The Watchers (46 page)

In January 1594, when Burghley was weak and ill, the Earl of Essex struck quickly and powerfully with his charge of treason against Lopez. Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil hardly expected it to be taken seriously, but Essex was tenacious. In his efforts to impress the queen with a sensational political revelation, the earl's remarkable gamble paid off. With no way to avoid a full investigation of the facts, Burghley found that he had to throw himself behind Essex's efforts to expose Doctor Lopez's treason. He did so reluctantly. It was purely a tactical move in the political game.

The fact was that Burghley had been aware for a long time of Doctor Lopez's Spanish contacts. He knew that Lopez was a Spanish agent who had been in communication with one of King Philip of Spain's ambassadors, Don Bernardino de Mendoza. Between Lopez and Mendoza there was an intermediary, a Portuguese (like Lopez himself) called Manuel de Andrada. In 1591 Andrada was captured in England, and Burghley had him thoroughly examined. Burghley wrote very detailed instructions on how the interrogation should be conducted: friendly at first but then ending with a blunt offer: either Andrada could cooperate and tell his interrogators everything he
knew or he could lose his life. Burghley, who was aware of the correspondence between Lopez and Andrada, sent Lopez to help with Andrada's interview.

So by 1594, three years after Andrada's capture, Doctor Lopez's work as a Spanish agent was old news to Burghley. More than this, Burghley had used Lopez to penetrate Spanish efforts at spying in England and encouraged him in his work as a double agent. In 1594, however, thrown off balance by the intensity of Essex's assault, Burghley felt compromised by his own association with Lopez. He did nothing to frustrate the energetic investigations of Essex and his men. In fact quite the opposite: Burghley threw himself aggressively at the Lopez case. With the aid of Thomas Phelippes (who helped to write a narrative of Lopez's treasons) Burghley controlled the government propaganda on the case, levering it away from Essex. Burghley, who only three years before had recruited Andrada as an English spy with Lopez's help, was ferocious in his public denunciation of Lopez and his treasons:

Lopez the physician who should have committed the fact by poisoning Her Majesty under colour of physic [medicine], confesseth that he was of late years allured to do service secretly to the King of Spain, which he did by the means of one Manuel [de] Andrada a Portingale [a Portuguese] much used in France by the King of Spain's ambassador there Don Bernardino, by whom Lopez received a jewel of gold of good value garnished with a large diamond and a large ruby.

It was all very unlikely. Lopez indeed had secret connections with Spanish spies, though in the end with Burghley's knowledge. His plot to murder Elizabeth, however, was improbable in the extreme. Yet the ingredients of the case against the physician were mixed powerfully together: Essex's nakedly political campaign, the febrile worries at court about Spanish espionage and the fact that Doctor Lopez's father was a Jew. The effects were toxic. Far from defending Lopez, the Cecils threw themselves behind the campaign to expose and try him as a traitor. Sir Robert Cecil, who by February was one of the investigative team with Essex's men, was present at Lopez's trial. Justice, he felt, was done. Of the ‘vile Jew' he wrote: ‘the most substantial jury that I have seen have found him guilty in the highest degree of all
treasons'. Sir Robert, like his father, was complicit in the destruction of Roderigo Lopez in the interests of family and politics.

The panic over Irishmen in London in 1594 played on the fearsome reputation of Sir William Stanley's regiment of desperate renegades, who, recruited by their officers, bribed by great fortunes of tens of thousands of crowns and blessed by Jesuit priests, came secretly to England to murder the queen. Now it may have been that some of Stanley's men were willing to take on so desperate a mission, but if they did it was not because Sir William's regiment operated as a kind of crack unit of Catholic storm-troops. Beset in the early 1590s by dissent and internal tensions, it seems highly unlikely that in 1593 Stanley and his advisers dispatched assassins to England practically every other week, as worried courtiers believed they did. Certainly he and his men fought for the King of Spain, at least after a fashion; certainly Sir William was the queen's enemy. Perhaps men like Patrick O'Collun and William Polewheele, with an eye on a fortune, were willing to try their luck as assassins: desperate times could encourage desperate measures. But it is a considerable stretch of the imagination to believe that Stanley and his regiment were organizationally capable of mounting a sustained campaign to murder Queen Elizabeth.

