The Watchers (24 page)

John Halter was practised at smuggling people across the English Channel. Usually his passengers went only one way, from England to France, either to Le Havre or Dieppe. Many of those he took to France were members of the Earl of Northumberland's household. They were Catholics or at least had Catholic connections. And they relied upon Halter's discretion. The shipmaster did not ask questions: sometimes he knew who his passengers were, sometimes he did not. But they had to have lots of money, for bribing the English port officials was an expensive business. The going rate to pay off the searcher of Arundel, whose job it was to check ships and their passengers, was £40, though for this great sum of money the searcher had let ‘divers pass'. Or so said the writer of a secret report for William Allen in Rheims.

What was unusual, however, about John Halter's gentleman passenger in September 1583 was a fact Halter may have suspected from the especially secretive means of their entry into England. The mysterious man who suffered so badly with sea sickness had come to Sussex to spy out the land for an invasion of Queen Elizabeth's kingdoms by the Catholic powers of mainland Europe.

Behind it all was a meeting in Paris four months earlier, in June 1583, convened by Henry, Duke of Guise to discuss an invasion of the British Isles. Six men attended the meeting. They were Guise himself, one of the most powerful men in Europe and a passionate believer in the rescue of Elizabeth's England from heresy; the duke's spiritual confessor, Claude Matthieu; Archbishop James Beaton of Glasgow, the ambassador
at the French court of the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots; the Pope's Nuncio in Paris, Castelli; William Allen, the guide and moral compass of English Catholics in exile; and François de Roncherolles, one of the duke's men, who gave a military briefing.

Some, like Doctor Allen, favoured an assault upon England; others thought that any army should land in Scotland. By the end of June Guise had his plan. A force of 12,000 troops under the command of the Duke of Bavaria's brother – most of them Spaniards, Germans and Italians – would sail from Spain to Flanders and land eventually in Lancashire, provoking a popular uprising of English Catholics in the north of England. Duke Henry would land with a second, smaller army on the Sussex coast, where he would use the local strongholds of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth in Sussex and the Earl of Arundel at Arundel Castle. This was at last a serious effort to decapitate Elizabeth's government once and for all: no wonder that in the spring and summer of 1583 the diplomatic connections between Spain, Rome and Paris buzzed with activity.

The Duke of Guise, cousin of Mary Queen of Scots, was thirty-three years old, tall and handsome, with a fair complexion and strawberry-blond hair. He was intelligent, athletic and charming, but also possessed the kind of arrogance and sense of high position that came of long nobility. In a country riven by religious civil war, the Guise family was immensely powerful, driven by a passionate hatred of Protestantism and the desire to revenge the murder of the second Duke of Guise by an assassin in 1563. They were not afraid to oppose even the French kings.

But the ambitions of Duke Henry went beyond the borders of France. Since the 1570s he had wanted to mount an invasion of England. His plans were often frustrated by a lack of either political and military will by King Philip of Spain or money, but Guise was always persistent in their pursuit. In 1578 he had consulted William Allen and representatives of Spain in the cause of his cousin Mary. The following year his chief agent travelled secretly throughout Europe. In December 1581 the duke had met Robert Persons, not long out of England, and William Crichton. Crichton, also a Jesuit priest, was an essential contact on Scotland, and a few months later, in spring 1582, he was involved in a project to restore Scotland to the
Catholic faith through the agency of Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox, then in favour at the court of young King James VI. Lennox would command an army and restore the Catholic faith; Guise, Crichton and others discussed an invasion of 8,000 men planned for September 1582. But it all came to nothing because of the collapse of Lennox's influence at James's court, the cooling of King Philip's support and the Pope's unwillingness to provide money for the expedition.

But the Duke of Guise was not a man to give up easily. The meeting in Paris in June 1583 meant that a definitive battle plan was at last agreed, and in July Henry went to Normandy to begin to prepare for the invasion. He sent a gentleman of his household to negotiate secretly at Petworth with the Earl of Northumberland and, through intermediaries, with the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth's court, Don Bernardino de Mendoza. This gentleman's name was Charles Paget.

