The Watchers (45 page)

For Phelippes this was a remarkable recovery. His debt to Elizabeth's treasury still hung over him; he never repaid it. But Sir Robert, in recognizing Phelippes's talents and expertise, had doubtless done much to heal the bruises of the Sterrell affair. Phelippes set to work straight away with energy and passion, using his old contacts abroad to discover the intentions of England's fugitive enemies: ‘to feel their pulse on the other side', as he put it in a lively metaphor.

And so Phelippes survived. If he was not prosperous in the years after 1600 he was certainly busy. He was in Sir Robert's favour and protection – at least for the time being.

When Sir Robert Cecil accepted Thomas Phelippes's offer of service he had in place already a formidable network for gathering foreign intelligence. Phelippes joined a system of espionage that had not been rivalled since the time of Sir Francis Walsingham, set up by Sir Robert with care, ingenuity and imagination. But Master Secretary Cecil's apparently easy dominance of the Elizabethan secret world was (as Phelippes once wrote of a difficult cipher) won out of hard rock. As Phelippes found to his cost, the 1590s were troubled and difficult years blighted by the intense political competition between Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and the great political dynasty of the Cecils.

In 1593 Essex joined the Privy Council and he was zealous, as the Sterrell affair shows, to prove his prowess in matters of secret intelligence. Recognizing Lord Burghley's dominance of politics and patronage at Elizabeth's court, the earl recruited experienced advisers and threw money at sources of information throughout Europe. Feeling that he was the natural successor to Burghley as the queen's leading adviser, Essex wanted to build for himself an unrivalled expertise in foreign affairs. Given what appeared to be Burghley's failing health in 1593, the earl imagined that the great flowering of his career in Elizabeth's service would come very soon.

If Essex underestimated Burghley's tenacious constitution, he saw plainly the lord treasurer's ambitions for Sir Robert Cecil. With an eye upon the secretaryship, Burghley did everything in his considerable power to prepare his son for office; often from his bed or couch, besieged by government business, he was the exacting master of a gifted apprentice. Kept away from court by sickness, Burghley reminded Elizabeth of his long faithfulness. ‘Even now,' he wrote to
Sir Robert in February 1594, ‘I received your letter, wherein you report Her Majesty's care for my health, for the which I most humbly thank her, hoping that her good wishings shall help to return me to strength for her service, which I esteem the service of God, whose place she holdeth on earth.' The contrast with Essex could not have been greater. Burghley saw it as his duty to serve the queen, to prove his loyalty and constancy as her oldest adviser. Upon that depended his power and the future prospects for Robert Cecil. In contrast to this grave and elderly councillor, Essex had risen in Elizabeth's favour with spectacular speed, quickly finding a position at court in 1587 as Elizabeth's companion and master of the royal horse, an office which gave him regular access to the queen. The young earl needed royal favour: his family was heavily in debt. There was an urgency to his political ambitions that only grew and became more intense as the years passed. Essex, too, had something to prove. As a boy, left an orphan by his father's death in Ulster, he had been made a royal ward. He grew up for a time in Burghley's house, sharing a table and a classroom with Robert Cecil and his siblings. Who knows what challenges or grievances of childhood were being settled in the 1590s?

Against a family that felt it was born to rule – against a father and son so well entrenched at Elizabeth's court – the Earl of Essex pushed and pressed. He sought power and credibility; he wanted his moment of glory at court. Between the straining ambition of Essex and the formidable power of the Cecils something had to give. The year of crisis was 1594 and it was one of blood and betrayal. A huge price was paid for the competitive vanities of powerful and ambitious men at Elizabeth's court.

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We men are of life short, of constitution frail, of thoughts vain, of words rash, and of knowledge unperfect, taking the shadow for substance …

The disposition of this quarter will be indifferent, yet will there be many unkind storms with sudden lightnings, and terrible thunder-claps. Sickness this quarter will not be many, but passing dangerous, hot, and fervent agues, great distemperature of men's brains, with immoderate heat, whereby many will become frantic.