The statements of O'Collun, Polewheele and others present a very confused tangle of lies, evasions, half-truths and muddle. Under close examination in the Tower of London the prisoners' stories changed daily. As instruments of a ruthless plot to kill Elizabeth these men made a very poor showing. They appear to have made no serious effort to get anywhere near the queen. Polewheele was duped out of his money before he left mainland Europe; even to make the sea crossing to England seemed at the very limit of his abilities. What seems oddly disproportionate is how these shambolic hired assassins caused such a panic in government in February 1594. Their examinations and confessions had the crown's law officers scurrying to and from the Tower and a man as busy as Lord Burghley personally putting in place mechanisms to close Elizabeth's court to intruders.

Once again, however, there was a strong political angle to the Irish panic of February 1594, and this is at its clearest in the roles played by John Danyell (the man who went to Justice Young with the report
of the plot to blow up the Tower) and Hugh Cahill (another supposed assassin). It looks very much like Danyell's emergency was planted by Lord Burghley himself. Cahill's mission to kill the queen was long known to Burghley: Danyell had told the lord treasurer about it eighteen months before the emergency of February 1594. The chronology of Danyell's whole story shows that it was pretty stale by the time he went to see Justice Young. Cahill met Danyell in Brussels in May 1592. Though promising to Stanley, Holt the Jesuit and Hugh Owen that he would kill the queen, the young soldier had already sworn an oath to Danyell ‘never to perform it, for it is a wicked deed, and abhominable before God to do it'. Cahill went off to London. In June, from Calais, Danyell wrote to Burghley saying that he had ‘intelligence of causes of great importance'. Burghley sent Danyell a passport to allow him to cross the English Channel. By August Danyell was in England. In September 1592 he met Burghley and told the lord treasurer all about Cahill's supposed mission to kill the queen.

So everything to do with Cahill's plot, which the young Irish soldier confessed to in February 1594, had happened nearly two years earlier. He and Danyell were lodging in Westminster for some months before Danyell went to the authorities in February 1594 with his report of the plot to blow up the Tower of London and burn the city. So at just the moment when Burghley by his strenuous labour defended the queen from desperate Irish assassins, his old informant Danyell happened to come forward to offer evidence of an imminent and probably deadly fire attack upon London. Neither Danyell nor, more significantly, Cahill was held under lock and key in February 1594. Cahill, the commissioned assassin, was left to Danyell's care with Burghley's full knowledge. More intriguing still is the very strong suggestion that one of the men who planned to blow up the Tower of London had three years before sent intelligence to Burghley.

How providentially fortuitous was the timing of Danyell's information in February 1594 and how politically convenient for Lord Burghley. Fear became a political currency that Burghley and Essex could use to secure Elizabeth's favour. And both men had it. The earl's ambitions only grew in 1594, and in the summer progress of that year the queen visited Burghley's palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire, the house of Sir Robert Cecil on the Strand in Westminster and the estate
of Sir Robert's elder brother Sir Thomas Cecil at Wimbledon. For the time being at least, the queen was prepared to accept for her courtiers' sakes the cost of so many treasons.

The Earl of Essex leaped upon the conspiracy of Edmund Yorke even more swiftly than he had moved against Doctor Lopez. Captain Yorke was dangerous to Essex. He had asked specially for the earl's help in reconciling him to the queen and he had come into England carrying a passport signed by Essex himself. Why, a hostile observer may have asked, did Yorke expect to find in Essex so sympathetic an intermediary? But if Yorke presented a risk to the earl's reputation, his case was also an opportunity. As the campaign against Doctor Lopez had shown so brutally, there was no better way for Essex to prove his political credibility than by exposing a murderous plot against Elizabeth's life. When it came to the English émigrés and exiles the case was more straightforward still. Essex's friend and confidant Francis Bacon called it ‘the breaking of these fugitive traitors and filling them full of terror, dispair, jealousy and revolt'. And so, sensing a conspiracy easy to reveal, and following on so naturally from the panic over Stanley's assassins only a few months before, Essex and particularly Bacon moved in for the kill. Both men were present for the most important of Yorke's and Williams's confessions.

Burghley, though he had nothing to do with the investigation of Captain Yorke's treason, had a specific reason to be interested by it. There was evidence that his own life had been in danger. The queen's attorney-general witnessed and signed a short statement made by Captain Yorke saying that Henry Young, the man who had denounced Yorke as a traitor, had written to Father Holt with an offer to kill the lord treasurer. Burghley, keen no doubt to see what Essex was up to, had his own summary of the case compiled from the evidence of the traitors' confessions.