Of all the English Catholic families caught between faith and loyalty, few were grander than the Pagets of Beaudesert in the county of Staffordshire. Of these Pagets none was subtler than Charles. He was a younger son of a noble family. His brother Thomas, a man in his middle thirties, was the third Baron Paget, inheriting the title in 1568 on the death of an elder brother, Henry. Their father, the first baron, was William Paget, one of the most powerful English politicians of the 1540s and 1550s, an adviser to monarchs, a diplomat and something of a king-maker. He died in 1563. His wife, Charles's mother, the dowager Lady Paget, was a formidable woman who lived till 1587.

For some years before his secret visit to England Charles Paget tried to play a double game with Sir Francis Walsingham. The two men met in Paris in August 1581 when Secretary Walsingham was in the city on a special embassy. Paget's problem was that he had crossed the English Channel without the queen's licence. Paget had complained about his ‘lamentable estate'. He was sick and in need of physic. He felt he might be of use to Walsingham. He proposed to change his lodgings in Paris and to live a life of secrecy: in other words, he offered himself as a spy. But Paget had not counted on the reports of Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, who made it plain to Walsingham that Paget was ‘a practiser against the estate' and a known supporter of Mary Queen of Scots. Cobham had even refused to allow
Paget into his presence. Paget appealed instead to Walsingham's wisdom and humanity.

There is a clear record of what Sir Francis Walsingham thought of Charles Paget. It is a model of brilliantly compressed frankness, sharp as flint. He wrote:

I have of late gotten some knowledge of your cunning dealing and that you meant to have used me for a stalking horse. Master Paget, a plain course is the best course. I see it very hard for men of contrary disposition to be united in good will. You love the Pope and I hate not his person but his calling. Until this impediment be removed we two shall neither agree in religion towards God nor in true and sincere devotion towards our prince and sovereign. God open your eyes and send you truly to know him.

Of a busy and inveterate plotter Walsingham, like Sir Henry Cobham, had taken full measure. Charles Paget was an exile to watch very carefully indeed.

This was the man who in September 1583 set off for the Sussex coast from the port of Dieppe. Very few people knew his real name, including John Halter the shipmaster who landed him at Arundel haven, guided him to Patching in Sussex and brought him safely back to Dieppe. The alias Paget used, when he had to, was Mope. Perhaps his choice of name – as a noun it could mean a fool and simpleton, or as a verb to wander around aimlessly or be in a daze – was in ironic counterpoint to the precision of his secret journey.

As Dame Margery Throckmorton rode in her coach from London to Lewisham on the second Wednesday in October 1583 she reflected upon the best way to leave England secretly. She was thinking about this not for herself, but for the second of her four sons, Thomas. His younger brother George had tried it already and he had failed, stopped and searched at the port. Temporarily detained, his clothes and belongings had been taken from him. Lady Throckmorton wanted Thomas to be able to pass safely with money, plate, clothes and other things ‘to carry over with him for his own provision'. She wanted him to have the chance to live a new life abroad. She had heard that the safest way for Catholics to leave England was to go to the Countess
of Arundel at Arundel Castle in Sussex, a few miles from where a gentleman with no name had come ashore from John Halter's bark a month before. The countess could be approached through her physician, Doctor Fryer. Very probably this was Thomas Fryer, who lived near the church of St Botolph outside the city walls of London at Aldersgate. Dame Margery had already invited Doctor Fryer to dinner at her house in Lewisham the very next day.

When Dame Margery arrived at Lewisham she wrote a letter to her eldest son, Francis, at Throckmorton House in London. She wanted Francis and his brother Thomas to act quickly. She asked Francis to be at Lewisham early the following day to meet Doctor Fryer. She sent to both of her sons God's blessing.

Francis Throckmorton received his mother's letter. He replied immediately. He did not like the idea of getting Thomas abroad with the help of the Countess of Arundel. He asked his mother to persuade – even to command – Thomas not to cross the English Channel. Francis Throckmorton was a careful man in October 1583. As a courier working secretly and treasonably for the Catholic powers of Europe, he had every reason to be.

