 Yn ymchwil, oedd yn fwyaf i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, i ffyrdd y Cyfyrdd yma i'r cyfweld. Mae'r ddechrau'r srif yn ôl o'r ddau'r newid ymddangodau sydd wedi'i ffyrdd ar y cyflogon a'r gwaith yn ychydigol. Mae'r gwaith i'r gwaith ar y gwerthon ac ar y gwaith. Mae'n hyn i ddau'r gwaith o'r gwaith ffyrdd yn ysgrifennu ymddangodd a'u ddaw'r gwaith hynny. My name is Andrea Clark and I'm lead curator of medieval and early modern manuscripts here at the British Library. And the lead curator of the library's current exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary, Royal Cousins, Rhyfel Queens. This evening's panel discussion is one of a number of public events to support the exhibition. Which is in fact the first major exhibition to consider Elizabeth the First and Mary Queen of Scots together. Putting them both centre stage and giving them equal attention. Elizabeth and Mary's turbulent relationship dominated English and Scottish politics for 30 years. But despite their fates being intertwined, the two queens never met in person. Instead their relationship was played out at a distance, much of it by letter. The British Library holds the largest collection of autographs for Elizabeth the First and Mary Queen of Scots letters. And it's these thrilling documents that light the heart of the exhibition and enable visitors to step back into their world and understand how from amical beginnings their relationship turned to one of suspicion, distrust and betrayal. The crisis years of the 1580s, which saw an embattled Protestant England threatened with foreign invasion in support of the Catholic Mary, formed the exhibition's penultimate climactic section. Faced with such grave threats to the survival of Protestant England. Elizabeth's chief adviser William Cecil, Lord Burley and the Queen's principal secretary, Sir Francis Worzingham, understood that the effective use of intelligence networks was critical to ensuring the Queen's safety. Consequently, they greatly expanded the Elizabethan secret service, often resorting to underhand and brutal methods. Exhibits, including cifod documents and decipher documents, and letters describing intelligence gathering and encryption techniques demonstrate how Elizabeth's government thwarted the 1583th Rock Morton Plot and the 1585 Parry Plot before the most famous Elizabethan surveillance operation of all uncovered the 1586 Babington Plot, which entrapped Mary Queen of Scots and brought her to trial and execution in 1587. The exhibition is open until the 20th of February, so if you haven't already visited, you still have plenty of time to do so. At the end of the lecture, we will be taking questions from our online and in-house audiences. So if you're watching online, you can submit your questions through the question box below the video. And for our audience in the theatre, please raise your hand and a microphone will be brought to you. If you are watching online, you can use the menu above to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library and to order a copy of the exhibition catalogue. A couple more housekeeping points for me before we get going. For our live audience, please do turn off your mobile phones or put them on silent. And we're not expecting any fire alarms this evening, so if you do hear one, please follow the emergency exit signs. So I'm now really delighted to welcome our panellists this evening, Professor Stephen Orford, Stephanie Merritt, Alan Judd, and our Chair, Gordon Carrera. Together, they're going to explore the Elizabethan Secret Service and how it shaped modern espionage practice. It is a huge pleasure for me to introduce our Chair, Gordon Carrera. Gordon is a security correspondent for BBC News, where he covers espionage, terrorism, cyber security, and other related issues. And he's also the author of a number of books related to intelligence and spies, including MI6, Life and Death in the British Secret Service, and Russians Among Us. Thank you very much, Gordon. Thank you, Andrea, and thank you and welcome to all of you here, and those of you joining online as well. It's a great pleasure to be able to moderate this panel and explore Tudor surveillance and spymasters. I spend my time talking about the modern variety, writing and broadcasting about them, but I'm lucky to have an expert panel with me to delve into the past and try and explore it. Stephen Orford, as we heard, is a Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds, author of six books on the period, including The Watchers. He is joining us, as you can see, online, remotely, I think from the Yorkshire Dales, is that right, Steve? That's right, absolutely. Beeping in from a distance, I'm afraid. But you're very welcome. Stephanie Merritt, then on my left, is the author of 12 books, including Sunday Times number one bestselling historical crime series written as S.J. Paris, featuring Elizabethan, Heretic and Spy Giordano Bruno. The most recent is Execution, I think that's right. Alan Judd, then at the end, is a former member of the Diplomatic Service, turned author. He's written nonfiction, including about the first chief of MI6, as well as fiction, most of which is set in more recent times, although his most recent novel, The Fine Madness, is about Christopher Marlow. So, this is a chance to explore this fascinating period, which I still think has many echoes today. The MI5 crest has a rose in honour of Sir Francis Walsingham. I remember once going into an MI6 chief's office and seeing a painting of John Thurlow, as well. And so, I think modern spy masters certainly know the importance and the significance of this period in really defining a lot of what becomes modern espionage. And I think what we'll try and do is explore a little bit about what it was like then, and perhaps also how it differs to where we are now. Stephen, perhaps I could get you to go first, and maybe paint us a bit of a scene of the landscape in which the spying took place. At that time, what were the forces? We think of modern spying really defined by the Cold War, but what were the forces which shaped it back then? I think the Cold War similarities are really interesting, because I think what we have from the second half of the 16th century across Europe is a difficult and fractured landscape. I suppose we might understand it as two competing ideological blocks, that the long sort of duration of a painful Reformation Catholic and Protestant, the superpower of Europe in the second half of the 16th century, and Elizabeth's reign was undoubtedly Spain, which was the great Iberian power, but also a global power in many ways. England was a little bit of an outlier. We might even think of it as a rogue state, a pariah state on the edge of the European mainstream, following the long consequences of Henry VIII's break with the Church of Rome in the 1530s. By the 1560s, we have war and rebellion uprising in the Spanish ruled low countries, the Netherlands, and also dynastic religious civil war in France at the same time. I think religion and dynasty are those two elements of the bigger landscape, which are really important to understand. They give real kind of bite to the politics, to the diplomacy, to the security or lack of security of kingdoms and states across the whole of Europe. The reality, certainly from Elizabeth's reign, in Elizabeth's reign, is that a fair portion of Western Europe saw sustained military action and quite intense violence. England on the edge of that, but Protestant England, very conscious, Elizabeth's ministers very conscious, the Queen conscious herself of being beset and embattled. With Scotland as both a threat