Little Beagle

The life​ of a Tudor statesman could be a painful one. Even if dignified by a measure of moral integrity or, conversely, sweetened by the fruits of corruption, it still required long hours of unremitting labour. In the 16th century, when the political process rested less on institutions and more on informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from disaster. Robert Cecil knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely got away from the office. We see them transacting Privy Council business at midnight, or on Christmas Day, or for Robert, the day after his beloved wife died in childbirth; his handwriting was shaky and he blotted his signature. When in the 1590s the poet Henry Lok, anxiously seeking patronage, dedicated sonnets to the great men of the age, he wrote of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating.

Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart of power, but it isn’t exactly a biography, or a work of political history; it might be better described as a voyage through a landscape of political crisis, seen through the eyes of his central figure. As Alford notes, Cecil came to prominence in ‘a decade of emergency’. England was wearied by long years of war and religious tension, its ruling elite apprehensive for the safety of its ageing, unmarried, childless queen. Cecil and his contemporaries were inclined to see threats everywhere, and not without cause. This is where the spies came in. The wars in Europe had a sharp ideological edge, with foreign Catholic powers conspiring to invade England and often also plotting to assassinate her queen. Alford’s assertion that a ‘fundamental assumption of Elizabeth’s government was that no English Catholic could ever quite be trusted’ is oversimplified – some Catholics served the queen well – but it may reflect Cecil’s own perspective. Burghley had compared apparently peaceable Catholics to Judas, ‘that came to Christ without armour, colouring his treason with a kiss’. So Cecil conceived of his role as that of a guardian against the forces of dissension and destruction. In the one long account he wrote of himself, a defence against many libels and detractions, he described the job of a secretary of state: ‘to stand sentinel over the life of kings and safety of states’.

Alford does a good job, but he makes Cecil appear quite dull. Hard-working, principled, ingenious, attentive, efficient – but dull. This is partly a consequence of the emphasis on his paperwork, with relatively little consideration of his role as artistic patron or his religious beliefs. Putting espionage in the title may be an attempt to compensate, but even when it came to his ‘intelligencers’, as he called them, the narrative is not exactly exciting. Their role was essential, but their activities were often tedious. Cecil kept a list of them, gave them numbers instead of names and recorded the ciphers they used and the payments they received. Their scope was broad: one of the busiest was sent on missions to Denmark, Holland, Berwick, Flushing, Ostend, Brussels, Antwerp and Edinburgh. They reported on threats from abroad: one dispatch from Spain in 1594, where a new armada was under construction, helpfully translated a list of military preparations and their costings into English; another referred to sacks of wool as a code for galleons and shovels as a code for horsemen. They spent a lot of time evaluating who could be trusted and who might be a potential danger – questions which were hard to answer. The shadowy realms that they inhabited, of plot and counter-plot, of concealed ambition and incipient violence, might sound exciting, but they claimed the lives of some of them. Such activity was a painful necessity in a time of war. As Cecil wrote of some of his own more covert dealings, ‘all honest servants must strain a little when they will serve princes.’ It was warfare of a kind, but one fought with painstaking use of pen and ink, ciphers and secrets.

Contemporaries who resented the power that Cecil came to exercise mocked the fact that he wielded the pen and not the sword. In questioning the significance of his administrative activities, they might perhaps have had a point. His role was essential to government, but there is a risk of overstating his centrality. Alford describes Cecil as ‘the most accomplished and formidable politician of his generation’ and insists that ‘no one had power quite like his.’ Accustomed as we are to the dominance of politicians, we might forget that in the 16th and 17th centuries, they weren’t the only people running the country. The Cecils, father and son, served the queen. Indeed, they made this an article of faith: ‘Serve God by serving of the Queen, for all other service is indeed bondage to the devil,’ Burghley wrote to his son. They did not, however, always take their female monarch as seriously as they should have done. When Robert Cecil delicately began to forge a political relationship with Elizabeth’s probable successor, James VI of Scotland, he kept his activities secret. Years later, justifying this course of action, he observed that her ‘age and orbity’ – meaning her childlessness – ‘joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her’.

If the woman ruling the country might be said to occupy a rather peripheral place in this account, it is in line with Cecil’s view of his own importance. This is an abiding difficulty with the kind of history that focuses on the machinations of state and the workings of administration. In more recent times, we have the phenomenon of political biographies which seem to insist that the cabinet secretary or special adviser in question was the most important player in the political process. Historians have their own version of this, where the achievements of Thomas Wolsey or Thomas Cromwell, for example, are lauded to such an extent that Henry VIII barely makes the frame. Elizabeth herself recognised her dependence on men like the Cecils, and – despite a disinclination to give lavish rewards – gave them the wealth and nobility they had earned. The responsibility of government, however, ultimately lay with her. Towards the end of her reign, she described herself as a candle made of wax, whose job it was ‘to waste myself and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me’. Both Cecils were illuminated by their closeness to the queen; the source of illumination should not be left out of the picture.

