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Spying and the Crown
Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana
Rory Cormac
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eBook - ePub
Spying and the Crown
Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana
Rory Cormac
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A Daily Mail Book of the Year and a The Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2021 'Monumental.. Authoritative and highly readable.' Ben Macintyre, The Times 'A fascinating history of royal espionage.' Sunday Times 'Excellent... Compelling' Guardian
For the first time, Spying and the Crown uncovers the remarkable relationship between the Royal Family and the intelligence community, from the reign of Queen Victoria to the death of Princess Diana. In an enthralling narrative, Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac show how the British secret services grew out of persistent attempts to assassinate Victoria and then operated on a private and informal basis, drawing on close personal relationships between senior spies, the aristocracy, and the monarchy. This reached its zenith after the murder of the Romanovs and the Russian revolution when, fearing a similar revolt in Britain, King George V considered using private networks to provide intelligence on the loyalty of the armed forces - and of the broader population.In 1936, the dramatic abdication of Edward VIII formed a turning point in this relationship. What originally started as family feuding over a romantic liaison with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, escalated into a national security crisis. Fearing the couple's Nazi sympathies as well as domestic instability, British spies turned their attention to the King. During the Second World War, his successor, King George VI gradually restored trust between the secret world and House of Windsor. Thereafter, Queen Elizabeth II regularly enacted her constitutional right to advise and warn, raising her eyebrow knowingly at prime ministers and spymasters alike.Based on original research and new evidence, Spying and the Crown presents the British monarchy in an entirely new light and reveals how far their majesties still call the shots in a hidden world. Previously published as The Secret Royals.
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ELIZABETH I AND MODERN ESPIONAGE
‘Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.’
Queen Elizabeth I, 16001
AROUND 1600, THREE years before her death, a stunning painting of Queen Elizabeth I was commissioned. Known as the Rainbow Portrait, it still hangs in Hatfield House, the historic home of her advisers, the Cecils, on the northern edge of London. Her face is ageless and perfect. At the height of her powers, glorying in her defeat of the Spanish Armada a decade earlier, this image is rich with complex symbols and hidden meanings. Eyes and ears are embroidered all over Elizabeth’s orange dress, warning that she sees and hears everything. The dominant theme is surveillance; it is all about spies and royals.2
The painting is more than a visible celebration of the triumph of Elizabeth’s intelligence networks over many rebellions, plots and conspiracies. Her left arm sports the most cunning of all creatures, a vast jewelled snake. It symbolizes that intelligence is only powerful in the hands of those who understand its complexities, who know how to use it wisely, and who then have the courage to take timely action. In her right hand, she holds a rainbow, a symbol of peace: the ultimate prize of her statecraft. Elizabeth is perhaps saying that without her impressive spy network, without her skill in using intelligence and her capability in covert action, there could be no peace.3
In England, spies and royal statecraft were episodic and opportunistic partners.4 Elizabeth was the first monarch who can claim to have presided over an organized intelligence community, perhaps reaching its apogee during the penultimate decade of the sixteenth century when she battled the Spanish Armada. Here, familiar tradecraft suddenly becomes apparent, including human espionage, codebreaking and interrogation, but also more complex ‘dark arts’ of covert action, double agents and even strategic deception. At first glance, all this seems strikingly modern. Indeed, the historian Stephen Budiansky argues that Elizabeth and her spymasters constitute ‘the birth of modern espionage’.5
Yet in other ways, Elizabeth’s spymasters are peculiar and distant. They relied on private endeavour and personal connections more than formal machinery. Some of her most loyal subjects went into debt, even bankruptcy, subsidizing this strange assemblage of subterranean activities only partly funded by the crown. Intelligence was sometimes run alongside family members from their own private houses – a rather vernacular form of espionage.6
Elizabeth’s inner circle, including William Cecil, Francis Walsingham and the earl of Leicester, were all heavily involved in intelligence work. Espionage fascinated the queen, raising the question of how much she personally knew about these remarkable, and often competing, clandestine structures operating in her name. Was she an active intelligence manager, or else to what extent was she manoeuvred by competing courtiers who were spinning intelligence for their own ends? The Elizabethan spy network was impressive in its geographical and political range, but the hand of Elizabeth herself is often hard to trace.7
The Elizabethan age has been much celebrated and so has its supposedly modern spy system. But over the years we have been fed an anachronism: the idea of a proto-modern collective and constitutional secret service, working largely for national security with Elizabeth commanding her forces against the invading Spanish Armada – a curiously Churchillian vision. One can almost imagine her puffing a cigar and orating ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’.8
Some see the ballooning intelligence bureaucracy as a successful attempt to isolate Elizabeth from policymaking; as a shift to a more constitutional form of government. Others have even suggested that the privy council, by controlling the flow of intelligence, became the practical head of the regime. In one historian’s view, the way her ministers dominated intelligence circulation diminished Elizabeth’s power, pointing the way to something close to a ‘monarchical republic’.9
This is misleading. Elizabeth was in personal control, engaged in the everyday detail of spy craft, even setting out how particular agents should be rewarded – or how specific suspects might be tortured. She did, however, seek plausible deniability when it suited her.
