Elizabeth's Spymaster (43 page)

Munday, Anthony
(1553–1633). A disaffected student at the English College in Rome, brought back to London to identify priests. Son of a London bookseller; apprenticed to John Alide, stationer, in 1576 and went to the English College in Rome two years later to study to become a priest. Returned to London and wrote
The English Roman Life.
Joined staff of Richard Topcliffe, the priest-hunter and torturer, who described him as a man ‘who wants [lacks] no sort of wit’. In 1581 he wrote an anti-Catholic narration of the circumstances of Edmund Campion’s capture. By 1584, appointed a messenger of the queen’s Privy Chamber. Became a minor playwright and poet, producing eighteen plays of which four are extant, and some popular romances.

Needham, Francis.
One of the spy master’s most trusted servants. Appointed the Earl of Leicester’s secretary in the Low Countries and used by Walsingham to spy on his behaviour and actions. Leicester wrote to Walsingham: ‘I thank you Mr Secretary again and again for this honest, able young man.’
²⁶

Nowell, Thomas.
Former student at the English College in Rome who returned to London to identify missionary priests.

Nünez, Dr Hector.
Portuguese physician in London. One of Walsingham’s correspondents, or in modern spy jargon a dead letter box, receiving letters from abroad on his behalf.

Ousley, Nicholas.
Agent in Malaga who smuggled his intelligence out of Spain hidden in wine casks. Mendoza exposed his clandestine work in a note to the Spanish king on 12 July 1587. The ambassador added: ‘On Walsingham receiving certain letters from him, he said he was one of the cleverest men he knew and the queen was much indebted to him for his regular and trustworthy information.’
²⁷

Ousley was captured, then bribed himself out of jail, and was still sending reports to London as late as April 1588. He later served as a volunteer soldier aboard the
Revenge
in the skirmishes against the Armada up the English Channel. Granted the lease of St Helen’s Bishopsgate as a reward for his services.

Palavicino, Horatio.
Genoese merchant who distributed Walsingham’s funds to spies in northern France and spied on Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris.
²⁸
In 1586, travelled to Germany to raise a Protestant army to invade France. Later knighted.

Parry, Dr William.
Spy and double agent. Described as a ‘passing proud, neat and spruce’ man, he was probably insane. Spied on the English Catholics resident in Rome, Paris and Siena during the 1570s for Burghley.

In 1580, he escaped a death sentence for assaulting and badly wounding one of his creditors, Hugh Hare, after breaking into his room in the Temple in London. Parry spent more than a year inside the Poultry Prison before being bound over to keep the peace on a £1,000 bond. In return for his freedom, he was instructed to spy once again on English Catholics abroad for Burghley and Walsingham, firstly in Paris, then in Venice, and finally in Milan and Lyons.

In January 1584, Parry returned to London and told Elizabeth that he had been involved in dealings with Pope Gregory XIII and Thomas Morgan, Mary Queen of Scots’ agent in Paris, in planning an attempt on her life.
²⁹
His involvement, he maintained, had merely been to unmask the plans of ‘malicious persons’ at home. Given the Queenborough Seat in the Commons in the Parliament of 1584.

Parry returned to spying to augment his income, and sought the role of freelance agent provocateur in concocting a new plot against the queen. He suggested to Edmund Neville, cousin of the exiled rebel Westmorland, that Elizabeth should be murdered. Neville promptly betrayed Parry and he was arrested and executed in Great Palace Yard, Westminster, on 2 March 1585.

Paule, Stephen.
Sent by Walsingham to Venice in early 1587 to discover information about the Armada. Sent weekly reports for more than a year. In November of that year, Paule reported that Michael Giraldi, a ‘Bergomase’
³⁰

has set sail for England, pretending to be a merchant. It is thought that for several reasons, [he is] to poison her majesty at the instigation of the Pope. The Pope, under pretence of supporting the war against the heretics and for performing some great enterprise, has enriched himself exceedingly.
³¹

Pellegrini, Pompeo.
Alias of
Anthony Standen.

