691. Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Queen’s Spymaster (Part 1)

The Rest Is History

This episode explores the political and espionage tensions during Elizabeth I's reign, focusing on William Cecil’s role as spymaster and his efforts to protect the Protestant monarchy from Catholic threats, especially fr

Key takeaways

• Cecil saw Catholic powers as existential threats

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by the Lloyd's 5K house deposit, and this is something that was last seen in 1996. Speaker 1 (0:12) Yeah, so the 1990s looks now like a lost golden age of prosperity and positivity, doesn't it? Think of the sort of the advent of the Blair administration in 1997, all the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded that, the economic growth at the time, the technological developments, the sort of sense of an endless golden summer where everybody is listening to Blair and a, and looking forward to buying their first houses. And that, of course, takes us to mortgages. Now, the good news is that in a nod to the 1990s, Lloyds are offering 5K deposit mortgages to first-time buyers. So search 5K first-time buyer. Speaker 2 (0:49) 1996 average first-time buyer deposits are based on ONS data. Subject to status, your home may be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments. and conditions apply. Speaker 3 (1:06) The city moves vast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 4 (1:13) I just a boy, a boy, habanthakou in this wild night, a pyrrero to my boy, so it's just a boy. Speaker 3 (1:21) The new Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 1 (1:30) A short memorial of the state of the realm. The perils are many great and imminent, great in respect of both the persons and the matters. Persons, the Queen's Majesty, who plays the part of the patient, the Pope, the King of France and Spain, as the authors and workers on her, the Queen of Scots as the surgeon's knife, whereby the matters shall be attempted against the Queen's Majesty. The Matters. For the recovery of the tyranny to the Pope, which of late years hath been discovered and so weakened. The eviction of the Crown of England from the Queen's Majesty to set it upon the head of the Queen of Scots. Changing the estate of England to popery, which cannot be accomplished while the Queen's Majesty liveth, nor so assuredly and plausibly any way as by putting the Crown of England upon the Queen of Scots' head. Hi everybody, that was rather downbeat, indeed positively gloomy, briefing. There was written in the early months of the year 1569 by Sir William Cecil, who is the chief minister to Queen Elizabeth I. So Elizabeth I, perhaps the most celebrated of all England's monarchs, had at this point been on the throne of England for just over a decade. She is 35 years old. She is the second daughter of King Henry VIII. So England has broken from Rome. The Reformation has taken place. However, even after a decade, Elizabeth remains embattled. she feels herself threatened by enemies within and enemies without and that is the subject of this epic new series in which we will be delving into the realm of Elizabeth I and her various challenges not least the Queen of Scots Mary Queen of Scots so Tom take us through William Cecil's briefing paper because he sets out perfectly there the challenge that Speaker 2 (3:50) we're going to be discussing in this series well the metaphor in that briefing paper is a very brutal one. I mean, it's kind of cundering up an image of Elizabeth as a patient who's been strapped down. And the king of Spain, the king of France, the pope are descending on her with their butcher's knives. And the worst blade that they have is the Queen of Scots, Mary Stewart. And so, as you said, this is a very downbeat report. And the briefing that he goes on to list all the challenges that he sees his mistress, Queen Elizabeth, is facing. So, Elizabeth is on the throne of England as a Protestant queen, but the two most powerful monarchies in Christendom, Spain and France, are both Catholic. And so these two monarchy, in alliance with the papacy, which it goes without saying is also Catholic, are very keen to see England return to the Catholic fold. And Cecil sees it as his job to stop that happening. But he also feels this is a massive, massive task because the prospects of England returning to Catholicism, as he sees, are actually very, very real. So the issue for Cecil and for all English Protestants is that the country's future as Protestant hangs really by a single thread. And this thread is Elizabeth's life, because she rules famously as a virgin queen, which means she has no child, She has no air. And that in turn means that if Elizabeth is toppled from her throne, by assassination perhaps, or maybe by armed invasion, then who is best place to succeed her? And the answer to that is someone we have done an entire series about on the rest of history. And that is Mary Queen of Scots. So she is Elizabeth's cousin, terrible taste in husbands, hanging out with a squad in which everyone is called Mary. very kind of glamorous and romantic, but an incredible threat to Elizabeth because she is a Catholic. And so getting the Catholic Mary onto Elizabeth's throne, you know, the kings of France and Spain couldn't be happier at the prospect, because they regard Protestant England pretty much as the United States today regards Iran as a kind of a rogue state to be toppled. Speaker 1 (6:17) So to pursue that parallel, when