The Watchers
Authors: Stephen Alford
8. âSundry wicked plots and means'
9. The Secret Lives of William Parry
11. âA very unadvised enterprise'
17. âGood and painful long services'
19. The Fall and Rise of Thomas Phelippes
20. Politics and Prognostications
For Joyce and David Scott
Here is no place to sit down in, but you must rise as soon as you are set; for we have gnats in our chambers, and worms in our gardens, and spiders and flies in the Palaces of the greatest Kings.
Jeremy Taylor,
The Rule and
Exercises of Holy Dying
(1651)
And the watcher â was he watched? He was haunted for a moment by the vision of an endless distrust.
Graham Greene,
The Confidential Agent
(1939)
Elizabethans exchanged New Year gifts on 1 January each year, though by long convention the calendar year began in Europe on 25 March, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or Lady Day. A few writers used 1 January as the first day of a new year, yet this practice was not adopted officially till 1600 in Scotland and 1752 in England. Throughout this book I have adjusted all dates to a calendar year that begins, as ours does, on 1 January.
In February 1582 Pope Gregory XIII ordered the use of a new calendar to replace the Julian calendar. Mathematicians had detected a small error in computing the calendar year and over the centuries this had accumulated to as much as ten days in each year. Pope Gregory's solution was to cut ten days out of 1582, so that 15 October followed immediately upon 4 October. This Gregorian calendar, with its system of âNew Style' dating, came into force in Italy and France at Christmas 1582, and in the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire in October 1583. The Protestant Tudor kingdoms of England and Ireland did not adopt the new calendar.
Elizabeth's government asked Doctor John Dee, astronomer and mathematician, to look at the New Style Gregorian calendar. Dee agreed that there had been an error in the old computation, but he thought that eleven days, not ten, should have been taken out of the year. In the end Dee accepted the Gregorian calculation and proposed that ten days should be shaved across May, June, July and August. So Elizabeth's government was minded, in March 1583, to change the calendar in line with continental Europe. But there were some objections: firstly, this adjustment could cause schism in England; secondly, it would offend England's Protestant neighbours on the continent;
and thirdly, it would really matter only to âbut a few, viz. such as have traffic with foreign nations, but to the rest of the realm it will be troublesome'. This meant that England continued to use the Old Style of the Julian calendar with ten days' difference between England and most of the countries of continental Europe for the next 170 years.
Officials of Elizabeth's government at home and abroad used the Old Style Julian calendar. Catholic governments, the Roman Catholic Church, foreign ambassadors at Elizabeth's royal court, and English Catholic exiles and émigrés adopted New Style dating from 1582. In this book I use dates in Old Style, but when New Style was being used, or where it is unclear whether or not a writer was working from the Julian or Gregorian calendars, I give both dates in the notes to each chapter at the end of the book. A good example would be Thomas, Lord Paget's letter to his mother on 12 December 1583 âaccording to the new accompt', by which Paget meant the Gregorian calendar. This would have been 2 December in England and is shown in the Notes as 2/12 December 1583.
Elizabeth, Queen of England and Ireland
(1533â1603), the daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who succeeded her sister Queen Mary I to the English throne in 1558.
William Allen
(1532â94), founder and rector of the English seminary in Douai (which later moved to Rheims), the moral and spiritual leader of English Catholics in exile in Europe, a formidable pamphleteer and polemicist, and a keen supporter of England's invasion by the Catholic powers of Europe.
Robert Beale
(1541â1601), an official of Elizabeth's Privy Council close to Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham, a determined Protestant, and an experienced investigator of conspiracies and interrogator of state prisoners.
Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley
(1520â98), the first of Queen Elizabeth's secretaries (1558â72) and later her lord treasurer (1572â98); Elizabeth's most influential adviser for forty years, and the mentor of Sir Francis Walsingham.
Sir Robert Cecil
(1563â1612), Lord Burghley's son, privy councillor and secretary from 1596, who ran a formidable network of secret agents in the 1590s.
Mary Queen of Scots
(1542â87), the daughter of King James V of Scotland and Mary of Guise, great-granddaughter of the Tudor king Henry VII, pretender to Queen Elizabeth's throne; deposed in
Scotland in 1567 and kept in English custody from 1568 until her execution by Elizabeth's government in 1587.
Thomas Morgan
(1543â
c
. 1611), Mary Queen of Scots's chief intelligencer in Paris, whose influence lay behind many of the plots against Queen Elizabeth of the 1580s.
Charles Paget
(
c
. 1546â1612), a Catholic émigré, the son of an influential family in Tudor politics and an inveterate plotter against Elizabeth's government.
