1 Foley, Henry S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. 1 (London, 1877), p. 5–62 Google Scholar. On p. 4 Foley says that on 3 April 1606, Garnet ‘names Father Rivers, while giving some directions for the government of the English mission of the Society after his death.’ But in fact Garnet speaks here of ‘Fr. Anthony’, who is undoubtedly Fr. Anthony Hoskins: Caraman, Philip, Henry Garnet 1555—1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (London, Longmans, 1964), p. 423 Google Scholar.

2 Jenkins, Harold (ed.), Hamlet (Arden edition, Methuen, London and New York, 1982), p. 554 Google Scholar, quotes from the Anthony Rivers letter of 13 January 1601, which observes: ‘It was commonly observed this Christmas, that her Ma^tie when she came to bee seen was continually painted not only all over her face but her very neck and breste also, and that the same was in some places well neare halfe an inch thicke.’ In Hamlet (5.1.187), probably written soon after this letter, Hamlet, holding a skull, declares to Horatio: ‘Now get you to my Ladies [the Queen’s] chamber [Q2, 1604: table], and tell her, let her paint an inch thicke, to this favour she must come.’

3 Hotson, Leslie, The First Night of Twelfth Night (London and New York, 1954), pp. 199–200 Google Scholar.

4 Caraman, Philip, John Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, Longmans, 1951), pp. 244, 285Google Scholar takes ‘Anthony Rivers’ to be a pseudonym of Hoskins, but Caraman’s later book, Henry Garnet, p. 299, treats it as a real Jesuit’s real name.

5 Edwards, Francis S.J., Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit 1546–1610 (St. Louis, Missouri, Institute of Jesuit Sources, n.d. [1995]), p. 46 Google Scholar; Edwards, Francis, ‘Identifying Anthony Rivers SJ’, Notes and Queries 239 (1994) pp. 62–3 Google Scholar. The latter Note cites Foley 1 pp. 506–513 with approval. But as Foley 1 pp. 505–6 observes, Floyd was in Newgate prison in or within the period 1600–1602 (the letter of ‘Anthony Rivers’ dated 20 May 1602 mentions Floyd’s capture in mid-1601, almost a year earlier) and was then in Framlingham Castle, until deported soon after the accession of James, being thereafter in Lisbon for some years.

6 Letter of Penelope Renold to Fr. Leo Hicks S.J., 12 August 1963. We are very grateful to Fr. Thomas McCoog for his permission to see and quote from the letter, which was written to provide Fr. Hicks with an assessment of an edition prepared in draft by an overseas author. Doubtless for the reasons amply explained in Renold’s letter, the edition was not proceeded with. None has subsequently appeared. In this article, quotations in the text from these and other primary materials are rendered into contemporary spelling and punctuation; a number of quotations in the notes have been left in the original form.

7 SP 12/271/21 (CSP Dom. 1598–1601, p. 216). Colling was working in Yorkshire at this time, as was the Yorkshireman ‘Greenwell’/Tesimond. This letter appears to have been forwarded by Greenwell/Tesimond to Garnet. See next note.

8 SP 12/271/22 (CSP Dom. 1598–1601, p. 216). This letter has a postscript by ‘Greenwell’ saying ‘I send a note from Richard’ indicating the letter of Richard Colling. This ‘Greenwell’ letter is identified as by Oswald Tesimond by the fact that it is endorsed in Garnet’s hand ‘Oswald’s letter concerning Mr. [Thomas] Wright.’ Although Tesimond’s alias is now generally considered to have been ‘Greenway’ he was generally known at the time of the Gunpowder Plot as having the alias Greenwell. He was so identified in the indictment and trials of Robert Winter, Thomas Winter, Guy Fawkes, John Grant, Ambrose Rookwood, Robert Keyes, Thomas Bates, and Sir Everard Digby; and see SP 77/8/95, Th. Barnes from St. Omer to M. du Pre (i.e. Salisbury), April 26/May 6 1606 (‘Fa: Gerrard and Greenwell by good probabilities are safely arrived on this side’). In his letter of 23 June, Greenwell says: ‘I pray you, if you send this to my dearest friend, remember my most hearty and humble commendations to him and to all where he is, especially Claud . . . etc., and my best friends from whence I came.’ This is clearly a request that his letter be forwarded to Persons, with felicitations to Fr. Claudio Aquaviva, the Rome-based General of the Jesuits, and to those who had been Greenwell’s (Fr. Tesimond’s) friends in his student days in Rome (English College) and Messina, whence he was sent to England in 1597.

9 SP 12/271/28 (CSP 1598–1601, p. 220). This letter concerns a 22 year old youth who wishes to go abroad to study, and it is endorsed by Garnet ‘Mr. Walker to yourself. This party will needs send his son unto you. . . .’ Robert Walker, son of William Walker, entered the English College at Rome 7 November 1599 and was ordained a priest in 1601. The signature on the letter may well be ‘J. of Stowey’, and if so may allude to Nether Stowey, Persons’ Somerset birthplace, since the writer is clearly begging a favour of Persons, and describes himself as ‘your poor neighbour’. The son was educated in Berwick and Carlisle, far from Somerset, but this may be explained by the fact that his father and mother were certainly living apart.

10 This letter of Garnet makes clear the identity of the ‘J. Stowey’ in the prior packet, for Garnet tells ‘Marco’: ‘I sent you a letter of Mr. Walkers. He is fallen into great poverty & therefore you may do well to help his son.’

11 A transcript of this letter is held in the Jesuit Archives in London, Box 46.12.2, identifying its source as Inner Temple, Petyt MSS, S 38 vol 47 f. 199, and its author as Henry Garnet.

12 Mistranscribed as ‘Bleinell’ by Foley. The Rivers letter dated 9 March 1603 addressed to Ridolfo Perino mentions certain ‘advertisements’ which ‘Tho: Nevell hath formerlye sent to you.’