An Elizabethan almanac was a store of information: a calendar, a
reference book of astronomical data and a guide to astrological forecasts – a companion in uncertain times. But whatever its other virtues, the
Almanac
for 1594 failed to predict that it would also be a year of peculiar and disturbing intensity in the history of Elizabethan royal murder plots, though the prognostications of sudden storms and fevered brains captured something of the dangerous and unpredictable political intrigues at the court of the queen. Between January and August Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex squashed three murder plots directed against Elizabeth. It seemed that the two most powerful of the queen's councillors had a remarkable nose for treason, and surely no observer in those eight months of 1594 could fault the energy of Burghley and Essex in hunting down Her Majesty's enemies.

And yet there was much more to these plots and apparently miraculous discoveries than at first meets the eye. To begin with, we have to review the bare facts of each conspiracy and then consider the politics behind them.

The first plot to be discovered, and the most startling of them all, was that of one of the queen's physicians, Doctor Roderigo Lopez, to poison Elizabeth. It was Essex himself who in January 1594 made the charge of treason against Lopez, though he had been unpicking the evidence in Lopez's case for three months before that. It seemed at the time a wild charge to make against a respected doctor. A Portuguese Jew who had converted to Christianity, Lopez had lived in London for thirty-five years; in that time he had built an enviable medical practice at court. Yet Essex was absolutely convinced that Lopez was a traitor. In January he made a very plain statement of his accusation, writing:

I have discovered a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was Her Majesty's death. The executioner should have been Doctor Lopez. The manner by poison. This I have so followed that I will make it appear as clear as the noon day.

Essex was consumed by the interrogations of Lopez, to which the earl, showing extraordinary tenacity, gave every particle of his time and energy. By the end of February he had accumulated enough evidence against Lopez to have him tried for high treason as a Spanish agent who had agreed to murder the queen by poison for the sum of
50,000 crowns paid by the King of Spain. Doctor Lopez was found guilty. A few months later, in June, he was hanged, drawn and quartered on the gallows at Tyburn.

The second plot to be discovered, in February 1594, involved an Irish soldier in the regiment of Sir William Stanley, the turncoat English military commander who fought for the King of Spain. In October 1593 Stanley, his deputy Giacomo de Franceschia (who was known simply as Captain Jacques) and the Jesuit priest William Holt were supposed to have recruited Patrick O'Collun to murder Queen Elizabeth. We do not know when O'Collun arrived in England or how he was captured, but he was questioned in the Tower of London in early February 1594. Two witnesses testified to his mission. One of these was William Polewheele, himself a soldier of Stanley's regiment who also admitted to having been sent by Stanley to assassinate Elizabeth.

One of Patrick O'Collun's interrogators was Justice Richard Young of Westminster. On the day of O'Collun's first examination, another Irishman, called John Danyell, came to Justice Young to reveal the existence of a plot to blow up the Tower of London with its own supplies of gunpowder and brimstone as well as a conspiracy to burn ships and houses in Billingsgate and to set fire to inns and woodstacks throughout London. With Danyell was Hugh Cahill, yet another Irish soldier of Stanley's regiment. Cahill's examination at Lord Burghley's house in Westminster revealed that, like O'Collun and Polewheele, Cahill had been approached by Jesuit priests, at Stanley's behest, to assassinate Elizabeth.

Acting upon the prisoners' interrogations and examinations, Lord Burghley himself took great care in ordering the arrest of suspicious persons coming into England, with special precautions to be taken against Irishmen in London and near Elizabeth's court. He gave a particular warning against any man who had served in Sir William Stanley's rebel regiment. Burghley's orders were enforced by a royal proclamation, which said that some men had come secretly into the kingdom ‘with full purpose, by procurement of the Devil and his ministers, Her Majesty's enemies, and rebels on the other side the sea, to endanger Her Majesty's noble person'.

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The third great murder conspiracy discovered in these remarkable months of intrigue and danger involved Edmund Yorke, for three years a captain in Stanley's regiment. In late June 1594 Yorke sent a letter to the Earl of Essex. Having left England without a licence, he sought the earl's help in seeking a reconciliation with the queen. Yorke wanted to be forgiven for aiding her enemies and to prove himself her loyal subject. He wrote to Essex:

I most humbly beseech your honour to stand my gracious lord and master in obtaining pardon for me and the gentlemen with me [including Richard Williams, his companion] the which if it may please your honour to do you shall find both me and them ready to do Her Highness service in what we know against her estate next unto your honour, as in duty we shall be bound till death.