and an ally potentially, just to the north, and the Tudor Kingdom of Ireland always a problem, long running series of insurgencies across the second half of the 16th century and always vulnerable to attack and invasion. So it's really quite a fraught picture, which has a kind of Cold War resonance, but also has that extra dimension. Certainly for Elizabeth's ministers, you really find somebody like a Burleigh or a Walsingham would see this conflict across Europe in cosmic terms. They wrote about fighting the forces of Antichrist. They saw their times as the latter days. They were expecting the great sort of cosmic showdown between heaven and the powers of darkness. And I think that also lends really quite a sort of sharp edge to the perception of conflict and very fraught diplomacy. So what you get a sense from that is of instability, competition, a sense of how much is at stake, and that really drives then the desire for intelligence on what's going on because of that kind of environment. Yes, I mean, it's necessary. I mean, in terms of sheer survival, certainly the survival of the Elizabethan state of Protestant England, it was very difficult, I think, to kind of disentangle those two things. The Church of England and Elizabeth as Queen, those two elements of the Elizabethan state are very much bound together. Elizabeth's crown was uncertain. I mean, one of the absolutely kind of essential themes of the exhibition is the potential rivalry for the English crown of Mary, Queen of Scots. So there's a whole kind of dynastic element to it. And there's also that kind of bigger strategic issue for Elizabeth's government of war, of Spanish armies, putting down rebellion and resistance in the low countries, those questions of whether to intervene or not in that. So there's a kind of military intelligence dimension to this as well. So spies were necessary. Now, how they worked is, of course, one of those things that we can kind of unpick over the over the next few minutes. There are similarities, I think. So perhaps intelligence organisations and espionages, we might understand it today, but also I think there are big differences also. But the really clear thing is that intelligence work and espionage was felt to be essential for the survival of Queen Kingdom and government. Thank you, Stephen. We'll come back to some of those themes about what it actually looked like and what it felt like. Stephanie, maybe I can turn to you. What drew you to writing fiction about this period? And how does it fit in with this world of spying and surveillance? Well, I came to this whole landscape of Elizabethan espionage through the character of Giordano Bruno. And this is quite a tentative link. But I'd come across him when I was a student, so years ago. And I knew that he was an associate. He'd spent time in London in the 1580s. He was an associate of people like Sir Philip Sidney, who was Francis Walsham's son-in-law and a courtier poet. So he was on the fringes of this kind of intellectual circle at Elizabeth's Court. And I started doing a bit of research on him at the time. And I discovered he'd had this extraordinary life. He was born in Naples or just outside Naples in 1548. He became a Dominican friar. But because he had a penchant for reading forbidden books and getting into trouble, he ended up having to go on the run and flee his convent. And he ended up living this kind of itinerant life for the next, well, for the rest of his life, really, he was travelling all through Europe. The short version, he ended up at the French court. He was a philosopher and he became very close to the French king. The Catholics didn't like that because he was a heretic. He was being pursued by the Inquisition. So they sent him over to London, where he was a lodger in the house of the French ambassador. This is in 1583. Now, what we know at the time is that one of the more significant plots against Elizabeth of the 1580s was the Throckmorton plot, which was foiled by the interception of letters passing through the French embassy between Mary's Stuart supporters in France and her when she was under guard. And there was a mole in the French embassy. And so it was some some years later that I came across this. I brought this to show you because this is the book that sort of gave me the idea for the series. It's by the late John Bossie, who was Professor of History at York. He died a couple of years ago. And it's just it's so he had this theory, which I think Stephen will probably know a lot more about this, but I don't think it was widely taken up or it's quite speculative. But there was this mole in the French embassy called who called himself Henry Faggott or Faggall, who is mentioned in the exhibition, anybody who's seen the exhibition, he's mentioned in these the letters from to Walsigham regarding the Throckmorton plot. And it was John Bossie's theory was that Bruno was Henry Faggott and that he was the mole because he had this antipathy to the Catholic Church, that it was in his interests to prevent a Catholic invasion of England. So that he was the person intercepting this. And I felt as a fiction writer, I'd always wanted to write about Bruno. And this was like it was the key that turned in the lock. I thought, well, whether or not it is true. And I don't think it was, you know, I think it's still quite tentative, the evidence that he finds. But there's enough there to make it plausible. And so I started writing this series of books with Bruno working as a spy. And at that point, that's when I started diving into all of this. Well, I had to wait for Stephen to write his book, The Watchers, which has been absolutely, but I wish he'd written it, you know, when I started these, because it's just been so, it's been such a rich source of information. And the last thing I have to say about this is that John Bossie, when the second book in the series, Prophecy came out, which I think was in 2011, which is the one that's sort of based around the Throckmorton plot. John Bossie actually wrote to me and told me that he thought it was ridiculous. And he thought it was very silly. But, you know, that's where the sort of, the demands of history meet the demands of spy fiction. So what's fascinating from the brief biography you gave was the sense of individuals being able to move around as well. And which is obviously very rich territory for spies and people involved in espionage. But it feels like a period in which that ability to move between courts and countries was certainly possible. Well, it was unusual, actually. I mean, I don't think ordinary people didn't travel widely. So that's why, you know, you'll find a lot of the people who were, who put themselves forward as intelligences or who were recruited were people in the diplomatic service merchants, people who had a reason to be travelling. And someone like Bruno, he was quite an oddity to have this kind of itinerant. He worked as a teacher and a lecturer. He sort of moved around universities before he ended up kind of worming his way into the courts. Alan, let me turn to you, plots, moles. These all sound familiar from modern fiction, but what turned you to go back to this period and how different did you find it from what you've written and seen really in more recent times? Well, Christopher Marlow interested me for a long time, not for reasons of spying originally, but when I was a student I read a lot of Dostoe... I was obsessed by Dostoeffsky and I read almost everything of Dostoeffsky. And Christopher Marlow rather reminded me of a Dostoeffskian figure, maybe of Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov. There's a kind of atheistical, desperate