Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Ar...

Author: Robyn Adams | Rosanna Cox

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Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton

Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share a historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox DIPLOMACY AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMAN IN EARLY MODERN ENDLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Patrick Cheney MARLOWE’S REPUBLICAN AUTHORSHIP Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England David Coleman DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Indelible Characters Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 James Daybell and Peter Hinds (editors) MATERIAL READINGS OF EARLY MODERN CULTURE Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors) THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 Tobias Doring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI

10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford

Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (editors) ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA,1500–1660 Forms Outside the Canon Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (editors) THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF PURITAN WOMEN, 1558–1680 Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Gregory Kneidel RETHINKING THE TURN TO RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Edel Lamp PERFORMING CHILDHOOD IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Scott L. Newstok QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Marion Wynne-Davies WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE ON THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Relative Values The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading. Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71472–0 (Hardback) 978–0–333–80321–9 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quotes above. Customer Services Department Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (editors) SHAKESPEARE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE

Edited by

Robyn Adams Senior Research Officer, Centre for Editing Lives and Letters Queen Mary, University of London and

Rosanna Cox Lecturer in English Literature, University of Kent

Foreword by

Lisa Jardine



Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Robyn Adams and

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23976–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



Rosanna Cox 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 Foreword © Lisa Jardine 2011

Foreword by Lisa Jardine

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox 1

2

3

4

1

‘Procure as many as you can and send them over’: Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations, 1460–1760 Peter Barber

13

Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William Swerder in England and Abroad Jason Powell

30

Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham Stephen Alford

46

A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence Robyn Adams

63

5

Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy Joanna Craigwood

6

Gender, Politics and Diplomacy: Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England James Daybell

101

Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing Alan Stewart

120

Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques Hannah J. Crawforth

138

7

8

82

v



Contents

vi Contents

10 The Postmistress, the Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier and the Power of Postal Control Nadine Akkerman Index

155

172

189



9 The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing Mark Netzloff

This volume of essays is that rare thing, a scholarly, academic collection of essays which sets the reader’s pulse racing. Its subject matter does, of course, give it an advantage. Spies, intelligencers, knowledge gatherers and diplomats are the stuff of which romantic historical fiction and Tudor conspiracy theory investigations are made. What is so remarkable about the accessibility and easy reading of the present work, largely by academics in the early stages of their career, is that the studies it presents are scrupulously based upon archival evidence, painstakingly researched in manuscript collections around the world. The skills the authors of these essays bring to their topics are those of the trained archivist and interpreter of the manuscript remains of the past: above all, palaeography, the ability to decipher and transcribe difficult sixteenth- and seventeenth-century handwriting, so as to make sense of long-inaccessible and forgotten written materials. These traces of early modern men and women are the more tantalizing for being, inevitably, fragmentary, chance survivals from an age which attached great importance to committing everything regarded as significant to writing. These researchers also possess the ability painstakingly to reconstruct coherent narratives from the shards and fragments they have unearthed in the library. Each of them has a commanding understanding of the context within which their particular sample of material was produced, the milieu for which it was written. They stamp their interpretations with an easy authority which gives the reader confidence that their tale is to be trusted. As someone who has worked in adjacent fields, on similar materials for much of my own academic career, reading this collection of essays has informed me, and deepened my knowledge of the intricate world of the early modern diplomat and intelligencer. I have also learned a great deal from the strategies for seeing an existing field with fresh eyes and exploring its complexity in original and often unexpected ways. The study of Renaissance diplomacy is very much richer for their efforts. Lisa Jardine May 2010

vii



Foreword

This volume began life after a three-day conference held at the University of Kent in collaboration with the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary, University of London in 2008. The exciting discussions generated by our dynamic group of delegates inspired us to put together this collection, and we are grateful to those who spoke, who attended, and who supported the proceedings. We owe a debt of gratitude to our respective colleagues at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and at the University of Kent, who freely gave their valuable advice and time, and made us tea when it counted. A special note of thanks must go to Lisa Jardine. At every stage of both our academic careers she has unfailingly supported us. Without her invaluable and magnificent guidance and friendship our world would be a dull and quiet place. Our thanks also to Bernhard Klein, Catherine Richardson, and Helena Torres; Matt Symonds, Jan Broadway, Susan North, Elizabeth Williamson and Will Tosh. Thank you also to David, Ed and Barney.

viii



Acknowledgements

Robyn Adams is the Senior Research Officer at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the editor of two online letter editions, The Letters of William Herle and The Diplomatic Letters of Thomas Bodley, and associate editor of Letters of a Stuart Princess: the Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, vol. II (with Nadine Akkerman). Her research focuses on intelligence and information networks of the sixteenth century. Nadine Akkerman is a Lecturer in English Literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and an Associate of the Centre of Editing Lives and Letters (CELL, QMUL) in London. She is editor of the forthcoming Letters of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (3 volumes), to be published by Oxford University Press. Stephen Alford was trained as a historian by John Guy at the University of St Andrews before moving to Cambridge in 1997 as a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow. He was elected a Fellow of King’s College in 1999 and appointed to a University Lectureship in Tudor history a year later. Also in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His first and second books, The Early Elizabethan Polity (1998) and Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (2002), were published by Cambridge University Press. His biography of Lord Burghley, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I, was published by Yale University Press last year. His next book is about intelligence, security, treason and loyalty in the reign of Elizabeth, and it will be published by Penguin in the UK and Bloomsbury Press in the US. Peter Barber studied international history at the London School of Economics before joining the British Library in 1975. After 12 years in the Department of Manuscripts, where he helped to catalogue the archive of the first Duke of Marlborough, he transferred to the Map Library where he has been Head of Map Collections since 2001. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has curated several exhibitions, notably on Diplomacy (1979), the Glorious Revolution (1988), the mapping of London (2006), and Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art (2010) and has published extensively on the history of cartography. Among his publications are ix




x


Rosanna Cox is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent, UK. She works mainly on the politics, literature and thought of the civil war, commonwealth and restoration periods, and is particularly interested in the works of John Milton. She has published chapters and articles on Milton’s politics, and on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, and is currently working on her monograph on Milton and citizenship. Joanna Craigwood is a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. She has recently completed a PhD on diplomacy and early modern English literature at Cambridge University. She works on crossovers between diplomatic and literary representation in the writings of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne and Wroth, and in early modern diplomatic treatises and related historical documents. She also works on diplomatic agency in the international circulation of books, manuscripts, and literary news in the early modern period. Her publication on this subject (in Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Thomson et al., 2010) traces the intersection of national interest and international exchange in the circulation of books by the poet-diplomats Matthew Prior and George Stepney. Hannah J. Crawforth is a Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral thesis, completed at Princeton, was entitled ‘The Politics and Poetics of Etymology in Early Modern Literature’. It reconsidered the poetry of Spenser, Jonson and Milton in the light of increased efforts to study the history of the English language in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is currently working on a book about the relationship between literature and linguistics in the Renaissance. Previous publications include essays on topics from Richard Verstegan to Geoffrey Hill. James Daybell is a Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Plymouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is author of Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 2006), editor of Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing, 1450–1700 (Palgrave, 2001; winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women award for best collaborative project, 2002), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Ashgate, 2004), and (along with Peter Hinds) Material Readings of Early Modern Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).



Diplomacy: the World of the Honest Spy (1979), The Map Book (2005), the chapter on mapmaking in England 1480–1650 in The History of Cartography iii (University of Chicago, 2007) and (with Tom Harper) Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art (2010).

Notes on the Contributors xi

Lisa Jardine CBE is Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University. She is a Trustee of the V&A Museum, a member of the Council of the Royal Institution, and sits on the Library Committee of the Royal Society. She is Patron of the National Council on Archives. For the academic year 2007–8 she was seconded to the Royal Society as Advisor to its Collections. In April 2008 she took up the post of Chair of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. Lisa Jardine has published over fifty scholarly articles in refereed journals and books, and seventeen full-length books, both for an academic and for a general readership, a number of them in coauthorship with others. She is the author of a number of best-selling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Her most recent book on Anglo-Dutch reciprocal influence in the seventeenth century, entitled Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, was published by HarperCollins in April 2008, and won the 2009 Cundill International History prize. Mark Netzloff is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern Colonialism (2003) and the editor of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue: A Critical Edition (2010). His current book project examines the writings of English state agents in early modern Europe. Jason Powell is Assistant Professor of English at St Joseph’s University. His two-volume edition of Thomas Wyatt’s complete works, now under contract with Oxford University Press, has been supported by a Fellowship from the US National Endowment for the Humanities and a Harrington Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. He is working toward a monograph on Tudor literature and diplomacy and co-editing, with William T. Rossiter, a collection of essays on Diplomacy



He has published more than twenty articles and essays on the subjects of early modern women and letters and is currently completing a monograph entitled ‘The Material Letter in Early Modern England’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).

xii Notes on the Contributors

Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and International Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters in London. He is the author, most recently, of Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford University Press, 2008), and is currently editing volumes 1 and 2 of the Oxford Francis Bacon.



and Authority from Dante to Shakespeare. His articles have appeared in Huntington Library Quarterly, The Sixteenth Century Journal, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, and Poetica, among other places.

Introduction

The National Gallery portrait of Constantijn Huygens painted by Thomas de Keyser in 1627, around the time of his marriage, shows a confident, cultured gentleman seated within a comfortable and elegant chamber. Attired in an expensive riding habit, Huygens sits in his study surrounded by objects which testify to the pursuits and tastes required of a leading political adviser. Turning his body a fraction to the viewer in response to an interruption by a figure described by curators as a ‘clerk’, Huygens is handed a letter. Clearly a commonplace occurrence, Huygens does not meet the messenger’s eye, marking his place with his finger on architectural plans, perhaps detailing a building project for the Dutch Stadholder (head of state), whom he serves as First Secretary. Accompanying these plans on the Turkish rug, which is draped over the table, are terrestrial and celestial globes, a pair of dividers, a pocket-watch, an inkwell, books and a stringed musical instrument festooned with midnight blue ribbon. A tapestry in the background depicts St Francis before the Sultan.1 We begin our introduction to the present volume in Constantijn Huygens’ private study. Here graphically brought to life for us is the quintessential agent and facilitator to those who rule – a visual icon for the kind of diplomatic figure with which this collection of essays deals. Constantijn Huygens was born in 1596, the son of another First Secretary to the Stadholder.2 From birth he was expected to enter the service of the House of Orange, and was raised accordingly. By his teens he was highly educated in letters and manners, a proficient musician and linguist, and a shrewd observer of life and art, with a good understanding of political and military matters. In 1618 he was sent on his first diplomatic mission to London, in the train of the English ambassador to the northern Netherlands, Sir Dudley Carleton. Accompanied by 1



Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox


the young Jacob de Gheyn (subsequently a distinguished painter), the purpose of this trip was for Constantijn to become fluent in English and to broaden his cultural horizons in the comparatively sophisticated surroundings of Stuart London. His letters home to his parents are clear evidence of the success of both these aspirations. He visited a number of James I’s royal palaces, kept the company of gentry and aristocracy at court and in the city, performed on the lute before the king (James knighted him on the spot) and acquired a deep and lasting artistic connoisseurship. Frequently required to wait around while Carleton conducted his diplomatic business and saw to his personal affairs, Constantijn and de Gheyn spent many hours in the Earl of Arundel’s art gallery and admired Prince Henry’s art collection at St James’ Palace. Huygens made a number of subsequent diplomatic trips to London, his command of English proving increasingly invaluable to the Dutch embassies he accompanied. In 1625 when Frederik Hendrik succeeded his half-brother Maurits as Stadholder, Constantijn Huygens lobbied for, and was successful in gaining, a post as his First Secretary. The following year he made an advantageous marriage to the well-connected and well-to-do Suzanna van Baerle, further establishing himself in court circles in The Hague. Thomas de Keyser’s portrait was painted in 1627 and captures the demeanour of a young agent and diplomat, confident and commanding at the outset of his career. It may be the painting referred to by Huygens in a Latin poem he wrote in July of that year.3 A strong theme of the present volume is the way in which sometimes shadowy figures engaged in intelligence- and information-gathering, surveillance, diplomatic activity, procuring of cultural objects, advising and counselling shaped significantly the events and milieux in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As adviser to Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, the young Constantijn Huygens fulfilled all these functions. It is not an overstatement to suggest that his influence contributed significantly to raising the international profile of the Dutch Stadholder’s court. This was no mean feat, considering the unpromising beginnings of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms’s period at the helm of the northern Netherlands. Frederik Hendrik was the youngest son of William the Silent, and became Stadholder by default when his older half-brother Maurits died without legitimate heirs. His marriage to Amalia van Solms – lady-in-waiting to the exiled Elizabeth of Bohemia – was a hurried affair, carried out at the express command of the dying Prince Maurits, and designed to ensure the dynastic succession of the House of Orange.



2

Amalia had neither the rank nor the pedigree to become the consort of the ruling Prince of Orange, nor had Prince Maurits’s court at the Hague attracted much interest on the part of other ruling heads of Europe. Within a decade, however, Constantijn Huygens had seen to it that the court of Frederik Hendrik and Amalia in The Hague was one of the most celebrated in Europe, for its ostentation and cultivation. To take a single example of the way Huygens, as cultural eminence grise, helped create an aura of entitlement and authenticity for the couple, we may take an event which typifies the kind of advisory activities required of a cultivated aide operating between domestic and political concerns. The inferior social status of Amalia van Solms was a matter for public comment, both inside and outside the Netherlands. One of Huygens’ roles was that of image-maker for Frederik Hendrik’s new nonroyal wife. Soon after assuming the position of First Secretary, between 1625 and 1626, shortly after Frederik and Amalia’s marriage, Huygens was called upon to facilitate the purchase of a painting by the Flemish painter (resident in Antwerp) Peter Paul Rubens depicting the marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxane. ‘Alexander had raised a wife from among his imperial conquests to princely rank, while she had obediently complied with his royal command.’4 This painting makes a virtue of the difference in rank between Frederik and his new consort, drawing attention to the union which would strengthen the Orange claim to sovereignty. Frederik is the magnanimous sovereign, pre-eminent in battle, whose generosity and love transform a captive bride into a regal figure. There is surviving evidence which testifies to the importance placed on this painting by Amalia. An inventory of the royal apartment in the Binnenhof in The Hague from this time indicates that it hung on a prominent wall above the mantle-piece in Amalia’s elegant private ‘cabinet’.5 The painting was set against walls clad in green velvet, in a room lavishly furnished with matching velvet-upholstered furniture and green silk curtains. As well as Rubens’ ‘Alexander and Roxane’, there were other paintings and portraits on the walls of this intimate chamber, including a portrait of Elizabeth of Bohemia and a Rembrandt profile of Amalia. As well as being acutely fashionable, the lavish programme of artistic patronage and expenditure on their domestic interior powerfully signalled the dynastic intent of the royal couple. This careful staging of Frederik and Amalia’s dynastic-chic interior decoration and sumptuous court lifestyle was shaped in no small part by



Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox 3


Huygens, who drew directly on his experiences of fashionable English taste during his formative period in England with Sir Dudley Carleton before his appointment as First Secretary to the Dutch royal family. Among the Huygens papers from this period now in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague can be found documentation in Rubens’ hand making arrangements for the sale of the painting of Alexander and Roxane, with Hugyens acting as the negotiator and Michel le Blon as the intermediary and agent. Examples like these can be multiplied many times within Huygens’s extensive surviving correspondence in his official capacity as secretary, advisor and facilitator. They reveal that, among the other duties demanded of a high-ranking political adviser, Hugyens was required to steer matters of taste and commerce to a conclusion which would be aesthetically as well as politically advantageous.6 One further example will help convey the breadth of expertise required by an official in Huygens’s position. For the duration of his extraordinarily long career, Huygens remained an active participant in the transmission of cultural ideas, including those associated with the new field of practical scientific discovery. In 1674, perhaps while on official business, he paid a visit to Sir William Temple, the English resident ambassador to The Hague. Temple was suffering from a serious attack of gout, and was confined to his house, in considerable pain and limited in his movement. Huygens told Temple that he had recently obtained a copy of a book written by Hermann Busschoff, a physician who had served as a minister of the Dutch Reformed church in the East Indies, in which was detailed a remedy for gout used by the people of Taiwan. The next day, Huygens dropped a copy round to Temple. The English ambassador read Busschoff’s account – in Dutch – of a new method of relieving the symptoms of gout by burning a piece of moxa (mugwort) next to the skin to improve circulation. Temple decided to give this new remedy a try. After several applications, Temple related in a later account that to his delight, the procedure was successful. The easy access Huygens had to this new scientific knowledge concerning medical treatment for a painful condition was part of the energetic environment of trade, commerce and information-gathering that fuelled and was fuelled by the expansionist movements of seventeenth-century Holland. Huygens’ procuring of Busschoff’s book, and his interest in both the new scientific knowledge flooding in from Dutch overseas territories and Temple’s health demonstrate a spry engagement in affairs not normally connected with diplomatic activity. The image of two political representatives conferring over the printed



4


medical material is a seductive reminder of the porous and fluid nature of diplomatic exchange.

This volume brings together varied and suggestive examples from right across the early modern period of the activities of those who, like Huygens in areas such as information-gathering and exchange, the acquisition of luxury items, and experimentation with poetic and literary form, influenced in distinctive ways the culture and society in which they lived and worked, not from the centre but from the margins. The reader will learn to know a group of influential men and women forgotten for the most part by history in spite of their lasting importance. Outside the Netherlands, hardly any student of the seventeenth century recognizes the name of Constantijn Huygens, unless it is as the father of the celebrated scientist Christiaan. Yet in every area of contemporary public life, Huygens during his lifetime exercised unrivalled influence. Once we recognize this, our understanding of the period is bound to change, particularly because it becomes impossible neatly to separate areas of activity and disciplines. These agents and diplomats made no distinction between the many arenas in which they worked to exert their influence on behalf of those who employed them. Even those largely employed in surveillance took the opportunity of their extended periods abroad to gather knowledge which they believed might be useful to those at home. Because these men and women were adept at self-effacement, there are no boundaries between their various activities of the kind we conventionally assign to individuals based on a singular professional identity. If we return for a moment to the portrait of Sir Constantijn Huygens and his clerk with which we began, closer scrutiny of it allows us some useful concluding comments concerning the diplomats, facilitators, agents and intelligencers who are the subject of our study. Constantijn Huygens is seated at the centre of the painting, commanding the scene and confidently at ease. He wears an expensive riding outfit, lavishly decorated and accessorized with extravagant riding boots and gloves. The gloves, edged in orange are, we assume, part of the livery of the house of Orange. For the attentive ‘clerk’ wears identical gloves, one of which he has removed, respectfully, to receive a folded and sealed letter. Once we note the gloved and ungloved hands, in their matching livery, at the centre of the composition, it seems to take on greater significance. The two men are ‘hand in glove’ in the service of the



***


Stadholder. Constantijn’s left hand and the clerk’s right hand form a kind of diptych, suggesting that both are ‘their master’s hands’ – a phrase which Jonathan Goldberg memorably picked out from contemporary handbooks of secretarial conduct, to capture the way in which the secretary penned intimate and private correspondence on his master’s behalf.7 The gloves complete and complement Huygens’s attire – he is, after all, the man who travels on his master’s business, who transacts at a distance on his behalf, and represents him in diplomatic contexts abroad. We might ask ourselves why he has ungloved his left rather than his right hand – it is his ungloved left hand that rests on the papers and architectural drawings on his desk. And we might ask why his companion wears gloves at all, since in all other respects he is elegantly and expensively dressed as an indoor gentleman – indeed, perhaps as an ‘at home’ secretary rather than the superior secretary who transacts his master’s intimate business and observes and records on his behalf outside the household. Which leads us here to a novel suggestion about this painting. Perhaps the second figure is no clerk at all, but is Constantijn’s brother Maurits – one year older than him, and also in the employment of Frederik Hendrik. This is, after all, a family portrait, commissioned to celebrate a marriage, and the elevation to the summit of service in the employ of the Stadholder of the main sitter. Maurits Huygens had been Secretary to Prince Maurits, Frederik Hendrik’s predecessor. It was he who had transmitted to Frederik Hendrik the rhetorically elaborate letter from Constantijn, requesting that he be considered as Frederik Hendrik’s first secretary. It was also Maurits Huygens who had first unsuccessfully courted Suzanna van Baerle. When she turned him down, the whole Huygens family was disappointed. Constantijn started his courtship of Suzanna immediately following his appointment to Frederik Hendrik’s service. The Latin poem referring to a painting made on the occasion of the wedding refers to his ‘triumph’. So here, perhaps, the two brothers are joined in assiduous secretarial service, setting aside the family competition which for a time has set them one against the other. The likeness between the striking face of this ‘clerk’ and Rembrandt’s portrait of Maurits Huygens, painted five years later is, we believe, suggestive. Whether or not this is the case – or could ever be shown conclusively to be so – the two men in this evocative painting perform together the attentive and interlocking duties of those raised for a life of diplomatic service. We leave the reader to contemplate the spectacle of the autonomous, transacting, diplomat at



6


large (Constantijn) and the dependent, subservient secretary at home (Maurits), as at once familiar and exotic inhabitants of the seventeenthcentury social world.

This volume of essays marks an exciting point for students of diplomacy in the early modern period. Moving away from the traditional reading of the diplomat as perceived through the lens of political or military history, scholars have begun to explore the complex backdrop to diplomatic negotiation and embassy which emerged at the end of the medieval period. Building upon foundations laid over fifty years ago by Garret Mattingly’s Renaissance Diplomacy, which had a predominantly Italian perspective, recent studies have begun to assess the diplomat in context, examining in further detail the myriad types and forms of diplomacy, the circumstances occasioning diplomatic negotiation and the heterogeneous nature of individual embassies and ambassadors. Dissolving the artificial division between exterior and interior politics, there has been a shift from viewing the ‘foreign’ policy of a nation as demarcated from the ‘domestic’ policy, and a move towards a holistic view of the closely connected nature of government.8 As these fictive boundaries have been demolished and as the texts and contexts surrounding the ambassador have been brought into closer focus, the textured background to the early modern embassy has begun to be revealed. Interdisciplinary studies of the diplomatic environment have begun to expose a rich seam of historical detail, fleshing out what we know of the delicate infrastructures, social conditions and practical elements of the envoy abroad. This widening of the scope of what we mean when we talk about diplomacy has resulted in much valuable scholarship. A reconsideration of the figures who were sent abroad as envoys has enabled us to anatomize the diplomatic ‘corps’ more closely.9 Studies of the friendship networks and trading practices of many of these figures have enabled us to penetrate the culture of giftgiving, transaction and exchange in the period, with a special focus on art, jewelry and book-collecting.10 The space in which diplomatic business was conducted has been examined, revealing crucial information about protocol and precedence.11 The filtering of diplomatic experience through dramatic literature, letters and other texts has been examined, providing a view of how the embassy was viewed by various areas of the social spectrum. Examination of the interplay between practitioners and followers of science and technology has revealed that news of discovery



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and experimentation were often disseminated through diplomatic channels, or were exchanged between continental correspondents regardless of national tensions.12 We seek to build here on the recent surge of interest in what has traditionally been viewed as the ‘background’ to diplomacy, addressing the lacunae in our knowledge of how the ambassadorial context functioned, and to open up new areas for debate and discussion. The essays in this collection take a broader view of diplomatic culture, encompassing studies of material objects, networks of communication and exchange, the domestic context of the embassy, the alternative figures on the diplomatic scene such as agents and spies, and the use of flummoxing features such as ciphers to combat prying eyes. Developing from an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Kent in 2008, the essays in this volume have been selected for their fresh approach and their widening of the conventional entry point into the study of diplomacy to reveal neglected spaces and activities which are central to a fuller understanding of the processes and systems of embassy in the early modern period. Drawing on evidence including letters, maps, historical manuscripts, dramatic literature and diplomatic theory, these essays mark a departure from the study of the lone diplomat or agent about his official business, exploring the in-between people and places along the journey of the legate, his belongings, household and his or her correspondence. Examining these spaces and activities brings a richer and more textured view of the role of the ambassador abroad, alerting the modern reader to the meaningful texts and contexts surrounding the official or ceremonial mission. The essays in this collection are arranged chronologically by period, and explore in energetic ways what happens before, between and after embassy. They examine the associated figures and processes which require rehabilitation within the diplomatic landscape; including agents, spies, information-gatherers, postal officers, staff within the diplomatic household, the communication and preservation of sensitive information and the formalizing of diplomatic representation. In his article, ‘“Procure as many as you can and send them over”: Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations 1460–1760’, Peter Barber explores the materiality of the world of cartographic espionage. He examines how sovereigns were anxious to protect maps and plans of their territories by forbidding publication of their confidential mapping. Taking a wide range of examples, Barber demonstrates how these rulers’ attempts to safeguard their own dominions were accompanied by a desire to procure details of



8

rival territories, for trade, military and dynastic purposes. Despite the demand for and premium on these materials, Barber reveals that far from being accurate and even useful tools, many of these maps were unreliable. In ‘Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William Swerder in England and Abroad’, Jason Powell explores the archival legacy of two Tudor men-of-business, Weldon and Swerder, focusing particularly on their time in Paris between 1538 to 1540. Both men had served in embassies abroad and were well connected with substantial patronage networks in England. Though neither achieved political or literary prominence, Powell reveals how their letters from this period can tell us much about the varied activities and experiences of English expatriate scholars, servants and spies abroad at the height of the Henrician Reformation. Stephen Alford, in ‘Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham’, offers an interior view of the day-to-day workings of the intelligence secretariat headed by Sir Francis Walsingham. His essay reveals the modus operandi and the motives of the figures involved in espionage during the reign of Elizabeth I. Central though Walsingham’s office was to the practice of spying, Alford demonstrates how espionage permeated every level of court and society, and moreover reveals the intrinsic links between patronage and the gathering of information. In her essay ‘A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence’ Robyn Adams presents a case-study of the Elizabethan agent Herle, exploring how his methods of disseminating intelligence intersect with his strategies for maintaining patronage and credit. Beginning with an examination of a sequence of letters sent by Herle from Antwerp in 1582, Adams interrogates the status of agents sent abroad or permitted to travel without official diplomatic status, and asks whether it is possible to construct an anatomy of the Elizabethan intelligence service by looking at the porous membranes inhabited by informers, spies, agents, ambassadors and intelligencers in this period. Joanna Craigwood explores the relationship and dialogue between diplomatic theory and literary representation in her essay ‘Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy’. Exploring the relationship, both intellectual and personal, between the diplomatic theorist and civil lawyer Alberico Gentili and the poet-diplomat Sir Philip Sidney, Craigwood argues that for Gentili and Sidney, theories of diplomatic representation and theories of language and literature derive from their shared readings of Plato, Aristotle and Scaliger. For Sidney, as for Gentili, poetry is analogous to embassy: words are ambassadorial representatives that faithfully represent the author’s reason. In his essay





‘Gender, Politics and Diplomacy: Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England’ James Daybell considers the status and activities of women in early modern news networks, and how these intersect with the world of diplomacy, statecraft and intelligence gathering, a sphere which has traditionally been viewed as male. His essay populates the diplomatic world with women, focusing on informal and familial channels of information. Daybell makes a clear case for integrating women into ‘high politics’ diplomatic history, and delineates the kinds of roles that women could play in this arena, for example, as brokers of patronage within the Elizabethan court, as political agents to foreign rulers, and in underground networks of Catholic recusancy. In his ‘Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing’ Alan Stewart relocates Bacon’s cipher in the material/textual conditions of the early modern embassy. He reconstructs the secretarial workload of Paulet’s embassy from Paulet’s surviving copy-books at the Bodleian Library, and explores the place of ciphers within Paulet’s correspondence. The chapter shows how the cipher is entirely dependent on different modes of handwriting, in which the two different forms on which the cipher depends correspond to two different handwritten forms of each alphabetical letter, capital and small – a detail specific to the (handwritten) experience of early modern diplomacy, that has been misunderstood by editors of later printed editions. Stewart argues that if we read the manuscript corpus of correspondence and diplomatic material with these strategies and techniques in mind, the handwritten documentation may yet yield startling secrets. In her essay ‘Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques’, Hannah Crawforth explores the fertile ground between differing kinds of ‘intelligence’, focusing on Jonson’s masques and Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. She re-evaluates Jonson’s status within the Elizabethan intelligence network to discover why the figure of the spy haunts Jonson’s poetry. By tracing his relationship with the Catholic exile and intelligencer Verstegan, Crawforth’s study examines how these authors use linguistic codes to create a private community of readers, united by shared values. Mark Netzloff considers how the social space of the embassy shapes the correspondence and professional relationships of the diplomatic community in ‘The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing’. He argues that an examination of the domestic arrangements of the ambassador’s household reveals significant factors contributing to the success or



10

failure of the legation; including structures of communication, through which patronage, alliances and friendships might be conducted; and the procedures set up by Henry Wotton to facilitate the collection and dispatch of information. Netzloff examines how the ambassador’s household becomes a ‘training ground’ for young and ambitious men of varying backgrounds, and thereby reconstructs the social and material life of the early modern embassy. In her study, ‘The Postmistress, The Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier and the Power of Postal Control’ Nadine Akkerman examines the epistolary networks between exiles on the continent and Protestant England, and charts the development and operation of the ‘black chamber’ of Alexandrine of Taxis in the Spanish controlled Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Akkerman demonstrates how Elizabeth of Bohemia’s correspondence with her agent Sir Balthazar Gerbier provides fertile ground for an examination of the vicissitudes of the early modern postal routes, and how the control of these networks were a source of power and influence for the Taxis dynasty, masterminded by the resourceful Alexandrine.

Notes and references 1. Quentin Buvelot, ed. (2007) Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals (London: National Gallery), p. 150. ‘Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his (?) clerk’ (1627), Thomas de Keyser, National Gallery, http://nationalgallery.org. uk/paintings/thomas-de-keyser-portrait-of-constantijn-huygens-and-his-clerk, accessed 14 May 2010. 2. Lisa Jardine (2008), Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: HarperCollins), esp. chapters 4 and 12. 3. Leiden University Department of Dutch Language and Literature website, De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens [CH1627:007] ‘IN EFFIGIEM MEAM PAULLO ANTE NUPTIAS DEPICTAM’, http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/ Huygens/HUYG27.html accessed May 2010. 4. Jardine (2008), p. 83. 5. ‘An autograph Memorandum from M. le Blon, in the handwriting of Rubens, Concerning a Picture for the Princess of Orange. The Subject The Marriage of Alexander the Great with Roxane’. See J.G. van Gelder (1981), ‘Rubens Marginalia IV’, The Burlington Magazine 123, 542–6, cit. L. Jardine (2009), p. 83. 6. J.G. van Gelder (1981), p. 545. 7. Jonathan Goldberg (1990) Writing Matter: from the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) passim., especially chapter 5, pp. 233–78. 8. Daniela Frigo (2000), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: the Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 5.





9. The basis for much of the research on figures sent abroad on embassy relies on Gary M. Bell (1990) A Handlist of Diplomatic Representatives, 1509–1688 (London: Royal Historical Society). See Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani, eds. (2009), Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate); Jeremy Black (1997), The Diplomacy of a Rising World Power: Britain 1603–1800 (Diplomatic Studies Programme: Leicester); Jeremy Black (2010) A History of Diplomacy (London: Reaktion); Anne Overell (2009), ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, c.1503–1558’ in History 94:315, pp. 265–78. 10. See, for example, Toby Osborne (2007), ‘Van Dyck, Alessandro Scaglia and the Caroline Court: Friendship, Collecting and Diplomacy in the Early Seventeenth Century’ in Seventeenth Century 22:1, pp. 24–41; Lisa Jardine and William Sherman, ‘Pragmatic Readers: Knowledge Transactions and Scholarly Services in Late Elizabethan England’ in David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds. (1994), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 102–24. 11. Simon Thurley (2006), ‘Architecture and Diplomacy: Greenwich Palace under the Stuarts’ in Court Historian 11:2, pp. 125–33. 12. Lisa Jardine (2009), passim., esp. chapter 10.



12

‘Procure as many as you can and send them over’: Cartographic Espionage and Cartographic Gifts in International Relations, 1460–1760 Peter Barber

The quotation within the title of this essay reports Charles II’s response to the offer of his envoy in Paris, Lord Preston in 1683 to send over ‘the plans of some fortified places which I believe are very exact. If Your Majesty hath them not before and if you approve of them, I do not question but to have draughts of all the other fortifications of France in a little time.’1 Charles’s words, as reported by Preston’s confidant Francis Gwynne, the Under-Secretary of State, well reflect the enthusiasm of governments then as now for confidential spatial information about other partners in the international system – even if, as in this case, they were at the time allies. Yet there is an apparent paradox. Since the fifteenth century maps and military plans have often been equated with power and strenuous efforts were made at times to keep their contents secret. This made maps and plans a primary target of espionage. It is less well known that throughout the same period rulers and governments often openly transmitted the same sort of geographical information. I shall try to answer the question of the use to which this spatial information, both confidential and open, was actually put by its recipients and the role played by this category of map in international relations in early modern Europe. Before proceeding further it would be as well to define ‘cartographic espionage’. It obviously includes maps and map-like objects illicitly taken by the agents of one state (be they formally appointed envoys, or sailors, soldiers, merchants or travellers utilizing a one-off opportunity) from another, wherever that other state exercised legal authority, be it a room at court or a cabin aboard ship on the high seas. It also includes copies and memorized versions of these original maps and plans, 13



1


whether they be skilled, scribal copies or sketches. By extension it also covers maps and plans, regarded as confidential by the state or ruler for which they were created, which were smuggled into another by a defector. More arguably it also includes memorized maps, mapping knowledge and the ability to create maps from notes carried by these defectors. It also extends to maps and plans, for instance of fortifications, official buildings or harbours, illicitly created by agents of one state in the lands of another whether through direct observation or from memory. At certain periods rulers or ruling groups in a state explicitly attempted to forbid the divulgation of its most sensitive mapping. In 1619, the Dutch East India Company tried to justify their successful application to obtain an official privilege forbidding the printing and dissemination of their detailed maps of Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, on the grounds that ‘[if our maps logbooks and drawings were to be] printed or in any other way would be known to the world in general, and in this way be known not only to all Kings, Princes and Republics surrounding us but also to private merchants, they would help them to also enter into the East Indian navigation and become active in the trade of the applicants, taking away their profit. . . . which is harmful to both the applicants and the United Provinces’.2 The sentiments would have been echoed by the Portuguese rulers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who also sought periodically to restrict access to the up-to-date charts of the African and Asian coastlines being produced by their mapmakers.3 Even the English authorities seem to have been reluctant to make Christopher Saxton’s relatively detailed depictions of the English and Welsh counties and their coastlines widely available for the first few years after the completion of the project in 1579.4 By virtue of their knowledge and skills, mapmakers often enjoyed benefits and privileges that most other types of spy could only have dreamt of. One of the lesser lights of this group, John Elder, a onetime tutor to Lord Darnley and a Scottish Vicar of Bray with an eye permanently out for the main chance, cynically used his mapmaking abilities to win employment, advancement and financial security, in the form of rewards and pensions for himself, by switching sides between competing English, Scottish and French regimes over a period of twenty years from the late 1530s. Toward the end of his career, around 1560, the English ambassador in Paris described him as ‘as dangerous for the matters of England as any he knew’ while his counterpart in Scotland concluded that he had ‘the wit to play the spy where he list’.5 And despite his duplicity he seems to have enjoyed a prosperous old age. Sebastian Cabot also got away in the course of



14

his career with switching sides repeatedly between England and Spain despite their periods of enmity, without any risk to himself. Mapmakers could, quite literally, get away with murder as the career of Elder’s contemporary, Diogo Homem, showed. Homem, the talented son of the Portuguese king’s mestre de cartas de marear, Lopo Homem, had been involved in the updating of the official Portuguese map or maps of its overseas empire, the Carta Padrao de el-Rei. His cartographic knowledge and skills were sufficient to win him a warm welcome in England where he fled after having been excused of involvement in a murder in Lisbon in 1544. He went on to produce a magnificent atlas which Queen Mary commissioned as a gift for Philip II. It contained the latest information about the French discoveries in Canada which was probably obtained from his cousin (or brother) André Homem who worked for the King of France while also acting as a Portuguese spy.6 A century later the military engineers Johannes and later his son Cornelis Elandts blackmailed the Dutch East India Company into paying them large sums of money through the threat of passing their plans of the Company’s Asian forts to commercial map publishers.7 Throughout the early modern period other military engineers regularly eased their sometimes cynical switches from side to side through the offer of detailed fortification plans.8 For all the fuss made of them, however, the mapmakers frequently did not give value for the tolerance, privileges and money lavished on them. Not infrequently the maps and plans sent by agents, including even the ablest military engineers were works of fiction. No doubt some of the engineers were double-agents, as we shall see, but in many cases the culprit had simply failed, which could not be admitted, to penetrate the fortifications of a town, pen in hand,9 with bad weather, poor eyesight, faulty memories – or simple laziness allied with a degree of impudence. Over the years Louis XIV must have spent considerable sums in sending military engineers into Italy to make covert plans of the fortifications of the most important Lombard towns. In the early 1680s these plans were copied and the copies were inserted into an atlas prepared for the Marquis de Louvois and now owned by the British Library. The plans often portray the same fortifications in a variety of conflicting ways, so presumably they were inserted in the expectation that one would prove to be correct. When the chance finally came, after the French invasion of Italy in 1701, to check the images against the reality, almost all were found to be hopelessly inaccurate, as the rough notes scribbled by the people charged with checking the maps, which are still in the volume, demonstrate.10



Peter Barber 15


Almost as if to rub salt into the particular wound of money ill-spent, governments often displayed a surprising degree of cartographic openness. In part this was a response to realities: for most of the time the Portuguese had reluctantly to accept that they could not ultimately prevent leakage of information about the discoveries being made by their ships: between 1440 and 1480 Venetian chartmakers such as the prolific Grazioso Benincasa and Andrea Bianco mapped almost without a delay the steady progress of the Portuguese fleets down the coast of Africa towards the Cape of Good Hope on the basis of information sent to them by compatriots serving on the Portuguese ships. In some instances the Portuguese origin of the models is betrayed by the depiction on Venetian charts of the padrones or commemorative stone crosses that the Portuguese erected to mark their progress.11 In the case of the Dutch, the decentralized nature of the United Provinces meant that information flowed from offices in Amsterdam and The Hague to the provinces and the outside world like water through a sieve. By 1635 the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) had largely abandoned the attempt at secrecy embodied in its privilege of 1619.12 At times, however, rulers were positively profligate with their cartographic knowledge – providing far better maps than the frequently mediocre mapping obtained by spies. Admittedly the passage of time, alliances, diplomatic opportunities and mathematical scale were crucial in dictating which maps and charts could be sent without prejudicing national security and when and to whom, but no ruler could be certain that even a relatively uninformative small-scale map sent to an old ally might not be useful to an enemy later should the ally defect, or fall victim to the activities of a spy. In the summer of 1502 Ercole I of Ferrara only managed to obtain what is generally agreed to be a copy of the Carta Padrao de el-Rei of that year through the undercover activities and bribes of Albert Cantino, his agent in Lisbon.13 Yet in the course of the 1520s, Charles V liberally dispatched copies of the latest Padron Real, the Spanish equivalent, to the Pope, and a number of Italian and German princes and influential cardinals and aristocrats like Baldassare Castiglione.14 Most of these world maps, also known as planispheres, were in the distinctive style of Diogo Ribeiro, the first cartographer to the Casa de Contratación, the Spanish equivalent of the Armazém himself and not that of some second-rate clerk or copyist as seems often to have been the case with most maps transmitted by spies. Charles was spurred to this generosity by the desire to persuade the world of the justice of the Spanish claim to the Spice



16

Islands in face of opposing (and eventually successful) Portuguese counterclaims based on the true position of the Line of Tordesillas. The planispheres naturally gave the Spanish interpretation of the course of the Line in Asia, but they also displayed the very latest discoveries in Asia and America almost as they were being reported, their accuracy emphasized in many cases by the drawings of the quadrants and other scientific instruments with which Ribeiro adorned his maps.15 Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries atlases were common diplomatic gifts. They were particular specialities of the Venetians in the sixteenth century and of the Dutch in the next and, from about 1700, of the French, reflecting the special pride which each took in the quality of their cartography. The Dutch and French atlases almost invariably contained printed maps with nothing of a confidential nature.16 This sort of material was confined to manuscript atlases which were usually but not invariably housed in the offices of rulers and statesmen which, in the case of the Dutch, included wealthy merchants.17 The case with Venetian atlases was different. Their atlases were manuscript and their cartographers specialized in including information about the latest discoveries made by others and notably the Portuguese. Henry VIII was far from being alone when in his last years he was presented, almost certainly by a Venetian envoy, with an up-todate atlas dated 1542 by the most prolific of the mid-sixteenth century chartmakers working in Venice, Battista Agnese.18 These planispheres and most of the atlases were, of course, small scale but they do not seem to have been significantly less informative than the larger-scale manuscript regional charts retained by the Spanish and Portuguese in their official archives if the few surviving examples are anything to go by. By the next century the coastlines and ports of Africa, Asia and America were known in far greater detail in Lisbon. Again cartographic diplomacy ensured that this knowledge was shared well beyond the Iberian peninsula. In 1661 the Portuguese authorities provided Charles II with a detailed account of the Portuguese empire in Africa and Asia by António Bocarro as part of his wife, Catherine of Braganza’s dowry. The volume19 eventually came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane (1650–1743), the founder of the British Museum and is now held by the British Library. The written history and description of the empire is accompanied by detailed regional maps of considerable accuracy by Pedro Berthelot, the pilot of the Dutch fleet who had transferred his services to the Portuguese in 1626, and detailed and colourful depictions of the Portuguese forts and settlements by native Indian draughtsmen employed by Pedro Baretto de Resende, the secretary to



Peter Barber 17


the Portuguese viceroy.20 The volume had been commissioned in 1632 and completed a dozen years later and in the intervening period several of the forts had been seized by the Dutch while Bombay formed the most important part of Catherine’s dowry. Most of the places depicted, however, remained in Portuguese hands and would have altered little in the intervening years. And while the English were firm allies of the Portuguese and enemies of the Dutch, the Portuguese would have known that there were many friends of the Dutch in Whitehall: but they seem to have felt, probably correctly, that there was little if anything in the volume that their enemies did not already know. It was not only rulers who had access to detailed information about the territories and fortresses of their fellow rulers. When in celebratory mode, governments were happy to divulge what might otherwise have been considered confidential information to the general public. Thus in 1664, Wenceslas Hollar was commissioned to etch Jonas Moore’s highly detailed bird’s-eye view of Britain’s new possession of Tangier, another part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, with its fortifications,21 and further improvements to them were seen again, once more etched by Hollar but this time on the basis of his own drawings, illustrating the published account of the Earl of Carlisle’s mission to Tangier in 1668.22 In 1689, the secretary of state authorized his office to leak the plan of Londonderry by the Second Engineer of Great Britain, Thomas Phillips, to commercial map publishers in London following the successful raising of the siege by James II.23 Of course, in the immediate wake of the Williamite victory this would have been safe enough, but because of the time it took to upgrade fortifications (despite the plethora of proposals to be found in surviving archives) in the longer term the information could have been useful to an enemy. Again however, the authorities probably calculated that this information, at least in its broad outlines, was already known by foreign leaders if not to the British population – and not necessarily by way of espionage. What purposes were, then, served by cartographic espionage and by the public distribution of geographical information? Undoubtedly in some cases spies and turncoats supplied commercial, military and political information that could not be obtained by other means, was felt to be reliable and was soon tested in practice by the recipient and was found to be useful, if only in the short term. We know that the charts of the African coastline created by Venetian mapmakers on the basis of information from Portugal were used to further commercial objectives through the fact that an anonymous merchant of the 1490s had several



18

of them copied and bound into a thick working volume, now known as the Cornaro Atlas, which also contained information about tariffs, tides as they affected ports and general navigational information.24 In the long-term the Venetians did not become major participants in the Africa trade, but the cartographic evidence in the Cornaro Atlas demonstrates that for a short period in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries some merchants considered it to be a serious option. It was a fairly similar story in England after 1681 when the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp captured the Santo Rosario in the Caribbean and his colleague Basil Ringrose prevented the terrified pilot from throwing overboard a book of sailing instructions accompanied by charts of the coasts of South America. Though plans of individual ports in the Caribbean and Spanish America had been in English hands for decades – several had been depicted as early as the 1580s by Battista Boazio at the time of Drake’s voyages25 – the Spanish authorities seem on the whole to have been successful in suppressing detailed knowledge of the coastlines of South America and of the smaller ports and harbours. Back in London the text of the sailing instructions was translated by Philip Dassigny. The charts were copied by William Hack, a chartmaker with a workshop by the Thames east of the Tower, and bound up to create a manuscript ‘South Sea Atlas’. Although most of the charts were relatively small scale they were the most detailed then available to the English – and some were very detailed, giving details of moorings, navigational hazards and even the names of the local plantation owners. Over the following decades Hack produced numerous copies of the atlas for kings and courtiers.26 In the short term they probably were of some use to the privateers and buccaneers who often enjoyed covert English government support. Their principal impact however seems to have been as reminders to successive British monarchs and ministers of the practicality of trade with Latin America and as a medium for nurturing the widespread dream of fortunes to be made in the Southern Seas that culminated in the foundation of the South Sea Company in 1711 and the grant of the Asiento to Great Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. It was in the diplomatic and military fields that cartographic espionage was perceived of being of greatest practical use. In 1539, at a time when serious consideration was being given to ways of smuggling Anne of Cleves to England for her marriage to Henry VIII in face of the combined opposition of Charles V and Francis I, a small team of sailors led by John à Borough was sent over the Channel under conditions of great secrecy to map the Zuiderzee. That plan was soon incorporated into



Peter Barber 19


a larger, much more polished plan intended for the consideration of Henry himself showing the whole of the proposed journey from Cleves to London. Miraculously draft and finished map survive and we know that Henry did view the finished map. At the same time he probably saw another manuscript plan, which also survives, showing an alternative route which took Anne overland to Calais. This map may have been picked up on the continent by the King’s printer Reyner Wolf while engaged in a diplomatic mission for Henry VIII, and then annotated and expanded by him. In the event, and presumably on the basis of the evidence presented in it, the King decided on the latter and Anne came to London via Calais.27 A few years later, Henry VIII used another map obtained by somewhat unorthodox means as an aid to achieving an objective, this time military. Acutely aware of lacking an even reasonably accurate map of Scotland prior to the outbreak of war in 1543, he was accordingly delighted when the Scottish turncoat, John Elder, who was then working as tutor to the children of the Earl and Countess of Lennox, supplied him with one showing an enormous improvement in the depiction of that country’s coastlines.28 Elder claimed that the map was based on his own direct observation and it may well have proved useful in facilitating the transport of troops by ship which made possible the capture of Edinburgh in the next year though the land routes from England had been known and mapped for over a century. Following the capture of Edinburgh, English soldiers led by John Dudley, Viscount Delisle (the later Duke of Northumberland) made an important discovery when plundering Holyrood House. Among the more obvious loot they found detailed sailing instructions and a rough chart, associated with a pilot called Alexander Lindsay, for navigating the coasts of Scotland. These were still more accurate than John Elder’s. Back in London the newly discovered charts were enthusiastically copied. In the summer of 1546 Dudley showed the sailing instructions and chart to Nicolas de Nicolay, arguably the greatest French mapmaker of the time, whom Dudley had just persuaded to come to England. Less than a year later, in May 1547, following Henry’s death in the previous February, Nicolay returned to France with his copy of Lindsay’s charts and reputedly with plans of all the major English ports. He had been a French ‘plant’ all the time.29 His receipt for payment from the French king for his services undertaken while he was in England still survives.30 As soon as the news of his defection got out, English diplomats predicted that ill consequences for England would follow. They did. In 1550 with Nicolay aboard as pilot a French fleet captured St Andrews, proceeded



20

to expel the English forces from Scotland and carried the young Mary, Queen of Scots off to France. Things did not change much over the following two centuries. To judge from the style and detail of a depiction of southern England in a map in a volume of French invasion plans of about 1779, a French spy must have been active in the Drawing Room of the Board of Ordnance in the Tower of London.31 This was the office where topographical plans of strategic areas, encampment and battle plans and official plans of English forts throughout the world were stored and copied for use as required. There was a second category of use to which grander maps, whether acquired illicitly or by gift, seem to have been put. These were intended in a variety of ways to add to the gloire of the recipient. The public display of planispheres sent by Charles V in the courts of minor Italian and German princes would inevitably have reminded visitors that their host was up-to-date in his geographical knowledge and a friend of the powerful. Printed maps derived from these planispheres would also have bolstered these rulers’ or individuals’ reputations as patrons of learning. It seems most likely, for instance, that in about 1505 René II of Lorraine received (whether by gift or otherwise) a map closely resembling the Caverio world map, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, itself a copy of the latest Portuguese Carta Padrao de el-Rei. He probably allowed members of what would today be called his thinktank, the ‘Gymnasium’ of the Vosges in St Dié, which enjoyed his active patronage, and a leading member of which was the mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, to inspect it. This seems the simplest explanation for the obvious similarity between the Caverio and Waldseemüller’s world map in the 1513 edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia and his Carta Marina of 1516 which utilized the world map created at St Dié some six years earlier of which the sole surviving example is now in the Library of Congress.32 Even the more powerful rulers drew some political advantage from the great maps which were presented to them or which they acquired by other means. In 1528 the explorer Giovanni di Verrazzano’s brother, the mapmaker Girolamo Verrazzano, presumably with the thought of short-term financial reward and possible employment in mind, presented Henry VIII with a large world map showing the latest discoveries. Henry displayed the map in the Privy Gallery in Whitehall Palace. Though neither Henry nor his immediate successors seem to have had any particular extra-European territorial ambitions, the frame (or possibly the map itself) contained the royal coat of arms to suggest



Peter Barber 21


the hazy universalist aspirations of any self-respecting sixteenth century potentate.33 By the 1580s, however, the presence of the map was being remarked on by proto-imperialists such as Richard Hakluyt and it soon became a symbol of the North American colonialist ambitions that they wished to foist on Elizabeth I.34 If the renegade Franco-Scottish chartmaker Jean Rotz did little more than flatter Henry VIII’s vanity by scattering his name and the Tudor rose throughout the handsome manuscript atlas of the world and its regions that he presented on his arrival in 1542 (but which had originally been intended for his previous master, Francis I of France),35 Queen Mary ensured that the atlas she intended for her husband a decade or more later went beyond the merely decorative in its efforts to please the proposed recipient. Diogo Homem conveyed all the Portuguese geographical information so thirsted after elsewhere in Europe in a way that bestowed a sort of reality on Philip II’s geopolitical dreams. Western Europe is shown as it would have been if all of Philip’s war aims had been fulfilled with Spain’s dominion expanding far to the north of Perpignan. The Portuguese share of South America is diminished in size to exaggerate the extent of the Habsburgs’ dominion with novel depictions of Pizarro’s conquest of the Incan Empire and of the silver mining in Potosi, while, equally outrageously, the settlement with Portugal reached at Saragossa in 1529 is disregarded and the world map in the atlas shows the Spice Islands firmly in the hands of Spain.36 The third and last category of use for maps could best be classed as reassurance or reinsurance. This applied to the majority of espionage maps and plans which were acquired haphazardly and opportunistically, even from allied governments, and probably with no immediate or specific end in view. The thirst was fed by chronic mistrust of one’s neighbours despite transient periods of peace, the free exchange of information and even alliance. The underlying attitude was perhaps best revealed in the words of the duc de Choiseul in August 1768 when instructing a French spy who was about to depart for England, charged with mapping English forts and advising on the best ways of invading England. ‘Une Malheureuse experience,’ he wrote, had persuaded him that despite France’s own peaceful intentions ‘il est de la prudence de ne pas attendre qu’elle [Great Britain] ait donné de nouvelles preuves de son ambition démesurée pour Examiner s’il n’a pas moyen d’y mettre les Bornes et de l’en faire repentir’.37 The sense of insecurity and mistrust implicit in these words seems to have extended to a lack of trust in the information directly provided by the other party or indirectly made



22

available through the press and a belief that only the information that you yourself had procured could be relied on. It is surely to this category that most spy maps belong. In 1760 William, Duke of Cumberland, paid an agent at Versailles to copy plans of French fortifications: a map of the interior of Metz showing changes to the urban fabric and the fortifications since 1727, with a note of the fifty guineas that Cumberland had paid the agent for the information, is to be found in the King George III’s Topographical Collection in the British Library.38 The plan of Metz might have been useful to the British at any time over the following decades as, to the French, would been the map of the south of England from the Drawing Office in the Tower of London that found its way into their invasion plan, though in the event the plan of Metz was never called on and the map of south England remained a paper exercise. King George III’s Topographical Collection in the British Library, which incorporates the working map collections of many of his predecessors and relatives back to the reign of Charles II, includes a map of the strategically important fort of Huningue (Hüningen) near Basel which on stylistic grounds is likely to be one of the maps which Preston passed on to a delighted Charles II in 1683.39 Yet such a plan could only ever have been peripheral to British military activity on the continent. The same collection contains a series of manuscript maps of the French border provinces, almost certainly by or derived from the work of French ingénieurs-géographes, notably Claude de Chastillon, of the 1620s and 1630s.40 These too may have been sent over by Preston and would have been of much greater potential value to a British government, but again at the time there was no chance that Charles II would make use of them – the main purpose of Louis XIV’s subsidies was to keep him from intervening militarily in Europe – and by the 1680s many of these plans would anyway have been freely available in printed form, having been engraved and published in the late 1630s in Paris by Christophe Tassin. Despite that, Charles II evidently felt the originals (which in truth did include some maps that had not been engraved) were worth acquiring. Indeed ironically the British Library appears nowadays to be richer in manuscript maps of some of the border regions of France than the Archives Nationales or the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre at the Chateau de Vincennes in Paris.41 By the same token the French archives possess many important manuscript plans of British and Irish forts and harbours. Some were smuggled out of official English repositories, such as the secretary of state’s office or later the Tower of London Drawing Room while others



Peter Barber 23


were drawn by French spies, often from memory.42 A few must have been the work of mapmakers who had been in English employment. On 1 August 1683 at precisely the time when Charles II was ruminating over whether Viscount Preston should send him the plans of French forts, the English military engineer Thomas Phillips told Samuel Pepys ‘the whole story of the French(man) recommended by P(rince) R(upert) to the King for an engineer, one Sturffe [i.e. Colonel Paul August de Storff], who took draughts of all our forts and ports, and then run away and went where he is in the King of France’s service after he had been in ours about three years’.43 To conclude, then, it can be said that on rare occasions the products of cartographic espionage did indeed prove to be of considerable military, diplomatic and commercial value to the spies’ paymasters particularly if they were the work of defectors who were trained cartographers and military engineers. Such information would never have been voluntarily released and could only ever have been obtained by subterfuge or good fortune. In most cases, however, the maps and plans gave no more information than what was already available in printed form or in the form of maps received from fellow rulers. Indeed quite often the maps provided by spies were of lower quality than what was available from either of these sources. Yet for most of the time a chronic sense of insecurity and mistrust of their fellow-monarchs led emperors, kings and princes, their ministers and diplomatic representatives, regardless of the lessons of experience, to place greater trust in maps and plans that they had paid for and obtained illicitly than those that were relatively freely available. Showing an optimism akin to Mr Micawber in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist European leaders continued to acquire them voraciously and unselectively from friends and foes alike on the assumption that some had to be more accurate than anything that was currently publicly available and that at some time in the future one of these maps and plans might after all justify its purchase price and prove to be of immense practical value.

