In the famous “Rainbow Portrait” Elizabeth I wears an extraordinary gown embroidered with ears and eyes — often assumed to be a sartorial statement of her rule through the wise counsel of virtuous statesmen. But eyes and ears also invoke the grubbier reverse of Gloriana’s glittering image. The eponymous “watchers” of Stephen Alford’s title are the spies and secret agents employed by Elizabeth’s regime to pry into the lives of those who would assault the vulnerable body of the queen or invade the fledgling Protestant state. The context of this cat-and-mouse game was the Reformation: the ultimate stakes the uncertain succession to the throne that would determine the future of religion in England.
Alford’s subject matter could not be more absorbing. From the Northern Rising onward, the regime was plagued by the specter of assassination plots, domestic insurrection, and foreign invasion, kindled by the agitators of the militant Counter-Reformation, seminary priests. Courted aggressively by English exiles were the great Catholic powers: the papacy, the Guise, the mighty king of Spain. The atmosphere invoked is of relentless crisis: we swoop through the entrapment and trial of Campion, and the Parry, Throckmorton, and Babington Plots to a climax of sorts — the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, the public execution of an anointed queen by a fellow monarch, an event greeted with outrage by most of Western Christendom. But this is a false denouement, and we resume (with rather less wind in the sails) conspiratorial intrigue in the 1590s, when the queen’s own physician was embroiled in a poison plot hatched allegedly in connivance with chief ministers of Philip II. As late as 1598 the hapless Edward Squire was executed for the biologically improbable scheme of killing the queen by poisoning her saddle.
The author has not set out to write a major work of discovery — his canvas is too expansive, his anticipated audience the interested general public. From the archival materials he knows so well, Alford retells and reshapes the interconnecting narratives of major plots against Elizabeth’s government through the eyes of the men who performed the regime’s dirty work, cozying up to suspected traitors, feigning sworn friendship with those they were (theoretically) paid to betray.
The fantastical experiences of these spies and agents are utterly gripping, not least in the detail they provide about life lived in shadowy exile communities that migrated restlessly between London, Paris, and Rome. Anthony Munday, a chief informer during the show trials of Campion and his associates, voyeuristically recalled with his writer’s eye the quotidian routine of the English College in Rome, the exotic food the seminaries consumed, the Spartan cells in which they slept. When Munday fell sick on his travels he was tended to by Luke Kirby, known for his charity toward English exiles, who became a particular friend. Munday repaid the favor by giving evidence that convicted Kirby of treason. The psychological opposite to the showy Munday was the inscrutable Thomas Phelippes, the great cryptographer. Phelippes worked in ruthless harmony with Francis Walsingham, cozening the dim-witted Anthony Babington and John Ballard to land the greatest prize of all — the head of the Queen of Scots. For his pains he would die penniless in the 1620s, his great work conveniently ignored — an embarrassing relic that fitted no nascent legend of a splendid Elizabethan era.
As Alford shows, the cultures of espionage and paranoia nourished each other. As the state grew rightly fearful of Elizabeth’s enemies, the spies employed to uncover treachery were encouraged to foster treason — to smoke out the corrupt before they could act successfully on their seditious impulses. The most spectacular victim of this deadly game was William Parry, a self-aggrandizing double agent who died the dreadful death of a traitor, ensnared in a plot he had woven to catch greater flies.
Alford flirts inconclusively with some nagging questions. Did these “watchers” enjoy a common background? What motivated men to break the normal codes of ethical behavior, to bear false witness against their acquaintance? Poverty? The lure of court patronage? As Phelippes’s experience arrestingly demonstrates, neither of these were rewards any more certain than salvation. It seems an imaginative leap too far to describe the actions of these spies as instances of the self-consciously virtuous patriotism of the type that defines Collinson’s “monarchical republicans.” But it was that self-same cause — the preservation of Protestant monarchy— that they ultimately served. Hatred of Catholicism, which defined the mentality of their patrons Francis Walsingham and Lord Treasurer Burghley, seems a likely explanation. But the religious sympathies of men like Munday and Parry were profoundly ambiguous and, perhaps, unfathomable from the textual remains of their activities. And what lines do we need to draw — can we begin to draw — between genuine plots to overthrow the Protestant regime and those fostered and even fabricated by the government? What was the dynamic between threat and prevention? Those are the kinds of questions that must be interrogated from painstaking case studies of particular episodes. This book succeeds most emphatically, though, in its main aim: to persuade a broad readership that the Golden Age of Elizabeth is a myth, albeit of extraordinary power and tenacity.
