The Watchers (48 page)

Probably the strangest feature of Poley's career is its longevity. He was not an obviously trustworthy man. In fact he was a teller of tales, something of a conman and a bully and an accomplished liar. He bragged about his secret work to his landlady, whom he seduced. He was sent to the Tower of London for a time because of his suspicious behaviour in the Babington affair. As we know, he gossiped that the cause of Walsingham's urinary illness was a disease he had contracted from a French prostitute. Poley was cunning, mercurial and dangerously peruasive. But perhaps those were precisely the skills his masters needed him to employ in their secret work. Certainly Sir Robert Cecil kept him on the secret payroll till 1601.

Thomas Phelippes, unlike Poley, floundered in the years after Walsingham's death. He was a man of considerably more ability in secret affairs than Poley, more important by far and in many ways a victim of both his own talents and the wretched political struggles of the 1590s. After 1600, in the service of Sir Robert Cecil, he still possessed the practised dexterity of his early career in Walsingham's household.
But for the great deceiver of Her Majesty's enemies the most painful deception of all was to imagine for himself a future of security and prosperity.

The second great crash came for Phelippes after Elizabeth's death in 1603. The accession of James VI of Scotland as the queen's successor was a disaster for him. He was the only man still living who had played a significant part in sending James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, to the block. For that alone King James distrusted Phelippes. But the political scene was changing, even if Phelippes was a man of old habits. War was over: in 1604 an Anglo-Spanish peace was negotiated. And yet still (though with Robert Cecil's knowledge) Phelippes kept up a correspondence with Catholic émigrés in the Low Countries. That correspondence was Phelippes's undoing. He was arrested in January 1605 for his association with Hugh Owen, the influential émigré intelligencer, and sent to prison; his books and papers were seized. Within days he sent to Cecil a difficult cipher he had just broken and an urgent plea for help. Clearly Phelippes had angered King James. ‘I humbly beseech your lordship [Cecil was now Viscount Cranborne] therefore to prevent His Majesty's further displeasure,' he wrote, ‘your gracious consideration of my excuse'. He asked Cecil ‘to stand my friend': ‘I know the credit your lordship hath to remove vain imaginations from the King's Majesty's mind.'

Phelippes was freed from prison in April 1605, still mistrusted and suspected. Worse was to come less than a year later. Once again because of his contacts with Hugh Owen, Phelippes was caught up in the great tangle of the Gunpowder Plot, the conspiracy in November 1605 by a group of Catholic gentlemen to blow up the chamber of the House of Lords in Westminster Palace and with it King James and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, at the opening of a parliament. James denounced Hugh Owen for his apparent involvement in the plot. Given his association with Owen, Phelippes was once again sent to prison, this time to the Tower of London. By February 1606 he was desperate, writing to Robert Cecil:

God and His ministers confound me body and soul if I be to be touched with the least miselling drop of guilt in that foul project and do not detest both the religion and policy which giveth scope to any such devilish and impious actions.

A few months later, still a prisoner, he offered as his defence the tangled unrealities of his secret life: ‘The truth is that there never was any real or direct correspondence held with Owen but by a mere stratagem and sleight in the late Queen's time.' Owen's correspondent in England, he said, was an imaginary person.

Phelippes survived the Tower and the Gunpowder treason of 1605. After that, we find only fragments of his life. In 1618 he was involved in a lawsuit over his debt to the crown. Four years later he was once again in prison. The government was still using him to decipher sensitive letters as late as 1625, when he was accused of revealing the contents of one of them for the offer of money. Phelippes wrote to the king's secretary. He was alone in the King's Bench prison. Deprived once again of his papers, he was, he said, exposed to his enemies; he was miserable and without hope. And yet there is still in the letter a spark of anger and a note of bitter resentment for a government which had forgotten his services. He wrote that he could not stand the indignity of prison. He found himself ‘without good ground [good reason] thus confined to a doghole without comfort or means to relieve myself and those that depend upon me'. By March 1626 he was dead. In his old age the most prolific spy of Elizabeth's reign was a forgotten and sorry figure who had been left alone with his memories of the real and imaginary characters of his past.