soul searching rigorously, almost brutally logical, and in the end perhaps nihilistic side to him. He was born in the same country as William Shakespeare in the same year and according to some of his supporters, potentially as great a poet and playwright as Shakespeare, I don't think he would have been had he lived beyond the age of 29. I don't think he would have matured in the way that Shakespeare did, that's just my opinion. But he was certainly the premier playwright and poet of his time and indeed Shakespeare knew him and collaborated with him. And I always wanted to write something about Marlow. I wanted to write fiction about Marlow, because I'm not an historian. But I never could work out a way in. And it was really reading around the period and into the espionage of the period and especially a book called The Watchers by a chapw's name I can't remember. The second plug within five minutes, not bad. Which I do recommend to you because it gives you the whole picture. But especially The Watchers made me alive to Thomas Phillips, spelled Philippeus, who was Walsingham's kind of right hand man and one man Bletchley Park in Second World War terms. And I thought Phillips was such an interesting figure in his own right. I mean, I think he deserves a biography, but I'm not sure there's enough to make a full biography about him. That I thought, well, he would be perhaps a way into Marlow. You don't write about Marlow through Marlow's eyes. You write about him through the eyes of someone else who's seen him. And my book doesn't concentrate on his plays or his poetry particularly because Thomas Phillips is not that interested in all that. He's interested in the spying. And I have Marlow doing quite a lot of spying for which, before Stephen says anything, there is no evidence. There is evidence that he did confidential work of some kind for the government. I mean, firstly, when he was a student at Cambridge, he was going to be refused his degree and the Privy Council wrote to Cambridge and the Privy Council, the biggest guns in the land, suddenly turning on the vice chancellor of Cambridge and the head of Corpus Christi College and saying, you know, whereas it has pleased Her Majesty that her good and loyal servant Christopher Marlow has done her good work, et cetera, et cetera, it does not please Her Majesty that there is no not whereof he was about should defame him, give him his degree. And there's, you know, in two of the times, as I'm sure, you both know very well. There's no, you put your hands up at that point. You just do it. And that letter, I think, was sent on a Thursday. The degree ceremony was on Tuesday and he got his degree, which says something for communications in those days. Also, when he died violently in a fight that it is believed he himself provoked, the three who were with him, including the person who killed him, all had associations with Warzingham's spy network. So I thought, well, this is enough for me to elaborate on and build on and, you know, have a bit of fun with. And I've tried to keep more or less to the historical record in that I've involved him in things he could potentially have been involved in because he was alive then. But as I say, there's no evidence that he was. Let's delve a little bit into some of the detail and particularly, I think one of the areas we could look at is some of the plots, particularly the Babington plot, which I think is one of the central features of this fantastic exhibition that's here. Stephen, I wonder if you could maybe talk us through its significance when it comes to espionage and how the kind of key role intelligence played within that. Yes, it was extraordinarily important defining. And I think subtle operation and picking up on some of Alan's themes there. I mean, Philips is absolutely central to it. It's Philips who was the workhorse, really, of all the kind of intelligence efforts against Mary Queen of Scots. You know, both in Paris with agents, Wallsyngham's agents in Paris, a chap called Nicholas Burden in Paris in the later months of 1585 were porting back over and then Burden comes back over to England. In early 86, Philips generally is the great kind of coordinator, as Alan said, really kind of Wallsyngham's right hand. In seeing the possibilities of gathering the evidence against Mary Queen of Scots that they knew had to exist, they knew that she was guilty of plotting against Elizabeth. The simple question was to kind of gather that evidence and shape it and pin it down with absolute precision. So, in a way, the great kind of art of the operation is to control the information a little bit like the Throckmorton plot that Stephanie was talking about a few minutes ago. It's controlling letters, it's intersecting letters, but it's letting the enemy... It's not letting the enemy know that you have control of the correspondence. So that's Philips' art, I think, both as a handler of agents and they have a young man called Gilbert Gifford who had been recruited in Paris as a courier for Mary Queen of Scots to get communications from Paris, chap called Thomas Morgan. He's really Mary's chief intelligence officer imprisoned in the Bastille all the way through to Mary imprisoned in the English Midlands. So Gilbert was the man, but Gilbert was picked up and I think was given the choice to hang or to spy. And it's really Philips' control of Gilbert Gifford and another number of other actors and players, including a brewer in Bert and the Pond Trent in this extraordinary complex operation to, in a sense, get the letters to Mary. Philips actually helping the secret communication of letters to Mary but of intercepting those letters, copying them, gathering them, decrypting the information. All this material was cyfford communicating it on to Mary, so Mary and her secretaries in a sense have no idea what's happening but all the time communicating back with Walsingham. So an operation of really enormous subtlety and patience and quite extraordinary hard work on the part of Philips who was, as Alan said, one man, one Bletchley Park, he was a linguist, he was a mathematician, he had that eye and brain to be able to break code and particularly Cypher from scratch, but he had the key to Mary's secret correspondence and the key that linked Mary to various groups of Catholic gentlemen of whom Anthony Babington, Catholic gentleman from Derbyshire, is really the kind of key player and a couple of other important people, priests called John Ballard and a whole kind of cluster of sympathetic but not especially sort of competent Catholic gentleman who saw themselves as Mary's supporters but who were entirely sort of surrounded and pinned down by Philips and Walsingham's other servants over the course of spring and early summer of 1586. So it's both a kind of brilliant operation in terms of kind of crypt analysis, a masterly piece of agent handling, I think by Thomas Philips who really had to be switched on in handling some very, very delicate characters and very delicate moments but then also the big question mark about method as well because in the end, as anyone who has seen the exhibition will see, the final evidence against Mary was gathered but then manipulated with an element of fabrication by Philips in coordination with Walsingham to pin down in a very, very specific way Mary's complicity in a putative plot to murder Elizabeth. So it's an operation which really sort of concentrates and elaborates so much about method but also about morality as well and what was necessary in terms of the protection of the stage. Because you're suggesting an operation which was run long, carefully, quite subtly but then they also