Elizabeth's Spymaster (14 page)

He ends with an assurance of the veracity of his information:

Most [of] these places I have been at since I was last with [your] honour: for the rest, I am most assured to be most certain of and for my service to be to your content.
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Walsingham’s agents and pursuivants were remarkably effective, particularly in the teeming, stinking streets and alleys of London. The Jesuit priest Robert Persons reported that in July 1580 ‘the searches grew so eager and frequent … and the spies so many and diligent as every hour almost we heard of some [priests] taken, either on suspicion or detection against them’. That month, five or six of the newly arrived priests had already been arrested. The Jesuits daringly held a synod at St Mary Overy in Southwark to plan their missionary campaign. Shortly before the meeting’s close, Henry Orton,
³⁴
a former lay student of the English College, was on his way to the safe house when he was unluckily recognised in the street by Walsingham’s spy Charles Sledd, who had known him in Rome. Sledd followed him to discover his hiding place, but grew tired of the chase and arrested him. A priest in the hand is worth two hidden in a secret chamber. A little more patience and he
would have captured the entire Jesuit leadership in England.
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Persons commented: ‘It was a marvel that … we all together had not been taken.’ However, that same day Sledd also captured another priest, Robert Johnson,
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‘as he was walking about the streets’.

Sledd was an assiduous priest-hunter. According to Persons, he was on our track more than [the] others for he has authority from the royal council to break into all men’s houses as he will and to search all places which he does diligently whenever there is a gleam of booty.
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The priest later wrote to Alfonso Agazzari, Rector of the English College in Rome, that ‘false brethren’ now working for Walsingham were ‘the most troublesome to us and more deadly than anything else’. Another time, he complained of being unable to write a long letter ‘because I cannot, without difficulty, stop anywhere long enough to finish writing one page’.
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His hunters must have been pressing hard on his heels. From the other side, the paranoid torturer Richard Topcliffe complained bitterly to the Privy Council in 1586 that about twenty seminary priests of

reputation and best learning [are] now in London. They walk audaciously, disguised, in the streets of London. Their wonted fears and timorousness is turned into mirth and solace among themselves, as though the day of their expectation were not past …
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The oddly named Maliverny Catlyn was another of Walsingham’s agents directly tasked with spying on covert Catholics. The spy master seemingly already knew him, for when Catlyn wrote from Rouen on 22 April 1586 to offer his services, he mentioned opening ‘the way for a
further
[author’s italics] entrance into matters needful to be discovered for her majesty’s surety’. A former soldier in the Low Countries, he was something of a sober-sides Puritan with a burning moral hatred for actors and stage plays.
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He had wormed his way into the confidence of English Catholics exiled in France and reported ‘secret intelligence of a most dangerous person who brought Adams the priest into England [with] three Agnus Dei and certain jewels of Edmund Campion’.
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Two months later, Catlyn was languishing in a Portsmouth prison
after being detained by the searchers at that port. Clearly an opportunist, Catlyn saw his inconvenient imprisonment as an excellent cover story to use in his later efforts to gather information. He asked Walsingham to arrange for him to be transferred to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark and, once there, ingratiated himself with the priest Edward Jackson and another prisoner. Poor innocent priest! Believing Catlyn to ‘be participant to his estate’, Jackson hinted at the plans for invasion being drawn up by the Pope and Philip II of Spain. The spy immediately sent the intelligence to Walsingham, urging that the other (unnamed) prisoner be summoned and interrogated:

No doubt being either terrified or gently entreated, he will declare to you the circumstance thereof, by which means this wicked instrument may presently be called into question and the matter avouched before his face, and yet I may still remain without suspicion.

Catlyn suggests that he should be summoned by Walsingham, in order that he might impart further information more discreetly:

Besides the inconvenience of the place is such as I can hardly be suffered to have paper, pen or ink, except I will impart to my keeper what I write. [He] in truth, uses me like a prisoner committed for high treason, so that I was forced to charge him, in her majesty’s name, to deliver this to your honour with speed, as [a] confession touching the suspicion … against me.
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The spy walked out of the gates of the Marshalsea in August 1586 and headed to the North of England on Walsingham’s orders to investigate Catholic disaffection there. After his experiences in jail, Catlyn had no doubts about the tide of subversion created by locking up priests. He told his master:

If you mean to stop the stream, choke the spring. Believe me, the prisons of England are [the] very nourishers of papists. Banish them, for God’s sake, or let them remain close prisoners, so that they may not daily poison others.
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Ironically, the spy’s viewpoint was unconsciously echoed by the Jesuit Robert Persons, but naturally from an opposite perspective. Persons maintained that jailed priests

are sometimes of more use to us there than if they were at liberty. For these men, being always definitely in the same place, make possible the visits of many people who are unable to discover the whereabouts of other priests.
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Catlyn returned to London in the early autumn and was then employed to spy on a number of the great and good who had come under suspicion in the spy master’s mind of harbouring Catholic sympathies. Catlyn reported in November:

Yesterday, I spied the Earl of Worcester
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and Lord Mordaunt
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go off on a clandestine journey on a wherry
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to an obscure inn [the Red Lion] and have conference with a third man whom I knew not. I have within these four or five weeks used my best endeavour to pierce into the mind of a very great one of this realm and have been with him these few hours, not doubting but to find [out] his affections thoroughly and then I will advertise [tell] you.
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The spy continued to work for Walsingham in London and the North until at least June 1587, but annoyingly there are no more clues or hints in the State Papers as to the identity of this mysterious great personage. Catlyn must have possessed the manners and bearing of a gentleman to be able to circulate freely within the higher echelons of society. Despite this, he suffered periods of poverty and at one point, in December 1586, appealed to Walsingham for funds as ‘I and mine are like to keep the coldest Christmastide that hitherto we ever tasted’.
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He received £5 as a stop-gap payment for his pains.