Elizabeth had to engage directly because there was more than one spy system. In fact, there were at least three rival intelligence systems. Cecil, Leicester and Walsingham, while working together to a degree, ran their own private networks with distinctive styles and their own clientele. This reflected not only rivalry for privilege and patronage, but also deep ideological divides over how to secure the monarchy from subversion.10
Far from being a proto-modern intelligence community, these networks competed at home and abroad, spying on each other and even attempting to undermine each other’s work.11 What is curious is how well this byzantine system, with Elizabeth at its head, worked, despite the fact that intelligence was often a way of gaining favour or smearing court rivals. Elizabeth needed all these spies, but she also found them vexing. Walsingham, the most famous spymaster of the era, was intense, puritanical, obsessive, even paranoid. Perhaps the first to encapsulate the idea of worst-case analysis, he urged: ‘There is lesse daynger in fearinge to muche then to little.’12 Elizabeth, as the old saying goes, needed to watch the watchers.
QUEEN ELIZABETH DID not inherit an intelligence community. Instead, it developed slowly during her first decade on the throne. Succeeding her half-sister in 1558, she enjoyed a decade of relative grace that ended with the arrival of Mary, Queen of Scots, in England. The following year, northern earls unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Elizabeth in favour of her rival, Mary. So began the Elizabethan era of secret intelligence.
The Northern Rebellion was superficially about tensions between Catholics and Protestants at court. Although Elizabeth tried to present a tolerant front, she marginalized important Catholic figures. They, along with several other nobles in the north, revolted in the summer of 1569. By November, several hundred knights assembled in County Durham; open rebellion had broken out. Even Pope Pius V weighed in, declaring Elizabeth a heretic and encouraging defiance.13
On 13 December, Elizabeth’s forces arrived to meet them, and, within a week, the rebel leaders were on the run to Scotland. The rather short-lived revolt signalled the beginning of a long period of spy wars and, with the rebellion over, Elizabeth ramped up her intelligence capabilities. The Northern Rebellion shocked her, for it was not merely a conspiracy of northern barons but, in her mind at least, constituted a popular religious rising.
Elizabeth personally intervened in the reprisals. She asked for more executions of ‘the meaner sort of rebels’ as a deterrent, or, as she put it, for ‘the terror of the others’.14 Her agents executed no fewer than 750 of them. More importantly, Elizabeth, along with her closest advisers, had come to see the threat that Catholicism posed to her rule, and how it combined active external subversion with internal disloyalty. The Northern Rebellion not only transformed how Elizabeth understood her enemies, but also drew her towards new forms of intelligence operations, in particular the use of elaborate covert operations, even provocation and entrapment; much of it focused on her captive Catholic rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.15
IN 1571, THE somewhat fanciful Ridolfi Plot again underlined that Elizabeth was no mere bystander when it came to intelligence operations. Roberto Ridolfi was a gregarious Florentine banker based in London, who had links to the Cecils and even to the queen herself. Seemingly respectable, he travelled Europe on business without suspicion, moving effortlessly between Amsterdam, Rome and Madrid.
During his travels, Ridolfi quietly built up support for an invasion of eastern England which, he hoped, would stimulate a Catholic revolt. This would be followed by Thomas Howard, the duke of Norfolk, marrying Mary, who would then replace Elizabeth as queen.16
No less than her nemesis Elizabeth, Mary also delighted in the pantomime and paraphernalia of spy craft. An English prisoner for almost twenty years, she presided over an elaborate system of couriers, codes and encryption. She was a particularly zealous practitioner of the arcane art of invisible inks, encouraging contacts, ‘under the pretext of sending me some books’, to ‘write in the blanks between the lines’.17 Unfortunately for Mary, most of her correspondence, whether disguised by cyphers or invisible ink, was available to Elizabeth’s spymasters throughout her captivity.
For Walsingham and Cecil, the Ridolfi Plot offered a wonderful chance to act against Norfolk, among the wealthiest men in the country. In April, they detained one of Mary’s servants at Dover. An inspection of his luggage unearthed forbidden texts and enciphered letters. Later, deep in a dungeon inside the Tower of London, he was placed on the rack and blurted out enough to bring in one of Mary’s closest advisers, the bishop of Ross, and the duke of Norfolk.18 The rack was such a fearsome limb-dislocating device that often the mere sight of it caused brave men to buckle. Two of Norfolk’s clerks were rounded up, each caught carrying gold to M...