knew what they had to get at the end of the day. They believed it was there but they might have to manufacture some of the evidence to fit, if you like, the policy or the aim. I think that's it. I think it was a very clear objective. It was a very clear legal standard for measuring Mary's involvement in any plot against Elizabeth and of course they knew she was guilty but they merely needed the evidence to pin that down absolutely. So it's an extraordinary sort of operation. I think the patience of Walsingham but certainly the patience of Thomas Philips in the sense that the station, very, very close to Mary's place of imprisonment, chartly, intersecting the letters, coordinating over a distance. Alan mentioned a little bit earlier about perhaps the surprising speed of communication. Without any kind of modern technology with simply horses, letters, posts, couriers, Walsingham Philips were able to co-ordinate not only the operation against Mary but also to watch the plotters and conspirators, Babington and so on, on the streets of London, to follow them and monitor them. So, as an operation of watchers, it's also an extraordinary kind of subtle long game played not just over a couple of weeks but actually a number of months really. Very, very slow but lots of patience needed. Stephanie, you've written about this. Yeah, so this is what execution is really all based around the Babington plot and I chose the title because the quote that I used at the beginning of the novel is a quote taken directly from a letter from Anthony Babington to Mary, Queen of Scots, which says, and I'll get it wrong, I can't remember it exactly, but it says, he says to her, I have six gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the love we bear your majesty and the Catholic cause will undertake this tragic execution, by which he means the assassination of Elizabeth. But ironically, of course, it was these letters which led to Mary's execution. So that was, and then it ends with the execution of Babington and his co-conspirators, but some of the details of the Babington plot, it's so rich for dramatisation, it was just such a pleasure to write because, so one of the things Anthony Babington did in having got this group of men together to carry out this incredibly secret plot by which he was hoping to assassinate the queen and herald a Spanish and French invasion, he got them all to pose for a woodcut with their names on. There is this woodcut that exists of all the conspirators, so I mean you can just, I'm just trying to imagine them all just kind of standing there for like posing while an artist and maybe one of them saying, should we be doing, it's like doing a selfie before you kind of get into that. Anyway, so that was brilliant. The Brewer in Burton who is, so they've got this fantastic system that Thomas Phillips and Walsingham come up with where they're putting the letters, Gilbert Gifford is bringing letters from London, they're putting them into a watertight canister inside the beer barrels that are being delivered to Charlie and where they are then fished out by Mary's servants and taken up the stairs to her. And the Brewer who realises he's on to a really good thing because now they can't go anywhere else for their beer, he keeps putting the price up because he knows, you know, because now he's on the inside of this operation, he knows they can't get it, yeah exactly, so he just keeps putting the price of the beer up. So all these little details that I found them so fascinating, so Bruno, it's like Alan was saying about Marlowe, he wasn't, there's a good possibility that he was the person involved with the Throckmorton plot, he almost certainly had nothing to do with the Babington plot but at this point I've got a really ship who want more stories so he's ended up being a bit like Forrest Gump, I just dropped him into, I have tried to be, so that summer of 1586, we don't know where he was, he was probably in France but I've gave him a reason to come back and get involved with the the Babington plot because obviously Walsingham did have men inside this group of conspirators who were going into the taverns reporting back what was being said in the meetings so I just gave that role to Bruno instead but there's just so much drama in it and these conflicting personalities and I think it's Stephen who says it might as well have been called the Ballard plot because he was this very charismatic kind of priest who was behind it and and such a disparate group of men who've come together for all kinds of different reasons but mainly looking for a bit of glory and adventure and yeah as and the ego of it as demonstrated by this woodcut which is yeah so it's got it's got so many details, the characters are fascinating aren't they and if you said the kind of the people out for glory, the brewers out for money, I wonder Alan what's your sense of how what the motivation was for people who got involved in intelligence work back then and perhaps also is it different do you think from what they are more recently? Well I think I mean the brewer in your brewer I mean he is the one they call the honest man isn't he and he's probably honest in the sense that he just honestly wants money and I suspect you know money was a large very large part of it for quite a few of them whether you know who knows motivations and methods change over years but human beings at least in the modern eras are fundamentally very similar and I suspect the I think the modern FBI acronym for motivation for spying mice all right can you remember this? Money, ideology, compromise, ego, I suspect those four just about cover most of it then and now and it would be very interesting to know you know about a bit more about the conspirators of the at the time of Babington and all the rest of it and how you know what about the role of Robert Poli I mean I'm sure Stephen could say a lot about Robert Poli who is a figure who was integral to the Babington plot he was also integral to the deaths of Marlowe and he was he was there then he seems to have been an agent who's spied for a long time well into the next rain I believe and his motivation well I wonder what Stephen yeah he did and it's an improbably long career I think in the case of Poli because he seems you know at very definite moments to have been absolutely kind of transparently untrustworthy um Francis Mills Walsingham's private secretary really kind of you know goes goes at Poli in the in the wake of the Babington plot and he's there I mean Poli has this fantastic habit of of of turning up at kind of questionable dinners you know so he's he's there in you know Deppford with with Marlowe and he's dining in in various gardens and at various taffens with the with the Babington and Ballard plotters at different points and Mills Walsingham's secretary doesn't trust him as far as he could throw in and yet you know Poli from that point somehow manages to convince Walsingham of his trustworthiness and he has a really interesting career because Poli is traceable both as a standard kind of courier carrying diplomatic packets to various parts of Western Europe kind of Antwerp and Amsterdam and Paris and so on and yet he also has this kind of secret dimension as as well and a kind of intelligencing career and those two things I think are slightly different in in the 16th century and so far is there was any great distinction between them but I think motivation is really interesting I suppose I mean I right at the beginning of the the session talks about kind of ideological blocks in Europe or across Europe in the second half 16th century and we have to be careful I think for the 16th century