Elizabeth's Spymaster (40 page)

Elizabeth, the surviving daughter of Sir Philip and Lady Frances Sidney, married Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland, in March 1599, but died without issue at the age of twenty-nine in 1614. She was something of a poet, with the dramatist Ben Jonson describing her as ‘nothing inferior to her father in poetry’.
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The widowed Frances took as her second husband the dashing Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, in a secret marriage probably in March 1590, only days before Walsingham’s death, to the chagrin of Queen Elizabeth. She bore him one son, Robert, in January 1591, and two daughters, Frances and Dorothy, before he was executed on Tower Hill for attempting rebellion on 25 February 1601, in the dying years of Elizabeth’s reign.
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Robert became a leading Parliamentary general in the Civil War.

Twice-widowed Frances then married for a third time in 1603 – this
time to Richard de Burgh, Fourth Earl of Clanrickarde. She bore him one son in 1604 – Ulrick, later Marquis of Clanrickarde – and a daughter, Honora, who married John Paulet, Fifth Marquis of Winchester. Frances herself died on 17 February 1633.

Burghley expired on 4 August 1598 after four decades of faithful service to Elizabeth. His last years were afflicted by poor health, especially the painful gout in his legs. His son Robert had deputised for him for some years before his official appointment as Principal Secretary of State on 5 July 1596. For once, the churlish queen unbent sufficiently to show gratitude for Burghley’s loyalty, saying that she gave ‘hourly thanks’ for all his services, and urged him ‘to use all the rest possible you may, that you may be able to serve her at the time that cometh’. She came to his bedside and spoon-fed him during his last days.
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The code-breaker and forger Thomas Phelippes worked for Essex after Walsingham’s death and his dismissal by Sir Robert Cecil. By 1596, he was so inundated with intelligence reports from Europe that four secretaries were employed to handle the deciphering.
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A grateful government appointed him Collector of Petty Customs for the Port of London, deputising for that old recusant-hunter, the magistrate Richard Young. But in this lucrative sinecure Phelippes managed to come a cropper. He may have been good at the arithmetic of code-breaking but he was hopeless at the management of money and cash accounts. In just two years, he built up a debt to the crown totalling £11,682 6s 6d, lost his office and was thrown in jail.
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In 1598, he asked to repay the cash by instalments and to use the exchequer to recover his own debts.
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After the accession of James I, Phelippes was quick to write an apology to the new king for his ‘meddling in the cause’ of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. He pleaded that he had merely deciphered the letters relating to Babington intercepted by the government.
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Sir Robert Cecil re-employed him to decode the correspondence of new suspects; one letter has an annotation written in Cecil’s hand: ‘Letters written by Phelippes and suggested by him to be counterfeited.’
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An old dog continues with his favourite tricks. In 1605, he was arrested and questioned about his correspondence with undesirables living overseas
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and four years later, his
old debt problems caught up with him again, with a warrant issued to pay Sir Robert Carey £800 for the redemption of the lease of Phelippes, ‘late collector of subsidies for the port of London’.
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His last appearance in the State Papers is in 1622, by which time he must have been an old man. He was then imprisoned in the Marshalsea, ‘arrested upon an old warrant between me and one Tytten’. Sir Robert Cotton reported that Phelippes had been advised to leave England

and to expect entertainment abroad to sell his skill. He was told … by others to have recourse to the king’s bounty here, being also of himself loth to wander at these years, especially without leave of the state.

He thereupon presented a petition to his majesty, importing that he had been forced … to part with a pension [he] had for deciphering, towards satisfaction of a debt owing to the late queen, which she was in mind to have pardoned …

His majesty therefore may be moved – if not for his feat of deciphering, by the which … England was sometime preserved to him and sometime his majesty to England, when he knew not of it – for these other abilities to bestow upon him for the present, for to pay his debts till something may occur to repair his estate and to entertain such a servant, perhaps to some ecclesiastical dignity of the inferior sort…
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History does not record whether Phelippes received his lowly church job, a post remarkably ill-suited to his lurid past as a forger and deceiver.

The spy Anthony Standen heard of Walsingham’s death while in prison in Bordeaux after, ironically, he had been arrested on suspicion of being a Spanish agent. He languished in jail for nine months before he could smuggle a letter out to his friend Anthony Bacon, signed with the fictitious name Andrew Sandal’. In June 1591, Standen wrote to Burghley complaining about lack of payment for his espionage on behalf of the English crown and seeking his help in obtaining his freedom. Walsingham had told him of a pension of
£
100 a year that had been granted to him by a grateful sovereign.

At my coming back from Spain to Florence in 1588, I found the effect by the receipt of a year’s pay and now this year another towards my voyage which has not sufficed for my expenses in travelling to and especially now this last time being forced to remain for passage at Genoa for five month[s].

The year 1588 was the time that huge armada went and perished: I was, by his [Walsingham’s] order, at the court of Lisbon, where I had the view of all and by the way of Italy, gave advice of the whole manner of their designs, which, by his letters I found in Florence, seemed most grateful to her majesty.
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Standen was freed on 12 October and went on to Spain, sending a new cipher to Burghley and using the new alias of ‘La Faye’. He was later knighted by Elizabeth but fell foul of James I and was imprisoned in the Tower from 1603 until the November of the following year after the discovery of some letters he wrote to various cardinals in Rome about the possible conversion of James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, to Catholicism.
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Gilbert Gifford, Walsingham’s agent provocateur in the Babington case, also came to an ignominious end. Back in France, he astonishingly got himself ordained as a priest but was discovered in flagrante delicto in a brothel in Paris in December 1587. He was immediately imprisoned and an attempt to prosecute him for his treachery against the Catholic cause was launched unsuccessfully by the Papal Nuncio in France. He died in prison in November 1590.