Notes and references 1. Gwynne to Preston, 13/23 August 1683, Preston to Charles II 1/11 August 1683 HMC Seventh Report, pp. 374, 288. The Preston archive is now in the British Library and the volumes containing the letters are BL Add. MS 63759, 63765 (Preston’s letterbooks, vol. 3). 2. Extract from the application of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to the States General for an open privilege for all VOC maps, descriptions, rutters



24

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

and so forth of South and South East Asia, 29 January 1619 (ARA SC 4934) quoted in K. Zandvliet (1998) Mapping for Money: Maps, Plans and Topographic Paintings and their Role in Dutch Overseas Expansion during the 16th and 17th Centuries (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International), p. 95. While the wording of the petition refers to foreigners, there was an equal fear on the part of Dutch trading companies of giving unfair advantage to rival Dutch companies through the untimely divulgation of new geographical information. Thus it was hostility between the Dutch East India and Australian companies over authorized routes to the East and not primarily fear of foreign competition that led the States General in 1617 to forbid the Dutch mapmaker, Willem Blaeu, from showing on his printed maps or his 68cm globe the Le Maire straits at the tip of South America, which had been discovered in 1615/6, and which offered an alternative route to the Spice islands to the Strait of Magellan or the Cape of Good Hope. P. van der Krogt (1993) Globi Neerlandici (Utrecht: HEC), pp. 181–2. I am grateful to my colleague Tom Harper for bringing this to my attention. F. Alegria, S. Daveau, J. Carlos Garcia and F. Relano (2007) ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’ in D. Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography: Cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), iii, pp. 1005–7. P. Barber (2007) ‘Mapmaking in England ca. 1470–1650’ in History of Cartography iii pp. 1630–1. Nicholas Throckmorton to William Cecil, 19 September 1559, Calendar of State Papers Foreign 1559 (1864) (London: HMSO), 1335; Thomas Byschop to Cecil, 9 February 1561, Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland (1898) (Edinburgh), i, p. 602 and for the background see P. Barber ‘The British Isles’ in M. Watelet (1998) ed. The Mercator Atlas of Europe (Pleasant Hill, OR: Walking Tree Press) pp. 42–77 and particularly 70. For Diogo Homem’s career see A. Cortesao, A. Texeira de Mota (1960) Monumenta Cartographica Portugaliae (Lisbon: Comissão Executiva do v Centenário da morte do Infante D. Henrique), ii, pp. 3–10. For the atlas see (2005) The Queen Mary Atlas with a commentary by Peter Barber (London: Folio Society). Zandvliet, pp. 193–5. Like Jean Thomas, a Huguenot military engineer employed and trained by Vauban, whose list (ca. 1702) of memorized plans of French forts that he could supply to the Allies survives among the Marlborough Papers in the British Library (Add. MS 61342, f.139). Unlike many military engineers he continued to serve the British into the 1730s and was then succeeded by his son of the same name. See A.S. Mason and P. Barber (1991) ‘“Captain Thomas, the French engineer” and the teaching of Vauban to the English’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society xxv (3), 279–87. William Hogarth showed himself sketching the fortifications of Calais in his 1748 painting of the Gate of Calais or the Roast Beef of Old England, in Tate Britain, while life continues as normal around him. Hogarth was actually arrested for espionage but from his location in the painting he would have seen little of importance. It is unlikely that he would have been able to penetrate the strategically important spots without being intercepted. However see E. Stuart (1991) Lost Landscapes of Plymouth; Maps, Charts and Plans to 1800 (Stroud: Alan Sutton) p. 11 for a French spy’s account of how he had



Peter Barber 25

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture been caught while sketching the fortifications of Plymouth in 1779 – and then offered a guided tour of the same fortifications in return for a bribe of 10 guineas! For a full discussion and bibliography of the Hogarth painting see http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid⫽-1&workid⫽6617& searchid⫽false&roomid⫽false&tabview⫽text&texttype⫽8, accessed 22 August 2009. BL Add. MS 64109, passim. And for an example of such a slip, f. 148 (referring to plans of Pavia). P.D.A. Harvey (1991) Medieval Maps (London: British Library) pp. 60, 68 and ills.47–50 on pp. 64–5 and BL Eg. MS 73 chart 36. More generally see R.J. Pujades i Bataller (2007) Les cartes portolanes: la representacó medieval d’un mar solcada (Institut Cartografìc de Catalunya); T. Campbell (1987) ‘Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500’ in J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. i, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 371–463. Zandvliet, pp. 128–30. M. de la Roncière, M. Mollat du Jourdin (1981) Les Portulans: cartes marines du xiii au xvii siècle (Fribourg: Office du Livre), pp. 214–15. The world map – one of the earliest to show South America and the earliest to show the Line of Tordesillas – is still to be seen in the Biblioteca Estense though it had been removed and was only recovered for the Library in the course of the nineteenth century. J. Brotton (1997) Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion), pp. 138–50. For a list of manuscript world maps of the 1520s and early 1530s by or attributed to Ribeiro that fall into this category and include at least one that went to a German prince (presumably the Elector of Saxony since it is now in the Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar), see F. Alegria, S. Daveau, J. Carlos Garcia and F. Relano (2007), p. 1063. S. Davies (2003) ‘The Navigational Iconography of Diogo Ribeiro’s 1529 Vatican Planisphere’, Imago Mundi 55, 103–12. For Dutch and French atlases see C. Koeman (1967–85) Atlantes Neelandici: Bibliography 6 vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum) [This is currently under revision by P. van der Krogt]; M. Pastoureau (1984) Les Atlas Français xvi–xvii siècles. Répertoire bibliographique et etudes (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Catherine Hofmann of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is currently completing work on a successor volume covering the eighteenth century. And for the use of atlases as diplomatic gifts see C. Koeman (1970), Joan Blaeu and his Grand Atlas: Introduction to the Facsimile Edition of the Grand Atlas 1663 (Amsterdam: Theatrun Orbis Terrarum), pp. 20–2, 42–3 and P. Barber (1997), ‘Maps and monarchs in Europe 1500–1800’ in R. Oresko, G.C. Gibbs, H.M. Scott (eds), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 114–16. Even then they seem often to have ‘escaped’ as did the confidential VOC maps assembled by Laurens van der Hem in the later seventeenth century which came on to the open market shortly after his death and were acquired by Prince Eugene of Savoy. The atlas containing the maps and much else is now one of the greatest treasures of the Austrian National Library. And for a recent introduction see E. De Groot (2006) The World of a Seventeenth-Century Collector: the Atlas Blaeu-van der Heem (Goy-Houten: HES & de Graaf).



26

18. The Atlas is now in the Vatican (Cod. Pal. Lat. 1886). The Agnese workshop seems in effect to have been the official supplier of presentation manuscript charts to the Venetian Republic (with Jacopo Gastaldi performing the same function for printed and painted maps): the same role performed a century later by the Blaeu dynasty on the Dutch Republic. For Agnese see H.R. Wagner (1931) The Manuscript Atlases of Battista Agnese, reprinted for private circulation from ‘The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America’, Vol. 125 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); H.R. Wagner (1947) ‘Additions to the Manuscript Atlases of Battista Agnese’, Imago Mundi 4, 28–30. On the same occasion another, smaller atlas (now Lambeth MS 463) may have been presented to Edward, Prince of Wales. 19. BL Sloane MS 197. 20. W. Eisler and B. Smith (eds) (1988) Terra Australis: The Furthest Shore (Art Gallery of New South Wales), p. 86 and for an updated accounted of this group see M.F. Alegria, S. Daveau, J.C. Garcia, F. Relano (2007), pp. 1023–5; and for reproductions and the previously accepted orthodoxy about Baretto de Resende’s authorship of the fortification plans see A. Cortesao, A. Texeira de Mota (1960) v, 59–85. 21. Jonas Moore, A Mapp of the Citty of Tangier with the Straits of Gibraltar 1664. [R. Pennington (1982) A Descriptive Catalogue of the etched work of Wenceslas Hollar 1607–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) no. 1202]. The surviving example is BL K Top 117.19 11 Tab. On 26 March 1664, Samuel Pepys recorded that after dinner he showed his friends and relatives ‘a map of Tangier . . . cut by our order, the Commissioners, new drawn by Jonas Moore – which is very pleasant and I purpose to have it finely set out and hung up’ (R. Latham, W. Matthews (1995) The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: Harper Collins) v, p. 98). 22. Divers Prospects in and about Tangier delineated by Wenceslaus Hollar (London: John Overton [1673]), [Pennington (1982) nos. 1187–1202]. 23. The plan is an inset (The true groundplat of the Cittie of Londonderry. By Capt. T. Phillips) in A True Survy of the . . . Barronie of Enish-Owen (London, 1689). For an example of the manuscript model see BL K Top 54.31. Both are illustrated in P.M. Barber (1989) ‘British Cartography’ in R.P. Maccubbin and M. Hamilton-Phillips (eds), The Age of William III & Mary II: Power, Politics, and Patronage 1688–1702. (Williamsburg: College of William and Mary), pp. 98–9 and see also S. Tyacke (1978) London Mapsellers 1660–1720 (Tring: Map Collector Publications), nos. 174, 202, 203, 206. 24. BL Eg. MS 73 also known as the Cornaro Atlas from the patrician family that once owned it. Though the vast majority of the 37 charts in the atlas depict the Mediterranean and the eastern Mediterranean in particular, seven charts show the coasts of Western Africa. 25. Plans of San Domingo, Cartagena and San Augustin by Battista Boazio, probably engraved by Jodocus Hondius the Elder first appeared in the Summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drakes West Indian Voyage, published in 1589. For a discussion of these plans see [HM Wallis (ed.)] (1977), Sir Francis Drake. An Exhibition to Commemorate Francis Drake’s Voyage around the World 1577–1580 (London: British Library), pp. 108–10. For Boazio’s participation in the voyage: M.F. Keeler (1981), Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage, 1585–86 (London), pp. 317–19.



Peter Barber 27


26. This is clear when one sees the names of the recipients of surviving copies of the atlas by Hack and the later provenance of these atlases (which in one case included Robert Walpole) as listed in N. Thrower and D. Howse (1992) A Buccaneer’s Atlas: Basil Ringrose’s South Sea Waggoner (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 267ff. 27. The three plans in question are now BL Cotton Aug. I.ii.29 (à Borough sketch), I.ii.64 (finished plan) and I.ii.63 (alternative plan: reproduced in Woodward 2007 p. 1621). For these see A. Ruddock (1961) ‘The earliest original English seaman’s rutter and pilot’s chart’, Journal of the Institute of Navigation xiv, 409–31., P. Meurer (2002) ‘Op het spoor van de kaart der Nederlanden van Jan van Hoirne’, Caert-Thresoor 21/2, 33–40; for his diplomatic mission in 1539, H.R. Plomer (1900) A Short History of English Printing (London: Kegan Paul), p. 104 n. 21. I am grateful to Laurence Worms for this reference. 28. P. Barber (1998), pp. 45–6. and works cited there. The map no longer survives but Elder’s description does and the map must have closely resembled the depiction of Scotland on Mercator’s map of Great Britain and Ireland of 1564. 29. A.B Taylor (1980) Alexander Lindsay: a Rutter of the Scottish Seas ca. 1540 eds. I.H. Adams & G. Fortune (Greenwish: National Maritime Museum); R.W. Karrow (1993) Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and their Maps (Chicago: Speculum Orbis) pp. 435–43. As well as preparing some manuscript charts soon after 1547, Nicolay engraved and published a printed version at the end of his career in 1583. Henri II was to plant another cartographer, this time as tutor to the children of the English governor of Calais, in 1558, who managed to map the fortifications leading a few months later to the town’s capture by French forces (Woodward 2007, p. 1533, n. 4). 30. BL Add. Ch. 12366. The description of the services rendered is extremely vague, but Nicolay would have had access to the plans of Scottish forts created by English engineers after 1542 (some originals still survive among the collections of the Duke of Rutland in Belvoir Castle) in addition to the chart of Scotland and the plans of English ports, and these would have been particularly appreciated at the French court. 31. The manuscript volume is now BL Add. MS 74751 A, B. For The Drawing Room at the Tower of London see D.W. Marshall (1980) ‘Military maps of the eighteenth century and the Tower of London Drawing Room’ Imago Mundi 32, 21–44. The approximate date of the atlas can be deduced on stylistic grounds and on the assumption that the French declaration of war on George III in support of the American rebels in 1778 provided a motive. 32. See most recently J. Hessler (2008) The Naming of America: Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map and the Cosmographiae Introductio (Washington: Library of Congress). 33. See P. Barber (forthcoming 2012) ‘Cartography, Topography and History Paintings’ in M. Hayward and D. Starkey (eds), The Inventory of King Henry VIII (London: Society of Antiquaries), iii. 34. Richard Hakluyt, Divers voyages touching the discoueries of America (London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1582), preface, sig 2r. for the mention of the map, which he wrongly assumed was by the explorer Giovanni Verrazzano and not by his brother.



28

35. H.M. Wallis (1981), The Maps and Text of the Boke of Idrography presented by Jean Rotz to Henry VIII (Oxford: Roxburgh Club). 36. Homem (2005). 37. Quoted by Stuart (1991), p. 68 n. 14 from TNA PRO 30/8/86 no. 3. 38. BL K. Top. 67.80-2(a-d). 39. BL K. Top. 58.10. The map contains a full-length reclining portrait of Louis XIV and is very similar to the maps being produced, from manuscript originals, in the workshop of the Invalides at the time when Preston made his offer to Charles II (for instance the ‘Louvois Alas’ mentioned above). See P. Barber (1990) ‘Necessary and Ornamental: Map Use in England under the Later Stuarts 1660–1714’, Eighteenth Century Life 14/3, 27 n. 63. 40. D. Buisseret (2007) ‘French cartography: The Ingénieurs du roi 1500–1650’ in Woodward (2007) pp. 1506–10 and in more detail in his article (forthcoming), ‘The Manuscript Sources of Christophe Tassin’s maps of France: “The Military School”’ in Mélanges Lisette Dankaert. Preston’s correspondent, Francis Gwynne, also owned an atlas of not particularly skilled plans of forts in the Netherlands dating from the 1660s by one N. Renaud (now BL Add. MS 16369), a French military engineer whose work is also to be found in the French Archives Nationales (‘Receuil de diverses places fortes de Holland, d’Allemagne et pays de Nord dessinez a main’; 1 JJ 116). 41. See Buisseret (2007). 42. Stuart (1991) p. 10, nos. 135, 136. There are few relevant carto-bibliographies of individual towns but in her thorough carto-bibliography Elisabeth Stuart lists no less than 47 (out of a total of 218) detailed manuscript and printed maps and plans of Plymouth in French archives and libraries, of which seven are officially produced English manuscript plans with English titles which must have been smuggled out of English official archives, while seventeen are French surveys derived from espionage activities (i.e. and not manuscript copies of English printed originals). Interestingly the British National Archives possesses one set of plans of Plymouth by a French spy (PRO MR 1111; Stuart no 135) presumably illicitly acquired by a British diplomat and on the atavistic assumption that any map, regardless of quality might be useful at some time – an urge that seems commonplace among diplomats and statesmen. 43. E. Chappell (1935) The Tangier Papers of Samuel Pepys (London: Navy Records Society) p. 110. Though none of Storff’s plans have yet been traced in French archives, a few plans of forts on the Isle of Wight that he made for Charles II before his defection are still to be found in the King’s Topographical Collection in the British Library (see for example BL K. Top. 15.5, 23c, 34).



Peter Barber 29

Scholars, Servants, Spies: William Weldon and William Swerder in England and Abroad Jason Powell

I In early January 1540, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Wyatt sprung a trap for the attainted traitor and expatriate Robert Brancester. Using two English scholars in Paris to watch over his target, Wyatt brought the French provost with him to seize Brancester at his lodgings. His subsequent report to Henry VIII is a masterpiece of narrative correspondence, featuring the moment of the traitor’s capture as the centrepiece of an elaborate plot.1 Nearly lost – and intentionally so – in the detail of his narrative and the subsequent discussion of an interview with Emperor Charles V is the fact that Wyatt had failed in his attempt to extradite Brancester, who was later released by the French king upon a request from the emperor. This traitor was himself a fascinating character.2 However, my purpose here is not to rehearse his capture, but to investigate the lives and activities of the men who are perhaps even more obscured by the narrative: William Weldon and William Swerder, the English expatriate scholars Wyatt used to watch over this traitor. Neither of them served in the peripatetic household of the embassy as it followed the emperor’s court on its journey from Spain through France and into Flanders to investigate a rebellion in the Habsburg territory of Ghent. Wyatt mentions them in the same letter to Henry with a passage of obligatory praise: I have vsid gretly the help off on Sworder a servant off my lord of Cantorbury, a yong man well lernt and well langaged, off good sobernes and discretion, and also of one Weldon a student here and longing to Master Pate, whose industrye and true diligens according to theire duytye I must gretly comend vnto your highnes.3 30



2

William Weldon (d. 1545) and William Swerder or Sworder (d. 1575) have barely earned a mention in published studies of Henrician diplomacy and the Reformation,4 and indeed neither achieved the political prominence of other men associated with Wyatt’s embassy, including John Mason, Thomas Chamberlain and George Blage, all of whom were later knighted. Yet both were well connected in England, and their biographies to this point diverge little from these more prominent examples. Moreover, their activities in these years are surprisingly well preserved in the extant archive. Whether in spying for embassies, reporting continental news to patrons, translating Lorenzo Valla, sending books and other items back to England, or in educating the children of prominent English gentlemen and nobles, these two obscure figures can tell us much about the variety of roles played by servants, scholars and clerics living abroad in the early years of the English Reformation.

II Though my focus here lies primarily on the activities of Weldon and Swerder abroad in the 1530s and 1540s, some outline of their broader lives and backgrounds will help to establish a context for these years. Among the two, Swerder’s life is more readily available, thanks to the survival of some Swerder family documents among the Loseley Papers in Surrey. He was a cousin of Sir William More of Loseley,5 who was an heir and executor of his will in 1575. Most of the extant papers relating to Swerder are legal documents regarding land and debts, and were probably kept by More as part of his own financial records. A skeletal life of Swerder can be extracted from these documents with some educated guesses about their contexts. William was probably the son of Robert Swerder, goldsmith of London, and grandson of another London goldsmith, John Swerder, both of whose papers he preserved. Robert apparently died between 1530, when he last paid rent to the abbot and convent of Stratford, and 1532, when William pays a ‘fine’ (a term often associated with the transfer of lands to heirs) to the abbot of Bury for other lands in Harlow, Essex.6 The family’s roots lay in Essex, and most recently in Harlow, to which parish church John Swerder gave liberally in his will.7 William’s mother, Alice Swerder, died in Harlow in 1550, leaving lands there to her son, and it was to Harlow that William himself returned in 1565.8



Jason Powell 31

32


My veray singuler good lorde after most hartie comendacions vnto your lordeshipe I likwise thanke the same for your goodnes towerd the bringer here of William Swerder, desiering you to contynue the same. I haue intendid as I shewyd you when I spake withe you last, to sende hym into fraunce or Italy, except you be otherwyse mynded to set hym forwarde, as truly I wolde be ryght glad it myght please you so to doo, and therfore I haue sent hym vnto you, that he shulde informe your lordeship off hys mynde, desiering you to be good lorde vnto hym for hys passeport.9 Cranmer makes clear not only that he is Swerder’s patron (as Wyatt suggests), but that he and Cromwell had personally discussed how best to employ him, and even that Cromwell may have been considering another assignment. The nature of that assignment – either from Cranmer or the prospective employment from Cromwell – is not entirely clear, but it looks in any case as if there were no small expectations for Swerder in 1538. Already in 1535, a less certain reference in a letter from George Lily to Thomas Starkey places Swerder within a circle of prominent humanists with substantial Italian contacts. Writing from Venice, Lily asks Starkey to ‘salute his old friend Sworder’.10 Starkey had recently returned from Italy, where he had probably known Pietro Bembo and spent time with Reginald Pole (not yet entirely out of favour in England). He was also now a royal chaplain, close to Cromwell, a familiar of the king’s, and engaged in writing propaganda for the government. Lily was the son of the humanist and grammarian William Lily, master of St Paul’s School, and he was now writing from Pole’s Italian household. This is the only known link between St Paul’s School and Swerder, who is not listed on the fragmentary register of the school; as we shall see, the links between Weldon and St Paul’s may imply that one or both of them attended that school. There is little other certain evidence of Swerder’s activities before 1538, when he was appointed master of the Hospital at Eastbridge in Canterbury by Archbishop Cranmer.11 However, some unpublished documents in the Loseley collection give tantalizing hints – reinforcing the mention in Lily’s letter – that Swerder had already spent time abroad. In particular, he was the co-executor with Philip Hoby of the will of Nicholas Hawkyns, archdeacon and bishop-elect of Ely, who died in January 1534



Swerder first appears with certainty in the state papers in August 1538, when Archbishop Cranmer writes to Cromwell requesting a passport for him:

while in Spain as the English resident ambassador, an appointment that began in October 1532. A quitclaim, dated 23 November 1535 and signed by Hoby, absolves Swerder of any claims Hoby or his heirs might make against Swerder in relation to Hawkins’s will. Hoby is identified there as a servant to Cromwell12 and was known to have served in the embassy household of Hawkins. He was an ambassador himself by 1538, and became a prominent counsellor under Edward VI. We know that Hawkins had remade his will during his illness in Spain, specifying that he should be buried at Balbase in Aragon.13 It thus seems very likely that Swerder also served in the embassy household with Hoby, and that the delay between Hawkins’s death and the quitclaim resulted from the continued activities of one or both of these executors abroad. It was common for some members of an embassy household to continue on with an ambassador’s successor,14 and indeed, Hoby carried a letter from Spain to England in April of 1535,15 indicating that he stayed to serve the new ambassador, Richard Pate. It may instead have been Swerder who returned to England to execute Hawkins’s will and announce his death at court.16 Between the end of 1538, when Cranmer requests his passport, and some point after 1540, Swerder was in Paris. Mysterious ‘business’ later places him at Strasbourg in 1545, where he signs a ‘testimonial’ for the English Protestant exile Richard Hilles, which was intended to help Hilles receive the freedom of the canton of Zurich. In the letter to Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as head of the Zurich church, Hilles calls Swerder ‘a gentleman whose zeal for learning is joined with piety and sobriety of life’.17 The other person serving as a reference for Hilles was none other than the New Testament translator Miles Coverdale. Bullinger and Coverdale are serious figures with whom to be named two years before the start of the Edwardian Reformation. Among the three proxies Swerder appointed to manage his affairs in 1538 during his absence abroad was Nicholas Bacon (1510–1579), the future lord keeper for Queen Elizabeth.18 But Swerder appears nowhere in the state papers from the Edwardian period or later. From this point, the Loseley documents place him vaguely in London in 1547, and in 1567, in a residence at ‘the netherend of paternosterrow’ (famous for its printing houses), beside ‘A Ierkyn maker’.19 Despite residing in London, Swerder is after 1545 principally linked in the Loseley papers linked to James Killigrew of Blean, Kent, which was just north of Canterbury and Eastbridge Hospital. Among other roles, he served as a legal agent for Killigrew, collecting the latter’s debts between 1562 and 1567.20 This connection might also derive from Swerder’s time



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in the service of Cranmer: Killigrew is mentioned as ‘gentyllman huysher to my lorde of cantorbory’ in the 1538 appointment of proxies.21 In the midst of this period of work on Killigrew’s behalf, Swerder either gave up or was forced out of his mastership of the hospital in 1565; the hospital buildings had apparently decayed in his stewardship, and Swerder was made to pay out of his own pocket for repairs in 1566.22 Four years later, Archbishop Parker visited the hospital and later drew up new statutes requiring residency of the master, perhaps partly in reaction to the decay of the hospital under Swerder’s absent stewardship.23 Upon relinquishing the mastership, Swerder gave his household articles to a servant, Robert Wryght, married on or around 8 October 1565, and with his new and unnamed wife and two servants, boarded with one Adryan Thorpe between 13 October and 11 January while building or refurbishing a house.24 His wife does not appear again in subsequent documents, including his will.25 An inventory of Swerder’s goods survives from after his death in 1575, mentioning Latin, French, and Italian books. Though a total value of the goods is not listed, some of his lands in Harlow were sold or rented by his executor and principal heir William More in 1579 for £360, and others were inherited separately by his servant Daniel Curtis, an orphan raised by Swerder, including his principal house in Harlow, along with another in Sheering.26

III William Weldon was perhaps the fourth and youngest son of Robert and Elizabeth Weldon, among whose children Thomas was cofferer to Edward VI, and Edward master of the household for Henry VIII.27 To my knowledge, no archive of family documents provides the kind of biography we have for Swerder. However, other extant references tell us much about Weldon. One is a Latin encomium written to Weldon by the antiquary John Leland: AD GULIELMUM VELDENUM Perge libros Vallae docti versare politos Promittunt fruges semina laeta bonas. Nam mihi iudicii si quid tribuere sorores, Plectigeri et si quid numina magna dei, In toto Latio nihil est felicius illis, Grammaticus certe maximus ille fuit. O utinam facunde mihi Veldene liceret Hoc studio lateri semper adesse tuo!

5



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10

(TO WILLIAM WELDON Continue translating learned Valla’s polished books, these happy seeds promise goodly fruit. For if the Muses and the great quill-wielding god have granted me any judgment, in all of Italy there is nothing better than those, he was assuredly the greatest grammarian. Oh Weldon, would I could always be at your side in this effort! But I am dragged elsewhere by the words of my sweet Muse, which does not let me be my own man. But you must persist. Although they may be late in coming, William, worthy rewards await such efforts.)28 Leland studied at St Paul’s School and then Cambridge, and was in Oxford in 1525 and 1526 before heading abroad to France. Weldon can be found at Corpus Christi, Oxford, from 1522, where he took a BA in 1523 and became a probationary fellow in 1525. The poem probably dates to the end of this period.29 The Valla project is of course uncertain; the only contemporary publication of Lorenzo Valla’s works in English, a translation into English of The Donation of Constantine by William Marshall, was printed by Thomas Godfray in 1534.30 Leland’s reference to Valla as the best grammarian (‘In toto Latio nihil est felicius illis, | Grammaticus certe maximus ille fuit’ – a sentiment that echoed Erasmus) provides some certainty that this was Lorenzo Valla, rather than his younger cousin Giorgio. The same reference makes De elegantiis latinae linguae a more likely text for Swerder’s efforts than The Donation. In any case, a William Weldon, BA, was granted a small benefice associated with the chapelry of the Virgin Mary in Jesmond, near Newcastleupon-Tyne, in April 1526.31 An appointment by proxy to the prebendary of Welton Beckhall followed on 6 March 1535. As the proxy appointment suggests, Weldon was at this point already abroad in the household of the English ambassador to Spain, Richard Pate, archdeacon of Lincoln, whose uncle, John Longland, was the bishop. Weldon presumably returned with Pate and then came back into Spain carrying letters to Wyatt in June 1537.32 How long he stayed is unclear, but by November he was back in England; he writes to John Mason, a member of Wyatt’s embassy, from Longland’s residence in Holborn in November 1537.33 In 14 June of 1538, he was back on the continent at the College of Cambrai in Paris, a more liberal and humanist-friendly counterpart to the Sorbonne.34



Distrahor ast alias blandae per verba Camenae Quae me hominem iuris vix sinit esse mei Tu tamen insistas. Taleis, Gulielme, labores Sera licet veniant, praemia digna manent.


Weldon’s elevated rank within Pate’s household is confirmed by a letter from another of Pate’s servants, Peter Rede, who writes to his brother-in-law Geoffrey Loveday, a spear or spearman of Calais, in September of 1535. Rede writes that Weldon ‘ded warne [i.e., dismiss] me off owt of my masters saruies’, apparently without directions from Pate. Rede was able to return only after having the French ambassador speak to Pate on his behalf.35 The appointment to Welton Beckhall within Longland’s bishopric further confirms Weldon’s importance as a servant to Pate and perhaps to Longland, and ties him closely to this religiously conservative ambassador and his similarly conservative uncle. Weldon might have come to regret those ties in December 1540, when Pate, then under suspicion of treason, fled to Rome from a subsequent ambassadorial post, but on this point we can only speculate. Though he may have been appointed vicar of Gargrave, Yorkshire, in 1543,36 other details of Weldon’s life are unknown from then until his death of unknown causes in 1545. He was buried in the parish church of St Antholin in London on 17 September 1545.37

IV Weldon and Swerder were chosen to spy on Brancester in 1540 in part because Weldon already knew him. Other extant letters from members of the embassy in 1535 make clear that Brancester had been friendly with Pate and his household.38 Swerder’s own connections to Pole’s household through his apparent friendship with Starkey and Lily, combined with Brancester’s history as a servant to Pole, made him another ideal interloper. But their work as spies for Wyatt is only a part of their recoverable activities in Paris. Swerder’s three extant letters dating from 1539 to 1540 give a good indication of his activities and the patronage he sought. The first, a letter to Cranmer dating 10 November 1539, sustained some damage in the 1731 Cotton Library fire, but what remains of its text is almost indistinguishable from the sort of rumours – notes about the emperor’s movements, the Turks, the travels of the Great Master of France and the cardinal of Paris – that comprised much ambassadorial correspondence in the period.39 Later in the next year, Swerder’s letter to Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley contained similar news, including the rumour that ‘Paule the Romayn byshope ys deade’. He notes having used ‘harry bryan a marchant yt dwellyth yn lylke strete’ in London, who ‘hauntyth muche these partyes’ in Paris to convey his letters to Audley.40 Letters such as these from English expatriates to prominent



36

councillors and others back in England are sprinkled throughout the state papers. Though the writers are often anonymous, the frequency of their reports are an indication not only for the hunger for news at court, but also of the social and political importance such an independent source of information could hold for those making or framing policies in England. However, this letter from Swerder to Audley, dated 4 April 1540, focuses principally upon ‘thes gentyllmen your scolers’ who Swerder was ‘husbandyng’ on Audley’s behalf. He notes that he had received on 2 April ‘a lettre of banke for thes your Gentyllmen of a hondreth crownes. whiche the banker hathe promysyd to paye wyth yn thes ii dayes’. Elsewhere, he refers to ‘the chylderns inclynatyon and desyer homewarde’ to England and ‘theyr towardenes yn lernynge, and the frenche tonge, and the spendyng of theyr tyme’ in Swerder’s ‘pore tuycyon’. He praises them ‘wyth out simulatyon or dyssimulatyon, wythout affectyon or respecte had here yn’, claiming that ‘better wytts shall not com owt of Englonde a greate while yf there come ony suche’.41 These children and gentlemen are clearly the same, though Swerder names them nowhere in the letter. A bill dated 25 April 1540 and retained among the Loseley papers is on its own similarly mysterious. It is a receipt for sixty crowns of the sum returned by Swerder to Audley via the latter’s servant John Plame (or Plaine), which had been used for ‘the behove of my lorde Ihon Graye, thomas awdely, and George Chrystmas’.42 These are clearly the ‘Gentyllmen’ referred to in Swerder’s letter, who are now returning to England, and the sixty crowns the remainder of the hundred sent on 2 April to Swerder. Lord John Grey (d. 1564) was the youngest son of Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset (1477–1530), and younger brother of Henry Grey, later duke of Suffolk (1517–1554). His biographical entry in the DNB mentions no particular details of his education, but Swerder’s ‘tuycyon’ and ‘husbandyng’ may have partly prepared him for his subsequent military role in within the pale of Calais, where he was deputy of the English fortification of Newhaven near Boulogne. Grey was later charged with complicity in the plot that led to Wyatt’s rebellion under Queen Mary, and was the only one of the three Grey brothers to escape execution.43 His relationship to the chancellor derived from the elder Audley’s marriage in 1538 to Grey’s sister, lady Elizabeth. The young Thomas Audley mentioned in the bill was the lord chancellor’s nephew (the elder Audley had no children),44 and George Christmas was the son of the London alderman John Christmas.45 Weldon, too, may have had some experience tutoring or husbanding young students in Paris. The Victorian calendar entry for his letter,



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38


Now I wyll prevent to desyr you, not to wysch nor adresse vnto me the cure [care] and charge of no man hys chylde nor chyldren. for I am now satlyde [saddled] to my study and ame able to lyue (I thanke god, and my master) withowt eny sych helpe and lett of study. wherwyth I wyll not intangle nor cumbre me self in nowyse now, as I dyde in tymes past, nor then with no other impediment, onles ytt be for a specyal frynde. for I haue lost tomych tyme alredy, as you well know, and ame farre in age asb absque arte de pane lucrando [to be concerned with daily bread rather than art].47 Barely eight months after his last extant letter places Weldon with Bishop Longland at Holborn, where he bemoans the entanglements that have kept him from study. These distractions ‘in tymes past’ may include his diplomatic service in addition to the English travellers, students and merchants (with and without children) that Jones has sent his way. This turn toward study may be one reason that Weldon’s name falls out of the extant state papers so soon after his involvement with Wyatt and Brancester in 1540. In contrast to Swerder, whose letters to Cromwell, Cranmer and Audley suggest someone seeking further patronage, Weldon is at least for the moment focused on his studies. However, despite the impression he gives of neglecting his daily bread for study, Weldon discusses another distraction in the same letter, an elaborate search for very specific items requested by Jones. He reports that he cannot find a particular type of cosmetic case requested for Jones’s wife; she wants a ‘rownde’ tablet, but that ‘faschon’ is (perhaps embarrassingly) ‘exolete [obsolete] and litle now usyde’. He offers instead a small tablet the size of an English coin, a ‘rial’, which opens with a clasp or ‘vice’ to reveal musk ‘or swett powdres’. Such a tablet would cost 30 shillings plus at least a noble or crown to have it made. Jones himself wants a stone with the image of Pegasus engraved upon it, but does not specify the type of stone or whether he is willing to have it made. Weldon has already searched ‘diuerse places’ for such a stone, and concludes that it should to be made to order.48 Swerder too is engaged in procuring items for people in England, but more openly as gifts to past and potential patrons. A letter to Cromwell,



dated 15 June 1538 from the College of Cambrai in Paris to Richard Jones, master of St Paul’s School, summarizes his refusal ‘to take charge of children any more’.46 The manuscript gives a slightly different impression:

dated 29 November 1539, is sent with a ‘lytyll book . . . for lacke of a better’ that ‘yntreatith of comon welthis, and dyvers matters ther vnto perteynyng’. The title is not mentioned, but Swerder does refer elliptically to ‘your goodnes toward me’ in the past.49 The question of what that ‘goodnes’ might have entailed may recall the hints in Cranmer’s letter to Cromwell of a broader discussion about Swerder’s employment, but they are in any case uncertain. Their surviving letters tell us much about the activities of these two men, but they also reveal something of their personalities. Writing in his particularly open italic hand to Jones, Weldon not only employs the Latin tag quoted above, but also signs off with a trilingual statement of his location, giving the college first in Latin and then in French, while signalling the French with an intermediate English phrase: ‘E collegio cameracensis in french le college de cambray, 15·Jun·1538·’.50 Highly educated men such as Weldon and Jones might sometimes use multilingual tags as a way of bonding.51 This is a different culture than we often encounter in the state papers, one largely obscured by the summaries collected in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.52 Similarly excised in these summaries is the remarkable obsequiousness of Swerder’s letter to Cromwell. The calendar summarizes thus: Swerder ‘Apologizes for interrupting with his rude letters one who is so occupied with weighty affairs, but thinks it his duty to write, as a servant of Cromwell’s is here’.53 Swerder’s own words reveal a highly educated man struggling to replicate an imagined or remembered model letter with a copia that may anticipate Euphuism: All be it most honorable and my syngular good lorde, I doo well consider and ponder yn my mynd the greate affaires the weyghtye mattears and besognes [affairs] that daily and howerly environe, besette and occupye your lordship on all sydes, so that yt myght seme, nether mete nor convenyent, for suche a won as I am, to wythdrawe your lordshipe his myndes or eyes, neuer so lytyll from them, or to offende your lordshipe his eyes, wyth theis my rude and folyshe letters, yet my good lorde I iudgyd with my selfe, that yf I showlde not haue wrytten vnto your lordshipe at this tyme, specyally a servant of your lordshipes being here paresent, I showlde one the oother syde have semyd to as mayny as knowe your goodnes toward me not to have doon my part, dewtye, and offyce towarde your lordshipe ayen for the same, And yf I doo offende your lordshipe hereyn, I can not see to whome your lordshipe showlde impute the faulte, but to your lordshipes goodnes, that yt plesith yow to showe toward me, which



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doyth [?] so animat, encourage, and bolde me, that I doo nothyng doubte, nor feare, lest your lordshipe shawlde take ony displeasur heareyn, but doo trust surely, that your lordeshipe will so take it, as I knowe, ye are wont to take, quecunque grati amini testamenti sunt [you who are a testament of generosity], as I most humbly beseche your lordshepe so to thynke54 Swerder’s doublets (‘consider and ponder’) quickly become triplets (‘environe, besette and occupye’) as the concern for Cromwell’s time cedes to the fear that some larger audience would misinterpret his silence. Any space between prolixity and silence is unimagined as an option. The Latin phrase enters just as the English language seems to fail under the weight of the writer’s deference. How this letter was actually taken by Cromwell amid the ‘besognes’ of his daily work is simply not available to us now, and no response survives. Certainly, many in this period, scholars and otherwise, affected a similar absence of Horatian brevity. We might nevertheless imagine Cranmer, the scholar-turned-archbishop, as a more receptive reader of this style than Cromwell, the busy, pragmatic, self-taught statesman. In any case, both men must have suffered – Swerder in his search for patronage, Weldon in his financial support – when two of their patrons fell in 1540. Pate fled to Rome from his embassy to Charles V in the Low Countries in December 1540, and Cromwell was executed in July 1540. Though Swerder’s principal patron, Cranmer, of course lived on as archbishop into the Marian years, I find no particular evidence that Swerder continued in his service. However, there is one further and uncertain hint of Weldon’s involvement with an important project of the Henrician Reformation. A very damaged, anonymous letter to bishop Edmund Bonner, apparently dated 1 March 1539, discusses sending ‘your bokes’ at Bonner’s request to Rouen to be forwarded on to Cromwell’s servant, Thomas Seryll, and mentions that the author will speak today with a ‘Mr. Warde and Mr. Weldon and show them your lordship’s . . .’.55 Much of the text is lost, and the subject is not entirely clear. But this is roughly the moment in which Bonner was attempting, in his role as English ambassador resident in France, to recover initial copies of the Great Bible that had been printed in Paris and confiscated by French authorities late in the previous year.56 Does this reference to Weldon suggest his involvement in that effort, however marginal? Or does it simply recall yet another of the varied and obscure activities of these two men abroad?



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1. I wish to thank the Donald D. Harrington Foundation and Faculty Fellows Program at the University of Texas at Austin for generous funding of the work from which this essay proceeds, and Marjorie Curry Woods for her comments on portions of this essay. See J. Powell (ed.) (forthcoming) The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (Oxford: Oxford University Press), edited from British Library, Harley MS 282, fols 87v–89r. The letter dates from Paris on 7 January 1540. Also available in K. Muir (1964) Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 117–18. 2. In 1529, Brancester was a merchant’s factor abroad when he encountered the emperor’s ailing ambassador, Jean de Balbi, en route to Persia. On his deathbed, de Balbi passed his commission to Brancester, whose successful mission resulted in a Persian attack on the Turks at an opportune moment for the emperor. Brancester returned on a Portuguese ship via the Cape of Good Hope, possibly becoming the first Englishman to travel the route. A decade later, he was considered a hanger-on by the emperor’s counselors and was loaned as a servant by Charles to the attainted Catholic exile, Reginald Pole, an association that led to his own attainder by Parliament in the summer of 1539. Little more is known about his life and activities. See P. de Gayangos (ed.) Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations Between England and Spain (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1867–1954), vol. IV:1 of XIII, pp. 455, 184, 543 and J.J. Scarisbrick (1961) ‘The First Englishman Around the Cape of Good Hope?’, B.I.H.R. XXXIV, pp. 165–77; J. Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (eds) (1862–1932) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (London), vol. IX of XXI 490; XIV:1 867(c.15) (hereafter cited as L&P with volume and item number). Brancester has sometimes been erroneously confused with another attainted traitor, the Welshman, James ap Gruffydd. On this confusion, see P. Marshall (2008) ‘The Greatest Man in Wales and the International Opposition to Henry VIII,’ Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIX, pp. 700–1. Wyatt’s involvement with Brancester has been mentioned several times in studies on Wyatt. There are mentions of the incident and its diplomatic aftermath in S. Greenblatt (1980) Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 144–5, and E. Heale (1998) Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London: Longman), pp. 16–17. Different aspects of the diplomatic scenario are found in J. Powell (2002) ‘Thomas Wyatt and the Emperor’s Bad Latin’, Notes and Queries IL, pp. 207–9 and Powell (2005) ‘“For Caesar’s I am”: Henrician Diplomacy and Representations of King and Country in Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry’ The Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI, pp. 415–31. 3. Powell (ed.) Complete Works of Wyatt; BL Harley MS 282, fols. 85v; Muir, Life and Letters, p. 116. Wyatt also mentions them briefly in his Declaration and Defence against treason charges that were lodged against him after his return to England. 4. Aside from primary source calendars and nineteenth-century regional and Reformation histories, I have found only one mention of either man, and that in a footnote: A. Ryrie (2003) The Gospel and Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 269, ftn. 29. Ryrie mistakenly calls Swerder an ‘exile in Strassbourg’ (where Swerder was on some sort of business in



Notes and references

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture 1545), citing H. Robinson (ed.) (1846) Original Letters relative to the English Reformation (Cambridge: Parker Society), p. 247. Surrey History Centre, MS LM/348/113 (hereafter Surrey with catalogue details). Surrey LM/1659/24, 26. In his receipt, the abbot first writes ‘Thomas Sworder’ before deleting ‘Thomas’ and writing ‘William’ above it, suggesting that his association with William was recent. A Thomas Swerder was William’s likely uncle, brother to Robert. William Sworder must have studied at Oxford or Cambridge, though he appears nowhere in the published registers. A ‘Swerdars’, speculated to be William’s grandfather, John, studied at Cambridge in 1495–6, having been incorporated from Oxford. See J.A. Venn (1922–54) Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pt. 1, vol. 4, p. 192. John Swerder’s bequest of Old Poole’s farm to the Harlow parish church and poor continued to yield benefits into the twentieth century. See W.R. Powell (ed.) (1983) A History of the County of Essex (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 8, pp. 131–49. Surrey LM/1659/33. Cranmer to Cromwell, 3 August 1538. TNA SP 1/135, fol. 31r (paraphrased in L&P XIII:2 25). 23 October, L&P 9 673. To my knowledge, there are no other candidates for the ‘Sworder’ mentioned here. The appointment is made in Surrey LM 1659–28. Surrey LM 1659/27. D.G. Newcombe (2004) ‘Hawkins, Nicholas (c.1495–1534)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/12678, accessed 13 Jan 2010]. This also makes it possible that Swerder was already serving Cranmer in the embassy prior to that of Hawkins, though the receipt of the fine from the abbot of Bury (previously mentioned) dates from 23 August 1532. This lies in the middle of Cranmer’s embassy (January 1532–January 1534), though it could have been received by an agent on behalf of Swerder, since it does not contain his signature or hand (Surrey LM 1659/26). Among Richard Pate’s servants, Peter Rede stayed on with Wyatt, and a ‘Barker’, probably Anthony, may have continued with Pate when Wyatt returned to England and Pate replaced him. William Wolf, who served Wyatt, later served Sir Henry Knyvett in Spain, and may have also served Pate who was briefly ambassador in between Wyatt and Knyvett. Diarmaid MacCulloch also mentions a servant of Cranmer’s who stayed to serve Nicholas Hawkins, who replaced him in embassy to the emperor. See D. MacCulloch (2007) ‘Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retraction and Additions’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History LVIII, pp. 273–86, 278. L&P VIII 734. When news reached court in late January, Hawkin’s death was controversial; Anne Boleyn implied that he had been poisoned (L&P VII 171). L&P XX 528. Surrey LM 1659/29. The others were James Killigrew, John Barbour, doctor of law, and Robert Talbot, clerk. John Myles and Peter Lily, perhaps a brother of George Lily, are named as witnesses.



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19. Surrey LM 1659/31 and 1659/35/9. 20. Surrey LM 1659/35/1–9, LM 1659/36. He also conveyed ‘two knyfes and a forke of the Italyan making’ from George Neville to Thomas Parker in 1558 (Surrey LM 1659/34). 21. See a note on the reverse of Surrey LM 1659/29. In a 1535 letter, Cranmer refers to ‘My servant Kylligrewe’ L&P IX 869 (SP 1/99, fol. 73r). 22. Surrey LM 1659/40 and 1659/43. 23. See W. Page (1926) A History of the County of Kent (London: St Catherine’s Press), vol. II, pp. 209–16. 24. Surrey LM 1659/39 and 1659/41. The second of these mentions the purchase of rings, and lists £4, 7s. 3d. worth of food purchased ‘agaynst the daye of my doughters maryage to Mr Sworder’, though the name of her father is not given. 25. A certified copy, heavily damaged, survives as Surrey LM 6729/7/31. The enrolled will is in TNA PROB 11/57. 26. Surrey LM 348/128/1. 27. W.H. Ireland (1930) England’s Topographer (London: G. Virtue), p. 396. This could be a separate William Weldon, though we know that this family had links to or derived from Northumberland, to which county our William Weldon is linked in J. Foster (ed.) (1968) Alumni Oxoniensis (Netherlands: Kraus Reprints), p. 1595. There, Weldon is uncertainly linked to his canonry in Lincoln (the prevendary of Welton Beckhall – see below); however, the succession to that canonry upon his death in 1545 of one Roger Weldon, also of Northumberland and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Ibid., p. 1594), makes it fairly certain that William was his father or uncle and connected to the same county and canonry. 28. D.F. Sutton (ed.) (2007) John Leland’s Epigrammata (Birmingham: The Philological Museum), poem CXXXIX [http://www.philological.bham. ac.uk/lelandpoems accessed 18 January 2010]. 29. J.P. Carley (1986) ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of his Poetry’ Studies in Philology LXXXIII, pp. 1–50, 8. See also L. Bradner (1956) ‘Some Unpublished Poems by John Leland’ PMLA LXXI, pp. 827–36, 828. On Weldon, see also Alumni Oxoniensis, p. 1595. 30. A treatyse of the donation, STC 5641. For Marshall’s role as translator, see his two letters to Cromwell mentioning the Donation and the Defensor Pacis by Marsilius of Padua, L&P VII 422–3. Both works were printed as anti-papal tracts. 31. L&P IV 2132 (g.21). 32. Two notes in Wyatt’s hand on fol. 280v of British Library Harley MS 282 identify Weldon as the courier for a letter from Thomas Wriothesley (L&P XII:2 42): ‘master wryothesley in Iuyn by weldon at valedd[olid]’ and on another fold, ‘master wryethsley In Iune by weldone’. It is unclear whether Weldon stayed some time with Wyatt or returned with the next post. 33. Weldon signs ‘Raptim ex ædibus episcopi nostri Holborn’, dated 28 November 1537 (L&P 12:2 1137). 34. The Sorbonne was apparently hostile to the new learning for its perceived relationship to Protestantism, so much so that Budé convinced François I to found a new college in 1530 for the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.



Jason Powell 43

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture This new college, which is now the College of France, initially used space belonging to the college of Cambrai, and eventually subsumed it under orders from Napoleon in 1804. Weldon’s reference to Cambrai is probably to that college, but could also indicate that he was studying Hebrew, Greek, or Latin at the newer college using the same building. TNA SP 1/97, fol. 33r (L&P IX 459). Alumni Oxoniensis, p. 1595. Though Foster here cites his own Index Ecclesiasticus on the Gargrave appointment, I do not find it mentioned there. See J. Foster (ed.) (1890) Index Ecclesiasticus (Oxford: Parker and Company). J.L. Chester and G. J. Armitage (ed.) (1883) The Parish Registers of St. Antholin, Budge Row, London (London: Harleian Society), p. 5. L&P IX 490 (British Library Cotton Vit. MS xiv, fol. 145rv). Wyatt also notes in his Defence that another member of his embassy, John Mason, refused the task, because another ambassador, Edmund Bonner, had once accused Mason of becoming friendly with the Cardinal Pole during a similar proposed spying project (see Powell, The Complete Works of Wyatt or Muir, Life and Letters, p. 195). L&P XIV:2 492. TNA SP 1/158, fols. 138r, 137r (L&P XV 456). The rumour was false; Pope Paul III died in 1549. TNA SP 1/158 fols. 137r, 137v, 138r. Surrey LM 1659/30. Stanford Lehmberg (2004) ‘Grey, Lord John (d. 1564)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press); online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11548, accessed 7 Jan 2010]. The heralds’ visitations of 1612 and 1634 conflict on Audley’s nephews. He had two brothers, Robert of Berechurch and Henry of Gransden, but while the 1634 visitation shows Henry with no children, the 1612 list nephews named Thomas by each brother, including Thomas of Holton Conquest, son of Henry, and Robert’s son Thomas of Berechurch, both of whom married and produced heirs. One would tend to assume that the 1634 visitation was mistaken in depriving Henry Audley of children. This would leave two possible Thomas Audley nephews as the candidates for Swerder’s charge. See W. Metcalfe (ed.) (1878) The Visitations of Essex (London: Harleian Society), pp. 139–40, 338. L.M. Higgs (1998) Godliness and Governance in Tudor Colchester (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 133 (ftn. 18). L&P XIII:1 1193. TNA SP 1/133, fol. 47r. Ibid. fol. 47r. TNA SP 1/155, fol. 48r. TNA SP 1/133, fol. 47r. For a discussion that touches on this issue, see Marjorie Curry Woods (2001) ‘Boys Will Be Women: Musings on Classroom Nostalgia and the Chaucerian Audience(s)’ in R.F. Yeager and C.C. Morse (eds.) Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve, ed. (Asheville: Pegasus Press), pp. 143–66.



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52. The Victorian calendars are typically criticized by historians for their political bias rather than for the degree to which they obscure the literary character of the writing. 53. L&P XIV:2 605. 54. SP 1/155, fol 48r. 55. TNA SP 1/144, fol. 9r; L&P XIV:1 416. The first quotation derives from manuscript, the second from L&P where I am unable to read the damaged text. 56. See A.J. Slavin (1979) ‘The Rochepot Affair’ The Sixteenth Century Journal X, pp. 3–19, especially pp. 12–13.



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Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham Stephen Alford

This is a short essay about the security and intelligence work of Sir Francis Walsingham and the men who worked for him in the 1580s. Thomas Phelippes was Walsingham’s right-hand, his chief cryptographer and agent-runner. Francis Mylles was Walsingham’s private secretary, and he, like Phelippes, was engaged in handling agents. Four others, whose origins are obscure but who would have called themselves gentlemen, were Thomas Barnes, Nicholas Berden, Maliverey Catilyn, and Robert Poley. A fourth was Gilbert Gifford, the son of a recusant family from Staffordshire who, after an education at Douay, Rome and Rheims, returned to England in 1585 to work for Walsingham and Phelippes against Mary, Queen of Scots. Catilyn worked for the most part in England, especially in prisons like the Marshalsea; Berden, Barnes, and Gifford spent some time in France. These men can tell us a great deal about the mechanics and motives of espionage in the reign of Elizabeth I, about why and how spies spied. This may already seem a very familiar story. There are a number of books showing how Sir Francis and his men ‘saved England’, a sort of ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure with a dash of the narrative of John Foxe.1 With Walsingham we have to beware of this kind of easy familiar story. Of my two caveats the first is that intelligence and espionage in Elizabethan government and society extended much further than Walsingham and his office, as this collection of essays demonstrates so well. The work of Robyn Adams, John Bossy, Paul Hammer and others has helped to show how many of Elizabeth’s courtiers and councillors ran their own extensive networks of information-gathering.2 Spying was popular indeed in the later years of the sixteenth century, as we should expect of any form of activity which had to do with patronage, politics, and money. And so from this follows my second caveat. This is an essay with few 46



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ambitions to be exhaustive. It considers a familiar topic, but I hope from an unfamiliar angle; if it suggests fresh lines of enquiry then it will have succeeded.

