The Watchers (26 page)

Paget had told almost no one of his plan to leave England. His solicitor and secretary knew, and a few other close servants; others may have guessed. His mother had expected him at her house in Staffordshire, where he had had an appointment to see her. He apologized from Paris for not keeping their meeting. His sister, Lady Anne Lee, was entirely in the dark, though he wanted her now to make the official arrangements necessary for his servants to be sent to him. Lady Anne's husband was Sir Henry Lee, the queen's champion, and we can guess that Lord Paget had put Lady Anne in an awkward situation. The baron also left behind him in England the heir to the Paget barony, his young son William. Paget's wife had died a few months before he left England, and so near the end of the note to Lady Anne Lee her brother wrote: ‘I pray you take care of Will.'

Lord Paget's letter to Burghley went directly to England with the post of Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford. The packet to his mother and sister Paget sent to a London bookbinder called Williams at the sign of the Horn on Fleet Street, from where it would be carried to Staffordshire. Lady Paget may never have read her son's letter, for it survives, probably intercepted, in the papers of Walsingham's office.

Lord Paget and his friend and companion Charles Arundel visited Sir Edward Stafford at his house in Paris. This was the day before Lord Paget composed his letters to Burghley, his mother and his sister. On 1 December Stafford wrote to the queen and to Walsingham. Just as he had sealed up the packets for the courier who would take them to London, Lord Paget and Arundel called on him. They appeared silently. ‘They were behind me in my dining chamber afore anybody was aware of them,' he explained to Walsingham, leaving Sir Edward ‘somewhat amazed'. Paget and Arundel began to explain why they had left England, ‘for their consciences, and for fear [of] having enemies that the cause being given by the traitorous Somerville [John Somerville, Elizabeth's putative assassin] to have a hard hand over all papists'. Choosing his words very carefully, Stafford replied to them that he thought ‘their coming away at this time might give cause to their enemies (if they had any) to suspect their conscience not be clear'. Sir Edward promised to write to the queen to tell her what they had said. He also asked them not to visit him again till he knew Her Majesty's pleasure. To protect himself – a sensible precaution given the suspicions of Paget and Arundel in England – he wrote to Walsingham and Burghley, and enclosed with Burghley's packet Lord Paget's letter to the lord treasurer.

Francis Throckmorton was interrogated again in the Tower of London on 2 and 4 December. He confessed to a conversation he had had with King Philip's ambassador in Paris and the ‘plot laid for the enterprise of the Duke of Guise'. Throckmorton had given the ambassador an account of havens along the English coast and a list of sympathetic Catholic noblemen and gentlemen. Throckmorton said that Philip had promised to fund half the cost of the expedition. Robert Persons went to Rome to solicit the Pope for the rest. Dame Margery Throckmorton, Francis's mother, admitted to the arrangements she had made in September to get her second son, Thomas, out of England. She told her interrogators about the Countess of Arundel, Doctor Fryer and the letter she had written to Francis.

The most difficult prisoner to handle was Lord Henry Howard. Hardly any piece of evidence stuck to him. The challenge of his interrogation can be seen in the long and involved questions put to him by
his interrogators. The most important of these had to do with Charles Paget and the alias the government knew he had used, Mope; with the activities of the French ambassador; with any tokens or messages Lord Henry had received from the Queen of Scots or her agents; and with any of his communications with Francis Throckmorton, Charles Arundel and Lord Paget. Howard admitted to knowing about Charles Paget's letters brought to Lord Henry's house and to the Earl of Arundel's Charterhouse. Of course he had no idea of who had delivered them and could say nothing about the two or three seals that had been used to secure the packets. He remembered that one letter handed to him in St James's Park bore the seal of a St Andrew's cross. If it came from the Queen of Scots, he said, it did so only indirectly. In the subtle evasions of clever Lord Henry Howard hard facts were elusive things.

The arrival of the two important Englishmen in Paris caused a stir in official circles. ‘There is no small ado here in court of my Lord Paget's and Charles Arundel's coming hither,' Sir Edward Stafford wrote in the first week of December. Sir Edward added with a dash of acid that Lord Paget was esteemed by the French king's courtiers to be ‘a greater man' than ever Stafford knew him in England. The ambassador had had Paget and Arundel watched since their arrival. He knew that Charles Paget rarely left the company of Thomas Morgan, the Queen of Scots's intelligencer in the city.