13 See ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons: Memoir V: A Political Retrospect’, ed Pollen, J. H., in Miscellanea II, CRS vol. 2 (1906)Google Scholar, note to the letter from Persons, dated 6 July 1603, traditionally said to have been addressed to Anthony Rivers. The letter near its end refers to ‘Marke’ in a way entirely consistent with a reference by Persons to himself.

14 Foley 4, pp. 45, 50.

15 Richard Verstegan, also known as Richard Rowland(s), born c. 1550, matriculated Oxford (Christ Church) 1564/5, departed to Antwerp c. 1576, imprisoned in Paris for publishing denunciations of English persecution of Catholics 1587, for some decades Catholic intelligencer based in Antwerp, contributed to and supervised printing of A Conference of the Next Succession 1594/5, author of A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the English Nation (including etymology of ‘Shakespeare’) 1605, died 1640.

16 Fr. Henry Walpole’s confessions in 1594 included the statements that ‘Allen, Persons and Holt receive all their intelligences by Verstegan . . .’ and that ‘Verstegan sends letters, intelligences, and books up and down between the Cardinal [Allen], Parsons, Holt, and Owen, and England’ (CSP Dom. 1594, p. 533). The spy-adventurer Thomas Allison in 1604 said that ‘Verstigen’ in Antwerp was ‘Agent for the Jesuits for conveying their lres to all places’ and that Hugh Owen had told him, Allison, to write to him through Verstegan: Dodd, A. H., ‘A Spy’s Report, 1604.’ Bulletin of Celtic Studies (1938), vol. 9, pp. 154–67, 161Google Scholar. On Verstegan’s role in transmission of intelligence, mail, missionaries, etc., see generally Petti, Anthony G. R., ‘A Study of the Life and Writings of Richard Verstegan, (c. 1550–1640)’, M.A. Thesis University of London, April 1957, pp. 132–143 Google Scholar; Petti, Anthony G., The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640) (London, 1959) (CRS No. 52), pp. xv–xxiv Google Scholar.

17 He is probably the Jacques Ghibles of Antwerp who was identified as an important courier of news and transporter of persons for many years in a 1602 report of Father Joseph Creswell: Loomie, Albert J. S.J. The Spanish Elizabethans (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), p. 58 Google Scholar. He is probably the person identified in the 1602 report of a turncoat priest/spy (Hatfield Papers vol. 12, p. 231, letter of July 17, 1602 [date] of Robert Barrois [Barwis] to Robert Cecil) as ‘Gibeis, resident in Calais, who within a few hours’ warning can provide at any time a skiff or fisherboat for a sudden passage, landing at some odd creek, either upon the coast, or in the river of Thames, in the night’. On May 19/29 1602, ‘J.B.’ writes to Robinson (Sterrell) to direct his letters to Calais, ‘to one Gibels dwelling at one Nicholas Jacobs house’: SP 771 6 f. 341.

18 Apart from the Cordale letter to Antwerp of 22 July 1599, discussed in the text of this paragraph, see the Rivers letter to Persons/Perino dated 1 September 1602 (‘it [Dr. Ely’s book] shallbee sent to Edlyn in Flanders’); and the Renzo letter to Verstegan [‘Gio. Ant. Frederico’] dated 31 January 160[4]: ‘I assigned Edlyn to pay you 54 ^li,; ‘There is now 54 ^li more in Edlyns handes if he have not againe forestalled the market ... I pray you convey the inclosed w^th the fondell [?findell—invention or flotsam] that hath Edlyn marke unto hym w^th the soonest opportunitye.’ All these references are appropriate if Edlyn is in Brussels, close to Verstegan in Antwerp (Brussels’ seaport), and far distant from Persons in Rome.

19 And also one from SP 15/34/30 (State Papers Domestic Addenda) (CSP Domestic Addenda 1580–1625, pp. 405–6), April 30, 1600 from Liège—J.B. to Peter Halyns.

20 The different handwriting is explained when ‘Nicols’ tells ‘Hallins’: ‘you must excuse me for I am forced to use another man’s hand for security.’ Hatfield Papers vol. 5, p. 97—7 February 1595 (n.s.), W. Nicols to Sr Peeter Hallins.

21 Hugh Owen, born north-west Wales 1538, Oxford (Christ Church) 1550, BA 1553, servant of Henry Fitzalan earl of Arundel until 1571, at Spanish court 1572/3, intelligencer and counter-intelligencer based at court in Brussels until 1608, died Rome 1618.

22 There survive a number of letters from ‘J. Sauf’ to ‘Hallins’, in a hand different from that of ‘J.B.’, ‘J.P.B.’ and ‘John Petit’; it is certain, from the handwriting and other internal evidence, that Sauf is Verstegan: see notes 41 and 94 below.

23 Phelippes’s annotation may be a slip, for although much of the news in the letter relates to the Archdukes’ court and other events at Brussels, the letter gives eye-witness accounts of the Archdukes’ ceremonial doings in Antwerp on and about 12 December, and finishes ‘Antwerp 17 Xbre new stila. Your friend J.B.’ On the other hand, the annotation may be in no way a slip, but rather a way of indicating that this is a letter from the man who usually works in and writes from Brussels (Hugh Owen).

24 This letter is found in the State Papers in two widely separated parts. The first four pages are in SP 12/248/53 (CSP Dom. 1591–1594, pp. 475–7). The last sheet is in SP 15/33/13 (CSP Domestic Addenda 1580–1625, p. 363). The link between the two is facilitated by Owen’s epistolary practice of writing at the foot of each page the first word of the next page.