Within his personal secretariat, Walsingham assembled a group of experts to organise and process his intelligence work, unobtrusively based at his new London home, an impressive house in Seething Lane in the parish of St Olave, Hart Street.
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It was also handily located for the great fortress and prison of the Tower, a few hundred yards away to the
south. Some of his agents wrote directly to Walsingham; others were handled by his assistants, acting as ‘case officers’, in modern intelligence parlance.

Of course, the best method of thwarting conspiracy was by interception of the communications necessary for the planning and execution of the plot. Signals intelligence was as important in the sixteenth century as it remains in the twenty-first. Aside from the developing science of cryptography, which is discussed in detail in
Chapter 4
, the government’s counter-intelligence resources had to detect a huge range of methods utilised to covertly transmit messages. Secret inks were widely used at that time – a dilute solution of alum
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or a thin mixture of milk and lemon juice – which needed the application of warmth to reveal the handwriting. If these ingredients were unavailable, the hard-pressed agent could resort to using his own urine, if watered down.
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Seemingly innocuous books were employed by both sides to disseminate instructions by using one or more words on pages indicated by a separately issued cipher. Alternatively, messages could be hidden inside a bound book’s leather cover. Letters were also concealed in wine bottles, in the linings of luggage, or, in Mary Queen of Scots’ case, the fashionably high heels of ladies’ shoes. Dead letter boxes were employed, whereby messages were hidden at a pre-arranged location to be safely retrieved later by another agent. The greatest prize of all was the discovery of the key to a cipher – the ill-fated Duke of Norfolk hid his codes beneath two roof tiles at his London home in the Charterhouse.

In all this, the overriding imperative was not to allow your adversary to learn that his correspondence had been compromised. Walsingham employed Arthur Gregory who was adept at opening and resealing intercepted letters in such a way that the addressee would be unaware they had been tampered with. His specific skill was in forging seals, so he may have had some training in engraving precious metals. After Walsingham’s death, Gregory was employed for similar work by Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son, who acted informally as Principal Secretary of State until his official appointment in 1596. Gregory remains a mysterious figure, but at the end of his life he not unreasonably
expected some reward. The Cecil Papers contain his suit, made early in the reign of fames I:

In consideration of my services done and which I shall be able ever to do during my life, to grant me the two-thirds of recusant lands … and to receive good assurance for the payment of £20 by the month.

Gregory adds, very frankly: ‘His majesty by this grant gains nothing. And I will accept it for recompense for my services and never crave another suit.’
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Walsingham’s trusted chief assistant was the code-breaker Thomas Phelippes, the son of William, a London customs officer. He was a Cambridge Master of Arts who lodged in Leadenhall Market, an easy 500-yard walk from Seething Lane. He was fluent in French, Italian and Latin but less skilled in Spanish. Phelippes was described by Mary Queen of Scots as being ‘of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow hair on the head, [eaten] in the face with small pocks [scars of smallpox], of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance’.
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He may have been ugly but his skills as a decipherer and a forger were to become the instrument of her destruction.

He first appears in 1578 when Walsingham sent him on temporary attachment to the staff of Sir Amyas Paulet, then Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris, to decode correspondence intercepted there. Subsequently he controlled spies in France and carried the cash that Elizabeth secretly supplied to the French Huguenots during the religious civil wars. At various times he used the pseudonyms ‘John Morice’ and ‘Peter Halins, merchant’. His servant Casey was often employed for delicate missions.

In his heyday, his services were greatly valued. In May 1586, Walsingham told Phelippes ‘that the queen has signed his bill for a pension of 100 marks
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and takes his services in good part’.
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Six months later, Walsingham reported his conversation with Elizabeth when she said that Phelippes ‘was greatly beholden to the Lord Treasurer for his good report of him to her’.
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Always venal, the codebreaker complained to Walsingham in August 1589 that he had heard of the death of his good friend Paulet and
‘that Mr Middlemore had obtained a grant of his office of clerk of the Duchy [?of Lancaster] but which had been promised to himself by her majesty’.
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Edward Burnham, another of Walsingham’s servants, was used for sensitive diplomatic missions as well as intelligence-gathering forays overseas. In 1577 he was sent to Picardy and elsewhere in northern France to ‘see and learn what French forces were levied there to enter the Low Countries’ as well as holding discussions with military governors. Surprisingly for a spy master obsessed with secrecy, Burnham was allowed to write an account of his mission –
‘Special Services
…
performed
…
at the commandment and appointment of Sir Francis Walsingham, her majesty’s principal secretary and my honourable master’.
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This was presumably for the queen’s eyes only – and was probably written in the hope of soliciting some mark of royal favour.

Six years later, in 1583, Burnham was dispatched to the Netherlands to assure the Dutch Protestant government of Elizabeth’s goodwill and to assess how much reliance they were placing on France for assistance in their campaign against the Spanish forces in the Low Countries. In 1585, he carried letters and verbal instructions to William Davison, the queen’s envoy in Holland, and to George Gilpin, the Merchant Adventurers’ company representative in Zeeland (who was also Walsingham’s agent), to tell the Dutch unofficially that Elizabeth was prepared to protect them if they handed over the towns of Flushing, Enkhuizen and Briel to England as financial security. A more dangerous assignment followed for Burnham: he was detailed to keep watch on the headquarters of Spanish forces in the run-up to the Armada invasion in 1588 and warn of the movement of troops towards embarkation in the Channel ports.