It was really only a matter of time before William Parry, that ever-keen advocate of exiles and émigrés, the gentleman spy with a gift for social flattery, took it upon himself to write in the cause of Lord Paget and Charles Arundel, Paget's companion in their secret departure from England. Parry was in Paris on 26 November and fed up: ‘Myself do begin to despair of better fortune, my state … being brought to £20 [of] land.' To Walsingham he pleaded poverty. ‘Fiat voluntas Dei,' he wrote, ending his letter ‘with my most hearty prayer for your honourable and happy life.'

But less than a fortnight later, thrown into action by the cause of the new exiles, Parry was very busy. On 7 December he understood ‘the disquietness' at home caused by the departure overseas of Paget and Arundel. A day later he was thoroughly involved in the matter.
‘I find them not to complain of Her Majesty's government,' Parry wrote, ‘but that, oppressed by their contraries [enemies], they were either to leave their country or to abide and suffer more disgraces than they deserved or were able to bear.' He said that they spoke very honourably of Walsingham and commended him ‘for as real a gentleman as liveth'. Parry wrote: ‘I have had sundry conferences with them whereof I mean to make you privy upon my return.'

It was unlikely in early December 1583 that Sir Francis Walsingham would have been much affected by the flattery of either William Parry or Charles Arundel. He was more concerned by the facts of conspiracy that were being gathered and assembled. Dozens of possible witnesses – gentlemen, shipmasters, yeoman farmers, household servants – were interviewed in Sussex by justices of the peace and in London and Westminster by clerks of the Privy Council.

Edward Caryll, a Sussex gentleman who had been in London, denied hearing anything of ‘the going away of the Lord Paget and Charles Arundel' other than the common rumour in London. He had last seen Lord Paget on the street near the Temple Bar in the very early days of November. ‘Good morrow, Master Caryll,' Lord Paget had said, to which Caryll replied ‘Good morrow, my lord.' They had had no conversation. Caryll had seen Charles Arundel once or twice in London during the Michaelmas law term but they not had spoken. The only thing Caryll admitted to was hearing a rumour in Sussex that Paget and Arundel had slept at Caryll's house in his own absence before leaving England. Knowing that suspicion might fall on him, Caryll had immediately gone to a Sussex justice to make a statement.

Gradually the pieces began to fall into place. Within a fortnight of Paget's illicit departure for France, Walsingham knew the names of the owner and the skipper of the boat who had met Paget and his men under cover of darkness on the Sussex coast. Even more significantly, he discovered from Paget's secretary that his lordship had met Francis Throckmorton and Lord Henry Howard only the day before Paget had left London to go into exile.

The conditions of Francis Throckmorton's confinement in the Tower of London were by early December proving surprisingly leaky.
He was, after all, a state prisoner under close observation, around whom was gathering a formidable body of evidence of treason and espionage. But Throckmorton had a contact on the inside. She was Sislye Hopton, the daughter of the Tower's lieutenant, who became friendly with Francis Throckmorton's brother George, sent to the Tower some time after 13 November. George ‘moved her for some device to have his brother [Francis] out of the Tower'. Sislye did not agree to this: but nor did she tell her father about it.

Very probably with Sislye Hopton's help, George Throckmorton managed to get a letter from Francis to his wife Anne. It arrived at dinnertime on Friday, 13 December, brought by a little boy with long hair. Two days later, one of the Throckmortons' servants said under interrogation that the opening words of the letter were ‘My good sweetheart'. He then revealed the existence of the little velvet-covered casket that had been smuggled out of Throckmorton House and given to the Spanish ambassador's servant. The Throckmorton family was questioned, as was the little boy who had carried the letter from the Tower. He was sent to Bridewell hospital to be held for further examination. Sislye Hopton, who was much too friendly with traitors in the Tower of London, found herself in a great deal of trouble.