25 This may seem too good to be true, and in one sense—which does not affect its evidential value—it is. The letter was contained in a packet addressed to ‘Mr. Robinson in London’ and delivered to the son of one John Robinson of St. Helen’s parish in Cheapside, who took it to the Lord Mayor of London who in turn, finding the letter addressed to ‘Mr. Sterrell, London’ and signed by ‘Hu: Owen’, and aware that Hugh Owen was known as a practiser against the English state, took the packet to Burghley. This is what Owen and Sterrell doubtless intended: for the letter itself states, with mock naivety, that the writer (Owen) has but ‘small acquaintance’ with the recipient (Sterrell—one of whose aliases for 11 years was Robert Robinson), they having met ‘but twice’ (once in Antwerp and the other at the Spa), and proceeds to a series of protestations of the writer’s innocence of involvement in various recent plots against the state which had resulted in the execution of men (Hesketh, Daniell, Cahill, and Polwhele) who were officially said to have implicated Owen in their crimes. But though the letter was clearly intended to reach and influence Burghley, it was equally clearly written by Owen himself, whose acquaintance with Sterrell was by no means as small as he stated. Sterrell himself could safely be made a part of this ruse because he had been known for several years to Burghley and the Queen as an agent (often under the alias Robinson) of Essex in dealings with the Catholic exiles in the Low Countries.

26 McCoog, Thomas M., ‘“The Slightest Suspicion of Avarice”: The Finances of the English Jesuit Mission’, Recusant History 19 (1988) 103 at 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 In intelligence documents of the English government from 1595 to 1605, Baldwin (who was in or near Brussels throughout that period except for a year or so in Rome in and around 1597) is depicted as, with Owen, a principal practiser in the Catholic interest and against the English government. After the Powder Treason, Cecil will urgently request the Archdukes to extradite both Owen and Baldwin for their alleged involvement in it, and failing that will try to kidnap Owen, if not also Baldwin.

28 SP 12/271/21: CSP Dom. 1598–1601, p. 216.

29 J.B. to Halyns, 13/23 November 1599 (SP 77/6/66) will elaborately describe the installing of the Lady Mary Percy as abbess of the new Benedictine convent in Brussels on 4/14 November 1599.

30 We used the transcript held in the Jesuit Archives in London, Box 46.12.2.

31 Both Rivers and ‘A’ wrote to Creleto on 9 March 1603, mentioning their receipt of letters dated 25 January from him, and the contents of their own letters are consistent with Creleto being Baldwin. ‘A’ read Rivers’s letter before writing his own, and made several references to its contents. ‘A’ is probably Blackwell who as a secular priest would refer to Baldwin, a Jesuit, as ‘cousin’ and would identify Garnet and Baldwin, both Jesuits, as each other’s (but not his own) ‘brother’: ‘Mark is unwilling unto it and so your brother Henry dare not adventure to send.’ The relationship between ‘Mark’ and ‘Henry’, and their respective leadership rôles, which this sentence suggests also corresponds precisely to the relationship between, and leadership rôles of, Persons and Garnet. The letter of ‘H’ to ‘Ottaviano Marini, Venice’ is clearly to Baldwin, who is ‘Mr. Octavian’ in Garnet’s letter to Aquaviva, 11 February 1597: see Caraman, Henry Garnet, pp. 233–4.

32 Hammer, Paul E. J., The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 153–1 Google Scholar.

33 Apparently unaware of Phelippes’s covering letter to Essex, the calendariser of the version of those extracts which ended up in the State Papers (CSP Dom. 1595–1597, p. 311)—a version which is clearly a draft of what Phelippes sent to Essex—takes at face value the annotation, apparently in Phelippes’s hand, on the back fold: ‘A collection of certain intercepted intelligences since Michaelmas 1596’. Phelippes in fact makes it plain to Essex that these are not intercepts, but letters addressed, if not to himself, certainly to Sterrell, who typically reads them in Phelippes’s chamber and is wont to leave them there: see the letters and the other, final version of the extracts, in the Hatfield Papers vol. 6, pp. 484, 490–493, 511–513, 555–556. We think the annotation may well be an intentionally deceptive note made by Phelippes to explain away a document which, if uncovered in a search of his files, might well seem highly suspicious. Be that as it may, Phelippes did, as his letter of 9 December makes clear (p. 512), enclose for Essex, along with that set of extracts, certain letters written in 1595 by Dr. Gifford to Thomas Throckmorton, and these had indeed been intercepted by Burghley and given by him to Phelippes for deciphering. We have inspected microfilms and photocopies of the underlying documents in both the State Papers and the Hatfield Papers.

34 Accurately rendered in Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 512.

35 Hatfield Papers vol. 6, pp. 16–17; the further supplementary letter, enclosing another original, is at p. 513, where it is wrongly dated 9 December.

36 Thomas Nicols to Halyns, November 19, 1596, Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 484; Tho Nicols to Halyns, November 26, 1596, Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 493.

37 Accurately rendered in Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 511.

38 SP 77/6 f. 48, 29 September (n.s.) 1599, J.B. to Halyns.

39 In a letter from J.B. to Halyns of 7/17 December 1599, SP 77/6 f. 75 (only partly calendared in CSP Dom. 1598–1601, p. 356), the writer says: ‘I do pray you send more stoar of doble gloves of the beste and some with flamen and two payres with plush[,] a dozen payres in al.’

40 Perhaps Mr; the paper is torn after the initial capital letter.

41 Very probably this is Verstegan, who is the main conduit for money going into England to Thomas Phelippes and William Sterrell (and perhaps the Jesuits too); and equally probably ‘Jacob Samander’ is another name for ‘J.S.’ and ‘J. Sauf’, which are unquestionably aliases of Verstegan in his capacity as a participant in the incoming J.B. (etc.) correspondence of Owens with ‘Halyns’ (etc.), and in an outgoing series of letters to Owen (as ‘Benson’) from ‘Vincent’ (=Phelippes). Thus Vincent writes to Benson, in cipher, on 10 January 1605: ‘Since the writing hereof, we understand from the factor of the arrival of our letters of the 5 and 12 of December, as also of the cheese [=money] by Samander, for the which I thank you . . .’. SP 14/12/16 (CSP 1603–1610, p. 187). See text and nn. 92–95 below.

