The Watchers (42 page)

If Snowden was indeed telling the truth about these papers, aboard
The Adulphe
was a substantial cache of material valuable to Elizabeth's government. Of their books, Snowden explained that he and Fixer had given them to the ship's cook. Snowden told Burghley that he would recover the books and papers by writing to the ship's master. If he would not or could not help, then a member of his crew and a fellow passenger on
The Adulphe
knew where Snowden had put them. And so Snowden wrote to the master in Amsterdam, while Burghley, careful to keep and mark every piece of paper, dated and endorsed his own copy of the letter.

On 25 May, the fourth day of Snowden's questioning, Burghley set out to test every part of the story so far. He wanted facts; he was looking for corroboration, and evidence that Snowden knew what and whom he was talking about. There was nothing in Burghley's hard and pressing questions about freedom of worship for English Catholics or
ambitious plans to control the seminaries. He was not bothered about grand designs. Burghley wanted the physical descriptions of all the priests of Persons's mission and of the Englishmen who served the King of Spain. He wished to know more about Snowden's journey from Spain and Portugal; indeed he wanted from Snowden a full report of where he had been and how he had lived since leaving England years before. Snowden had said that he had once written to Sir Francis Walsingham using the alias of Juan de Campo: exactly when was that? Who were Snowden's kinsmen in England? Burghley asked Snowden what name he had intended to use when he came on his mission to England and how he was able to make a cipher alphabet out of the word DEUS. What did he know of the plans and dispositions of King Philip to invade England?

Here we begin to find the real John Snowden. The truth behind the self-confidence was a young man cut off from his family in England, of whom he knew nothing: it was almost nine years since he had heard from them or they from him. His two brothers were dead, killed fighting Spanish soldiers in Flanders. He had not seen his father for twelve years. Snowden had left England for Rheims in 1582 and begun to study divinity in William Allen's seminary; he was one of the priests of Allen's mission to save England. He became close to Allen, who employed Snowden as his Latin secretary.

To Burghley's question about his cover name in England Snowden gave a prickly response. He had, he said, never had any intention of carrying out the mission. The DEUS cipher was a simple substitution, moving the alphabet along so that D gave a, e gave b and so on; it was a cipher that would have troubled Thomas Phelippes for minutes at best. The King of Spain's intention, Snowden said, was to persist in the Enterprise of England, the invasion of Elizabeth's kingdoms and the queen's deposition. He ended by speculating on how he and his companion Fixer might be able to spy for Burghley, to ‘go unknown and keep our intelligence secret'. But beyond the suggestion Snowden was uncharacteristically guarded: that would have to rest upon Burghley's wisdom and experience.

Perhaps he seemed to be losing some of his self-confidence, beginning, after five days of questioning, to feel the wear and tear of close examination. But Snowden quickly bounced back. He made a new
and confident statement of the conspiracies of Cardinal Allen and Father Persons and gave a sure-footed technical analysis of Spain's military capabilities. For a man whose interests may have been served by exaggerating King Philip's power, Snowden's judgement was perhaps surprising: ‘His domestical forces are wonderful poor and pitiful, more than can be imagined.' He believed Spain was painfully short of naval captains, soldiers, sailors, gunners and munitions. He gave the names of Cardinal Allen's principal supporters and agents in Rouen, Paris, Madrid and Flanders. He provided a long list of those priests who quietly opposed Allen's aggressive policy. And he named those of Elizabeth's subjects who favoured the Spanish. At the head of the list was the renegade English military commander Sir William Stanley, followed by Sir Francis Englefield and the Duke of Parma's intelligencer Hugh Owen.

Burghley had wanted facts: Snowden gave them willingly. The young priest who had for days been questioned very closely by the most powerful man in Elizabeth's government, still hidden away in Burghley House in Westminster, had now only to wait to hear what use would be made of him.

Burghley decided to use Snowden and Fixer as spies. The deal was done by 31 May 1591. On that Monday night Snowden met Sir Robert Cecil, to whom Burghley now left the practical arrangements of getting Snowden and Fixer safely across the English Channel to mainland Europe. Sir Robert, Fixer and Snowden talked that evening about the gathering of intelligence from Spain and Italy.

