years ago from St Isidro in Seville with a nun of Utrera, to whom he is married.

The son is a much worse heretic than the father and when he
wrote the letters he had them dated March to deceive the Englishman…

He wished to pledge the English gentleman here by this civility, in order that he might send him some news.

I mention this matter to your majesty that you may understand that although these reports have some appearance of probability, they are really hatched by Walsingham’s knavery.
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Richard Gibbes, one of Walsingham’s agents in Lisbon who posed as a Scotsman, was questioned by the Spanish about the suitability of various English harbours and rivers for use by the Armada ships. He told them misleadingly that the Thames was Very ill, full of sands within and without sight of land and not possible to bring in a navy’.
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As events turned out, they did not believe him because their final plan was to aim for the Thames, in order to land troops on either bank of the river.

Walsingham also employed the black art of psychological warfare. Those with the precious skills to divine the future foretold disasters and great storms for the summer of 1588, and these predictions received wide circulation in pamphlets and almanacs printed both in Paris and Amsterdam. In Spain, recruitment for the Armada began to suffer in the teeth of these prophecies and in Lisbon an astrologer was arrested for making ‘false and discouraging predictions’.
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It is entirely plausible that Walsingham encouraged these demoralising forecasts.

But his greatest opportunity to hoodwink the Spanish government lay in Paris. The English envoy there, Sir Edward Stafford, appointed in 1583, had become a double agent for the Spaniards. He had accumulated substantial gambling debts by playing cards with the French king’s brother Francis, Duke of Alençon,
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and his companions during his first year as ambassador, but maintained that he now avoided such expensive (and dangerous) pastimes.

But he remained always short of money. Stafford had been recruited by Mendoza who had offered him financial inducements to supply information – the classic espionage scenario for ‘turning’ an individual into a useful agent. He perhaps became the ‘illegal’ in Paris (in modern parlance)
codenamed ‘Julio’.
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The Spanish ambassador had reported to Philip II in 1585 that ‘now was the time for your majesty to make use of him [Stafford] if you wished any service done. You should see by his acts how willing he was to do so. This ambassador is much pressed for money’. The Spanish king suggested paying him 2, 000 crowns ‘or the jewel you suggest’.
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Stafford also accepted 3, 000 crowns from the Duke of Guise for showing him English diplomatic correspondence and was in regular contact with Charles Arundel, a Catholic exile in Paris and a congenital conspirator. There is no doubt that Walsingham deeply mistrusted the envoy, even sending one of his agents, Thomas Rogers, alias Nicholas Berden, in 1586 to monitor Stafford’s relationships with exiled English Catholics in Paris.

Stafford may well have suspected Walsingham’s doubts about his loyalty and honesty. He wrote to him on 10 July 1588 complaining of his shortage of funds:

If you did know what unseasonable times and unreasonable, I have had to pass … ordinary bounds of expense and especially the Queen of Scots’ time, above all other, and this last both for mine own conservation and preservation of things in good state for her majesty’s service here, I think you would not wonder at the expense.
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But his treachery also provided Walsingham with an opportunity to use him as an innocent conduit for feeding false information regarding English intentions and military strength to the Spanish, and no doubt the spy master spotted this and seized his chance. But why the ambassador was not eventually impeached remains a mystery.
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Certainly, the flow of intelligence to the Spanish in Paris ceased after the defeat of the Armada.

In Rome, the Pope was also carefully monitoring the progress of the Armada and the constant diplomatic posturing in the courts of Europe. The Count de Olivares, King Philip’s ambassador to the Vatican, reported in October and November
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that Sixtus had been told that the French king Henry III had refused to take any role in the Spanish invasion ‘until he pacified his own affairs’. The pontiff heard that Châteauneuf in London
had written that the English were ‘in the utmost confusion and discouragement’. In Scotland, King James VI was reportedly deeply suspicious of the motivation behind the Armada invasion plan and, perceptively, believed that Philip of Spain wanted to deprive him of his rights to the English crown. A Scottish diplomatic source also said that Elizabeth had ordered Burghley and Walsingham ‘by all means to make peace with’ Spain and when the Secretary asked her ‘what about religion, she replied angrily that she would agree about religion and everything else’.