Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  The chief agents of the Scottish Queen are Mr. Throckmorton and Lord Henry Howard, they never come here except at night.

  He added a postscript: “Be on guard, if you please, against a Scot by the name of Fowler. He is very treacherous.”

  1583-87: The Bosom Serpent

  8

  THE THROCKMORTON PLOT

  The government’s official account of the incident in English history that would come to be known as the Throckmorton Plot was circumspect when it was published two years later. Francis Throckmorton’s apprehension in the matter, the government stated, “grew first upon secret intelligence given to the Queen’s Majesty, that he was a privy conveyor and receiver of letters to and from the Scottish Queen: upon which information, nevertheless, divers months were suffered to pass on, before he was called to answer the matter; to the end there might some proof more apparent to be had to charge him therewith directly; which shortly after fell out.”

  There were advantages in Mr. Secretary’s now well-known reputation as the man who believed knowledge was never too dear, for men who thought they had something to sell knew where the marketplace was to be found. There were disadvantages, too: the tides of greed and vanity and mischief-making washed a continual stream of bilge water and refuse along with the much rarer prizes. “Hear all reports but trust not all”: the parade of “hired Papists,” as Walsingham once termed them, and of disreputable Scotsmen, and of prison conmen who had served Mr. Secretary in his search for privy information were all liars of a lesser or greater sort. They lied to inflate their own importance, or to fill in a slack period when they hadn’t found anything genuine to sell; they lied in hopes of playing both sides of the street; sometimes they lied for no reason at all except maybe that they were in the habit of lying and couldn’t help themselves or wanted to stay in practice.

  And when they weren’t lying they sometimes tripped over one another. Spies watching spies: Fowler was probably not treacherous, as Fagot warned, merely incapable.

  Henry Fagot, however, was a spy of a different order. Though he was doubtless seeking reward, there was something of an intellectual game or a jape in the way he wrote. His dislike of Catholicism and the Pope bore none of the vulgarity or perfunctory insults about “notorious papists”: it seemed to go deeper.

  And his promise of corrupting the ambassador’s secretary to betray his correspondence with the Scottish Queen was something else again entirely. By mid-summer of 1583, the French Ambassador’s secretary had indeed begun to leak like a sieve, delivering to Mr. Secretary sheaves of copies he had made of the letters secretly passing between Mauvissière and Mary.

  The immediate payoff was some useful bits of political intelligence, and counter-intelligence. Mauvissière was greatly optimistic that diplomatic and political pressures were building on the English government to free Mary, with no direct force needed. Mary asked Mauvissière to have a questionable Scottish nobleman in his employ named Archibald Douglas write her a letter praising Walsingham’s efforts on her behalf and send it by ordinary post so it would be sure to fall into his hands; this was either a piece of calculated flattery designed to soften Mr. Secretary or a piece of deliberate disinformation designed to embarrass him.

  But this was small beer. The very fact that Mary’s friends had reopened a secret channel of communications suggested that something larger was afoot. And so the challenge now was to avoid scaring the prey until they fully revealed themselves. That would also require not scaring the French Ambassador’s secretary: for he was already living in constant fear of exposure.

  In August, his fear turned to panic after he was slipped a note demanding to know the names of the secret messengers who were conveying Mary’s letters. The note appeared to come from Queen Elizabeth herself. But the signature did not quite look right. The man, almost frantic, hastened to his go-between with Mr. Secretary: it was none other than Mr. Secretary’s old and none-too-effectual spy Walter Williams, the one who had received the humorous letter of recommendation from his Catholic cellmate.

  Walsingham, unfortunately, was away. And so, on the 31st of August 1583, Williams wrote to the Queen directly, explaining the danger she had placed the ambassador’s secretary in by her indiscreet question:

  He is in great fear, as a thing whereon his life dependeth. He sayeth three may keep council if there be two away, meaning thereby if any more be made acquainted, not to proceed any farther in his course begun. He marvelleth why your Majesty should desire to know the messengers who are already known to be but two… . If they should be apprehended, then there were but one way with him, for he only hath been employed for this six years in writing all matters of importance and now, especially in the absence of Courcelles, who was acquainted with the delivering of them from time to time, it cannot be but he only must be suspected to be the revealer of secrets.