of using a word like ideal ideological but you know religious passion is is a motivator for for some um certainly money I mean literally for for some of Walsingham's agents putting clothes on their back and food on the table I mean they literally sort of right in in those terms and also I suspect you know sort of you know ego playing the great game being a big player on a small stage or a small player on a big stage but you know having having the ear of powerful men it's also a patronage game and that I think again is something that is quite different from modern intelligence organisations in the sense that there's no set career structure there are no kind of institutional controls or formal recruitment or you know anything like that really can a profession in that way but it is potentially a step up the ladder so doing these small jobs of intelligence gathering of spying of keeping an eye on underground Catholics in London or beyond recusant Catholics can be a way for some of these individuals to kind of register their talents with powerful individuals and hope to to get on the patronage ladder so in that way it's very much a kind of it's very much a kind of career game but in quite a different sort of way than than perhaps today I think and that is a difference isn't it it's much more personal it feels then the allegiance is personal you hear about personal networks rather than the kind of institutions if you like which persists beyond what one person builds and the loyalty of those spies is often to a person in that sense isn't it yeah I think one you've touched on I'll be both touched on one big parallel with with the cold war I think you know I mean one shouldn't draw too many detailed comparisons but in both those times and in the cold war you had a perceived external threat that had resonance internally where you had dissension and division and I think those were both characteristics that worked at the same time in the same way in that in the 1930s in this country and in many parts of Europe you know there were a lot of people who were seriously communist in a way that doesn't happen now or certainly became much less after Stalin's crimes became revealed but at the time it was possible to be a respectable democrat and believe that communism was the future as many many did and so you know you had a hostile Soviet Union that actually could play upon this division within the country just as in those times you had a hostile Spain mainly in France some of the time so it could actually threaten to come in and invade and over's very the queen and kill the government see it's interesting that you say that because when I started writing this series the the parallel that was really obvious to me is I started writing in and sort of 2008 2009 and the parallel that seemed very very obvious then was with young Islamic men so there you know people who so you've got you know in the 16th century in the 1580s you've got these young disaffected Catholics whose families have perhaps lost their money and their land who have maybe seen their fathers imprisoned for refusing to give up you know refusing Protestant worship they go abroad to France to these English run seminaries where they train as missionary priests they then come back secretly into England with the intention of converting people and the fear for Elizabeth's government is that you've got these kind of ardent young men whose principal allegiance is to their religion not to their country and their religion which which makes them more loyal to another country that shares their religious faith or religious ideology and that's you know so to me that that those were the parallels that seemed to to suggest themselves most obviously when I started writing about this the idea of you know people going abroad to study in religious schools and then coming back and and and it was at the time when there were all sorts of new legislation was being mooted here about detention on suspicion of terrorism charges and and when you look at what was going on in the 1580s and the stuff that Elizabeth's government were bringing in it it's the you know the idea that somebody could be arrested for something they have been reading or for what they might do rather than something they have done and these sort of so the potential that you know you're detaining somebody because they've been looking at suspect material and that to me it was just seemed such a kind of you know quite quite sort of you know gave me a bit of a shiver to look at the way those those things compared. Yeah it's a very interesting parallel I mean one of the things that I mean certain periods get defined by espionage and clearly the cold war is one of them and because in popular culture and as well as in reality kind of spies become this dominant theme and you also see sometimes spying itself fuels a kind of paranoia when you know there are spies afoot when you fear that they might be everywhere when you don't know who's a spy you can see these kind of waves of spy fever break out you know in popular culture sometimes you saw it in the 50s and the 60s with kind of you know the third man and you know Kim Philbyn and so on and it feels like this period this Tudor period was another of those where perhaps it can verge into a kind of paranoia or a bunker mentality where you start to see spies everywhere Stephen do you think do you think there was a bit of that a bit of an obsession with spies? Yes I think so and not I mean not simply espionage but I think the wider picture certainly for Elizabeth's advisors and ministers and those close to them of seeing you know whole movement across Europe you know step by step the queen excommunicated as a bastard heretic schismatic various kind of plots funded by foreign powers the great massacre in in Paris in in 1572 the massacre of the Huguenots which was an extraordinary shock even to hardened veterans like Elizabeth's probably count so the assassination of William of Nassau Prince of Orange in 1584 the great hero of Protestant resistance against Spain each of these episodes I think sort of contributed to that sense of fear and panic and made those groups that Stephanie was talking about just a few minutes ago I think all the more relevant you know that they were really worried about the Jesuits the Jesuits looked like the the kind of ideological storm troopers of the of the Catholic Church you know their mission was obviously political it was obviously subversive the emigre groups in the foreign centres you know whether it's sort of Antwerp or or whether in various towns and cities in in in France you know all of those were you know suspect individuals and it was extraordinarily hard to to keep very consistent tabs on them reckasants at home the the the kind of underground Catholic community even Catholics held in prison the the notion of prisons like New Gates or the Marshall Sea or the Plink or wherever it was as nurseries of of rebellion and treason I think all of these you know together made very much you know sort of atmosphere of of fear and real kind of existential anxiety I think on the past it was of its governance so yeah absolutely there were some parallels with just before the first world war in this country and in Germany when there was real spy fever on a on a scale that I don't think we've ever witnessed you know I mean newspapers had spy editors in those days and people got prizes money prizes for having spotted a spy if they could write in during the week there was um there were novelists such as the most famous was a man called William Le Pew who was horrifyingly feckoned he could write six books a year which is going it