William Parry
(d. 1585), a spy for Lord Burghley in Italy and France who in 1584 conspired to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
Robert Persons
(1546â1610), Jesuit priest, writer and Catholic propagandist, and a collaborator with William Allen on plans for the invasion of England.
Thomas Phelippes
(
c
. 1556â?1626), Sir Francis Walsingham's trusted right hand in secret matters, a gifted linguist, mathematician and cryptographer, whose fortunes fell severely after Walsingham's death.
Philip
II
of Spain
(1527â98), the husband of Queen Mary of England (d. 1558), politically and militarily the most powerful king in Europe, ferocious in his campaign against Protestant heresy, who sent the Great Armada against England in 1588.
Sir Francis Walsingham
(
c.
1532â90), diplomat and privy councillor, Queen Elizabeth's secretary (1573â90), possessed of a keen eye for security and secret intelligence; a protégé of Lord Burghley, to whom he wrote in 1568: âthere is less danger in fearing too much than too little'.
Of all the ruling families of England none has been more accomplished at projecting its majesty than the Tudors. As usurpers with a tenuous claim to the English throne they had to be. Seizing the crown from the Yorkist King Richard III in 1485, the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, based his grab for power on the royal ancestry of his mother's noble family, the Beauforts, and his father's connection by marriage to the Lancastrians Henry V and Henry VI. The first of these fifteenth-century kings was a warrior and a model of chivalry, the second posthumously a saintly worker of miracles. Out of these rich and complicated threads of family and history the Tudor kings (Henry VII, Henry VIII and the boy-king Edward VI) and the Tudor queens (Mary I and Elizabeth I) wove a pattern of power and dynasty that is as vibrant and recognizable today as it was five hundred years ago.
Certainly the Tudors still dazzle. Their magnificent buildings are stunning in scale and grandeur, from the solidity of Hampton Court Palace to the splendid gothic traceries of St George's Chapel in Windsor and King's College Chapel in Cambridge. As remarkable is the Tudors' mausoleum in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, first intended by Henry VII as a shrine for his saintly Lancastrian forebear Henry VI. In royal propaganda the early Tudors never lost an opportunity: even a badge as simple as the double rose of the rival houses of Lancaster and York, the red and the white united, expressed so clearly and neatly the bringing of peace to a kingdom divided in the fifteenth century by civil war.
Henry VIII, who ruled between 1509 and 1547, continued his father's ambitions in the stone and stained glass of palaces and chapels
but also through the printing press and the pulpit. At Henry's court Hans Holbein the Younger, a German painter of spectacular talents, produced masterpieces of minute detail, showing members of the royal family and leading courtiers in portraits that have the immediacy of photographs. More obviously political in purpose was Holbein's great mural for the audience chamber of Whitehall Palace, so powerful a representation of Henry VIII, massive and regal, that it made visitors who saw it tremble.
This Henry was the king who changed English history in a way no other monarch had done before. He set England upon a path strikingly different to most of the countries of Europe. Refused an annulment of his first marriage by the Pope, in 1530 Henry's eyes were opened to new possibilities. He broke away from the Church of Rome. Recognizing the insistent calls of God and history, he proclaimed himself an emperor, magnificent in his power, supreme head of the Church of England on earth next under God. These facts of Henry's kingship were pressed home unceasingly from the pulpits and the printing presses. In a beautiful woodcut on the title page of the official translation of the Bible from Latin to English Henry was shown to be in direct communication with God, with no need for the intercession of priests or popes; the interests of the king in his palace and God in his heaven were identical. This whole edifice of projected authority was inherited eleven years after Henry's death by his daughter Elizabeth, who ruled the kingdoms of England and Ireland between 1558 and 1603. And Queen Elizabeth, as her subjects and enemies alike well knew, was very much King Henry's daughter, unbending, wilful, at times severe, a magisterial presence in government.
The impression of Elizabeth's England is fixed firmly in the popular imagination. It was a glorious Renaissance kingdom distinguished by its self-confidence, its wealth, the imperial exploits of its royal navy and its aggressive determination to succeed. Courtiers sparkled, poets and dramatists wrote, and audacious sea captains harried the Spanish enemy. We have to be impressed by the Elizabethan roll call of brilliance: Sir Francis Drake, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Edmund Spenser, Sir John Hawkins, Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Gabriel Harvey, Francis Bacon, William Camden. Presiding over her kingdom was a queen who in her last speech
to parliament, in 1601, said: âyour sovereign is more careful of your conservation than of herself, and will daily crave of God that they that wish you best may never wish in vain.'