Burghley died in 1598, worn out by his years of service, but Cecil was instrumental in ensuring the peaceful accession of the next monarch, when in 1603 James VI of Scotland became also James I of England. James wrote gratefully to Cecil, while acknowledging to others the ‘deep and restless care’ that Cecil took to secure his safety: he had ‘performed the part of a friend and an honest man’. Even so, James was inclined to ridicule the energetic endeavours of the man he called his ‘little beagle’. He addressed one letter to ‘the little beagle that lies at home by the fire when all the good hounds are daily running on the fields’. Under James, Cecil was raised through several levels of nobility until he eventually became the earl of Salisbury. It is a shame that Alford doesn’t give the years of service to James, when Cecil (now Salisbury) was at the height of his powers, the same kind of scrutiny as the Elizabethan years. Cecil helped to establish the new regime, confound the Gunpowder Plot and, in the last major contribution of his political career, proposed a system of annual parliamentary revenue that was one of the few relatively clear-sighted responses of the time to the problem of inadequate financial provision for government. Had he succeeded in putting the Great Contract into place, the subsequent history of the 17th century might have been significantly different. It was defeated by both royal suspicion and parliamentary unease. James wrote to Cecil disparaging his optimism: ‘Your greatest error hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall.’ He also observed, rather unkindly, that Cecil had been ‘a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament’. Even the king who owed him so much wasn’t convinced that Cecil held the key to the political process.

Administrative skill wasn’t everything in early modern politics. Among those who conceived of the political process in very different terms was Cecil’s sometime colleague and political rival, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, who is almost as central to Alford’s narrative as Cecil himself. Essex was no administrator; he was a nobleman, a scholar, a soldier and a political leader of a different type. Essex mocked Cecil’s patient labours as secretary. In a tactless tableau that he organised in 1595 as part of the annual celebration of the queen’s accession, he seems to have characterised Burghley as a tired old hermit longing for retirement (an image Burghley himself had invoked on previous occasions) and Cecil as a secretary fit only to deal with paperwork but furtively pursuing his ambitions. Essex himself figured as the dashing knight who was Elizabeth’s most faithful servant. Cecil was capable of collaborating with him, but he also worked hard to portray Essex as a liability. He was, Cecil thought, ‘a man of a nature not to be ruled’ and ‘too violent in his passions’.

Essex was lordly, impetuous and immensely charismatic, to judge from the loyalty he commanded from his followers and the place he held in the queen’s affections. Since we are looking at him through Cecil’s eyes in this book, we do not get to appreciate sufficiently his intellectual sophistication or political skill; we also do not get to see the extent of Cecil’s role in his downfall. Essex is cast as alternately angry, petulant or despairing. Certainly what Alford describes as his pattern of ‘ferocious overdrive and wounded retreat’ made him a volatile proposition. He yearned for a more assertive foreign policy that would take the fight against the European Catholic powers to a new level and did not appreciate Elizabeth’s wariness at the possible disaster – financial and political – that such a policy might generate, chafing at what he called her ‘unkind dealing’. He complained that he had given everything he had to her service ‘and yet am I so far from receiving thanks, as her Majesty keepeth the same form with me as she would do with him that through his fault or misfortune had lost her troops.’

The Roberts – Essex and Cecil – had at least one thing in common: a high opinion of their own political acumen. They took very different approaches, however, and in Alford’s book it is Cecil’s type of political engagement that appears superior. Essex is depicted as unable to recognise his mistakes, blaming instead those whom he perceived as his detractors and competitors. In this story, the fates of the industrious secretary and the doomed earl are intertwined, but it is the tortoise who wins the race. What is usually described as ‘Essex’s rebellion’ did in the end lead him to a traitor’s death. The curious events of February 1601 were cast by Essex’s enemies as an attempt to stage a coup; his endeavour to raise support from Londoners might be better read as a frantic but loyal bid not just to protect himself from his enemies, but to protect the queen from those who were leading her disastrously astray, and in the process threatening the Protestant succession. In Alford’s account – which others would contest – it appears that Essex had only himself to blame. In part, this is because it was Cecil who got to shape the story of Essex’s fall. His failings, in Cecil’s view, included ‘strengthening himself with vulgar opinion and the hearts of such subjects as by his dissembled affability and fair liberal promises of gifts he was able to maintain’. In other words, Cecil condemned his rival as a smooth operator, deceptively charming, dangerously attractive and – a little like Alford’s account – did not do him justice. Responding to Essex’s sarcastic mockery when he was brought to trial, Cecil declared: ‘My lord, I humbly thank God that you did not take me for a fit companion for you and your humours; for if you had, you would have drawn me to betray my sovereign, as you have done.’ Perhaps it was a relief to get that off his chest, but he was also claiming the narrative.