42 SP 77/6/98, J.B. to Halyns, 21/31 January 1600.

43 SP 12/283/75 viii (CSP Dom. 1601–1603, p. 175, which misreads cocq in the French address). A letter from Sterrell, writing in 1594 as ‘Wicham’ to Fr. Richard Sherwood S.J. in Brussels as ‘Derrick’, says: ‘I have written to him [Francis Harvey in Middleburg] that he shall not write to Peter Henricke any more.’ SP 12/283/75 iv (CSP 1601–1603, pp. 174–175, which misdates this letter of 10 August 1594 as 1597, partly by misreading ‘Sussex’ as ‘Essex’).

44 See SP 12/248/101 (CSP Dom 1591–1594, p. 504), examination of Adrian de Langhe, Flushing, 11 May 1594.

45 Born 1552, grandson of a Judge of Common Pleas; Oxford (Exeter or Lincoln College) 1568, Middle Temple 1571; associated with Campion and Persons in London and married 1580, departed with wife for France 1582, supported Mary Queen of Scots, widowed and departed to Spain 1588; pensioner and intelligencer to King of Spain in Rouen in and before 1593; adviser to the Duke of Feria in Paris and Brussels 1593–7; principal adviser to Spanish on English affairs 1597–1601; ordained priest Rome 24 March 1602; Jesuit from 1613; in Brussels 1616–18; rector English College Rome 1618–39; died 1640.

46 SP 12/244/98 (CSP Dom 1591–94, p. 335), an abstract of the letter, in the hand of Phelippes.

47 Ibidem. See also Petti, Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan, pp. 135–6, 139 n. 16, letter of Verstegan to Persons, 30 April 1593 (n.s.), apparently (as Petti thinks) about Sterrell as someone employed in England by Fitzherbert (in France) ‘about some special service’, who has “been at charges for the same’ and indeed ‘is taken for being Catholic yet hopeth for liberty, and will do his business as soon as he shall be free; and by sundry letters that I have seen I do deem him to be an honest man, and that he will be as good as his word.’ Despite this. Petti (139 n. 16) takes the standard view that Sterrell was a government spy, who wrote his advices ‘at the direction of Thomas Phelippes’.

48 On 26 January 1605, John Chamberlain wrote to his friend Ralph Winwood: ‘I heard yesterday that Phelippes the deciferer was apprehended and committed and all his papers seized: how far the matter may spread is not yet discovered, for it is very new. All that I could learn is that he held correspondence with one Owen an ancient fugitive about [close to] the Archduke.’ Norman Egbert McClure, The Letters of John Chamberlain (1939) vol. 1, p. 202.

49 See text at n. 111 below.

50 SP 14/12/32; CSP Dom. 1603–1610, p. 189, reduces the whole to: ‘Examination of Thos. Phelippes [by Visct. Cranborne [Cecil],] touching his carrying on a secret correspondence with persons abroad.’ Phelippes’s first statement to Cecil is ambiguous about precisely when (as between the King’s accession in March 1603 and the peace with Spain and the Archdukes in mid-1604) Sterrell’s knowledge of the correspondence ceases. Phelippes’ statement to Cecil on 29 January 1605 makes it clear that his assertion is that Sterrell knew nothing from the time of ‘the Q[ueen’s] death’.

51 A standard view of Edward Somerset earl of Worcester is expressed by Caraman, Henry Garnet, p. 349: ‘Worcester’s rôle among the Councillors [at the examinations and trial of Garnet] was perhaps the most sinister. The Earl Marshal of England and a Catholic, he had nevertheless received a commission in 1602 to expel the Jesuits from the country. He had worked closely with Popham and had been very active against Catholics at the time of the disturbances in Herefordshire [in mid-1605]. ... He was one of Salisbury’s most useful tools.’ We believe the truth to be far otherwise. The history of Worcester’s ‘suppression’ of the Catholic disturbances in Herefordshire discloses, on close examination, a pattern of masterly inactivity and mock activity; his own report to Cecil and the King could be summarised in something like the following terms: ‘I did my best to catch the malefactors and priests, but they all got away—a full report will be in the post—the one priest I caught turned out to be a government agent, so I gave him a public lecture and sent him on his way.’ Cecil, we are confident, will have discerned the thinly veiled accents of farce, but could do little against a man of such high repute so close to the King. Matthias, Roland, Whitsun Riot: An account of a commotion amongst Catholics in Herefordshire and Monmouthshire in 1605 (London, Bowes & Bowes, 1963), pp. 56–62 Google Scholar, reviews the conduct of Worcester (‘almost certainly a more complex personality than he appeared to his contemporaries . . . one whose religious credentials and personal activities have been insufficiently examined’), and concludes that Worcester throughout was ‘playing a very cunning hand’ and (pp. 107–8) that there is much to confirm the Catholic and pro-Jesuit assessment, in a Catholic document dated 1 March 1607 which contains ‘the clear implication that the Earl of Worcester arrived on the scene at the request of the Archpriest and the Jesuits and made the settlement he did with the full assessment of the responsible (i.e. Jesuited) Catholics of the district.’ Though we do not accept all of Matthias’s main theses in the book, and though it is certain that Worcester arrived on the scene as emissary of the Privy Council, we think that the drift of Matthias’s remarks about Worcester will be confirmed by the evidence, taken as a whole, about his life, his family, and his secretary.

52 Phelippes made the bad mistake of stating to Cecil, in writing and in his presence on 25 January 1605, that ‘I write not in cifer since a little after the peace was concluded’ (mid-summer 1604). Within a few minutes, we suppose, Cecil will have pushed across the table the heavily ciphered letter of ‘Vincent’ to ‘Benson’ dated 9 January, and before the end of the interview Phelippes has endorsed that document ‘1 confess this to be my hand’. No wonder that endorsement was countersigned by three officials, and no wonder Phelippes remained in detention, and was under suspicion ever after.

