Read Online The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) by Alan Haynes - Free Book Online Page A

Stanley, Hugh Owen and Father Baldwin accompanied a young special messenger from England called Robert Spiller to a meeting with the new envoy of Spain to England, Juan de Tassis. 7 To try to avoid being observed by spies the four exiles arrived late at the ambassador’s lodgings and Tassis wrote notes as they discussed conditions in England as well as the political leanings of Jacobean politicians. Essentially this aspect of the conversation was about who might usefully be bribed and who not. Robert Cecil was viewed as anti-Spanish, but Owen still hoped to see about James a cluster of royal councillors favouring Spain and Rome. For a clandestine mission to London to further this notion he selected Dr Robert Taylor, like Guy Fawkes a Yorkshireman, but one who had quit England after the accession of Elizabeth. During this visit Taylor had aid and advice from Anthony Skinner, at one time a servant of Cardinal Allen who had thoughtfully excluded him from the Jesuits. Skinner’s career in the Spanish navy had also been cut short, apparently because of sea-sickness, but he did receive a pension of 40 escudos when in the Low Countries. 8 As yet unable to settle he chose to return to London where his income was supposedly some 3,000 escudos (£750 then, or circa £37,500 today). Given the sometimes testy rivalry between the spy services of the Earl of Essex and the Cecils in the early 1590s after the death of Walsingham, it is not surprising that Skinner was soon under arrest. Imprisoned and tortured he confessed a part in a plot (later retracted) to murder Elizabeth, and Richard Verstegen, in the newsletter he produced, reported Skinner’s trial in August 1592. Although condemned the payment of £500 by his friends led to the substitution of a prison sentence, and since Sir Thomas Heneage was his saviour we may infer that the young man was then recruited as a spy – Heneage having taken on some of the intelligence work of the late Walsingham. Skinner’s sentence may have been shortened by apostasy, and certainly he gained the confidence of the capable (if rather expensive) English government spy based in Antwerp, William Sterrell (alias H. St. Main or Robert Robinson). He had fairly frequent dealings with Hugh Owen, and on three occasions he asked that Skinner be sent to Liège for meetings.
    At the time of Dr Taylor’s secret visit to London, Father Henry Garnet, who met him, wrote to Robert Persons decrying the stupidity of Watson and Clarke. Persons wrote back on 6 July in a gloomy frame of mind, lamenting missed opportunities in the previous decade, and offering no hope that James might yet be converted. He did not think anything dramatic or of galvanizing immediacy could be done, and he simply advised those who resisted diaspora to hold tight and ‘to expect the event of things’. The ‘retrospective’ and the letter Persons addressed to James in October 1603 indicate that for an option he still had not given up the idea of resistance and that it was simply a matter of seizing the moment. ‘This is not to say that in 1603 [he] was threatening to blow up the king and Parliament. But it does suggest that Parsons [ sic ] wanted James to know that he and others were watching . . . very carefully and that they intended to leave all options open.’ 9 Persons was a constant source of irritating propaganda and the English government could not ignore his connections. Early on James sent the ageing and retired spy Sir Anthony Standen on a diplomatic mission to the Duke of Lorraine, to Venice and then to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The sometime intelligencer made the curious mistake, for a man with his past, of being indiscreet, communicating with Persons, and indicating when finally he got to Rome that he was acting on behalf of Queen Anne whose Catholic leanings were growing. Sir Thomas Parry intercepted mail from Standen who committed the sin of being candid in a letter, and so it was that Cecil learnt Standen was returning