Wars are​ fought on many fronts. Alford’s account of Cecil shows that if deeds of arms on the battlefield mattered, so too did transactions made in secret. Both his book and Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman’s Spycraft make reference to what Ben Jonson had to say about intelligencers. He called them spies and said they were ‘lights in state, but of base stuff’, comparing them to cheap candles, or tapers, ‘who, when you’ve burned yourselves down to the snuff,/Stink, and are thrown away’. Jonson’s work was full of bitter observations on a world of watchers and informers. Spycraft, however, takes a more positive view, rooted in a study of the practicalities of life in the shadows. It gives such a detailed account of what it was to be a professional ‘intelligencer’ in early modern Europe that it is hard not to come away impressed by the scale of the technical skill required. Indeed, by the end of this book, an attentive reader has been prepared for an apprenticeship in the arts of deception. With a slightly unsettling attention to detail, recipes for invisible ink and deadly poisons are included in an appendix, just in case.

Spycraft makes clear that although intelligence networks were becoming increasingly extensive and professionalised in this era, the definition of a spy was inexact and many of the techniques of espionage were still at an early stage of development. Akkerman and Langman instruct the reader how to open and reseal a letter undetected, how to ‘lock’ a letter to guard against such interference, how to use a cipher, how to disguise or conceal a message, how to prepare and use invisible ink of various sorts and – if all these fail – how to assassinate someone. Along the way we learn how best to prepare a quill pen, are warned not to confuse ciphers with the newly developed technique of shorthand and told how many women were involved in this shady profession, including the royalist agent Jane Whorwood, who in due course became the mistress of the captive Charles I (she plotted his escape from Carisbrooke Castle, even having a ship ready to take him away). By paying attention to ‘the physical nature of spycraft’, Akkerman and Langman make the case for the importance of studying material culture. The book as a whole is imbued with a faint but detectable sense of professional pride; the authors imply a rather fastidious disapproval, for example, of the assassin who killed the Scottish regent, the Earl of Moray, in 1570, for employing so unsubtle a weapon as the loud and obvious arquebus when there were so many more sophisticated options available.

Spies, or intelligencers, frequently had a rather inflated view of their own abilities, and spoke loftily of their capacity to deceive, detect and, where necessary, kill. Spycraft mingles its analysis of the techniques involved with a wide selection of absorbing case studies exposing these exaggerations. Attempts by the Venetian authorities to remove a troublesome individual involved the collaboration of a professor of botany from the University of Padua, among others, but to no effect; the carefully prepared poisons proved ineffectual. Several years later, the man in question was found dead in the street, apparently of the plague; the Venetian Council of Ten’s latest assassin specialised in making his victims look like they had died of the disease. Trial and error was rife; the man who confidently asserted that he could assassinate Elizabeth I by poisoning her saddle turned out to be wrong. Even the famous murder of Sir Thomas Overbury went through several failed iterations of poisoned pork and partridge, until he was carried away by a toxic enema.

Both these books, in very different ways, give a keen sense of the clouded, troubled world of the late 16th and 17th centuries. Spycraft refers to a contemporary depiction of the spy or intelligencer wearing a cloak covered in ears and eyes to denote his constant vigilance; the image appears on the book’s cover (be warned, it glows in the dark). The same device appears in the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Elizabeth I, in which she wears a dress decorated with the ears and eyes of an all-watchful monarch. The constant level of threat, and commensurate sense of existential dread, that hung over the Elizabethan regime is not always given the prominence it deserves in discussions of the era. It was not just that Europe was plagued with war and England threatened with invasion, but that these conflicts were generated by the rift within Christendom produced by the Reformation, so that the antagonisms between factions or kingdoms were based on ideological commitment to one or other vision of religious truth. These were desperate times, and if All His Spies gives some idea of the personal cost involved, Spycraft shows the extraordinary measures that politicians were compelled to employ. Both Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, took pains to make ‘preservatives’, thought to counteract the effects of poison, a part of their regimen, and both had ornaments set on gold chains – one of a bezoar, another of ‘unicorn horn’ (in fact narwhal tusk) – that were believed to neutralise poison and could be dipped into any liquid. It appears they saw a lot of use. In an age so burdened with hatred and strife, you couldn’t be too careful.