isn't it you know and um he was convinced that we were about to be invaded and that there were spies everywhere and the ask with prime minister had to stand up in parliament and deny that there were 40 000 german hairdressers and waiters in this country who were secret reservists waiting for the call on the tug the day to go to an arsenal hidden within a court of mile of charring cross and seize the commanding heights of the economy of course askers denied all this and said his nonsense which just confirmed it in most people's eyes because anything prime ministers say tends to be and you know as with other spy fe other fevers at other times there was a tiny kernel of truth in it i mean germans did not plan to invade us but they did plan to go to war and there was a german hairdresser who was a spy um just the one yes on the harbor at porsimus and a very very good place to have one because who what did he do he cut sailor's hair all day he heard all the gossip about which battleship was going where and which one had been out for how long or which one was damaged and couldn't leave port very useful chap might have thought just to remind you if you if you're online and you'd like to submit questions please do if you're in the audience start thinking them up i'm going to come to you in a minute just one or two quick questions perhaps one for the panel which is um writing about researching spies is hard i know that from the modern world because it's secret you know that's the point of it i just wonder what it's like in this period i mean what's the what's the evidence trail like what are the the sources steven you know how much of it is left over and how different it is is it from other you know aspects of governance if you like it in the period to research and then maybe i'll come to the novelists into what what it's like to try and recreate some of it um in the fictional world steven first well i mean it's it's it's painstaking and forensic work um the material survives um and some of that material has um extraordinary richness as the the the exhibition shows the levels of um kind of close fine grain texture and detail you know down to lots of incor ceiling wax you know is is you know even i you know still still find that i'm so used to it over so many years but but even um i find that um extraordinary um so it can be really rich um it tends to be a job of um quite sort of broad range reconstruction so um you know quite a few archives a couple of major archives but a number of archives have material that um originally in the Tudor archive and the archive say of uh Francis principal secretary or lord burley as lord treasurer originally principal secretary and all that material that would have been filed together and you can tell it you know would have been bundled and filed together in in kind of tills and units and various filing cabinets stuffed in the office um over the centuries for all kinds of reasons has been dispersed so much of it is i suppose much of my job is in a sense kind of putting all that together and a surprising amount of it survives it's it's a little scattered and a little random and of course there are accidents of um survival you know much of the outgoing correspondence perhaps doesn't um but letter books and copies and uh and material returns does um so it's it's it's sort of surprise it's a mixed picture it's surprisingly complete um but there are a few obvious gaps um at the same time one of the the things that always makes me smile a little bit are the number of documents which have something like the formula of burn this letter still there in the archive burn after reading and somebody didn't quite and you know you wonder what's going on there for which you are very grateful no doubt which i'm very very great which we're all very grateful and and i guess that the the there's richness in the fiction in having some material but being able to recreate as well for both of you as well well yeah absolutely i mean that's the uh you know i'm so grateful as uh i'm sure if you've seen the exhibition you will have seen some of these documents the tiny tiny writing thomas philippe particular tiny letters and um and these ciphers these really complex ciphers so i am incredibly grateful to proper historians like steven who have gone through all of this material and then written a book about it which i so but i have done very little digging in the actual archives because because there's so much material from this period and people have written excellent books about it so i've i've sort of started there but it is there for me there's such a freeson in seeing those documents and so somebody that that i have written about like francis waltzing and montany babbington you know to to have to have imagined yourself into their heads and then to see their signature on a piece of paper it's quite it's extraordinary to to kind of think this was a real person who lived and died and wrote his name on this bit of paper in front of me um but yeah the gaps make it all the more interesting for you know to to imagine your your way into it which is um you know where the where the story begins i think really i suppose it's different when you're trying to write about modern spying in the sense that we have different expectations of what we were and we're not going back we're not going to documents and that sort of thing as you say you know what is secret is secret you can't go and have a look at it all and and nor would it necessarily make for a more entertaining spy literature if you did because the two most successful the world's most successful spy writers ian phleming and the late john neccari you know they they both exhibit different traditions of spy writing and of course they're both quite unrealistic in in different ways obviously but so is it realism that people really want or do they just want a good story and a bit of a thrill you know maybe i sometimes think that the greatest spy writer who hasn't yet appeared um would be a kind of trollop and a kind of antony trollop who could do for the for the modern intelligence world what trollop did for cathedral closes in the 19th century i he writes about the people and and that because they are after all people like us they are ordinary people they go to offices every day they do a job and they come home and they live lives just like everyone else but of course if you try to do that in a spy novel it i have sort of made a half hearted attention that once or twice but it it doesn't work because people know they want some action they want some spying they want some secrecy they don't want the admin dead letters or whatever you know the bureaucracy of filling in your forms yes they don't want the bureaucracy so but you can do it with humour too you could do humor yeah i always think what's interesting is the intersection of the individual drama and motivation which we've talked about with great events and and dramatic things happening and things being at stake and that certainly is the the feel you get in this period now i have some questions already here do we have some questions from the floor yes lots of questions right let's get to some um where shall we start actually while we get to the first microphone i'll for here one in the front i'm just going to read one from the audience so that um i get through that this is from um miss deborah stokes thank you for your question it seems that elisabeth's spy network was pretty sophisticated but where did it come from was it something which had developed over the whole Tudor dynasty with henry the seventh and eight or was it waltzingham and sessel that kick started it um steven what's what's