The Watchers (22 page)

Sir Thomas Copley was a fairly harmless exile. The Earl of Westmorland, outlaw and rebel, was not. But still Parry wrote on Westmorland's behalf to Burghley. Westmorland, who was twenty-six or twenty-seven when he had taken part in the Northern Rising of 1569, was now ready to fall at Elizabeth's feet, repenting the errors and faults of his youth. Only here in Parry's report to Burghley there was just a shade of uncertainty. He did not know whether ‘the reclaiming of desperate men do agree with our state and policy' – this certainly suggests the limit of any instructions Burghley had given to him – but he saw the benefits of it and left the matter to Burghley's ‘wisdom and grave consideration'.

Even William Parry may have recognized that these were treacherous waters, but he was unselfconsciously happy to navigate them. He had standing, unofficial yet acknowledged. One mark of his credit in official circles was to receive letters from Burghley. A second was his freedom to send a letter to England with Edward Stafford, Elizabeth's special ambassador to the Duke of Anjou, which Stafford delivered to Burghley at Elizabeth's court. This letter contained a digest of a fortnight's worth of intelligence from Paris in July: the politics of the Pope's cardinals, a book printed in Paris slanderous to Elizabeth, the thinking of William Allen, the Bishop of Ross's standing with the Archbishop of Glasgow (both men were representatives in Paris of the Queen of Scots), and even an account of dinner with the archbishop and two Scottish noblemen. To Lord Burghley Parry was a moderately useful source of information. His cleverness and vanity worked to his advantage – for the time being.

In September 1580 Parry was in London. He would have preferred to speak to Burghley at court but had to settle for a letter. Burghley was too busy to see him. ‘Your lordship's small leisure maketh me loath to deliver many things by mouth,' he wrote, ‘my letters serving for your better leisure.' He recommended the service of Guido Cavalcanti, an agent of Catherine de' Medici, and enclosed a letter he had come across in Paris. It was the work of ‘a busy dealer in English practices', an Italian called Julio Busini.

Parry was pompously self-important in writing to Burghley. He related his many conversations with the French ambassador in London, who, Parry said, talked to him plainly about great and significant things. He boasted about his contacts with Mary Stuart's advisers in Paris: the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Bishop of Ross and, most mysterious of all, Thomas Morgan, Mary's gatherer of secret intelligence. Parry was always alert to Lord Burghley's powerful patronage: he was, he wrote, merely the poor sworn servant of the queen and looked upon Burghley as his best friend, father and lord. Parry was a man rarely given to understatement. But the truth was that Parry the social climber had long lived the kind of life he could not afford to sustain. The easy flatterer was heavily in debt. Soon he would feel the reality of the situation he had made for himself.

The great fall came for Parry in early November 1580. On Wednesday the 2nd he forced his way into a chamber in the Inner Temple in London and confronted Hugh Hare. Hare was both a lawyer and a moneylender who had lent Parry the huge sum of £610, with interest to pay on top. Hare said that Parry broke down the door to his rooms and threatened to kill him. Parry's account was very different. Picking through the depositions of witnesses, he contended the evidence. The broken door and the threat to Hare's life, for example, came from Hare's evidence only, or so Parry maintained. One witness had gone up to Hare's chamber to find ‘the nail of the latch of the door thrust out', but he could not say that Parry had done this. The same witness seems to have deposed that Parry had no weapon. Another said in his deposition, according to Parry, that ‘no harm had happened if Hare had not threatened to put Parry in a sack'. The threat, then, came from Hare. Carefully and precisely – and no wonder, for his life was at stake – Parry set out in a letter to Lord Burghley the weakness of the evidence against him, even questioning the literacy and accuracy of his indictment. The case went to trial, but Parry, always given to feelings of betrayal by others, believed that it was a fix: ‘It will be proved that the recorder [i.e. the most senior judge in London] spake with the jury. And that the foreman did drink.' Whatever the truth of his allegations, Parry was found guilty of burglary and attempted murder.

The Elizabethan punishment for a felony was hanging. But Parry, pardoned by the queen, was saved from the gallows: after all, in Lord Burghley he had a powerful patron. Yet he was nevertheless still deeply, painfully in debt. The sum of £610 he had borrowed from Hare had risen ‘by usury and recompence' (to use Parry's words) to £1,000. To add to the money he owed to Hare was the fantastic sum of £2,000 in a bond of surety.