the United States attacked Iran, the thinking in Washington and in Israel was that that would weaken the regime because there are lots of people in Iran who chafed against the regime. And in fact, there had been riots earlier this year. There had been the student protests. There had been all the killings and whatnot. Now, in the 16th century, if you're in the court of France or Spain, presumably you think very similar things because you look at England and you say, well, Protestantism is only a recent transplant onto the body of England and perhaps there are actually a lot of people who can't wait to be rid of this mad regime that they've got. Is that right? It is and that, Cecil thinks it too. Speaker 2 (6:57) I mean, he is also painfully aware that Protestantism in England has very shallow roots and that essentially outside London and the southeast where it's really pretty strong by now, most of the English, I think, remain instinctively Catholic. I mean, maybe not militantly Catholic, but instinctively Catholic. And in the north, so in the furthest most regions, maybe in Wales, in Cornwall, and particularly in the north of England, there I think there is a kind of more militant strain of Catholicism that is aching to see the old ways brought back. And so Cecil's great anxiety is not just about foreign intervention, Spain and France or whatever, but the fact that England is full of potential traitors. So that feels very modern actually, doesn't it? Speaker 1 (7:40) It feels very 20th century. The idea that you have two ideologically opposed blocks, but within each one there is a tremendous paranoia about the enemy within. Speaker 2 (7:49) I mean, I think it would be very familiar to anyone who's read La Caree's Cold War novels, the Smiley novels, because there is a kind of Cold War context to this conflict. So there are conflicts being fought out beyond England on foreign battlefields between Protestants and Catholics, and this is going to be part of the story that we're telling in this series. but you also have this war going on in the shadows. You have spy chiefs. They are employing code breakers. They are employing double agents. They have dirty tricks departments. The plots and the narratives will be very, very familiar to anyone who has read contemporary spy espionage thrillers. And Cecil, when he is warning about plots to topple Elizabeth and to replace her with the Catholic Mary, I mean, he is not crying wolf. These are really present dangers. There are conspiracies that are kind of brewing all the time. There are codes that he needs to have cracked. You know, there are moles buried deep within the establishment. So they didn't have the word spy so much. They used the word intelligentser, but you could imagine a novel called Tinker Taylor Soldier, intelligentser, and it would echo lots of the kind of Le Carre themes. But having said that, as well as this kind of story of espionage. We will also be seeing some of the greatest and most dramatic episodes of the age. So we will be in Paris as the streets run red with the blood of Protestants on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. And we will be out on the ocean wave on the Pacific as top son of Devon, Francis Drake, carves out a name for himself as one of the greatest heroes of the age. Or if you are Spanish, of course, one of the greatest pirates of the age. And we will be going to the low countries as well, the scene of the Dutch Revolt, one of the most seismic episodes in European history. And then the climax of this series, we will be in Fotheringay Castle on the 8th of February 1587. And there we will be witnessing an execution that will reverberate across Europe and will make inevitable the launching by Spain of a green. Armada and that will be the climax of the series. Very exciting, very exciting and loads to look forward to, Speaker 1 (10:16) but let's start with our protagonist. So this is the man whose voice we heard at the beginning of the episode. This is William Cecil. He's the principal secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth I. And he is unquestionably the most powerful man in England at this point, isn't he? He absolutely is. Speaker 2 (10:33) So we have met him before in the series we did on The Young Elizabeth, but those you haven't listened to that, or you've forgotten it, just to remind ourselves who he is, what he's lived through, what he's about. So he's from a relatively humble background of Welsh extraction. So a little Speaker 1 (10:47) bit of Welsh history again. Great to us in Welsh history. Yeah, of course. He's from Speaker 2 (10:51) Lincolnshire. He's a very committed Protestant. But even more than that, the thing about him is he's unbelievably alien. I would say perhaps the ablest minister in the whole of British history. And as you said, under Elizabeth I, he's definitely the most powerful figure in the kingdom. And is because he has all kinds of qualities. He's very loyal. He's very subtle. He has an insane capacity for hard work. And basically, he's the master of all the arts of statecraft. And he's also very experienced. So in 1569, he is 49 years old. And by this point, he has served three Tudomonics in succession. And these are the three children of Henry VIII. The son was Edward VIII. And he had come to the throne as a young boy in 1547, I mean, very young. But he was a very ardent Protestant. You know, if there were kind of churches to be painted, white and rude screens to be smashed, he'd be