Some Elizabethan Spies in the Office of Sir Francis Walsingham

Abstract

This is a short essay about the security and intelligence work of Sir Francis Walsingham and the men who worked for him in the 1580s. Thomas Phelippes was Walsingham’s right-hand, his chief cryptog—rapher and agent-runner. Francis Mylles was Walsingham’s private secretary, and he, like Phelippes, was engaged in handling agents. Four others, whose origins are obscure but who would have called themselves gentle men, were Thomas Barnes, Nicholas Berden, Maliverey Catilyn, and Robert Poley. A fourth was Gilbert Gifford, the son of a recu sant family from Staffordshire who, after an education at Douay, Rome and Rheims, returned to England in 1585 to work for Walsingham and Phelippes against Mary, Queen of Scots. Catilyn worked for the most part in England, especially in prisons like the Marshalsea; Berden, Barnes, and Gifford spent some time in France. These men can tell us a great deal about the mechanics and motives of espionage in the reign of Elizabeth I, about why and how spies spied. This may already seem a very familiar story. There are a number of books showing how Sir Francis and his men‘saved England’, a sort of ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure with a dash of the narrative of John Foxe.1 With Walsingham we have to beware of this kind of easy familiar story. Of my two caveats the first is that intelligence and espionage in Elizabethan government and society extended much further than Walsingham and his office, as this collection of essays demon strates so well. The work of Robyn Adams, John Bossy, Paul Hammer and others has helped to show how many of Elizabeth’s courtiers and councillors ran their own extensive networks of information-gathering.2 Spying was popular indeed in the later years of the sixteenth century, as we should expect of any form of activity which had to do with patronage, politics, and money. And so from this follows my second caveat.