was it something new or did it emerge and grow out of something it's it it's a patchy story over decades i i think the the elisabethan iteration of it uh was something fairly distinct and it kind of sits in its own sort of elisabethan ecosystem uh to to a certain extent um but spies and especially informants um had been important for decades because the big context here i guess is you know the um the the the power of the the the Tudor monarchs um but that also the fragility frankly of of Tudor power especially when it came to the dynasty and and religion so you know in the 1530s um the process of enforcing the break with rome um meant that it was important to sort of keep tabs on potential critics and to you know silence opponents and and so on um but i think that's a little removed actually so yeah it's interesting your yeah your sense is that there was something quite unique about this period about the dynastic struggles about the religious struggles about the international environment and the security situation which really made it special and different yeah and accelerating yes yes and i think so and especially about the 1580s as well you know that that really is the kind of key the key decade yeah very interesting question from the front and then um is one of the differences between the cold war and Tudor periods that in the cold war um they were up against an equally competent spy network on the other side whereas from what you're saying i gather that it's nothing like that really existed on the other side in the Tudor period. Steven do you want to go for that one first or? Yes well it it's sort of patchy patchy in a sense on the on on the other side i mean certainly um the king Philip of Spain the the the ultimate kind of monarch bureaucrat um of the 16th century um you know did have a sophisticated government system uh that there were sort of occasional fears of kind of pottings and spy networks um in the 1570s and 1580s um but whether it was quite as defined um or as focused um as the the kind of walsing and burly and eventually kind of Robert Cecil operation i i'm i'm i'm not quite sure i think the the factor that's different is that England was such an outlier um you know it's kind of the German democratic republic really of of western Europe um if you want to kind of cold war um reference uh you know it knew it was different it knew it was right um and it was fighting for survival and i think that that that that sort of sense of of needing um that the kind of intelligence gathering operation or sort of counter you know sort of security operation counterintelligence operation um that that uh walsing and the burly ran i i i i think was an element of that um it's not really quite it's not the cold war parallel um here but uh it just in terms of um threats to the throne and espionage networks uh there was um in the french court because the french king Henry III was uh was under a lot of threat from his catholic opponents as well um and uh his mother Catherine de Medici had this extraordinary um i wrote about this in the in the novel conspiracy she had recruited a network of uh young women ladies in waiting at court she would find the the most attractive kind of daughters who of good families who wanted their daughters to get on at court and they were called the flying squadron so they were they were known at court as the flying squadron and she would basically deploy them if she thought somebody was plotting against her son she would say to one of these girls right you need to go and seduce him and you need to find out from him what he's planning and she did she foiled several plots assassination plots against Henry III no it was actually against um one of her other sons but she foiled an assassination plot and two of these guys ended up being executed because they'd told their lovers what that they were gonna try and kill the king so there was there was espionage kind of going on in in different ways all over this you know all around the period i have a question here from the gentleman yes um Steven was quite right about the spanish empire of course the sun never set on the spanish empire before the british empire the second thing is that in fact um elizabeth was actually a bastard in relation to the other two so therefore it was more important for her to have spying facilities for her rather than anything else with Henry and with Mary but one thing that's really struck me about elizabeth was the fact that she really was reluctant to sign the the death warrant you know for for for Mary and i wondered whether there was any evidence that in actual fact she was actually aware because she was a an intelligent sensible woman like our present queen in actual fact to be able to realise that the maps perhaps be some manipulation there is the facts as well Steven do you want to pick that one yeah i it it's pretty clear to me that that she was briefed all the way through um the the the the the development of the baddington plant i think her reluctance to put her signature her sign manual to to the all important document that essentially is you know eventually sent out to fathering a and and you know it leads to marius execution um there's probably a little bit more to do with elizabeth's kind of natural instinct for self preservation and her great talent for kind of plausible deniability i mean on the day that that she signed the the warrant uh the the the document um within hours she changed her mind and there's a whole other story there about the implications of of that for her poor second secretary um william davison um she she ordered through davison and through walsingham um elizabeth's private um marius private assassination um you know kind of secret um assassination you know the message went to uh sammias paulett marius keeper to you know do do his duty uh and and dispatch the the queen of of scots which he refused to do and his conscience so in in a sense i i i you know it elizabeth was was brutal you know when when she needed to be uh she she she knew the necessity of of getting rid i think by that point um of of mary i mean there's twin poles for elizabeth of you know do do do do we find some sort of way of of integrating mary back into into the system of of coming to a treaty of coming to an agreement or you know do we do we eliminate um and and by early 1587 you know clearly elimination was the was the only possible option so i mean it's a it's a wonderful moment i mean it's it's it's possible to reconstruct but the the the stories and certainly elizabeth's version of the story um of what happened on that all important day um is um is complex a question over here hi i wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the actual techniques that spies used and you touched upon it when you were talking about the ciphers that the letters were written in but i wondered like what kind of codes were used how did people crack the codes and also did they use any of the techniques that we hear about in modern spy fiction like dead letter drops and was it that kind of system of handlers kind of grooming their spies um how how similar was elizabeth and spying to the kind of techniques that we see in modern spying i want to go first for that just and if you if you um i don't know if you've had a chance to look at the exhibition but there's one beautiful example of a letter that's got invisible writing on when they would use you could use some alam solution this is again you know thomas philippe's had these this great kind of arsenal of tricks um and waltzingham employed uh there was another um guy called Arthur Gregory yeah Arthur Gregory who um who was um could