piling he loved a whitewash. He loved a whitewash. And this is great for Cecil, who, as we said, is an ardent Protestant. So to be very able and to be an ardent Protestant under Edward the 6th was great. And so Cecil, you know, the Tudor board of snakes and ladders, he is shooting up those ladders under Edward the 6th. But then in 1553, total disaster for Cecil because Edward dies at the very tender age of 15. And he is succeeded by his elder sister, Mary. And when I say elder, I mean, she's really elder because she's 37 at that point. And she is the daughter of Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who is both very Catholic and very Spanish. and Mary has inherited a fondness for Catholicism and the Spanish that will result in England kind of doing a massive reverse turn from Edward's Protestant settlement. So Mary returns England to papal obedience. She marries a very, very Catholic husband, and this is Philip of Spain, who is the heir to an enormous empire. So not just Spain itself, but the low countries. huge chunks of Italy, great swayes of the new world. So all those lands that the conquistadors have conquered. Speaker 1 (13:09) But what about Cecil during this period? Because presumably he, as an ultra-protestant, yeah, this is not good for him. Yeah, so we said he's subtle. Speaker 2 (13:17) I mean, his subtlety at this point consisting very much in keeping his head down. But also kind of looking around and thinking, well, what if Mary doesn't survive? What if she doesn't have a child, which he ends up not doing? Who will then the air be? and the answer is it will be this very Protestant half-sister of Mary called Elizabeth. And Mary hates and fears Elizabeth for reasons that go a very long way back because we said Catherine Varaghan, this Catholic Spanish princess, who is Mary's mother, Henry's first wife, had notoriously been divorced and dumped by Henry VIII in favor of Anne Boleyn, who was Protestant, and Ambelin was Elizabeth's mother. So as Elizabeth grows up, Mary's supporters and Catholics more generally see Elizabeth as this kind of bastard daughter of a heretic, a witch, a whore, this woman who had been executed in the Tower of London. And so Elizabeth is the great kind of bogey for Catholics, but that of course makes her the great prospect, the great heroine for Protestants like Cecil. For large stretches of Mary's reign, Elizabeth has kept pretty isolated, either actually in the tower for several months or kind of in the depths of the countryside. But Cecil, he is kind of putting out feel as to Elizabeth and kind of serving really as her kind of right-hand man, her teacher, her instructor in the arts of statecraft. Her conigiary. Yes. And so by 1558, it is becoming clear that not only is Mary not going to have a child, but that she is dying. Speaker 1 (15:00) So then on the 17th of November 1558, the long awaited moment comes. Mary does die. Elizabeth becomes queen. She's 25 years old. And as everybody expects, her new chief secretary is William Cecil. And his priority is to have a new U-turn after Mary's U-turn to turn back to what he regards as the faith into lead England into the sunlit uplands of Protestantism. And he has a fair bit of leeway to do this because Elizabeth basically is placing a colossal amount of trust in him. I mean, Speaker 2 (15:35) he's got a lot of power, hasn't he? Yeah. So Elizabeth says to him, I want you as minister to do what you think is right for me in the country, even if I may not necessarily agree with you. So that is an incredible degree of trust. The kind of contrast with her father, of course, he was very prone to shopping the heads of ministers with whom he ended up disagreeing. Elizabeth is saying, I won't do Speaker 1 (15:56) this and she stays true to that word. Do you think she does that partly because she's a woman? Do you think she feels that she needs a reliable, stable chief minister? She can't go through Speaker 2 (16:07) them as her father did. I think that's part of it, but I think it's more the case that Elizabeth has a very, very astute eye for talent and she can recognize what she has in Cecil. And maybe the measure of that is that normally a king or queen is served by various secretaries, but Cecil is her only secretary. And effectively, I said he's the ablest man in the history of English government. I mean, he's definitely the most tireless. So to quote Stephen Orford, who's written the definitive biography of Cecil, by design and by instinct, he was at the heart of Elizabeth's court. He controlled the machinery of power. He ran the royal secretariat and chaired meetings to the Privy Council. He advised the Queen daily and read every piece of paper that was sent to her. He was Elizabeth's voice to the world for he wrote her letters and proclamations and drafted the instructions to her ambassadors. With ready access to her in her private rooms and a mastery of the government machine, he saw and heard all that went on at court. So he has a finger in every pie going. Speaker 1 (17:12) So some people might be reminded of, especially people who've read Wolf Hall and the successor books might be reminded of Thomas Cromwell, who was another very mighty chief minister. but I suppose the difference is that Thomas Cromwell, who was Henry the eighth's chief minister, was a bit of a blunt instrument, wasn't he? Whereas Cessor operates more cleverly in the shadows, he's smoother, I suppose. Speaker 2 (17:31) I think also Cromwell was loyal to Henry, but not