  I therefore beseech your Majesty that it may please you to have a care of such which desire to do you faithful service, and to burn all his writings which shall come to your highness, for he feareth greatly to be betrayed. So fit an instrument is not to be lost… .

  A fitter time may serve to take the practisers and dealers against your highness’s state and quiet with less suspicion for your servant’s discovery, and greater confusion and shame to the treacherous and evil-minded against your Majesty… .

  I most humbly crave of your Majesty to burn this letter.

  Your Majesty’s most bounden in this life, Walter Williams

  Claude de Courcelles was another secretary in the embassy who handled the ambassador’s secret correspondence: he was away in Paris at the moment.

  Elizabeth did not burn the letter, but neither did she do anything further to interfere with her Principal Secretary’s patient intention to wait this time for more incriminating information to “fall out” before acting, and to keep his manner of discovering it a secret even then.

  Walsingham was away: gone to Scotland, gone with “as ill a will” as he had ever set out on a mission in the Queen’s service, he declared.

  In the kaleidoscopic regrouping of factions and alliances, yet another court revolt had taken place in Scotland, led by the Earl of Arran and the Captain of the Royal Guard, one Colonel William Stewart: the usual mix of politics and grudges and venality. But the upshot was that the pro-English Protestant faction was once again out; worse, this time the young King James seemed to have taken an active part in conspiring with the change, and though still professing his friendly feelings for England, he was moving with alacrity to place his trust in France. There were rumors of plans afoot to marry James to a French princess. Arran was nominally a Protestant, but had been the right-hand man—and then the rival—of the leader of the pro-Catholic junta that had been in control several coups back. He was a brutal man, full of power and revenge; Walsingham made clear that if sent to Scotland to remonstrate with the King he would have nothing to do with his new chief counselor.

  Walsingham set out early on the morning of the 17th of August 1583 with a large train of horses and eighty men. He was again plagued by ill-health: he had to travel by a “coshe or chariot,” really not much easier than riding a horse over rough roads that were barely passable to wheeled vehicles. His colic and pains forced the caravan to halt several times; it was the 26th before he even reached Newcastle. “I hope I shall have more ease in another world than I do in this,” he was moved to observe.

  It was clearly a hopeless mission, doomed to fail, doomed to have the onus of failure fall on Walsingham. En route, he received a letter from the English Ambassador in Edinburgh that only confirmed he was on a fool’s—or a miracle worker’s—errand. The passion of this new Scottish ruling faction to take some irrevocable step had become almost unstoppable, the ambassador warned. “I pray God give you might to work some miracle and wonder to alter and assuage this rage, that undoubtedly passeth mine ability and remedy.”

  At the border at Berwick, the Scottish government subjected Walsingham’s party to petty harassm
ents; the safe conduct the King sent provided for only sixty men to accompany the English Secretary, and was made conditional upon the Englishmen’s continued good behavior. A diplomatic affront: Walsingham refused to accept the passport under these conditions and demanded that proper forms be followed.

  More delays: bookmakers in Scotland were offering attractive odds to anyone willing to bet that the English Secretary would ever make it to the Scottish Court. He finally arrived in Edinburgh on the 1st of September, to be met with still more pretexts and delays about seeing the King.

  Walsingham was a man with nothing to lose in the situation; he quickly sought to show he had nothing to fear, either. He told the Scots who called on him that, despite all the rumors swirling about as to the purpose of his mission, he had not come to woo the Scots, or bribe them, or threaten them, or destroy the friendship between the two countries. His mistress the Queen could get along perfectly well without wooing the Scots, he said bluntly. As for bribes, he would advise her Majesty not to spend a sixpence on such a pack of ingrates as the Scots had shown themselves to be. And though the Queen sought the friendship of all her neighbors, “yet hath she not her sword glued in the scabbard.”