But Parry was a survivor, even if there was something reckless in the way he tried to raise money. He became in effect a confidence trickster, working to ingratiate himself with a young heir called Edward Hoby. Parry, clever and plausible, was facing financial ruin: Hoby, who was twenty-one years old, was young, rich and inexperienced. He was also Lord Burghley's nephew, and in November 1581 Hoby's mother, Lady Russell, wrote to her powerful brother-in-law ‘in my extremity of grief for a matter of no small importance to my heart'. She had heard of Parry's ‘ill dealing' used towards her son ‘in compassing bargains at his hands' concerning some of Hoby's properties. Parry had given his oath to Lady Russell. He had broken it, and she was desperate: ‘if this be not prevented the boy is undone. I beseech your lordship most humbly off my knees, good lord commit Parry to some prison'. It seems that Burghley did exactly that, for by the middle of December Parry was in the Poultry Counter in London, a filthy prison between Old Jewry and the Royal Exchange, not far from Cheapside. There he reflected upon the debts he owed to Hugh Hare, with no prospect of a handsome fee from Edward Hoby.

To Parry it was obvious that he was the wronged party. He wrote to the Privy Council, ‘driven by this extraordinary mean' to petition for redress of the grievances done to him by Hare. He craved their lordships' favour and desired justice. He was very angry: ‘God knoweth and my conscience beareth me witness that I have deserved better of my prince and country than to be thus tormented in prison and credit by a known cunning and shameless usurer.' These were strong words to use for a man in Parry's position.

Twelve men had stood surety for Parry, together raising the necessary bond for good behaviour of £2,000. It was clear he had influential and rich friends. One of the guarantors was Edward Stafford, soon to
be Elizabeth's resident ambassador at the French court; on one level at least Parry must have been a persuasive man. Yet his difficulties continued. In late January 1582 Parry wrote again to Burghley. Those ‘best friends' of his who had been willing to be bound to Hugh Hare for £600 were, he said, ‘by the practise of my adversaries drawn from me'. Parry could rely only upon Burghley to ‘stand my good lord'. If Burghley did nothing, Parry was ‘like to lie here a good while' in what he called his ‘bad lodging' in prison. So Parry, the traveller and intelligencer, made a suggestion to Burghley: ‘If my absence at Paris for three years may do any service to your lordship (thereby also to avoid the offence of all men here) I will gladly undertake it.' His ‘singular devotion' to Burghley and resolution to honour and serve him made Parry ‘thus bold'. He wanted, in other words, once again to spy for Burghley: it was the price he offered to pay for his release from prison.

Burghley seems to have accepted Parry's offer. Freed from the Poultry Counter, in early August 1582 he prepared to set out for Paris. He stayed in the city for just over a month, leaving for Lyons on 25 September. By January 1583 he was in Venice. He appeared now supremely untroubled by any obligation to Burghley: the urgency of the Poultry Counter was soon swept away by the pleasures of travelling through France and northern Italy. He had clear ideas already about what he did and did not want to do for Elizabeth's lord treasurer. After all, he was no ordinary informant; he knew he had special talents. ‘I find it a matter very unpleasant to be troubled or tied to the advertisement of ordinary occurents,' he wrote. If anything happened that he thought was of importance, Parry said, he would not fail to inform Burghley.

And yet for all Parry's spectacular wilfulness, he does seem to have begun fairly vigorously to gather news and information from Venice, a city which had for a long time been a European hub for intelligence from the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula. Much of it was gossip, though some of it was useful. In a letter to Burghley in late February 1583 Parry sent news from Flanders, Naples, Spain and Portugal. He wrote, too, of a new book that had been printed in Rome called
De Persecutione Anglicana
, known in an English edition as
An epistle of the persecution of Catholickes in Englande
. It was the work of Robert Persons, Edmund Campion's fellow Jesuit in England, and had been first printed in Rouen in 1582.

Parry had never before shown very much interest in religion; he was drawn more to fine dinners in grand company. But here, for the first time, Parry hinted at his private view on what in Persons's argument was the persecution of Catholics in England. Parry took the book very seriously. He told Burghley that it gave ‘a barbarous opinion of our [i.e. English] cruelty', especially in the hanging, drawing and quartering of traitors: ‘I could wish that in those cases it might please Her Majesty to pardon the dismembering and quartering.' Parry continued on this theme six days later when he wrote once again to Burghley: ‘I pray you tell Master Secretary [Sir Francis Walsingham] that here is so great speech of his persecution and cruelty that your lordship (sometime in the same predicament) is almost forgotten.' Walsingham, the Earl of Huntingdon and the Earl of Leicester were ‘the men most wondered at' in the great persecution. For a man who never wore faith on his sleeve, William Parry's views on Robert Persons's
Persecution
were surprisingly vigorous.