Snowden wrote to Sir Robert the following day. He was not quite satisfied with their passports and safe conducts. He received a prompt reply from Cecil: Snowden could send his own wording for the passports, and Burghley would read and consider it. Sir Robert, though now in charge of the day-to-day handling of the priest-spies, by habit and experience deferred to his father's judgement.

So it seemed that only ten days after making their first statements to Burghley Snowden and Fixer were free at last to travel. Cecil reminded the two priests that their freedom came with an obligation not to be forgotten. They were being set free for a purpose, to gather intelligence for Lord Burghley or, in Sir Robert's elegantly grand
phrasing, to ‘bring forth good fruit with profitable correspondency for Her Majesty's service'. Snowden was too clever to misunderstand Cecil's meaning. He wrote to Sir Robert on 4 June acknowledging Burghley's ‘most benign and bounteous offer of warrant and protection, the reserving of the knowledge of us, our case and cause to his honour only'.

Soon enough, Snowden got from Burghley the passport he wanted. Its wording suggested an important mission, and no port official who saw the lord treasurer's signature would have dared to hold the two agents: ‘You shall let the bearer hereof pass without trouble or vexation, for that the knowledge and examination of his cause and person I have reserved to myself for divers occasions.' Snowden promised faithful and good service. He wondered whether the ‘good' Catholics they came across would be subject to England's ferocious penal laws. Snowden, like any Catholic priest, was acutely conscious of the law he and John Fixer had been so fortunate to escape, which declared any Jesuit or seminary priest in England to be guilty of high treason. Once this point was resolved, Snowden wrote, they would do good service in Italy or Spain. He sent another letter to Sir Robert on the same day with descriptions of priests. Snowden left his letter unsigned: ‘Your worship knoweth the heart and hand of the writer.'

The days passed by, but for Snowden and Fixer there was no quick dispatch across the English Channel. Their mission had suffered a false start. Burghley or Sir Robert (or both father and son together) had had second thoughts.

The excitement of the first week of June quickly passed. Confident Snowden, stuck in London, began to fret about his safety. By now trusted to leave Burghley House, he walked around the city, trying to make sense of what Catholics were saying about him and Fixer. At the busy public meeting places at St Paul's Cathedral and the Royal Exchange he heard the rumour that the two priests had been arrested but then quickly released, mistaken for soldiers returning home from the wars in the Low Countries. Snowden was terrified that Catholics would get wind of any suggestion that he was now Lord Burghley's agent. So he was very relieved to have bumped into an old school friend on 12 June who gave him no suggestion of any suspicious or
malicious rumours. Snowden wrote with relief that he and Fixer ‘stood free from all impediments that might arise in the opinion of Catholics by our apprehension'. But quickly a new worry came to occupy his mind. Because Catholics in London had seen him walking the streets of the city, he was known to be at liberty; it followed that sharp eyes could observe he was in correspondence with Burghley. He wondered to Sir Robert whether he should be sent into the country for the sake of secrecy and security.

Snowden, brimming with a subtle self-confidence when he had first been brought with Fixer to Burghley House in Westminster, was a nervous man. On the evening of 19 June he met Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil. The meeting was not a happy one. Snowden apologized the next day for his ‘sharpness' and even his ‘shamefulness'. Clearly Snowden recognized that he had behaved very badly. Days of worrying about who was watching him on the streets of London and Westminster, and the feeling that his offer of service was not being taken seriously, led him to lose his temper. Burghley was provocative, probably deliberately so. He told Snowden to his face that what he had given so far, or promised from his papers in Amsterdam, amounted to ‘vulgar and trivial intelligences and to no great purpose'; these may have been Burghley's exact words. Snowden robustly defended his own honesty and goodwill. And he did not back down: once again he offered to do good service for his country, whatever the perils or dangers. He wanted Sir Robert to ‘perceive my forwardness and desire to do something of importance'.

