Elizabeth I’s shadowy spy network was tasked with uncovering secret conspiracies. Here’s what it found

Elizabeth I’s England of the late 16th century was a Protestant nation riven by anxieties that were a consequence of a bitter divorce. The blame lay at the feet of her father.

But it wasn’t Henry VIII’s famous separations from Catherine of Aragon or Anne of Cleves that were the source of the trouble. It was his divorce from Rome.

Only a generation earlier, England had been a staunchly Catholic country. That had changed when Henry VIII, seeking to wrest power away from the papacy, had broken from Rome in the 1530s. Following his death, Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I, had tried to reverse that, burning Protestants and restoring the pope’s authority.

But, when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, she reinstated her father’s Protestantism through the Elizabethan Religious Settlement: a middle way that was designed to bring the realm back. It only partly worked.

To Protestant hardliners, Elizabeth’s church was still too Catholic. To Catholics, she was a heretic and an illegitimate queen. Abroad, Philip II of Spain and the papacy viewed her as an enemy of the faith, and in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated her – releasing her subjects from allegiance to the English Crown.

From that moment on, the Catholic institutions across Europe became Elizabeth’s greatest enemies. And Catholics in England now lived under intense suspicion.

The myth of the Tudor ‘secret service’

As fears of foreign invasion and internal rebellion grew, Elizabeth’s court increasingly viewed intelligence as a potent weapon to be wielded against the Catholic threat, and it fell to two men to spearhead its use: Sir Francis Walsingham, her shrewd and zealous secretary of state; and Robert Cecil, the brilliant son of Elizabeth’s long-time advisor William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

“Both of these men, Robert Cecil and Francis Walsingham, have got a reputation of being the M figure out of MI5 – the head of a vast and highly organised secret service,” says Professor John Cooper, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast’s four-part series on the Gunpowder Plot.

But how much are their reputations as England’s pioneering spymasters deserved?

“I don’t think that the intelligence networks, either of Francis Walsingham or Robert Cecil, were ever as vast as people believe them to be,” says Cooper. “But that’s part of the illusion they create. They deliberately create that sense that everywhere is infiltrated with spies.”

Building the network

Under Walsingham, Elizabeth’s government professionalised the business of espionage.

“He puts a lot of secretly accounted-for money into paying informers,” Cooper explains, “and also paying people to be something like modern-style professional intelligence agents.

“The most dangerous thing about their spies is how they go into deep cover.”

Through these networks, he exposed plots like the 1586 Babington Plot, which aimed to assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. Coded messages were intercepted and double agents were deployed to great effect. The unravelling of that conspiracy sealed Mary’s fate, and confirmed the crown’s conviction that Catholicism and treason were inextricable.

Spies in the pews

By the 1580s, attending or hosting a Catholic mass was illegal.

Despite the suppression, Catholics still found covert ways to worship in secret gatherings. And it was these kinds of meetings that were ripe for infiltration.

“One of the most extraordinary things about Francis Walsingham’s intelligence network is the extent to which he secretly penetrated the English Catholic community,” says Cooper.

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“As a Catholic celebrating and attending the mass in late Elizabethan England, you were never quite sure who the other people in the room were; whether one of them might actually be a secret plant – a counterfeit Catholic as it were, in the pay of Francis Walsingham.”

• Read more | The dark side of Elizabethan England

The information that was gathered had direct consequences. Priests who had returned from exile to minister in secret were hunted, often betrayed by those they thought allies. Many were captured, tortured and executed.

Walsingham’s reach extended abroad too. “[He] managed to place young men in the English Catholic training colleges in Europe,” Cooper says. “These men are supposed to be training to be Catholic priests alongside their fellow students, but they're actually reporting back this stream of intelligence to Walsingham on which of the priests are going to be coming on this secret Catholic mission to England.”

For every priest who landed on the English coast, there was a real chance his name was already known in London and marked down for monitoring.

As much as the intelligence gathered was intended to have direct results, there was another outcome too. Walshingham’s goal was to spread a climate of fear, and the impact was the creation of a kind of panopticon. Catholics knew that spies were watching, but they didn’t know where, or when. “They know that they have to be suspicious,” Cooper says.

Robert Cecil’s inheritance

After Walsingham’s death in 1590, the work continued.

“Robert Cecil, after Walsingham’s death, picks up a lot of these individual agents and these contacts, and continued to maintain these intelligence networks,” says Cooper.

Those networks proved their worth to Cecil in 1605, when informants helped uncover the Gunpowder Plot – arguably the clearest demonstration of how deeply the state’s surveillance culture had taken root.

But even under Cecil’s control, espionage networks had become amorphous and difficult to control. “In fact,” Cooper says, “there were rival intelligence networks operating at the court of Elizabeth I and James VI and I. It isn't all one organised secret intelligence service, because knowledge is power, information is power.

“Everybody is competing to try and be the person who is reporting to the government, because it increases your power at the royal court.”

In this way, factions used informants to outmanoeuvre rivals and advance their own ambitions, too.

While the Elizabethan spy networks might not have been as extensive as later rumour suggests, those rumours alone speak to its influence, and its impact was certainly profound. “They deliberately create that sense that if you're a Catholic, you need to be fearful,” says Cooper.

This created a pervasive feeling that someone, somewhere, was always watching, working to stabilise the Protestant state in what was a moment of significant fragility, and exposing genuine plots along the way.

John Cooper was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.