Nicholas Berden wrote, probably in early July 1586 and probably to Thomas Phelippes: ‘This only I Crave that thoughe I professe my self a Spye (which is a profession odious thoughe necessarie) that I prosecute the same nott for gayne, butt for the Saffetie of my Naty[ve] Countrie.’3 Berden was not afraid to use the word spy. Many Elizabethans would have come across it in copies of the Geneva Bible. When, in the Book of Numbers (13:1–2), God instructs Moses to send the leaders of the tribes of Israel to search the land of Canaan, these men were ‘The spies’.4 In A Worlde of Wordes (1598) John Florio wrote of ‘a spy, an espial, a scout, a prier, an eavesdropper’, and of the spy’s business ‘to espy, to peer, to pry, to watch or scout with diligence, to ask or enquire for’.5 A spy could be an ‘intelligencer’, though perhaps an intelligencer was not always a spy. Information and news might not be secret. But often it was, which was why Lord Burghley had safe in his custody after 1590 ‘The booke of secret intelligences’.6 Thomas Phelippes wrote of ‘The imployment of Gilbert Gifford for to make intelligence’.7 Sometimes intelligence sat on a more uncertain boundary between open and covert information, and here the work and career of Richard Verstegan is especially interesting.8 At the heart of Elizabeth I’s government was the Queen’s Principal Secretary, William Cecil, Lord Burghley in the early years of the reign (1558–72), Thomas Wilson, William Davison and others, but preeminently Sir Francis Walsingham from 1573 till his death in 1590. Almost every paper in government crossed the Secretary’s desk. He and his tiny staff of men prepared papers for meetings of Elizabeth’s Privy Council, and he chaired the Council’s meetings. He handled the Queen’s correspondence and generally knew of news from abroad before Elizabeth did. He met her in regular audience. He was on call to the Queen day and night, and the burden of the job (as both Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham so often reminded their colleagues) was enormous. It was the Secretary’s task to provide Elizabeth and her Council with information and to supervise the day-to-day governing of the state and its security. He read all diplomatic reports and dealt with the correspondence of ambassadors and diplomats, both English and foreign,



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personally. He used information given to him by merchants and their factors. And he cultivated his own secret sources at home and abroad. There was no ‘Secret Service’ as such, nothing resembling the formal structure of a department or agency of government.9 There were instead private men and private sources who communicated with the Secretary and his men using codes and ciphers only he and they knew. In the 1580s, the years of emergency, Sir Francis Walsingham was both the procurer and customer of secret intelligence: he commissioned it, made sense of it, and with his colleagues in Elizabeth’s Council used it to inform policy. The frustrating thing about the records of the Privy Council is that what survive are minutes of routine business but rarely debates on important political matters. Yet when they do, we find the Secretary making presentations to his colleagues from long briefing papers. From 1573 Walsingham worked very closely with Lord Burghley, whose protégé he was. It is worth at this point saying two things. The first is that there was no kind of distinction between the gathering of intelligence at home or abroad or between intelligence, security work and counter-espionage. The secret reports on Walsingham’s desk in the 1580s could range from letters by diplomats to the reports of informants working close to English Catholic families. Categories were blurred. Secondly, Walsingham both gathered and interpreted secret intelligence. There were no structures to allow for removing the careful assessment of intelligence from the making of policy, and little hope of keeping the business of gathering intelligence free of the politics of Elizabeth I’s court and Council. Espionage was a political activity. This lack of distance and discipline, especially at times of high political anxiety, made for serious errors of judgement and some ruthless politicking. When Walsingham was able to read the paper setting out the order of the Spanish Armada, sent to him by a diplomat, Sir Anthony Standen, by way of a Flemish valet in the service of a Spanish general, the intelligence was priceless.10 More dangerous was gossip and muddled news, and the posturing of informants in need of money who told Walsingham and his servants what they thought important men wanted to hear. If Elizabethan espionage was a political activity, then agents and informants were men seeking patronage and preferment. Among Walsingham’s papers were instructions for diplomats and embassies, ‘The Booke of Recusantes’, ‘The copie of the lettres to the States in english and in french’, certificates for the lords lieutenant, and ‘The little book of musters’, all of which are unsurprising given the Secretary’s responsibility for the foreign and domestic business of



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A Secretarie must have a speciall Cabinett, whereof he is himselfe to keepe the Keye, for his signetts, Ciphers and secrett Intelligences, distinguishing the boxes or tills rather by letters than by the names of the Countryes or places, keepinge that only unto himselfe, for the names may inflame a desire to come by such thinges.12 We know that Walsingham used such a cabinet, or cabinets, as Cecil would have done before him. The word could mean either a small room or repository or a case or box for safe keeping. Beale probably meant this second kind of cabinet. In April 1585, writing of diplomatic papers to Lord Burghley from his house in Surrey, Barn Elms, Walsingham referred to the ‘cabynet’ in which he had put the documents. This cabinet was at court and he had sent for it.13 Appropriately enough, Walsingham’s will was found by Robert Beale and others a day after his death in a ‘secret cabinett’. Presumably they knew where to look and by then had the key.14 It is easy to be carried away, as many writers have been, by Sir Francis Walsingham’s preternatural gift for intelligence work. It is a notion with a long history, going back at least (as so many Elizabethan reputations do) to Sir Robert Naunton’s Fragmenta Regalia.15 The evidence needs to be read carefully. There survives, for example, a paper of ‘The names of sondrie forren places from whence Master Secretary Walsingham was wont to receave his advertisments.’ It gives the names of twelve towns and cities in France, seven in the Low Countries, five in Spain, ten in Germany, three in the United Provinces, three in Turkey, and five in Italy. Walsingham had ten informants ‘at the least’ on the AngloScottish border and in Scotland, more in Ireland; some set around the Queen of Scots and the French, Spanish and Portuguese ambassadors; and ‘Many among the Papists to discover their Treasons’. The author of the paper wrote of money given to merchants and mariners, extraordinary ‘rewards and consideracions’ for Walsingham’s own servants, and the charges of shipping. Both Conyers Read and Lawrence Stone knew the paper, and Stone in particular, in a very sober reading, exposed its defects and limitations. It was compiled, he wrote, after Walsingham’s death in April 1590 ‘with the patent object of stressing Walsingham’s heavy expenditure on foreign espionage’: ‘The document is worthless as evidence of the scope of the espionage service



government.11 Robert Beale described the Secretary’s office in 1592, by which time Beale had been a clerk of the Privy Council for twenty years. On secret matters, Beale wrote:


proper.’16 Stone’s judgement is perhaps too severe. Still, to adapt one of Walsingham’s aphorisms, sometimes there is a greater danger in believing too much than too little.17 So what can we say, as something approaching fact? The first thing has to do with money. For secret work Walsingham was given a regular annual allowance of between £750 (in 1582) to £2,000 (for the years 1585–8), paid by warrants of the Queen’s Privy Seal. (Today this would be somewhere between £110,000 to £250,000.) The calculations are Conyers Read’s, who reckoned the sums from money paid to Walsingham by warrants of the Privy Seal (which survive for the years after 1585), helped by a paper compiled by Thomas Lake (Walsingham’s servant by 1584 and a clerk of the Signet from 1589) which lists warrants paid between April 1585 and December 1589. The wording of these warrants is vague – ‘to be emploied according to her highnes direction given him’ – and so the amount of money Walsingham put to intelligence and security work is at best an estimate.18 An agent would ask for money when he needed it, often to set himself up for a journey. In May 1589 Walsingham wrote to Phelippes that he approved of the proceeding of B (probably Thomas Barnes), ‘and therefor you shall incorage him to goe forward for I see he hathe bothe wyt and corrage’. Walsingham wanted Barnes to be furnished with £20 to make his journey and proposed to meet Phelippes the following day to work out how to send the money to him.19 In England paying agents was straightforward. In 1590 Barnes acknowledged £5 given to him by Phelippes.20 In November of the same year, once again for Phelippes, Barnes signed a formal receipt for £20: Receaved the xxixth daye of November in the thre & thirtie yeare of the raigne of the Queenes Majestie that now is of Master Thomas Phelippes Esquier the som’ of xxli of lawfull englishe moneye the juste true recepte wherof I doe acknowledge by these presentes In witnes wherof I have sett to my hande the day & yeare above mentioned. 1590 By me Thomas Barnes Phelippes just as carefully endorsed it.21 To get money abroad, however, took a little more ingenuity, and often an intermediary. Probably in 1588 one Andrew Scott acknowledged the receipt of ten French Crowns from Phelippes. The money was for Gilbert Gifford, who was by then in the Bishop of Paris’s prison. Probably Andrew Scott was a Scottish merchant or factor.22 This money did not really help to run



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Gilbert as an agent, but it did help him to survive. It is significant, I think, that a letter recording a family arrangement for the delivery of one hundred Crowns to Gilbert was received and endorsed by Phelippes. Gilbert’s uncle in Rouen, Hugh Offley, had seen to the delivery of the money to Paris by means of one Bartholomew Martin. Gilbert wrote to his father, John, to ask him ‘to paie the same to my uncle Offley or the valey [value] therof with the exchange which ther shall be courant in london’.23 Beyond these apparently ad hoc payments to agents, one wonders whether a more regular system of budgeting from secret funds was set up for men like Thomas Barnes and Gilbert Gifford. Couriers travelling abroad would cover their own costs and then recover the money, by a signed warrant, from the Lord Treasurer of the Chamber. When, after a brilliant piece of detective work by J. Leslie Hotson in 1925, historians and literary scholars began to interest themselves in the part played by Robert Poley in the death of Christopher Marlowe, Eugénie de Kalb found in the declared accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber twenty-six warrants for payments to Poley for his journeys abroad between 1588 and 1601. Poley went to France, the Low Countries, Northumberland and Scotland often on ‘her Majesty’s special service’. To The Hague, in May and June 1593, he carried letters in post ‘for her Majesties speciall and secrete afaires of great ymportaunce’. For this journey alone, a month’s travelling from the court at Croydon to The Hague and then back to Nonsuch Palace, Poley was reimbursed £30, or something like £3,500 today.24 When we consider the frequency with which trusted agents working at home and abroad would ask for sums of £20, £10 and £15, and certainly when we take into account the pension of £100 a year granted to Gilbert Gifford in Paris in 1587, we can see how far the secret budget, however complicated it is to calculate or wherever the money came from, must have been stretched. Agents tended to report directly to Walsingham or to Phelippes or Francis Mylles. Aliases were used, both by agents and also by Phelippes. Occasionally a writer relied upon Phelippes or Mylles to identify him by his handwriting, signing with a formula like ‘He whom you know’. Both Nicholas Berden and Maliverey Catilyn did this. From Paris in 1588 Gerard Gifford, the brother of Gilbert, wrote ‘To his very ffrende Raphe husbande merchaunt’. Husband was Thomas Phelippes.25 Nicholas Berden worked under the name Thomas Rogers.26 Gilbert Gifford was Nicholas Cornellis or Cornelys in letters to Thomas Morgan, Thomas Phelippes, and Sir Francis Walsingham; and William Luson in Paris to Thomas Phelippes,



Stephen Alford 51


his letters directed to the sign of the Elephant on the Rue St Jacques.27 For Robert Poley’s secret work in the Low Countries in the 1590s there survives with his cipher alphabet a formal record of his identities and addresses. Letters from Poley, it was agreed, would be superscribed ‘Elyzabeth Boogarde in den Lyllye in den Augustine streate: Antwerpen’ or to ‘Harman vandermyll Jueller op Den Augustine Antwerpen’. Letters to Poley from England would go to either ‘Jacob Mynistrale: Italyano:’ or ‘Arnolde Mulemake Jueller’.28 We have to assume that the posts knew exactly where and to whom these letters had to be delivered – any packet sent to Poley would after all be put into his hands – but that the false superscriptions represented a first layer of protection should the correspondence be intercepted. Equally a mark (very much like one in a code or cipher) or a monogram could be devised and agreed. Gilbert Gifford signed his reports to Walsingham and Phelippes in 1586 with a mark, and Phelippes used a number of marks to endorse those reports. Robert Wood or Woodward, who informed on English Catholics between 1581 and 1583, wrote sometimes under the alias of Robert Barnard but more generally signed letters with a monogram. His reports were often endorsed ‘B.B.’29 In July 1586 Francis Mylles met and talked to Maliverey Catilyn about a mission he was to be sent on. Mylles wanted Laurence Tomson, another of Walsingham’s secretaries, to know if ‘anie lettres of this mark II come to him that he convey them presently’ to Sir Francis. From this time on Catilyn invariably marked his letters in just that way.30 The hand of Thomas Phelippes is hard to miss in these letters and reports of the 1580s and 1590s. He or Mylles, or perhaps one of the other secretaries, would endorse the packets in the usual way, writing on the dorse the date of the letter, its author (either by a monogram or a mark or his real name, but rarely by an alias) and perhaps a short summary. Phelippes had a practised hand at this, with a sharp eye for the main points of a letter and a natural economy of expression. On one letter, from Charles Paget, a Catholic exile and conspirator, to Nicholas Berden in February 1588/9 he wrote: 10. February 1588 from Ch. Pagett to Berden His rayling agaynst Philips./ His rayling agaynst master Secretary Walsingham./ Advises Berden to place him selfe wheare he may do best service to the common cause/



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This aided a system of quick reference. It was quite usual for Phelippes to write very full notes on reports. A good number of the letters sent to Walsingham and his men in the 1580s and 1590s used cipher. Simple codes substituting a name of a place or a person or an object for a symbol on paper had been used for a long time, but code and cipher became more sophisticated in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign. In these Thomas Phelippes was widely acknowledged to be expert, a point demonstrated when, in July 1582, Walsingham sent him a cipher to work on. Phelippes was actually in Bourges. On that occasion he ‘travaylde to my uttermost in the cifar’ but was unhappy with what he had been able to achieve: ‘those imperfett lines that I have sett downe have bene wonne as it were owte of the hard rocke. For truly I have had to do as yowr honour knowes with many Cifars but I never light uppon any wherwith I was more combred.’32 In theory, as Robert Beale suggested in 1592, the Secretary would himself hold the key to his cipher cabinet. Certainly Walsingham deciphered papers on his own, yet sometimes he ran into difficulty and asked Phelippes for help. Once, in March 1589, he received a letter a part of which was written in cipher ‘so much mistaken in falce placing and writing as though I have the Chifre yet I cannot make anie sence therof’. He instructed Phelippes to ‘take so much paines as to desiphre it.’33 For years Thomas Phelippes gave advice on cipher, in matters to do with what we would call secret service but also on ordinary diplomatic ciphers. In July 1594 he worked for Lord Burghley on the cipher of Edward Barton, resident ambassador in Constantinople, which he was able to do without Barton’s cipher alphabet, offering for the future one of his own devising ‘by Nombers easyer to be written with and likewise to be redd by him that knoweth it’.34 For Robert Poley, working as a courier on a number of missions to the Low Countries, ciphers were set out with quite as much care. Some sense of what Poley was expected to write about is shown clearly by the topics and subjects marked for special attention: ‘Queenes Majestie’, ‘her lyfe’, ‘her ships’; the Pope, the King of Spain, the King of France, the King of Scots and courtiers and councillors in England; and then the leading Catholic emigrés and exiles of the dangerous years of the 1590s, Sir William Stanley, Charles Paget, Father Persons, and Father Holt.35



To gayne some of the Postes./ The proudest of England wilbe glad of a Catholikes favor in the day of invasion/31

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Lawrence Stone had hard things to say about the men who typically worked in the shady business of espionage. He described with blunt economy the familiar shape to a spy’s story: The normal start for an agent’s career was to be imprisoned for debt. A series of appeals for help from the great proving ineffectual, the first step would be to turn stool-pigeon and denounce his fellowprisoners. Thence the unfortunate would insensibly drift into offering himself as a spy. Cleared of his debts and given money for his journey, he would set out boldly on his travels to the enemy country. On arrival in Brussels or in Madrid, all would go well for a short space, until he was arrested. He would then change sides and religion and be sent back to England to spy for Spain. This shuttle-cock existence would last until one or other of the optimistic paymasters would lose patience at this easy venality, and the spy would disappear for ever, dying of disease in a dungeon, paying for his duplicity on the gallows, or wearing out the rest of his life in the galleys.36 Stone had a point, and good examples to illustrate it. We may not find a spy quite as derelict working for Sir Francis Walsingham or Thomas Phelippes in the 1580s and 1590s, but one or two come close. Gilbert Gifford, apprehended in a brothel and committed to the Bishop of Paris’s prison, died there. Robert Poley was trusted to go on delicate missions in the later 1580s and 1590s and yet he often sailed close to the wind. He ran into trouble in 1589, when William Yeomans, a London cutler, alleged serious misbehaviour. Poley was accused of being on intimate terms with Yeomans’ wife, Joan, whom he impressed with ‘matters of estate’. He was also alleged to have told William Yeomans about Walsingham’s attack of sickness. Yeomans asked Poley what the sickness was. ‘Marye’, Poley is said to have replied, ‘he hath his olde desease the which is the poxe in his yeard the which he gott of a ladie in fraunce’, which was hardly a polite thing to say about one’s employer. The year may have been 1586. In 1593, more famously, Poley – confidential courier and fraudster – was one of the three men who witnessed the killing of Christopher Marlowe.37 So we find, as we might expect to, characters whose morality was questioned by their contemporaries, and men who were able to adapt and thrive: Gilbert Gifford did so with remarkable ease, for a time, and



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Robert Poley was a gifted survivor. These men were not vetted, and it is hard to be sure how far they were trusted by their superiors, other than to get a specific task done. What we miss is the human factor, that knowledge of complicated human relationships at work; the written evidence takes us only so far. A man like Gilbert Gifford, for example, relayed a mass of news and gossip by letter; we can make some sense of it; but in the end I suspect that only in Thomas Phelippes’ knowledge of Gilbert and the strengths and weaknesses of his personality was it possible really to fit the pieces together. Even Gifford, I suspect, knew the limitations: he once wrote to Phelippes, the clever mathematician, ‘I pray yow looke not for a mathematicall satisfacion at my handes’.38 If we want clear motives and tidy explanations we shall not easily find them. In Elizabethan espionage, as in Elizabethan politics more generally, the joints do not fit neatly together. Spies spied for all kinds of reasons. For some it was adventure, a chance to play a grand secret game. Others spied out of belief, out of their hatred of Catholicism, or their patriotism, or a little of both. Sometimes we have letters which amount to offers of service, in which there is a confession of the fault of living as an emigré, a profession of loyalty to the Queen, to friends, and above all to God; they, like reports, could follow a kind of formula; they have a certain voice, a distinctive tone. This is hardly a surprise: how to talk about one’s loyalty could be extraordinarily difficult in the 1580s, when political loyalty to the state was impossible to disentangle from loyalty also to Elizabeth’s supremacy in the English Church. Thomas Barnes, whose sentiments here are typical, wrote to Walsingham in 1588: Yf any waye I may by my service for the repairinge in some parte of that faulte committed serve your Honours turne by discoveringe or bringing to light any of ther trecherous intentes towardes the state herafter which be fugitives & traytors at home or abrode, I most humblie beseech your Honour to accept of the same, and I wilbe right gladde to be imployed therin, promisinge you by the faythe of a Christian that I will trulie sincerelye and faythfullie proceede therin accordinge to such direction as I shall receave from your Honour . . .39 Here the skill of the historian is to listen to the modulations of Barnes’ voice, which are very subtle, and to interpret it with great care. Espionage was a living, just another kind of patronage, and money was important. Some corrupt pursuivants took bribes to turn a blind eye to Catholics they had warrants to arrest, or extorted money from



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those they did take into custody, stripping them of their possessions before escorting them to prison. But pursuivants were not really secret agents. Maliverey Catilyn, however, was. Catilyn did his job with passion: he hated Catholics. But above all he was keen to put food on his family’s table. Five days before Christmas in 1586 he wrote miserably to Walsingham of his family’s poverty. His mother, ‘my wonted comfort’, was now in her grave. ‘God and my secret thought knoweth so that were I of myself able to supply my ordinary wants’. ‘Trust me’, he continued, ‘I would never trouble your honour . . . I and mine are like to keep the coldest Christyde that hitherto we ever tasted.’40 Catilyn is an interesting case study. We have a few of his letters, most of them undated and obviously written in a hurry. His speciality was to go into prisons to play the Catholic and to inform on fellow prisoners. He was in Portsmouth in June 1586, equipped with a couple of writing ‘tables’ hidden in the ‘bombast’, or soft padding, of his doublet.41 Soon after this he reported to Francis Mylles on the movements of the Babington plotters in London. Catilyn worked for money, certainly, yet he also harboured hatred for the men and women he befriended and spied upon. Nine days after his melancholy letter to Walsingham of 20 December 1586 he wrote again, this time in a quite different mood. In an extraordinary piece of writing he described how he and a number of Catholic women went up to the roof of Newgate prison and looked out over London to see the remains of executed traitors (probably the Babington plotters), hanged, drawn and quartered and stuck on poles. Catilyn likened himself to Christ tempted by Satan in the desert, his language close to the Geneva translation of St Matthew’s Gospel (4:5): ‘for a special favour they carried me up to the top of a pinnacle and showed me all the quarters of the traitors standing on that place/wishing me to fall down and worship them: but offered me no kingdom.’42 This is a letter with a particularly sharp edge to it. Like Maliverey Catilyn, Nicholas Berden worked for Thomas Phelippes in the 1580s, between about March 1585 and April 1586. Berden’s work has been known for a long time. His letters and reports, most of which are in the Elizabethan State Papers Domestic, were gathered together and edited by Father J.H. Pollen and Father William MacMahon as ‘Informations’ in 1919.43 Conyers Read knew of Berden too, and pointed to the kind of official corruption practised by a man who, playing the friend of Catholics, offered to buy them their liberty. Helped by Thomas Phelippes this was one of Berden’s major sources of income. From the Bethlehem Hospital, probably in June 1586, he wrote to Phelippes about sums of £20 and £30 to be had for the release of Catholics. ‘The monye’,



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he wrote, ‘will do me great pleasure beinge nowe in extreme nede therof, neither do I knowe howe to Shyfte longer withoute yt.’44 Nicholas Berden deserves to be looked at once again, for it is his career, probably of all the agents who worked for Sir Francis Walsingham and Thomas Phelippes in the 1580s, that demonstrates most effectively the blurred boundary between foreign espionage and domestic security work and, frankly, the murky secret patronage of service to the ‘estate’ and sheer venality. Do we believe Berden when he wrote, a month or so after his letter to Phelippes quoted above, that he worked ‘nott for gayne, butt for the Saffetie of my Naty[ve] Countrie’? Father Pollen, who detested Berden, certainly did not.45 The capture of a priest and a number of his letters gave Nicholas Berden the opportunity to go to Paris to work his way into the confidence of the English Catholic exiles there. He lived in the city between August 1585 and April 1586, just at the time Thomas Phelippes was putting Gilbert Gifford in play against Mary, Queen of Scots. In his reports to London Berden would prepare an innocent covering letter to Walsingham and write the rest in secret ink; possibly it was orange juice. Phelippes would then write a long summary on the outside of the packet. These are often fuzzy and blotched but they are fascinating documents. Berden was back in London in the spring 1586, from which time he kept up a regular correspondence with the exiles, all the way through to at least 1588. This was not, of course, a cosy world of glamour and adventure. The Catholic exiles may not have trusted Berden: probably they tried to use him just as Walsingham used Gilbert Gifford and others in a ‘double game’ against the Queen of Scots. One document, I think, brings home the cold sharp reality. It is a list of Catholic prisoners in London’s gaols, drawn up by Berden and addressed ‘To his woorshippfull’ good ffrend Master Thomas Phelippes’ and sent ‘with spede’. Phelippes’ name has been carefully inked out, but his telltale tidy handwriting gives away his identity. These were Berden’s recommendations for action, and he was blunt in sorting through the prisoners: ‘preistes mete for banyshement’, he wrote against one column, and (more sinister still) ‘preists meete for the gallowes or Galleys’.46 Do we have here the spy as judge, even as executioner? *** If Elizabethan espionage was one feature of a whole system of patronage, then it was also a special kind of political activity. What we have to



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see if we want to understand Elizabethan espionage properly is a whole landscape of political life in the second half of the sixteenth century, and especially that view of the world as it was seen by men by Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Burghley, and others at court and in Council. Equally if we want to understand Elizabethan political life we must know something of this world of the shadows. Few moments in the history of intelligence and security work in Elizabeth’s reign were more charged than the so-called ‘Babington plot’ of June, July and August 1586. Almost all of Walsingham’s men – Phelippes, Mylles, Catilyn, and Berden – worked together closely in following the putative plotters. Even Nicholas Berden’s brother-in-law helped to arrest John Ballard, one of the chief conspirators, in Robert Poley’s lodgings on 4 August 1586. Robert Poley’s actions are the hardest to make sense of: certainly Walsingham did not trust him entirely.47 Father Robert Southwell wrote a Catholic account of the Babington plot. The fault was Gilbert Gifford’s, for when Gilbert was put in the Bishop of Paris’s prison in 1587 compromising papers and ciphers were found in the chest in his chamber. By February 1588 Walsingham’s secret operation against Mary, Queen of Scots was known in Paris.48 Southwell’s account, though wrong in many points of detail, must have been uncomfortable reading for Elizabeth’s government. He described a conspiracy ‘furthered, and finished, by Sir Francis Walsingham, and his other complices, who laid and hatched all the particulars thereof’. He wrote of Walsingham’s ‘subtle and sifting wit’; of Phelippes and his ‘party practitioner’ Gilbert Gifford, ‘having some years before been Master Secretary’s intelligencer’. Southwell wrote of Robert Poley, ‘thoroughly seasoned to his master’s tooth’, as a fisherman drawing into his nets ‘such green wits’ as Anthony Babington and his friends.49 And he used the verb entrap. Babington and his fellows were green, tricked by the cunning of Walsingham, Phelippes, and Gifford. Southwell wrote of the panic when Babington and the others fled: ‘all ways were watched, infinite houses searched, hues and cries raised, frights bruited in the people’s ears, and all men’s eyes filled with a smoke, as though the whole realm had been on fire’. In fact, wrote Southwell, who had arrived secretly in London just days before, ‘that was but the hissing of a few green twigs, of their own building’. Walsingham and his servants, he was saying, had made a conspiracy, engineered and guided it, merely to serve sordid political ends.50 Southwell puts the case sharply, and with a poet-martyr’s eye for the metaphor of fire. When so much of the intelligence work done by Elizabeth’s government from the 1570s to the 1590s had to do with the



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security of what men in official circles were beginning to call ‘the state’, we have to wonder about the soundness of their intelligence and the uses to which it was put. Historians know that privy councillors like Sir Francis Walsingham, or Lord Burghley, or Sir Christopher Hatton, took a definite view of a hostile world, in which the forces of the Catholic Antichrist were forever on the move.51 When they and their trusted servants sought secret intelligence, received it, made sense of it, and then used it to make political decisions, we have to look carefully the quality of that evidence. There was always the danger in Elizabethan security work that plots discovered confirmed old suspicions, and that new suspicions, shaped and reinforced by the old, in turn suggested other plots. A further danger was that information from diplomats and agents was forced and twisted to the shape of the Secretary’s mind, either consciously or unconsciously. Another was that in the power politics of the court intelligence could be used to devastating effect by political rivals: here the destruction of Doctor Roderigo Lopez stands out prominently. On the politics of Elizabethan espionage there is much work yet to do. *** Most of the spies and agents of Elizabeth’s reign disappear suddenly from the archives after very short careers. There is no real pattern other than a final quiet obscurity. But in the case of Nicholas Berden we do have a documented effort at retirement from the secret world into what he called, in one letter to Walsingham, ‘a more publique course of lyffe’. This was on 14 March 1588. It may have been a forced retirement, for Berden referred to words spoken about him in Paris. Probably he was compromised; in the end it could be hard to know whom to trust. So Berden wrote for help in securing ‘the place of her Majesties Pourveyor of Poultrye’. The poulter ran a large and important sub-department of the royal household, and Berden believed himself to be specially qualified to hold the position. ‘The Lord Steward desyreth new men to take that service uppon them’, he explained, ‘wherof there are butt fewe meete emongest the poulters for that office.’ He had served in it ‘by the space of iij yeres in my fathers lyffe tyme’ and was therefore ‘sufficiently experimented . . . to serve the same agayne’.52 This is a strong clue to Nicholas Berden’s origins. His father, John, and mother, Agnes, lived on Lombard Street in London. John was a citizen and a member of the Poulters’ Company, and he died in September 1587, leaving Nicholas and Agnes the joint executors of his will. Agnes died three years later.



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Nicholas Berden is not mentioned in her will, but from it we learn that he had a sister called Lettice.53 It seems Nicholas Berden’s letter to Sir Francis Walsingham did the trick, for he secured some kind of preferment. A month after his first letter he wrote to thank Walsingham for his ‘honorable ffavor extended towardes me in preferringe me to the place which I nowe enjoye, in the which I wilbe allwayes reddy to doe your honor anye service when yt shall please you to comaunde the same’. He enclosed some letters he had lately received ‘from the Traytors beyonde the seas’, and he asked Walsingham’s permission to answer them.54 The letter was neatly noted and filed, as we might expect, by the ever-vigilant Thomas Phelippes. For Walsingham, Phelippes and Berden an Elizabethan spy’s work was never quite finished.

Notes and references 1. See, for example, Stephen Budiansky (2005) Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (New York: Plume Books); Robert Hutchinson (2006) Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London: Phoenix). 2. See especially John Bossy (1991) Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven & London: Yale University Press) and (2001) Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven & London: Yale University Press); Paul E.J. Hammer (1992) ‘An Elizabethan Spy Who Came in from the Cold: The Return of Anthony Standen to England in 1593’, Historical Research, 65, 277–95. See also Robyn Adams (2009) ‘A Spy on the Payroll? William Herle and the MidElizabethan Polity’, Historical Research, 82, 1–15; and Mitchell Leimon and Geoffrey Parker (1996) ‘Treason and Plot in Elizabethan Diplomacy: The “Fame of Sir Edward Stafford” Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 111, 1134–58. 3. [Nicholas Berden to Thomas Phelippes,?7 July 1586,] SP 12/167/3, printed in J.H. Pollen and William MacMahon (1919) eds, The Venerable Philip Howard Earl of Arundel 1557–1595 (Catholic Record Society Publications, 21, London), pp. 88–9. 4. In the Geneva Bible of 1560 (STC 2093) Numbers 13:1–2 is p. 67r–v. 5. John Florio (1598) A Worlde of Wordes (STC 11098; London), p. 389. 6. SP 12/231/56. 7. Thomas Phelippes’ decipher of Thomas Morgan to Mary Queen of Scots, 5/15 October 1585, SP 53/16/50. 8. Anthony G. Petti (1959) ed., The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640) (Catholic Record Society Publications, 52, London). 9. Charles Nicholl (1992) The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape), chapter 13; and John Bossy’s review of Park Honan (2005) Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), in London Review of Books, 28: 24 (14 December 2006). 10. Geoffrey Parker (1998) The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), chapter 7.



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11. SP 12/231/56. 12. Conyers Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), vol. 1, p. 428. 13. Walsingham to Burghley, 24 April 1585, BL Harley MS 6993, f. 78r. 14. The National Archives, PROB 11/75, sig. 33. 15. ‘They note him to have had certain curiosities, and secret wayes of intelligence above the rest’: Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, or Observations on the Late Queen Elizabeth, Her Times and Favorits (Wing/N250; [London] 1641), p. 20. See also the biography of Walsingham by Simon Adams, Alan Bryson, and Mitchell Leimon in (2004) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 57, pp. 148–9. 16. SP 12/232/12, printed in Lawrence Stone (1956) An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 323–4, and discussed, p. 248; Read, Walsingham, vol. 2, p. 370. 17. Walsingham’s aphorism is that ‘there is lesse daynger in fearinge to myche then to lyttle’: Walsingham to Sir William Cecil, 20 December 1568, SP 12/48/61. 18. Read, Walsingham, vol. 2, p. 371. See also Stone, Palavicino, p. 233. Signet Office docquet book, 1585–March 1597, The National Archives, SO 3/1; Thomas Lake’s paper of entries in the Signet book, SP 12/229/49. 19. Walsingham to Phelippes, 1 May 1589, SP 12/224/1. 20. SP 15/30/90. 21. SP 15/31/169. 22. SP 12/213/102. 23. Gilbert Gifford to John Gifford, 1/11 August 1588, SP 12/214/10. 24. J. Leslie Hotson (1925) The Death of Christopher Marlowe (New York: The Nonesuch Press); Eugénie de Kalb (1933) ‘Robert Poley’s Movements as a Messenger of the Court, 1588 to 1601’, Review of English Studies, 9, 13–18, quotation at p. 17. de Kalb worked from the declared accounts of the Pipe Office, The National Archives, E351/542–543. 25. Gerard Gifford to ‘Raphe husbande’ [Thomas Phelippes], SP 12/208/71. 26. Pollen and MacMahon, Venerable Philip Howard, pp. 67–8. 27. ‘Cornelys’ [Gilbert Gifford] to Phelippes, 7 July 1586, SP 53/18/37; ‘Cornelys’ to Walsingham, 11 July 1586, SP 53/18/40; see also Phelippes’ headings for a letter to Thomas Morgan, 24 May [1586], SP 12/170/89. ‘John Foxley’ [Edward Gratley], [8/18] June 1586, SP 15/29/118. 28. SP 106/2, f. 73r; Ethel Seaton (1931) ‘Robert Poley’s Cipher’, Review of English Studies, 7, 137. 29. What follows is a first tentative list of Robert Barnard’s reports: [?1581], SP 12/151/23; to [Walsingham, ?Nov. 1581], SP 12/155/96; to Walsingham, 5 January 1582, SP 12/147/2; to Walsingham, 19 April 1582, SP 12/153/14; to [Walsingham] 5 May 1582, SP 12/153/38; to Charles Sledd, 10 May 1582, SP 12/153/41; to [Walsingham] 19 May 1582, SP 12/153/54; to [Walsingham] 29 May 1582, SP 12/153/68; to [Walsingham] 4 July, 1582, SP 12/154/47; to Walsingham, London, 19 July 1582, SP 12/154/62; n.d., BL Additional MS 48023, ff. 110v–111r. See also Read, Walsingham, vol. 2, pp. 323–5. 30. Francis Mylles to Walsingham, 24 July 1586, SP 53/18/72. See, for example, Maliverey Catilyn to Walsingham, 30 December 1586, BL Harley MS 286, ff. 97r–98v, signed II but endorsed I.



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31. ‘Nauris’ [Charles Paget] to Nicholas Berden, Paris, 31 Jan./10 Feb. 1588, SP 12/208/39. 32. Phelippes to Walsingham, Bourges, 19 July 1582, SP 15/27A/99. 33. Walsingham to Phelippes, Greenwich, 25 March 1589, SP 12/223/29. 34. Phelippes to Burghley, 10 July 1594, SP 97/2, f. 291r; 292v. The alphabet of Barton’s cipher is SP 106/1, ff. 15r–10v. 35. SP 106/2, ff. 73r–75r; quotation at f. 75r. For a very close inspection of these ciphers, see Seaton, ‘Poley’s Cipher’, 137–50. 36. Stone, Palavicino, pp. 234–5. 37. Deposition of William Yeomans, 7 January 1589, SP 12/222/13; Nicholl, The Reckoning, chapters 16 and 27. 38. [April 1587], SP 12/200/49. 39. Thomas Barnes to Walsingham, London, 17 March 1588, SP 53/21/26; see also Barnes’s confession of the same date, SP 12/199/26. 40. Catilyn to Walsingham, 20 December 1586, BL Harley MS 286, ff. 95r, 96v. 41. Catilyn to Walsingham, Portsmouth, 25 June 1586, SP 12/190/51. 42. Catilyn to Walsingham, 29 December 1586, BL, Harley MS 286, ff. 97r–v, 98v. 43. Pollen and MacMahon, Venerable Philip Howard, pp. 66–93. 44. Read, Walsingham, vol. 2, pp. 316–17; Berden to Phelippes, Bethlehem Hospital, London, [11 June 1586,] SP 12/195/75, printed in John Morris (1872–7) The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, 3 vols. (London: Burnes and Oates), vol. 2, pp. 161–2; and in Pollen and MacMahon, Venerable Philip Howard, p. 89. 45. [Berden to Phelippes,?7 July 1586,] SP 12/167/3, printed in Pollen and MacMahon, Venerable Philip Howard, pp. 88–9. 46. SP 12/195/74. 47. Mylles to Walsingham, London, 4 August 1586, SP 53/19/14; Walsingham to Phelippes, 3 August 1586, BL Cotton MS Appendix L, f. 143r. 48. ‘Nauris’ [Charles Paget] to Nicholas Berden, Paris, 31 Jan./10 Feb. 1588, SP 12/208/39. 49. [Robert Southwell,] An humble supplication to her Majestie (STC 22949.5; [1600]), pp. 32–3 (sigs. C1v–C2r). 50. [Southwell,] Humble supplication, pp. 39–40 (sig. C5r–v). 51. For example, Malcolm R. Thorp (1984) ‘Catholic Conspiracy in Early Elizabethan Foreign Policy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 15, 431–48; Stephen Alford (2008) Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), esp. chapters 16–18. 52. Berden to Walsingham, 14 March 1588, SP 12/209/19. 53. John Berden made his will on 14 Sept. 1587 and it was proved on 3 October 1587 (The National Archives, PROB 11/71, Spencer, Quire nos. 41–82). Agnes Berden made her will on 6 February 1589 and it was proved on 25 June 1590 (The National Archives, PROB 11/75, Drury, Quire nos. 1–47). 54. Berden to Walsingham, London, 24 April 1588, SP 12/209/107.



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A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence Robyn Adams

Wherwith humbly comendyng me to your Lords good favor, I take mi leve for this tyme, desyrows with mi harte, that ye wolld employe me yn somwhatt yn these parts, and therewith to yngrave yn her majesties gracyows oppynion, the remembrance of a zelows poore servant of hers.1 In the later half of the sixteenth century, England’s ministers relied on unofficial and private information networks to supply information about foreign and domestic subjects. Among the admixture of these crown- and privately-funded networks were structures of communication and exchange built upon patronage relationships, and these societal bonds were constructed and maintained in part by the transmission of fresh and sensitive intelligence by letter and in person. Within Elizabeth I’s Privy Council, William Cecil Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex were the key ministers significantly responsible for compiling copious and diverse tranches of information, with an impressive geographical, political, religious and social scope. In this essay I propose to interrogate the relationships between these ministers and their agents, by examining the epistolary forms and strategies deployed in the intelligence letters of William Herle.2 I will focus on a particular sequence of Herle’s correspondence addressed to Walsingham, Leicester and Burghley, written at a critical point in English intervention in the Low Countries conflict. I intend to use this cache of letters as a case-study, to see what Herle’s epistolary legacy can reveal about the important role played by unofficial agents, intelligencers and spies in the diplomatic context. 63



4


William Herle was an agent of these three politically powerful figures. Inhabiting the grey area between diplomat, agent, intelligencer and spy, his letter-writing activity demonstrates the elastic and fluid nature of information gathering and exchange during this period. Although he was employed in official diplomatic work in the mid-1580s when he was sent as a special envoy to East Friesland on the northern borders of the Netherlands and Germany, Herle’s more typical pursuits were located at the polar end of licensed diplomatic function, rarely possessing official remit or instructions but rather having unofficial, tacit endorsement to visit, discuss or negotiate with foreign sovereigns and statesmen.3 Herle’s ‘agency’ was based firmly upon this collection and dissemination of information, but seems also to have extended to communication with ministers and leading figures in the Low Countries. This activity, endorsed by the English ministers responsible for steering foreign and domestic policy, reveals an alternative, more informal ‘tier’ of contact and correspondence with friendly nations than that of the ceremonial envoy or ambassador, who was constrained to adhere to the protocols and processes by which formal negotiation was required to proceed. Herle’s background is cloudy; no letters from him survive before 1558, and other than his letters, there are only rare glimpses of him in the historical record. A comment in a later letter to Burghley notes that he had been in the household of Sir William Garrard, a successful London merchant with strong links to the northern European cloth marts. There is some evidence that at around the time of Elizabeth’s succession and in the years following, Herle was recruited by Cecil to act as an unofficial envoy to several northern European rulers in the guise of a merchant.4 The evidence suggests that Herle was acting as Cecil’s agent whilst employed by Garrard (it’s likely that Herle was an apprentice or factor for the merchant), illustrating the convenient links between commerce and political information gathering for mobile members of society. Between this period in the 1560s and 1582, where this essay concentrates, Herle was, variously, a pirate, a prison spy, an unofficial envoy, and a seasoned gatherer of information. In this way, Herle undertook a self-modifying process, shaping his role to suit the occasion, and adapting to the grade of ‘service’ and function required of him in order to maintain favour with his politically heavyweight patrons. Aware that the ministers responsible for the security and active policy of England depended on a steady stream of fresh and fertile information, Herle fixed his sights on being a source of intelligence in exchange for favour and preferment. Insolvent to the point of frequent imprisonment for



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debt, Herle’s permanent objective was to secure gainful employment in the service of the crown. In order to establish his credentials, he performed activities that usually revolved around the pursuit of information pertaining to the health and security of the realm. It is my contention in this essay that there is a tension in the interstices of where this activity of information-gathering towards a political goal meets the aspiration for monetary reward. Herle followed two of his patrons, Leicester and Walsingham, to the Low Countries in the winter of 1582. Departing from Sandwich harbour on 8 February, the two ministers were responsible for escorting Henri, Duke of Anjou to Antwerp, the city from where the Dutch revolt was being coordinated. Anjou, fresh from his unsuccessful courtship of Queen Elizabeth, was preparing to be invested as the new titular sovereign of the Netherlands, strengthening and leading the alliance between France, England and the Low Countries in the revolt against Spain. Arriving at Flushing in very rough seas, Herle left England’s shores in order to escape his creditors and act as an intermediary for the profusion of information circulating in the region.5 Leicester and Walsingham returned to England at the end of February, and Herle remained in Antwerp. Upon their departure, Herle began a six month campaign of sending regular intelligence letters to Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham, which survives as a mostly unilateral correspondence.6 In his early letters Herle described Anjou’s political progress: his formal reception by the representatives of the seven United Provinces of the Low Countries, the oath he was required to take, and disagreements arising from his insistence in openly inviting the Catholics of Brabant and Flanders to attend mass. Herle notified Leicester that he had instigated the beginnings of his own private information network, the news from which would be disseminated back to England with regular dispatch: I am entred into the familyaritye and nere fryndship of vi or vii of the principall state men of this Contrey, wherby I am hable to infforme my sellf of sondrie secretes, and of the knowledge of theyre state from time to tyme the more, to the good servyce of our Contreye, and the satisfactyon of her majestie and yow.7 By writing letters which ran to several folio pages in length, and which contained detailed news of military manoeuvres against the Spanish army, economic matters, intellectual developments and dynastic matches, Herle attempted to make himself invaluable to the administrative machine back at the English court.



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His official position in Antwerp in relation to English interests is unclear. His letters describe meetings and conversations with leading statesmen in the Low Countries, including personal access to William, Prince of Orange, which would have not been possible without endorsement and letters of credence from the queen.8 At this point, Elizabeth did not have a formal diplomatic representative in the Low Countries, maintaining that the voluntary military personnel active in the conflict with Spain were not connected to English foreign policy. George Gilpin, another intelligence agent based in Antwerp, was unsure of Herle’s status. In a letter to Walsingham, Gilpin declared he was forwarding several letters that had arrived at his own desk (a common strategy of overseas agents which preserved their meagre resources), noting that Walsingham could test the veracity of the intelligence in the enclosed letters against those reports he would receive by other agents in the field, naming Herle as an example: By the lettres herewith sent, the presente newes here will better appeare then I canne write, and yet as parte of my bounden dewtie, would not omitt to add hereunto that which I could learne, submitting the certaintie therof to the writing of others that have leasure and comme in place to understand the same. Amongest others Mr William Earle, who saieth himself to be left here as Agent for the Earle of Lecestre, and so is of somme reputed, though also otherwise suspected.9 Resident in Antwerp in a guise which was not immediately recognizable to another agent of his cadre (Gilpin was another member of the commercial agent turned intelligence-gatherer fraternity), it seems that soon after his arrival, Herle already had a reputation for being a portal for information. Many intelligence letters from the period are simple reports, listing facts with little attempt to decorate the information with social niceties. Many are even anonymous, either at the time of dispatch, or because information pertaining to the correspondent (commonly on a separate cover letter or address leaf) has been lost. The content of some letters survive where the original letter has not, having been extracted and summarized at the time of receipt by the office of the Principal Secretary. Diplomatic correspondence sent by official delegates of the English crown tended to concentrate on the issue at hand, such as the special mission for which the envoy had been sent, or the ongoing negotiation of the resident ambassador, and adding items of intelligence on an



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intermittent basis.10 Herle’s correspondence adheres to the social formulae of contemporary epistolarity, articulating florid (if submissive), aspirational gestures towards employment, reward and service. Often placed directly after or linked to a particularly salacious item of news, or prior to subscription, Herle’s petitory requests and confirmation of ongoing service and loyalty to the crown were pronounced, especially during this period in 1582. In May, Herle requested that Walsingham intercede in a dispute over his debt to the Waad family, interposing information relating to Mary Queen of Scots: The Bishop of Rosses genelogye and his booke withall in Latten of the scotissh tytell to the Crown of England, hath byn grettlye axed for and solld at this Frankfords mart, which of mi knowledge I dare affirme, for I provyded my sellf there of som few bookes, and had trew advertisment hereof. Wherwith I humblye fynissheng, do comend Mr Wades cawse and myne to your honorable decysyon, which I do pray yow to do somewhatt yn, for charitye sake.11 Herle’s letters are richly studded with reports of continental affairs, in which he assembled information collated from personal conversations, his own correspondence, and forwarded lists and collections of his own gathering. The impulse behind such transmission is clearly articulated in his letters: I wrytt to your Lord by these late postes, 5 or 6 lettres wheryn were conteyned sondrye advertysments and papers of collectyons, which I hope shall not mislyke your good Lord nor leave unexpressed the desyre I have to serve yow.12 As well as these lists, advertisements and digests of the current situation in Antwerp, Herle was keen to dispatch relevant printed material, as far as his pocket would allow. Books and pamphlets tracking the progress of the revolt, and even scribal duplicates of printed matter when copies were scarce made their way to the pulsing intelligence centre of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. Upon his arrival in Antwerp, Herle waited patiently for La Joyeuse et Magnifique Entrée, a book with extensive engravings and describing Anjou’s symbolic entry into the city issued from the press of Christopher Plantin. He assured Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham that he would procure and send the books at his own expense as soon as they were available to purchase.13 On 18 March he wrote to Burghley,



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when ytt comes furthe in prynte, your Lord shall have the fyrst Drawght that shalbe sene therof sent yow by me, yf I were riche (as these thinges do coste money) yow sholld have more thinges, butt your Lord will bere with this in the mene tyme, for I have no ayde here but God and my sellf and yow knowe best my habilitye.14 Later the same evening, Antwerp was rocked by crisis. As William of Orange walked out of the dining hall after dinner at his palace in Antwerp, a man in the crowd of onlookers ran forward and shot him point blank in the face with a pistol.15 The gun misfired and exploded in his hand, blowing the assailant’s thumb clean off. The bullet entered William’s cheek, the explosion of the bullet singeing his hair and setting fire to his ruff. In the panic and confusion, and as William was removed to another room, the would-be assassin was seized and beaten to death by Orange’s bodyguards, a gruesome sight witnessed by William’s young son Maurice.16 Examined in his chamber by a group of surgeons, they confirmed that the bullet had passed through his cheek and palate from left to right, grazing the maxillary artery and causing extensive loss of blood. In this confusion, rumours that the Prince was dead were flying around Antwerp. The corpse of the assailant, a stolid clerk by the name of Jean Jaureguy, later found to be in the pay of the Spanish, was dragged into the main town square of Antwerp, and his body laid out to view. When Herle learned of the attempt on William’s life, he wasted little time in dispatching an advertisement – now lost – on 19 March reporting the recent climacteric events. The following day Herle sent a lengthy account of the state of the Low Countries as a result of the assault. In addition to the rumours circulating around the area that the Prince was dead, many believed that the Duke of Anjou was involved in the attack because the assailant had been dressed in the French style. This first surviving letter about the assassination attempt survives in two copies, one addressed each to Burghley and Leicester. Judging from his extant correspondence from this period, Herle registered that he was in an excellent position: having already situated himself in Antwerp as a vital node in the English intelligence network, and having an ear to the breaking news and developments within the political circles surrounding William of Orange, he was perfectly placed to report back with exigency the weighty consequences of the incident as they unfolded. He saw an opportunity to consolidate his unofficial position as intelligence-gatherer for the English crown with legitimate and prominent diplomatic activity which would invest him with a certain modicum of political gravity,



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[y]f her majestie or ^ani of^ her cowncell in partycler, do wryte to condole this action with the prince, yt most be don presently and yf I be thowght fytt, I will discharge the office of delyveryng those lettres, and of the further servyce that I shalbe comanded. 17 Herle reported that the survival of Orange was doubtful; the wound would not cease bleeding, his surgeons would not permit him to speak and insisted on personally holding a pad of lint to staunch the flow at all times of the day and night. Herle’s accounts of the state of the wound were thorough, if alarmist. If William were to die, the delicate alliance between the Low Countries, England and France might disintegrate and be at the mercy of Spanish forces led by Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma. Up-to-the-minute news was vital to keep his ministerial patrons in command of the situation in order to swiftly implement decisive action should William perish of his wound. Few reports of this incident from English agents survive in the archives. Herle was aware that his would not be the first account to reach his patrons; indeed, he would have realized that the incident warranted a special trip back home to impart the news in person. Walsingham’s agent Etienne Lesieur assessed the communication landscape in equal measure, reporting on the 18th between noon and 1 o’clock a strange rumour arose of the wounding of the Prince of Orange. The details of this I will excuse myself from writing to you, several gentlemen having been there who by this time are on your side, besides that I am sure you will hear it in detail from those who know how it all happened.18 Colonel John Norris went further, making a brief report to Walsingham of the event and noting, I persuade myself that ill newes flye faster then my letters cann passe; yet I could not but advertise your Honour of the vilainous treason invented and executed against the Prince of Orange.19 Herle’s letters following the assassination attempt record in detail the politically volatile situation, and demonstrate that Herle was keen to supply fresh information as the events unfolded, especially if Orange’s



and he accordingly took advantage of the situation as it developed. He wrote to Leicester,


condition changed. In the hasty dispatches sent back to England, there is a discernible note of uncertainty, of reporting the ‘strange rumour’ of the attack on Orange. Herle’s position in Antwerp afforded him at least a passing chance at gathering intelligence which was endorsed by Orange’s circle, and could therefore be classified as an accurate report of events. In a letter of 21 March he indicated that the medical practitioners supervising Orange’s treatment were not confident of his recovery. He informed Leicester that Orange’s condition was now looking especially grave: In the general lettre written to your Lord yesterday, I thowght good to omitt this that followith, as matter of more ymportance and secresye, to be cowched a parte. Ytt is thowght by Gaspar the Surgyen, who hath charge (among others) of the Prynces wound, that he cannot escape, for that the Artherye is towched . . . that make the cure owtt of hope. Therefore do I send this berer mi servant John Morgan of purpose, to . . . her majestie by your Lords honorable menes, and will not fayll from ynstant to ynstant (having the ynsynuatyons that I have) to advertys whatt allteracyon, ether his person, or the matters of State do suffer here.20 In supporting the cost of his servant John Morgan as bearer, whose errand and journey would place pressure on his already diminished finances, Herle was committed to dispatching his servant to communicate the (prematurely) unfortunate news in person.21 The ‘ymportance’ and ‘secresye’ with which Herle regarded as necessary the transmission of the latest diagnosis from the surgeon is a recurring refrain in his letters from this tumultuous period, and throughout his wider correspondence. Aware that the information in his letters was a precious commodity, and, from his own perspective, one which held the key to his ongoing favour and patronage with his politically powerful correspondents, Herle employed diverse measures to protect the information contained within the fragile and easilyintercepted letter packet. In the days following the assault on Orange, Herle took the opportunity to send exhaustive written accounts of the assassination attempt and the ensuing chaos which charged through Antwerp and the Low Countries beyond. One of these accounts, comprising four folio pages of cramped script, was sent to Leicester, with another copy to Burghley. In the cover letter enclosing the copy to Burghley, Herle noted,



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Herle was diligent in scrupulously providing duplicate intelligence to his patrons, deploying a single bearer to deliver verbatim copies of letters along his route: Att this present I do send this berer mi servant of purpose to my Lord of Lecester, with advertisments of ymportance, ynclosyng heryn the copye of eche thyng that I do wryte to mi sayd Lord of Lecester Verbatim, omitteng noe one syllable.23 Herle’s practice of sending ‘verbatim’ intelligence letters enabled his correspondents to consult and confer on information from a trusted source, and ensured maximum coverage between prominent members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. This method of communication, common among correspondents overseas or along unpredictable postal routes, provided an added layer of security to a postal system riddled with pitfalls and hazards. Should a letter be intercepted, lost in the channel crossing, or delayed along its route, a letter sent separately to a ministerial colleague had the chance of arriving safely,and the information could be shared towards a common purpose. The verbatim letter offered more than simply the guarantee of delivery, however. In sending copies of his letters to Leicester to the hands of Burghley, Herle was making a point of offering Burghley the same information as he offered Leicester, situating himself as the point of contact between the two as a hub of information exchange. The tripartite readership engendered by the dispatch of a verbatim letter, with Herle as the principal (if distant) source, offered him the invaluable opportunity to simultaneously address the key ministers responsible for foreign policy. It is possible that Herle envisaged Burghley and Leicester using his letters as the main source of information about the matter of the Prince of Orange’s doubtful recovery. His insistent and repeated employment of this strategy, one which served the dual purpose of conserving his own resources while broadcasting to a wider audience than the traditionally dyadic epistolary relationship, suggests that his correspondents responded positively to this method.24 Herle’s insistence on duplicating the letters is significant. If the information included in a letter to one of Elizabeth’s councillors was considered to be of sufficient import, it was likely to be summarized for, shared or broadcast at a council meeting or privately between ministers. That Herle considered it worthwhile



I do send your Lorde herynclosed, the copies of my ii last lettres written to the Earl of Lecester verbatim.22


to send verbatim copies suggests that he was at pains to extend and advertise his intelligence letters widely, rather than, say, merely providing extra copies of a standard digest of news in something other than an epistolary format. Herle’s frequent practice of sending duplicated letters to multiple correspondents does suggest that despite his marginal and obscure status (and being ‘suspected’ by fellow agents like Gilpin), the prominent figures governing foreign policy viewed Herle’s intelligence letters, and letters from similarly placed agents, as central to the information network and the practical functioning of the Tudor regime. In the above letter, Herle mentions using his servant as a bearer. The employment of a messenger known to either the letter-writer or recipient was a prudent and cost-effective measure which ensured – to a certain extent – the safety of the correspondence. To avoid unnecessary costs, it made sense to dispatch letters with a trusted individual who was already making the journey.25 The private carriage of letters was an obvious foil to the corrupt practices of postmasters in the pay of hostile forces or interested parties.26 From the frequent subscriptions or notes describing and vouching for these bearers we get a sense of a group of people accustomed to the hazards of travelling and methods of outwitting conspirators and others with designs on the politically decisive correspondence. Furthermore, if the route travelled by post and person was extremely hazardous, the letter-writer had the option of entrusting the most sensitive parts of the news to the oral transmission by the bearer, a common method which sadly means that for the most part, the information imparted ‘by mouth’ is now lost. Herle employed methods of securing his correspondence using ad hoc tactics where the occasion suited. Perceiving Orange’s condition to be of such critical significance, as it required the utmost secrecy, Herle petitioned Burghley for the use of a cipher in order to protect the information in his letters even further: Yf it may plese your Lord to send me spedylye a Cipher, which shalbe peculyer only to her majestie and your sellf, I will under the sayd Cipher, advertys yow of a matter that consernes her majesties Crown and person . . . Butt trulye there most be non more acqwainted with the sayd advertisments butt her majestie and your Lord alonely.27 In most cases, when leaving England on legation, diplomats would be provided with a provisional cipher. However, this did not guarantee the inviolable protection of the diplomatic correspondence. Indeed, those ciphers which were provided to diplomats and agents



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were usually outdated, endlessly recycled, easily cracked or known by counter-intelligence organizations. In 1590, Thomas Bodley, English representative to the Dutch Council of State, was issued with a standard diplomatic cipher upon departing England.28 However, when it came to reporting matters of sensitivity which fell outside the areas covered by the official cipher, Bodley was obliged to request of Burghley a more detailed code in which to make a sufficiently secure report. Burghley responded positively: Wheare yowe require to have a Cipher, I doe at this present send yowe one, not verie curiouslie made for avoidinge of trowble to us both but yet sufficeint to serve our purpose, and maie be augmented as yowe see Cawse.29 Encrypting letters, even only partially, was a time-consuming and cumbersome task requiring a significant outlay of time and resources. A survey of diplomatic correspondence suggests that it was only the particularly sensitive material within a letter which the writer would encipher, which inconveniently drew attention to and advertised the parts of the letter the writer wanted to protect. Herle’s request for a cipher extends beyond the standard discourse of concern for the precarious carriage of information. His appeal for a private method of communication between only Burghley, Queen Elizabeth and himself is an extension of the scenario described above in the case of the verbatim letter. In Herle’s fantasy, the private cipher, the key to which was only known to Burghley and Elizabeth, would create a restricted triad of correspondence and a valuable intimacy based upon the exchange of sensitive information.30 Indeed, Herle defers imparting the information to Burghley until the cipher has been dispatched, reversing the dynamic of power in the patron–client relationship. No evidence survives to suggest that Burghley complied with Herle’s request, and the information Herle was at pains to conceal may have been assimilated into his letters (at which point the information blends with the other news and is difficult to separate) or sent by oral transmission with a bearer. Herle, as an unofficial agent (and here the distinctions are blurred between what constitutes a ‘private’ rather than a ‘crown’ intelligencer), would not have been a candidate for a royal cipher. Furthermore, it may be that Herle’s request for a cipher is merely an indicator that he is fit for purpose, and that by appealing for this method of secret communication Herle emphasizes his credibility and efficiency.31



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In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, while the Low Countries anxiously awaited the outcome of William’s injury, Herle concentrated on situating himself as the intermediary between English concerns directed through Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham, and prominent figures in Antwerp. Interceding in the appointment of English soldiers, passing along messages from principal statesmen, and suggesting routes of policy to be adopted by Elizabeth and her ministers, Herle was, if only unofficially, ‘our man’ in Antwerp. For Herle, the opportunity to grease the passage to preferment for a fellow Englishman elevated his status to more than merely an informer. He endorsed the suit of Colonel Morgan who sought the command of his own regiment: Your Lord most needes be good to Coronell morgan, who trewlye is a Tall sowdyor & an honest gentillman, asswell ynclyned to do your Lord service, as ani on that ever deppended of you. Yf you will vowchesave to allowe of his prefferment to a Regyment, I do fynde that bothe monsieur & the Prince of orenge be well ynclyned unto hym to favor hym, therfore ye sholld do very honorable to comande me by 3 lynes wrytten to your Lord by your L. to me to sollicite with monsieur the Prince of orenge, his advauncement before other yong fellowes that ar very busye to gett charges here, which will do nothyng elles butt sclander the service & natyon.32 Here, Herle bolsters his position, or at least the position to which he aspired, as the nucleus of English interests abroad in terms of the patronage network on which military appointments were made. Citing positive endorsements from Anjou and Orange (who was still unable to speak, and could only conduct the management of the revolt by writing directions on paper), he advertised what he saw as his significant political connections. Participating in this localized patronage system in a different role than his usual position in the hinterland of English hierarchy, Herle viewed the successful selection of Colonel [Thomas] Morgan as a move which would have several positive outcomes. Orange and Anjou would receive the commander of their choice, England’s interests would be served (in Herle’s view, the appointment of the alternative candidates who were ‘busye to gett charges’ would be harmful) and Herle would have the satisfaction of having engineered the advantageous conclusion, which in itself might engender its own reward in the form of a gift from the successful party. One month after the assassination attempt on Orange, Herle was keen to formalize his position as ‘agent for the Earle of Lecestre’. In a



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For which & mani other resons that I understand, I do know that it is nott necessarye for her majestie to have any publick Agent here, Lest she sholld be openlye qwarrelled with, yett to yntertayne with a convenyent allowans underhand, on that sholld have vigilancye & nere dutye in hym, towards her servyce, methyncks (I speke it under favor) that it were most necessarye, wheryn remember me, your L. trew & faythfull follower.33 Stoutly recommending himself for the service which he was already effectively performing, Herle’s suggestion carried with it an implicit request for remuneration. A frequent tactic of Herle’s was to couple a particularly sensitive and potent item of intelligence with a request that his situation might be made permanent, or at least salaried. The exchange of intelligence, in his eyes, could be reciprocated by a favourable advancement of his prospects. In the same letter in which he ruefully noted his reprimand for being too hasty in doubting the Prince of Orange’s recovery, Herle robustly listed his credentials as an intelligencer, drawing attention to local negative feeling towards English policy. He required a steady flow of monies in order to maintain and expand his sources: I want only mayntenance & cowntenance, which her majestie might easelye supplye, yf she wolld be enclyned to ad som portyon towards the same. Wherof she hath more neede to looke unto than I, for bothe her States & person ar hated & envyed, & so be yow of her Cowncell, which will breke owtt yn practys & actyon, uppon the first occasyon, wherof when it shall plese her majestie I will give her more partyculer ynfformatyon.34 Here, Herle characteristically defers the information until a later date, no doubt holding out for a promising elevation in his prospects or finances. Significantly, the financial aspect, ‘maintenance’, is figured as going hand-in-hand with official recognition of his service, ‘cowntenance’, carrying with it a connotation of patronage and support.35 This strategy of Herle’s, which juxtaposed information of serious political significance with requests and palpable hints at official profitable employment, repeatedly failed in the middle period of Elizabeth’s



letter which described the secret attitude to Queen Elizabeth of Pierre Loiseleur, Sieur de Villiers, adviser to the Prince of Orange, Herle suggested a route to preferment which would suit all parties:


reign. Disseminating information in order to maintain his patronage relationships, it is likely that the ‘valuable’ position in which he found himself – being perfectly and unofficially placed to elicit, digest and communicate information – denied him the prospect of moving into the higher, more professionalized echelons of the Elizabethan diplomatic corps. After several years of constant petition, Herle was finally awarded the post of special ambassador to East Friesland (an assignment that left him significantly financially straitened). Herle recognized that for his individual circumstances it was through the careful regulation of political information, whether by the careful transmission of intelligence or the satisfactory negotiation with foreign princes, that he would be able to obtain employment closer to the centre of political power, such as a clerkship or crown office. This route to preferment was a growing trend in Tudor bureaucracy. Clerical credentials were established in the diplomatic arena where legates displaying an equal measure of patriotic and organizational enthusiasm were ideally placed to move into lucrative positions within government upon returning from their successful embassy. While diplomatic employment was not an end to remuneration itself (indeed, far from it), it supplied the Tudor government with a dedicated coterie of skilled bureaucrats who, upon their return home, could contribute to the ceaseless administrative machine. Those involved in diplomatic affairs, from varying areas of the social spectrum, provided a sympathetic and well-connected group of proficient men on whom the Elizabethan authorities could draw for further employment.36 The quotidian activity of the embassy, comprising heavily paper-based tasks including making surveys of affairs, summary letters, frank letters of opinion, suggesting alignments towards alliances and writing papers and reports, all lent themselves well towards the kind of duties expected in a government office in England.37 Despite being a training-ground for lucrative government appointment once they returned from a posting, most diplomats and official envoys bemoaned the time spent away from home. Ironically, despite the training for professional life and political acumen obtained during the embassy, they complained of the geographical distance between their patrons and themselves, which had a detrimental effect on their career prospects.38 Herle’s correspondence from this period exhibits the standard epistolary formulae inherent in Elizabethan letters. The bald facts and figures – the administrative elements of the letters – collated from several months spent on the continent, are juxtaposed and dressed



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My lettre Right honorable, dated the 28 of Aprill, and ment to have byn sent by the post to your honor, was stayed uppon som occasyon tyll now, which this berer shall delyver yow and a booke therewith: besekying that thowgh ytt com late, ye will nott yett despise the humble menyng I have, which is to do yow ani service I can with mi harte.39 Founded upon textual affect, attempting to recreate the distance between correspondent and recipient, the letters were Herle’s sole method of communication when separated from his patrons. They sought to compensate for the distance between correspondents. These letters were transactions – ‘gifts’ of knowledge in exchange for the stalling of debts, the granting of offices or official service to the crown – and their content of political intelligence made them extremely valuable.40 For Herle, his letters to the political triumvirate of Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham were vehicles for his patron–client bond, a bond given impetus and currency by the exchange of information. For Elizabeth’s ministers, Herle’s letters were political tools, stuffed with potent intelligence, and for whom the delicately wrought (yet standard) epistolary forms designed to convey intimacy and friendship were a conventional, but decidedly secondary, requirement. Herle’s position in Antwerp was ostensibly as an agent of Leicester, yet his divided trajectories of intelligence reports suggest that his role was founded upon a split patron–client relationship, with the incentive to supply Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham with equivalent numbers of letters. Herle supposed that the efficient, well-tested and regular stream of information might lead to a more formal engagement, whether at home or abroad. He aspired to extend his ‘agency’ further, to consolidate the multiple features of his work in Antwerp and to shape a protean role which included the diligent and pragmatic collection and dissemination of news and information in a secure and efficient manner. His intention to win preferment through the judicious exchange of time-sensitive information crucial to the ongoing safety of English interests was managed through the pragmatic and assiduous collation, digestion and dissemination of intelligence. Through the careful communication of sensitive news and potentially inflammatory information, Herle signalled his ability to safeguard secrets in accordance with the leading guidelines on the administration of state information of the time.41 William Herle offers the scholar a useful example of how agency was figured and configured in the early modern period. The boundary



with codified and conventional expressions of service, humility and friendship:


between ‘official’ diplomatic activity and intelligencing for profit, however deferred, was porous and elastic. Moving away from the unhelpful and vague term ‘spy’ (although, of all the handles given to these figures in the period, ‘spy’ or ‘espyall’ would probably feature most often, and carry a pejorative sense), a focus on these men who, like Herle, operated on the fringes of government activity, enables us to begin to anatomize the amorphous private and crown Elizabethan information networks of the early modern period. The group of agents who sent select items of news to appropriate ministers or court figures with whom they had a connection (however tenuous), whom we may also term intelligencers or informers, fed and fortified the decision-making process of statesmen. Herle’s status as a conduit through which informal correspondence and negotiation could occur between prominent English and Low Countries statesmen suggests that essential diplomatic activity was not limited to those sent out of England with instructions issued by the Queen and Privy Council. Reward for diplomatic work was not limited to high status figures, as the skills acquired on legation were eminently transferable to a government administrative department upon return home. Agents like Herle operated on behalf of England’s ministers, through the transmission of information, discussion with local officers or even conversation with the host monarch. Patriotic zeal and religious fervour aside, for many agents, the impulse for collecting information was basic – to ensure the means of subsistence. Intelligencing for personal profit, albeit through the service of the crown, could call the agent’s allegiance into question. The repeated affirmations of loyalty and humble service with which information-gatherers like Herle’s correspondence is flecked, suggest that the agent’s visible interconnectedness within the endorsed patronage structures of early modern England went some way to mitigate this economic tension.42 Uniting the dual impulses of protecting Elizabeth and her realm and advancing his own prospects, Herle’s letters open to wider view the methods and technologies of the communication of intelligence, founded upon and driven by a sophisticated and intricate patronage network.