‘P. H.’
Alias of
Robert Barnard.

Phelippes, Thomas.
Codebreaker and forger. Also controlled a number of Walsingham’s agents, notably Gilbert Gifford after his return to France. Son of William, a London customs officer. Cambridge Master of Arts, fluent in French, Italian and Latin but less skilled in Spanish. Described by Mary Queen of Scots herself as ‘of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow hair on the head, [eaten] in the face with small pocks, of short sight, thirty years of age by appearance’.
³²

In 1578, Walsingham sent him to Paris to decode correspondence intercepted there. He was then used to control spies in France and to carry 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’.
³³
His servant Casey was often used for delicate missions.

Appointed Collector of Petty Customs for the Port of London, deputising for Richard Young. In just two years he built up a debt totalling £11,682 6s 6d to the crown, lost his office and was thrown into jail.
³⁴
In 1598, he asked to repay the cash by instalments and to use the exchequer to recover his own debts.

Pooley, Robert.
A member of Walsingham’s daughter’s household. The Jesuit Father William Weston described him as ‘quick-witted by nature and ingenious in deceiving’. He entertained many of the chief Catholics in London with meals at his own home ‘at a table handsomely supplied’.
³⁵
Francis Milles, one of Walsingham’s confidential secretaries, thought him ‘a notable knave with no trust in him’. Agent in the Babington plot. Worked for Sir Thomas Heneage in Flushing and Brussels in 1592 and was a witness to the murder of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford on 30 May 1593.

Poyntz, Antony.
Acknowledged double agent. Brother-in-law of Sir Thomas Heneage, Treasurer of the queen’s Privy Chamber, and student in the Inner Temple, but frequently in trouble with the law. Sent to Paris in December 1586 to spy on the Spanish ambassador Mendoza, but immediately revealed his true role. Sent by Walsingham to Madrid to discover information about the Armada.

Robinson.
Alias of
Thomas Barnes.

Rogers, Thomas.
Alias of
Nicholas Berden.

Sandal, Andrew.
Alias of
Anthony Standen.

Sassetti, Captain Tomaso di Vicenzo.
Florentine decipherer who spied for Walsingham in France, later moving to London where he became a bodyguard to the Earl of Leicester for a fee of £50 a year.

Short.
Informer or spy against recusants and fugitive priests in England.

Sledd, Charles.
Masqueraded as a Catholic to infiltrate the English College
in Rome in 1579, staying at the home of the tailor Solomon Aldred, who later became another of Walsingham’s agents. On Sledd’s return to England in May 1580, he wrote out long lists of Catholic exiles and priests, some with physical descriptions, all of whom he had met on his travels in France and Italy. These he supplied to Walsingham, together with a curious diary of his time in Rome. He remained in London, becoming a successful priest-hunter.

Somers, John.
One of Walsingham’s secretaries, expert in deciphering codes.

Stafford, William.
Agent provocateur in the so-called ‘Stafford’ plot of 1587. Described as lewd, [and] miscontented’, he was the younger brother of Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris. He allegedly contacted Leonard Des Trappes, secretary of Châteauneuf, the French envoy in London, offering to carry out a plan to kill the queen. Two years earlier he had acknowledged some kind of deep obligation to Walsingham, telling him in June 1585: ‘I am as ever at your command.’

Stallynge, Richard.
English merchant in Rouen who sent Walsingham news and gossip from his wide circle of correspondents.

Standen, Anthony,
alias
Pompeo Pellegrini,
alias ‘B. C.’
³⁶
Member of the household of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Mary Queen of Scots’ second husband, in 1565. Later lived and worked in Tuscany. Great friend of Giovanni Figliazzi, the Duke of Tuscany’s ambassador in Madrid, and his dispatches, many routed through Walsingham’s agent Manucci, began to tap this useful friendship. He also ran an agent within the household of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, the Spanish naval commander-in-chief.