Was the fight worth it? The cost of defending Elizabeth's kingdom was profound. To Protestant Elizabethans their country was a model for Christendom to follow. To their Catholic enemies it was a poisonous pariah state. So many words were used to both defend and excoriate the queen's government, so much energy and effort expended on the keeping and breaking of secrets, so many lives lost in war and on the gallows. For forty years there was religious schism and an apparently endless struggle. For either side the consequence of failure was destruction: the destruction of queen, country and what Protestants called the ‘true religion', or for Catholics the triumph of pernicious heresy over the faith, traditions and authority of the Church.

Looked at from the view of Elizabeth's government, probably the balance as it stood in 1603 indicates a profit. It was at least a breaking even. All the instruments of the state, from the use of the rack in the
Tower of London to the sustained deployment of propaganda, allowed Queen Elizabeth to die in her bed at Richmond Palace. It is impossible, of course, to guess what might have happened if Walsingham and Burghley and others had not fought the enemy in the way that they did. The variables of counterfactual history – history as it might have been – are just too many. But at the very beginning of this book I imagined the very scenario that held Elizabeth's advisers in a grip of anxiety. Had the queen been killed by an assassin's bullet, an emergency interregnum government would have done all it could to suppress domestic rebellion and prepare for a Spanish invasion. Surely it could not have survived for long. The queen, determined never to encourage any potential focus for opposition to her rule, had always refused to name her royal successor; there were few plausible candidates for the Privy Council, recast as a Council of State, to choose from. Equally, the Great Armada of 1588 might have succeeded. If the Duke of Parma's troops had been able to land, then with good supply lines and perhaps with the help of defecting militias they could have taken London or at least caused enough of a panic for Elizabeth and her government to leave the city. What would have been the terms of surrender? Would the queen, no queen in the eyes of the Pope, have been put on trial by Catholic Europe? Would the English people have acquiesced in the toppling of an unpopular regime and the formal installation of King Philip of Spain, heir of the house of Lancaster, as King of England?

Of course, none of these things happened. The scenarios are entertainments – exercises of the historical imagination – not facts. We know that no murder plot against Queen Elizabeth was successful and that foreign efforts to invade England failed. But the Elizabethan story was not written in the stars, as Elizabeth's advisers well knew. The narrative might have been so very different. This is why the queen's councillors treated any conspiracy with deadly seriousness. From everything they saw of the world and the operations of divine providence they expected the worst. They felt they knew their enemy, just as they understood the righteous anger of God. Though convinced of the rightness of their cause, they knew that where Spain was strong England was weak.

The plain truth is that Elizabeth Tudor lived to see the seventeenth
century, and her country escaped the horrors of religious civil war and invasion against fantastic odds. The price to be paid for this was vigilance and suspicion and the determined suppression of any resistance to Elizabethan rule. It was the politics of raw survival, and it came, for all its achievements, with profound costs. In eliminating Mary Queen of Scots a blow was struck at monarchy; the reverberations would felt into the seventeenth century. Many perfectly loyal English Catholics were sent to prison or fined, their political allegiance measured by religious faith: the consequences were felt well into the nineteenth century, with a lingering sense of persecution. Some twentieth-century Catholic scholars of Elizabethan England likened the queen's government to a police state. Almost certainly it was not, for it lacked the most modern instruments of coercion. But these were developing. Any state that justifies and defends the use of torture claims for itself special rights over any other consideration.

Many of those men who viewed Elizabeth as a bastard heretic excommunicate, and who sought actively to resist or end her rule, died before she did: Cardinal William Allen in Rome in 1594, Sir Francis Englefield at Valladolid in Spain two years later, Elizabeth's brother monarch King Philip of Spain in 1598. Others survived Elizabeth. Robert Persons's passionate faith in a Catholic restoration for his homeland came to nothing. He died in 1610 in the English College in Rome, where bright young Anthony Munday had met him thirty-one years before. Thomas Morgan, Mary Queen of Scots's busy intelligencer in Paris, had hoped for favour from her son King James. He never received it and died around 1611. However, Morgan's colleague and friend Charles Paget, held to be one of the most dangerous exiles conspiring against Elizabeth's government in the 1580s and 1590s, found in Jacobean England a home, a pardon and royal preferment.