Any study of William Parry must point to his inflated self-regard, his snobbery, his peculiarly distorted sense of reality, his naive faith in Lord Burghley's patronage and good fortune, his gambler's instinct for taking wild chances, his stratagems and schemes. Parry was variable and vain, possessed of self-confidence over ability. In the spring of 1583 it would have been harder to find a more contrastingly different man to Parry than Thomas Phelippes, servant to Sir Francis Walsingham, who was engaged in secret work in France.

Phelippes was deliberate, able and self-reliant: a thoughtful, careful and compact man. He set out his letters with care; he wasted few words. He wrote in an italic hand, the mark of an educated man. His script was minute, perhaps showing something of the technical precision of a mathematician, which as one of the most gifted breakers of secret code and cipher in Europe Phelippes certainly was. Born in about 1556, he was the eldest son of William Phelippes, a London cloth merchant. He was a student, probably, of Trinity College in Cambridge. Beyond this, it is hard to be sure of the facts of Phelippes's
early life: he is one of the most secret and secretive characters in this book.

Phelippes was in France in July 1582, though it is not clear for what purpose. In Bourges he replied to a letter from Walsingham. His master had sent a letter in cipher for Phelippes to make sense of. For Walsingham this was a risk; the danger of having packets intercepted was real – indeed the letter Phelippes applied himself to was itself intercepted by Elizabeth's government. It may have been one of William Allen's letters, which were either stolen or bought from the European couriers fairly regularly in the early 1580s; or perhaps it was a packet sent to the Queen of Scots's ambassador in Paris, the Archbishop of Glasgow. In 1580 the archbishop had complained to William Parry about a number of his letters that had been intercepted.

Whatever the letter was, to send it all the way to Phelippes in France was a measure of his unique skills in Elizabethan cryptanalysis. Phelippes told Walsingham that he had ‘travailed to the uttermost in the cipher'. He had had, he wrote, some success, ‘if not so good as was wished, sufficient yet I hope as to satisfy Her Majesty'. He gave a technician's appreciation of the difficulty of the task, ‘won as it were out of the hard rock'. The problem was the writer's terrible Latin: ‘whether it were of ignorance or policy the writer hath made so many faults as well in the Latin as the orthography that I was fain [compelled] to supply it almost everywhere by conjecture to make sense'.

Phelippes left Bourges in August and went on to Sancerre, between Nevers and Briare on the main post road out of Lyons. There he kept himself to himself: ‘I kept myself close in places of small bruits [rumours].' He wanted to get to Paris, but his path was blocked by plague and sickness and the filthy winter weather of early 1583. He arrived in the city on or near to 13 March, for he was keen to report immediately to his master: ‘Being here now at the last arrived at Paris,' he wrote to Walsingham, ‘the first thing I think it my part to do, is to remember my most humble duty unto your honour.' In the letter he gave away little of his mission, though it seems to have been somewhere off the beaten track of Anglo-French diplomacy. In July Sir Henry Cobham, Elizabeth's ambassador, knew that Phelippes was in Bourges and had sent his servant to visit him. Now in Paris Phelippes was sure that Walsingham would forgive the long delays
of the journey. This was the confidence, not of a man like Parry, but of a trusted and discreet servant who could assure himself of Walsingham's ‘gracious interpretation' of his actions with few words of excuse.

The mystery of Thomas Phelippes's mission remains its object and purpose. Phelippes had been in France for at least eight months. Perhaps he was gathering news from France or making contact with possible sources of information. Given that he spent some time hidden away on the main post road from Lyons to Paris, a route commonly used by priests travelling between the English College in Rome and William Allen's seminary in Rheims, he may have been watching for émigrés or intercepting their letters. Whatever the nature of his mission, it did not involve a long stay in Paris. He had only just reached the city when he wrote his first letter to Walsingham, and already he was preparing to leave for England, giving ‘these few lines' to let his master know of his return. He offered his ‘poor service' to Walsingham at home or abroad.