By the middle of December Walsingham knew that Charles Paget, using the alias of Mope, had come to England secretly from Dieppe in September of that same year. His purpose had been to spy out the land for an invasion of the Sussex coast by the Duke of Guise. Essential to Guise's plan were two English Catholic noblemen who had strongholds close to the point where the duke wanted to land his troops, the Earl of Northumberland and Philip Howard, thirteenth Earl of Arundel, and Lord Henry Howard's nephew. Both men inevitably found themselves under suspicion.

On 15 December Northumberland was held under guard in his London house, accused of having secretly met Charles Paget in September. He quickly confessed to the meeting with Paget, but said that it had to do with the private affairs of Lord Paget. Walsingham thought the earl was lying. He wrote to Elizabeth's ambassador in Paris: ‘Charles Paget is a most dangerous instrument, and I wish for the Earl of Northumberland's sake, he had never been born.'

In Paris ambassador Stafford himself was pursuing several lines of inquiry. He reported to Walsingham that Charles Paget and Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart's chief spy in Paris, were inseparable. Lord Paget now had money: 4,000 French crowns sent to Paris by a London merchant; the exchange of currency had come through the city of Rouen. In London Walsingham's men began to make out Lord Paget's movements and itinerary in October and November 1583, weeks before he had left England. They learned one crucial fact. Francis Throckmorton had met Lord Paget ‘the last term about Hallowtide' (1 November) ‘and supped with my lord at his lodgings in Fleet Street'.

Equally, the details of Charles Paget's secret visit to England were all the time becoming clearer. Thanks to careful investigations in Sussex, Walsingham's men found and questioned the shipmaster who had brought Paget across the English Channel from Dieppe. The Earl of Northumberland was interrogated further about his dealings with Francis Throckmorton, his conversations with the Paget brothers and Lord Henry Howard. Significant was Charles Paget's great interest in places and landing sites along the coast. What is more, there was growing evidence of the part Paget had played over some years in the carrying of letters between the French and Spanish ambassadors in London and Mary Queen of Scots in captivity in Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The case against the dangerous English émigré who called himself Mope began to mount up.

The principal treason was to mount an invasion of England and it was clear as day that the Duke of Guise was behind the enterprise. Charles Paget was a major player. Francis Throckmorton was a small but significant element in the machine. The French and Spanish ambassadors in London were quite clearly hostile to Elizabeth. Senior members of some of the grandest families in the kingdom were implicated in the projected invasion: the Earl of Northumberland, Thomas, Lord Paget and surely Lord Henry Howard.

The Christmas holidays did not impede an investigation that by now had great momentum. Both the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Henry Howard were interrogated once again. So were their household servants. The Earl of Arundel was questioned further. The government intercepted suspicious packets of letters sent from
England to Charles Paget in France. In Paris Sir Edward Stafford had Lord Paget and Charles Arundel followed. The two men were quite different kinds of émigré, Paget quiet and reserved, Arundel angry and talkative. One was tongue-tied, Stafford wrote, the other had it at liberty: Paget was cold and patient, Arundel choleric and impatient.

One political consequence of the uncovering of the Duke of Guise's plan for the invasion of England was a major rupture in Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. Although Guise was responsible for the project, helped by English Catholic émigrés, Francis Throckmorton had been plain about Spanish involvement in it. So it was that Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the ambassador of the King of Spain who despised Elizabeth's Protestant government with a passion, was dismissed from her court with very little ceremony. In January 1584 he was taken from Dover to Calais on board
The Scout
, a ship manned by a crew of forty sailors and twenty gunners. At the substantial cost to Elizabeth's treasury of £46 and 5 shillings, an enemy was escorted out of England across the English Channel. An English official was sent to Spain to explain Mendoza's expulsion, but King Philip did not even grant him an audience.

Francis Throckmorton was tried and condemned for treason in the Guild Hall in London on 21 May 1584. Three weeks later a full account of Throckmorton's conspiracies appeared in print, laying out in plain English his ‘intelligence' with the Queen of Scots and the plottings of the Duke of Guise, Charles Paget, the Throckmorton family, Sir Francis Englefield in the Low Countries and Thomas Morgan in Paris. The names of the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Henry Howard were carefully omitted. A Latin translation of the pamphlet was printed for foreign readers; in the case of Francis Throckmorton Elizabeth's government was sensitive to criticism throughout Europe.