  When Walsingham was finally given his long-delayed audience with the King on the 9th of September, he was equally blunt. A seventeen-year-old sovereign was too young to pass judgment on matters of state. He had chosen badly in his councilors. England could live perfectly well without Scotland; and as far as Walsingham was personally concerned, he could do without the King’s friendship, too. And so he left. He declined to meet with any of James’s government, on the grounds that his instructions provided for him to deal with the King only.

  Two days later, James summoned Walsingham again and professed himself completely willing to do what the Queen asked of him. Walsingham dictated a long series of conditions: restoring the pro-English party, respecting the law and the will of the people as expressed in Parliament, avoiding the “great errors upon an opinion of the absolute-ness of their royal authority” that “young princes” were liable to: for “as subjects are bound to obey dutifully so were princes bound to command justly.” It was a remarkable statement not just of English interest but of the Puritan tenets of right governance—and also of Walsingham’s courageous refusal to curry favor with a sovereign who might, not implausibly, be in a position to exact revenge for such effrontery in the future: more than a few English courtiers were already seeking James’s good graces with an eye to when he might succeed to the English throne. But now James swore he would do as Walsingham bade him. Then he had his councilors draft a written undertaking full of ambiguities and evasions, and so Walsingham threw up his hands.

  As he had predicted from the start, the effort had been a trial and was now a failure, personal and professional. He had missed his young daughter’s wedding in September to his good friend Sir Philip Sidney; he had endured a miserable journey on miserable roads in miserable health; he had been personally harassed and insulted. Arran kept up a relentless series of dirty tricks during Walsingham’s whole time at the Scottish Court: issuing orders to refuse members of Walsingham’s entourage admittance to the palace; hiring “a common scold” known as Kate the Witch to sit outside and hurl abuse at the English delegation as they came and went; and secretly replacing, on the ring James had presented Walsingham as a parting gift, a diamond worth seven hundred crowns with a worthless piece of crystal.

  Mr. Secretary arrived back in London in mid-October 1583 and resumed his vigil upon the French embassy’s comings and goings. Still he stayed his hand. Then, at last, on the 5th of November, the opportunity to strike that he had been waiting so patiently for presented itself.

  The French Ambassador had just dictated a hasty note to his secretary, to be dispatched to Mary at once. It was the very first line that told Walsingham what he needed to know: “Madam, I write this letter to your Majesty in order to send it more promptly to the Sieur de la Tour, who has told me to have a man ready to leave this evening, and that he could not, moreover, keep him.” The information appears to have been relayed at once to Walsingham: here was a chance to catch Mary’s and Mauvissière’s courier red-handed.

  Moreover, there was the fact that on the 1st of November the embassy secretary Courcelles had returned from Paris, and that meant two other things of considerable importance: first, that he had probably come bearing a packet of letters for Mary, which would be turned over to the courier for delivery, and these could be seized along with the man himself if Walsingham moved at once; and, second, that with Courcelles back in town, the ambassador’s corrupt secretary now had at least some cover for the suspicion that would otherwise fall squarely on him if the “Sieur de la Tour,” whoever he was, were to be arrested.

  It seems clear that Mr. Secretary knew exactly who the “Sieur de la Tour” was: He was the same Francis Throckmorton whom Fagot had mentioned haunting the ambassador’s house at night, along with Lord Henry Howard.

  Throckmorton was nearly thirty years old, a member of the staunchly Catholic branch of a well-known family. He had been educated at Oxford and studied law at the Inner Temple; he had passed the last few years on an extended tour of the Continent with his brother. And so, that night, Mr. Secretary ordered certain “gentlemen of no mean credit and reputation” sent to search Throckmorton’s houses in London and Kent and arrest him. When Throckmorton was surprised in his London house that night, he was caught in the very act of enciphering a letter to the Queen of Scots. In his possession, too, was a list of Catholic noblemen and gentlemen throughout the country, a list that Throckmorton was apparently in the process of updating and rewriting. The new version pointedly contained notes about which harbors and ports of the country suitable for an invading fleet were situated close to the estates of these friendly men. Throckmorton was also found to be in possession of a dozen copies of the pamphlet published by the Bishop of Ross defending Mary’s title to the English crown.