53 Sterrell’s position with Worcester is well expressed in a report of July 1603 to the Spanish government in Madrid—a secret ‘List of the Councillors of State of the King of England and other notables of that kingdom, the character and habits of each . . .’—prepared largely by Robert Spiller who came to Brussels late in June ‘sent by the Catholics and the Theatines [i.e. Jesuits] of England to the Archduke and the Jesuits here’. Only in relation to one of the 30 notables identified and discussed is an employee mentioned. With the Earl of Worcester, says the report, one approaches ‘his secretary, who is called Esterel’. Loomie, Albert J., Spain and the Jacobean Catholics vol. 1: 1603–1612 (CRS 64, 1973), pp. 1–2, 6Google Scholar.

54 The word ‘since’ is somewhat tentatively deleted.

55 Hatfield MSS 103/151 (calendared very summarily in Hatfield Papers vol. 17 p. 39).

56 See text at n. 37 above. That Phelippes’ statement is here referring to 1596 and not to his initial approach to Essex in 1591 is made clear by his allusions in adjacent sentences to the enterprise of the Adelantado, scil, the 1596 Armada, and to setting up the approved correspondence while in prison.

57 Many of the ‘J.B.’ (etc.) letters are datelined from Brussels or Antwerp, but J.B. presents himself throughout as a canon (ecclesiastical office-holder) usually resident in Liege, a nominally independent episcopal territory related by treaty but not jurisdiction with the Archdukes (and the Spanish). This enabled J.B.—Hugh Owen—to maintain, for the purposes of this correspondence, a position of purported neutrality, pursuant to his (and Sterrell’s) underlying purpose, which was that the correspondence be used to sway the Queen away from the French and the Hollanders and towards a revival of the ‘ancient amity’ of England with Burgundy, a Burgundy now ruled by the Archdukes in Brussels.

58 See n. 25 above and text at n. 97 below.

59 SP 14/12/44 (calendared summarily in CSP Dom. 1603–1610, p. 191).

60 As we will see (see text at nn. 74–75 below), Renzo letters may well not have been directed to Owen.

61 SP 14/18/63 (calendared summarily in CSP Dom 1603–1610, p. 285).

62 SP 14/20/51 (calendared briefly in CSP Dom 1603–1610, p. 314).

63 The confessions of Henry Walpole S.J. in or about July 1594 include the statement that Walpole ‘knows whence all these [viz. Cardinal Allen, Persons, and Holt] fetch their intelligences from England; Verstegan takes from Garnet and Spiller for Parsons and Holt . . .’: CSP Dom. 1591–1594, p. 533. Fr. William Holt S.J was Baldwin’s predecessor as Vice-Prefect of the English Jesuits in the Low Countries, having performed that kind of rôle in Brussels since early 1589; he left Brussels towards the end of 1598 and died at Barcelona in the fourth week of May 1599. On Spiller’s rôle as a representative of the Catholics living in England, see also Loomie, Spain and the Jacobean Catholics vol. 1, p. 1.

64 SP 14/20/51.

65 SP 14/12/35: Stephen Phelippes’ statement (calendared in one sentence, CSP Dom 1603–1610, p. 189).

66 SP 14/20/50 (calendared in one sentence, CSP Dom 1603–1610, p. 314).

67 Caraman, John Gerard, p. 73.

68 See Caraman, Henry Garnet, pp. 104n, 184, 225.

69 Fulwood is very probably the ‘Flud’ in the intercepted letter of 30 June 1599 from Garnet (‘H’) to ‘Marco Tusinga, Venice’; ‘I was sending Flud over to be a journeyman, and make the Noviciate, but cannot spare him, so will receive him [into the Society] here.’

70 SP 14/20/50.

71 On the back of SP 14/12/11 is inscribed ‘I confirm this to be my hand. Tho. Phelippes [counter-signed] Tho: Windebank, Ri^rd: Percival, Levynus Munck’. SP 14/12/12 is inscribed, accurately, ‘The decipherment of a letter dated 9 January 1604 [i.e. SP 14/12/11] to Benson. Tho. Phelippes.’ On 25 January 1605 Phelippes admitted; ‘I know the name of Benson which I have sometimes used.’ In his long statement to Cecil dated 29 January 1605, calendared in Hatfield Papers vol. 9/17, p. 39, Phelippes seeks to explain away ‘that which your Lo. hath now intercepted’, on the basis that it had been part of an effort by him, Phelippes, to persuade the Archdukes that, in relation to the dispute about traffic to Antwerp, it would be ill advised to ‘think your Lo. [Cecil] is to be bought or sold’, i.e. is open to ‘gratifications’ from either the Archdukes or the Dutch.

72 The letter as deciphered by Phelippes (SP 14/12/11: note 71 above) states, for example:

And so on: manifestly an account by, or from, an eye-witness.

73 Edwards, Francis, ‘The Attempt in 1608 on Hugh Owen, Intelligencer for the Archdukes in Flanders’, Recusant History 17 (1985) pp. 140–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 One item is a copy of a letter dated 14 April 1604 addressed to ‘Augustino Cornelio in Vinegia’, which is doubtless to Persons in Rome. The other is a set of three copies of transcripts of excerpts made by Fr. Grene in the late-seventeenth century from letters which he described as ‘of Anthony Rivers’. These are dated 29 August, 17 September, and 12 December 1604. (Archives of the Society of Jesus, Rome: Anglia 37, f315^v, 316, 316^v-317 (old), 115, 115^v 116–116^v (new); we used a transcription of these made by Penelope Renold in or before 1963 and kindly supplied to us, along with typed transcripts (prepared by another for the projected edition mentioned in n. 6 above, and annotated by Renolds) of the surviving originals of the Rivers letters, by Fr. Thomas McCoog S.J., then London Archivist of the Society of Jesus. Our reference to the letter dated 4 April 1604 is to the version included in these typed transcripts.) Assume, as seems reasonable, that Grene correctly identified these 1604 letters as being in the handwriting and format, etc., characteristic of the many letters he had seen from Rivers and alternative aliases to Persons. This only shows that after the King’s accession their author was still corresponding with Persons.