Notes and references 1. British Library (hereafter BL) MS Lansdowne 36 fols. 181r–182v. 17 June 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley. 2. For the full edition of Herle’s letters in English, see The Letters of William Herle ed. R. Adams (2006) Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters. ac.uk/herle/index.html. For Herle’s ideas of service based upon the transfer of



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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

intelligence, see R. Adams (2009) ‘A Spy on the Payroll? William Herle and the mid-Elizabethan Polity’, Historical Research 83 (2010): 266–80, and (2009) ‘Signs of Intelligence: William Herle’s report of the Dutch Situation, 1573’, Lives and Letters, I, April. For discussions of ministerial intelligence networks of the later sixteenth century, see S. Alford (2008) Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), esp. pp. 167 and 319, and P.J. Hammer (1999) The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: the Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–97 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Herle was sent to negotiate a loan from Germany in the 1560s. Several copies of instructions survive for this journey; however, no instructions survive for Herle’s numerous other journeys. BL MS Lansdowne 54, fols. 150r–v, 152r–v, 6 August 1587, William Herle to Lord Burghley. O. de Smedt describes Herle as a ‘servant’ and ‘skilled businessman’ of Garrard, (1954) De Engelse natie te Antwerpen in de 16e eeuw, 1496–1582 (Antwerp), p. 213; R. Ehrenberg (1896) Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Konigin Elisabeth (Jena), p. 61. Herle had been in debt to the Waad family since at least the 1570s. These letters are located primarily in the State Papers (Holland and Flanders) at The National Archives, London, and in the British Library, in the Cotton collection. The National Archives (hereafter TNA) State Papers (hereafter SP) 83 15/36.a fol. 77r–82v. 3 March 1582. William Herle to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. I am grateful to Dr Jan Broadway for pointing out (in relation to a separate episode in Herle’s quasi-diplomatic career) that Herle would require some kind of official endorsement from the English authorities, even if his ‘mission’ was not a formal one. TNA SP 83 15/39, fols. 94r–95v. 4 March 1582, George Gilpin to Sir Francis Walsingham. Herle was not in receipt of a regular stipend during his residence in Antwerp, see TNA SP 83 15/74, fols. 167r–168v. 21 March 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley. See, for example, Thomas Bodley’s voluminous diplomatic correspondence between Cecil and the Privy Council between the years 1588–97, The Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley, ed. Robyn Adams (2009) Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/bodley/bodley. html. TNA SP 83 16/3 fols. 2r–5v. 5 May 1582, William Herle to Sir Francis Walsingham. TNA SP 83 15/68, fols. 148r–152v. 18 March 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley. The Joyeuse Entrée cost 30 stuivers to buy from the shop attached to the Plantin printing house. Herle could have opted to send his patrons the cheaper quarto edition which lacked the engravings and etchings for which the folio version is well known, only retailing at 2 stuivers. A stuiver was equivalent to roughly 30 English pence. L. Voet (1980) The Plantin Press (1585–1589): A Bibliography of the Works Printed and Published by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden 6 volumes, (Amsterdam: Van Hoeve), vol. 2, p. 953. La Joyeuse et Magnifique entrée (1582) (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin). See also Emily Peters (2008) ‘Printing Ritual: the performance of community



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14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture in Christopher Plantin’s La Joyeuse & Magnifique Entrée de Monseigneur Francoys . . . d’Anjou’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61:2, 370–413. TNA SP 83 15/68, fols. 148r–152v. For a detailed account of the two assassination attempts upon William of Orange, (the second one successful) see Lisa Jardine (2005) The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: the First Assassination of a Head of State with a Handgun (London: HarperCollins). Jardine (2005), p. 65. Jardine notes that many printed accounts state that Maurice participated in the reprisal on the assailant. TNA SP 83 15/73 fols. 163r–166v. 21 March 1582, William Herle to the Earl of Leicester. A.J. Butler (1907) ed., Calendar of State Papers, Foreign (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office) 1581–2, Vol. 15, number 617. Etienne Lesieur to Sir Francis Walsingham, 19 March 1582. TNA SP 83 15//72 fol. 72r–73v. John Norris to Sir Francis Walsingham, 20 March 1582. TNA SP 83 15/73 fols. 163r–166v. BL Cotton Galba C VII fols. 226r–227v, suggests that Herle was reprimanded for his bleak report on the ‘unlikely’ survival of Orange, ‘that I sholld be so hastye in advertiseng things for understanding, that nether were assured nor lykelye’. 14 April 1582, William Herle to the Earl of Leicester. TNA SP 83 15/87 fols. 191r–192v. 1 April 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley. TNA SP 83 15/74 fols. 167r–168v. 21 March 1582, William Herle to Lord Burghley. (My) italics denote marginalia by Herle. Indeed, the practice was familiar to Burghley. In February 1590, Burghley sent a letter to Thomas Bodley indicating that he had sent a copy under separate cover, ‘And bicawse a former letter of mine with the said Project might miscarry; I have verbatim cawsed both to be dowbled, for more suretie, and for your direcion thearein’, BL MS Harleian 287 fols. 188r–189v. For more on early modern postal systems, including those constructed for the carriage of diplomatic mail, see Alan Stewart (2008) Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press), esp. chapter 7. See also Philip Beale (2005) England’s Mail: Two Millennia of Letter Writing (Stroud: History Press). See Nadine Akkerman’s essay in this volume. TNA SP 83 15/87 fols. 191r–192v. BL MS Cotton Galba D III fols. 273r–274v. Thomas Bodley’s cipher, endorsed 28 November 1588. BL MS Cotton Galba D VII fol. 345r–v. Lord Burghley to Thomas Bodley, 24 December 1590. Bodley’s supplementary cipher is BL MS Harleian 287 fol. 187r–v. For a brief survey of the provision of diplomatic codes and ciphers, see Alan Haynes, (1992) The Elizabethan Secret Service (Stroud: Sutton Publishing). It is difficult to credit that the queen would be presented with a letter that had not been deciphered for her survey of the contents. See Nicole Greenspan (2005) ‘News, Intelligence and Espionage at the Exiled Court at Cologne: the Case of Henry Manning’ in Media History 11:1/2, 105–25. BL Cotton Galba C VII, fols. 211r–212v. 31 March 1582, William Herle to the Earl of Leicester. See also TNA SP 83/15/88 fols. 193r–194v, for a scribal copy. Colonel Morgan is probably Sir Thomas Morgan, see ODNB.



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33. BL MS Cotton Galba C VII fols. 222r–223v. 14 April 1582, William Herle to the Earl of Leicester. 34. BL MS Cotton Galba C VII fols. 226r–227v. 35. See OED, ‘cowntenance’, n. 8, ‘Patronage; appearance of favour’. 36. David Potter (2005) ‘Mid-Tudor Foreign Policy and Diplomacy’, in Susan Brigden and Glenn Richardson, eds, Tudor England and its Neighbours (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 106–38, p. 110. 37. Potter, p. 109. 38. Jeremy Black (1997) The Diplomacy of a Rising World Power: Britain 1603–1800 (Diplomatic Studies Programme: University of Leicester), p. 7. 39. TNA SP 83 16/3 fols. 2r–5v. 40. For ‘knowledge transactions’, see Lisa Jardine (1996) Reading Shakespeare Historically (London & New York: Routledge), esp. chapter 6, ‘Alien Intelligence: Mercantile exchange and knowledge transactions in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta’. 41. Robert Beale, A Treatise of the Office of a Councellor and Principall Secretarie to her Majestie in Conyers Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford: The Clarendon Press). 42. Greenspan, pp. 117–18.



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Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy Joanna Craigwood

Early modern Europe was newly concerned with diplomacy as a representative art. Medieval diplomatic messengers gradually gave way to ambassadors acting in the ongoing interests of sovereign states. The introduction of the permanent embassy is symptomatic of this transition from a series of communications to an art and practice of representation.1 Literature is also an art and practice of representation – and the parallel was not lost on early modern diplomatic theorists. Their understanding of the ambassador as a faithful and persuasive representative of his sovereign, in word and deed, placed diplomatic theory in conversation with theories of rhetorical, poetic and dramatic representation.2 As many theorists noted, the Romans called ambassadors oratores, or orators, and early modern diplomatic treatises repeatedly ask how to use words well. This rhetorical approach was rooted in the broader literary and philosophical concerns of Renaissance humanism, which also shaped the period’s literature and poetics. From the composition of Ambaxiator Brevilogus in 1436 to the 1680 publication of L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions, European treatises on embassy engaged with many of the same rhetorical and representational considerations as contemporary European literature. These crossovers between literature and diplomacy were equally clear to literary authors. European writers as wide-ranging and influential as Torquato Tasso, Luís de Camões and Pierre Corneille drew on the analogies between literary and diplomatic representation.3 This essay traces one exceptionally important and previously unstudied instance of this dialogue between diplomatic theory and literary representation. It examines the personal and intellectual exchange that took place between the diplomatic theorist Alberico Gentili and the poet, diplomat and literary theorist Sir Philip Sidney in early modern England. Gentili was an Italian civil lawyer and professor at Oxford University, 82



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and he was without question the most important and influential diplomatic theorist to work in England in this period. He is generally considered to have founded the field of international law alongside the Spanish scholar Francisco Suárez and the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius. Sidney, meanwhile, was famous as both a courtier and a poet, and his poetic treatise, the Defence of Poesy, stands among the most important works of English literary theory. The intellectual exchange between these leading theorists emerged from direct discussion between them: Gentili not only dedicates his 1585 diplomatic treatise De Legationibus Libri Tres to Sidney but also credits Sidney with a formative role in its theory of embassy. This dedication has often been noted as passing evidence of Sidney’s intellectual interests and patronage, but the implications of Gentili’s acknowledgments to Sidney have never been pursued.4 This chapter illuminates the intellectual exchange between Gentili and Sidney and, through them, the conceptual interface between diplomatic and literary theory in early modern England. I argue that these two influential theorists share a conceptual understanding of representation that underlies their thinking on both literature and diplomacy. The interrelation of early modern literature and diplomacy has recently begun to attract critical attention, as the introduction to this volume observes, but much remains unknown in this significant field.5 Timothy Hampton suggests that we might seek a diplomatic poetics: he has in mind both a way of reading literature that is attuned to its diplomatic implications and a way of reading diplomacy that ‘would take into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions’.6 In this chapter, I use ‘poetics of embassy’ to indicate both a theory of literature informed by diplomatic ideas and a theory of diplomacy informed by literary-theoretical concerns. I do so with the awareness that what we now know as literary theory and poetics was, to early modern writers, the study of the intersecting, even inseparable, arts of rhetoric and poetry, grounded in classical rhetoric and poetics, and incorporating moral philosophy. My broader point is that junctures of literature and diplomacy – when diplomatic theory draws on literary theory, or ambassadors and embassy feature in literature – raise considerations and concerns about the art of representation. This brings diplomacy into conversation with the philosophical and literary-critical ideas surrounding mimesis – a term that Sidney defines as the ‘art of imitation’ and then glosses as ‘a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth’.7 I draw consciously on the long Western philosophical tradition of theorizing literary and artistic representation as mimesis, from Plato and Aristotle onward, when I describe diplomacy as a mimetic art in this chapter.8 This would have made sense to early



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modern thinkers, who commonly treated both jurisprudence and politics as arts and understood these arts with reference to classical thought. Indeed, the Italian legal tradition in which Gentili trained employed Aristotelian ideas about mimesis to define the law as an art that imitates nature, because it reproduces natural principles through legal fictions.9 The early modern dialogue between diplomatic and literary representation took place within a well-established dialogue between the principles of law, politics and poetics.10 Embassy is more precisely the representation of sovereigns and sovereignty, and here too cross-pollination between legal, political and poetic philosophy is important. The idea that the poet is sovereign appeared as early as Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Italy, and built on the idea that poetic creativity is akin to the creation of new legislation by a sovereign prince, a quasi-divine creation of something out of nothing; as Ernst Kantorowicz observes, this analogical reasoning employed a Renaissance juristic technique known as aequiparatio or equiparation: that is, the placing two or more things on a legal equality.11 However, such analogical thinking is hardly restricted to the law, and prince and poet were far from the only early modern sovereigns: God was sovereign of all; the reason sovereign in the body; and the Christian platonic trio of truth, beauty and goodness (or virtue) were sovereign religio-philosophical ideals.12 Poetry, then, could be ambassadorial in representing the poet, or his or her reason, or divine and philosophical truths – or all of these things. The equiparation of sovereignty across these different spheres is central to this chapter’s investigation of poetic embassy as the representation of sovereignty. The exchange between Sidney and Gentili – and diplomatic and literary theory in early modern England – sits within this broad context. In this essay, I argue that Sidney and Gentili share a protestant platonic understanding of ambassadorial and literary mimesis as analogous representations of sovereignty. In the first section I trace the personal and intellectual relationship between Sidney and Gentili. I then argue that Gentili, at Sidney’s suggestion, develops a protestant platonic model for understanding ambassadorial representation as a mimetic art in his 1585 treatise on diplomatic theory, law and practice, De Legationibus Libri Tres (Three Books on Embassies).13 Sidney’s poetic treatise, The Defence of Poesy (circa 1582), uses an equivalent protestant platonic model to understand poetic mimesis, which Sidney places under the implied trope of embassy. I end by tracing this trope of embassy in Sidney’s unfinished prose fiction, the revised Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (circa 1584).



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Alberico Gentili (circa 1552–1608) was an Italian civil lawyer who came to England in 1580 after his religious beliefs had attracted the attention of the Inquisition. In 1581 he was incorporated into Oxford University and appointed professor of Roman law, and in 1587 he became the University’s Regius Professor of Law, a post he held until his death in 1608. Gentili published prolifically throughout his career, particularly on international law. Anthony à Wood’s seventeenth-century history of Oxford University records that he was ‘the grand ornament of the University in his time’, while modern criticism recognizes his seminal contribution to the field of international law.14 Gentili was also involved in some of the most important politico-legal questions of his day. In 1584 the Privy Council consulted him on the highest profile diplomatic case of Elizabethan England, in which the Spanish ambassador Don Bernadino de Mendoza was accused of conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth’s life, but (in a groundbreaking ruling) granted exemption from trial on the grounds of diplomatic immunity and instead exiled from England.15 Around 1590 he delegated his lectures at Oxford and moved to London to practise at the Admiralty Court, where he worked primarily on international legal disputes between the rebelling Dutch provinces and their Spanish overlords.16 Gentili belonged to the Italian Bartolist school of law, as opposed to the French legal humanist school, but he was, of course, steeped in the broader humanist intellectual culture of Renaissance Europe. He engaged actively with classical literature and philosophy and also had an interest in poetry and poetics; he published treatises in defence of poetry and drama in 1593 and 1599.17 Christopher Warren has traced poetic concerns in his legal work on war, and Hampton has noted rhetorical and dramatic aspects of his diplomatic theory, although he has not connected them with Sidney or the conceptual model I outline in this chapter.18 These new connections expose previously unappreciated poetic and philosophical influences on Gentili’s diplomatic theory. Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), and his influence as a poet, prose writer and literary theorist, need little comment here. Sidney is well known as one the most important writers, and arguably the most important poetic theorist, in early modern England. His interest in diplomacy, his diplomatic ambitions, and his contemporary fame as a courtier are also well documented. Biographical narratives often give central place to his disappointed aspirations to diplomatic work and his intense and enduring interest in international affairs, noting an education that



Gentili and Sidney


actively prepared him for diplomatic work, his embassy to the Holy Roman Emperor in 1577, and his attempts to gain further diplomatic employment from the queen.19 In the most recent biography of Sidney, Katherine Duncan-Jones opens a chapter on Sidney’s one full diplomatic mission with the bold claim that ‘1577, when Sidney was sent to the Holy Roman Emperor, was the best year of his life’.20 F.J. Levy argues that Sidney’s entire education prepared him for diplomatic work, particularly his Continental tour of 1573–75, on which (Levy suggests) Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet ‘consciously trained Sidney as England’s future ambassador’.21 Much of the criticism on Sidney’s writings addresses political, cultural and religious concerns related to his European and diplomatic interests. Yet virtually none of this research on Sidney’s intersecting ‘poetics, piety and politics’ addresses Sidney’s views on the actual art of embassy. None at all explores embassy and poetry as analogous mimetic arts, or pursues this analogy through Sidney’s relationship with Gentili.22 These connections reveal a significant new conceptual link between Sidney’s poetic and diplomatic interests. Gentili and Sidney met some time between 1580 and 1584. Most of our knowledge about the relationship between the two men comes from Gentili’s dedicatory letter to Sidney in De Legationibus. This letter is, however, supported by considerable corroborating evidence. Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, became Gentili’s patron shortly after Gentili arrived in England. On 24 November 1580, Leicester, who was the Chancellor of Oxford University as well as a powerful political figure and patron of the arts, wrote to recommend that the University incorporate Gentili ‘because he is a stranger and learned and an exile for religion’.23 This letter is addressed from the Court, where Gentili was apparently first introduced to Leicester; as Leicester’s heir presumptive, Sidney was often with his uncle, and we know he was at Court for at least some of the winter of 1580–81.24 It is likely, then, that Sidney and Gentili met late in 1580, as Gentili’s biographer Gezina van der Molen assumes.25 Gentili remained part of the intellectual circle enjoying Leicester’s patronage: he wrote gratefully to Leicester’s secretary reporting on his reception at Oxford; he dedicated a book to Leicester in 1582; and it was probably through Leicester’s agency that he was invited to advise the Privy Council on the Mendoza case.26 We can be certain, then, that Gentili was attached to the intellectual and literary group known as the Leicester/Sidney circle. In his dedicatory letter to Sidney in De Legationibus, Gentili claims that he corresponded and often met with Sidney. He describes his work on embassy as the result of these previous discussions: ‘So I treated



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the subject of the Ambassador, which, as you know, you had previously induced me to investigate, and had aided me in threshing out with every variety of Socratic device’ (‘Tractaui itaque de Legato quæstionem, & (vt scis) eam, in quam despiciendam tu me olim deduxeras, atque explicandam penitus Socratico omni artificio adiuuaras’).27 Gentili adds that, following Sidney’s encouragement to investigate embassy, he gave a speech on the subject at Oxford before both Sidney and Leicester, which he then expanded into the treatise De Legationibus in about the space of six months (fol. A5r).28 The dedication is dated 21 July 1585 (fol. A5v) and Leicester visited Oxford in January of 1585; there is strong evidence that Sidney was with his uncle.29 Leicester’s disbursement book for the years 1584–86 records that his secretary gave five pounds ‘in reward by your lordship’s commandment to Synneor Gentyle at Oxeford’ on 11 January 1585.30 This payment gives a credible date for the speech Gentili mentions; his assertion that it ‘seemed to give satisfaction’ (‘placere uisa fuit’) could even be an oblique reference to Leicester’s reward (fol. A5r). Moreover, we know that Sidney also commissioned readings and reports on diplomatic matters from the academic Gabriel Harvey and the lawyer John Hammond.31 Gentili’s claims in his dedicatory letter and the external evidence, taken together, make a compelling case that Sidney (together with Leicester) instigated and influenced Gentili’s work on embassy. Gentili’s treatise provides a remarkable insight into the nature of that influence, because his attributions to Sidney provide a vital clue to the content of their discussions: they link Sidney with platonic thought. In both his dedication and conclusion he claims that the treatise aims to describe the form or idea of the perfect ambassador on Sidney’s model, on the second occasion reinforcing the platonic character of this ideal form by also citing Socrates (fol. A4r, p. 231). Gentili is flattering his dedicatee; yet it is significant that he chooses to do so in platonic terms, given his claim that Sidney aided him in his thinking about embassy with every Socratic device (‘Socratico omni artificio’) (fol. A5r). A hint lurks in Gentili’s choice of the word artificium – a word for device that can also mean ‘theory of the art’ – that Sidney’s Socratic method might also have aimed at a platonic theory of the art of embassy. When all this is taken together with Sidney’s known interest in platonism, it looks very much like Sidney and Gentili discussed embassy in platonic terms. This insight turns out to be the key to the conceptual framework that unites their theories of embassy and poetry. Sidney’s debt to Plato and his various followers and commentators has been much debated; his philosophical position is most plausibly



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viewed as a personal synthesis of various platonic, Aristotelian and Christian influences, falling broadly within a northern humanist, protestant platonic tradition.32 His close involvement with northern European protestant intellectual circles has been amply demonstrated, and the only copy of Plato’s works that we know he owned was the northern humanist and protestant edition published by Henri Estienne and Jean de Serres in Geneva in 1578.33 As I have discovered – and will later show – this is also the edition of Plato Gentili worked from when writing De Legationibus. The 1578 Geneva Plato distances itself from the perversions (‘corruptelas’) of Florentine Academy neoplatonism, incorporates Aristotelian philosophy, draws heavily on patristic, especially Augustinian, thought, and insistently interprets Plato in light of protestant beliefs and the Bible.34 In the rest of this chapter, I draw on the protestant platonic ideas about imitation in de Serres’s translations and commentaries in this edition of Plato, both because Gentili’s use of Plato points directly to de Serres’s platonic theory of language, and because this theory in turn clarifies the crucial connection between Gentili and Sidney.

Gentili’s mimetic art of embassy In De Legationibus, Gentili defines the ambassador as the representative of sovereignty and implicitly relates this definition to a platonic understanding of mimesis. Plato famously places the mimetic arts last in the tripartite schema he lays out in the Republic: first are the true conceptual forms of things created by God (which are sovereign); then individual things that imperfectly express the truth of the forms; and finally the imitative copies of these individual things – poetry and other mimetic arts – which Plato condemns as too far removed from the sovereign forms to retain any truth or morality. Gorgias extends this argument into a combined attack on rhetoric and poetry (the dialogue argues that ‘poetry is a kind of popular oratory’). Here Plato makes a categorical distinction between arts that entail knowledge of the truth and false imitations of those arts that merely give pleasure; the mimetic arts are all false. Rhetoric is, more specifically, a false imitation of the true political arts – a ‘phantom of a branch of statesmanship’.35 Yet, in admissions of great importance to early modern poetics, both Republic and Gorgias allow that the mimetic arts could be counted as true arts if they promoted truth, morality and good government, that is, if they truly represented sovereign truths.36 This is precisely where Gentili positions embassy in De Legationibus. His definition of the ambassador is heavily engaged with mimetic concerns; at this intersection



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of diplomacy and poetics, Gentili draws on Plato to define embassy as a mimetic art that is also a true representation of sovereign truths. Gentili develops this definition in the second chapter of his treatise and in the process he makes three significant comparisons: between ambassadors and messengers, ambassadors and orators, and ambassadors and interpreters. Ambassadors, Gentili insists, are different from state messengers because the ambassador is sent ‘not only by the state, but also in the name of the state, and as the representative of the state’ (‘non modo publice, sed publico etiam nomine, & publica indutus persona’, p. 6). The theatrical origin of Gentili’s political language immediately gestures at the dramatic nature of this representation: ‘publica indutus persona’ literally describes the ambassador as ‘having put on the mask of the state’ like a masked classical actor assuming a part. Gentili’s complete definition of the ambassador starts further down the same page and reiterates the ambassador’s representative function within the emerging European system of sovereign states: the ambassador goes in the name of a state, to a state, in the interest of a state. Elsewhere Gentili conflates this with the representation of kings and queens; either way, embassy is defined as the representation of sovereignty. Gentili develops the rhetorical, poetic and platonic implications of diplomatic representation in his accompanying comparison of ambassadors to orators. He acknowledges parallels between rhetoric and the verbal part of the ambassador’s art, whilst insisting that the ambassador is more than just an orator, because oratory only involves speech, whereas embassy also involves actions. Gentili attributes this kind of distinction between verbal and manual arts to Plato and references Gorgias (p. 4).37 The reference evokes the spectre of Plato’s critique of the mimetic arts just as embassy emerges as a representative art that entails both words (or the mimetic art of rhetoric) and action (or the mimetic art of acting). This explains why Gentili argues so emphatically that the ambassador, unlike the orator, only uses rhetoric in the service of the state (p. 3). His insistent and repetitious emphasis on the ambassador’s official role – always contrasted with the individualistic and promiscuous art of the orator – is, in effect, a defence against Gorgias’s condemnation of rhetoric as a ‘phantom of a branch of statesmanship’.38 Gentili’s discussion of embassy and oratory reveals that the ambassadorial art he envisages is a very particular and privileged art of words (or rhetoric) and action (or acting): it is a mimetic art that truly promotes good government – a mimetic art that is also a true and moral art.



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Plato’s criticism of poetry and other mimetic arts in the Republic literally sites them too far from ‘the king and the truth’.39 The phrase indicates that truth is sovereign, as Robin Waterfield reflects in his recent translation ‘the throne of truth’, but it also reflects the Republic’s wider equation of political and metaphysical sovereigns – and it resonates with widespread early modern attributions of platonic truth, goodness and beauty to political sovereigns.40 Gentili’s appeal to Plato at junctures of embassy and the mimetic arts draws on this interface between representing sovereigns and the expression of essential truths. Yet he also recognizes that sovereigns are not always good and true, and maintains that the ambassador’s fidelity to virtue and religion must take precedence over his faithful representation of his political sovereign (p. 197). The protestant platonic character of this point is reinforced by a framing discussion that aligns ideal ambassadorial virtues with the platonic and Christian cardinal virtues (pp. 180–97). Gentili’s embassy properly represents not only political sovereigns but also sovereign truths. This kind of ambassadorial representation does not just use language; it is equivalent to language. So, at least, Gentili suggests, as he turns once more to Plato to explain why an ambassador might be like an interpreter: We know that an ambassador is also called an interpreter. For the poet Virgil in the fourth book of the Aeneid, speaking of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, says: ‘The interpreter of the gods bears their dread commands through the air.’ Of this god’s name, as well as that of Iris, Plato in the Cratylus gives an explanation which, though strikingly relevant, I refrain from quoting. Cicero also applies the term interpreter to those who carry instructions to and fro, and whom we rightly call ambassadors. Unquestionably that expression of Lucretius in the sixth book is based on a similar idea: ‘And the tongue, the interpreter of the mind, dripped’; and Plato’s remark in the Timaeus, that speech is an interpreter. [Interpretem quoque nominari Legatum scimus. Nam de nuncio deorum Mercurio Virgilius Æneid 4: Interpres Diuum fert horrida iussa per auras. Et eius nominis, itemque Iridis ad rem belle explicat rationem Plato in Cratylo, quam exscribere nolo. Sed & Cicero interpretes dicit, qui ferunt, referuntque mandata, quos Legatos appellamus probe. Et sane tali ratione stat Lucretii illud libr. 6:



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The ‘strikingly relevant’ passage in Cratylus that Gentili cites is exclusively concerned with connecting the names Hermes (Mercury) and Iris with the invention, use and power of speech, as part of the dialogue’s broader investigation of whether words faithfully represent the essential nature of things.41 Gentili’s subsequent citation of the tongue and speech as interpretive ambassadors continue this train of thought and connect it to Timaeus. Speech is described as an interpreter in Timaeus in only one early modern edition of Plato’s works: Estienne and de Serres’s 1578 Geneva Plato. Neither of the other two European editions of Plato’s works available at the time Gentili was writing makes this comparison, so Gentili, like Sidney, must have had the Geneva Plato to hand.42 Only the Geneva Plato reproduces the Greek, and only de Serres translates it in terms that compare oratio to interpres, speech to an interpreter. The passage in question addresses the relationship between words and the divine conceptual truths that lie behind the visible world. ‘And so let this thing be supposed’ Plato asks (in de Serres’s translation) ‘that speech [orationem] correspond with a certain affinity and even kinship to these matters of which it is the messenger and interpreter [quarum nuntia est & interpres]’. Yet, he warns, since speech is only a likeness and we only human, it is enough if it achieves likeness to these truths, or verisimilitude. In a marginal note on this passage, de Serres emphasizes that words imitate divine truths, and that the imperfect human execution of this imitation is due to our mortal ‘clayey lodgings’ (‘domunculas has figulinas’) and specious fallen reasoning.43 De Serres’s introduction to Cratylus – the other dialogue Gentili cites in his comparison of ambassadors to interpretive language – elaborates on this linguistic imitation. Here he posits innate mental concepts equivalent to Plato’s external forms, in ways that evoke a comparable theorization of innate ideas by reformist theologian Philipp Melanchthon. These mental concepts, de Serres argues, are the remaining traces of the divine Logos in our minds, and are equivalent to the ‘original’ language Plato hypothesizes in Cratylus that truly represented the nature of things. Our fallen and corrupt language is the imperfect mimetic representation of these mental concepts just as nature is the imperfect copy of the forms. De Serres uses this theory of language as a preface not just to Cratylus but also to Gorgias, on rhetoric, and Ion, on poetry.44 De Serres thus creates a theory for the mimetic arts of language that unites platonic



Atque animi interpres manabat lingua. Et quod in Timæo Plato, orationem esse interpretem scribit.] (pp. 4–5)


metaphysics with an Aristotelian poetics of mimesis, sixteenth-century Italian-Aristotelian poetics of verisimilitude, Melanchthonian innate ideas, and protestant beliefs about the extent of human knowledge, the importance of the word, and the fallen nature of language and reason. This is the kind of speech and writing Gentili compares to embassy. His discussion of the interpreter-ambassador starts with Hermes the ambassadorial interpreter of the gods and ends up with a protestant platonic hermeneutics and a theory of language as embassy. The comparison is apt in the protestant platonic framework Gentili references. For Gentili’s mimetic art of embassy and de Serres’s protestant platonic rhetoric and poetry are both true representations of sovereignty, whether that be the sovereignty of political rulers, or the sovereignty of the human reason, truth, goodness, beauty, and God.

Sidney’s ambassadorial poetics This ambassadorial theory of language is strikingly similar to Sidney’s theory of poetry in his poetic treatise, the Defence of Poesy. Sidney places this poetics under the implied trope of embassy: the Defence opens with an anecdote in a diplomatic setting. Moreover, the Defence was written during the period Sidney knew Gentili and was actively seeking diplomatic appointments, yet, disillusioned with his lack of success at court, was also turning to poetry as alternative occupation. It is surely no coincidence that its poetics belong to the same protestant platonic paradigm as Gentili’s mimetic art of embassy – especially given the formative and Socratic role Gentili attributes to Sidney. Sidney, I suggest, views poetic mimesis as analogous to ambassadorial representation. There are close parallels between de Serres’s theory of language, which Gentili cites as ambassadorial, and Sidney’s theory of poetry. Both S.K. Heninger and Mary Jane Doherty have linked de Serres’s commentaries directly to Sidney’s thought in the Defence, though Heninger looks only at the introduction to Ion and Doherty is primarily interested in Sidney’s concept of architectoniké.45 Robert Stillman has, moreover, convincingly demonstrated the similarities between Sidney’s poetic conceits and the Melanchthonian innate ideas that parallel and inform de Serres’s theory.46 Like de Serres and Melanchthon, Sidney places the ‘idea or fore-conceit’ of poetry in the ‘zodiac of [the poet’s] own wit’, and makes this innate idea the source of a mimetic poetry that imitates ‘the divine consideration of what may be and should be’ (pp. 216, 218). Sidney calls the resulting poetic creation ‘another nature’ echoing de Serres’s parallels between this verbal mimesis and nature’s copy of the



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forms (p. 216). He likewise recognizes the corrosive effects of our fallen ‘degenerate souls’ and their ‘clayey lodgings’ – de Serres’s ‘domunculas has figulinas’ – observing that ‘our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it’ (pp. 217–19). And like de Serres, he recognizes that the ‘purifying of wit’ through learning and reason is required to grasp these conceits rightly and figure them forth in platonic eikastiké (good and true imitations) not phantasiké (fanciful and untrue imitations), faithfully repeating a distinction from Sophist that de Serres makes in his preface to Ion (pp. 219, 236).47 This protestant platonic and ambassadorial theory also aligns with Sidney’s direct treatment of Plato in the Defence, and his assertion that, although he disagrees with Ion’s idea of poetry as divine fury ‘above man’s wit’, Ion still gives ‘rightly divine commendation unto poetry’ (pp. 239–40, my emphasis).48 Sidney’s poetic theory is very like the theory of language that de Serres outlines before Cratylus and applies to rhetoric and poetics – the theory Gentili calls ambassadorial. Sidney places this ambassadorial poetics under the implied trope of embassy. He introduces the Defence with an anecdote from his 1574 stay with Edward Wotton, secretary to the English embassy at Maximilian II’s court in Vienna, and although Sidney refers only briefly to Wotton and the imperial court to which he would return as ambassador in 1577, the implications are difficult to dismiss. As Roland Greene points out, ‘theory is never altogether theoretical, especially in this period, but often responds closely to experience, and there is a certain attempt at coherence visible in Sidney’s bringing his ideas about fiction to order under the implied trope of embassy, where many of his past and future hopes were already gathered’.49 This implied analogy between political and poetic embassy resonates through Sidney’s use of the language of sovereignty. He repeatedly applies the language of political sovereignty to poetry: poetic skills are ‘princes over all’ because they elicit virtuous action; the poet is ‘monarch’ of the sciences; and since virtue is the ‘most excellent’ end of all learning, poetry is ‘most princely’ in pursuing it and ‘full of majesty and beauty’ (pp. 220–8). Sidney’s poetry in fact represents all those things that are sovereign within the protestant platonic framework he and Gentili reference: the realm of ideas (particularly ideal virtue and beauty), the reason in which they are inscribed, and the God who placed them there. This makes poetry ambassadorial, at least when done rightly, and in accordance with an educated reason. For Sidney, embassy and writing both belong to a single protestant platonic model for true mimetic arts. Only by understanding that model is the full significance of the Defence’s implied trope of embassy realized.



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Sidney’s revised version of his prose fiction Arcadia makes the trope explicit. This unfinished romance follows the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, and the two sisters they fall in love with, Pamela and Philoclea, along with a number of other stories of love, politics, chivalry and villainy. Sidney was engaged in revising the Arcadia over the time he knew Gentili, in the early 1580s, and Warren observes that the new version ‘explored many of the same legal issues as Gentili explored, particularly where classical texts like the Aeneid were concerned’.50 Sidney’s major revisions involved the addition of two important plotlines: those of Parthenia and Argalus and of Helen and Amphialus. He also added a number of new sub-narratives recounted by the central characters, which, as critics have observed, add a considerable metanarrative dimension to the story.51 My contention is that Sidney’s two additional plotlines likewise raise metafictional questions of right representation and right interpretation and do so under the figure of embassy. The stories of Parthenia and Argalus and Helen and Amphialus are heavily involved with those platonic sovereigns, virtue, beauty and reason, as well as with political sovereignty. Sidney places the representation and reception of these sovereigns under the figure of embassy. The story of Parthenia and Argalus first and most rigorously tests the relation of inner to outer and establishes the challenges of true representation and right reading in the revised Arcadia. Parthenia is introduced as one whose virtues, which perfectly express Aristotelian moderation, make her an exemplum of platonic goodness and beauty. The relationship between this inner beauty and her outer beauty is first figured as embassy: The fair Parthenia – fair indeed [. . .] and that which made her fairness much the fairer was that it was but a fair embassador of a most fair mind full of wit, and a wit which delighted more to judge itself than to show itself; her speech being as rare as precious, her silence without sullenness, her modesty without affectation, her shamefastness without ignorance: in sum, one, that to praise well, one must first set down with himself what it is to be excellent – for so she is.52 The true ambassadorial representation of Parthenia’s sovereign reason, goodness and beauty in her external beauty is rightly received by Argalus and he truly loves her. However, this perfect embassy occurs just as the relation of inner to outer is about to be put under intense pressure: a jealous rejected suitor disfigures Parthenia’s face with poison – and she



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flees in shame (pp. 30–1). This transformation is followed by a series of increasingly unreliable messengers, marshals and harbingers (both metaphorical and real) that convey only Parthenia’s outer appearance or present her under a disguise (pp. 30–1, 42). But Parthenia’s fair embassy and Argalus’s true love are soon rewarded: Parthenia is healed; the lovers are reunited; and the ambassadorial relations of right representation, right understanding and right loving restored. Helen’s story is an inversion of Parthenia’s: it is plagued with misrepresentations, misunderstandings and usurpations, and it is introduced by a false embassy. Helen, Queen of Corinth, first appears recounting the history of her love for Amphialus. This history – and her plotline – begins with Philoxenus, one of Helen’s suitors and a dear friend of Amphialus. Helen recalls of Philoxenus: [He] wan thus far of me that in truth I less misliked him than any of the rest; which in some proportion my countenance delivered unto him, though I must protest it was a very false embassador if it delivered at all any affection, whereof my heart was utterly void – I as then esteeming myself born to rule, and thinking foul scorn willingly to submit myself to be ruled. (p. 60) Embassy once more indicates the outer representation of inner truths, and it is immediately connected with ideas of sovereignty in both its political and wider metaphorical senses. Helen’s political sovereignty as a queen ‘born to rule’ leads her to reject the familial sovereignty of a husband and the metaphysical sovereignty of virtuous love (she scorns ‘to be ruled’). Helen’s ‘false embassador’ initiates a storyline that is characterized by wrong interpretation, wrong loving, and associated revolts against both political sovereignty and the sovereignty of virtue, love, and reason. Amphialus woos Helen on Philoxenus’s behalf, but she purposely misreads Amphialus’s suit and falls in love with him instead of Philoxenus. Yet no sooner is her rebellion thus subjected by love than Amphialus’s own misdirected love turns him from Arcadia’s virtuous exemplar to its anti-hero. A series of misreadings and misunderstandings lead him to kill his friend, commit treason against his rightful sovereign Basilius, and allow his household to be misgoverned by his mother Cecropia and his loving carried out through a web of her misrepresentations, until eventually he loses even reason’s sovereignty over the emotions just before the end of the unfinished Arcadia. In the contrasting plotlines of Parthenia and Argalus and Helen and Amphialus, Sidney places extreme depictions of right and wrong



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representation and reading under the tropes of true and false embassy. These opposed poles act as a guide to the importance of reason and virtue, that is, the representation and recognition of sovereignty in its broadest sense. The added plotlines of the new Arcadia illustrate both what it is to represent and interpret truly, and how easy it is to get both wrong – apt lessons for readers of the more ambiguous central narratives and sub-narratives of Musidorus, Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea. If Parthenia and Argalus get as close to perfection as our ‘erected wit’ can get us, and Helen and Amphialus demonstrate how easily the ‘infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it’, then the Arcadia’s central characters show us that it is not always easy even to tell the difference. That lesson applies as much to reading (and perhaps writing and rewriting) the Arcadia as to the representations and interpretations within it. Embassy points towards ideals and problems of representation that are inseparable from questions of true writing and right reading.

Gentili’s mimetic art of embassy and Sidney’s ambassadorial poetics belong to the same protestant platonic paradigm: they are both mimetic arts that truly represent sovereignty. We can have little doubt, either, that Sidney and Gentili discussed the paradigm that connects their ideas in those Socratic conversations Gentili cites. Together this leading diplomatic theorist and influential author arrived at a poetics of embassy. This insight supplies a significant intellectual context for these two important men. Gentili played a foundational role in the emerging European field of international law, and tracing his connection with Sidney exposes previously unappreciated philosophical and poetic aspects of his diplomatic theory. Reading Sidney’s works alongside the theory of embassy Gentili dedicated to him uncovers new links between Sidney’s well-known diplomatic interests and his influential poetics. It has often been suggested that Sidney, frustrated with his lack of public employment, turned to writing as an alternative to politics, and the connections I have traced here suggest that, for Sidney, political and poetic representation were truly analogous (if perhaps not equally desired) alternatives.53 The trope of embassy consequently provides access to Sidney’s conception of reading and writing. I have suggested how this bears on the revised Arcadia, and I also suggest that the implicit trope of embassy – and what it means to represent the queen – informs the intersection of politics, love, platonism and writing in Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. But the connection between Sidney and Gentili and their theories of embassy and poetry



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also has wider implications: it points towards a broader contemporary interface between diplomatic and literary representation. The analogies between the mimetic art of embassy and literary mimesis – so important to the exchange between leading poetic and diplomatic theorists Sidney and Gentili – promise to illuminate a far-reaching investigation into what it means to represent at the intersection of literature and diplomacy in early modern England.54

Notes and references 1. K. Hamilton and R. Langhorne (1995) The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London: Routledge), pp. 22–40; M.S. Anderson (1993) The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman), pp. 1–12, 41–2; G. Mattingly (1995) Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape). Note reservations in J. Watkins (2008) ‘Introduction’ in J. Watkins, ed., Toward a New Diplomatic History, special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38.1, 1–14 (4); but see D. Frigo (2000) ‘Introduction’ in D. Frigo, ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800, trans. A. Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 1–24 (p. 9). 2. I use the masculine pronoun for the ambassador throughout this chapter because that is the assumption made in early modern diplomatic treatises. 3. See Timothy Hampton’s groundbreaking and insightful analysis: T. Hampton (2009) Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Also: D. Biow (2002) Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 16, 101–52; A. de Wicquefort (1716) The Embassador and His Functions, trans. J. Digby (London: Bernard Lintott; repr. Leicester: Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, University of Leicester, 1997), p. 294; and, for Ambaxiator Brevilogus, Hampton (2009), pp. 18–19. 4. For typical treatments: K. Duncan-Jones (1991) Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton), p. 271; J.A. van Dorsten (1962) Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (London: Oxford University Press), p. 91. 5. See particularly: Hampton (2009); Watkins (2008); B. Charry and G. Shahani (2009), eds, Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham: Ashgate); J. Powell (2005) ‘“For Caesar’s I am”: Henrician Diplomacy and Representations of King and Country in Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 36.2, 415–31; J. Watkins (2009) ‘Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI and the Tragedy of Renaissance Diplomacy’ in C. Levin and J. Watkins Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the Elizabethan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 51–78; H. Adlington (2008) ‘Donne and Diplomacy’ in J. Shami, ed., Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press), pp. 187–216. 6. Hampton (2009), pp. 2–3.



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7. P. Sidney (1989) The Defence of Poesy in K. Duncan-Jones, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 212–50 (p. 217). Subsequent references are to the page numbers of this edition and are given in the body of the text. 8. Plato (1993) Republic, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 598b; Aristotle (1932) Poetics in W.H. Fyfe and W.R. Roberts, eds and trans., Aristotle, Poetics; ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime; Demetrius on Style (London: Heinemann), pp. 4–118 (1447a). 9. E. Kantorowicz (1965) ‘The Sovereignty of the Artist: A Note on Legal Maxims and Renaissance Theories of Art’ in Selected Studies (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin), pp. 352–65 (pp. 352–5). 10. K. Eden (1986) Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 156–76. 11. Kantorowicz (1965), pp. 360–2. 12. These particular equiparations date to Plato; see Plato (1993). 13. A. Gentili (1585) De Legationibus Libri Tres (London: Thomas Vautrollerius). 14. A. Wood (1691–92) Athenæ Oxoniensis, 2 vols (London: Thomas Bennet), I, p. 314; B. Kingsbury (1998) ‘Confronting Difference: The Puzzling Durability of Gentili’s Combination of Pragmatic Pluralism and Normative Judgement’, American Journal of International Law, 92, 713–23 (p. 715); T. Meron (1991) ‘Common Rights of Mankind in Gentili, Grotius and Suárez’, American Journal of International Law, 85, 110–16; P. Haggenmacher (1992) ‘Grotius and Gentili: A Reassessment of Thomas E. Holland’s Inaugural Lecture’, in H. Bull, B. Kingsbury and A. Roberts, eds, Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 133–76. 15. Hamilton and Langhorne (1995), p. 45. 16. T.E. Holland (1898) ‘Alberico Gentili’ in Studies in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 1–39; Gezina van der Molen’s biography is heavily indebted to Holland’s original research: G.H.J. van der Molen (1937) Alberico Gentili and the Development of International Law: His Life, Work and Times (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris). 17. A. Gentili (1593) ‘Commentatio’ in Ad Titulum Codicis de Maleficis (Oxford: Joseph Barnes), pp. 45–63; A. Gentili (1599) De Actoribus et de Abusu Mendacii Disputationes Duae (Hanau: G. Antonius?); see also J. Rainolds (1599) Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (Middelburg: Richard Schilders). 18. Hampton (2009), pp. 24–5, 164–5; C.N. Warren (2010) ‘Gentili, the Poets, and the Laws of War’ in B. Kingsbury and B. Straumann, eds, The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 146–62, with thanks to Christopher Warren for generously sharing his draft in advance of publication. 19. Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 113; F.J. Levy (1986) ‘Sidney Reconsidered’ in A.F. Kinney, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, CT: Archon), pp. 1–13 (pp. 2–3); W. A. Ringler (1986) ‘The Myth and the Man’ in J.A. van Dorsten, D. Baker-Smith and A.F. Kinney, eds, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Brill/Leiden University Press), pp. 3–15 (p. 5). 20. Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 113. 21. Levy (1986), pp. 2–3. 22. The quote is from Robert Stillman’s outstanding recent contribution to such accounts: R. Stillman (2008) Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance



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23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. vii. The only work I have found relating Sidney’s poetics to his ideas about embassy is R. Greene (1997) ‘Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy’ in E. Fowler and R. Greene, eds, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 176–202; Greene does not consider embassy as a mimetic art or Sidney’s relationship with Gentili. Reproduced T.E. Holland (1877) ‘Praefatio’ in T.E. Holland, ed., Alberici Gentilis De Iure Belli Libri Tres (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. v–xxi (p. viii). Holland (1898), p. 9; Duncan-Jones (1991), p. 191. Van der Molen (1937), p. 44. Holland (1898), pp. 28–9; A. Gentili (1582) De Iuris Interpretibus Dialogi Sex (London: Johannes Wolfius); the other legal expert consulted on the Mendoza case, Jean Hotman, was Leicester’s secretary between 1582 and 1584; see Hamilton and Langhorne (1995), p. 45. A. Gentili (1594) De Legationibus Libri Tres (Hanau: G. Antonius; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1924), fols A2v, A5r. I have silently expanded contractions. Subsequent references are to the folio and page numbers of this edition and are given in the body of the text. Translation is taken from the companion volume to this facsimile reprint: A. Gentili (1924) De Legationibus Libri Tres, introd. E. Nys and trans. G.J. Laing, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Classics of International Law 12, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press), II. Van der Molen and Artemis Gause are mistaken in thinking that this speech is the same as Gentili’s printed Oxford disputation Legalium Comitiorum Oxoniensium Actio; the mistake originates in van der Molen’s misreading of Holland’s notes; see van der Molen (1937), p. 279, note 36; Holland (1898), p. 11; A. Gause (2004) ‘Gentili, Alberico (1552–1608)’ in ODNB. F.S. Boas (1914) University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 192–3. S. Adams, ed. (1995) Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–1586 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society), p. 212. L. Jardine and A. Grafton (1990) ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past and Present, 129, 30–78 (36, 63–4); H.R. Woudhuysen (1981) ‘Leicester’s Literary Patronage: A Study of the English Court, 1578–1582’, unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, p. 72. See Stillman (2008), pp. 63–122; J. Ulreich (1982) ‘“The Poets Only Deliver”: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15.1, 67–84; A.L. DeNeef (1980) ‘Rereading Sidney’s Apology’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 10, 155–91. Stillman (2008); Å. Bergvall (1989) The ‘Enabling of Judgement’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet), pp. 42–59; S.K. Heninger (1983) ‘Sidney and Serranus’ Plato’, English Literary Renaissance, 13.2, 141–61; G. Warkentin (1990) ‘Sidney’s Authors’ in M.J.B. Allen and others, eds, Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements (New York: AMS Press), pp. 69–89. Plato (1578) Platonis Opera Quae Extant Omnia, ed. H. Estienne and trans. and introd. J. de Serres, 3 vols (Geneva: Henri Etienne), I, fols **.ir–**.vv (fols **.vv).



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35. Plato (1993), 595a–608a; Plato (1994) Gorgias, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 502c, 454e–455a, 463a–d. 36. Plato (1993), 607c–e; Plato (1994), 503a–b. 37. He has in mind Plato (1994), 450b–e. 38. Plato (1994), 463d. 39. Plato (1930–35) The Republic, introd. and trans. P. Shorey, 2 vols (London: Heinemann), II, 597e. 40. Plato (1993), p. 348 (597e); S. Orgel (1975) The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 40, 89; F.A. Yates (1975) Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge). 41. Plato (1953) Cratylus in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H.N. Fowler, rev. edn. (London: Heinemann), pp. 7–191 (408a–b). 42. Gentili must be referring to 29b; see Plato (1952) Timaeus, in Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, ed. and trans. R.G. Bury, rev. edn. (London: Heinemann), pp. 16–253 (29b); for the other translations see: Plato (1581) Omnia D. Platonis Opera, trans. M. Ficino (Venice: H. Scotus), p. 405; Plato (1561) Platonis Atheniensis Philosophi Summi ac Penitus Divini Opera, trans. J. Cornarius (Basil: H. Frobenius and N. Episcopius), p. 734. 43. Plato (1578), III, p. 29. 44. Plato (1578), I, pp. 378–80. 45. Heninger (1983), p. 159; M.J. Doherty (1991) The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), pp. 133–80. 46. Stillman (2008), pp. 115–18. 47. Heninger (1983), p. 158. 48. Divine fury leads Heninger (1983) to discount de Serres’s influence on Sidney’s poetics (p. 156), but de Serres glosses divine inspiration in line with his earlier treatment of poetry before Cratylus (I, p. 528). 49. Greene (1997), p. 182; Greene focuses on diplomatic mediation not representation. 50. Warren (2010), p. 159. 51. J. Bernard (1996–97) ‘Metanarrative and Desire in the New Arcadia’, Sidney Newsletter & Journal, 14.2, 33–42 (34); M. McCanles (1989) The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham NC: Duke University Press), p. 157. 52. P. Sidney (1987) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), ed. V. Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 28. Subsequent references are to the page numbers of this edition and are given in the body of the text. 53. Among others: B. Worden (1996) The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale University Press), p. 65; D. Alwes (2004) Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of Delaware Press), p. 95. 54. I would like to thank the Arts Humanities Research Council and St John’s College, Cambridge for enabling me undertake this research; also Raphael Lyne, Jason Powell, Christopher Warren, and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments.