If the meeting on the 19th was for Snowden a bruising encounter, it also seems to have done something to release the building pressure of anxiety. But still the weeks passed while Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil waited for Snowden's books and papers to come from
The Adulphe
of Amsterdam. Some of them had arrived in Westminster by early July, for on the 3rd Sir Robert had Snowden's copy of Josephus Acosta's history of the Jews (a rare book, said Snowden) and Robert Persons's manuscript on the new martyrs of England. Also among the papers were a letter by Persons to the rector of the seminary at Rheims and Persons's letter to Snowden and Fixer dated a few weeks before they had left the coast of Portugal.

From the beginning, Burghley had wanted to be sure of the papers
from Amsterdam. At first he had doubted Snowden's story; he wanted evidence of its authenticity. There had been a false start to the priests' mission in late May and early June. After leaving the details of platforms and passports to Sir Robert, Burghley was still not as sure of the priests as he needed to be. But now, with the proof he wanted from Snowden, the lord treasurer was content for his son to send the priests to Europe as spies. With the right sort of handling, they could prove to be significant weapons against the queen's enemies.

In July Snowden and Cecil began to work out the precise details of the mission. At first these had been vague. Sir Robert saw that a more precise objective was necessary. He proposed for Snowden and Fixer a difficult mission: to cause the King of Spain to doubt sources of Spanish intelligence on England. Snowden, considering this proposition carefully, applied himself to the details of how this might be done. And he offered to Sir Robert three principles by which he proposed to operate clandestinely. Firstly, he said, he would communicate with England through one man only, who would believe that he, Snowden, worked to free Catholic prisoners. Secondly, only Burghley and Sir Robert should read his reports. And thirdly, he would work for Sir Robert alone, with whom he felt he could talk openly. Burghley, he thought, was too busy to discuss and examine every aspect of Snowden's secret work. Besides, Snowden pleaded timidity and ‘insufficiency' in talking to Burghley – the bruises from their fractious meeting had not entirely healed.

By now Sir Robert and Snowden were settled upon the mechanics of the mission. They had met and talked. Snowden's contact was in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a port town close to Spain in the Bay of Biscay; he was Cecil's man and the representative of a London merchant. There was, if necessary, a second intermediary in Calais. Sir Robert and Snowden made arrangements for Snowden's passport, a cipher and an alias he could use in his reports. And of course there would be further instructions: in Snowden's words, ‘the most principal and necessary points whereof you would be advised from time to time'.

A few days or weeks later (he gave neither date nor place) Snowden wrote to Sir Robert once again. He wondered whether he might have another passport in his own name. It was just an idea: ‘But in this and all other my affairs as your wisdom shall determine, whose hands
I most humbly kissed and take my leave of your worship till I write from the port.'

And so it was that John Snowden alias John Cecil, the priest-spy, and one of the first of Sir Robert Cecil's many secret agents, set out upon his career in espionage. He was a volunteer and he cost nothing other than Lord Burghley's and Sir Robert's time, patience and hospitality at Burghley House. That at least satisfied the Lord Treasurer of England's taste for economy.

Snowden pursued his new career with skill and subtlety, able to convince of his loyalty men as experienced and perceptive as Robert Persons and William Allen. He continued to work and travel with John Fixer, with whom, months after taking his leave of Sir Robert Cecil, he sought to re-enter England. As before, they were captured, though this time it was probably by prearrangement with Sir Robert. In 1592 Snowden was in Rome, and then Cardinal Allen sent him to Scotland. Already there were rumours of his duplicity, and from Scotland in October of that year he sent to Allen a passionate defence of his actions. He wrote of his interview by Lord Burghley: ‘But this I know and this I professed upon my salvation, that there never passed from me anything prejudicial to my faith or function … I always had this firm resolution, rather to be torn into one thousand pieces than to hurt willing the least hair of the meanest Catholic head in the world.'

Snowden remained in Scotland till early 1594. He set out for Rome, but in February he was again captured at sea by the great Sir Francis Drake. As he later wrote to Sir Robert: ‘I discovered myself to Sir Francis Drake and Master Edgecombe [probably Richard Edgecombe, a Cornish gentleman], charging them as you willed I should in Her Majesty's name to keep me secret and take no other notice of me than as of a Scottish man till they heard from you.' To Drake he gave letters by Robert Persons and Sir Francis Englefield.