reconstruct wax seals so he could forge seals and so you you know you you would look as if the seal had not been tampered with um and so there's a letter in the exhibition where you can see the the secret writing that's been revealed with with holding a flame to it and they could use they would use orange or lemon juice if they could get a hold of it or alam solution um and so there's all these tricks tricks that you sort of err in your kind of children's spy kit that you get when you're little you know and um that's what what i love about it because it's the some of these techniques is so sort of easy but they they worked and you know these yeah they were using those quite quite frequently i mean some of the things you see in the the exhibition like frequency analysis of yeah and things some of these tricks are similar to what you see in the 1930s very similar and i think what what tends to happen is that the technology of spying if you want to call it that follows the technology of the times whatever it is and frequency analysis as you say which i think was invented by the or discovered by the Arabs i think sometime before um as a way of you know i mean you know a very basic example that the letter e is apparently the most commonly used letter in English so if you look at a page of of jumbled up letters or symbols and you pick out the most common one and that might be e you know and then you work on from there so that when you get more sophisticated forms of communication you get more sophisticated forms of intercepting that communication because a lot of spying is about reading other people's communications what they say to each other and basically we were doing it then we're doing it now in the same way but just in very different rather more complicated ways more questions a question here from the lady in the middle in black the microphone is just coming from behind you i just wondered that um elizabeth's opponents would know that walsingham and burley were very very important to her um were there any assassination attempts on them and also what happened to walsingham's network when he died did did it carry on steve yeah oh no steven no no no stuffy go go go ahead yeah go ahead um no well i was just i mean it was taken over by burley's sarton robert sesel who was then um sort of took over but walsingham was he was such a lynch pin and such a figurehead i'm i that's kind of out of my period once it gets into robert sesel so yeah burley burley takes over uh in in in a sense and um went through um with the vice chamber and of elizabeth's household it was kind of formal um sort of supervised hand over of um secret documents uh walsingham had a it's described as the black box as well as other um special sort of cyber cabinets with tills and various documents and vice chamber and thomas henwich and burley together supervised the removal of many of those documents from walsingham house on the wonderfully sort of named seething lane near the near the tower of london and and those documents were taken to to westminster and really together they they they went through um and pruned back um those agents and uh sources um on the on the payroll finding that that that some of them were probably spanish um agents or um were producing intelligence of a very little value so some of the agents carry on um and when robert sesel uh became principal secretary was appointed principal secretary in 1596 he took on um a number of of individuals in robert poli um earlier from from the the malo baddington um sort of connection there poli is one of them um and robert sort of recruited a number of of others and by 1598 robert sesel really had a pretty effective sort of network of information intelligence gathering really designed in a very um conscious um sort of way for for most of western europe um and and sort of central europe and and scandinavia uh much of it sort of based through mercantile connection and quite a sophisticated system of passing correspondence through various um towns and places in some ways might you can say a little bit more sophisticated than the the wasingham um operation in terms of assassination plots certainly there were intimations of plots um against um elizabeth's ministers um burley intercepted a plot uh or at least received a advertisement that he he was a target he was going to be picked off by an arquibus um somewhere near charring cross um in in 1571 so occasionally they can pop up although in in terms of security and protection really elizabeth and her ministers were by modern standards really pretty seriously unprotected um in in many ways which i think is interesting it is we're nearly out of time but i think i saw one more question from the gentleman over here um you've drawn parallels with um the cold war i'm interested in the napoleonic wars and i can sense parallels there as well the concept i keep coming up against there is is the asian provocateur have you encountered that role that far back in tudor times and do you have you seen any examples of that where the government effectively is is planting someone and to to create a crisis that they can manipulate i think there are examples aren't there even but yeah i i think so that yes yeah there are certain moments at which there are scares about um you know sort of plots and conspiracies um at um tactically sensitive sort of moments um so in those wobbly weeks before um elizabeth signed um the document um that session trained the whole process of executing mary queen of scots a plot is discovered um associated with the the household of the the french ambassador um there's a bit of a question mark over that you know a number of um powerful individuals are kind of sent off to to investigate and it doesn't seem to have a huge amount of substance um about it but it does raise the level of kind of anxiety and um expectation really uh and fear um really kind of kind of key political moment um so there are suggestions and intimations i think of of of that and the same is true of various putative plots in the in the 1590s i think and of course there's the the final paragraph to the the bloody letter wasn't there that um warzingham and phillips created to make it absolutely clear that mary was guilty and then didn't use did they in in her trial it wasn't used yes yes so that was a fabrication yeah well i'm afraid we have run out of time um thank you all for your questions whether here in person or online i have learned an enormous amount about a subject which i found absolutely fascinating and it just leaves me to thank such a wonderful panel of stephan stephanie thank you so much and i would just like to um conclude by thanking you all for being our audience this evening both here on site in the knowledge centre at the British Library and also online across the country and overseas for those of you who are here this evening um Stephanie and Gordon have very kindly offered to sign copies of their books which will be on sale in the foyer outside just to say if you've enjoyed this evening's panel discussion um we have an exciting range of events coming up including Tudor Fest on the 4th of December which is a day dedicated to exploring Tudor life um and we would love to welcome you back here for more lectures conversations and performances so please do keep an eye on the what's on page of our website for more information and remember if you've missed any of our recent events you can catch up on those on um the British Library player so um i think all that remains for me now is to ask you to once again say a very special thank you to our panel for a fascinating discussion and a really wonderful evening thank you very much