Probably the greatest success of all for Queen Elizabeth's ministers was their tenacity in preserving the continuity of rule and the Protestant religion. Elizabeth's refusal to name her successor or to allow one of her parliaments to make a succession law caused her advisers enormous anxiety, and this only became more pronounced as the 1590s wore on. If James VI of Scotland was to Elizabeth's government the best (or the least worst) of the plausible successors, the queen's
enemies had their own candidates. In 1594 Robert Persons published, anonymously, a book called
A Conference about the next succession to the Crown of England
. Persons examined all the possible claims to the English throne. Over that of James VI of Scotland Persons favoured (not surprisingly) the claim of the Infanta Isabella of Castile, daughter of King Philip of Spain. The Infanta was, Persons showed, descended from William the Conqueror, the daughters of Henry II and Henry III of England and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the son of Edward III. This was not fanciful speculation by Persons; indeed Elizabeth's government took his work very seriously. Sir Robert Cecil got copies of
A Conference
from Antwerp, Lord Burghley read it in close detail, and the book was heavily suppressed in England.

It was impossible to escape the blunt fact that in Elizabeth the Tudor dynasty had reached its end. For Protestants, there were few places for her succession to go other than to James VI of Scotland. After decades of fighting with all the political and legal means available to deny the claim to the English throne of James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth allowed James to understand that his succession would not be blocked. In 1601, briefing his ambassadors at Elizabeth's court, the king referred to ‘her old promise … that nothing shall be done by her, in her time, in prejudice of my future right'. In letters to the queen he played the part of her protégé. As early as August 1588 he promised Elizabeth to behave himself ‘not as a stranger [foreigner] and foreign prince, but as your natural son and compatriot of your country in all respects'. A Protestant king and an English pensioner, James was always the most likely successor to Elizabeth; yet, as he himself recognized, his accession could never be taken for granted. His mostly smooth climb to the English throne was not without its hitches.

James's most worrying experience was in 1598 when he was accused of involvement in a plot to murder Elizabeth. It was a wild and fantastic claim by an Englishman called Valentine Thomas, who said that James had commissioned him to assassinate the queen. What worried James most was that Elizabeth did not move quickly enough to quash Thomas's allegation. The king was furious; he was also very
worried that Thomas's bizarre charge would damage his claim to the English throne. Sir Robert Cecil knew this from George Nicholson, his principal intelligencer and spy in Scotland, whose secret reports made it clear that the Thomas case had reopened for James the old wound of his mother's execution by Elizabeth. The king believed that similar allegations of complicity would be made against him. James was concerned above all with the Act for the Queen's Surety, the statute that, in putting in place a mechanism for the prosecution of anyone who could be proved to have conspired against Elizabeth in favour of a royal successor, had seen his mother go to the block at Fotheringhay Castle. Through his ambassador in England, James was desperate to know that his chances of becoming King of England and Ireland had not been wrecked. He urgently requested an accurate copy of the Act.

In spite of Valentine Thomas, the Stuarts of Scotland had their dynastic victory. Mary Queen of Scots died for her blood claim to Elizabeth's throne. But the fact that King James VI of Scotland was through his mother the great-great-grandson of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, meant that he came peaceably to the crown of England. In 1603 the facts were that Queen Elizabeth had failed to produce a legitimate heir to the throne or to make an explicit choice of her successor. Trumped by dynastic happenstance, the long struggle for political survival seemed suddenly to count for nothing.

Yet what was most extraordinary about James's accession to the throne of England and Ireland was that every detail of it was arranged before Elizabeth's death and done so without her knowledge. Old habits of secrecy and dissimulation were hard ones to break. It was Sir Robert Cecil, so accomplished in secret matters, who from 1601 onwards negotiated the succession at the English and Scottish courts. Remarkably, only five men knew who was certain to succeed Elizabeth. One of them was Lord Henry Howard, the subtle and elusive Catholic nobleman who by a miracle had managed to get through the plots of the 1580s without being charged for treason. Of Lord Henry it was once written by one of Lord Burghley's spies: ‘his spirit … is within no compass of quiet duty'. Sir Robert Cecil recognized in Howard, who became a trusted intermediary with James, a fellow mercurial talent for politics.