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Gender, Politics and Diplomacy: Women, News and Intelligence Networks in Elizabethan England James Daybell

An increasing body of scholarship has begun to elucidate early modern women’s involvement in the circulation of news, and to understand more fully female roles in news networks, as gatherers, readers, purveyors and writers of manuscript and printed news.1 What is less clear, however, is firstly the extent to which these kinds of informal news-related and networking activities intersected with the world of diplomacy, statecraft and intelligence gathering, which has traditionally been viewed as male, and secondly, the nature and degree of female political influence. Women could not be appointed as formal ambassadors, and the ‘boy’s own’ world of the spy has largely been depicted as a female-free zone.2 Taking this as a starting place it is not too difficult to populate these traditional narratives with female protagonists and to find examples of women engaged in diplomatic and intelligencing activities, operating through informal and familial channels. Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, as I have argued elsewhere, was at the centre of a dense news and intelligence network, receiving regular dispatches from court commentators, members of Elizabeth I’s Privy Chamber and correspondents throughout Europe. News played a vital function to the countess during the period that she and her husband were keepers of Mary, Queen of Scots.3 It has also been shown that the calligrapher Esther Inglis used the occasion of presenting manuscript books as gifts to Elizabeth I and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex for diplomatic ends.4 Meanwhile, Mary Phelippes, wife of the master cryptographer Thomas Phelippes took over some of her husband’s correspondence and intelligence gathering activities after his imprisonment in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot for his continued correspondence with the fugitive Catholic Hugh Owens.5 Thus, a clear prima facie case can be made for integrating women into this kind of ‘high politics’ diplomatic history. One of the aims of this 101



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essay, however, is to delineate the sorts of roles that women could play in this arena as intermediaries, ‘information-brokers’ and in informal ambassadorial capacities. Women were able to operate through networks of family and other social contacts, and were often integral to the lubricating of socio-political relations through a range of secondary patronage activities related to sociability. Letter-writing, in that it directly documents female networking activity, represents a crucial way by which women fostered networks – and women’s letters and letter-writing form the primary focus of this essay – but equally, functions such as visiting, hospitality and gift-giving were vital in cementing personal connections. Where women’s own letters do not survive, the kinds of roles in which women engaged can be reconstructed through incidental reports in general correspondence, ambassadorial dispatches and diaries, as well as records of trials and examinations. Allied to this exploration of female epistolary networking is an examination of the gendered nature of women’s involvement in news and intelligence activities, which raises numerous questions. How far were women’s roles circumscribed or shaped by issues of gender? To what extent were early modern news and intelligence networks gendered? Could women operate outside of family networks? What was the purpose and nature of news and intelligence? How did the gathering and circulating of news and intelligence function within patronage networks? In what ways were women able to engage in political and diplomatic spheres? All too often these kinds of female activities are viewed by some historians as rather nebulous, as background functions away from the hard-faced world of policy-making; women’s influence it seems is sometimes regarded as intangible, distant from definitions of power as formal and direct, qualities connoted by office.6 Nevertheless, the cultural turn of ‘new Tudor political history’ with its emphasis on the personal, and the non-institutional nature of political relations has facilitated a crucial reassessment of female influence and the types of power and authority they could wield within the family, society and on the wider public stage.7 To this end, this essay focuses on three distinct areas, groups of women or kinds of activity in order to examine female involvement in informal intelligence networks. First, it surveys the ways in which women letterwriters provided a vital channel of communication linking the centre and the periphery through which news and intelligence flowed, and considers the extent to which such activities could propel women into diplomatic activities. Secondly, it examines the broader political activities of women at court. Close attendance on the royal person provided women of the Privy Chamber with access to the intimate secrets of the



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inner sanctum of royal power. Female influence with the queen was also widely recognized by contemporaries. Acting as brokers of news and information women were thus central to the political and patronage system; as trusty body servants, it will be shown, they were employed by Elizabeth as intermediaries in a range of ways. Finally, the essay briefly explores female involvement in Catholic postal and communication networks, illustrating the ways in which recusant women harboured and supported Catholic priests, and also sought to influence pan-European diplomacy.

News, networking and diplomacy A study of sixteenth-century women’s letter-writing demonstrates the complex ways in which women participated in wide-ranging news-related activities. Women were the recipients of newsletters: Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria received lengthy newsletters from George Chamberlain and Sir Francis Englefield; Alice Stanley heard of ‘court news’ from her nephew Sir Robert Spencer; Elizabeth Ralegh thanked Robert Cecil for his packet of letters which brought her news of the fire at Durham house.8 Husbands frequently included news of events in London and the court in dispatches to wives.9 Thus, John Thynne reported to his wife Joan the Earl of Essex’s revolt in 1601.10 The letters women wrote themselves frequently contained news of family, household and locality, as well as items of ‘national’ interest. For example, Margaret Hill wrote regularly from London to her cousin Richard Carnsew in the West Country, keeping him informed of events in the capital, and in one of her letters she enclosed a newsbook and a copy of the Earl of Essex’s funeral sermon.11 Letters of this nature show that women were among the early writers of letters that mixed news and rumour with accounts of family and friends, a form that developed into the professional newsletters of the early-seventeenth century.12 Furthermore, female correspondents were central to maintaining political and kinship relations, contacts that could usefully be brought to bear on other occasions; and conveyance of news in letters was one of the chief ways in which these networks were strengthened. News itself provided a stimulus to letter-writing, forging links between the capital and the provinces. As a commodity, news kept people apace with current events at a local, regional, national and international level, and functioned as important political capital.13 Thus, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland implored Sir Julius Caesar to write to her with news when occasion served.14 Lady Anne Newdigate took great care in cultivating



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court contacts by correspondence, an activity that she rather than her husband undertook.15 Female letter-writers commonly kept in touch informally with government officials and male heads of families by sending letters of thanks, gifts or conveying news. Although seemingly ‘familiar’ in content, many of these letters were in fact written to oil the wheels of patronage and, therefore, assume an added significance in the context of the petitioning activity. Indeed, ‘networking’ letters of this kind often followed, and sometimes preceded, requests for favour. In 1595 the Countess of Shrewsbury congratulated Robert Cecil on his appointment as Principal Secretary, and in later years sought to forward numerous suits through him.16 Lady Elizabeth Knightley sent gifts of two boxes of conserve of quinces which accompanied letters to both Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex.17 Countless letters of social courtesy survive written to powerful men such as Burghley, Robert Cecil and Julius Caesar, offering thanks for favours granted, sending greetings and commendations to their families and wives, and begging for continued remembrance in their suits. The significant degree to which women utilized these social connections is readily sketched by an analysis of letters of petition or request, which reveals the parameters of women’s interventions as political intermediaries on behalf of family, friends, clients and wider contacts. Well over 1000 such missives survive for the Elizabethan period alone, written by female letter-writers interceding in a broad range of patronage, judicial and business-related matters.18 Alice, Countess of Derby wrote to Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Court of Requests, in support of a free school to be erected in Dent in Yorkshire, and pressed Robert Cecil permit one Captain Philips to have a military company; Anne, Countess of Warwick likewise petitioned Caesar for an old servant, William Dillon, that he receive a ‘speedy trial’.19 Frances Devereux approached Lord Keeper Puckering for an office for a cousin; while Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk recommended to Burghley that he take her kinsman, Charles Chamberlain into his service.20 This kind of direct petitioning activity seldom happened cold – this was not a sixteenth-century equivalent to modern-day cold-calling – but in most cases women utilized existing relationships, channels assiduously maintained through regular contact. While personal interactions and occasions of sociability helped to cement alliances, where this was not possible many women relied on letter-writing to foster positive bonds and keep open lines of communication. One of the best documented examples of this kind of epistolary activity over a significant period of time is the correspondence of Lady Elizabeth Russell.21 Well over 50 of her letters survive for the years 1566



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to 1608, mainly addressed to her brother-in-law and nephew, father and son, William and Robert Cecil, with whom she frequently kept in touch. As such her letters provide a remarkable insight into the ways in which familial connections were sustained and mobilized for political ends.22 Familial in tone, often matriarchal (especially those addressed to her nephew), the letters mix social niceties with a combination of news, report and counsel, as well as requests for advice and the supplication of suits. Writing to William Cecil in 1566, the then Lady Hoby thanked her brother-in-law for his kindnesses to her and her husband: ‘Althoughe wordes be verie small recompens for yowr so manie benefitts and curtesies . . . thus by writing I thought it my parte to shew some litel part of gratefullnes this waie till occasion serve otherwaies by deede to recompens ye least part to you or some of yours’.23 The occasion of her writing was almost ceremonial; the letter itself acting as a gift of remembrance. Yet beyond the staged courtesies of social decorum, Lady Russell’s correspondence also reveals an interest in patronage, domestic politics and even foreign policy. In a letter to Robert Cecil on the death of his wife, the Dowager Lady Russell consoled her nephew recommending that he abate his melancholy through a strategy of diversion. She added in a postscript that she in no way liked the current policy in Spain, informing him that while it may have had a good beginning she feared ill success in the end.24 This example in particular is typical of how her correspondence blended the ‘personal’ and the ‘private’ with the ‘public’ and the ‘political’. In January 1599 during a rift between Robert Cecil, Sir William Knollys, Lord Admiral Charles Howard and the Earl of Essex, Lady Russell offered to come to court to act as an intermediary and do him ‘any good offices’.25 Another letter, written in October 1599 at the time of Essex’s imprisonment on his return from Ireland warned Cecil of the ‘most vile words that had been openly uttered’ about him; she was not willing to ‘commit’ them ‘to paper’, but would inform him all in person in order that ‘being warned’ he was ‘half armed’.26 Regular contact also provided opportunities for Lady Russell to act as a political intermediary with her influential kinsmen, and her letters are teaming with suits for others: she wrote on behalf of her neighbour, the publisher and book-seller Ascanius Yetsweirt, to become a master printer; requested a knighthood for another neighbour, Andrew Rogers; forwarded Matthew Day to become Master of Requests; asked that John Borlase be excused taking up the post of Sheriff of Buckinghamshire; and presented numerous staunch Protestant candidates for ecclesiastical positions (among them the Cambridge scholar and tutor in her household, Edmund Rockray, her distant kinsman James Morrice and the preacher William Day).27



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The degree to which epistolary activities could thrust women into the diplomatic arena is further illustrated by the example of Penelope Lady Rich, sister to the ill-fated Earl of Essex, who in 1589 was intimately involved in her brother’s diplomatic overtures to James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth I’s eventual successor. At this time, Lady Rich secretly corresponded with the Scottish King through the auspices of Richard Douglas (nephew of the Scottish ambassador to England, Archibald Douglas) and Jean Hotman, a former secretary of the Earl of Leicester, who acted as an emissary.28 The weekly letters written in secret code – Lady Rich using the name ‘Ryalta’ – were on Essex’s behalf and addressed to Douglas to be passed onto James VI, who ‘commended much the fineness of her wit, the invention and well writing’.29 The whole episode, however, failed and James lost interest when Douglas, whose credit had always been poor with the Scottish king, proved indiscrete and Burghley soon learned of the moves from his agent in Edinburgh, Thomas Fowler.30 Analysis of Lady Rich’s correspondence more broadly reveals a Europewide network of correspondents, which included Hotman and his wife Jeanne (a correspondence conducted in French), two French noblewomen, Mme de Mirabeau and Mme Chateauneuf, and Antonio Pérez, the exiled former secretary of Philip II of Spain, to whom she wrote in Spanish.31 She also received newsletters from Anthony Bacon and he likely sent her a copy of Henry Cuffe’s ‘True relacion’, a partisan account of the victory at Cadiz penned by Essex’s secretary and circulated in manuscript form for propagandist purposes.32 Her own letter to Queen Elizabeth, written in support of her brother after his fall from favour, was likewise widely disseminated in manuscript and print to drum up (in the first stage at least) support for the beleaguered earl.33 In combination these activities reveal well Lady Rich’s intercession in the political arena and the sophistication with which she operated through the medium of the letter. Yet her example is not unusual; other women engaged in similar activities. Historians have, for example, long recognized Mildred Cecil’s influence over her husband Lord Burghley in the dispensation of wardships, an influence for which she was paid. Most recently Pauline Croft has shown Lady Cecil’s role as an intermediary in several areas where her influence with her husband could be used to good effect, including Scottish affairs and the Habsburg marriage project, and that she was influential with the queen in her capacity as a Lady of Honour in the Privy Chamber.34 Likewise, Lady Anne Glemham, a woman whose influence stemmed from her relationship with her father Thomas Sackville, the Lord Treasurer, sought to exert herself in numerous patronage suits, and she appears to have received payments



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from clients for favours solicited. In 1603, Robert Cecil wrote to his secretary Michael Hickes, directing him to give Lady Glemham ‘a purse’ of £100 to deal directly with her father.35 Alongside her patronage suits she was also interested in wider political affairs, and in early 1600 wrote to Julius Caesar asking him to send her a note of all ‘French causes’ and cases of ‘piracy’ between the French and the English that came before him and the other commissioners at the high court of the admiralty.36 In each of these instances, we are dealing with women whose networks were based on an overlapping nexus of familial relationships and court connections, the latter providing an important lever of political influence.

Women and the court It has long been understood by historians that women were integral to the political life of early modern courts as Queens regnant, Queens consort, princesses, ladies-in-waiting, maids-of-honour and even mistresses.37 Olwen Hufton in a survey of recent studies of female courtiers throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has argued that ‘a court without women is like a body without a nervous system. Women are part of a vital system of communications through which messages are transmitted, channels opened up.’38 Scholars of the Elizabethan court have rightly emphasized the role of women as political intermediaries, brokers of patronage and information.39 Pam Wright argued that women of the Privy Chamber were ‘barometers of the Queen’s mood’.40 In so arguing she followed Robert Beale, Clerk to the Privy Council, who in his 1592 ‘Treatise of the office of a councellor and principal secretarie to her majestie’ advised Sir Edward Wooton: learne before your accesse her majesties disposition by some in the Privie chamber with whom you must keepe credit for that will stand you in much steede and yet yield not too much to their importunitie for sutes, for so you may be blamed, nevertheless pleasure them when convenientlie you may.41 Certainly Roger Manners in a letter of advice to his niece Lady Bridget Manners considered that her acceptance into Queen Elizabeth’s service in 1589 as a Maid-of-Honour, showed the Queen’s ‘great and spetiall favor’ towards her, which was ‘to the exceeding great comfort of all your frends’, who ‘shall rejoice of your well doing’. In his letter Manners outlined a set of rules for her conduct in ‘her majesties privy chamber’.



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Despite a warning that she should ‘be no medeller in the causes of others’ the implicit expectation was that she would be well-placed to favour family and friends.42 In practice too women of the Privy Chamber were the focus of suitors’ attentions because of their perceived intimacy with the monarch, and approached to speak with or pass on letters to the queen. Elizabeth Bourne implored ‘M[ist]r[e]s Morgan’ to ‘delyver me a letter to good M[ist]r[es]s Blanche parry’, adding that she hoped she would ‘entreat her most ernestlie to move her ma[jes]tie’.43 Thomas Edwardes described to Elizabeth Wolley the role of ‘mestrys Raclyffe’, presumably Mary Radcliffe ‘Keeper of the Jewels’, in forwarding her letters to the queen: ‘I rec[eive]d a l[ett]re directed to mestrys Raclcyffe who impartinge theffecte thereof to the queene her Mag[es]tie commanded to see the l[ett]res takinge greate paynes in reading’.44 Furthermore, those close to the queen were often present when suitors’ letters were read and therefore well situated to support a letter by favouring a writer’s cause. Bishop Thomas Bentham wrote to Katherine Ashley, an influential woman of Elizabeth’s bedchamber, informing her that, ‘necessitye haithe compelled me to wryte unto the Quens highnes a rud supplication whiche I beseche you helpe to deliver yf nede shall requyre or els when it is delivered to speak a good word to prosper yt’.45 Frances, Countess of Hertford informed her husband, ‘I delyvered your letter after I had rede it to her maiesty’.46 Women were thus at the heart of court networks, integral to the patronage system and the promotion of suits. The court was also an important hub for news. Being present at court provided women access to news of national and international focus, either by attending on the queen, or through contact with the many courtiers and diplomats who thronged the court. Anne Talbot (née Herbert) thought the court a place to ‘learn’ news ‘worthey the wrytynge’.47 The newsletters of several female courtiers survive, typically discussing similar topics to men’s letters, such as the monarch’s health and moods, court progresses, fluctuations in royal favour, aristocratic marriages, appointments to office, and military affairs. Frances Seymour (née Howard) informed her husband the Earl of Hertford of the queen’s recent fall from her horse, but assured him that the progress into Sussex would go ahead as planned, but that there is no more talk of her going to Wanstead, but instead to Nonsuch.48 Margaret Arundel wrote to her brother Francis Willoughby of the Earl of Leicester’s entertainment of the court at Kenilworth.49 Lady Elizabeth Wolley acted as a court commentator for her father and brother when they were based in Surrey.50 Bess of Hardwick’s female court correspondents provided her with intimate firsthand accounts of the goings-on in the Privy Chamber.51 Margaret Clifford’s



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court correspondence to her husband brims with gossip and rumour as well as descriptions of events of national and international importance. Her letters, however, are not indiscriminate in the news they relay; instead the Countess of Cumberland’s concern was to provide information of interest to her husband, himself a naval commander. One such letter begins with details of business personal to the Cliffords: the countess’s efforts to negotiate with Robert Cecil about Knaresborough Castle, and Cecil’s attempt to move the queen concerning the earl of Cumberland’s ‘going to sea’. After an aside about the queen’s tendency to alter her mind, the remainder of the letter reports on military matters: the fleet, the campaign in France and appointments of commanders. The letters of these individual women illustrate the ways in which women at court were able to tap into intelligence networks and participate in the wider geographical dissemination of news. News of this nature – the ups and downs of royal favour and details of life at court and its inhabitants – was also political capital within a patronage society. Yet this recognition of the prominent roles that women of the Elizabethan Privy Chamber played in the dispensing of royal patronage has often been emphasized while excluding the very same women from the realms of diplomacy and policy-making, arenas in which their male counterpoints so conspicuously intervened in the reign of Henry VIII.52 Wright, for example, argued that with the removal of the Dry Stamp from the Privy Chamber under Elizabeth, female Chamberers were excluded from administrative duties. Once a ‘cockpit of faction’ the Elizabethan Privy Chamber instead became a ‘cocoon’ for the queen, a stable place of withdrawal from the welter of politics, a fundamental assumption little challenged by later reassessments of the Elizabethan court by Charlotte Merton and Joan Greenbaum Goldsmith.53 More recently this consensus has been ruptured by Natalie Mears who has convincingly shown that gentlewomen of the Elizabethan Privy Chamber were indeed involved in diplomatic relations and policy-making activities, acting in ambassadorial capacities during the queen’s early courtships and more widely operating as messengers and conduits for information.54 In particular, she ably demonstrates Lady Mary Sidney’s involvement in Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations with the Spanish ambassador for Archduke Charles in 1559, and the support of Eric XIV of Sweden’s suit in 1562 by Katherine Ashley and Dorothy Broadbelte, arguing that by providing ad hoc counsel such women were involved in the central issues of Elizabeth’s reign. The nature and significance of the kinds of roles played by female members of the Elizabethan Privy Chamber are especially well-documented



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by the career of Mary, Lady Scudamore (née Shelton), who served as a chamberer of the Privy Chamber, a place to which she was appointed on 1 January 1571.55 More is known about her than perhaps any other woman of the Privy Chamber, not least because of the survival of an important body of Scudamore papers among the ‘Duchess of Norfolk’s deposit’ in the Chancery Exhibits at The National Archives.56 Her influence with the queen is suggested by a letter from Thomas, Earl of Sussex calling her back to court after Lady Dorothy Stafford broke her leg in a riding accident: ‘for I fear untill you come her majestie shall not in the night have for the most part so good rest as she wyll take after your comyng’.57 This obvious close standing with Elizabeth polarized opinion, her enemies jealously describing her as ‘a barbarous, brazenfaced woman’, her friends as one of ‘a Trinity of Ladies’, which included Blanch Parry and Anne, Countess of Warwick, who were ‘able to worke miracles’.58 George Boleyn, dean of Lichfield was scathing of her in writing to the Earl of Shrewsbury: ‘yet is she one that is wonte to delaye more then needes, and looseth many a tide for the takynge . . . there is no sure confidence in her’, he warned the earl, adding: But as her speeche is fayre & as smoothe as a reede, so do I beseche yor ho[nour] to take this as a watche worde spoken vnder benedicite . . . For women be waspish and will do a man more harme whan they be angered than good whan they be quiet.59 Political disquiet aside, she certainly received considerable financial perquisites for her role as an intermediary, something that in itself may have garnered censorious comments.60 Her intercession for friends and clients is apparent from the considerable correspondence that survives. She wrote to Julius Caesar on behalf of her ‘good frend’ John Pettus concerning his case in the Court of Requests; and in 1576 approached Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy on behalf of Nicholas Fermor, a client of the Earl of Leicester, for a place as under-sheriff of Norfolk should Gawdy himself be appointed Sheriff.61 Using her friendship with Mary and Gilbert Talbot, in 1600 she forwarded one Peter Burrows to be chaplain to the Earl of Shrewsbury.62 It is also clear that her favour was widely sought: Charles Cornwallis sought her advice on a suitable match for his niece; Eadith Beale sought her mediation with the Queen for a suit that she wished brought before her majesty; and Fulke Greville wished her to pass on a note of his gratitude to the Queen.63 Lady Scudamore also acted as a useful conduit for two-way communication between the monarch and the



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nobility, and here again news proved a useful lubricant. In 1592, for example, she wrote to her friends the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, informing them that the queen had been ‘highly contented’ with their letter and ‘humble duties’, passing on the monarch’s plans to venture on a progress during the next year, and her intention to the visit the Shrewsburys en route.64 Moreover, it is clear that the queen used Lady Scudamore as a go-between. Indeed, she was a personal messenger for Elizabeth on numerous occasions. In 1588 she delivered a message conveying the queen’s opinions on foreign policy to James Croft, the Gentleman Pensioner, on occasion of his accompanying his father, Sir James, on his peace commission to the Netherlands.65 Between 1584 and 1585, she mediated with the Queen on the repayment of family debts by George Goring; and in 1602 communicated to Henry Clare the queen’s promise that he be awarded the surveyorship of the Tower on the death of the office’s current incumbent.66 What this illustrates is not only the varied complexity of Lady Scudamore’s roles, but also more broadly the ways in which women of the Privy Chamber undertook quasi-ambassadorial responsibilities. Royal favour and intimacy of this sort, as David Starkey has shown, had important symbolic resonance, allowing female body servants legitimately charged to do the queen’s business to act with the charisma of royal authority.67

Catholic women’s networks Finally, outside of the charmed circles of the court, women were active participants in the underground Catholic networks that developed during Elizabeth’s reign. While Catholic men had to conform publicly or outwardly to Anglicanism, recusant women, as several studies have shown, fostered a private, household-based Catholicism and were pivotal in sustaining a traditional Catholic faith.68 Operating within the locus of the household, women were perhaps able to operate more freely than their male counterparts, without arousing suspicion. In the same way, clandestine letters disguised and addressed in women’s hands passed without notice of the authorities. In Catholic circles, women were certainly active in hiding priests and conducting clandestine correspondences.69 The recusant Elizabeth Vaux (née Roper), for example, harboured the Jesuit priests John Gerard and Henry Garnett.70 Through her correspondence she also sought to foster a spirit of survival among other Catholic families, writing a letter of comfort to the recusant Agnes, Lady Wenman (d. 1617) assuring her that there would soon be ‘toleration for religion’. The letter was of particular interest in that was



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intercepted by the authorities and led to Lady Wenman twice being examined. In her own examination, Elizabeth Vaux admitted to writing to Lady Wenman saying that ‘Tottenham would turn French’; and Agnes’s husband, Sir Richard Wenman’s response was to condemn the communication, accusing Elizabeth Vaux of trying to pervert his wife.71 Elizabeth Vaux was later embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot and wrote to her father Sir John Roper amazed at the accusations, saying that there was nothing in her letters that would implicate her; the letter itself as well as one of her father’s was delivered by Thomas Race, a London Porter who was questioned for his own part in carrying the missives.72 Catholic women it appears could be instrumental in conveying clandestine letters throughout Europe, connecting priests operating in England with Rome and providing channels of communication for English recusants; and Nadine Akkerman shows elsewhere in this volume the ways in which the mail system of Alexandrine of Taxis was used by the Catholic league.73 John Gerard mentions in his autobiography receiving daily news letters from Elizabeth Vaux.74 Another well-known recusant, her sister-in-law, Anne Vaux, daughter of William Vaux, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden, established a line of communication with Henry Garnett, arranging for letters to be passed to him through his gaoler during his imprisonment in the Tower in the aftermath of the gunpowder plot. The letters themselves were outwardly innocuous, dealing with everyday matters such as his spectacles, but contained secret messages written in invisible ink (made using orange juice) at the bottom of the page.75 They aroused suspicions, however, not only because of the size of the paper on which they were written, but also because the insignificance of their contents appeared strikingly odd. The letters were therefore examined and utilized as evidence in Garnett’s trial. Anne Vaux also corresponded with Guy Fawkes, whom she sheltered at her house in Enfield Chase; her letters to him too were intercepted.76 Indeed, much of what we know about these epistolary activities survives because it fell into the hands of the prosecuting authorities, partly because of the notoriety of the correspondents. Gender in these instances did little to allow women to evade surveillance, yet presumably there was much covert correspondence that we know very little about simply because it successfully travelled under the radar. Nevertheless, Catholic women operating through the household were a central component in clandestine Catholic networks that stretched across Europe, with some women able to wield influence at a more public, diplomatic level. During Mary Queen of Scots’ imprisonment in England, her female attendants played a pivotal role in



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having correspondence secretly conveyed and were a vital conduit for news, keeping her abreast of events outside the confines of the walls that incarcerated her.77 Jane, Duchess of Feria and her husband provided Philip II of Spain with invaluable intelligence concerning England and its queen, which was gathered through the duchess’s network of kin.78 After the abortive northern uprising in 1569, Anne, Countess of Northumberland enjoyed some influence as a high profile Catholic exile on the continent. Based in Mechelen from 1571 (and later in Brussels, Liège and Luxembourg) the countess maintained a correspondence with other Catholics who had fled Elizabethan England in the aftermath of the Papal Bull against the Queen.79 At this time she wrote to the soldier and exile Sir Thomas Stucely encouraging him to persevere in his causes against Queen Elizabeth at a point when he was encouraging Spanish and Papal support for an expedition to Ireland.80 Evidence that she conducted diplomatic correspondence in multiple languages comes in the guise of a letter from Nicholas Sanders, in which he recommended to her service one Mr Fenn for writing letters in Latin to the Pope or the King of Spain (from whom she received a monthly pension), and one Dr Knott for correspondence in Italian and French.81 She also appears to have waged an epistolary campaign for foreign intervention in Scotland to aid Mary, Queen of Scots. According to John Lee the Pope sent a letter to the countess in April 1572 informing her that he would be sending 10,000 crowns to be sent to Scotland.82 While her husband remained alive north of the border she acted as a conduit for news of current events in Europe, and mobilized efforts to secure his release from his Scottish captors.83 In July 1572, for example, a month before her husband was beheaded the countess wrote to the French king to be a means to Queen Elizabeth.84 Her diplomatic initiatives continued after the loss of her husband. The dowager countess was in regular contact with the Catholic exile William Cotton during the mid 1570s; her letters which dealt with events in France, Spain and the Netherlands were at least partly written in cipher, with symbols used to disguise the identities of people and places, and were considered important enough for the English state to intercept and attempt to decipher them.85 In early 1577 she moved Don John of Austria to intervene in Scotland in favour of Mary, encouraging him to marry the Scottish queen.86 Thus, in exile this Catholic noblewoman working through powerful contacts sought at the very highest level to encourage foreign intervention in the British Isles, while simultaneously maintaining lines of communication with various conspirators among her fellow recusant exiles.



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Cumulatively these three different areas of focus – on women and news networks, the court and Catholic communications – build up a vivid picture of the range of ways in which women were able to operate and exert influence in the realm of diplomacy and intelligence. Clearly traditional narratives must now incorporate the various roles and complex activities played in these arenas by early modern women. One of the strongest themes to emerge from this analysis, however, is the way in which all these women appear to have worked through family and kinship networks, often acting as a key part of co-ordinated family patronage strategies, operating to complement the actions of male relatives, and even drawing on distinctly female networks.87 Lady Rich interceded diplomatically for her brother; women of the Privy Chamber sent news to and operated on behalf of husbands and other family members; and it was through her own kin that the Duchess of Feria obtained English intelligence that was relayed to Spain. News gathering and letter-writing were important, informal social functions central to oiling the wheels of social networks and keeping open lines of communication. News and intelligence were invaluable commodities that provided women significant political capital. Social standing and positions at court similarly brought influence, as women close to the monarch and those related to powerful officials and noblemen were viewed as significant political intermediaries, useful conduits to power. Gender was also in some ways an advantage, one that sometimes allowed women to operate below the radar of surveillance, and that under a female monarch structurally allowed them access to the kinds of intelligence and information denied to men because of their own gender. Moreover, it is clear that women during Elizabeth’s reign were at the heart of political and diplomatic events, intervening in matters of domestic and foreign policy; they were used in quasi-ambassadorial and diplomatic activities by the queen; and by virtue of their religion were drawn into Catholic plots and conspiracies.

Notes and references 1.

James Daybell (2004) ‘“Suche newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett”: The News Networks of Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527–1608)’, in James Daybell, ed., Women and Politics in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 114–31; Marcus Nevitt (1999) ‘Women in the Business of Revolutionary News: Elizabeth Alkin, “Parliament Joan”, and the Commonwealth Newsbook’, in Joad Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers,



Conclusion

2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass), pp. 84–108; idem (2006) Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate). The classic account is Garrett Mattingly (1955; 1965) Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin). See also, Malcolm R. Thorpe and A.J. Slavin (1994) eds, Politics, Religion & Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Delamar Jensen (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 27) (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994); Gary M. Bell (1998) ‘Tudor-Stuart Diplomatic History and the Henrician Experience’ in Charles Carlton, Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson and Joseph S. Block, eds, State, Sovereigns & Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin (Stroud: Sutton), pp. 25–43; Daniela Frigo (2000) ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Daybell ‘Suche newes’. Tricia Bracher (2004) ‘Esther Inglis and the English Succession Crisis of 1599’, in Daybell, ed., Women and Politics, pp. 132–46. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Cecil MS, 123 fol. 132, 119 fol. 65, 197 fol. 41, p. 1144; Historical Manuscripts Commission (1883–1973), Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House Hertfordshire, 24 vols., 19, pp. 386–7; William Richardson (2004) ‘Phelippes, Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). James Daybell (2004) ‘Introduction: Rethinking Women and Politics in Early Modern England’ in Daybell, ed., Women and Politics, pp. 1–20 (pp. 1–2). Barbara J. Harris (1990) ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, Historical Journal, 33, 259–81; Sharon Kettering (1989) ‘The Patronage Power of Early Modern French Noblewomen’, Historical Journal, 32, 4, 817–41. The National Archives, PRO, SP15/18/29, SP15/18/45, SP15/18/52 (see also SP12/14/36); British Library, Additional MS, 25079, fol. 59; BL, Add. MS, 6177, fol. 65. James Daybell (2006) Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 153. Alison D. Wall (1981) ‘An Account of the Essex Revolt, February 1601’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54, 131–3. TNA, PRO SP46/71/223, 224, 226, 228. Kendal Record Office, WD/Hoth/Box 44. On newsletters see Richard Cust (1986) ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 112, 60–90 (pp. 62–3); F.J. Levy (1982) ‘How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550–1640’, The Journal of British Studies, XXI, 2, 11–34 (pp. 20–3); idem (1999) ‘The Decorum of News’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass), pp. 12–38; Ian Atherton, ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, in Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society, pp. 39–65. BL, Add. MS, 12506 fol. 231. Vivienne Larminie (2001) ‘Fighting for Family in a Patronage Society: The Epistolary Armoury of Anne Newdigate (1574–1618)’, in James Daybell, ed.,



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16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 94–108 (pp. 96–7). Cecil MS, 32, fol. 48, 80 fol. 9, 84, fol. 75, 86, fol. 12, 91, fol. 105, 92, fol. 1, 99, fol. 114, 135, fols. 129 and 150, 250, fol. 16. Cecil MS, 78 fol. 69, 179 fol. 97. Daybell, Women Letter-Writers, ch. 9. BL, Add. MS, 12506, fols. 185, 49; Cecil MS, 88, fol. 98. BL, Harleian MS, 6997, fol. 164; (1888) HMC, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (London: HMSO), 2, p. 173. On Elizabeth Russell see, Felicity Heal (1996) ‘Reputation and Honour in Court and Country: Lady Elizabeth Russell and Sir Thomas Hoby’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, pp. 161–78; Pamela Priestland (2004) ‘Russell, Elizabeth, Lady Russell’, ODNB. Elizabeth Farber (1977) ‘The Letters of Lady Elizabeth Russell (1540–1609)’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University). TNA, PRO SP15/13/10. Cecil MS, 175, fol. 92. Cecil MS, 176, fol. 88. Cecil MS, 179, fol. 92. Cecil MS, 63, fol. 7, 59, fol. 93, 41, fol. 74; TNA, PRO SP12/44/37, PRO SP12/77/11; Cecil MS 25, fol. 51. Cecil MS, 18, fol. 51. Paul E.J. Hammer (1999) The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 91. Cecil MS, 18, fol. 51. Code names used in the correspondence, which were added in Burghley’s own hand include: Lady Rich (‘Ryalta’), Essex (‘Ernestus’), Lord Rich (‘Richardo’), James VI (‘Victor’), Jean Hotman (‘Orlando’), Richard Douglas (‘Robert Dalle’), Queen Elizabeth (‘Pallas’), Henry Constable (‘Sconsolato’). Writing to her servant Madame Jeanne Hotman she referred to a reply for the ‘disguised prince’, a passing allusion to her correspondence with James VI (‘je vous ay enuoie vne reponce pour le prince cache, ce cela qui est san supscription’): Haarlem, Teylers Stichting, Hotman Letters, No. 44, 11 Sept [1589]. In addition to her letters, a portrait of Lady Rich (possibly by Nicholas Hilliard) was conveyed to James by Henry Constable: R.C. Strong (1959) ‘Queen Elizabeth, the earl of Essex and Nicholas Hilliard’, Burlington Magazine 101, 145–6; Hammer, Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics, p. 91; H.R. Woudhuysen (1996) Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 289–90; D.B. Smith (1916–17) ‘Jean de Villiers Hotman’, Scottish Historical Review, 14, 147–66; HMC, Salisbury, 3, p. 438; Cecil MS, 18 fol. 51; P.J. Blok (ed.) (1911) Correspondance Inedite de Robert Dudley, Comte de Leycester, et de François et Jean Hotman (Archives du Musée Teyler, 12/2, Haarlem). Haarlem, Teylers Stichting, Hotman Letters, No. 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46; G. Ungerer (ed.) (1974) A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondence of Antonio Pérez’s Exile, 2 vols (London: Tamesis Books), vol. 1, No. 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51.



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32. Lambeth Palace Library, Bacon MS, 657, fol. 61, 657, No. 88. Paul E.J. Hammer (1994) ‘The Uses of Scholarship: The Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1581–1601’, English Historical Review, 109/430, 26–51 (p. 38). 33. James Daybell (2010) ‘Women, politics and domesticity: the scribal publication of Lady Rich’s letter to Elizabeth I’, in Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman, eds, Women as Scribes and the Domestication of Print Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer), pp. 111–30. 34. Conyers Read (1955) Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 170. Pauline Croft (2002) ‘Mildred, Lady Burghley: The Matriarch’, in Pauline Croft, ed., Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils, 1558–1612 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 283–300 (pp. 286–8, 292). 35. BL, Lansd. MS, 88, fol. 105. 36. BL, Lansd. MS, 158, fol. 86. 37. Barbara J. Harris (1999) ‘The View From My Lady’s Chamber: New Perspectives on the Early Tudor Monarchy’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60, 3, 215–47; Helen Payne (2002) ‘The Cecil Women at Court’ in Pauline Croft, ed., Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), pp. 265–81; Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (1999) eds, Maids and Mistress, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). 38. Olwen Hufton (2000), ‘Reflections on the Role of Women in the Early Modern Court’, The Court Historian, 5/1, 1–13 (p. 1). 39. Pam Wright (1987) ‘A Change in Direction: the Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603’, in David Starkey, ed., The English Court From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (Harlow: Longman), pp. 147–72; Charlotte Merton (1993) ‘The Women Who Served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: Ladies, Gentlewomen and Maids to the Privy Chamber, 1553–1603’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge); J.B. Greenbaum Goldsmith (1987) ‘All the Queen’s Women: the Changing Place and Perception of Aristocratic Women in Elizabethan England, 1558–1620’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University). 40. Wright (1987), pp. 152–3. 41. Beale’s Treatise is printed in C. Read (1925) Mr Secretary Walsingham and the policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1, pp. 423–43 (p. 437). 42. (1888) HMC, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland, K.G. Preserved at Belvoir Castle, 4 vols (London, HMSO), 1, p. 275. 43. BL, Add. MS, 23212, fol. 187. 44. Folger Shakespeare Library, LM/COR/9/116. 45. Rosemary O’Day and Joel Berlatsky (1979) eds, ‘The Letter-Book of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield 1560–1561’, Camden Miscellany, 27, pp. 113–238 (p. 136). 46. Longleat House, Seymour Papers, 5, fols. 168–69. 47. Folger, X.d.428 (122). 48. Seymour Papers, 5, fols. 144–5. 49. (1911) HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Preserved at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire (London), pp. 528–9.



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50. Elizabeth McCutcheon (1999) ‘Playing the Waiting Game: the Life and Letters of Elizabeth Wolley’, Quidditas, 20, 43–6. 51. Daybell, ‘Such newes’, pp. 126–7. 52. David Starkey (1987), ‘Intimacy and Innovation: The Rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’, in David Starkey, ed., The English Court, pp. 71–119; idem (1985) The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London: George Philip). 53. Wright (1987); Goldsmith (1987); Merton (1993). 54. Natalie Mears (2004) ‘Politics in the Elizabethan Privy Chamber: Lady Mary Sidney and Kat Ashley’, in Daybell, ed., Women and Politics, pp. 67–82 (pp. 72–4 and passim). 55. On Mary Scudamore see, Simon Adams (2004) ‘Scudamore, Mary, Lady Scudamore’, ODNB. 56. TNA, Chancery: Master Harvey’s Exhibits: Duchess of Norfolk’s Deeds,C 115. 57. TNA, PRO, C115/101/7543. 58. I.J. Atherton (1999) Ambition and failure in Stuart England: the career of John, first Viscount Scudamore (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 28. 59. LPL, Shrewsbury MS, 707, fol. 221. 60. W.J. Tighe (1995) ‘Country into Court, Court into Country: John Scudamore of Holme Lacy (c.1542–1623) and his Circles’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 157–78. 61. BL, Add. MS, 12506, fol. 481; Bodleian Library, Tanner MS, 241, fol. 2. 62. LPL, Talbot MS, 3205, fol. 56. 63. TNA, PRO, C115/100/7511; Cecil MS, 84, fol. 57. See also Cecil MS, 89, fol. 140; LPL, Talbot MS, 3203, fol. 7. 64. LPL, Talbot MS, 3199, fol. 441. 65. TNA, SP74/2/79, SP74/2/81, SP74/2/115. Steven G. Ellis (2004) ‘Croft, Sir James (c.1518–1590)’, ODNB. 66. HMC, Salisbury, 4, p. 516; Cecil MS, 32, fol. 34, 97, fol. 10. 67. David Starkey (1977) ‘Representation Through Intimacy: a Study in the Symbolism of Monarchy and Court Office in Early-Modern England’, in I. Lewis, ed., Symbols and Sentiments: Cross Cultural Studies in Symbolism (London: Academic Press), pp. 187–224. 68. Marie B. Rowlands (1985; 1996) ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London: Routledge), pp. 149–180; J.C.H. Aveling (1980) ‘Catholic Households in Yorkshire, 1580–1603’, Northern History, XVI, 85-101; Roland Connelly (1997) The Women of the Catholic Resistance in England, 1540–1680 (Edinburgh: Pentland Press). 69. Michael Hodgetts (1989) Secret Hiding Places (Dublin: Veritas Publications). 70. TNA, SP14/216/10; SP14/16/44; SP14/216/70/1; SP14/18/109 71. TNA, SP14/216/105; SP14/216/103; SP14/216/141, 148, 149, 150, 156, 228, 230. Jane Griffiths (2004) ‘Wenman, Agnes, Lady Wenman’, ODNB. 72. TNA, SP14/216/226 and 83. 73. For a later period, the Ghent Benedictines in the 1650s put their postal services at the disposal of Charles II for delivering royalist mail: Claire Walker (2000) ‘Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 43, 1, 1–23. 74. Philip Caraman (1951) ed., The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London: Longman), p. 208.



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75. TNA, SP14/216/241–246; SP14/19/11, SP14/20/11, 39. See also, SP14/216/200, 201, 212, 214. Mark Nicholls (2004) ‘Vaux, Anne’, ODNB. 76. TNA, SP14/16/7; SP14/16/70. Mark Nicholls (2004) ‘Fawkes, Guy’, ODNB. 77. (1910–69) Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, eds. W.K. Boyd, J.D. Mackie, H.W. Meikle, A.I. Cameron and M.S. Giuseppi (13 vols., Edinburgh and Glasgow), Vol. 8 (1585–1586), p. 182; BL, Cotton MS, Caligula CVII, fols. 338r-v, 341r-v. 78. M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado (2004) ‘Suárez de Figueroa [Dormer], Jane, duchess of Feria’, ODNB. 79. Julian Lock (2004) ‘Percy, Thomas, seventh earl of Northumberland’, ODNB. 80. BL, Cotton MS, Caligula C/III, fol. 186. Peter Holmes (2004) ‘Stucley, Thomas’, ODNB. 81. HMC, Salisbury, 2, p. 4. 82. TNA, SP15/21/58. 83. HMC, Salisbury, 1, p. 570, 2, pp. 6, 7, 9; TNA, SP15/21/5, SP 15/21/30, SP 15/21/33, SP15/21/31. 84. TNA, SP15/21/141. 85. TNA, SP12/107/24, SP12/107/33, SP12/108/39, SP12/108/47, SP12/108/75, SP12/108/76, SP12/108/77, SP12/108/80. 86. TNA, SP Foreign, SP70/143/43, SP70/148. 87. S.J. Gunn (1995) ‘The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 5, 59–90; Barbara J. Harris (2004) ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic women, 1450–1550’, in Daybell, ed., Women and Politics, pp. 21–50.



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Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher and the Materiality of Early Modern Diplomatic Writing1 Alan Stewart

While embassies have traditionally been discussed in the somewhat abstract language of international law and diplomatic protocol, recent studies have paid increased attention to the rhetorical and textual skills required of early modern diplomats and their servants. Douglas Biow, for example, has explored the relationship between humanist ideology and the ambassador and secretary,2 while Timothy Hampton has examined the massive literature produced about diplomacy in the period, much of it by those with personal experience of embassies.3 This essay returns this attention to writing to its most basic level: the role of handwriting in the early modern embassy. It takes as its starting point the celebrated ‘bi-literal cipher’ devised by Francis Bacon, described in his De augmentis scientiarum as ‘the highest degree of Cypher’. Bacon recalls that this ‘invention, in truth, we devised in our youth, when we were at Paris: and is a thing that yet seemeth to us not worthy to be lost’.4 Bacon was in Paris, and elsewhere in France, when he served on the embassy of Sir Amias Paulet, Elizabeth’s resident ambassador to the French king, from 1576 to 1579.5 In this essay, I shall suggest, first, that this celebrated ‘bi-literal cipher’ has its origins in the reality of embassy correspondence carried out in wartime, and second, that its particular genius lies in Bacon’s understanding of the materiality of early modern letters – both of these fully implicated in the early modern ambassador’s workaday, pen-and-ink concerns. The Paulet embassy produced a good deal of paperwork. Most famously, Jean Hotman, son of political theorist François Hotman, and tutor to Paulet’s sons in Paris, drew on his experience of the Paulet household to write De la charge et dignité de l’ambassadeur, translated into English as The ambassador,6 declaring his intention ‘not to make a perfect Idea of an Ambassador, as Tasso, Magio, Gentilis and some others 120



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haue labored to do’ (B7v–B8r), but rather a more practical depiction of what an ambassador needed to know. Sadly, the book contains only one explicit allusion to the Paulet embassy, when Hotman describes how, on his departure from France, ‘The Ambassadour of England sir Amias Pawlet would not receiue the chaine of golde which the king sent vnto him, according to the custome, vntill he was halfe a league out of Paris’ since ‘Giftes doe oblige, and those that receiue them, become slaues to them that giue them’ (D7v–D8r). But there survive many other textual traces. Multiple letters from Paulet to various English politicians have found their way into the state papers. Most usefully, we also have Paulet’s copy-book, a collection of either drafts or transcripts of letters sent from the ambassador back to England. Part of this copy-book, covering the period from May 1577 to January 1578/9, is extant as Rawlinson MS A. 331 in Oxford’s Bodleian Library,7 and was edited by Octavius Ogle for the Roxburge Club in 1866.8 Unbeknownst to Ogle, another part had also survived, as Bodleian Add. MS C.82; Lisa Jardine and I were the first to draw on this section extensively in preparing our 1998 biography of Bacon.9 From these copy-books it is possible to reconstruct to whom and how often Paulet wrote, the nature of reports provided for his diverse correspondents, and the manner in which they were dispatched back to England. The ambassador had to provide the sovereign with a regular, full and lucid report of his activities in his host country, with meticulously detailed accounts of how he was receivd at court, over whom he took precedence, with whom he was permitted to speak, and so on. From this the Queen could gauge her present standing in the host nation, both absolutely and in relation to other countries sending ambassadors there. But the resident was also required to send another report, more bluntly worded, to the Secretary (or Secretaries) of State. Other senior ministers also demanded personalized accounts, as might influential clerks of the Privy Council. On top of this, the resident had to maintain cordial relations with his personal patrons, his country neighbours and his kinsmen. The resident ambassador was thus torn between two essential tasks: acting as an ambassador, with all the court protocol and entertainment that entailed, and acting as an intelligence gatherer and disseminator of news. Paulet complained that he had been so troubled with entertaining other ambassadors, and especially those ‘of the religion’, that he was forced to make his dispatches at night.10 The ambassador also had to forge new relations with potential sources of fresh and elusive intelligence. As Hotman notes, ‘he shall doe most



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wisely in establishing foorthwith his intelligences from all partes following the order of his predecessor, adding therevnto, the correspondencie which hee can haue with his friends, euen to the remotest countries: there being no charge whatsoeuer in the Estate which hath more neede to know the occurrents of the worlde, as I haue heard the most sufficient Ambassadors to holde: Considering that this is done with little charge, and oftentimes with much fruite’ (D4r–v). A typical letter from Paulet thus included alongside the personal account a relaying of international intelligence: ‘Yt is wrighten out of Germanie, that the Tartaryans have ynvadid Polonia . . . I am credibly aduertised that the K: of Spaine maketh great preparations by sea, and some of good iudgment are of opinion that it is for Ireland . . . A Scotte tylleth me that the Ambassador of Scotlande will not retorne from the Bathes in Lorraine callyd the Plomberies vntill he haue spoken with Don John . . .’11 While the letters should be full, they should not contain superfluous or inappropriate matter. Hotman urges the ambassador ‘To take heed rather to that which is done, then to that which is spoken’, and to avoid being one of those ‘who for a desire which they had to giue fresh intelligences, wrote all things indifferently, were it false or true, and oftentimes at the first answere which they receiued from the Court, were rewarded for their dilligence with some piece of mockery’ (G3v). Another pitfall is what he calls ‘this extreamitie of writing, euen to the least occurrence of a countrie, the quarrells of particular men, the loue of Ladies in Court, the executions of iustice, the orders for receiuing the treasure, and of the gouernement: or other friuolous matters which no way concerne the Estate, much like those aduises and occurants of Italie, which are fit for nothing but to make worke for idle heads’. While he conceded ‘It is true, that there are some Princes and Ladies woulde knowe all’, Hotman suggests contenting their curiosity by sending ‘a priuate letter, which not medling with the affaires of his charge, should not neede to be carried or read vnto the Counsell’ (G3v–G4r). It was important to get the reports or ‘aduises’ right, because they might be the key to an ambassador’s posterity. Hotman goes on to give a lesson in how these ‘aduises’ should be composed: They must therefore be graue, briefe, well compact, containing much in few words, couched in tearmes, rather ordinary then borrowed, interlaced sometimes with sententious clauses, and points, yet very seldome; and that they may be the better vnderstood, it shall be good to articulate euery affaire apart: as commonly those of Monsieur de Vileroy (chiefe and most worthy Secretary of the Commandements)



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are, and as the vse is in the most parte of the Chaunceries in Germanie. For my part, I cannot allow the manner of writing of such as tie themselues to a continnuate [sic] running on, and heaping together of their letters, notwithstanding the difference of affaires which they containe, and it seemeth, as it were a course couering or other like worke made of diuerse pieces ioyned together. And if his Maisters seeruice [sic] can admitt it, I would rather giue no new aduise, vntill I had answere vnto the former. Order and Methode in all things easeth the minde, and augmenteth the memory. Likewise if it fall out that he must write many letters of the same subiect, for the same place, as it ordinarily happeneth, hee shall doe well to vse as much difference as he can in the tearmes & stile, that they may not be like to a Notories president (G6r–G7r).12 Hotman points out that in some far-flung countries, there is little opportunity for an ambassador ‘to make his vertue knowne’ – ‘It was once forgotten that there was an Ambassador in Denmarke, if the late Sieur de Douse a worthy Gentleman, and who hath beene there aboue thirtie yeares, had not at length remembered it himselfe.’ The ambassador ‘shall doe well to make himselfe knowne by his aduises which are looked on and considered by the Secretaries of Estate, read vnto the Counsell, and represented vnto the Prince, according vnto the worth of the subiect’, since ‘things are worth no more then the value that is made of them’ (G6r). Everything had to be done to an immovable deadline:13 the departure of the post, by which all letters had to be drafted, converted into the relevant cipher, and then copied into the copy-book for future reference. Thus, for example, on 19 February 1577/8, Paulet wrote to the Queen, the Secretaries (Francis Walsingham and Thomas Wilson), Walsingham separately, Wilson separately, the earl of Warwick, Lord Treasurer Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Paulet’s predecessor Dr Valentine Dale, the Treasurer Mr Heneage, Edward Tremayne of Colocumb in the west of England, the Privy Council clerk Thomas Wilkes, and Sir Thomas Leighton, the Puritan Governor-General of Guernsey. In the next post, sent on 11 March 1577/8, the key figures of the Queen, the Secretaries together and separately, Warwick, Burghley, and Leicester, were joined by the earls of Sussex and Hertford, the Lord Admiral, Heneage again, Mr Horsey, Wilkes and Tremayne again, Privy Council clerk Robert Beale, and Latin secretary Nicasius Yetsweirt.14 Letter-writing became so habitual that when, in November 1579, Paulet finally left France, he could not shrug it off, as he admitted to Walsingham: ‘I am Jack out of office.’15



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In order to produce these letters, the ambassador needed a dedicated staff of secretaries. Hotman advised that, for an ambassador, ‘Amongest the Officers of his house, the most necessary, and in choyce of whom hee ought to be most carefull, are, the Secretaries, and the Steward of the house’ (C6v). While the steward was to concern himself with ‘the expenses of the house, which ought to be well ordererd, and neuerthelesse honorable in euery part thereof, chiefly at the table and kitchin’, the secretaries were meant ‘to assist and ease him in the businesses of his charge, to dispatch causes that concerne the same, and to hold a good register therof, to keepe faithfully the scroles, cyphers, and other papers of importance (which neuerthelesse would be better vnder the maisters locke)’ (C7r, C6v–C7r). In addition, Hotman later adds ‘the Secretary and the Interpreter, which are necessary Instruments vnto him, and which serue rather the Ambassage then the Ambassador, as amongst the Swisers and Grisons, where the saide Secretaries and Interpreters are enrowled in the accompt of the pensions of that Nation, and receiue the ordinary wages of a crowne by the day’ (K6v). In addition to the drafting, fair writing, and copying of the ambassador’s letters, his team had to make copies of incoming correspondence and intelligence for inclusion in the packets sent back to England. This put extra strain on embassy resources. In the summer of 1577, Paulet forwarded to Walsingham ‘the copye of a lettre wryten not long sythens by the French Ambassador in England to a gentleman of this Court, thinkeing the same to be the more worthy of consideracion because it is addressed to one that hath good creditt with the King’: he had to apologize that ‘This copie is very ill written, and therefore, to avoyd your labor and losse of tyme in the reading, I have made an other copye which I allsoe send here with all, and yet there are some words which passe my conning’ – early modern handwriting could pose problems even in its own day.16 On 6 October 1577, Paulet passed ‘some notes’ concerning the movements of the French and Navarre kings to Walsingham, but had to apologize to Leicester that they ‘came not to my handes vntill this last eueninge, and are of soche lengethe as tyme did not serue me to make more then one copie, beinge required to restore the originall’.17 On 19 November 1577, Paulet sent to Walsingham ‘a discourse sent lately out of Germanie, because I thinke yt will lyke you’, but apologizes for its appearance: ‘I was driven for hast, to cause yt to be copied out by two or three scholers; wherein yt may please you to pardon me, and shall behoue you to comaunde yt to be written out againe before you can reade yt’.18 Paulet’s expenses from 31 May to 30 September 1577 include three pounds paid ‘for the copies of sondry writinges’,19 and



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this must only account for copies for which Paulet was forced to turn outside his household. The choosing of the bearer of the post was ideally an important decision, since many of the most sensitive portions of communication home were transmitted orally, under cover of the written document. It was standard for the ambassador to refer his correspondent ‘for the state of things here to the report of this bearer, whose declaration by mouth shall be more effectual than if the same were set down in writing’. The mission had to be strictly confidential – even the identity of the messenger needed to be kept secret: ‘no other man living is acquainted with the voyages of my messengers than the messengers themselves’.20 Clearly, then, the bearer needed to be someone well educated, well informed, trustworthy, and intimately acquainted with the business of the embassy. Although other bearers occasionally presented themselves – servants travelling abroad on behalf of their English masters, men making their way through France on other diplomatic business, merchants (who were ‘likely to pass without suspicion’) and men who made their livelihood from the occupation – Paulet tended to rely on his closest household servants, and on occasion his eldest son, to carry such dispatches. The disadvantage of this arrangement was that while such servants were absent for extended stretches of time – and the trip had to include not only the two journeys from France to the English court and back, but also all the waiting associated with the court, and if necessary trips to prominent courtiers in their country or London houses – they were not available to carry out their everyday jobs at the ambassadors residence. Paulet’s correspondence is littered with complaints about understaffing, a problem he never solved. Moreover, there were inconveniences and real dangers to be taken into consideration on such a mission. The bearer had to take care not to mislay letters, and to pray that the weather held out. He would also hope to avoid the alarming experience of several of Paulet’s messengers. The ambassador told Walsingham of ‘one of my servants passing towardes Jersay thoroughe Normandy, where he was committed to ward, his packet of lettres sent to Matignon, and was not deliuered againe vnto him vntyll after xvten dayes, so as it is likely that the same [the packet] was sent to the Court’. In this case, his ambushers were unlucky: ‘I thinke they were sorye for their owne trouble and expence, the lettres importing no other thinge then my privie busines with my brothers and some others of that isle’.21 On 26 May 1577, Paulet wrote to Walsingham, clearly upset: his servant John Tupper, a French speaker from Jersey, had been sent on a mission in Brittany but had



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not reappeared: ‘The tyme appointed for his retorne ys expired so long sithence, as I thinke assuredly that he is imprisoned yf he be not slayne, and yet I doe not se how he can be longe a prisoner, because he had neither lettres or any other wryting aboute hym, and do thinke rather that he is fallen into the handes of the knavishe soudoyours of Bussy’s companie, and that his good gelding and the money in his pursse have been the cause of his distruction’.22 Two weeks later he was able to explain what happened. Tupper ‘as he passyd through Mayne, fell into the hands of Matignon and Ramboillet at the lyttell towne callid Sably, where after long and straight examinacion he was sent to the castell, and there strypped twyse to his shirte, and the colour [collar] of his shirte and all his other garments searched with all extremitie’. Although ‘Yt was found that he had no lettres, instructions, or anie other things in wrighting’, the very lack of letters set off alarm bells: it ‘semyd straunge vnto them that pretending to be sent into Jersaye he had no lettres from me to my Leiuetenants, which he excuesed with some reason affyrming that he refused to carry lettres, doubting least they might give occasion of his staye in his jorney.’23 ‘After two dayes’ Paulet’s servant was ‘discharged’ and allowed to continue on his way, but ‘a gentleman was sent after him to see his doings and what waye he tooke in his jorney’, continuing with him as far as Vittry. Paulet’s servant went to St Malo, where he busied himself supposedly arranging some lading of canvas, and made contact with Paulet’s friend de Martynes, who relayed the news of what had happened back to the ambassador. Even at this late stage, the servant worried ‘that yf he shoulde be taken in anie place out of the highe waye between Bloyes (from whens he cam) and Saint Malo he should be in perill of his lyfe, and therefore durst not to go forward in his jorney’.24 However, the dangers were in some measure offset by the personal advantages to the bearer in terms of guaranteed access to the Queen and her leading councillors, during which access the bearer would often be called upon to enlarge on the letters’ contents verbally. Bacon’s chaplain and editor William Rawley alleged in 1657 that Bacon was ‘after a while, held fit to be entrusted, with some Message, or Advertisement, to the Queen’, a mission that he ‘performed, with great Approbation’ before returning ‘back, into France again; With Intention, to continue, for some years, there’, a plan ultimately cut short by his father’s death in February 1579.25 For three centuries, Rawley’s claims went uncorroborated, until in 1998, Lisa Jardine and I presented as evidence a letter that recounted in detail how Bacon came from France to Elizabeth’s court to deliver letters, accompanied by the ambassador’s man.26 The letter is undated,