On returning to England, Yorke gave himself up to the Privy Council and was promptly sent to the Tower. Essex, far from looking leniently upon Yorke's years away from England, helped rigorously to examine him. Also interrogated were Richard Williams, Captain Yorke's friend, and a witness to their conspiracy called Henry Young. Quickly Essex discovered a plot against the queen involving Captain Yorke and Williams.

Young said that Captain Yorke had planned with Sir William Stanley and the Jesuit William Holt to raise a rebellion in north Wales. Captain Yorke made a counter-accusation, saying that it was in fact Young who had been recruited by Father Holt to kill Queen Elizabeth. Richard Williams, Yorke said, had volunteered to do just the same thing for money for his family: ‘he could find in his heart to do it so as he might have great store of money that his house might be advanced for he himself was sure to die'.

Pressed by his interrogators, Yorke changed his story. Before the lieutenant of the Tower and Essex's friend Francis Bacon, he made a full and voluntary confession. Offered 40,000 crowns by Holt, Captain Yorke had agreed to return to England to kill the queen. Three times Yorke met Stanley, Holt and Charles Paget, that most dangerous of English émigrés, to talk about the mission. They gave special attention to the weapons Yorke and Williams would use in London. Though some of the group spoke of the merits of using a small steel
crossbow with poisoned arrows, Yorke agreed instead to shoot the queen with a small pistol. Williams would carry a rapier tipped with a poison concocted of bacon, garlic juice and juniper.

For another week Francis Bacon and other interrogators pressed Yorke for more information about plots laid out by Stanley and his fellow conspirators against the queen. Compelling evidence against Yorke and Williams was gathered with remarkable speed. The two men confessed to their guilt and went to the gallows some time before February 1595.

Three plots, three revelations of terrible danger to the queen, the strenuous investigations of treason led by the Earl of Essex in the cases of Lopez and Captain Yorke and by Lord Burghley in the mission of O'Collun and the conspiracies revealed by John Danyell and Hugh Cahill. Each one of these murderous projects involved conspirators and assassins motivated by a cause as well as by money; behind each was a shady network of highly dangerous and organized English émigrés and exiles, or in the case of Lopez Portuguese agents working for Spain. Each conspiracy had been close to its execution: only the swift and energetic actions of Burghley and especially Essex, who barely left the Tower of London between January and March, saved the queen from destruction.

The plots of 1594 seem at first glance very similar to the Throckmorton, Parry and Babington conspiracies of the years 1584–6. And certainly they did have features in common. Murder conspiracies had always called for urgent action, stimulating great passions and provoking ferocious official denunciations of the traitors. But what had changed over a decade was the tone of the investigations, and even to some extent their methods. Patient gathering and sifting of evidence had given way to quick confessions; other documentary evidence seemed to have a marginal significance. Only in the case of Lopez were there papers to make sense of, though the Earl of Essex, soon tiring of the slog of investigation, chose the more direct route of open accusation followed by an unforgiving routine of interrogation. In 1594 everything seemed just a little out of proportion: frenetic, urgent, panicked and strained. The political atmosphere seemed especially charged.

Each of the three plots of 1594 was in fact a game for advantage in a visceral political contest between the Earl of Essex and the Cecils. They played for the highest stakes of power and royal favour. Essex and Burghley sought conspicuously to save the queen, and so the kingdom, from destruction. An organized enemy dedicated to Elizabeth's destruction; the dispatch of assassins; the work of English Jesuits in commissioning and blessing these murderous missions; the queen poisoned or shot: these were not new terrors in Elizabeth's reign, but they were still very immediate anxieties, and in the fraught war years of the 1590s they spoke to old fears of massacre and invasion. The Elizabethan imagination was always haunted by the memory of the mass killings in Paris in 1572. The nightmare was real: at the end of 1593 Londoners could see for themselves on stage the horrors of Catholic conspiracy when Christopher Marlowe's play about the shocking events in Paris on Bartholomewtide twenty-one years earlier,
The Massacre at Paris
, was performed at the Rose playhouse in Southwark.