In this exhaustively researched book, Patrick H. Martin aims to rehabilitate Elizabethan Catholics’ reputation from a traditional charge of terrorism. English Catholics were viewed as willing participants in violence sponsored by Rome, Spain or France. This was intended to draw Elizabeth’s subjects from their allegiance to her through a series of regicidal plots lasting from the 1580s to the accession of James I. Martin shifts the focus of the investigation into Elizabethan espionage from the conventional concern for Francis Walsingham and his spying, which have been well researched by Conyers Read, and recently by John Cooper and Stephen Alford, towards Catholic counter-espionage.

Any attempt to understand Elizabethan espionage, undertaken by both Protestants and the Catholics, is hampered by the intractability of fragmentary archives. Substantial quantities of intelligence reports were burned after they were read, in accordance with instructions, or vanished either deliberately or accidentally after spymasters’ deaths. Through the resourcefulness of William Sterrell, the principal mole of the English Catholics at Elizabeth’s court, Martin traces the establishment of the labyrinthine Catholic counter-espionage machine, which functioned effectively between 1594 and 1603. He offers the first comprehensive study of the intricate interrelationship between Catholic intelligencers and their patrons through an examination of family and marital ties, educational careers, or exile experience. His book further explores how these Catholic moles, especially Sterrell, disguised their correspondence with co-religionists either as a service to some high-ranking sponsors at court, such as Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, or as highly-classified missions warranted by the seemingly ‘innocent’ Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile, their counter-espionage foils lurking in the late Elizabethan court witnessed the daily tightening of the factionalism between Essex and Robert Cecil throughout the 1590s, and the controversies relating to the English succession as the Queen’s choice narrowed between Arabella Stuart and James VI of Scotland.

Most significantly, Martin pictures William Sterrell less as a spy and more as an enthusiastic intermediary engaged in a peace effort. Sterrell is thus shown in sharp contrast to Francis Walsingham and his violent suppression and devious provocation of recusants. Instead of converting Protestants or stirring dissent, Sterrell applied his role in the English espionage service to protect his persecuted co-religionists from torture and imprisonment, or to serve as a bridge between them and Catholics overseas. His efforts were, Martin says, for the self-protection and religious freedom of Catholics, and in the hope of a Catholic revival in the future. Hence ‘terror was never a component of a plan or strategy advocated by any English Catholics’ (p. 1). The only terrorism in Elizabethan England, Martin charges, was the brutish torture and executions practiced by the government in its persecution of its innocent Catholic subjects. And Walsingham, we are told, was the real maker of terrorism, fabricating plots to create universal fear and public antagonism towards Catholicism, and ultimately to forcibly open the eyes of Queen Elizabeth, who ‘beinge by sexe fearefull, cannot but be irresolute’. (BL, Harley MS 168/54r). Walshingham was driven by a desire to convince the Queen ‘to believe that the great increase of papists is of danger to the realm’ (TNA, SP 12/155/42, Leicester to Walsingham, 5 Sept. 1582).

Martin’s means of exculpation - to establish Catholics as loyal to the state by denying the authenticity of the Elizabethan plots - has been seen since the nineteenth century. As the government was urged to abolish anti-Catholic legislation and grant Catholics civil equality, Catholic writers and historians presented a view of the past that challenged Protestant assumptions. Certain Jesuit historians, including John Hungerford Pollen and, more recently, Francis Edwards, tried to expunge past discrimination against Catholic treachery by rewriting the history of Elizabethan plotting. The beheaded Mary Queen of Scots was redefined as a tragic martyr, instead of a murderous traitor. They also claimed that, although rising discontent over the English government’s persecution had unavoidably provoked the exiles into schemes on the continent, none of these ‘would ever be hatched on English soil, nor would the Queen’s life ever be for a minute in danger’. The so-called plots were described either as rumours or deceptions instigated by Elizabeth’s Protestant ministers to falsely incriminate Mary Stuart.

It is noticeable that Martin mistakenly places the separation of the Elizabethan espionage system into different groups within the larger factionalism between Essex and the Cecils that occurred in the 1590s. Actually, as early as the late 1570s, the divergence over English interventionist policy regarding the continental Protestant wars—whether such intervention should serve first the ‘advancement of the Gospel’ or state interests and ruling legitimacy—had split Elizabethan espionage into rival components. Burghley and Walsingham individually organised their own spy systems to reflect these objectives. In the 1580s, the two systems monitored, defamed, and impeded each other, as well as contended for Catholic intelligence, in order to undermine each other’s prominence, and benefit their respective parties in policy debate. Martin misunderstands the mid-Elizabethan espionage system as a collective and constitutional state service under the sole leadership of Walsingham, and thereby neglects the different involvement and influence of Burghley and Walsingham on Catholic counter-espionage. In 1590, Walsingham’s death with no male heirs meant the surviving portion of his intelligence service was divided between his son-in-law Essex, and, ironically, his conservative rivals, the Cecils. The majority of Walsingham’s intelligence employees, such as Nicholas Faunt, Arthur Gregory, Thomas Lake, Geoffrey Davis, Anthony Standen, Charles Chester, and Anthony Roston, preferred service with Cecil due to his more profitable patronage. In 1601, the execution of Essex and the victory of Cecil in the factional struggle finally drove the divided Elizabethan espionage system towards a union.