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but it mentions only Walsingham as Secretary of State, which suggests that the mission probably took place before Walsingham was joined as Secretary by Thomas Wilson on 12 November 1577 (as we have seen, Paulet was always careful subsequently to write to both Secretaries). A reference to walking ‘between the Courte and [Burghley’s] howse’ strongly suggests that the court was at Whitehall, near to Burghley’s residence on the north side of the Strand. The letter is valuable on two counts: it is one of the earliest known extant examples of Francis Bacon’s writing, and it tells us a vivid and surprising story of the way ambassadorial letters circulated at the Elizabethan court. Leaving Paris on a Friday, Bacon arrives at court the following Tuesday afternoon; he writes back to Paulet on the Wednesday with a report of his progress. The letter tells how he went first to Secretary Walsingham, whom he found ‘scant well at ease; and delyuered vnto him my chardge of Lettres beinge laide vppon his bedd’. Walsingham ‘opened them and rendred vnto me twoo Lettres directed to my Lord of Leicester to deliuer with mine owne handes’, saying that he could see the others ‘deliuered him self’. The Secretary then dismissed Bacon, and he ‘repayred to my Lord of Leicesters Chamber whome I found there with the Queene’. Astutely realizing this was not the most opportune time to interrupt, Bacon instead ‘thought good to wayte vppon my Lord Tresaurer’, his uncle William Cecil Lord Burghley, to deliver Paulet’s letter to him. Luckily, their paths crossed: ‘Yt was my chaunce to meete him between the Courte and his howse, and there he receyved of me the saide Lettre and toulde me that he woulde speake with me farther some other time.’ An hour later, as instructed, Bacon ‘attended on him at his Chamber’, but Burghley was not there; instead Bacon, ‘went thence into the parke where I spake with him, and receyved of him many good wordes’, as Burghley told him that ‘her maiesties meaninge was I should comme to her presence that eveninge’. Bacon raised the question of a verbal message he had from Paulet for Burghley, but his uncle said ‘he would heare it at his first leasure’. Shortly afterwards, Bacon ‘founde her maiestie in the gardenie [sic] where it pleased her maiestie to vse vnto me so manye and so gratious woordes as coulde not be vttered in most ample and effectuall sorte’. There he was also greeted by Leicester, to whom he delivered the relevant letters. Later, returning to Burghley, he was once again ‘put ouer’ (put off) ‘towchinge my messuage vntill some other tyme’. At the time of writing, Bacon reports, he still had not been able to deliver his message to Burghley.27 This letter is instructive on several counts. First, it testifies to the absolutely personalized nature of letter delivery at this exalted level of society: Bacon has to encounter Walsingham, Burghley, the queen and



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Leicester in person to hand over their letters, although Walsingham takes responsibility for conveying other, less important letters. Second, it makes explicit the way in which envoys had to memorize messages to be given orally to particular recipients. Third, it reveals the importance of reporting back how letters are received: to a modern reader, Bacon may seem to be boasting of the ‘good wordes’ he won from Burghley, Leicester, or the Queen, but they are in fact a signal to Paulet as to how his letters have been received: Bacon has to detail when and where each letter was handed over, and what the response was. To Paulet, he reasoned that Burghley was more interested in conveying the ambassador’s letters to the Queen, while he was ‘only to render a report for the rest’, of probable interest to Burghley, but not of pressing urgency. Bacon goes on to acknowledge Paulet’s both bestowing on him ‘your own good opinion’ and – by allowing him to deliver these letters – being ‘the cause of the good opinion of others’. He also particularly thanks Paulet for sending over his man with him.28 His gratitude was well placed. Like his initial departure to the embassy, when he kissed the queen’s hands,29 this mission gave Bacon an opportunity to serve Elizabeth directly. He was effectively being groomed to work as an intermediary or facilitator in the world of international politics. After news arrived of his father’s sudden death on 20 February 1579, Bacon returned from France for the last time. Once again he acted as bearer for Paulet’s post, of 20 March. In appointing him to carry the post again on his return journey, Paulet provided Bacon with a further chance to place himself in the presence of the Queen, and a last testimonial to present to her. ‘I know,’ he wrote to the monarch, ‘your maiestie will take pleasure to hear of the towardness of anie of your subjects, and therefore would not fail to advertise you that this bearer, Master Francis Bacon, is of great hope, endowed with many good and singular parts; and if God give him lyfe, will proue a verie able and sufficient subject to doe your Highnes good and acceptable servyce.’30 It was in France, then, that Bacon had his first experience of the letterwriting culture of embassy life. This culture also featured prominently ciphers and cryptography, which were to play such an important role not only in Bacon’s later life, but also in his posthumous reputation as the shadowy figure whose authorial identity is cryptically contained in anything from the works of Shakespeare to the Rosicrucian manifesto.31 Paulet’s letters attest to the constant need for new ciphers. In a June 1577 letter to Walsingham, he implores the Secretary ‘to send me some Cipher for the Prince of Oringe, P: of Condé, Don Jhon, Cazimer, D. of Guyse, Dampuille, Vicont de Tourayne, and La Motte, the gentleman of



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Bretaine mentioned in my other lettres, yet not vnknowne to Monsuire Villiers’.32 A letter to the Earl of Leicester reveals that each correspondent had his or her own cipher: ‘My zipher to Master Wallsingham hath some other thinges which I dare not commit to your Lordship’s zipher, and do wishe that yt would please you to give me a better.’33 Sometimes, the lengthy business of translating each character into cipher was not feasible. Writing to Walsingham in July 1577, Paulet enclosed a discourse that ‘wyll partely decipher vnto you the presente state of the King of Nauarre and his followers’. He explained that ‘I haue reducyd this discourse into so fewe wordes and short sentences, as I could not sett the same downe otherwys then in zipher, onlesse I would discouer the matter, and I had rather be troblesome vnto your Honour with a long zipher then to hazard hir Maiesties seruice, or to indaunger a good frind. You shall fynd that in this zipher I have confounded moodes, tenses, persons and nombers, therby to take as much helpe of my zipher as was possibele, but it shalbe easy for you to conceaue the sense.’34 (This explanation, taken from the copy-book, is not included in the letter as sent to Walsingham.)35 Bacon thus became intimately acquainted with ciphering during this time with the embassy. His interest may have been spurred by another member of the embassy, Thomas Phelippes, a client of Sir Francis Walsingham, who had been placed with Paulet precisely because of his skills in languages and ciphering.36 The Bacon – Phelippes intimacy endured: a letter from Paulet to Phelippes written in January 1586 sent ‘hearty commendations’ from himself and Lady Paulet to Phelippes ‘and their good friend Master Francis Bacon’,37 and Bacon would later recommend Phelippes to the attention of his patron Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in or around 1591.38 It is perhaps not coincidental that Phelippes was also famed for his ability to counterfeit any hand, for it is in the relationship between cipher and handwriting that Bacon found the inspiration for his bi-literal cipher. In his 1605 Advancement of learning, Bacon identifies the three ‘vertues’ necessary to ciphers: ‘that they be not laborious to write and reade; that they bee impossible to discypher; and in some cases, that they bee without suspition’. He even very briefly limns the perfect cipher: ‘The highest Degree whereof, is to write OMNIA PER OMNIA; which is vndoubtedly possible, with a proportion Quintuple at most, of the writing infoulding, to the writing infoulded, and no other restraint whatsoeuer.’39 But Bacon’s readers would have to wait until his 1623 expansion of The advancement, De augmentis scientiarum for a fuller treatment of this cipher.40 Here, the perfect cipher is not the one that takes



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a long time to crack; it is the one that is never perceived to be a cipher, and so is never subjected to ciphering. ‘For if Letters Missive fall into their hands,’ Bacon explains, ‘that have some command and authority over those that write; or over those to whom they were liable to examination and question; unlesse the Cypher be such, as may be voide of all suspition, or may elude all examination.’41 It is at this moment that Bacon introduces one of his own contrivances. According to Bacon’s desire for a perfect cipher, the secret message (‘the interior Letter’) would be encoded in another message (‘the exterior Letter’) which, being intercepted and read, would give no sign that it was a cipher, but rather would be ‘such as is probable the Writer might send, yet without perill’. Each character of the interior letter would be rendered in the exterior letter by five characters, so that the exterior letter will ‘beare a quintuple proportion to’ the interior letter.42 The content of these characters is irrelevant – but each character is to be formed in one of two ways, and it is in this binary differentiation that the true message will be encoded. Bacon realized that he had hit on something important with this binary rendering of information: ‘Neither is it a small matter these Cypher-Characters have, and may performe: For by this Art a way is opened, whereby a man may expresse and signifie the intentions of his minde, at any distance of place, by objects which may be presented to the eye, and accommodated to the eare: provided those objects be capable of a twofold difference onely; as by Bells, by Trumpets, by Lights and Torches, by the report of Muskets, and any instruments of like Nature.’43 Or the telegraph or Morse Code, for that matter. But for the immediate concern of ciphered correspondence, Bacon achieves his binary differentiation through a ‘Bi-formed Alphabet’, providing two different handwritten versions (a and b) of each character, in both its majuscule and miniscule forms (Figure 7.1). In some cases the differences are obvious: the majuscule ‘E’, for example, has the a form composed of angular, straight lines, while the b form is rounded. But most are more subtly differentiated: the final loop on the b version of a miniscule ‘d’, for example, or the final loop on the b version of a miniscule ‘h’. Bacon works through an example, where he wishes to send the message ‘fvge’ (flee). First, with his ‘bi-literarie Alphabet’ he renders the four letters F V G E as ‘Aababbaabbaabbaaabaa’. He takes as his exterior letter the phrase ‘Manec te volo donec venero’ (I want you to stay until I come). He then writes each character of this exterior letter rendering it in either a or b form according to the quintuple rendering of the interior letter. So he writes the a version of the first character, a majuscule ‘M’; the a version of the second character, a miniscule ‘a’; the b version of the third character, the miniscule ‘n’, and so on.44 In order to decode 10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox


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Figure 7.1 Bacon’s ‘bi-formed alphabet’, showing the different forms of each character, majuscule and miniscule. From Opera … tomvs primvs: Qui continet de dignitate & augmentis scientiarum libros IX (London: John Haviland, 1623), sig. Nn4v.



the message, the recipient would have to recognize that the characters were written in two different ways, and then, ignoring the content of the ‘exterior letter’, work through each character ascertaining whether it was in the a or b form, and then reading off each group of five a/b through the cipher. It is a cipher that requires immense control and skill in the penning of two alphabets character by character. What is crucial here is that the content of the message remains utterly irrelevant. Bacon writes ‘Manec te volo donec venero’ – of course, the direct oppposite of the encoded ‘flee’ instruction – but he could have written any phrase of twenty or more characters in any language using the Roman alphabet: it is in the careful handwriting of each letter that the message is encrypted. So we could write ‘Don’t forget to put the cat out’ or ‘Give my regards to Broadway’, and, as long as we use the correct form of each letter, the result would still be ‘FVGE’. The exterior epistle can even be a pre-existing text: in his next bravura example Bacon uses ‘a Spartan letter sent once to a Scytale or round cypher’d staffe’45 – ‘Perditæ Res. Mindarus cecidit. Milites | esuriunt. Neque hinc nos extricare, neque | hic diutiùs manere possumus’ (‘All is lost. Mindarus is killed. The soldiers want food. We can neither get hence, nor stay longer here’) – and then encodes it in a passage from Cicero’s first letter.46 His point is that a transcript of Cicero’s first letter, a millennium and a half old, is not going to be suspected as containing a cipher, because the cipher resides not in the content at all, but in the rendering of the message in handwriting. Various parts of these strategies are by no means unique or original to Bacon: a comparative study of the work of Joannes Tritemius, Girolamo Cardano, Giovanni Baptista Della Porta and Blaise de Vigenère reveals many of the same features. Indeed, Bacon’s editor Robert Leslie Ellis felt so strongly that Bacon should not be credited with inventing the bi-literal cipher that he added an appendix of four pages to the 1857 volume of Bacon’s Works that contained this section, noting Bacon’s possible indebtedness to other cryptographers.47 Ellis wrote that ‘The idea of a biliteral alphabet, which Bacon seems to claim as his own, is employed, though in a different manner, by Porta’: that is, Giovanni Baptista Della Porta, in his De occultis literarum notis (book 5, chapter 3).48 In describing the detail of Della Porta’s method, however, Ellis does admit that at a certain point it ‘departs wholly from Bacon’s . . . Porta’s method is therefore not, like Bacon’s, a method scribendi omnia per omnia, but only omnia per multa. Still the analogy of the two methods is to be remarked: both aim at concealing that there is any but the obvious meaning, and both depend essentially on representing all letters by combinations of two only.’49 It is the work of Blaise de Vigenère, however, that Ellis



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sees as closest to Bacon’s: he sums up his discussion by claiming that ‘The transition from this [de Vigenère’s] to Bacon’s cipher is so easy that the credit given to him must be reduced’.50 De Vigenère’s work was published (as the Traicté des chiffres, ou secrètes manières d’escrire) in Paris in 1586, seven years after the period when Bacon claimed to have developed his cipher; but the tract was allegedly first drafted in Italy in 1567–1568,51 so it may be that Bacon drew on de Vigenère’s still unpublished work during his time with the embassy although de Vigenère claims of his treaty that ‘he had revealed nothing of its contents’.52 It is indeed probable that Bacon met de Vigenère while in Paris – certainly Bacon’s embassy mate Nicholas Hilliard made enough of an impression on the Frenchman that de Vigenère penned a eulogy to him.53 But, whatever the nature of his indebtedness to earlier writers, Bacon does make an original contribution – in his deployment of handwriting. This point has been steadily occluded in the nearly four centuries since Bacon published his biforma and biliteral alphabets in 1623. Bacon’s initial publication employed presumably woodcut alphabets to render the differently handwritten characters. Editions published in Paris by Pierre Mettayer (in quarto, 1624) and Strasburg by the heirs of Lazar Zetzer (in octavo, 1635)54 and Johannes Joachim Bockenhoffer (1654)55 followed this example, as did Gilbert Watts’ 1640 English translation, printed by Leonard Lichfield for Robert Young and Edward Forrest.56 But even as early as 1645, Francisco Moiardus and Adrian Wijngaerden, publishing a duodecimo version in Leiden, failed to understand the importance of the handwriting, and printed the bi-literal alphabet as a nonsensically doubled uniliteral alphabet57 – as Wijngaerden did again in his duodecimo Leiden edition of 1652,58 and Joannis Ravestein in the Amsterdam edition of 1662.59 The great Victorian edition by Spedding, Ellis and Heath attempted to render the different versions of each letter by using different print fonts, but to the unpractised eye the differences are almost invisible. It is also a misapprehension of this aspect of Bacon’s cipher that catalysed much of the work attempting to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s works. As Alexander d’Agapeyeff explains it, in the late nineteenth century, ‘a Mrs Gallup, reading this cipher, wondered why Bacon should invent it and use it in the printing of books. Ciphers generally are made to be used at a moment’s notice, and he himself says that ciphers should be easy to read and write; but to set up a book in several different types is an expensive process, and nobody would do it without a reason.’ Thus prompted, Gallup ‘carefully studied the first edition of one of Bacon’s early works, and on the title-page, hidden under two set



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of italics, she discovered the name of William Rowley [sic] – Bacon’s chief secretary’.60 But Mrs Gallup either used the wrong edition of Bacon, or completely misunderstood what he wrote. For, as should be clear by now, in describing his bi-literal cipher, Bacon is emphatically speaking not of printing, but of writing in its most material sense, of the penmanship that puts in ink on paper to form individual characters. By resituating Bacon’s cipher in the milieu of its creation, however, we can appreciate why Bacon focuses on handwriting, and how crucial that handwriting was to the matter at hand: obtaining a safe and secure transmission of intelligence between Paris and London. We can learn something of Paulet’s embassy from Jean Hotman’s The ambassador. But that account needs to be set alongside the endless papers, letters, discourses, and ciphers whose creation, copying, deciphering and hearing filled most of the early modern ambassador’s waking hours. Bacon’s bi-literal cipher reminds us that, beyond the abstractions of humanism and literature, the world of early modern diplomacy was a world of constant, painful handwriting, a cipher whose secrets we may not yet have cracked.

Notes and references 1. This paper builds on, and furthers, research I undertook with Lisa Jardine for our 1998 co-authored biography, Hostage to fortune: the troubled life of Francis Bacon (London: Victor Gollancz). In addition to Lisa’s vital input, I am grateful to responses to earlier drafts from participants at the Silent languages colloquium (Birkbeck, University of London, 2002), and the Diplomats, agents, adventurers & spies 1500–1700 conference (University of Kent, 2008). 2. Douglas Biow (2002) Doctors, ambassadors, secretaries: humanism and professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 3. Timothy Hampton (2009) Literature and diplomacy in early modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). 4. ‘aliud Inuentum subijiciemus, quod certè, cùm Adolescentuli essemus Parisijs, excogitauimus’. Francis Bacon (1623) Opera . . . tomvs primvs: Qui continet de dignitate & augmentis scientiarum libros IX (London: John Haviland) Nn3v (278) (Gibson no. 129a). The translation is by Gilbert Watts: (1640) Of the advancement and proficience [sic] of learning or the partitions of sciences IX Bookes (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield for Robert Young and Edward Forrest), 2L1r (p. 265) (Gibson no. 141a). Bacon editions are cross-referenced to R.W. Gibson (1950) Francis Bacon: a bibliography of his works and of Baconiana (Oxford: Scrivener Press). 5. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, pp. 39–66, for the fullest account of this embassy. 6. [ Jean Hotman] (1603) De la charge et dignité de l’ambassadeur (Paris), trans. as (1603) The ambassador (London: V.S. for James Shawe). Subsequent references to the English edition are in the main text.



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7. Bodleian Library, Oxford [hereafter Bodl.], Rawlinson MS A. 331. A note on the flyleaf by John Locker states that ‘This was made some use of by Mr. Blackburne in his collections relating to Lord Bacon’. 8. Octavius Ogle (1866) ed., Copy-book of Sir Amias Poulet’s letters, written during his embassy to France (A.D. 1577) from a ms. in the Bodleian Library (London: Roxburghe Club) [hereafter Ogle]. 9. Bodl. Add. MS C. 82; see Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, pp. 39–66. 10. Paulet to Sir Francis Walsingham, 12 October 1576. Allan James Crosby (1880) ed., Calendar of state papers, foreign series, of the reign of Elizabeth [hereafter CSPF], 1575–1577 (London: Longman et al.), 395–6. 11. Paulet to Elizabeth, 26 May 1577, Tours. Ogle p. 6. 12. ‘Monsieur de Vileroy’ is Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy (1543–1617) who served under four French kings (Charles IX, Henri III, Henri IV and Louis XIII) and was the most noted secretary of his day. 13. This paragraph draws on Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, pp. 45–6. 14. Bodl. Add. MS C.82, fos. 22r–29v, 36r–47v. 15. Paulet to Walsingham, 22 November 1579. The National Archives, Kew, State Papers [hereafter TNA, SP], 78/3, art. 52; Arthur John Butler (1904) ed., CSPF, 1579–1580 (London: HMSO), p. 96. 16. Paulet to Walsingham, [22 June ⬍–⬎ 10 July 1577, Poitiers]. Ogle p. 50. 17. Paulet to Leicester, 6 October 1577. Ogle p. 152. See also Paulet to Burghley [6 October 1577]: ‘the articles . . . came not to my handes vntill this last eveninge, and was constrayed to restore them in the morninge, the same beinge so longe and tedious as tyme did not serue me to make more then one copie’. Ogle p. 153. 18. Paulet to Walsingham, 19 November 1577, Paris. Ogle p. 200. 19. ‘MONEY defrayed by Sir AMYCE POWLET knight, Ambassador Resident for her Maiestie in Fraunce, as well in PROCURING INTELLIGENCES, as otherwise for her MAIESTY’S SERVICE, from the last of May, 1577, to the last of September in the said yeare’. Ogle p. 224. 20. Paulet to Walsingham, 22 June 1577. Ogle p. 48. 21. Paulet to Walsingham, [10 June 1577, Tours]. Ogle p. 25. 22. Paulet to Walsingham, 26 May 1577. Ogle pp. 7–8. 23. Paulet to Walsingham, [10 June 1577, Tours]. Ogle p. 25. 24. Paulet to Walsingham, [10 June 1577, Tours]. Ogle pp. 25–6. 25. William Rawley (1657) ‘The life of the honourable author’, in Bacon, Resuscitatio, or, bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, ed. William Rawley (London: Sarah Griffin, for William Lee) (Gibson no. 226), b3r. 26. The letter is in British Library, London [hereafter BL], Additional MS 33271, fo. 46v. For previous discussions see Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, pp. 58–9; Alan Stewart (2008) Shakespeare’s letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 198–9. 27. Bacon to Paulet, n.d. BL Additional MS 33271, fo. 46v. 28. Bacon to Paulet, n.d. BL Additional MS 33271, fo. 46v. 29. Bacon dated his royal service from this moment. In January 1594/5, writing to Sir Robert Cecil, he refers to having served Elizabeth ‘for these one-and-twenty years (for so long it is that I kissed her Majesty’s hands upon my journey into France)’ and at the same time recalls to Essex of serving ‘now these twenty years (for so long it is, and more, since I went with Sir Amias Paulet into



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30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture France, from her majesty’s royal hand’. Putting to one side Bacon’s erratic sense of time, there is no good reason to doubt that Bacon took his leave directly from the Queen, as ambassadors and their household were expected to do. Bacon to Cecil, January 1595. James Spedding (1861–1874) ed., Letters and the life of Francis Bacon, 7 vols (London: Longman et al.), 1, p. 350. Bacon to Essex, [January 1595]. Letters and the life of Bacon, 1, p. 351. Paulet to Elizabeth, 20 March 1579. TNA, SP 78/3, art. 14; Arthur John Butler (1903) ed., CSPF, 1578–1579 (London: HMSO), pp. 461–2. This paragraph is based on Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to fortune, p. 55. Paulet to Walsingham, Walsingham [10? June 1577]. Ogle p. 31. Paulet to Leicester [1 Sept 1577, Poitiers]. Ogle p. 108. Paulet to Walsingham, [10 July 1577, Poitiers]. Ogle p. 54. Paulet to Walsingham, 10 July 1577, Poitiers. TNA, SP 78/1 fo. 2r. On Thomas Phelippes, see William Richardson (2004) ‘Phelippes, Thomas (c.1556–1625x7)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography [hereafter ODNB] (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Alan Haynes (1992) Invisible power: the Elizabethan secret services 1570–1603 (Far Thrupp, Glos: Alan Sutton). Paulet to Phelippes, 25 January 1585/6. William K. Boyd (1914) ed., Calendar of the state papers relating to Scotland, and Mary, Queen of Scots, vol. 8, 1585–1586 (Edinburgh: HM General Register House/HMSO), p. 201. Bacon to Phelippes, n.d. TNA, SP 12/238, art. 138 (fo. 269r). Bacon (1605) The twoo bookes . . . of the proficiencie and aduancement of learning (London: Henrie Tomes) (Gibson no. 81), 2Q1r; Michael Kiernan (2000) ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 4, The advancement of learning, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 121–2. Bacon, De dignitate, N3r–Oo2r; trans. Watts, Of the advancement, Kk4v–Ll3v; see also the translation in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath (1857–59) eds., Bacon, Works, 7 vols (London: Longman et al.), 4, pp. 444–7. Watts, Of the advancement, 2L1r (pp. 264–5). Watts, Of the advancement, 2L1r (p. 265). Watts, Of the advancement, 2L1v (p. 266). Watts, Of the advancement, 2L2v (p. 268). A ‘scytale’ is ‘A method of secret writing practised by the Spartans, consisting in writing the message on a strip of parchment wound spirally round a cylindrical or tapering staff, so that it became illegible when the parchment was unrolled, and could be read only by the use of a staff of precisely the right form and size’ (OED). Watts, Of the advancement, pp. 268–9. Bacon, Works, 1, pp. 841–4. See Ioan. Baptista Porta (1563) De furtivis literarvm notis, vvlgò de Ziferis libri IIII (Naples: apud Ioa. Mariam Scotum), and the English publication (1591, London: John Wolfe); Blaise de Vigenère (1585) Traicté des chiffres, ou secretes manières d’escrire (Paris: Abel L’Anglier). On Della Porta’s ciphers, see David Kahn (1967) The codebreakers: the story of secret writing (New York: Macmillan), pp. 137–43. Bacon, Works, 1, p. 842. Bacon, Works, 1, pp. 841–2, quoting from 1, p. 842.



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51. Bacon, Works, 1, p. 841, quoting de Vigenère, Traicte des chiffres, fo. 285v; see Kahn, Codebreakers, pp. 145–8. 52. Quoted in Bacon, Works, 1, p. 843. 53. Mary Edmond, ‘Hilliard, Nicholas (1547?–1619)’, ODNB. 54. Paris: P. Mettayer, 1624 (Gibson no. 130); Argentorati [Strasbourg]: hæredum L. Zetzneri, 1635 (Gibson no. 131). 55. Argentorati [Strasbourg]: sumptibus Iohan. Ioachimi Bockenhoferi, 1654 (Gibson no. 134). 56. Trans. Watts, Of the advancement (Gibson no. 141a). 57. Lugd. Batav [Leiden]: F[rancisco] Moiardus & A[drian] Wijngaerden, 1645 (Gibson no. 132). 58. Ludg. Batavorum [Leiden]: ex officina Adriani Wijngaerden: 1652 (Gibson no. 133). 59. Amstelædami: sumptibus Ioannis Ravesteinij, 1662 (Gibson no. 135). 60. Alexander d’Agapeyeff (1939) Codes and ciphers (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 38–9, quoting from p. 38.



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Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques Hannah J. Crawforth

Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuffe, Who, when you haue burnt your selues downe to the snuffe, Stinke, and are throwne away. End faire enough.1 Imprisoned for killing the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in 1598, Ben Jonson found himself plunged into a world inhabited by underground agents and intelligencers.2 His famous epigram ‘On Spies’ evokes this shadowy place in which moments of illumination are fleeting and extinguished as easily as a flickering candle. Whilst waiting to stand trial for his crime at the Old Bailey Jonson seems to have encountered the Jesuit priest Thomas Wright, who lived in semi-confinement in London’s jails where he worked as an informer to the Earl of Essex, the operator of extensive intelligence-gathering networks and a brief source of hope for recusants when he appeared to champion religious toleration around this time.3 Wright also undertook missionary work for the Jesuit cause amongst the prisoners and appears to have succeeded in converting Jonson to Catholicism, although uncertainty surrounds the extent to which this change of faith was motivated by political convenience.4 Jonson’s supposed conversion may have provided him with a cover under which to infiltrate Catholic communities, enabling him to act as a counter-insurgent agent before his overt return to the Protestant Church around 1610. The suggestion that Jonson might have accepted a plea bargain in exchange for such services during a subsequent jail-term in 1605 has never entirely gone away, and Richard Dutton concludes that ‘The suspicion that his release from prison might have been bought at the expense of an agreement to spy for Cecil, or even act as a double agent, is difficult to discount.’5 Dutton cites John Michael Archer who thinks it ‘likely that Jonson was allied to both sides 138



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at once in 1605’, noting that ‘[e]ven as late as 1611 his attitude towards spying was still marked by the ambivalence of the double agent’.6 This characteristically Jonsonian ambivalence, or doubleness, is manifested in the idea of the cipher, a paradoxical mechanism of simultaneous concealment and revelation that haunts his work, and which forms the subject of this essay. Whilst Jonson’s sustained, complex engagement with Elizabethan and Jacobean intelligencing has been long recognized, it is only in recent years that critics have begun to reconsider his literary output in the light of this involvement.7 William Slights describes Jonson’s interest in ‘the art of secrecy’ utilized by the spy, which he believes offers the playwright not only ‘a resilient set of plot conventions’ but also allows him to satirize the practices of ‘two prominent secret societies of his day – the court and the city of London,’ and ‘to offer a blistering critique of the art of reading, or rather misreading texts – that is, of penetrating good sense to arrive at the bad’.8 Most influentially, Annabel Patterson suggests that Jonson ‘meditated’ upon the exposure to the methods of undercover agents and intelligencers afforded to him by his spells in prison ‘and incorporated them into a political and social theory of literature, a poetics of censorship’ that draws upon the discourses of cipher in order to construct hidden forms of meaning.9 I wish to build upon this important critical development by exploring the particular understanding of cipher as practised amongst recusant intelligence agents with whom Jonson was familiar, and to resituate his own use of forms of linguistic code within the particular practices of these early modern spies. I will chart his relationship with the Catholic exile, linguist, controversialist, publisher, intelligencer, engraver, translator and sometime poet, Richard Verstegan, as a means by which to begin to reconstruct a single fragment of the community of recusant informers in which Jonson moved. Verstegan’s most popular work, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), lexicographically analyses the Anglo-Saxon elements in English vocabulary in such a way as to suggest a pre-history to the language of contemporary Catholicism that endorses the continuing traditions of the outlawed faith.10 Jonson’s familiarity with this text is attested by some mockery of Sir Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist (1610), which satirizes the idea of Teutonic as the original – or Adamic – language, a theory first expounded by Goropius Becanus but introduced to a wider English audience by Verstegan (who is himself dubious about this argument).11 It is my belief that Jonson shares with Verstegan a sense of the potential for apparently innocuous language to encode secret meaning, and an understanding that linguistic codes can serve inclusively



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as well as exclusively, to reinforce connections between those who are educated to appreciate their meanings. Jonson, like Verstegan, uses this technique to engender a particular community of readers who share with him certain religious or political beliefs. Forced to flee England following his involvement in the publication of a seditious account of Thomas Campion’s martyrdom in 1583, Richard Verstegan lived in Antwerp from 1587 until his death (aged over ninety), where he served as an informant for the European recusant community providing his contacts with information about Catholic interests in England via his regular newsletters.12 Answering mostly to Robert Persons, a leading figure in the Jesuit missions of the early 1590s who was based in Spain and then at Rome, Verstegan was at the hub of a busy network of Catholic spies, overseeing the exchange of news and books across the continent. As Anthony G. Petti writes: Verstegan was at the centre of a very elaborate communication system in the 1590s. It is difficult to over-estimate his importance in this respect. He was the connecting link at Antwerp for a number of leading English Catholics in England, Spain, Italy, France and the Low Countries, despatching and forwarding letters to and from each of these countries with amazing speed and efficiency, considering the precarious state of letter-carriage at the time.13 Most of Verstegan’s letters consist of three to four pages of closely written text, measuring roughly twelve by eight inches. Formerly at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, the letters are now held in the Jesuit archives in Farm Street. Of eighty surviving dispatches, the vast majority of Verstegan’s correspondence covers the years 1592, 1593 and 1595, and is predominantly compiled from the advices he received from his own sources in London, Rouen, and Middelburg. Its contents are condensed and summarized as appropriate for the benefit of the letters’ recipients, who included Cardinal Allen at Rome (then regarded as the leader of Catholics in exile); Allen’s secretary, Roger Baynes; Father Henry Garnet (head of the Jesuit mission in England until his execution in 1606); the highly influential Welsh exile Hugh Owen; Father Richard Walpole (Prefect of Studies in the Jesuit College at Seville); his brother, Henry, author of a popular poetic epitaph giving his eye-witness account of Campion’s death (which included being splashed with the martyr’s blood, a transformative experience for Walpole); and of course Persons, to whom he sent at least one letter a week during this period.



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The dangerous nature of Verstegan’s occupation is illustrated by the earliest surviving letter in his collected correspondence: an account by the Jesuit priest and martyr Robert Southwell of the perilous state in which English recusants found themselves. Southwell describes the ‘very many and severe’ searches to which those households suspected of harbouring Catholics were subject, and reports that ‘Over such Catholikes as are abrode they set such watches, that, if there be any meanes to make them fal in to their hands, they fayle not to put it in practise by their spies and catchpols, who, under good pretenses, sometymes worke the undoing of good howses.’14 Other letters concern the fearsome priesthunter and interrogator, Richard Topcliffe, whom Verstegan brands a ‘Barrabas’ figure to Southwell’s ‘Christe’. According to a salacious and rather gossipy letter sent by Verstegan late in 1592, Topcliffe brags of intimacy with the Queen, claiming, amongst other things, ‘[t]hat he hathe felt her belly, and said unto Her Majestie that she h[ad] the softest belly of any woman kynde’.15 In such a climate – and indeed in such a dangerous position – Verstegan chose to employ cipher in many of his letters, substituting innocuous words or a system of numbers in place of terms that would have attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth’s own intelligencers, organized under Walsingham. By my count, cipher is used in ten of the eighty extant missives, and within these texts its appearance is limited to those paragraphs containing key pieces of sensitive information – although when it does appear its usage tends to be fairly dense. A typical instance of the use of cipher in this correspondence is the letter from Verstegan to Baynes on 22 August 1592 describing efforts to mitigate Robert Southwell’s suffering following his imprisonment in June of that year: With my last [letter] of the 15 of this presente [month] I sent you a copy of a 222 his letter from 137. Since that tyme I have recyved another letter from a brother of that parties dates there the 5 of August; and he writeth that 112 his father hathe somuch labored by meanes of frendes that his sonne is not so continually tortured as he was.16 The code used here is a relatively straightforward one in which 3-digit numbers are substituted for certain nouns, to which they bear no obvious relation. Elsewhere in Verstegan’s correspondence we see a variation on this, a letter-substitution code where 2-digit numbers represent individual letters. (Hence the word ‘French’ is spelled out in a communication sent to Baynes in January 1594 as 6 21 53 43 49 41 45’.17) In both





forms of cipher, however, the relation between number and referent remains stable. The same code is used throughout the entire Baynes correspondence, and seems not to have altered at all between 1591 and 1595. (In fact, all of Baynes’s informers across Europe appear to have used exactly the same code in their letters to Rome throughout this period.) By any standards then these ciphers are relatively simple and straightforward. One has to wonder how difficult it is to discern Verstegan’s meaning in the letter quoted above; it seems likely that the words ‘Jesuit’ and ‘England’ might be supplied in place of the numbers ‘222’ and ‘137’ by an interceptor of even very limited imagination, let alone an experienced cryptographer such as Thomas Phelippes, whose marginal decipherings appear next to coded sections of one of Verstegan’s own letters, sent to Baynes, on 20 May 1595. Phelippes had been central to Walsingham’s intelligence operations and continued to work for his successor Robert Cecil at this time (despite a loss of royal favour and subsequent imprisonment for debt).18 Petti believes that Verstegan reserves cipher ‘for occasions when particular secrecy was to be observed in the naming of important people, places or subjects’.19 Let us turn to another example to illustrate why I believe this remark fails to fully account for the role of cipher in the letters. In a despatch to Robert Persons, dated 29 October 1592, Verstegan reports that ‘181 dothe thinck it best to stay for a fewe weekes to send any 239 to any 139 in 25, because Mr. 9 m 12 dothe here by 227 meanes very much seek to understand which way and how 181 dealeth’.20 The code employed in letters to Persons differs from that Verstegan uses for Baynes, combining letter and numerical substitution. Yet, again, it does not seem to require an enormous leap to guess that a ‘239’ might be a ‘letter’, that a ‘139’ could be a ‘priest’, or a ‘227’ might mean ‘spying’ or ‘secret’. I do not mean to undermine the significance of these letters, the sensitivity of their contents, or the potential danger to Verstegan and his correspondents at this moment. Cipher clearly does have an important role in preserving the identity of specific people and places, and – even where its meaning can be inferred with apparent ease – in maintaining a crucial element of deniability should the letters fall into the wrong hands. (This latter aspect would later be illustrated in a letter sent partly in code by Archbishop William Laud to Lord Wentworth in 1635: ‘I am most confident if either of us fail, our letters will be fingered’, he writes.21) But I would like to suggest that we might usefully think of the role of cipher in Verstegan’s letters as not just a kind of protection but also a form of protocol, by which shared membership of a community of Catholic exiles could be signalled between correspondents. As such,



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I will argue later in this essay, its operations have much in common with the coded language of Jonson’s masques, designed to appeal to a select audience whose understanding of the linguistic codes employed in such performances allows them to participate in the communities the masques themselves constitute. Gary Schneider’s account of The Culture of Epistolarity emphasizes the importance of news exchange in early modern letters as a means ‘to assure a correspondent of ongoing social connection’, serving as ‘a socially binding tool, concerned as much with maintaining social relationships as with informing’.22 I propose extending Schneider’s thesis to include the letter-writing environment of the coded letter, particularly as it functioned as a medium of communication between the fractured and constantly threatened English Catholic population abroad, where this sort of social continuity, connection and cohesion was essential. Verstegan’s own position was especially precarious. His letters repeatedly betray signs of his continuing struggle against poverty, and they owe their concision in part to the cost of postage, for which he was rarely reimbursed. In October 1592 he tells Persons that this is ‘the fourteenth moneth since we had any pay, except one succours long since’.23 When he finally receives a payment in January 1594, Verstegan numbers himself amongst those who ‘to kepe their credit, were enforced to pay away all that they receaved within 2 or 3 dates after’, to settle debts.24 To add insult to injury, Verstegan reports, the Jesuits’ enemies in England rejoice at their destitution whilst the Pope diverts funds away from supporting this community of exiles in order to build new seminaries.25 Things get even worse in March 1595 when serious floods in the Low Countries affect the ready availability of food (‘Thousandes of cattell and many men are drowned’, he writes to Persons), and when he does not receive any reply to a letter sent to Baynes a few weeks later, Verstegan sends another missive, the brevity of which he apologizes for on the grounds that ‘I am so ill at ease that scarsly I can hold up my head’.26 In such dire circumstances Verstegan clings to his influential connections amongst the Jesuit community like a life-line, and it is partly in order to reinforce such links, I believe, that he adopts cipher in writing to his important correspondents. As such, the use of code represents just one aspect in a series of letter-writing conventions imposed on Verstegan by his correspondents. When he includes a description of Southwell’s sufferings meant for Sir Francis Englefield along with a letter to Robert Persons, leaving the paper ‘unsealed, to the end he may read it with the other thinges therein conteyned, because I would save the labour to write it twice’, Persons is displeased, noting to himself ‘[r]emember to





advise hym of not putting letters for Francis in my packett’.27 Despite being extremely pressed for time and money, Verstegan discontinues the practice as requested, realizing himself to be entirely at the mercy of Persons’s whim. In this regard, Verstegan’s relationship to Persons – and the other recipients of his newsletters high up in the Catholic community – closely resembles that of an artist to his patron, with both the form and content of his offerings carefully designed to please their addressee. Indeed, John Michael Archer has described intelligence as ‘a particularly obscure sector of the greater field of patronage’.28 The actual effectiveness of Verstegan’s use of cipher as a secret device is less important, I believe, than the fact it creates a bond between writer and recipient that has the appearance of exclusivity and, similarly, forms one of a series of writing practices that signify Verstegan’s subservience to his correspondents, or patrons. It is within this context of the use of cipher as a community-building protocol that I believe Jonson’s work might be productively reconsidered. His poetry displays familiarity with the strategies for secret communication employed by early modern intelligencers, most notably in ‘The New Cry’, where he describes those who ‘get Porta, for the sundrie wayes | To write in cypher, and the seuerall keyes, | To ope’ the character’ (H&S VIII.59, ll.25–7).29 I would suggest that Jonson’s disdain is here reserved not for those genuinely engaged in intelligence gathering at the highest levels, but rather the ‘Ripe statesmen’ who clumsily imitate such behaviour out of a misguided sense of the glamour of this underground world (H&S VIII.58, l.3). The targets of Jonson’s scorn are those who read Porta merely to participate in a certain kind of group behaviour, and the processes of trend formation more broadly. The ‘sundrie waies’ of writing cipher are of interest to such men not as a means of survival, as they were to embattled spies and underground agents, but rather as a means of entry to a select cohort who share this knowledge and participate in this dialogue of secrecy. As R. Malcolm Smuts has written, the ability to ‘gather news and analyze political intrigues’ was an important weapon in the armoury of the fashionable courtier, to the extent that the everresourceful John Harrington would supposedly boast to Prince Henry in 1605 that his dog Bungey had carried a secret message from his house at Bath to the Court at Greenwich.30 Jonson’s poem, which ridicules of the use of ‘iuyce of limons, onions, pisse, to write’, might best be understood as an attack upon cipher as a fashionable mode of secret communication adopted by a select group of participants in order to build and reinforce an exclusive community (H&S VIII.59, l.28). Despite the biting satire unleashed in ‘The New Cry’, Jonson is himself characteristically quick to employ coded forms of language



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as precisely this kind of community-building protocol elsewhere in his work. In the remainder of this essay I will focus upon Jonson’s masques, suggesting that he derives from his encounters with early modern intelligencers an understanding of the way that secret forms of language can engender a sense of group identity, which he then uses to create and sustain the particular audiences for his work that have been described extensively by recent critics. Stephen Orgel has revealed the masque’s ability to convey political power through an ‘obscure’ kind of expression, whilst David Lindley suggests that the ‘opacity of meaning or apparent randomness of form’ typical of the genre belies its ‘vitally significant’ political and social engagements.31 David Bevington and Peter Holbrook believe that the masque ‘was unavoidably and consciously political’, but argue that such meaning was accessible to only certain audience members and ‘some of its spectators may have been uncomprehending of, or indifferent to, its deeper poetic and scenic meanings’.32 Martin Butler draws attention to the particular community-building dimension of masques, noting that they were ‘an important point of contact between the crown and its political class, cementing their bonds of loyalty and outlook’.33 Each of these accounts rightly emphasizes the dual processes of inclusion and exclusion by which the masque configures its own select, politically aligned and socially elite audience. We can see this at work in the entertainment Jonson was commissioned to produce celebrating the coronation of James I for the ceremonial entrance of the new monarch into London on 15 March 1604. The procession was to stop at a series of architecturally innovative and highly decorated arches, where actors would expound the symbolic meaning of each one in verse. In the printed version of his Part of the Kings Entertainment in Passing to his Coronation Jonson makes clear that the success of the spectacle depends in part upon an audience trained (in part by the masque itself) to decipher the coded significance of what it sees: the garments and ensignes deliuer the nature of the person, and the word the present office. Neither was it becoming, or could stand it with the dignitie of these shewes [. . .] to require a Truch-man, or (with the ignorant Painter) one to write, This is a Dog; or, This is a Hare: but so to be presented, as vpon the view, they might, without cloud, or obscuritie, declare themselues to the sharpe and learned: and for the multitude, no doubt but their grounded iudgements did gaze, said it was fine, and were satisfied.34





Whilst the unlearned ‘multitude’ will grasp only part of the intended effect, Jonson’s Entertainment will shape his preferred audience, ‘the sharpe and learned’ who will be fully capable of understanding the hidden meaning of what is on show here. Those who bring the requisite erudition to the spectacle will immediately, ‘without cloud, or obscuritie,’ discern a deeper level of the Entertainment’s coded message. Jonson provides glosses upon the names of the figures displayed as part of the arch at Fen-Church, supplying information about their characters in a kind of key ‘To ope’ the character’ (as he put it in ‘The New Cry’). We are presented with ‘EVPHROSYNE, or Gladnesse’, ‘SEBASIS, or Veneration’, and ‘PROTHYMIA, or Promptitude’ (H&S, VII.87, ll.127–8, 141–2, 150–1). The educated onlooker trained in classical languages will quickly decode these names even in performance. Jonson’s entertainment also incorporates more complex, allusive moments that require further deciphering. ‘AGRYPNIA, or Vigilence’, is dressed in yellow, complete with a ‘chaplet of Heliotropium, or turnesole’, a flower whose defining characteristic – that it turns to follow the direction of the sun – is epitomized by its name, and which here is used to symbolize ‘care’, Jonson says (H&S VII.88, ll.167–73, 180). Presumably the connection Jonson wishes to elicit here is between the heliotrope or sunflower’s constant alertness to the position of its source of light, and the eternal wakefulness of Agrypnia as a symbol of vigilance. An allusion to ‘TAGVS wealthy ore’ contains a submerged etymological pun (H&S VII.93, l.310). The river Tagus, Jonson’s note tells us, divides Spain and Portugal, ‘and by the consent of Poets stil’d aurifer’, meaning ‘gold-bearing’, which explains the ‘wealthy ore’ carried by the stream here (H&S VII.93, l.310n.). Similarly, Electra alludes to the origins of her own name when she says that ‘No more shall men suppose ELECTRA dead, | Though from the consort of her sisters fled | Vnto the Arctick circle, here to grace, | And gild this day with her . . . serenest face . . .’ (H&S, VII.107, ll.704–7). This is a subtle reference to the derivation of her name from Greek, as Jonson’s note here reads: ‘Electra signifies SERENITIE it selfe, and is compounded of ηλιος, which is the Sunne, and αιθριος, that signified serene’ (H&S, VII.107, ll.707 and n.). Like the ciphered letters through which Verstegan and his correspondents create a community of shared meaning, each of these instances helps to constitute an elite group of readers who are bound together through a common understanding of coded language. Why would Jonson choose to employ this kind of intricate linguistic device in a work to be performed on a busy day, in from of a large and noisy crowd, many of whom were unlikely in any case to appreciate its nuances?35 I would argue that Jonson uses such moments



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to establish two distinct audiences for his piece, namely those who are included in the select group who are able to interpret his coded language, and those who are unattuned to such subtleties, and consequently excluded. As was also the case for the kind of cipher we saw employed in Verstegan’s intelligencing letters, this is a mechanism designed to enforce group identity amongst those who can fully appreciate what is communicated here, reinforced by the alienation of those who can not. Jonson seems to register the competing requirements of these two different groups in his choice of stylistic devices in the Entertainment. He writes, ‘the Symboles vsed, are not, neither ought to be, simply Hieroglyphicks, Emblemes, or Impreses, but a mixed character, partaking somewhat of all, and peculiarly apted to these more magnificent Inuentions’ (H&S VII.91, ll.253–57). These linguistic figures might all be considered ciphered forms, in that each of these devices has a significance in the first moment of apprehension that differs from that reached through the subsequent process of interpretation. In describing hieroglyphics, emblems and impreses as having ‘a mixed character’ Jonson alludes to the various senses of the noun current at this time. The word ‘character’ has a primarily alphabetical sense in 1604, as demonstrated by Robert Cawdry’s definition in his Table Alphabeticall, where he notes the Greek etymology of the term meaning ‘the fashion of a Letter, a marke, or stampe’.36 It is also beginning to have some of the sense by which we most commonly use the noun today, pertaining to a person’s nature, and it is this meaning Jonson employs here.37 His phrase ‘mixed character’ is doubly fitting, for he will later turn on ‘Court Hieroglyphicks!’ as morally reprehensible in his poem ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, written upon the occasion of their quarrel in 1631. Jonson there lambasts the shallowness of such devices and other ‘Artes’ that ‘affoord | In [th]e mere perspectiue of an Inch board!’ (H&S VIII.402–6, ll.43–4). As Herford and Simpson note, ‘Court Hieroglyphicks’ here represent ‘an outward symbol of all the vain pretences of the Court’, in which outward appearances are incompatible with what lies within (H&S XI.153n). This vitriolic piece of verse simultaneously attacks Jones, paradoxically, for being too obvious and yet too obscure; the symbolic language of his costume designs serves to ‘Attyre [th]e Persons as noe thought can teach’, Jonson says (l.54). He lends further edge to his satire by claiming that even Jones’s vocabulary is impenetrable, branding his contribution to the masques as one ‘which by a specious fyne | Terme of [th]e Architects is called Designe!’ (H&S VIII.402–6, ll.55–6). Only those with ‘certeyne politique Eyes’, will be simultaneously blinkered and clear-sighted enough to be able to ‘pierce into [th]e Misteryes | Of many Coulors! read them! & reueale | Mythology





there painted’; political inconsistency of a kind that implies moral flexibility is a prerequisite for deciphering the full significance of Jones’s masque designs (H&S VIII.402–7, ll.45, 46–8). The word ‘character’ had one more important sense that Jonson touches upon here, as a synonym for cipher (a meaning he evokes in ‘The New Cry’, as we have seen.38) In 1588 Timothy Bright had published an extremely popular treatise entitled Characterie, An Arte of Shorte, Swifte, and Secrete Writing by Character, setting out a much-imitated version of shorthand that its author believed might, in addition to speed, offer the further advantage of functioning as a very basic form of code.39 As Lois Potter observes, such a simple form of cipher does not offer any real form of secrecy, but rather produces ‘a mixture of revelation and concealment’.40 The Royalists’ chief code-breaker, John Wallis (whom Potter considers the first ‘acknowledged professional decipherer’), would claim that cracking Bright’s ‘Character’ took him only an hour.41 The appearance of impenetrability in fact belies the ease with which those practiced in the arts of code breaking are able to interpret the hidden meaning of such characters. The figures of ‘mixed character’ that Jonson deploys in his Entertainment have exactly this function, constituting his audience by sifting those who understand such moments fully from those who do not, in precisely the same way Richard Verstegan uses cipher as a protocol designed not, as I have argued, to ensure complete secrecy but rather in order to signal participation in a shared enterprise that is governed by these letter-writing conventions. The community-building potential of this careful balance between concealment and revelation can also be seen elsewhere in Jonson’s court masques, which include complex verbal allusions that must be slowly unravelled along with other forms necessitating decipherment such as the anagram or the acrostic.42 In the printed version of The Masque of Blackness (1605) Jonson describes the dance with which the entertainment culminates, noting that each couple presented carries two fans ‘in one of which were inscribed their mixt Names, in the other a mute Hieroglyphick, expressing their mixed qualities. Which manner of Symbole I rather chose, then Imprese, as well for strangenesse, as relishing of antiquitie’ (H&S VII.177, ll.268–71). The ‘mixed qualities’ of these figures render them both strange, or obscure, and also allow them to signify in particular ways. The appeal of the hieroglyphic lies not only in its ‘resistance to single interpretations’, but also in its ability ‘to produce divergent impressions on the various members of the masque’s heterogeneous audience’, Molly Murray writes.43 Arguing that the hieroglyphic produces the appearance of transparency whilst in fact concealing multiple different possible meanings



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(in a reflection of the position of those recusants at court who perform religious conformity), Murray argues that it offers a coded mode of communication that can only be interpreted by those spectators attuned to its secret meanings, thus shielding a Catholic-sympathizing Jonson from the dangers that would otherwise attend upon the expression of nonconformism she detects in this masque.44 Hymenaei (1606), written for the marriage of the Earl of Essex and the Lady Frances Howard (which later ended in an infamous divorce), similarly contains linguistic devices requiring sophisticated levels of interpretive engagement. Reason entreats, for instance, that the audience should ‘see, where IVNO, whose great name | Is VNIO, in the anagram’ (H&S VII.217, 220–1, ll.232–3, 310–17). Such moments invite spectators to enter into the masque’s innermost world of meaning, accessible only to those willing to make the effort to decipher its full connotations. The ability or inability to fully comprehend such meaning is what determines an elite audience for the masque, awarding the form its particular power to perform inclusivity by the act of excluding those who lack privileged access to its secret significances. Jonson’s deployment of the anagram in order to instigate this particular kind of readership reflects his tutor William Camden’s attention to such verbal devices in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605), where he discusses anagrams as well as studying the coded meanings of Christian and surnames, allusions (by which he means a particular kind of word-play upon proper names) and rebuses (also known as ‘Name-deuises’, these combine words and images in order to pun upon a name). Camden takes the anagram particularly seriously owing to its association with the cabbala, and its relative difficulty.45 He points out that good anagrams are particularly hard to make in English, because its ‘names running rough with Consonants are not so smooth and easie for transposition as the French and Italian’.46 However, Camden is able to reproduce some fine examples of the English anagram, amongst them one that Jonson will later deploy in his Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1610): ‘Charles James Steuart’ = ‘CLAIMES ARTHURS SEATE’.47 This anagram had great political significance for the English monarch, flatteringly comparing James I’s court to the Arthurian in an extension of the British mythology of which the Tudors were so enamoured. Graham Parry describes James I’s fondness for the myth of Trojan descent so ubiquitous under the Tudors, effectively combined here with ‘the contemporary fashion for anagrams, whereby it was believed that a man’s name concealed his destiny, and that destiny could be discovered by ingenious rearrangement of the l[e]tters of his name’.48 In his Yale edition of Jonson’s masques,





Stephen Orgel notes that Oberon (1611), which also contains a reference to ‘Arthur’s Chair’ (l.222), was first performed at the wedding of the Earl of Huntly and Lady Henrietta Stuart in 1588: ‘[t]he marriage was celebrated in Holyrood Palace, at the foot of the hill called Arthur’s Seat’, he notes.49 Jonson uses coded anagrammatic allusions to build a political community around a shared mythology in this way. In concluding this essay I want to look briefly at Jonson’s most famous statement about coded linguistic devices, the poem he wrote upon the agonizing loss of his personal library (including the sole copies of several unpublished works) in 1623. ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’ is an extraordinarily angry poem – in keeping with an extraordinary grief – in which Jonson rails against the god who has brought such a fate upon him. Throughout the verse Jonson imagines a series of alternate possibilities in which this tragedy might not have happened as it did, listing books and works he would voluntarily have given up to the blaze in place of those destroyed, and bemoaning the failure of the civil and legal authorities that might have restrained Vulcan’s wrath to prevent him taking such vengeance, before ending in an infamously uncivil ‘civil curse’, wishing upon his adversary ‘Thy wife’s pox on thee, and Bess Braughton’s too’ (H&S VIII. 202–12, ll.59–84, 174–88, 189–216). Above all, Jonson attempts to imagine circumstances in which he might have deserved this awful punishment. If he had spent his time in his library engineering the kinds of intricate textual device that Camden treats in the Remains: Or spun out Riddles, and weav’d fiftie tomes Of Logogriphes, and curious Palindromes, Or pomp’d for those hard trifles, Anagrams, Or Eteostichs, or those finer flammes Of Egges, and Halberds, Cradles, and a Herse, A paire of Scisars, and a Combe in verse; Acrostichs, and Telestichs, on jumpe names, Thou then hadst some colour for thy flames, On such my serious follies . . .50 As we have seen, despite the fervent denunciation of such linguistic devices here, Jonson was not above using this kind of verbal play when it suited his own purposes. The Oxford editors have good reason to be sceptical towards the comments reported by Drummond of Hawthornden, that Jonson ‘scorned Anagrams & had ever in his mouth “turpe est, difficiles amare nugas, | et stultus labor est ineptiarum” [“It is humiliating to undertake difficult trifles; and the effort spent on idiotic tasks is foolish”]’.51



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Quixotic as ever, we have seen how Jonson picks up and puts down coded linguistic devices such as the anagram at will, utilizing where it serves the rhetorical purposes of any given text forms that he elsewhere derides. His oxymoronic branding of such ‘serious follies’ here reflects this deep-rooted ambivalence; but it also registers something of the multivalency attached to the idea of cipher in this period. I have suggested that the use of code in correspondence between spies and their patrons is as much a form of community-building protocol as a means of rendering texts genuinely secret; whilst using cipher may delay interpretation if a letter is intercepted, the kinds of code employed by the majority of informers are not sufficient to prevent decipherment when subjected to sustained scrutiny. This does not diminish the literary value of the cipher for Jonson. As I have argued throughout this essay Jonson’s own recusant allegiances place him in contact with the world of underground intelligencers, where he encounters an understanding of cipher that is both polemically and politically useful to him. His masques evidence the ways that concealed meanings can be used to draw together a particular community of readers or audience members who are able to discern this additional layer of significance. Jonson’s use of coded forms of language stems from a desire to ensure a safe yet provocative mode of political engagement for his texts, and requires his audiences to participate in an ongoing process of decipherment that continues to maintain its secrets as well as to reveal.