75 See the discussion of the Vincent-Benson letter of 10 January 1605: text at n. 72 above. In a ‘discourse’ brought to, and intended for, Cecil in or about July 1604, one Thomas Allison reports various confidential conversations he had recently had with Owen in Brussels: the discourse is fully transcribed in Dodd, , ‘A Spy’s Report’, Bulletin of Celtic Studies 9 (1938) pp. 154–167 Google Scholar. According to this plausible report, Owen was saying (in the spring or early summer of 1604) that he was receiving letters ‘from a pryvie Councello^r in England’ disclosing and commenting upon the intentions and policies of James in matters such as the union with Scotland and toleration of Catholics (pp. 157, 160). Though none of the surviving Rivers/Renzo letters relates to the precise weeks or months in question, these statements of Owen are certainly some evidence that the series may have been continuing with its usual mention of relevant news from the Council table, news accessible to Sterrell as secretary to a great Privy Councillor. Owen tried to recruit Allison to insinuate himself into the entourage of one of the Scots Privy Councillors in London, and write weekly intelligences for Owen:

Note that on one of the occasions when Allison met Owen it was at the Jesuit house in Brussels, where he was talking with Fr. Baldwin (p. 161), and on another occasion he met Owen in the company of ‘one Dr. Taylor’s son, a physician’, whom Allison later saw boarding ship at Calais, young Taylor now disguised like a rogue and carrying letters and gold (pp. 163–4). In 1626, when Sterrell, aged 65, retired as secret regular correspondent to the Privy Council of the Archduke in the manner of the old Fenner/Cordale/Rivers/Renzo correspondence, his successor was this same Henry Taylor, son of Dr. Robert Taylor.

76 See text at n. 50 above.

77 Dictation by Sterrell to Phelippes seems to be the most plausible explanation of the relationship between SP 12/278/54 (an account, almost certainly by Sterrell, of speeches in Star Chamber on 13 February 1601, about the Essex tumult) and the draft letter by Phelippes (qua Vincent Hussey and thus almost certainly writing to Owen) of 18 February 1601, written partly on that document and partly on SP 12/278/49 & 50, and rendering into epistolary form the account of 13 February supplemented, surely from memory, by further eye-witness reporting of the Star Chamber occasion.

78 Thus the ‘Fenner’ letter to [Rome] on 30 June 1599 says: ‘Mr. Secretary . . and many others of the Counsayle seem to enclyne thereunto [peace] of late[,] [yet] I do not hear that they have had any conference or meetings about the same as many times heretofore it was supposed they had’, and again: ‘As for Irish affaires I can say little by reason that to write or relate any news there is prohibited by proclamation upon pain of death and such occurrants as is brought by the post and only known to the Council who by all means conceal the same’; the Fenner letter to [Brussels] on the same date has similar expressions of ignorance, as well the following even clearer passage: ‘Sir Thomas Knolles is sent by the Counsayle to therle of Essex for what occasion I do not know.’ Similarly the Cordale letter to [Brussels] on 21 July 1599 says very plainly: ‘I am sorry I can yet send you no good news of our Irish warres, by reason that all advertisements thereof from thence are straightly prohibited, and such particuler informations as come thence to the counsayle heare is very carefully concealed’.

79 For example: ‘Mr. Secretary Cicell w^th most of the greatest in authoritye of our privy Counsayle ar now in a seeming willingness to talke w^th Spa: and the Archduke, and have lately underhand sente into Flaunders to discerne, if there bee like forwardness on that part’ (12 February 1602); ‘as well heare as in Ireland a Counsayle of warr hath been assembled, to consulte about the fortification of Slego, but the place is so incomodiouslye seated for us, as nothing can yet bee devised or agreed on, for the securing thereof’ (13 March 1602); ‘On Monday last [two days before the letter], Barwis by order from the Counsayle, was discharged of his tedious imprisonment in the gatehouse, and may goe now where he will as before’ (26 May 1602); ‘this money matter doth as much perplex the Counsayle as any other accident there [in Ireland]’ (9 June 1602); ‘the Counsayle much disgusted therat, and commaunding all wantes to bee supplyed wth all speede’ (21 July 1602). This list could be much extended.

80 ‘Rivers’ to ‘Perino’, 7 April 1602 (Westminster VII n. 35).

81 ‘Rivers’ to ‘Perino’, 21 July 1602 (Westminster VII n. 53) (emphases added). Other eye-witness vignettes of hunting are provided by ‘Rivers’, e.g.:

‘Neevell’ to ‘Perino’, 16 September 1602 (Westminster VII n. 60).

82 ‘Rivers’ to ‘Perino’, 10 December 1602 (Westminster VII n. 68) (emphasis added).

83 Ibidem, emphasis added. It need scarcely be added that ‘Rivers’s pretended neutrality (‘the Papist use’) is a mere veil for intense concern with Catholic affairs, as also with international affairs as they bear on the fate of Catholics in Ireland and England. The next sentence after the report of the christening begins: ‘Three youths (Persevall, Codrington, and a third), expelled of late [from] the English seminary of Douai, were the last week, by two of Sir Thomas Parry our ledger Ambassador in France’s men, presented to Mr. Secretary . . . this much I hear for certain, that those men [of the Ambassador’s) brought letters also from Dr. Bagshaw to Mr. Secretary concerning these three.’