Thomas Morgan, Mary Queen of Scots’ agent in Paris, was freed from the Bastille after appeals from Rome for his release, much to Elizabeth’s fury. Mendoza arranged a small pension for the Welshman and sent him to Flanders in 1588 to help with the preparations for the invasion of England by Spanish forces. He returned to England after James’s accession but was speedily deported back to France, where, bizarrely, he became involved in an intrigue over the custody of the bastard children of Henry IV. He was imprisoned again in the Bastille from June 1604 to April the following year for his inveterate plotting. He made the last
of his shuttlecock journeys across the English Channel in 1608 and died in England shortly afterwards.
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Bernardino de Mendoza, that most canny of all conspirators, had become blind by 1590 and retired from public life, his scheming and duplicity stilled at last. He died in the convent of San Bernardo in Madrid in 1604.

Richard Topcliffe, the odious rackmaster, prospered. He became the Member of Parliament for Old Sarum, Wiltshire, and developed commercial interests in all manner of enterprises from peat extraction to fuel-iron smelting
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and in droving cattle. His use of torture to extract information eventually became notorious even in those hard times: a letter from Standen in 1592 refers to an individual having ‘such mildness and affability, contrary to our
Topcliffian
[author’s italics] customs as he has won with words more than others could ever do with racks’.
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Despite this sly dig, Topcliffe was effective in arresting suspected priests and breaking down their resistance: the State Papers contain a number of confessions from his victims.
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But the tide was slowly turning against Topcliffe and his savage, sadistic methods. Questions over the legality of and official authorisation for his torture emerged after his torment of the priest Robert Southwell in 1592, whom he had arrested in June that year. At his trial three years later, Southwell said he had been tortured on ten separate occasions, but the newly appointed Attorney General Sir Edward Coke asserted that Topcliffe ‘had no need to go about to excuse his proceedings in the manner of his torturing’.
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The rackmaster was able to prove that he had official sanction to torture the priest ‘short of death or maiming’.

Always cocksure, always arrogant, Topcliffe was briefly jailed in the Marshalsea in 1595 for insulting the Privy Council, and from there he wrote to the queen, complaining that ‘by this disgrace … the fresh dead bones of Father Southwell at Tyburn
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and Father Walpole
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at York, executed both since Shrovetide, will dance for joy’.
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Released, he returned to his winning ways with prisoners, being employed by the Privy Council for a further four years in the interrogation
of prisoners in the Bridewell Jail in London, where he widened his net to include thieves, murderers, ‘Egipcians [gypsies] and wanderers’.
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He also interrogated the author and actor Thomas Nash and other players in the lost satirical comedy
The Isle of Dogs
in the Fleet Prison in 1597.

Topcliffe also enjoyed a little light homework at his house hard by St Margaret’s Churchyard in Westminster, where he constructed a ‘strong chamber’ fitted with various sets of manacles’
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to torment priests ‘in his own house in such sort as he shall think good’. Here, he boasted, he had ‘a machine, of his own invention, compared with which, the ordinary rack was mere child’s play’. One shudders to consider its workings and the effects on the bodies of his victims, or Topcliffe’s leer as he inflicted this home-made device on some hapless prisoner.

Topcliffe was now aged sixty-six and afflicted by lameness – no doubt caused by arthritis brought on by all the time he spent in all those damp prisons. His nephew Edmund renounced the family name as an acknowledgement of his uncle’s notoriety and his eldest son Charles was convicted of a felony. Topcliffe left London and spent the remainder of his life at his family estate at Somerby in Lincolnshire and, from 1603, at a new property at Badley Hall, Derbyshire, previously owned by the Catholic Thomas Fitzherbert, which he acquired as part of an agreement involving the persecution of the Fitzherbert family.
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He died peacefully in his bed in November or December 1604.

There is clearly little natural justice in his end.

For six months after her execution, the body of Mary Queen of Scots lay seemingly forgotten at Fotheringay, encased in an anthropoid coffin of lead. At last, in mid-July 1587, orders were issued to give the executed queen a royal burial. This may have been the result of a rare attack of conscience on Elizabeth’s part, or more prosaically because the smell of the rapidly decaying corpse was beginning to unpleasantly pervade her castle.

On Sunday 30 July, Sir William Dethicke, Garter King at Arms and the principal herald, plus five of his colleagues and escorted by forty horsemen, arrived at Fotheringay with a ‘royal coach’ covered in black velvet and decorated with shields bearing the arms of Scotland. Mary’s body – the
lead shell now encased in a wooden coffin – was reverently placed in the coach and the sad little procession headed off for the city of Peterborough at ten o’clock at night. Some of the Scottish queen’s household – her steward Andrew Melville, Dominique Bourgoing, Pierre Gorion and Jacques Gervais
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amongst them – followed the heralds on foot in the flickering torchlight for the duration of the eleven-mile journey.

At the door of the cathedral, the cortege was met by Richard Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough – ironically, the same clergyman who had fared so badly at Mary’s hands at her execution. Sometime around two o’ clock in the morning, her coffin was quickly lowered into a vault in the south aisle at the entrance to the choir, ‘without bells or chanting’.
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A small opening was left in the top of the brick vaulting. It had been decided to bury Mary in advance of the funeral because her coffin

was so extremely heavy by reason of the lead, that the gentlemen could not endure to have carried it with leisure in the solemn proceeding[s] and besides, [it] was feared that the [lead] might rip and being very hot weather, [there] might be found some annoyance.
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