Notes and references 1. As we await the publication of the new Cambridge Edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, the authoritative text still remains that of Herford and Simpson. All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated, which will be abbreviated to ‘H&S’ in the text. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds., with the assistance of Evelyn Simpson (1925–52) Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 11 vols., VIII, p. 45. 2. Ian Donaldson notes that Jonson had previously been imprisoned in 1597 and this would not be his last jail term. See Donaldson (2004) ‘Jonson, Benjamin (1572–1637)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 3. See Theodore A. Stroud (1947) ‘Ben Jonson and Father Thomas Wright’, English Literary History 14.4 (December): 274–82. 4. On the politics of conversion amongst the Catholic community in Elizabethan and Jacobean prisons see Peter Lake and Michael Questier (1998) ‘Prisons, priests and people’ in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London: UCL Press), pp. 195–235. 5. Richard Dutton (2008) Ben Jonson, ‘Volpone’ and the Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 22.





6. John Michael Archer (1993) Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 120. 7. Mark Eccles first argued that we should take seriously Jonson’s experience of intelligencing in (1937) ‘Jonson and the Spies’, The Review of English Studies XIII.52 (October). 8. William W.E. Slights (1994) Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press), p. 177. 9. Annabel Patterson (1984) Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 57. 10. See Donna B. Hamilton (1999) ‘Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605): A Catholic Antiquarian Replies to John Foxe, Thomas Cooper and Jean Bodin’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 22.1 (April), 1–38; and my own (2008) ‘Prophetic Language and Etymological Discovery in the Work of Richard Verstegan,’ New Medieval Literatures IX, 93–115. 11. The exchange occurs at II.i.80–6; see H&S V.316–17. 12. Paul Arblaster has recently published the first full-length monograph to address Verstegan’s writing in the context of his extraordinary life: (2004) Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press). 13. Anthony G. Petti (1959) ed., The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640) (London: Publications of the Catholic Record Society), p. xvi. 14. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti) No. I, p. 7. 15. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XX, p. 97. 16. Southwell was tortured for three years before he was finally put to death in 1595; Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. X, p. 72. 17. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XLVII, p. 199. 18. Robert Southwell describes the role of ‘Philips the decipherer’ in his letter to Verstegan of early December 1591. See Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. LXI, pp. 233, 235, and No. I, p. 3, respectively. On Phelippes’s work as a cryptographer and employment by Walsingham, see William Richardson’s entry ‘Phelippes, Thomas (c.1556–1625), cryptographer and intelligence gatherer,’ ODNB. 19. Introduction to Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), p. xxiv. 20. Letters and Despatches, (ed. Petti), No. XV, p. 87. 21. Quoted in Gary Schneider (2005) The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press), p. 91. 22. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity, p. 158. 23. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XV, p. 88. 24. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XLVII, p. 199. 25. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. XL, p. 177. 26. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. LVIII, p. 229, No. LXI, p. 233. 27. Letters and Despatches (ed. Petti), No. VIII, p. 65n. 28. Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, p. 5. 29. The manual referred to here is Giovanni Baptista Porta’s De Furtivis Literarum Notis (Naples, 1563). 30. R. Malcolm Smuts (1987) Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), p. 78; Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence, p. 46.



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31. Stephen Orgel (1975) The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press), p. 88; David Lindley (ed.) (1984) The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 8–9. 32. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (1998) eds., The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 4. 33. Martin Butler (2008) The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 2. Whilst the focus of this study – like that of Bevington and Holbrook – is predominantly the masques of a later period, this argument stands for Jonson’s Jacobean works. 34. H&S VII.91, ll.257–67. 35. The procession was notoriously a disaster, unable to hold the short attention span of King James. See H&S’s Introduction to their Commentary upon the piece (H&S, X.387), where they cite accounts of the monarch’s impatience with the festivities by Arthur Wilson (1653) Life and Reign of King James the First (London), pp. 12 and 13. 36. Robert Cawdry (1604) A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. (London), sig.Ciiv. 37. The transition of the word’s meaning can be reconstructed in the following way: from its original sense of an impression or mark, the term becomes associated with handwriting; handwriting is distinctive to a person, hence people are associated with their ‘character’, or, ‘The sum of the moral and mental qualities which distinguish an individual or a race, viewed as a homogeneous whole; the individuality impressed by nature and habit on man or nation’, Oxford English Dictionary (ed.) John Simpson, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ‘character, n, 11’. 38. H&S VIII.59, ll.27. Compare Sejanus (1604), when Posthumus refers to those at court who ‘talke in character’ (H&S IV.386, II.334). 39. Timothy Bright (1588) Characterie: An Arte of shorte, swifte, and secrete writing by Character (London), sig.A3v. 40. See Lois Potter (1989) Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 43 and 41. 41. Potter, Secret Rites, pp. 41 and 43. 42. Jonson employs acrostics in the arguments prefixed to Volpone (H&S V.23) and The Alchemist (H&S V.293), and in the epitaph on Margaret Ratcliffe (H&S VIII.46). 43. Molly Murray (2007) ‘Performing Devotion in The Masque of Blacknesse,’ Studies in English Literature 47.2 (Spring), 427–49, 440. 44. Murray emphasizes that this is not a straightforward ‘secret defense of Catholic belief’. ‘Such a reading’, she points out, ‘in addition to rehearsing contemporary Protestant allegations of the genre’s crypto-Catholicism, ignore the essential polysemy of the masque, its uncanny capacity to signal both a celebration and a repudiation of its titular color’. Murray, ‘Performing Devotion’, 428–9. On such allegations Murray cites David Norbrook, ‘The Reformation of the Masque’, in Lindley, ed., The Court Masque, 94–110. 45. See commentary to William Camden (1984) Remains Concerning Britain, R.D. Dunn ed., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), p. 401n. 46. Camden, Remains, p. 145.





47. Camden, Remains, pp. 145 and 403n. Dunn credits Jonson with the invention of this anagram, although I suspect that he borrowed it from Camden. 48. Graham Parry (1981) The Golden Age Restor’d: The culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 64. 49. Stephen Orgel (1970) ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), p. 481n. 50. H&S VIII. 202–12, ll.33–40. 51. The epigram is from Martial II.lxxxvi, 9–10; see Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, George Parfitt (1975, repr. 1996) ed. (London: Penguin), p. 611n and H&S XI.74–5.



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The Ambassador’s Household: Sir Henry Wotton, Domesticity, and Diplomatic Writing Mark Netzloff

After a decades-long period of neglect, the study of early modern diplomacy has experienced a revival in the past several years, with important contributions from historians such as Daniela Frigo and Douglas Biow and literary scholars including Timothy Hampton and John Watkins.1 As Watkins has recently argued, ‘the time has come for a multidisciplinary reevaluation of one of the oldest, and traditionally one of the most conservative, subfields in the modern discipline of history: the study of premodern diplomacy’.2 An examination of the historical foundations of the diplomatic system is especially pertinent due to the catastrophic failure of diplomacy in our own time. At a historical moment when our states have actively circumvented not merely diplomatic protocol but also, and more significantly, foundational premises of international law, we find ourselves turning to what Watkins accurately describes as a problematically conservative field. This position in which we find ourselves is oddly, reminiscently early modern. As James Der Derian points out, the most significant early modern efforts to theorize sovereignty similarly emerged out of contexts of political upheaval, from Jean Bodin and the French civil wars, and Hugo Grotius and the Thirty Years’ War, to Hobbes and the English Revolution.3 But these figures also inaugurated a tradition in which theories of sovereignty were analysed at a remove from diplomatic practice, something that continues to characterize much contemporary work on diplomatic history and international relations: ‘Diplomacy’, Der Derian notes, ‘has been particularly resistant to theory.’4 As a way of reflecting on the theoretical preconditions that informed diplomatic practice, this essay examines the social and material life of the early modern embassy. Through a discussion of the career and correspondence of Sir Henry Wotton, England’s resident ambassador 155



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in Venice through much of the Jacobean period, my focus is not the diplomatic content of these embassies but rather the unique position of the embassy as a space of residence, domestic business, and social and pedagogical conduct. Offsetting the naturalized assumption that diplomacy follows prescribed rules and universal protocols, I instead emphasize the extent to which its practices are shaped by the actions, agendas, and personal styles of its contributing agents. As Der Derian has commented, ‘some of the most “trivial” matters have been crucial – and neglected – factors in the formation of diplomatic practices’.5 This essay therefore analyses the everyday matter of the embassy: not only gossip, informal espionage, and even interior decorating, but especially the material practices and social dynamics of letter writing. ‘The early modern state’, Lynne Magnusson notes, ‘transacted its administrative business, for the most part, in personal letters’.6 The circulation of news and intelligence, one of the embassy’s primary functions, conferred a central role to a multinational staff of secretaries and correspondents. In its anomalous, extraterritorial position – as a national space beyond the nation and a household outside the familial structure – Wotton’s embassy re-imagined ‘domestic’ identities by elaborating alternative affective ties based on adoption, affiliation, and mentorship. The Jacobean period offers a particularly useful historical case study due to James I’s efforts to place diplomacy at the center of his foreign policy. In order to achieve these objectives, he needed a new diplomatic corps of state agents to serve abroad. Because the English state had severed diplomatic relations with every European nation over the final twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign,7 James had to revive a defunct institutional structure to manage inter-state negotiations, and his efforts to inaugurate a mode of public diplomacy led to a broader cultural examination of the role of ambassadors and other diplomatic agents, with the initial publication of diplomatic handbooks such as Jean Hotman’s The Ambassador (1603) occurring in the first years of his reign. As a new class of subjects was recruited to staff England’s permanent embassies, one of the key figures entering this political vacuum was Wotton, who would serve as James’s resident ambassador to Venice in three separate terms over the following twenty years. Logan Pearsall Smith, the early twentieth-century editor of Wotton’s letters, encapsulates the critical assessment that this figure has traditionally received: ‘Wotton is of more interest to us as a writer of letters, full of wit and gossip, than as a statesman.’8 This comment is indicative of what has traditionally counted as the subject of the study of diplomacy, and is premised on the assumption that the ambassador solely maintains



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a public, bureaucratic role, an identity that necessarily excludes the subjective traces of his own personality. It also reflects the extent to which the analysis of diplomacy is shaped by a modern bureaucratic paradigm that confines diplomacy to the domain of an ‘administrative process’, relegating it to an instrumental position in the formal negotiations between state bodies.9 But as Daniela Frigo has recently argued, early modern diplomacy is more effectively analysed in terms of the role or office of the ambassador rather than in an abstracted sense of a ‘sphere of formalized actions’.10 The historical ascendancy of a bureaucratic model of the diplomat has obscured recognition of the distinctive modes of agency and practices of writing exercised by ambassadors in the early modern period. These prior and competing forms of diplomacy, if not generally ignored, are consequently relegated to a private, literary sphere lying outside the public, institutional domain of diplomacy. Early modern ambassadors vied to establish a bureaucratic identity for themselves as a way of arrogating a degree of political agency. Particularly since many resident ambassadors hailed from civic, professional classes, or were younger sons of gentry or aristocratic families, the nascent civil service offered them a rare venue for meritocratic social advancement.11 But the lack of precedents for this kind of social model forced diplomatic culture to adhere to the rules of court culture, a dynamic that additionally stemmed from economic necessity, since ambassadors had to keep tabs on the English court as a way of ensuring their own pay and promotion. Offsetting the social and economic straits that often accompanied their position, Jacobean ambassadors were instrumental in professionalizing the diplomatic service, and they did so by forging what was primarily a corporate, bureaucratic identity. But the depersonalized, institutional forms of writing of Wotton’s colleagues, such as Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels or Sir Charles Cornwallis in Madrid, were countered by the ways that Wotton himself maintained a distinctive style throughout his correspondence. This personalized signature – what Smith described as the literary qualities of Wotton’s ‘wit’ – did not merely inflect his diplomatic life; rather, it was through this affective register that his diplomatic identity itself was constructed. A subjective emphasis on intimacy and sociability was intrinsic to Wotton’s fashioning of himself as a professional and political subject. As he wrote to his new colleague Sir Walter Aston, recently dispatched to Madrid, ‘Besides our own private friendship, we are now consociates in the public service.’12



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The identity of a professional diplomatic corps began to take shape under the direction of James and with the establishment of permanent embassies at Venice, Paris, The Hague, and Madrid. The lateral relations forged among ambassadors played a crucial role in this process of nascent professionalism, as did the social life within the embassy, particularly the affective, everyday commerce between diplomats and members of their staff. As reflected in Wotton’s comment to Aston, diplomats represented their social environment in the terms of the literary coterie, with its dominant languages of friendship and sociability. The interplay of sovereignty and intimacy, which, as Laurie Shannon has demonstrated, served as a register through which sovereigns forged bonds with their subjects and advisors, was just as integral a framework in defining relations among state agents.13 In initiating his correspondence with Sir Ralph Winwood, for example, Wotton subordinated professional duties to the ties of friendship: ‘I will not only interchange with you the offices of a public minister, but as diligently and more affectionately the respects and duties of a friend.’14 The central importance of codes of sociability and personal affect is seen most fully in the extensive correspondence between Wotton and his colleague Sir Dudley Carleton. The increasing enmity that marks their epistolary exchanges stemmed in part from the inherent competitiveness of diplomatic service: Carleton had succeeded Wotton as ambassador to Venice in 1610, only to be replaced in turn by Wotton when the latter began his second term in 1616. Throughout this period, each vied for the resident ambassadorship at The Hague, Carleton’s former post and a more desirable position, a rivalry that led to a rapid decline in the civility of their correspondence. The brief tenure of most ambassadors, and the frequency with which they exchanged posts, facilitated the professionalization of diplomatic service by limiting the extent to which office and office-holder were equated. But the constant jockeying for position also enabled the English state to limit the power of their overseas agents by pitting them against one another. Personal rivalries and animosities often played out in the context of the circulation of news and intelligence. Although resident ambassadors were obliged to share intelligence with their colleagues, at times it was in their interest either to withhold information or ensure that they were receiving some reciprocal news or benefit in return. One of the chief functions of the ambassador and his staff was to manage the flow of information with state officials in England as well as among the nation’s newly established network of resident embassies. Much of the daily life of the embassy was therefore devoted to writing,



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to maintaining a nearly constant output of intelligence reports. In an example of an embassy’s prodigious textual production, one early modern Venetian ambassador sent 472 dispatches in a single year.15 ‘Diplomacy,’ as Timothy Hampton points out, ‘is thus a political practice that is also a writing practice.’16 The burdens of writing offset the increasingly bureaucratic terms of diplomatic service and exposed, instead, the personal and intersubjective qualities of the ambassador’s role. Diplomatic letters are surprisingly self-referential, and acutely aware of the precariousness of their bureaucratic project: preoccupied with the number of letters lost or delayed; the missing gaps in news and intelligence; the deeply personal resentment stemming from having written more often or more fully than one’s correspondent. Carleton, for instance, was frustrated by Wotton’s frequent epistolary silences, and described him as ‘not affable, always busy, but dispatching little’, while their mutual friend and correspondent John Chamberlain, by contrast, complained that Wotton wrote too much, sending him letters every time he received a scrap of news, which produced a stream of overlapping messages that lacked any overarching narrative coherence.17 As Carleton’s professional relationship with Wotton progressively deteriorated, he even considered taking the unprecedented step of ending their correspondence, declaring to Chamberlain, ‘Fabritio’s correspondence and mine is at present at a stand, for he puts me in expectation of his next, and, in answer, I have referred him to my last; which I mean shall be my last to him.’18 Wotton retained a degree of agential power by asserting his control over the textual exchanges of information that were channelled through his embassy. When Carleton and Chamberlain mockingly renamed him ‘Fabritio’, or ‘the father of lies’, this characterization derived from what they identified as his distinctive modes of writing. As Carleton wrote to Chamberlain, ‘The world is much confused in conjecture at Fabritio’s late dispatches, which strangers write hither, out of his letters to his friends, [and they] are matters of the greatest moment that ever Legatus peregre missus, etc., sent to his prince.’19 Rather than using his diplomatic correspondence as a depersonalized, instrumental means for conveying news, Wotton ensured that the value of his information was contingent on his own indispensable role as its reporter. Moreover, instead of discretely sending secret intelligence back to England, his writings became more widely distributed, circulating not only between friends and within domestic coteries but also across national boundaries and among foreign readers. It is appropriate that Carleton elsewhere likened Wotton’s letters to ‘gazettes’ (or news-sheets), a comment that



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reflects the extent to which the secret writing of diplomacy had entered what Habermas identifies as a chief domain of an emergent early modern public sphere: the transcultural traffic in news.20 Blurring the boundaries of public and private in his writings, Wotton disseminated these documents in order to promote himself and advertise his suitability for other appointments. This degree of publicity undermined the traditional association of diplomacy with secrecy, and the diplomat as a dignified spy, an ironic reversal given Wotton’s own personal history as a figure trained in intelligence work. Over the course of his career, Wotton gained notoriety for making public the secret workings of diplomacy. The most scandalous incident occurred in 1610, when a Catholic polemical writer named Gaspar Scioppius published a statement that Wotton had made years earlier describing the role of the ambassador as that of ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.21 This episode was used to discredit James I’s efforts to institute a mode of public diplomacy and cited as evidence of the underlying deceitfulness of English policy. Wotton’s infamous pun – lying abroad – speaks to two key anxieties relating to the perceived duplicity inherent in diplomatic practice. The first is a spatially defined distinction premised on the assumption that the extraterritorial workings of state power entail a state of exception: when lying abroad, the state’s representatives may broadly lie. Moreover, states rely on this loophole in order to maintain a policy of plausible deniability toward their own agents, so that an ambassador caught in a lie may be discredited as a rogue agent acting on his own initiative.22 Indeed, the English state treated Wotton precisely in this manner following the scandal. After Wotton was recalled to England, bringing his first embassy to a premature close, he was forced to spend the next six years lobbying at court and accepting temporary assignments until he could regain his post in 1616. Wotton’s opponents also used this episode to bar him from any positions in England.23 Ironically, in relegating him to the suspect space of extraterritorial service, they only confirmed Wotton’s assessment of the ambassador’s social role. Wotton’s statement also reflected on a second, more fundamental anxiety relating to the duplicity of state power: the intrinsic ‘craft’ of statecraft. In order for the state to maintain its legitimacy, state authority must be abstracted from the means through which it is maintained. The position of the state as authorizing force is contingent on its separation from the actions of its agents. The theoretical elaboration of sovereignty depends on a kind of sleight of hand: by eliding the practices through which the state is constituted, sovereign authority can be represented as



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the prime mover of political agency, the point of origin and legitimacy that may remain unblemished despite the necessary means through which it is maintained. And in order to minimize the significance of the practices of writing and forms of agency that actively constitute the state, diplomatic agents are relegated to an instrumental, bureaucratic status, as cogs in a mechanism that, ostensibly, they can only manage, not control. In contrast to the modern definition of diplomacy as a ‘craft of the state’, in the early modern period diplomacy still adhered to its etymological root – the diplomat was a figure defined by his function as the writer of diplomas, literally, official documents folded together. Diplomacy, in this sense, offered a competing model of agency – a ‘craft of the hand’, to use Costas Constantinou’s phrasing – one that was constituted through acts of writing and intersubjective means of transmission. The historical foundations of diplomacy as an instrumental component in establishing sovereign authority and maintaining the interstate system stemmed from a key transition at the beginning of the modern era that gave priority to ‘the different political styles and effects of political authority and less [importance] to the hand of the scribe and acts of handwriting that produced the material or diploma’ which formed the content of interstate commerce.24 One of the unique stylistic features of Wotton’s diplomatic correspondence is the frequency with which his letters revealed the social contexts of their composition and circulation. In drawing attention to the personal signature of his diplomatic hand, his letters prized not the craftiness of diplomacy but the care intrinsic to the labor of writing – the underlying humanity, in other words, of the bureaucratic project itself, whether in terms of the inescapably personal loyalties or jealousies that motivate public duties or the ways that the all-too-human limits of the writing hand always press against the state’s prescribed writing regime. In one instance, he composed a letter to Sir Thomas Edmondes in Brussels in his own hand, presenting the document as a testament to his personal bond to his colleague and as a peace offering to compensate for a recent lapse in his correspondence.25 On other occasions, the absence of his secretary, sent as a messenger for a previous letter, forced Wotton to compose his letter himself.26 Many of his letters presented diplomatic writing as a collaborative process: in the midst of a winter cold spell that he claims had ‘benumbed’ his secretary’s hand, Wotton took over the quill himself.27 Another letter graphically represented the collaborative relations that characterized the embassy, and featured the alternating hands of Wotton and his secretary as they took turns composing the letter.28



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Wotton’s letters additionally emphasized the social and intersubjective contexts of their circulation by making reference to the messenger bearing the text to its addressee. Many of his letters served a double function: not only transmitting information to court or his diplomatic colleagues, but also acting as a letter of introduction for the bearer, a person who was, in most instances, a young member of Wotton’s embassy. When referring to these agents, Wotton described them in terms that blurred the boundaries separating public and professional life from a private, domestic sphere, calling them ‘an instrument of mine own’ as well as of ‘mine own family’.29 Friendship and family provided the affective registers in which social relations among state agents could be imagined. As Foucault notes, this process – of ‘governmentality’ – is a method that transposes the ‘meticulous attention of the father towards his family’ and introduces it ‘into the management of the state’.30 However, the social dynamics of the embassy disrupted the conventional analogy of family and state. Whereas the extraterritorial status of the embassy was often contingent on efforts to replicate a private, markedly English space abroad, the homosocial dynamics of a household populated by Wotton and his boys attested to the blurred social roles created within the embassy, the codes of sociability and forms of affect that drew on overlapping languages of family, pedagogy, and sexuality. An embassy is distinguished, of course, by its extraterritoriality – its unique legal position as a protected space lying outside the boundaries of the nation but possessing a sovereign authority of its own.31 But the early modern embassy was above all a household, a domestic space of both business and residence, and its social dynamics complicated conventional divisions of public and private spheres. This professional, bureaucratic space was also a domain of friendship and intimacy, one that was marked by the kind of ‘audience-oriented subjectivity’ that Habermas confines solely to the private realm of the family.32 The embassy’s distance from national culture and its models of domesticity facilitated the creation of alternative affective communities, forms of association that are perhaps recognizable now only in terms of their disruption of traditional categories. As Harold Nicolson tellingly observed in his early twentieth-century survey of diplomatic practice, ‘[e]ven in this country a professional diplomatist is regarded as rather un-English; as a queer cosmopolitan; and so he is’.33 Reflecting the historical ascendancy of the family as the paradigmatic model for the private realm and centre of emotional life, Nicolson can only represent the intimacies of a public, professional sphere – and its characteristic relations of adoption, surrogacy, and association – as a distinctly queer aesthetic.34



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William Leete, Wotton’s steward during his second term, described the embassy in the homosocial terms of the literary coterie or domestic college, idealizing it as a space safely removed from the dangers of political life. Writing to Wotton’s former chaplain Isaac Bargrave in England, he remarked, ‘wee liue happily merrily and honestly, lett state businesses goe as they will, wee followe our studies harde, and loue one another’.35 Leete’s comment was perhaps intended to evoke sentiments of nostalgia in Bargrave, not only for the life he had left behind in Venice, but also, it is implied, for the social relations that were no longer available after his return to England. The sociable, studious environment of the embassy was contingent on its extraterritorial distance from domestic culture. The embassy’s cloistered environment also stemmed from its political status in early modern Venice. Venetian law barred the English ambassador and his staff from private meetings with Venetian citizens, thereby relegating them to the sequestered environment that Leete prized so highly. Wotton nonetheless managed to circumvent these restrictions and maintain a remarkably public presence in Venice. Because these laws applied specifically to English members of his embassy, Wotton recruited Venetians into his service, and his embassy was exceptional for its multinational and multilingual personnel. One of Wotton’s Italian secretaries, Gregorio de’Monti, in fact served as the de facto English ambassador in Venice over the two-year gap between Wotton’s second and third terms.36 The statutes that were intended to ensure the national integrity of the embassy, and keep it at a safe distance from Venetian culture, thereby provided the means for creating, instead, a cosmopolitan social space. One of Wotton’s chief political aims had an intrinsic social component, as he fostered a project of mentoring Italian Protestant converts with the hope of creating a community who could enter political life and forge ties with England and its allies.37 Since the laws regulating foreign ambassadors’ social contacts applied solely within the city, Wotton also eluded restrictions by relocating his embassy outside Venice for periods of time. While he was away – touring the countryside, or settled in a nearby villa – he would leave a secretary, such as the Italian de’Monti, in charge of the embassy. The peripatetic nature of Wotton’s embassy confounded his diplomatic colleagues, who were frustrated by their inability to track him down in their correspondence and alarmed that he had seemingly abandoned his post.38 Contradicting Leete’s image of a settled domestic space, Wotton’s embassy depended on travel and circulation.39 During his extended stays outside of Venice, Wotton concealed his activities by assuming the



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role of a fashionable traveller, and he made frequent pronouncements in which he seemingly gave priority to personal leisure over professional duties.40 These statements, taken at face value by his colleagues, only fuelled the gossip swirling about him. As Chamberlain snidely noted to Carleton, ‘Fabritio’, enjoying himself in Venice, ‘geves himself buon tempo, and followes goode companie, and plays, as familiarly and ordinarilie as yf he had nothing els to do.’41 But Wotton’s sociability, which enabled him to move freely through Italy and mingle with different publics, was instrumental in gathering intelligence as part of his official duties.42 He maintained a network of agents throughout Italy, a group he was able to contact more easily when travelling outside of Venice. A large percentage of the embassy’s household expenses went to payments for these informants.43 Sociability was a key component in recruiting informants and maintaining intelligence networks, for agents were linked solely to the ambassador who employed them rather than to the English embassy or state more generally. When Carleton took over from Wotton in 1610, he did not inherit Wotton’s contacts, and was forced to create his own network of agents.44 The central role played by these Italian agents in the domestic business of the embassy reflects the extent to which the embassy blurred not only national boundaries but also demarcations of public and private spheres. In modern diplomacy, the extraterritorial privileges of the embassy are contingent on its permanence and universally recognized presence as a physical structure, a secure compound possessing a fictional status as national territory on foreign soil. The early modern period was instrumental in giving shape to the extraterritorial rights of the embassy. Indeed, the protection allotted to ambassadorial households was often a point of contention, as with the role of the Spanish embassy in London, which served as a site of sanctuary and religious observance for English Catholics.45 The embassy’s extraterritorial status inherently defined it as a space that uniquely traversed public and private spheres. But the English embassy in Venice was additionally exceptional in that this household was situated in a rented private home. The household accounts of Wotton’s embassy reveal the extent to which it was utterly dependent on its Venetian hosts: not only for the ambassadorial residence itself, but also for household furnishings, transportation, food, and domestic labour, material links that undercut the imputed separateness of the embassy as a distinctly English space. When Wotton had his secretary Isaac Wake compile an inventory of the embassy and its household goods at the end of his first term in 1610, for example, he did so in order to calculate the debts



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that he owed to the embassy’s landlord, a Venetian Jew named Isaac Luzzati.46 In her recent work on the economics of early modern domesticity, Natasha Korda has argued that a recognizably modern subject began to emerge in the early modern period in part by separating the individual from the world of objects – or ‘household stuff’ – associated with domestic spaces.47 Wake’s inventory, by contrast, illustrates the extent to which the ambassador – the subject of diplomacy – occupied a relatively marginal role in the embassy household. Most of the embassy’s fifteen rooms were reserved for staff and domestic labourers, with relatively little space set apart for the ambassador himself.48 The paucity of expensive domestic commodities, and the number of relatively austere rooms occupied by the embassy’s staff of young men, all contributed to a material sense of the embassy as resembling more a college residence than an aristocratic home or state office. In his tenure in Venice from 1610–16, Carleton attempted to secure a more permanent domestic arrangement for the embassy. His own household accounts detail his shopping spree, listing £1200 spent on ‘new furnishing my house’ alongside separate expenses for his wife amounting to £326.49 Carleton’s embassy acquired a sense of permanence as it accrued the conventional markers of domesticity: not only luxury items and domestic property, but also the recognizable propriety of the familial unit inhabiting this social space. Carleton took a great deal of pride in his efforts to improve the embassy and, when Wotton succeeded him as ambassador, was insistent that his colleague remain on in the new home, despite their personal differences.50 Domestic concerns dominate the correspondence relating to the transition from Carleton’s embassy to Wotton’s second term in Venice. Two years prior to his departure, Carleton complained to Chamberlain that Wotton ‘doth somewhat confound me here in that he writes nothing about his house’, that is, his domestic arrangements and needs.51 Indeed, the priority given to domestic issues is reflected in the fact that Wotton’s first letter to the Chief Secretary after his return to Venice was devoted entirely to explaining why he had chosen his own residence instead.52 Wotton neglected to inform Carleton of his decision until several months later, however, when he casually explained that he rejected the house ‘not so much for the greatness of the rent . . . as for the farness from the piazze’.53 Even years later this episode would remain a point of contention between them. After Wotton resumed his post in Venice for a third and final term, he took particular delight in informing Carleton of the



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expensive renovations that he was making to another new residence, efforts that claimed precedence over relaying intelligence to his colleague: ‘These silent days have been spent in the trimming of my house, wherein the rooms of receipt are so vast that I had rather have rigged one of the King’s ships.’54 Punning on the ever-contentious issue of household accounts, Wotton concluded his perfunctory letter by icily assuring him that it ‘was but to give your Lordship an accompt of my movings and the rest, wherein after this there shall be silence between us’.55 Just as Wotton had earlier declared his autonomy by refusing the recently and expensively furnished home that Carleton had left for him, in this parting shot he extended their rivalry into the domestic sphere, emphasizing the extent to which he surpassed Carleton’s earlier accomplishments in furnishing the ambassadorial household. In his analysis of commodity culture, Arjun Appadurai refers to the ‘social life of things’ to describe the paths in which objects travel and accrue social value.56 Diplomatic correspondence provided a medium for the exchange of a variety of commodities: not only a traffic in news and intelligence, but also a circulation of material goods, a network of exchange that encompassed the human subjects responsible for these objects’ transmission. In analysing Wotton’s correspondence, it is essential to foreground the intersubjective contexts which transmitted – and also transformed – the content of these documents. As Alan Stewart has argued in his discussion of early modern letters, ‘[t]hese objects contain text, certainly, but the message they convey is not primarily about that text, but about from whom they come, to whom they go, and how they make that journey’.57 Affect, sociability, and intimacy were key factors that dictated what could enter the text of the diplomatic letter itself. In a letter to Secretary Calvert, for instance, Wotton opted to leave out any details concerning his recent journey to Venice, and instead had his servant James Varie deliver both the letter along with the omitted narration.58 In other examples, the object of the letter and the person of its bearer became interchangeable in the process of circulation. In a letter to Sir Ralph Winwood, Wotton offered him not only news from The Hague, but also his servant Giovanni Biondi: ‘I will now deliver him unto your honourable hands.’59 It is only appropriate that Wotton elsewhere referred to Carleton’s secretary Isaac Wake as ‘a living gazzetta of this Court’.60 Wake, who would go on to have a distinguished diplomatic career, began his professional training by entering circuits of patronage in his role as a messenger. In the process, he forged a professional identity by assimilating himself to the workings of intelligence, even to the point of personifying the transmission of information.



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The extent to which the diplomatic letter was shaped by its social meanings and material qualities is reflected in a packet that Wotton sent to King James, Prince Henry, and Secretary Cecil in June 1609. The referential content of the letters, updates of news from Venice, is perhaps the least significant aspect of these documents. Instead, the texts drew attention to the importance of their bearer, Wotton’s nephew Albertus Morton, and each served as a letter of introduction on his behalf. The letters also functioned as components in a circuit of gift exchange, with Wotton conferring coded presents that appealed to each of his addressees. For Cecil, he offered a mosaic portrait of the Secretary, a gift intended to be transmitted from his protégé, Morton, to Salisbury’s son, thereby ceremoniously extending bonds of patronage and alliance to the next generation.61 For James, Wotton sent what seems on the surface to have been a gag gift, or a ‘strange relic’, as he jokingly described it: the Earl of Gowrie’s coat of arms, taken from a dancing school in Padua where Gowrie had stayed years before.62 As with the Italian mosaic, the gift advertised the reach of Wotton’s material access and political influence within Italy.63 But, more significantly, it also offered a coded reference to a specific personal context. The two had first met in 1601, when Wotton was sent to Scotland by Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany in order to warn James of a possible assassination attempt. Wotton had disguised himself as an Italian named Ottavio Baldi during his journey, and he famously revealed his identity and mission only once he had gained a private audience with the King. Throughout their correspondence, Wotton would often sign his letters ‘Ottavio Baldi’, not only reminding his monarch of his loyal history of service, but also accentuating the intimacies of political alliance, the forging and preserving of bonds through secrecy and concealment.64 The coat of arms of Gowrie, the thwarted assassin, along with the signature of his alias Baldi, thus evoked a shared history of dangers averted, one that implicitly extended to the most recent of foiled conspiracies, the Gunpowder Plot. Through these gifts, Wotton stressed the continued relevance of a diplomatic identity grounded on a politics of friendship, an ethos that was becoming increasingly strained in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The extent to which this event had transformed the diplomatic culture of early modern England is illustrated most clearly by an episode in which the English state circumvented diplomatic protocol and international law in pressing for the arrest and extradition of a group of Catholics exiles who were, in fact, unconnected to the plot.65 In a programme spearheaded by the Earl of Salisbury, and implemented by ambassadors



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Cornwallis in Madrid and Edmondes in Brussels, this state of emergency provided the pretext for a chilling innovation: a defence of the English state’s authority to unilaterally assert its sovereignty beyond its territorial boundaries, and juridically enforce its authority over its expatriated subjects, regardless of legal precedent or international law. Significantly, Wotton was left out of the loop in these efforts.66 One could draw on his marginal role at this critical moment so as to reinforce the view of Wotton as more of a literary figure than a statesman. But, in conclusion, I want to argue things differently. It is very easy to see Wotton, along with his diplomatic style, as being pushed aside out of political necessity. On the contrary, however, he took an active role in the English state’s response to the Gunpowder Plot. But for him, the event demanded a legal and intellectual response, and it was Wotton who was responsible for arguing England’s case to a European constituency. Alone among his colleagues, he presented copies of James’s defence of the Oath of Allegiance to European states.67And he also intensified his activist efforts to counter the imputed threat of an alliance of English Catholic exiles with European states by engaging in a battle of ideas: disseminating polemical literature, mentoring Italian converts to Protestantism, even proposing to establish Protestant seminaries on the Continent. These efforts did not produce much in the way of policy or material results, and, as a consequence, the later stages of Wotton’s career were marked by a growing sense of frustration and failure. As he complained during his inconclusive 1615 mission to Cleves, an initial flashpoint for the Thirty Years’ War, ‘for what sin, in the name of Christ, was I sent hither among soldiers, being by my profession academical, and by my charge pacifical?’68 Yet even in a political climate increasingly hostile to the politics of friendship he endorsed, Wotton nonetheless stubbornly adhered to his alternative model of diplomatic relations and refused to subscribe to a view of diplomacy that primarily saw itself as war by other, political means. Wotton had famously defined the role of the ambassador as that of ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’. His career demonstrates that this degree of agency could be exercised not only on behalf of the state, but also against it: ‘All States are ungrateful’, he confided to members of his embassy, but then too ‘so [are] their ministers.’69 The terms of his dissent were not direct, but instead expressed by contesting the characteristically abstracted terms in which state power is defined at those moments when sovereign authority is abused. As Wotton remarked in the final year of his final embassy, ‘as to his Majesty doth belong the sovereignty of judgement, so to his poor



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Notes and references 1. See Daniela Frigo (2000) ed., Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Douglas Biow (2002) Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Timothy Hampton (2009) Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); and the essays collected in the special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Spring 2008, ed. John Watkins. 2. John Watkins (2008) ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 1. 3. James Der Derian (1987) On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 112. 4. Qtd. in Costas M. Constantinou (1996) On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 50. 5. Der Derian, p. 114. 6. Lynne Magnusson (1999) Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 92. 7. M.S. Anderson (1993) The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450–1919 (London: Longman), p. 11. 8. Logan Pearsall Smith (1907) ed., The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon), vol. 1, p. 176. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 99–101. 10. Daniela Frigo (2008) ‘Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, 16. 11. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne (1995) The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London and New York: Routledge), p. 33. 12. Smith, vol. 2, p. 213. 13. Laurie Shannon (2002) Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 14. Smith, vol. 1, p. 319. 15. Hamilton and Langhorne, p. 33. 16. Hampton, p. 7. 17. John Chamberlain (1939) The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols., ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society), vol. 2, p. 84. 18. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series . . . 1611–1618 (1858; Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), p. 270. 19. Dudley Carleton (1972) Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624, ed. Maurice Lee, Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), p. 240. 20. Carleton, p. 235. For Habermas’s discussion, see The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 15–16.



honest creatures abroad, the liberty of relation, and a franker discharge of our zeal and duties’.70


21. Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1651), p. 21 and pp. 400–5 and Smith, vol. 1, p. 49 and vol. 1, p. 127. 22. Constantinou, p. 86. For Wotton’s 1610 visit to the French court, Salisbury refused to give him specific instructions in writing that could implicate the English state (National Archives, SP 78/56/245v). 23. In the interim, Wotton served as English emissary on a mission to Turin (1612) and during negotiations of the Juliers–Cleves dispute (1614–15). 24. Constantinou, p. 80. 25. British Library, Stowe MS 169, f. 3. 26. Stowe MSS 169, f. 185 and 170, ff. 61–2v. 27. Stowe MS 169, f. 245v. 28. Stowe MS 170, ff. 155–6. My discussion is indebted to Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 233–78. 29. Smith, vol. 1, pp. 325–6. 30. Foucault (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 92. 31. See E.R. Adair (1929) The Extraterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Longmans). 32. Habermas, pp. 28, 43–51. 33. Harold Nicolson (1954) The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (New York: Macmillan), p. 35. 34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 146. 35. Letters and Dispatches from Sir Henry Wotton to James I and his Ministers, in the Years [1617–20] (London: William Nicol, 1850), p. 48. Wotton similarly described his embassy as ‘my domestic college’ (Smith, vol. 2, p. 204; cf. vol. 2, p. 365). 36. Smith, vol. 2, pp. 473–4. 37. Smith, vol. 1, p. 76. Wotton pursued this program on his own initiative and without the support of James I (Smith, vol. 1, pp. 84, 89). 38. Among references to Wotton’s travels from his post in Venice, see Stowe MSS 169, f. 97v and 171, f. 63. 39. On the additional embassy expenses stemming from the costs of Wotton travelling with his ‘family’ of retainers, see SP 99/25/161 and Chamberlain, vol. 2, p. 308. 40. Stowe MSS 169, f. 139 and 171, f. 43. 41. Chamberlain, vol. 1, p. 382. 42. At other times, particularly during short-term extraordinary embassies, Wotton prolonged his travel or extended his mission as a way of ensuring that he continued to be paid until he acquired another post (Chamberlain, vol. 1, pp. 379, 565, 569, and 617). 43. Among references to payments for intelligence gathering, see SP 99/23/127 and 99/20/224, 232. 44. Intelligence letters from Carleton’s Italian agents are collected in SP 99/20 and 99/24. 45. Garrett Mattingly (1962) Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 280.



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46. Smith, vol. 1, p. 501n. 47. Natasha Korda (2002) Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1–14. 48. SP 99/6/209–15. 49. SP 99/20/132–2v. The amount spent on furnishing Carleton’s residence far surpassed any other expense related to the embassy (f. 131). 50. Carleton, p. 168. 51. Carleton, p. 168. 52. Smith, vol. 2, p. 96. 53. Smith, vol. 2, p. 101. 54. Smith, vol. 2, pp. 208–9. In a letter to Carleton near the beginning of his second embassy in 1617, Wotton was much more apologetic of the fact that ‘domestique’ business, including a recent change in residence, had resulted in ‘a slighter returne of intelligence’ (SP 84/79/43). 55. Smith, vol. 2, p. 209. 56. See Arjun Appadurai (1986) ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 57. Alan Stewart (2008) Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 23. 58. Smith, vol. 2, p. 207. 59. Smith, vol. 2, p. 80. 60. Smith, vol. 2, p. 14. 61. Smith, vol. 1, p. 457, 459, 460. 62. Smith, vol. 1, p. 458. 63. Melanie Ord (2007a) discusses Wotton’s role as a collector, as well as his later career at Eton, in ‘Returning from Venice to England: Sir Henry Wotton as Diplomat, Pedagogue and Italian Cultural Connoisseur’, Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe, ed. Thomas Betteridge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), pp. 147–67. 64. Among other examples, see Smith, vol. 1, p. 383 and vol. 2, p. 53. 65. Mark Netzloff (forthcoming 2011), ‘Catholic Exiles and the English State After the Gunpowder Plot’, Reformation 15, special issue on ‘Exile and Religious Identity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland’, ed. Christopher Highley. 66. For Wotton’s comments on the case, see Stowe MS 170, f. 237. 67. These presentation copies were, nonetheless, subsequently ignored and even banned: see Smith, vol. 1, pp. 416, 465, 467, 468n, and 469, as well as Melanie Ord (2007b) ‘Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604–1610’, The Seventeenth Century 22, 11–12. 68. Smith, vol. 2, pp. 81–2. 69. Smith, vol. 2, p. 492. 70. Smith, vol. 2, p. 226.



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The Postmistress, the Diplomat, and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier and the Power of Postal Control Nadine Akkerman

The Chamber of the Thurn and Taxis post in Brussels ran by Alexandrine (1589–1666), Countess of Taxis during the Thirty Years’ War may well have been the first Black Chamber in Europe. Black Chambers were the hidden offices of secret intelligence units, staffed by an elite group of polymaths and scribes allotted their own compartmentalized task, whether translation, short-hand, cryptanalysis, or forging seals, signatures and other marks that authenticated a document. This intelligence team, concealed in a separate quarter of the daily post office, extracted information from the mail of foreign diplomats in a bold but systematic manner. Assuming everything went according to plan, a document could be copied, swiftly resealed, and released into the normal postal channels within a mere couple of hours, without sender or addressee noticing that someone had tampered with the letters. Alexandrine, the Postmistress of Brussels, ran just such a covert operation. She probably acted as a spy for Emperor Ferdinand II and his son and successor Ferdinand III, although she may also have sold intelligence to the highest bidder, as I will suggest later. Her espionage activities have not been known until now and have therefore never been analysed,1 but they are a recurring topic of discussion in Sir Balthazar Gerbier’s correspondence, when the latter resided as Charles I’s agent in Brussels from 1631 to 1641. His correspondence both about and with Postmistress Alexandrine uncovers vital information about the epistolary networks of British exiles in the Spanish Netherlands, the Bohemian and English courts in Holland, and about the development of a European postal system with Brussels as the centre of this burgeoning European postal network. Gerbier was adamant that Alexandrine was running a Black Chamber, 172



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but was unsuccessful in convincing the English to take a closer look at her activities. Although the evidence remains circumstantial, Gerbier makes a good case that Alexandrine was indeed leading a spy network. Since the 1490s Brussels had been the gateway to Europe’s postal network, connecting international postal routes from Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Scandinavia, and England.2 One single family, the Counts of Taxis (from 1649/50 Thurn and Taxis), commanded the mounted couriers over these many-branched routes. Franz von Taxis (1459–1517) had been postmaster of the Spanish King Philip I and the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I since the late fifteenth century, and as such he was in charge of the postal networks of Spain and the entire Holy Roman Empire. He took up residence in Brussels, from where he led his powerful postal company, the Compagnia de Tassis. Emperor Charles V granted the Compagnia monopoly over the postal routes of the Holy Roman Empire. This meant that from 1516 until 1636 merchants or private bearers were forbidden to carry letters on the Continent, unless they worked for the Taxis family. In 1636 the legislative body of the Holy Roman Empire, the Electoral College, asked the Emperor for permission to employ private bearers for epistolary delivery outside the boundaries of the Taxis’ infrastructure. In the following year the Emperor granted this request, on the condition that the letter was not to pass through different hands; the same bearer who accepted a letter from a writer had to deliver it personally to the addressee.3 This condition meant that the use of privately-employed bearers was not only expensive, but also highly inefficient, especially for long distances. Whereas the Taxis-employed courier could pass his letters on to one of his well-rested colleagues, waiting for him at the first Taxis postal station, the privately-employed bearer, working alone, had to rest for hours before he could travel further. The Imperial law regarding privately-employed bearers of 1637 ensured that the Taxis family had virtually no competition; they remained the principal players in the European post. Brussels remained the residence of the Taxis family until 1702, ensuring that Brussels was the hub of a diversified European postal network throughout the seventeenth century. In 1621 Emperor Ferdinand II had decreed that the position of Postmaster of the Holy Roman Empire was not only hereditary, but that the Postmaster’s will should always be in favour of the surviving spouse, if no direct male heirs were available.4 Leonard II, Count of Taxis, had died in 1628, when his only son was barely seven years old. As a result, the Taxis postal company was led by Leonard’s widow, Alexandrine of Rye-Varax, Countess of Taxis over the period of eighteen years from 1628



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to 1646. The widowed Countess of Taxis acted as guardian for her son, Lamoral II Claudius Franz (1621–1676), until he came of age.5 When referring to the Thirty Years’ War and the Taxis postal service, scholars often assume Alexandrine’s son Lamoral II was running the company, glancing over the fact that he was still a small child at the time. As a widow, the countess quickly became one of the most powerful women in Europe despite her relative anonymity both at the time and now. Her reign was officially recognized by the Infanta Isabella, Emperor Ferdinand II, and King Philip IV of Spain: in 1628 she was sworn into office as Postmistress, for as long as she would remain a widow and until her son came of age.6 With mastery of four languages – French, Dutch, Italian, and German – she was well equipped to handle her demanding job. In fact she was not only linguistically skilled, but showed a genuine talent for postal administration. She opened up alternative postal routes, improving the infrastructure for mail sent from the Continent to England. Alexandrine made the Taxis postal service an international business enterprise that did not just cater to Catholic but also to Protestant Europe. Sir Balthazar Gerbier’s private notes reveal that the high-profile defender of English Protestantism abroad, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, the exiled Winter Queen, who lived in The Hague from 1621 to 1661, often smuggled letters to London via the channels of the Taxis post. When writing from The Hague, the courtly capital of the Dutch Republic, Elizabeth and her supporters often reveal that they sent their mail to London via two separate routes, ‘by sea and by land’.7 This phrase is peculiar because evidently all letters to England from the Continent had to travel over land and cross the Channel. The question arises, then, through which mysterious, alternative channel did their letters pass? Gerbier’s manuscript treatise ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles [sic]’ (1636), jotted down in a letter book riddled with ciphers, reveals that instead of dispatch via Calais, the so-called ‘letters by land’ would be sent to Ostend, the postal crossing in the Spanish Netherlands, by way of Brussels and Antwerp.8 In other words, at certain times the Queen of Bohemia and her courtiers took care to circumvent the regular postal channels in which letters were transmitted through Calais. Instead, they opted for an underground postal network, sending their letters unregistered by Ostend. In the first decades of the seventeenth century the sending of letters from England abroad and vice versa had been haphazardly arranged: the State certainly appointed messengers, but private couriers were also allowed to cross the narrow sea, and merchants operated their own, independent mail system. King James I’s appointment of Matthew De



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Quester as ‘official postmaster for foreign parts’ was intended to limit this multitude of systems.9 The Crown wished to increase its involvement in postal bureaucracy by ‘prohibiting all persons from conveying letters to or from foreign parts, except such as be employed by Matthew De Quester’.10 During De Quester’s tenure, from 1619–1632, even merchants were forbidden to transport their own mail. This had already created friction, and when in July 1632 De Quester sold his patent to William Frizell and Thomas Witherings, Charles I tried to top his father’s reform of the post, seizing the opportunity to transform the foreign posts along even stricter lines. Kevin Sharpe has fully described ‘the Order for the pacquet posts’ of 28 January 1633. It ‘announced the complete renunciation of the old systems of conveyance by “carriers, natives or strangers, who come and goe at pleasure”’.11 In conformity to continental systems, Postmaster Witherings had ‘to erect staffete or pacquett posts at fitt stages to runne day and night, without ceaseing’.12 Letters were bundled into packages for dispatch, and a register was maintained of letters in both directions. By not handing over their epistolary writings to Sir William Boswell, Charles I’s ambassador and Witherings’ representative in The Hague, the royalist exiles escaped registration of their letters. Their insidious mail, which was sent illegally by private messenger to Brussels, disappeared into the Postmistress’ underground postal channels. It was Gerbier, on occasion a double-agent himself, who acted as an intermediary between the Postmistress in the Spanish Netherlands and the Queen of Bohemia and her courtiers living in Holland. Whenever those of the Bohemian court needed to circumvent the official postal channels monitored by the Stuart Crown, they chose to send their letters via Brussels and Antwerp instead. With Gerbier’s assistance, the court of the exiled Winter Queen – in a later period described by one of John Thurloe’s informers as ‘the nest of malignant vipers’13 – established a connection with the Taxis family well before Charles I’s postmasters of foreign mail tried to come to a similar arrangement. However, what the Queen of Bohemia presumably did not know, but of which Gerbier was well aware, was that the postmistress’ services were duplicitous.14 Gerbier wrote an advice treatise for his successor which specified how to deal with Postmistress Alexandrine. Reading his treatise, it quickly becomes apparent that he suspected Alexandrine of running a Black Chamber. In his treatise, Gerbier refered to Alexandrine as this ‘troublesome busy Weoman’ who ‘will open letters’ and ‘hath counterfait seales of publicque Ministers’.15 To illustrate the countess’ mischievous dealings,



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Gerbier gave an example which related directly to the transmission of the Queen of Bohemia’s correspondence: ‘she [the postmistress] caused a pacquet of M.r Curtius [William Curtius, one of the Queen of Bohemia’s agents] to be opened when ^wherein^ the King of Suedens deaths was noticed and copies disperced here, the pacquet neuer restored’.16 The countess’ influence was far reaching: she ‘keepes her officers att Gant & Duncquerque who must punctually obserue her orders in stay of pacquetts’,17 Gerbier wrote. In other words, Alexandrine had agents who intercepted postal packages for her. She most likely then sold copies of those intercepts as newsletters. In 1632/1633, the incident of the interception and opening of Curtius’ letters had greatly vexed Gerbier. It must have been the first instance in which he discovered the Countess of Taxis could not be trusted. After being visited by Curtius, Gerbier made his way to Alexandrine’s house on the junction of Rue de la Regence and Rue des Sablon, where, after finding her from home and apparently being admitted by a servant, he wrote her a letter.18 The tone of his epistle is paradoxically both courteous and accusatory. It clearly shows Gerbier’s disbelief that a postmistress could operate as a spy. Critics Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, as well as Claire Walker, have noted that women had the opportunity to operate as intelligencers, precisely because they were not suspected of doing so. The generally accepted view of women’s supposed inferior intellectual capacity and their alleged innate tendency to gossip ‘made them so useful to men as emissaries, mediators, and spies’.19 The fact that the Black Chamber activities of the postmistress were not generally noticed can be explained in part by the presumption that women did not engage in politics or intelligence activities, views about female activity which Gerbier also held. Gerbier allowed for the possibility that there had been some sort of misunderstanding because in his view Alexandrine’s honesty, dignity, and sex automatically placed her above all suspicion (‘vostre probité, dignité et sexe vous me a l’abry de tout et particulierement des noises’). He had therefore taken his wife along with him as another discussant to resolve the problem without going to the authorities (‘ma femme vostre treshumble seruante vous j’auoir, pour a la mode du paijs decider la querelle s’il est possible’). Yet a culprit clearly had to be found because the crime was foul – someone had ‘kidnapped’ a sacred pile of documents and had robbed them of their innocence by illegally opening them (‘rapt & violement de la virginité de nos pacquets sacréz’).20 The gendered rhetoric of violence and sexual ravishment which Gerbier uses to refer to the interception and the opening of letters – he uses a



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trope of deflowering – also indicates his supposition that such ‘crimes’ were only committed by men. The next day he sent a copy of the letter to Curtius to indicate that he was dealing with the problem. A day later he sent Curtius another note, however, and by this point he was clearly panicking. The magnitude of the problem had dawned on Gerbier: ‘what if this countess does not merely open our letters but is also capable of deciphering their contents? God knows what she is capable of doing to us!’ (‘cy non seulement ouurent, mais ont le moyen de les dechifrer; Dieu scait comme cest Contesse de Taxis me tout’).21 Gerbier’s reaction may strike us as humorous but it does convey a very typical view: it seemed incredible to him and his male contemporaries that noblewomen could possibly be involved in such clandestine activities. From his ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’, written three years later, it becomes apparent that Gerbier had steadily found out more about the postmistress’ illegal enterprises. The countess’ curiosity also affected the incoming post from England that was to be sent on to Holland via Antwerp. Her Antwerp office was also used as a Black Chamber because Gerbier noted that Alexandrine’s ‘brother the Bishop of Cesarea’ was ‘a curious Spy on Letters’. Since Alexandrine did not have a brother, Gerbier probably referred to her brother-in-law, Antonio of Taxis (1584–1651). Antonio belonged to the Antwerp branch of the Taxis family. In 1629 he was ordained to the priesthood, and in 1630 he had become Canon of Antwerp Cathedral. Anthony van Dyck’s portrait shows the stern-looking Antonio in that role; a book in his arm as a sign of scholarship and religious devotional study (the wide garment concealing his missing arm).22 Yet Gerbier’s remark suggests that the Canon of Antwerp Cathedral may also have assisted Alexandrine’s intelligence activities. Alexandrine, with the assistance of her brother-in-law Antonio in Antwerp, deliberately kept postal packages behind in order to pass them on to her clerks working in her Black Chambers. On a practical level, this meant that post intended for Charles I’s ministers residing in Holland often suffered a three-day delay. The royalist exiles living in the Dutch Republic were also affected: the Queen of Bohemia for instance continually shared letters with several ambassadors in The Hague who received post from London, such as Ludwig Camerarius or Albert Joachimi, as she was often allowed to glean their correspondences for intelligence. If their post was held back in Brussels, both she and her court would suffer. The post from England arrived punctually every Tuesday afternoon in Brussels, Gerbier wrote, ‘but she [the postmistress] will make noe



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deliuery of the pacquett till Wensday noone or morning, whereby the English resident much interessed cause if any letters in his pacquett which must be sent for Holland to his Maj.ts Minister there, its retarded till friday night.’23 Furthermore, the postmistress sometimes embezzled whole packages, which meant that they were never sent on to their addressee. To outsmart the postmistress, Gerbier strongly advised his successor that the incoming post from England be closely monitored at the couriers’ station before it arrived at the postmistress’ offices: The Resident shall doe well to haue one watch Tuesday night the Ordinary Posts house right ouer against the Countesse of Taxis where the Courier lights, & from thence carrieth his Maile to the Countesse, who must be sollicited for the pacquett, conuinst its come & sturre kept till had.24 Gerbier thus had a servant who intercepted the courier before arrival at the house of the postmistress. The courier, who was presumably bribed by Gerbier, would reveal to Gerbier’s servant how many packages he carried from England. In this manner, Gerbier then could count the packages in order to see whether or not the postmistress had kept anything behind. With such elaborate and time-consuming schemes, Gerbier managed to keep some measure of control over the English post that was dispatched to or from Holland. Because Charles I perused his sister’s mail at all opportunities, trying to ensure she was not any hatching plots to undermine his conciliatory policy of foreign affairs, the Bohemian and English courts in the Dutch Republic came to rely on the underground postal crossing the postmistress offered from Ostend, via Brussels and Antwerp. In addition, from May 1633 onwards the postmistress also had control over the official crossing from Calais, and as a result it was no longer possible to withhold information from Alexandrine. Thomas Witherings, the king’s postmaster, had made preliminary agreements with the countess to use her post line.25 With the signed approval of Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, the Countess of Taxis promised to ensure that the route to and from Calais was especially well organized.26 As a result, the official British post to and from the Continent via Calais, as well as the unofficial post via Ostend, passed through the postmistress’ hands: from May 1633, she controlled the post both ‘by sea and by land’. The English postmaster with whom Gerbier interacted was, however, reluctant to believe that the well-respected Taxis company was at times fraudulent. Witherings accused Gerbier of sending him letters that