84 On this masque (The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses by Samuel Daniel, whose time at Magdalen Hall overlapped with Sterrell’s at next-door Magdalen College), see Chambers, , The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1923), pp 277–81 Google Scholar; at p. 281, Chambers quotes the letter of Worcester dated 2 February to his friend the Earl of Shrewsbury, enclosing a printed book of the masque which Worcester had annotated, as he says, with the names of the ladies who played goddesses. B.L., 161. a. 41 is almost certainly that very copy of the ‘book’, and the annotations are in the secretary hand of Sterrell.

85 SP 14/6/37, f. 86^r. The letter of ‘Vincent’ to ‘Benson’, 10 January 1605, SP 14/12/16, reports in considerably greater detail the diplomatic contretemps between the French and the Spanish ambassadors at the performance of Ben Jonson’s Mask of Blackness on Twelfth Night (6 January) 1605.

86 ‘Rivers’ to ‘Perino’, 28 July 1602 (Westminster VII no. 4): written in the left-hand margin near the end (emphasis added).

87 For simplicity we render all dates in relation to this Table and set of letters in the English (‘old style’) form, even though the incoming letters bore dates in new style (ten days on).

88 SP 77/6/25 and SP 77/6/28.

89 CSP Dom. 1598–1601, pp. 234–7 (an ample summary). We have used a copy of the original, SP 12/271/74.

90 The same associative analogy between bark and tree, friend and friend, and man and wife, is found with wonderful compression in the affirmation of Maria, in Loves Labours Lost (5.2.285), when she is pretending that Dumain is her special friend and likely husband: ‘Dumain is mine, as sure as bark on tree.’

91 It also takes the opportunity to say, in passing, that the 1586 plots entered into upon the service of Mary Queen of Scots, ‘as at her death she confessed’, were without her consent. In 1585 Sterrell was identified to Walsingham as ‘one of the chiefest familiars with Monsieur Mauvissière [the French ambassador] ... in all matters of weight concerning the papists in England’ and also ‘for all actions of the Scots Queen’; Edward Stephens to William Lord Cobham, 22 September 1585: SP 12/182/27 (CSP Dom. 1581–1590, 268).

92 It is the hand used at the end of a letter from ‘W. Nicols’ dated 7 February 1595 (n.s.), and in a letter of ‘Thomas Nicols’ dated 19 November 1596 (n.s.).

93 SP 77/6/27.

94 His handwriting, both in secretary and italic, has an extraordinary eccentricity: a small semi-circle (such as continental writers often use for an umlaut or dieresis) placed, in tic-like fashion, above the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ in many but by no means all their appearances. For an instance, signed by Verstegan, see SP 72/252/15 (CSP Dom. 1595–1597), pp. 39–40 (letter of 10/20 May 1595; amusingly, this letter was given to Verstegan’s clandestine colleague Thomas Phelippes, doubtless by Burghley, for deciphering of the occasional numerical cipher codes; and Burghley, we conjecture, will have admired Phelippes’s wonderful ability to decipher number codes—where one number, e.g. 107, stands for a proper name—from only one example; to maintain verisimilitude, the code’s probable co-author, Phelippes, left one of the numbers undeciphered). For another example of the eccentricity, see Petti, Letters and Despatches of Verstegan, CRS 52, p. xlx (facing page 1), lines 3 (two instances) and 10 (one instance). For an example signed ‘J. Sauf’, see the letter to ‘Mr. Halyns’ dated 13/23 March 1601, SP 77/6/256.

95 Hatfield Papers 46/60, second sheet (Hatfield Papers, vol. 6, 491).

96 Thus ‘Thomas Nicols’ [Owen] to ‘Peter Halyns’, 19 November 1596, Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 484 (46/62), says: ‘My host has sent the Holland cheese by such shipping and travellers as you gave direction.’ ‘Tho. Nicols’ to ‘Pieter Halins’, 26 November 1596, Hatfield Papers vol. 6, p. 493 (46/75) says: ‘The other cheeses promised are sent already, as you appointed. W is for wool [intelligence]. In the latter end of January we will knit up all accounts, and what you have laid out shall be answered. If you take great travel [=travel or travail/work], I hope to get for a pot of wine for your recompense.’

97 SP 14/12/35 (CSP Dom. 1603–1610, p. 189).

98 Hatfield Papers vol. 6 p. 490 (46/60).

99 See note 96 above.

100 See SP 12/244/15 (CSP Dom. 1591–1594, p. 308), William Sterrell to Thomas Phelippes, referring to a letter recently sent by Sterrell to Owen.

101 See Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans pp. 32, 37–39.

102 Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans, p. 78.

103 Edwards, Robert Persons, pp. 226–7, tells how the Roman curia was persuaded of Paget’s malice, beginning:

Edwards speculates that one of Cecil’s secretaries, Simon Willis, was the source of this amazing leak, and concludes his discussion by conjecturing that it was not really a leak but a ruse by Cecil. But, as we will recount in our book on Sterrell, it is entirely clear that the ‘two persons of credit’ who sent the papers were Sterrell and Phelippes, and that they were operating not on behalf of Cecil (who is as much the fall-guy in this intrigue as Paget) but of Persons, whose intelligencers they had been for years. On this occasion they did not need to copy papers out of the ‘state secretariat’: instead, they had them directly from Thomas Barnes, the very man to whom Paget wrote his incriminating letters for onward transmission to the English authorities (in the first instance Essex), not realising that Barnes was, on these occasions, simply the agent of Phelippes and Sterrell. Owen and thus the Cardinal Governor of the Low Countries doubtless received from Sterrell and Phelippes copies of the same Paget letters as Persons received. Edwards, Persons, p. 241, refers to ‘one of Robert Cecil’s spies, John Petit’ who in the extract letters quoted by Edwards from the Calendar of State Papers denounces Paget and William Tresham as ‘to be trusted by neither side’, etc., etc. But the Calendar’s ‘[John Petit]’ is none other than ‘J.B.’, that is, Hugh Owen, author—in closest coordination with Sterrell and Phelippes—of a series of letters (‘J.B.’ to Halyns’) whose primary if not sole purpose is to be read by the Queen and Cecil as coming from, not a spy of Robert Cecil nor a scheming Catholic exile, but rather a neutral ‘canon of Lìege’.