Heard of Walsingham’s death while in prison in Bordeaux after his arrest on suspicion of being a Spanish agent. In jail for nine months before he could smuggle a letter out to his friend Anthony Bacon, signed with the alias ‘Andrew Sandal’. In June 1591 wrote to Burghley complaining about lack of payment of a pension of £100 a year for spying.

Later knighted by Elizabeth but fell foul of James I and was imprisoned in the Tower from 1603 until 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.

Thomas, Captain.
Irish spy who had served with the royalist armies in the French civil wars. Escaped England and pretended to be a Catholic, thereby infiltrating the exiled Catholic community. Shadowed the activities of Maurice Fitzgibbon, Archbishop of Cashel, in Ireland in 1570. Five years later, he exposed plans for a rebellion in Ireland, but was arrested by the French government. The English ambassador Dr Valentine Dale eventually secured his release.

Tompson.
Alias of
Patrick Baynebridge.

Tomson, Lawrence.
Walsingham’s secretary. Sent to the northern Italian city of Bologna in 1580 to meet a papal agent with information to sell. He was told that Pope Gregory XIII intended to raise an army under Jacomo Bonacampanini. This general, with the assistance of Henry, Duke of Guise, was to invade England and dethrone Elizabeth.

Vavasour, William.
Alias of
Roger Almond or Amon.

Walton, Roger.
Former ward and page to Lady Northumberland. Dispatched to Paris by Walsingham sometime in midsummer 1588 to spy on the Catholic exiles there. Stafford, unaware that Walton was an English agent, wrote of him:

He [sleeps] here not far from me … To some he shows himself a great Papist, to others a Protestant… He has neither God nor religion, a very evil condition, a swearer without measure and tearer [blasphemer] of God, a notable whoremaster …

This Walton is young, without any hair on his face, little above twenty, lean faced and slender, somewhat tall, complexion a little sallow, [mostly goes about] apparelled in a doublet of black carke [cloth], cut upon a dark reddish velvet.
³⁷

On his return to England, Walton boasted to Walsingham that he had wormed himself into the confidence of the Duke of Guise and of Father Darbyshire, leader of the English Jesuits in Paris, and had learnt important secrets.

Williams, Walter.
Letter-carrier who sometimes dabbled in espionage. Former servant to Sir Thomas Copley, Catholic exile in France who tried to bribe Walsingham in 1582.
³⁸
Inserted into Rye Prison in August 1582 to investigate Catholic sedition. One of those used by Walsingham to watch Sir Edward Stafford, but the envoy made Williams very drunk and when he was ‘merry’ succeeded in learning from him some details of the intrigue against him.

Woodshaw, Edward.
Agent in Antwerp who replaced John Lee there in 1573 after his capture. A ‘cunning but unprincipled man’
³⁹
said to have considerable skill in a spy’s tradecraft, specifically tasked to watch the English fugitives exiled in Flanders following the 1569 Northern Rebellion.

Woodward, Robert.
Alias of
Robert Barnard.

Notes

Prologue

1
‘State Trials’, Vol. I, p.145.

2
De Critz (c.1552–1642) was later one of the serjeant painters to James I. He is probably responsible for the two portraits of Walsingham, painted 1585–7, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Other works by him (or attributed to him) include portraits of Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset (1601); Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury (1602); and the famous painting of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, with his pet cat in the Tower of London (1601), now at Boughton House, Northamptonshire.

3
See Ridley, p.264.

4
CRS, Vol. XXXIX,
Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons,
p.86.

5
From the Latin
recusare,
to refuse (the authority of the Church of England).

6
BL Add. MS 48, 029 (Yelverton MS 33), fols.131–141B. This text is printed in CRS, Vol. LIII,
Yelverton MS Miscellanea,
pp.193–245. Another version, differing slightly in the text but containing a preface probably addressed to Walsingham, is contained in BL Add. MS 48, 023, article nine. Worthington was captured and is recorded as being imprisoned in the gatehouse at Westminster in July 1586. See CRS, Vol. II,
Miscellanea,
p.254.