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Yours of the 6 of this instant I receiued by the last Ordinary with a great pacquett to M.r Secretary Coke vnder couer to me sealed, but that directed to M.r Secretary Coke vnsealed, it neuer hauing had any waxe vpon it vpon the first sight of it 3 of my men were by M.r Secretary Coke, told me there was a pacquett directed to his Majesty in it, but his hand will aduise you there had neuer been any wax att all put on it as before, I pray you take into your consideration the wrong I formerly receiued by the like mistake, & thereafter free me by your care of the like trouble or dispute.27 Gerbier, appalled by the suggestion of any wrongdoing, replied immediately: I recieued your note dated 14th Feb. take your stile thereof very ill cause it warnes my care to free you of trouble or dispute as if possible I could neglect the sending up of my pacquets, Therefore I tell you, that such a bare expression of yours cannot be well taken, reason & discretion should make you incapable to belieue me soe weake & soe carelesse as to obmitt that which is a mayne part of my care in this vocation [.] Instead, Gerbier accused the renowned Taxis post: you should haue concieued that either theise or those att Calais may haue counterfeited seales, able to jmitate a superscription & to disguise their act made a couuert to my dispatch to the right honourable Secretary Coke without any waxe, that it may passe as forgotten by the sender, the more when the vpper couuert vnto you seemed not to haue been taken of. He ended his letter by making clear that Witherings had taken too great a liberty in accusing him of malpractice: ‘you make an absolute determination as if I were faulty, which can not relish well, but I shall alwayes encline to take things at the best, and trust in him who may in time discouer the wicked doers’. Like Gerbier, it had not occurred to Witherings that Alexandrine was a spy.



were open. By sending letters without seals, Gerbier had engineered a situation in which Witherings could be accused of duplicity, by creating the impression that Witherings had broken off the seals to steal information. As Witherings wrote to Gerbier:


In March 1639, Gerbier reported his growing suspicions about Alexandrine to the Spanish authorities in order to hit two birds with one stone: he intended to expose her spying practices and, simultaneously, to put pressure on his diplomatic negotiations in Brussels. His dispatches had remained in the Dunkirk post office for three weeks on end, not in fact because of Black Chambers’ practices, but because of contrary winds. Although Gerbier soon discovered that the real reason for the delay had been bad weather, and that the package had finally been delivered intact, he chose to ignore this information and seize the moment to enforce a breakthrough in certain complex and burdensome negotiations in which he was involved. As he wrote to the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Windebank, in a partially ciphered letter: I see by your honours letter of 2d present come the 3 weekes dispatches for England stayed att Duynquerque, jn efect come to hand; cause (as your honour saith) Hell broke loose, and the great Duynquerque fleete past by Enghlands coaste, Contrary windes (as I mentioned jn my last of 13th) made the said fleete return to former anchor [. . .] I had sett on one to enqueire what neewes the Countesse of Tassis had from Duynquerque, touching the aforesaid: understnd the above said 3 weekes dispatches went over tenth present this stile, of which I tooke no notice, cause I thought fitt to take aduantage on this faire occasion, to persue jtt [. . .] to augment feares.28 Gerbier had become trapped in tiresome negotiations with the House of Lorraine for several months. In effect, if Charles I declined to enter into a league with France, the House of Lorraine would assist in resolving the Palatine conflict. The Duchess of Lorraine’s brother, Charles, would negotiate with Bavaria and the Emperor; her sister, Henriette Princess of Phalsbourg, would negotiate with the Cardinal-Infant (Spain), so Elector Charles Louis, the Queen of Bohemia’s son, would be fully restored to his dominions. The Palatine crisis had been at issue since 1620, when Emperor Ferdinand II had stripped King James’ sonin-law, Frederick V, of his title and lands, declaring him an outlaw for accepting the Bohemian Crown from the rebels in Prague, in November 1619. To finally resolve this conflict by again securing the Palatinate for Frederick’s heir, the king’s nephew Charles Louis, would be a coup for England. Yet Gerbier thought the discussions with the House of Lorraine were taking too much time and he seized the opportunity of the supposed stalling of English packages as a means to put pressure on his



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negotiations. He leaked false information to the Confessor of the Princess of Phalsbourg that he had ordered a passport in order to return to England, ‘as [it was] unfitt to stay in a place where Violence [was] used to the prejudice of his Majesty’s service as the stay of pacquets to the State of England is’.29 Gerbier’s act had the desired effect, as he revealed in his letter to Windebank: the Princess of Phalsbourg and her confessor ‘both conjuring me (for the love of God) not to stirre hence since as they thought the great busines of the intended Treaty for the Palatinat would miscarry. They willed me to complayne for the stay of letters.’30 Gerbier did not hesitate to do what they had asked of him and what he was hoping for all along. He wrote a harsh and accusatory letter to the postmistress, although fully aware that she had not done anything wrong in this instance.31 Understandably, she replied that no packages were kept behind, and that contrary winds were cause of the delay, as she had informed him previously,32 whereupon Gerbier sent her a second letter. His tone was haughty (‘Je n’ay parle en termes Eniqmatiques’): if she proved unwilling to accuse any of her officers, then Gerbier threatened to report her to the Spanish ministers in Brussels.33 Over the next months, when more accusations followed, the postmistress, possibly beginning to doubt whether or not she had opened the packages, made the vital mistake of checking this with her Dunkirk officer, Alonzo Ladron. He dutifully reported that they had not tampered with the dispatches in this instance.34 Since his letter ended up in the State Papers, however, Gerbier must have intercepted it. He now had his proof that the Taxis post could not be trusted. Gerbier had attempted to blacken her character. He was not alone in trying to question the authority of a female Master of the Post. Some German princes were uncertain that the monopoly of the post should remain in the hands of a woman and tried to argue that her tenure was not official. Alexandrine attempted to silence her opponents by pointing out that she was not just a Countess but that the Taxis family was descended from a Royal lineage. She commissioned Spanish and Italian genealogists Alonso Lopez de Haro, Francesco Zazzera and Pietro Crescenti to trace the true origin of the Taxis family line. They discovered that the Taxis branch from Cornello was related to the royal family of Torriani (delle Torre, or Thurn).35 Subsequently, herald Julius Chifletius produced a detailed history and pedigree, Les Marques d’Honneur de la Maison de Tassis, published in Antwerp in 1645. In 1649/50 King Philip IV and Emperor Ferdinand III officially recognized the Taxis family as descendants from Torriani.36 They were



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allowed to use the name and family crest; hence, the family came to be known as Thurn and Taxis. This increased the family’s status in the Empire, proving all the more that she was not simply a caretaker for her son. The Postmistress of Brussels was an influential figure who not only expanded the family business but also improved, quite literally, its name. It is widely known that the Taxis mail was used by the Catholic League. As mentioned before, the Holy Roman Emperor had given the Counts of Taxis a hereditary monopoly on the post, connecting France, Spain, and even Portugal by mail. It was (and indeed still is) less wellknown, however, that during the Thirty Years’ War Alexandrine of Taxis also made provisions for Protestants. As Gerbier’s treatise indicates, for instance, she engineered both official communication between King Charles I and his ministers on the Continent, and unofficial communication between the king’s exiled, widowed sister Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia in The Hague, and her supporters in London and elsewhere in Europe. It seems apparent that Alexandrine’s postal network, which was spy-ridden throughout, was foremost a commercial, international enterprise. Despite her Catholic ties – she was officially recognized as Postmistress by the Habsburgs and her brother-in-law was Canon of Antwerp Cathedral – Alexandrine was mostly in the business to make money. During the Thirty Years’ War, the Swedes dissolved the Taxis’ post in the areas that they conquered or recaptured, as it was, after all, the official postal system of the enemy, the Emperor. The Swedes then started their own entrepreneurial postal service, infringing upon the monopoly of the Taxis family. They took over the Taxis post offices in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig.37 As a result, there were two postal companies during the years 1630 to 1635: the Taxis’ post and the Swedish post.38 It would have made sense if royalist exiles, such as Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, had opted for the Swedish post whenever possible, as it is usually assumed that the Taxis’ post was predominantly used by the Catholic League and the Swedish post by the Protestant Union. It should be questioned, however, whether such a clear-cut, religious division ever existed. The Swedish encroachment on the Taxis postal service was not necessarily advantageous to the Queen of Bohemia’s side. Even though they were both Protestants and were fighting the same enemies, they also had secrets from each other and sometimes conflicting motives. Like the Taxis family, the Swedes intercepted the Queen of Bohemia’s letters, but did so in a more ruthless manner. In a letter of 12 October 1638 to



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I haue receaued letters from my Mother in law, the Electrice [Louise Juliana, the Dowager Electress Palatine], who writes to me that diuers of her letters to me and mine to her haue bene intercepted by the Suedens, I pray tell Monsr Saluius of it that if it be possible it may be remedied, and we may haue our letters rendered, he may be sure there are neuer anie in them to the Suedens preiudice.39 Roe had an opportunity to speak to the Swedish general postmaster, Johan Adler Salvius, about this delicate issue, when they both attended the peace conference in Hamburg.40 In her follow-up letter to Roe of 23 December 1638, Elizabeth wrote, ‘I thank you for speaking to Saluius about my letters into Prusse.’41 It is unclear whether the letters that had been intercepted by the Swedes were returned to Elizabeth. What is clear is that the Swedish postal service, which the Protestant Union so much relied on, was not necessarily more reliable than the Catholic postal service run by the Countess of Taxis. Elizabeth did not want to relinquish all of her trump cards to the Swedes either. If one company had a monopoly over a route, she would have had no choice but to use that particular service. But if several postal services served one route, she and other Protestants might sometimes have decided to use Catholic postal networks, or other alternatives, more readily than has previously been understood.42 Despite their knowledge that the postmistress tampered with their letters, the royalist exiles in Holland continued to use her service, as they continued to use the crossing she orchestrated from Ostend. The alternative, the official service from Calais, regulated by the Stuart Crown, still appeared as less attractive because, first and foremost, the royalist exiles tried to keep secrets from Charles I’s ministers. Information that had to be concealed from the king’s servants would often be of little interest to the Catholic League. There has not been a comprehensive, comparative study of Black Chambers in Europe, but by studying the Postmistress of Brussels’ activities we may reveal the birth of early modern espionage in the seventeenth century. Her Chamber probably was one of the first in Europe, as most did not become established until the late seventeenth century.43 The Brussels Chamber was in this sense remarkable, not only because it was led by a woman, but also because it was ahead of its time. It can be regarded as a precursor of the French Cabinet Noir which originated in the 1670s, the



her life-long correspondent and confidant Sir Thomas Roe, Elizabeth wrote:


British secret intelligence service of George I, or the Habsburg Geheime Kabinets-Kanzlei founded in the eighteenth century in Vienna.44 As postmistress of the Holy Roman Empire, Alexandrine monopolized the post in Europe and thus had ample opportunity for intelligence activities. Her motives are not yet clear, although we can guess at the reasons. She may have simply wished to improve the status and wealth of her family, at which she certainly succeeded. The family business grew rapidly during her reign. The fact that men found it incredible to believe that a woman was capable of such elaborate scheming, as Gerbier’s reaction shows, may partly explain why she was so successful at her trade.

Appendix SP 105/13, no pagination, folio or item number. It is part of other ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’. In the letter book, it follows Gerbier’s letter to the Earl of Leicester of 2/12 July 1636. About Ordinaryes & expresse Posts: The Countesse of Taxis general Postmistresse for the Empire, directs alsoe the Stafetta’s for England: will haue letter for Vienne an Venise paid here, a single letter 6 [. . .] & others accordingly: The letters for Veinne & all other parts of vpper Germanye goe thursday noones, those for Cullen & Hambourg Wensday night, those for England Saturday night: If occasion should require to send att 12 the clocke that night or next morning to ouertake the Stafetta att Gant who partes not thence till one or two the clocke sunday noone may send an Expresse att night to that purpose addresses his pacquet to Mons. Matton Postmaster there, sett thereon M.r Witherings for his Maj.ts affaires cause of the french & Hollanders should know ^passing the Seas^ its his Maj.ts pacquet: The letters for Holland are only sent to the Basque of Antwerp the Messenger hath care to deliuer it to the Post for Holland. The Countesse of Taxis is a troublesome busy Weoman, will open letters, hath counterfait seales of publicque Ministers, her brother the Bishop of Cesarea a curious Spy on Letters [f.1v:] she caused a pacquet of M.r Curtius to be opened when ^wherein^ the King of Suedens deaths was noticed and copies disperced here, the pacquet neuer restored, keepes her officers att Gant & Duncquerque who must punctually obserue her orders in stay of pacquetts: She must be handled something ruffe [variant spelling of rough?] else will abuse his Maj.ts Ministers with stay of pacquetts principally when



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the Stafetta comes from England, which in sommer comes punctually, euery teusday in the afternoone, but she will make noe deliuery of the pacquett till Wensday noone or morning, whereby the English resident much interessed cause if any letters in his pacquett which must be sent for Holland to his Maj.ts Minister there, its retarded till friday night: The Resident shall doe well to haue one watch Tuesday night the Ordinary Posts house right ouer against the Countesse of Taxis where the Courier lights, & from thence carrieth his Maile to the Countesse, who must be sollicited for the pacquett, conuinst its come & sturre kept till had, The ordinary letter carrier dwelleth behinde the Capelle church, where fitt to be sent also for he is a Drunkard who sometimes keepes letters ouer night. The letters are tax’t at randome, att the Dutch fashion, for all [. . .] soe much [f.2r:] The ordinary letters ^Messengers^ to all other places in the Countrÿ haue their seuerall houses who depend not of the Countesse of Taxis, those for Gant lodge in the Berghstraet & goe euery day, alsoe those for Liege who goe teuesdaÿes and fridayes in the afternoone, those for Dunquerque fridayes alsoe in the Bergstraet, for Tournay Valenuennes & Lisle on the Corne Markett goe Mundayes & Saterdayes, other places at Breda Gelders Venlo Roermond and Maestrickt on the Wood Markett as appear written on a bord att their doores.

Notes and references 1. The most recent biographical article on Alexandrine is curiously silent about the secretive side of her profession. In Fürstinnen von Thurn und Taxis, a study which sets out to detail the female history of the famed postal company, Marita A. Panzer credits the first postmistress of Thurn and Taxis with the might of a woman who fleshed out the grandest postal company of the early modern period in the midst of the horrors and turmoil of war. Alexandrine’s postal fraud or clandestine intelligence practices, however, surface nowhere in the somewhat hagiographic text. See chapter 1, ‘Der Name “Thurn und Taxis”: Alexandrine von Rye Gräfin von Varax (1589–1666), Die Erbgeneralpostmeisterin’, Panzer (2008) Fürstinnen von Thurn und Taxis (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet), pp. 9–22. 2. Wolfgang Behringer (translated from the German by G. Van Cauwenberge) (1992) ‘Brussel, Centrum van het Internationale Postnet’ in Luc Janssen and Marc Meursen, eds, De Post van Thurn und Taxis – La Poste des Tour et Tassis 1489–1794 (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief), pp. 21–42. 3. H.Ch.J. Roelofsz (1941) De Invloed van het Geslacht Thurn und Taxis op de Verkeersontwikkeling in Europa van 1500–1900 (Utrecht: De Haan), p. 18.



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4. Panzer, p. 13. 5. Bruno Emil König (1875) Schwarze Kabinette mit Anlagen: Geschichte der Thurn and Taxis’schen Postanstalt und des österreichischen Postwesens, und ueber die gerichtliche Beschlagnahme von Postsendungen in Preussen-Deutschland (Braunschweig: Bracke), p. 68. Lamoral II was named after his grandfather Lamoral I (1559–1624). 6. Panzer, p. 14. 7. For instance, see Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, 77 Pfalz Nr. 9863 i.39, Elector Charles Louis’ letter to Elizabeth, dated 20 January 1637 (OS); or Elizabeth’s letters to Laud, dated 20/30 October and 23 October (OS) 1637, respectively TNA, SP 16/370 i.9 (ff. 24–5) and SP 16/369 i.63 (ff. 179–80). 8. For the route of the letters see also J.R. Bruijn (1975) ‘Postvervoer en Reizigersverkeer tussen de Lage Landen en Engeland ca.1650–ca.1870’ in P.W. Klein and J.R. Bruijn, eds, Honderd Jaar Engelandvaart: Stoomvaartmaatschappij Zeeland, 1875–1975 (Bussum: Uniehoek), pp. 19–52 at 19. Part of Gerbier’s treatise is given as an appendix at the end of this chapter. 9. Kevin Sharpe (1984) ‘Thomas Witherings and the Reform of the Foreign Posts, 1632–40’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57.136, 149–63 at 148. 10. Proclamation issued by the Privy Council, as quoted in Sharpe, p. 150. 11. Sharpe, p. 153–4. 12. Sharpe, p. 154. 13. Daisy Lucy Hobman (1961) Cromwell’s Master Spy: A Study of John Thurloe (London: Chapman & Hall), p. 43. Thurloe’s informer not only referred to the Queen of Bohemia’s court, but also to that of her niece Mary Stuart, the Princess Royall, who had married the Stadholder’s son in 1641 and established her own English court in The Hague in 1642. 14. The Queen of Bohemia also put too much trust in Gerbier, not realizing he double-crossed her as well. 15. SP 105/13, no pagination, folio or item number. It is part of other ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’. It follows Gerbier’s letter to the Earl of Leicester of 2/12 July 1636. 16. This example also shows that Elizabeth had already been using the Taxis post as early as November 1632, at least half a year before Charles I’s postmaster Witherings had made his first preliminary agreements with the countess to use her post line. Witherings was clearly unaware that the countess ran a Black Chamber. 17. Gerbier’s ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’, no pagination. 18. Nowadays a bronze plaque commemorates the location of the Taxis post office in Brussels, where it was to be found up to 1872, when a stately home replaced it. The convenient proximity to the courtly palace of Infanta Isabella is striking. Across the street, within the Nôtre Dame du Sablon, the private chapel of the Taxis family – also mentioned in Gerbier’s ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’ (f.1v) – is still intact. 19. S. Mendelson and P. Crawford (1998) Women in Early Modern England, 1550– 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 413. See Claire Walker (2001) ‘Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’, Historical Journal, 43.1, 1–23 at 9–10 and 21.



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20. TNA, SP 105/10, no folio, item or page number: Gerbier’s letter to ‘Madame Taxis Maistresse des Postes’, written in her own house while he was waiting for her in vain, dated 3 January 1633. 21. TNA, SP 105/10, no folio, item or page number: Gerbier’s letters to Curtius, dated 4 and 5 January 1633. 22. Van Dyck’s portrait (1634) is part of the collections of the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, inventory number GE73. 23. Gerbier’s ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’, no pagination. 24. Gerbier’s ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’, no pagination. 25. Witherings struck a deal with Alexandrine in May 1633: see Sharpe 154. 26. At 31, Behringer refers to a document signed by Isabella Clara Eugenia for ‘la Comtesse de Tassis, en qualité de Mère et Tutrice de son fils, et comme Administratrice des Offices de la Généralité des Postes’. For the privileges the postal stations enjoyed on the route Brussels – Calais see J. Rübsam (1902) ‘Un service privilégé des postes et des estafettes des Pays-Bas pour Londres de l’année 1633’, L’Union Postale, 27, 193–8. 27. TNA, SP 105/11, no folio, item or page number: Witherings’ letter to Gerbier, dated 14 February 1634/5. 28. TNA, SP 77/28 f. 128r: Gerbier’s letter to Windebank, dated 10/20 March 1638/9. The underlined words are in cipher. 29. TNA, SP 77/28 f. 128v: Gerbier’s letter to Windebank, dated 10/20 March 1638/9. 30. TNA, SP 77/28 f. 128v: Gerbier’s letter to Windebank, dated 10/20 March 1638/9. 31. TNA, SP 77/28 ff. 120–1r: Gerbier’s letter to Alexandrine, dated 18 March 1638/9. 32. TNA, SP 77/28 f. 128r: Alexandrine’s letter to Gerbier, dated 19 March 1638/9 (copied by Gerbier’s secretary and enclosed in Gerbier’s letter to Windebank). 33. TNA, SP 77/28 f. 121v: Gerbier’s letter to Alexandrine, dated 19 March 1638/9. 34. TNA, SP 77/29 f. 524: Postmaster at Dunkirk’s letter to the Countess of Taxis, dated 26 December 1639 / 5 January 1640. 35. Panzer, p. 19. 36. Panzer, p. 19. 37. Behringer, p. 31. 38. Roelofsz, p. 18. 39. TNA, SP 81/45 ff. 167–8: Elizabeth’s letter to Roe, dated 2/12 October 1638. 40. For Salvius as postmaster see Heiko Droste (2006) ‘Sending a Letter Between Amsterdam and Stockholm: A Matter of Trust and Precautions’ in Hans Cools, Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus, eds, Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum: Verloren), pp. 135–48. 41. TNA, SP 81/45 ff. 322–3: Elizabeth’s letter to Roe, dated 13/23 December 1638. 42. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the use of Catholic continental postal networks by English Protestants has already been well-documented. Feminist studies of the last decade have analysed how the royalist cause of the exiled Charles II relied heavily upon the mail service of an English Benedictine cloister at Ghent during the late 1650s. The English Abbess Mary Knatchbull



Nadine Akkerman 187


exploited the cloister’s long-established Catholic networks to direct the king’s mail and that of his chief advisors, such as Sir Edward Hyde, Sir Edward Nicholas and James Butler, First Duke of Ormond, to royalist supporters in England and elsewhere. Knatchbull had a clear religious agenda for setting up an underground postal office for the royalist exiles on the Continent: she hoped that after the restoration, she could pressure the king in supporting the re-establishment of monasticism in England. The abbess manipulated preconceived notions of gender roles to her own advantage. To avoid detection, she despatched letters under her own cover. Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, kept a close watch on the channel ports; from 1649, letters addressed to royalists on the Continent were always opened. Knatchbull realized, however, that epistles directed to or written from the cloister’s address were not suspected to contain political information, and could thus be steered safely past Thurloe’s keen watch to their intended recipient. And, as has been shown, Elizabeth established a connection with the Taxis family well before Charles I’s postmasters of foreign mail tried to come to a similar agreement. In a sense the dependency of the Stuart exiled court on female Catholic postal networks in Flanders to communicate with Britain originated two decades earlier, when the Queen of Bohemia began to use Alexandrine of Taxis’ mail service. For the royalist mail service provided by English nuns on the Continent see Caroline Bowden (1999) ‘The Abbess and Mrs Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s’, Recusant History, 24.3, 288–308; Claire Walker (2001) ‘Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration’; Walker (2004) ‘Loyal and Dutifull Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics’ in James Daybell, ed., Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 222–36; and Walker (2001) ‘ “Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world:” Letter-Writing in Early Modern Convents’ in James Daybell, ed., Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave – now Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 159–76. 43. See Karl de Leeuw (1999) ‘The Black Chamber in the Dutch Republic during the War of the Spanish Succession and Its Aftermath, 1707–1715’, Historical Journal, 42.1, 133–56. De Leeuw’s article is one of the few articles on Black Chambers; a grand comparative narrative of European Black Chambers still needs to be written. For other useful accounts on Black Chambers see David Kahn (1996) The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (rev. edn New York: Scribner), pp. 157–88, and Christopher Andrew (1992) ‘The Nature of Military Intelligence’ in Keith Neilson & B.J.C. Kercher, eds, Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History (Westport, CT & London: Praeger), pp. 1–16. 44. For the French Cabinet Noir see Kahn 162; for the Black Chamber in Vienna see F. Stix (1937) ‘Zur Geschichte und Oranisation der Wiener Geheimen Ziffernkanzlei (von ihren Anfängen bis zum Jahren 1848)’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung, 51, 132–60.



188

admiralty, high court of the, 85, 107 Africa maps of, 16, 17, 18 Allen, Cardinal William, 140 ambassadors ambassadorship as path to advancement, 157, 158 bureaucratic model of, 156–7, 160–1 ceremonial status of, 64, 121 complaints of, 76, 125, 168 copy-books of, 121, 123, 124, 129 definitions, 88–9, 160 their dispatches, 30, 36, 47, 66, 102, 121–5, 127–8, 159, 166 the interpreter-ambassador, 90–2, 94 misrepresentation and false embassy, 95–6 professionalisation of, 157–8 as representative of sovereign or state, 82, 88–90, 94, 96, 168 resident, 66, 82, 157–8 role of, 156, 158 transmitting intelligence, 66–7, 121–4, 158–9, 164 withholding intelligence, 158, 164 see also under individual names, see also under diplomatic agents and women America, 17 colonialist ambitions in North America, 22 Incan Empire, 22 maps of coastline of South America, 19 Portuguese and Spanish control of, 22 Potosi, 22 Amsterdam, 16, 133 Anjou, Henry, Duke of, 65, 68 La Joyeuse et Magnifique Entrée, 67 Antwerp, 65–8, 70, 74, 77, 140, 174–5, 177–8, 181, 182, 184

Aristotle, 83–4, 88, 92, 94 Arundel, Earl of, his art gallery, 2 Arundel, Margaret, 108 Ashley, Katherine, 108, 109 Asia, 14, 17 Aston, Sir Walter, 157 Audley, Thomas, Lord Chancellor, 36–7, 38 agents sponsored by, 37 servants of, 37 Thomas Audley, nephew, 37 Austria, 173 Babington, Anthony, 58 Babington plot, 56, 58 Bacon, Anthony, 106 Bacon, Francis, 120–37 passim Advancement of Learning, 129 De augmentis scientiarum, 129 mission carrying message to Elizabeth I, 126–8 published editions of his biliteral alphabets, 133 Bacon, Nicholas, 33 Ballard, John, conspirator, 58 Bargrave, Isaac, chaplain to Wotton, 163 Barnes, Thomas, agent to Walsingham, 46, 50, 55 Barton, Edward, ambassador in Constantinople, 53 Basel, 23 Baynes, Roger, 140, 141–3 Beale, Eadith, 110 Beale, Robert, 49, 53, 106, 123 ‘Treatise of the office of a councellor and principal secretarie to her majestie’, 107 Becanus, Goropius, 139 Bembo, Pietro, 32 Bentham, Bishop Thomas, 108 Berden, Nicholas, agent to Walsingham, 46, 47, 51, 52, 56–7, 58

189



Index

Index

Berden, Nicholas, agent to Walsingham – continued family of, 59–60 preferment given to, 60 retirement of, 59 Berthelot, Pedro, Dutch pilot, 17 Bible, 88 confiscation by authorities, 40 Geneva Bible, 47 Biondi, Giovanni, 166 Black Chambers Chamber of the Thurn and Taxis post, 172–88 passim, 183 cryptanalysis, 172 delaying or withholding post, 177–8, 180–1, 184–5 forgery, 172, 175 French Cabinet Noir, 183 George I, intelligence service of, 184 Habsburg Geheime Kabinets-Kanzlei, 184 Blage, George, 32 le Blon, Michel, engraver and agent, 4 Bocarro, António, 17 dowry of wife, Catherine of Braganza, 17–18 Bodin, Jean, 155 Bodley, Thomas, ambassador, 73 Boleyn, George, dean of Lichfield, 110 Bonner, Edmund, ambassador to France, 40 Borough, John à, 19 Boswell, Sir William, ambassador, 175 Bourne, Elizabeth, 108 Brancester, Robert, 30, 36, 38 Bright, Timothy, his Characterie, An Arte of Shorte, Swifte, and Secrete Writing by Character, 148 Broadbelte, Dorothy, 109 Brussels, 157, 161, 168, 172–5, 177–8, 180–3 as centre of European postal system, 172–3 Bullinger, Heinrich, 33 cabbala, 149 Cabot, Sebastian, 14 Caesar, Sir Julius, 103, 104, 107, 110

Calais, 19, 174, 178, 179, 183 Calvert, Secretary, 166 Cambridge, 35 Camden, William, his Remains Concerning Britain, 149, 150 Camerarius, Ludwig, 177 de Camões, Luis, 82 Campion, Thomas, 140 Canada, 15 Canterbury Hospital at Eastbridge, 32, 33–4 Cantino, Albert, agent of Ercole I, 16 Cape of Good Hope, 16 Cardano, Girolamo, 132 Caribbean, 19 Carleton, Sir Dudley, 1, 4, 158–9, 164–6 Carlisle, Earl of, and mission to Tangier, 18 Carnsew, Richard, 103 cartography, see maps Casimir, John Duke of, 128 Castiglione, Baldassare, 16 Catholicism ‘Booke of Recusantes’, 48 Catholic community, 138, 151, 164, 168 Catholic League, 112, 182 Catholic prisoners, 57 Catholic spies, 139–40 extortion from Catholics, 55–6 recusant community in Europe, 57, 140–1, 142–3, 168 see also under women and postal system Catilyn, Maliverey, agent to Walsingham, 46, 51, 52, 56, 58 Cawdry, Robert, his Table Alphabetical, 147 Cecil, Robert, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 167 agents of, 138, 142 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 47, 48, 53, 59, 63, 104–6, 123, 127–8 agents of, 64, 65, 67–8, 70–4, 77 Mildred Cecil, wife of, 106 Chamberlain, George, 103 Chamberlain, John, 159, 164–5 Chamberlain, Thomas, 32



190

Choiseul, duc de, 23 Christmas, George, sponsored by Audley, 37 Cicero, 90, 132 ciphers, 48, 49, 52–3, 58, 72–3, 106, 113, 120, 123, 124, 128–9, 139, 148, 151, 174, 177, 180 aliases, 51–2, 106, 167; Ottavio Baldi, 167; Robert Barnard, 52; Husband, Thomas Rogers, Nicholas Cornellis, William Luson, 51 bi-lateral cipher, 130–4 problems with, 129, 142, 148, 151 use in creating social bonds, 141–2, 143–4, 146–7, 151 Charles I, 172, 175, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183 Charles II, 13, 17, 23, 24 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 16, 19, 21, 30, 40, 173 Clare, Henry, 111 Clifford, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, 106, 108–9 Coke, Secretary, 179 College of Cambrai, 35, 38 Corneille, Pierre, 82 Cornwallis, Sir Charles, 110, 157, 168 Cotton, William, Catholic exile, 113 Coverdale, Miles, 33 Cranmer, Archbishop, 32, 36, 38–40 Croft, James, 111 Cromwell, Thomas, 32, 33, 38–40 servants of, 40 Cuffe, Henry, secretary to Essex, 106 Cumberland, William, Duke of, 23 Curtius, William, agent of Elizabeth of Bohemia, 176–7, 184 Dale, Dr Valentine, 123 Dassigny, Philip, 19 Darnley, Lord, 14 Davison, William, Principal Secretary, 47 Denmark, 123 Derby, Alice, Countess of, 104 Devereux, Francis, 104 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 63, 101, 104–6, 129, 149 his intelligence networks, 138

marriage to Lady Frances Howard, 149 overtures to James VI of Scotland, 106 revolt of, 103 his ‘True relacion’, 106 diplomacy and literature, 82, 97, 82–100 passim, 120 intelligencing and literature, 139, 144 diplomatic agents, 63–81, 72–3 advising on policy, 74 complaints of, 76 later employment in government, 76, 78, 166 endorsing suits, 74–5 payments to, 37, 49–51 and gift-giving, 7, 17, 38–9, 121, 167 and information gathering and intelligencing, 31, 36–7, 65–7 procuring art, 3–4 and procuring books, 7, 39, 40, 67 procuring goods and fashionable items, 38, 166 access to scientific knowledge, 4, 7, 8 scholars used as, 30–1, 37 unofficial, 64–5, 74 varied work of, 5, 31 see also ambassadors diplomatic immunity, 85 diplomatic theory, 82–100 passim, 155–7, 160–1, 164 Ambaxiator Brevilogus, 82 L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions, 82 see also individual theorists Don John of Austria, 128 Dormer, Jane, Duchess of Feria, 103, 113 Douay, 46 Douglas, Richard and Archibald, Scottish ambassador, 106 Drake, Sir Francis, 19 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 150 Dudley, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, 123 Dudley, John, 20 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 63, 106, 108, 110, 123, 124, 127–8, 129, 184



Index 191

Index

Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester – continued agents of, 65– 71, 74, 77 patronage and the Leicester/Sidney circle, 86–7 Dunkirk, post office at, 180–1, 184–5 Dutch East India Company, 14, 15, 16 Dutch Revolt, 65, 67, 85 van Dyck, Anthony, 177 Edinburgh, capture of, 20 Edmondes, Sir Thomas, 157, 161, 168 Edward IV, 33, 34 Edwardes, Thomas, 108 Elandts, Johannes and Cornelis, military engineers, 15 Elder, John, 14, 15, 20 Elizabeth I, 22, 66, 72, 73, 101, 106, 109, 113–14, 121, 123, 126–7, 141 court of, 65, 78, 126–7, 139, 149 conspiracy against, 85, see also Babington plot, gunpowder plot favour of, 107, 111, 127 foreign policy of, 65, 111, 114, 156 government of, 47, 58–9, 63, 78, 121 marriage negotiations, Anjou, 65; Archduke Charles, 109; Eric XIV of Sweden, 109 Papal Bull, 113 professions of loyalty towards, 55, 78 see also Privy Chamber and Privy Council Elizabeth of Bohemia, 2, 3, 174–8, 180, 182–3 Elector Charles Louis, son of, 180 embassies daily activity of, 76, 120, 124, 128, 134, 158–9, 161 domestic and social context of, 8, 156, 158, 162–6 extraterritorial nature of, 156, 160, 162–4 finances of, 124, 164–5 of Hawkyns, 33 Jacobean network of, 158 overlap between ambassadors, 33, 163, 165 of Paulet, 120–37 passim

pedagogy of, 156, 162–3 as permanent representation, 82, 156, 158, 164 peripatetic nature of, 30, 163–4 and queer theory, 162 staff of, 124, 125, 129, 156, 158, 161–3, 165 training obtained during, 76, 78, 166 of Wotton, 155–71 passim of Wyatt, 31–2, 35 see also secretaries England, 15, 19, 20– 1 and passim, 65, 82 and passim, 140 and passim, 143, 181, 184–5 and international postal system, 173, 174, 177–8, 180 Englefield, Sir Francis, 103, 143–4 Ercole I of Ferrara, 16 Estienne, Henri, 88, 91 Fawkes, Guy, 112 Ferdinand II, emperor, 172, 173, 174, 180 Ferdinand III, emperor, 172, 181 Florio, John, his A Worlde of Wordes, 47 Flushing, 65 Fowler, Thomas, agent of Burghley, 106 Foxe, John, 46 France, 113, 120–37 passim, 173, 180, 182 agents working in, 46, 49, 125–6 alliance with, against Spain, 65, 69 civil wars, 155 discoveries in Canada by, 15 fortifications of, 13 French fleet, 20 1701 invasion of Italy by, 15 Francis I of France, 19, 22 Frankfurt, book fair, 67 Frederick V, 180 Frizell, William, postmaster, 175 Garrard, Sir William, merchant, 64 Geneva, 88, 91 Gentili, Alberico, 82–100, passim, 120 Mendoza, Bernadino de, consulted on the matter of, 85, 86 De Legationibus Libri Tres, 83, 84, 87, 88: dedicatory letter to Sidney, 86–7



192

legal career, 85 patronage of Leicester, 86–7 relationship with Sidney, background to, 85–8 George III, his Topographical Collection, 23 Gerard, John, 112 Gerbier, Sir Balthazar, 172–88 passim ‘Notes for a Resident att Bruxelles’, 174, 177, 184 Germany, 49, 64, 173, 184 de Gheyn, Jacob, 2 Gifford, Gilbert, agent to Walsingham, 46, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58 allegations made about, by William Yeomans, 54 Gerard, brother of, 51 money given to in prison, 50–1 uncle in Rouen, 51 Gilpin, George, 66, 72 Glemham, Lady Anne, 106 Goring, George, 111 Gowrie, Earl of, 167 Greville, Fulke, 110 Grey, Lord John, and family, 37 Grotius, Hugo, 83, 155 Guise Duke of, 128 gunpowder plot, 101, 112, 167–8 Gwynne, Francis, Under–Secretary of State, 13 The Hague, 2, 3, 16, 51, 158, 166, 174 the Binnenhof, 3 Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 4 Hakluyt, Richard, 22 Hammond, John, lawyer, 87 Hardwick, Bess of, 108 Harrington, John, 144 Harvey, Gabriel, 87 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 59 Hawkins, Nicholas, archdeacon and ambassador, 32–3 Hendrik, Frederik, Dutch Stadholder, 2–3, 6 and elder half-brother Prince Maurits, 2–3, 6 marriage to Amalia van Solms, 2–3 Heneage, Sir Thomas, 123

Henry, Prince of Wales, 144, 149, 167 art collection of, 2 Henry VIII, 17, 19, 21, 22, 30, 34, 109 marriage to Anne of Cleves, 19 Herle, William, 63–81, passim debts of, 67 espistolary strategies of, 69–73 as official envoy, 64, 76 patronage of, 64, 73, 74–5 unofficial or unclear status of, 64, 66, 68, 72, 74, 76 Hertford, Edward Seymour, Earl of, 108, 123 Hertford, Frances Seymour, Countess of, 108 Hicks, Michael, secretary to Cecil, 107 Hill, Margaret, 103 Hilles, Richard, English Protestant exile, 33 Hilliard, Nicholas, 133 Hobbes, Thomas, 155 Hoby, Philip, 32–3 Holland, 177, 178, 183, 184, 185 Bohemian court in, 172, 175, 177 English court in, 172 Hollar, Wenceslas, 18 Holt, Father William, 53 Holy Roman Empire, 173, 182, 184 Electoral College, legislative body, 173 Homen, Diogo, son of Lopo Homen, 15, 22 Hotman, Jean, 106, 120–4, 134 his De la charge et dignité de l’ambassadeur, 120, 156 Howard, Charles, Lord Admiral, 105, 123 Huntly, George Gordon, Earl of, 150 Huygens, Constantijn, 1–6 and brother Maurits, secretary to Prince Maurits, 6 as father to scientist Christiaan, 5 marriage to Suzanna van Baerle, 2, 6 portrait of, by Thomas de Keyser, 1, 2, 5–6 humanist friendship circles, 32 information and intelligence audience for, 71–2, 159



Index 193

Index

information and intelligence – continued authorised leaking of, 18 expenditure on, 49–51, 143, 164 gossip and rumour, 103, 109, 122, 141 intelligence and news, porous boundary between, 47, 73 leaking of false information, 181 secret, 48, 49, 51, 59, 70, 72, 77, 112–14, 134: storage of, 49 sources of, 67, 114, 121–2, 140, 164, 178–9 and relationship to policy and wider politics, 48, 58, 64–5, 69, 72 reliability of, 59, 66, 70–1, 73, 75, 122, 159 unauthorised dissemination of, 13–16 information gathering and espionage crown and private, relationship between, 63, 73, 78 domestic and foreign, overlap between, 48, 57, 63 networks of, 46–8, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71–2, 78, 101–4, 109, 113–14, 138, 140, 164, 172–88, passim and patronage, 48, 55–6, 64–5, 67, 70, 73, 75–8, 144, 160, 166 as route to higher office, 76, 78 see also maps; cartographical espionage and Black Chambers instructions for diplomats, 48, 78 for sailing, 19, 20 intelligencers, see spies Ireland, 113 agents working in, 49 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, 174, 178 Italy, 32, 84, 164, 167, 173 agents working in, 49 James I, 2, 145, 149, 167–8, 174, 180 foreign policy of, 156, 160 as James VI of Scotland, 106, 167 James II, 18 Jesuits, 143 Garnett, Henry, 111, 112, 140 Gerard, John, 111

missions of, 140 Wright, Thomas, Jesuit priest, 138 Joachimi, Albert, 177 Jonson, Ben, 138–54, passim The Alchemist, 139 ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’, 150–1 ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, 147–8 Hymenaei, 149 his masques, 143, 145–51; political nature of, 145 The Masque of Blackness, 148 Part of the Kings Entertainment in Passing to his Coronation, 145–8 ‘The New Cry’, 144, 145, 148 Killigrew, James, 33–4 Knightley, Lady Elizabeth, 104 Knollys, Sir William, 105 Lake, Thomas, servant to Walsingham, 50 law aequiparatio, 84 Bartolism, Italian school of law, 85 French legal humanist school of law, 85 as imitative art, 84 international law, 96 and passim, 120, 155, 164, 167–8 jurisprudence, 84 Venetian law, 163 Leiden, 133 Leighton, Sir Thomas, GovernorGeneral of Guernsey, 123 Leland, John, 34 Lennox, Earl and Countess of, 20 Lesieur, Etienne, agent to Walsingham, 69 Lette, William, steward of Wotton, 163 letters bearers, 1, 33, 35, 51, 69, 70, 72, 73, 108, 109, 111, 112, 123, 125–8, 161–2, 166–7, 173–5, 185 conveying news and intelligence, 36–7, 65–9, 103, 108, 109, 111, 114, 122, 124, 134, 158–9, 166–7, 177



194

circulation of, 106, 159, 162 copies of, 70–2, 123, 124, 172 cost of, 143, 173 couriers, 173, 174–5, 178, 185 of credence, 66 endorsements and summaries, 52, 57, 66, 140 false superscriptions, 52 forwarding letters, 66, 67, 124, 140, 143–4 of friendship, 32, 39, 77, 161 handwriting, 51, 57, 120, 124, 129–34, 161 language of, 39–40, 55, 76–7, 113, 157–9, 162, 166, 176 materiality of, 56, 120, 134, 161, 166, 172, 175, 178–9 news and personal matters, mix of, 103, 105, 109, 158, 160, 166 and patronage, 39–40, 77 and passim, 104, 105, 108, 160, 166, 167 postmasters, 72, 173–5, 178; see also Black Chambers in secret ink, 57, 112, 144 of thanks, 104–5 vulnerability of, 70–3, 102, 125–6, 130, 140, 159, 176, 177 women’s letter-writing, 101–19 see also ciphers Lily, George, 32, 36 Lindsay, Alexander, pilot, 20 London, 1, 2, 33, 36, 85, 103, 138, 139, 140, 174, 177, 182 news from, to the country, 103 Longland, John, bishop of Lincoln, 35, 36, 38 Lopez, Doctor Roderigo, 59 Lorraine, House of, 180 Louis XIV, 15, 23 Low Countries, 40, 64, 65, 68, 143 agents working in, 49, 52, 53, 65–74 alliance with, in revolt against Spain, 65–6, 69, 78 English intervention in, 63 Lucretius, 90 Madrid, 157, 158, 168 Manners, Roger, 107 Lady Bridget Manners, niece, 107

maps, 13–29 atlases, 17, 22: the Caverio world map, 21; Cornaro Atlas, 19; ‘South Sea Atlas’, 19; Louvois, Marquis de, atlas prepared for, 15; Waldseemüller’s world map, 21 and blackmail, 15 Carta Padrao de el-Rei, 15, 16, 21 cartographers: Agnese, Battista, chartmaker, 17; Benincasa, Grazioso, chartmaker, 16; Bianco, Andrea, chartmaker, 16; Boazio, Battista, cartographer, 19; Caverio, 21; Chastillon, Claude de, 23; Dutch, 17; French, 17, 20; Hack, William, chartmaker, 19; Nicolay, Nicolas de, mapmaker, 20; Rotz, Jean, chartmaker, 22; Saxton, Christopher, cartographer 14; Verrazzano, Girolamo, mapmaker, 21; Venetian, 16, 17, 18; Waldseemüller, Martin, mapmaker, 21 cartographic espionage, 13–14, 16, 18, 19, 22–4 commercial map publishers, 18, 23 for display, 21–2 as gifts, 15, 16, 17, 21 inadequacy of, 15, 24 legal restriction on the printing of, 14 military maps and plans, 13: of ports in the Caribbean and Spanish America, 19; of the Dutch East India Company’s Asian forts, 15; of England, 21, 23; of France, 13, 23; of Huningue near Basel, 23; of Irish forts, 23; of Lombard towns, 15; of Londonderry, 18; of Portuguese forts and settlements in India, 17–18; of Scottish coastline, 20; of Tangier, 18 Padron Real, 16 and patronage, 14 and trade disputes, 16–17, 22 Marlowe, Christopher, 51, 54 Marshall, William, his The Donation of Constantine, 35



Index 195

Index

Martin, Batholomew, 51 Mary I, 15, 22 Mary, Queen of Scots, 20, 46, 49, 57, 58, 67, 101, 113 female attendants on, during imprisonment, 112 Mason, John, 32, 35 Maximilian I, Habsburg Emperor, 173 medieval diplomacy, 82 Melanchthon, Philipp, 91, 92 de Mendoza, Don Bernadino, Spanish ambassador, 85, 86 merchants agents posing as, 64 and information gathering, 48, 49, 66 postal system of, 173, 174–5 Middelburg, 140 mimesis, or the art of representation, 82–100, passim de’Monti, Gregorio, secretary to Wotton, 163 Moore, Jonas, 18 Morgan, Colonel, 74 Morton, Albertus, nephew to Wotton, 167 musters, 48 Mylles, Francis, secretary to Walsingham, 46, 51, 52, 56, 58 Naunton, Sir Robert, his Fragmenta Regalia, 49 Navarre, Henri, King of, 129 Netherlands, 1–5, 64, 111, 113 Spanish Netherlands, 172, 174, 175 Newdigate, Lady Anne, 103 newsletters, 103, 108, 112, 140, 144, 159–60, 176 Norris, Colonel John, 69 northern uprising, 113 Northumberland, Anne, Countess of, 113 epistolary campaign to aid Mary, Queen of Scots, 113 the Old Bailey, 138 Orange House of, 1–3, 5

William, Prince of, 66, 128: assassination attempt, 68–70, 74–5, 72; son Maurice, 68 Ostend, post via, 174, 178, 183 Owens, Hugh, 101, 140 Oxford, 35, 82, 85, 86–7 Paget, Charles, Catholic exile, 52, 53 Palaces Holyrood, 20, 150 Nonsuch, 108 St James’ Palace, 2 Whitehall, 18, 21, 127 Palatine crisis, 180–1 Paris, 23, 24, 35–8, 58, 120, 133, 134, 158 Archives Nationales, 23 diplomatic agents in, 13, 14, 33, 51–2 English exile community in, 57 Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre, 23 Parker, Archbishop, 34 Parma, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of, 69 Parry, Blanch, 110 Pate, Richard, ambassador to Spain, 33, 35, 40 servants of, 36 Paulet, Sir Amias, ambassador to France, 120–9, 134 servants of, 125–6 and passim Pepys, Samuel, 24 Pérez, Antonio, 106 Persons, Father Robert, 53, 140, 142, 143–4, 147 Petrarch, 84 Phalsbourg, Henriette Princess of, 180–1 Phelippes, Mary, wife of Thomas, 101 Phelippes, Thomas, cryptographer, 46, 47, 50–3, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 101, 129, 142 Philip I, 173 Philip II, 15, 22, 106, 113 Philip IV of Spain, 174, 181 Phillips, Thomas, English military engineer, 18, 24 philosophy, 83, 85, 87–8, 90–6 piracy, 19 between French and English, 107



196

Herle, William, 64 Ringrose, Basil, buccaneer, 19 Sharp, Bartholomew, buccaneer, 19 Plantin, Christopher, 67 Plato and platonism, 83, 87–8, 90 Cratylus, 90–1, 93 Gorgias, 88–9, 91 Ion, 91, 92–3 platonic theory of language, 88 Republic, 88, 90 Sophist, 93 Timaeus, 91 poetry, 82–100, 144, 147, 150 see also under Sidney, Philip and diplomacy and literature Pole, Reginald, 32, 36 Poley, Robert, agent to Walsingham, 46, 51, 53, 54, 58 policy, holistic view of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’, 7, 63–4 Della Porta, Giovanni Baptista, 132, 144 his De occultis literarum notis, 132 Portugal Armazém, 16 fleet of, 16 Lisbon, 15, 16, 17 maps of Portuguese empire and exploration, 15–16, 22 and Spain, 15–17, 22 post, see letters postal system attempts to increase Crown control of, 174–5, 177 Catholics, networks used by, 103, 182 commercial nature of, 182 European, 172–88 passim, 173–5, 184 Swedish, 182–3; Salvius, Johan Adler, postmaster, 183 Taxis, 173–88 passim Prague, 180 Preston, Lord, 13, 23, 24 prison of the Bishop of Paris, 50, 54, 58 espionage inside, 46, 53, 56, 64, 138–9 Marshalsea, 46

Newgate, 56 Portsmouth, 56 Privy Chamber, Elizabethan, 102–3, 106, 107–8, 114 political influence of, 109, 114 and passim Privy Council, Elizabethan, 47, 49, 63, 67, 78, 85, 86, 101, 107, 123 clerks of, 121 Protestant Union, post of, 182–3 Ptolemy, Claudius, his Geographia, 21 public execution, 56 Puckering, Lord Keeper, 104 De Quester, Matthew, 174–5 Radcliffe, Mary, 108 Ralegh, Elizabeth, 103 Rawley, William, 126 Rembrandt, 3 Rene II of Lorraine, 21 de Resende, Pedro Baretto, secretary to the Portuguese viceroy in India, 17–18 Rheims, 46 rhetoric, 82, 83, 85, 88–91, 92–3, 120 Ribeiro, Diogo, 16, 17 Rich, Lady Penelope Europe-wide correspondence network, 106 Queen Elizabeth, letter to, 106, 114 Roe, Sir Thomas, 183 Rome, 36, 40, 46, 112, 140 Roper, Sir John, 112 Rosicrucianism, 128 Ross, Bishop of, 67 Rouen, 140 Royalist exiles, 172, 175, 177, 182–3 Rubens, Peter Paul sale of painting of Alexander and Roxane, 3–4 Russell, Lady Elizabeth, 104, 105 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Treasurer, 106 St Andrews, capture of, 20 St Dié, 21 St Paul’s School, 32, 35, 38 Jones, Richard, master of, 38, 39 Scandinavia, 173 Scioppius, Gaspar, 160



Index 197

Index

Scotland, 20, 113, 167 agents working in, 14, 49 Scott, Andrew, 50 Scudamore, Lady Mary, 110 influence with Queen Elizabeth, 110–11 secrecy and group identity, 145–7, 151 language and theory, 139–40 as political and social theory, 139–54 and social bonding, 143–4, 148–50, 151, 167 Secretary of State, 59, 121, 123, 128 office of, 23, 47–9, 66 papers of, 48, 53 secretaries, 6, 120, 124, 161, 163 de Serres, Jean, 88, 91–3 theory of language, 92 Shakespeare, William, 128, 133 Shrewsbury, Earl of, 110, 111 Shrewsbury, Elizabeth, Countess of, 101, 104, 111 Mary, Queen of Scots, keeper of, 101 news network of, 101 Sidney, Lady Mary, 109 Sidney, Sir Philip, 82–100 passim ambassadorial poetics of, 93, 82–100 passim Astrophil and Stella, 96 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 84, 94–6 Defence of Poesy, 83, 84, 92–3 diplomatic career, frustrations of, 85–6, 92, 96 Languet, Hugo, relationship with, 86 patronage and Leicester/Sidney circle, 86–7 relationship with Gentili, background to, 85–8 Sloane, Sir Hans, 17 Socrates, 87 Sorbonne, the, 35 South Sea Company, 19 Southwell, Father Robert, 58, 141, 143 sovereign states, emergent system of, 89 Spain, 113, 140, 173, 182 agents working in, 49

alliance against, 65–6, 69 ambassadors to, 33 English policy towards, 105 the Inquisition, 85 and Portugal, 15–17, 22 Spanish Armada, 48 Spanish embassy in London, 164 Spencer, Gabriel, 138 Spencer, Sir Robert, 103 spies, 36, 46–62, 138–54 passim, 177 dangers associated with, 141 definition, 47, 78 double-agents, 20, 24, 52, 54, 57, 138–9, 149, 175 entrapment, 58 French, 21, 23, 24 Homen, André, Portuguese spy, 15 Italian agents, of Wotton, 164 and maps, 16, 18, 23–4 motivations of, 55, 57, 78 secret missions, 19 Storff, Colonel Paul August de, French spy, 24 see also information gathering and information and intelligence Stafford, Lady Dorothy, 110 Standen, Sir Anthony, 48 Stanley, Alice, 103 Stanley, Sir William, 53 Starkey, Thomas, 32, 36 Strasbourg, 33, 133 Stuart, Lady Henrietta, 150 Stucely, Sir Thomas, soldier and exile, 113 Suárez, Francisco, 83 Suffolk, Katherine, Duchess of, 104 Sussex, Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of, 110, 123 Sweden, King of, 176, 184 Swerder, William, scholar and agent, 30–45, passim family, 31 patronage of, 38–40 wife and servants, 34 Talbot, Anne, 108 Talbot, Mary and Gilbert, 110 Tassin, Christophe, 23 Tasso, Torquato, 82, 120



198

Taxis, Alexandrine of, 112, 173–88 passim agents of, 176 Catholic League, use of Taxis mail by, 182 genealogy of, in defence of status as female postmistress, 181–2 Lamoral II, son of, 174 as leader of Taxis postal company, 173–88 as spy, 172, 176, 182, 184 Taxis, Counts of, 173–4, 181 Antonio of Taxis, 177 Leonard II, Count of, 173 Temple, Sir William, 4 Thirty Years’ War, 155, 168, 172, 174, 182 Thurloe, John, 175 Thynne, John and Joan, 103 Tomson, Laurence, secretary to Walsingham, 52 Topcliffe, Richard, 141 Tower of London, 19, 21, 23, 111, 112 trade Africa, 18–19 the Asiento, 19 Casa de Contratación, 16 with Latin America, 19 the Line of Tordesillas, 17 silver mining, 22 Spice Islands, 17, 22 treaty of Saragossa, 22 travel, 163–4 costs of, 51, 70, 72 danger and difficulties of, 71, 72, 125–6, 180 passports, 32, 181 ships: Santo Rosario, 19 Treaty of Utrecht, 19 Tremayne, Edward, 123 Tritemius, Joannes, 132 Turkey agents working in, 49 Tuscany, Duke Ferdinand of, 167 United Provinces, 14, 16, 49, 65 Council of State, 73 Valla, Lorenzo De elegantiis latinae linguae, 35 translations of, 31, 34–5

Valois, see Anjou Varie, James, servant to Wotton, 166 Vaux, Anne, recusant, 112 Vaux, Elizabeth, recusant, 111–12 Venice, 32, 156, 158, 163–7, 184 Versailles, 23 Verstegan, Richard, 47, 139–44, 146–8 his background, 140 correspondence of, 140, 143 his A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 139 Vienna, 93, 184 Maxmilian II, court of, 93 Vigenère, Blaise de, 132–3 his Traicté des chiffres, ou secrètes manières d’escire, 133 Virgil, 90 VOC, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, see Dutch East India Company Waad, family, 67 Wake, Isaac, secretary to Wotton, 164, 166 Wallis, John, Royalist code-breaker, 148 Walpole, Father Richard, 140; his brother, Henry, 140 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 46, 47–62 passim, 63, 123–9 passim, 141, 142 agents of, 46, 49, 65–6, 67, 74, 77 secretaries of, 46, 52 Wanstead, 108 Warwick, Anne, Countess of, 104, 110 Weldon, William, scholar and agent, 30–45 passim family of, 34 grants to, 35–6 later life and death, 36 Wenman, Lady Agnes, recusant, 111–12 Wenman, Sir Richard, 112 Wilkes, Thomas, 123 Williamite victory, 18 Willoughby, Francis, 108 Wilson, Thomas, Principal Secretary, 47, 123, 127 Windebank, Sir Francis, Secretary of State, 180–1



Index 199

Index

Winwood, Sir Ralph, 158, 166 Witherings, Thomas, postmaster, 175, 178–9, 184 Wolf, Reyner, 19 Wolley, Lady Elizabeth, 108 Women, 101–19 passim and Catholic correspondence networks, 103, 111–14 circulation of news, role in, 101–19 passim counsel of, 109 at court, 102–3, 105, 107–9, 114 familial networks, 101–2, 107, 114 financial return on intercession of, 106–7, 110, 113 and gift-giving, 101–2, 104 as informal ambassadors, 102, 109, 111, 114 and intelligence gathering, 101, 109, 112–14, 172–88 passim; through sociability, 102, 114 as intermediaries, 107–9, 110–14

and patronage, 102–4, 105, 106–8, 114 political influence of, 101–19 passim, 174, 176, 181–2 see also under letters and information gathering and Privy Chamber Wood, Robert, Catholic informer, 52 Wotton, Edward, 93, 107 Wotton, Sir Henry, 155–71, passim intelligence network of, 164 personal style of correspondence, 156–9, 161, 167 relationship with Dudley Carleton, 159, 164, 165–6 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38 Wyatt’s rebellion, 37 Yetsweirt, Nicasius, Latin secretary to Elizabeth, 123 Zurich, church of, 33



200

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