104 See CSP Dom. 1601–1603, pp. 184–6 (SP 12/284/4), 4 May 1602, Thomas Phelippes to Secretary Cecil, enclosing a document; a draft of the same document in the same hand as given to Cecil remained in Rome, and is endorsed by Persons.

105 M. Boulant as author of important letters is well known to historians of relations between England and the Low Countries between 1598 and end of Elizabeth’s reign (see e.g. Wernham, R. B., The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War Against Spain 1595–1603 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 246 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but he himself has, of course, never been found: see further n. 112 below. In what appears to be a draft (SP 77/6/436) prepared by Sterrell and, at the end, Phelippes, to be copied by Phelippes and sent by him to Cecil by way of explanation in February 1605, a very detailed summary is given of (as Phelippes endorsed the document) ‘the proceedings with M. Boulant about peace anno 1602’, beginning: ‘There was a long time entertained for the service of the state, with the privity of the late Queen, a correspondence between one Monsieur Boulant, a gentleman of Liège, and a canon there, his kinsman [i.e. ‘J.B./Petit’], of the one part, and another gentleman of our side that was first employed by the late Earl of Essex in those parts, under the name of Robinson’, i.e. Sterrell. The academic French of M. Boulant’s letters seems to us well within the prose-compositional capabilities of a well educated Englishman.

106 For example, at the time of the letters we have been considering, Phelippes sent another long letter, intended this time for Lord Treasurer Buckhurst, in which he speaks warmly and learnedly of the ‘ancient amity with Burgundy’: SP 12/271/8, Phelippes to his cousin William Phelippes in service to the Lord Treasurer, 6 July 1599.

107 It is difficult to be sure, because the aliases were successful. The Calendar of State Papers was comprehensively fooled by ‘Jo. Nicols’, whose letter is treated as private personal matters, especially the death of the writer’s lawyer Arthur.

108 Thus, for example, the letter of 30 June/10 July 1599 from J.S./Verstegan to Halyns/Sterrell/Phelippes says: ‘Being ready to seal up this letter, yours of the 9 and 16 June are come into my hands’. But the Fenner letters of 30 June, both to Owen and Baldwin in Brussels and to Verstegan in Antwerp, say ‘my last to you was of the 13 of this instant’. The outgoing letters of 9 and 16 are, doubtless, lower-level; the outgoing letters of 13 and 30 June are upper-level.

109 Spirit Orthon is an allusion to Froissart’s account of his visit to the Count of Foix: Book 3 of his Chronicles. People are amazed that the Count of Foix has instant knowledge of events far away. A squire tells Froissart that he suspects that the count has a familiar spirit, and in confidence adds a salutary story. There was a lord of Corasse who had such a spirit named Orthon. After a time the count was not satisfied with talking with the invisible Orthon, and became desirous of seeing him. There appeared a hideous sow, the count set his dogs on it, and it disappeared. Too late, the count realized that he had seen Orthon, who never returned.

110 Hatfield Papers vol 17, p. 39: Thomas Phelippes to Cecil, 29 January 1605. Phelippes’s claims that his identity was not known to Owen, and that Sterrell was perplexed about how to keep the secret, need not and cannot be taken as accurate accounts of what Owen and Sterrell knew.

111 See n. 49 above.

112 ‘Monsieur Boulant’ was a persona created originally, we think, by Owens, Phelippes, and Sterrell in the late 1590’s, as an instrument for peace between England and the Archdukes; see also n. 105 above. Letters from ‘Boulant’ are shown to Cecil and the Queen in 1598, and ‘Robinson’ [Sterrell/Phelippes] is still corresponding with him in 1602. We think it highly probable that behind ‘Boulant’ is the real and highly relevant Dr.Taylor, Robert, of whom Loomie writes, Toleration and Diplomacy (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, vol. 53, Part 6, September 1963), p. 15 Google Scholar:

Taylor was a professor of Civil Law, too, and on January 12/22 1601, ‘J.B.’ wrote from Antwerp: ‘Here I found our friend Boulant in law up to the hard ears with a chanon of this town’: SP 77/6 f. 247; in May, J.B. writes that Boulant is in ‘Brussels where he hath some affairs with Monsieurs des Finances’: SP 77/6 f. 271; on 29 June/9 July 1602, [J.B.] writes to ‘Robinson’ that ‘Monsieur Boulant is gone to Spixe about a processe’: SP 77/6 f. 348^v. Boulant first appears in the J.B./Halyns/Robinson letters in February/March 1598, and all the references to him therein are consistent with Taylor’s status as lawyer and diplomatist, sufficiently Catholic to risk and suffer imprisonment in 1606 when, living openly in London as a diplomatic agent in the Spanish interest, he and his wife secretly gave Fr. John Gerard S.J. shelter in their house (in which many of Garnet’s books were stored) during the intense manhunt which entrapped Garnet, Oldcorae, and many others: see Caraman, John Gerard, pp. 205–206, 257. In his first statement to Cecil, on 25 January 1605, Phelippes admitted to knowing Dr. Taylor as ‘a man . . . desirous to do service for the peace’, and to having last spoken with him at dinner on the previous Sunday: SP 14/12/32.

113 Lloyd, David, State Worthies [The Statesmen and Favourites of England (1665)], ed. Whitworth, C. (London, 1766), vol. 1, p. 469 Google Scholar.

114 See n. 51 above.