At no point in the interrogations, however, was Captain Yorke's connection with Burghley mentioned. In the lord treasurer's archives there were two letters by Yorke, one Burghley had received in 1591, the second, of 1594, from Yorke to a close friend in military service: ‘Sweet Will, thy absence is more grief unto me than you can imagine.' The first letter was an offer by Yorke of military intelligence
to Burghley on the taking of Rouen. The second was simply endorsed by Burghley ‘Young Edmund Yorke's letter'.

The letters may suggest a certain closeness between Captain Yorke and Lord Burghley which could never be guessed from Yorke's service with Sir William Stanley's rebel regiment. There is just the possibility that, in destroying Edmund Yorke, the Earl of Essex destroyed also Burghley's once or future agent. It was, however, a matter upon which Burghley seems to have kept his counsel. After nearly half a century of Tudor politics, the old lord treasurer knew when it was necessary to make sacrifices.

When Sir Robert Cecil was appointed secretary to the queen in 1596 he found a system of espionage put under extraordinary strain by the factional ambitions of the Earl of Essex and the power games of his own family. The habit of infighting and intrigue, shown so brutally in the first eight months of 1594, encouraged everyone involved in the struggle to look inwards instead of outwards. Vicious court politics corrupted any pretence at measuring foreign intelligence accurately and intelligently. Certainly Essex recruited many foreign experts and sources, though more for ornament and self-aggrandizement than for anything else. In the end, the easy task of exposing half-baked assassination plots was a poor substitute for a serious effort to understand the enemy's political outlook and military dispositions. In the field of foreign intelligence work the Cecils had for some time lagged behind Essex.

Quickly the Cecils recovered their political initiative at court. Driven on by rumours in 1595 of Spanish preparations for another armada, Essex had pressed successfully for the joint command with Lord Admiral Howard of a naval expedition against the coast of Spain. The earl's plan, which he concealed from the queen, was to seize a Spanish port and to hold it against the enemy. The fleet sailed in June 1596. The focus of the assault was the port of Cadiz, where Essex, going ashore in the first boat, led English troops through the streets. The action in Cadiz was followed by a raid on Faro; there the plunder was considerable, including nearly two hundred books looted from the bishop's palace, which Essex later donated to Thomas Bodley's library in Oxford University. But the earl was not welcomed back
at Elizabeth's court as a hero. Quite the opposite in fact: Burghley and Robert Cecil began an official investigation of Essex's plunder, and Elizabeth was furious that Essex had subverted her authority by attempting to ignore her orders. He, in turn, was mystified by the queen's lack of gratitude for his heroism.

In October 1596 King Philip of Spain did indeed launch a new naval armada against England. It was as great in size as that of 1588. To Elizabeth's government – and especially to Sir Robert Cecil – it was a timely warning of their very serious failure properly to understand the intentions of Spain. Broken by a storm off Finisterre, what remained of the fleet limped into port ten days before reports of the armada's departure from Lisbon arrived in London. Intelligence was hopelessly late. Sir Robert's agent in Bayonne, the brother of an English merchant, sent a very accurate account of the Spanish fleet but could not at first find a ship preparing to return to England skippered by a trustworthy man. Weeks after the armada's failure English coastal forces were still mobilized. The lesson to be learned was that even excellent and necessary intelligence was useless if it could not be dispatched to Sir Robert in time.

No wonder, then, that Cecil set to work with energy. Dead wood was cut away. Henri Chasteau-Martin in Bayonne, long used as a source by the Cecils (and before them by Walsingham), was found in 1596 to be in the pay of Spain. Lord Burghley had for six years doubted Chasteau-Martin's usefulness. It was the governor of Bayonne, finding a Spanish spy in his town, who had him executed. (It is hard to know whether the governor knew that Chasteau-Martin had spied for England too.) So it was obvious that Sir Robert had to start from scratch. Using the contacts of the merchant and international financier Sir Horatio Palavicino and the assistance of one of the clerks of the royal secretariat, William Waad, that is exactly what Secretary Cecil did. By about 1597 he had agents in Lisbon, Brussels, Calais and Seville, and throughout Spain more generally, Flanders and Scotland.