The Tudor Throckmortons were a great sprawling and long-established family of land and some influence. Francis Throckmorton's father, Sir John, was the seventh of seven sons. One of his elder brothers, Francis's uncle Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, had served as Elizabeth's ambassador at the royal courts of Scotland and France. John Throckmorton himself was a lawyer and an important royal official. But in 1580 the family's situation was not a cheerful one. Sir John was accused of slackness and corruption in office; he spent some time in the Fleet prison in London and was burdened by the enormous fine of 1,000 marks (nearly £700), which in his will he directed Francis, as one of his executors, to pay. He had over £1,000 of debts owing to him, but himself owed more than £4,000, to gentlemen, scriveners, tailors and a vintner; he had pawned his chain and other jewels. Sir John died in May 1580, two days after making his will. He left a widow as well as four sons (Francis, Thomas, George and Edward) and two daughters (Mary and Anne), of whom all but Francis were under the age of twenty-four. Burdened by debt and the
reputation of corruption, he left behind him, too, a lingering sense of family disgrace.

There seems little doubt that the Throckmorton boys were brought up as Catholics. In 1576 Dame Margery was accused of hearing mass said by a seminary priest, and it was alleged that the same priest taught her sons. As young men the two elder brothers, Francis and Thomas, travelled abroad secretly and established connections in the Low Countries with Sir Francis Englefield, long known by Elizabeth's government as a rebel and conspirator. By 1583 Francis Throckmorton was carrying letters between Mary Queen of Scots and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, through Castelnau's secretary, Claude de Courcelles. Throckmorton was a regular visitor to Castelnau's residence at Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street. Sir Francis Walsingham knew about this part of Francis Throckmorton's life, for, though Throckmorton did not know it, Walsingham had Salisbury Court under close and effective surveillance.

Through the French embassy, Throckmorton became acquainted with three powerful men of the English Catholic nobility. The first was Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northumberland, whose brother Thomas, the seventh earl, had been executed for treason in 1572. The second was Lord Henry Howard, the brother of Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, beheaded as a traitor also in 1572. Lord Henry was forty-three years old, an exceptionally bright man and frequently suspected of murky political dealings with Catholics at home and abroad; these suspicions always seemed to lack firm evidence. It was once written of Lord Henry that ‘his spirit … is within no compass of quiet duty'. His subtle intelligence was peculiar among the Elizabethan nobility. The third of Francis Throckmorton's acquaintances was the weary and melancholic Lord Paget, Thomas the third Baron, whose brother was the energetic Charles Paget alias Mope. Treason, it seemed, had a habit of running in some Elizabethan families.

To the casual observer – even in fact to the reader of intercepted private letters – Thomas, Lord Paget was a loyal subject of the Tudor crown. The behaviour and reputation of his exiled brother Charles appeared to cause him some pain. In late October 1583 Lord Paget
wrote from London to Charles in Rouen. The letter was short and stiffly polite. Elizabeth's government, he wrote, had not looked kindly upon Charles's stay in Paris. His move to Rouen, where he was known to be mixing with other exiles and émigrés, was similarly ‘misliked'. Lord Paget advised Charles to travel further into France. He was troubled by reports – ‘advertisements' – of what his brother was up to, writing: ‘in some advertisements lately come, [that] you are touched as not to carry yourself so dutifully as you ought to do'. If this news was true, Lord Paget was sorry. He warned his brother to be wary, and he made his own position very clear. The plainness of his words was almost for the official record: ‘if you forget what duty and loyalty you owe here, I will forget to be your brother'. He left Charles in God's keeping.

Charles Paget never received Lord Paget's stern brotherly warning: it was neatly filed away in the office of Sir Francis Walsingham and his staff. But more secret still was a fact masked by the crispness of Lord Paget's message to Charles. The letter was a smokescreen; it may even have been a coded warning for Charles to keep himself safe. In fact, in late September the brothers had met to discuss the Duke of Guise's plan to invade England.

Francis Throckmorton was arrested on the same day as Lord Henry Howard in the first week of November 1583. Throckmorton had been under surveillance for a long time, suspected ‘upon secret intelligence given to the Queen's Majesty, that he was a privy [secret] conveyor and receiver of letters to and from the Scottish Queen'. By now the proof against him was fairly complete. But what may have prompted his arrest was the anxiety of Walsingham and other councillors over the strange treason of John Somerville, the Warwickshire gentleman who had set out from home to London with the intention of shooting the queen with his pistol. The government was very nervous.