  Throckmorton at first denied that he had ever seen the papers before; he insisted they had been “foisted in” among his belongings by the men who had done the searching. Then he acknowledged having seen them, but said they had been left in his chambers by a man named Edward Nuttebie, who had since fled the country. The members of the Council who examined him were scarcely about to credit either story, especially after Throckmorton was caught trying to toss from the window of his cell in the Tower several cards from a pack of playing cards. On their back was a message for his brother, clearly pressing him to corroborate his story: “I have been examined, by whom the two papers, containing the names of certain noblemen and gentlemen, and of havens &c. were written; and I have alleged them to have been written by Edward Nuttebie my man, of whose hand writing you know them to be.”

  His story now completely fell apart under the persuasion of the rack. During Throckmorton’s first interrogation under torture, he confessed nothing. A few days later, on the 18th of November, Mr. Secretary sent word to try again the following day: “I have seen as resolute men as Throgmortin stoop notwithstanding the great show that he hath made of a Roman resolution. I suppose the grief of the last torture will suffice without any extremity of racking to make him more comformable then he hath hitherto shewed himself.”

  Walsingham was right: before Throckmorton was “strained to any purpose” the next day, he agreed to tell all. At the behest of Mary’s supporters in Paris, he and his brother had, in September, surveyed suitable landing places for a force of five thousand men to be led by the Duke of Guise. From this list, Guise had chosen the port of Arundel in Sussex; Guise had then sent Charles Paget, who handled Mary’s affairs in Paris along with Thomas Morgan, to come over to England secretly to make a detailed survey of this port. While in England, Paget had also sounded out his brother Lord Paget and the Earl of Northumberland, the chief magnate near Arundel.

  Throckmorton admitted he had relayed many packets of letters between Morgan and Mary. He had also met twice a week in London with Men
doza, the Spanish Ambassador, who was up to his neck in the scheme. Mendoza had canvassed Catholic sentiment in the country and was proposing that a second force, twenty thousand Spanish troops, land in Lancashire, in the Catholic north.

  Throckmorton also revealed that when he was arrested he had had under his bed, in a small green-velvet-covered casket, the packet of letters for Mary that had indeed just arrived from Morgan in Paris; but he had managed to have a servant spirit them out of the house—and to Mendoza—under the very noses of the searchers.

  On the 19th of January 1584, the Spanish Ambassador was summoned to the Lord Chancellor’s house. Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester, and several other members of the Privy Council were present; they rose, bowed, and led Mendoza into a small inner chamber. Walsingham spoke. Her Majesty knew all about his intrigues. He had fifteen days to depart the realm.

  The ambassador furiously retorted that Elizabeth should mend her own ways and stop stirring up rebellions in other sovereigns’ realms herself before she accused innocent men of the same. Walsingham stood his ground impassively; he suggested that Mendoza might consider himself fortunate to have gotten off so lightly.

  And so the ambassador stormed pompously out, hurling a torrent of insults and threats in his wake. “Don Bernardino de Mendoza,” he thundered, “was born not to disturb kingdoms but to conquer them!”

  Mauvissière was a more delicate matter. The French Ambassador was at the very least guilty of a serious violation of his diplomatic status, for as far back as September 1582 the English government had informed the French that all correspondence with the Queen of Scots must henceforth go through the English embassy in Paris. And if not an active plotter and participant in the conspiracy, as was Mendoza, Mauvissière at least had a general idea of what was being discussed.

  In April, the Council prepared a secret list of charges against the French Ambassador:

  He hath had secret intelligence with the Scottish Queen