Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I > Status Update

‘For Phelippes this was a remarkable recovery. His debt to Elizabeth’s treasury still hung over him; he never repaid it. But Sir Robert, in recognising Phelippes’s talents and expertise, had doubtless done much to heal the bruises of the Sterrell affair. Phelippes set to work straight away with energy and passion, using his old contacts abroad to discover the intentions of England’s fugitive enemies’

‘In July 1587 Sixtus V and Philip came at last to a formal agreement on the Enterprise of England. The Pope promised money in two instalments, the first to be paid on the landing of the Great Armada in England, the second once the kingdom was captured. Sixtus granted Philip the right to name as Elizabeth’s replacement one who would ‘stabilise and preserve the Catholic religion in those regions’’

‘Certainly a forgery, the tangle of the Babington Plot and a show trial at Fotheringhay and in Star Chamber meant that Mary Queen of Scots could be eliminated once and for all. Elizabeth Tudor was at last free of her rival. But in 1587 even the cleverest of the queen’s advisers could not properly apprehend what they had done. Mary’s death did not take the sting out of a contested Tudor succession.‘

‘Phelippes was an intuitive and skilled handler of agents. He briefed informants like Berden and Catilun and read the reports they wrote. No less importantly, he made sure that they had money to live on. They received no salary: espionage in the reign of Elizabeth had everything to do with patronage and favour and the financial pickings, though occasionally rich, were infrequent.‘

‘Probably no other character in this book was as accomplished as he at self-deception. Taking an extraordinary risk, in 1583 he [Parry] wrote to one of the Pope’s cardinals with an offer of service for the Catholic cause. Then, just as heroically, he reported to Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham his solo work as a master spy for queen and country.’

‘He confessed to a conversation he had had with King Philip’s ambassador in Paris and the ‘plot laid for the enterprise of the Duke of Guise’. Throckmorton had given the ambassador an account of havens along the English coast and a list of sympathetic Catholic noblemen and gentlemen. Throckmorton said that Philip had promised to fund half the cost of the expedition.‘

‘The response of the Elizabethan authorities was uncompromising. Of the 471 priests, 116 were executed; at least 294 were sent to prison; 17 died in jail; and 91 were eventually banished from England. To William Allen those priests who suffered on the gallows were glorious Catholic martyrs murdered in a vicious persecution. Edmund Campion was the most inspirational and potent martyr of all.‘

‘And so Pope Gregory’s dispensation allowed Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects to obey her without putting their souls in peril. For Catholics this was potentially the untying of a very difficult knot. Significantly, however, Elizabeth’s government did not see Pope Gregory’s dispensation as any relaxation of Regnans in excelsis.’

‘It was obvious that Sledd had produced the most complete reference work then available on Queen Elizabeth’s enemies. He surely knew how important his dossier was. The English Catholic exiles of Bologna, Cambrai, Douai, Florence, Lyons, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rheims, Rouen and Venice, but above all Rome and Paris, were stripped bare.‘

‘In the later years of Elizabeth’s reign Catholic ‘recusants’ - a word derived from the Latin recusans, a refuser - were fined huge amounts of money and regularly imprisoned for refusing to attend church services. Members of the grandest gentry and noble families in England were held under suspicion by the authorities and were sometimes under active surveillance.‘