Stephen AlfordRezensionen

I didn't make it all the way through.
However, I did enjoy what I was reading - mainly I wasn't in the mood for this type of book.
Scholarly, drawing from primary sources (letters, ledgers, etc) but without quoting them in minute detail.
I felt almost out of my depth, like I needed to have read another history of Elizabeth I's reign shortly before reading this book so that I could catch all of the allusions to political events.

This is a well-written book so it deserves four stars. However, you may not wish to read it. If you are hoping for details on the craft of espionage you'll come away dissatisfied. This is maybe interesting reading for those with an interest in the Tudors or Elizabeth specifically. There's also a bit more here on the divide between Catholicism and the Church of England explained than maybe a standard biography might have had.

If you are hoping to learn about ciphers, decoys, double agents or the like, this isn't the place. Perhaps this book, instead of being called the Watchers should have been titled The Haters. The interest here is far less about how Elizabeth's detractors were defeated but why they existed in the first place. And you know, T Swizzle is rally hot right now so any tie in to her songs is going to really bring the money.

Elizabeth I reigned for a total of 45 years in England, and the stability she gave as head of state gave us the Golden Age of wealth and greater self-assurance as a nation. The final Tudor monarch saw a cultural advances too, this being the time of Shakespeare and military confidence on the high seas. However, the Europeans saw her very differently; as daughter of Anne Boylen, Henry VIII's second wife, she was considered a bastard and Protestant heretic by catholic Europe. Following her denouncement by the Pope various European rulers prepared plans to dispose her, replacing her with Mary. The event that most people are aware of is the almost invasion by The Spanish Armada, but throughout her reign she was protected by a team of loyal subjects.

These men were a motley bunch of ambassadors, codebreakers, and confidence-men and spies who used all sort of covert and overt methods to counter the catholic threat. Infiltrators were sent to the continent to ingratiate themselves with the church, uncovering conspiracies both real and imagined, identified and followed gentlemen who were plotting the overthrow of their Queen. The network tracked priests entering the country under cover, intercepted and deciphered almost all correspondence between suspects in England and their contacts in France, Spain and Italy and neutered the threat that hung over the crown.

Drawing on documents from archive and collections, Alford shines a light into this dark and shadowy time of history. The narrative details tense searches across the countryside looking for specific people who were perceived to be a threat to the crown. Traitors who were convicted, sometimes only on hearsay and confessions uttered under torture on the rack, were condemned in horrific ways to die. It is an interesting account of those involved in keeping their monarch safe from all the assassination attempts and plots, but at times was fairly complicated as he details all the people involved in these plots. Worth reading though for those that like their Tudor history.

In this book Stephen Alford gives a detailed account of the men who chose (or were occasionally *persuaded*) to protect Elizabeth's life and government during the tumultuous years of her reign; far from being the Golden Age we often associate with it, the years between Elizabeth's accession in 1558 to her death in 1603 were anything but stable, characterised by disease, famine and religious upheaval, set against a backdrop of a divided Europe.

Most of this history was, out of necessity, kept secret, and the author has extracted the details from a variety of documentary and other sources. The result is not entirely successful: the chronology and the prose aren't as clear as they should be in a book like this, which made keeping track of the multitude of characters even more difficult, although it didn't help that I took nearly four weeks to finish the book (not because it didn't hold my interest, but because I had to do a lot of overtime that month). While the first part is filled with interesting facts, the pace doesn't really pick up until Mary Queen of Scots appears on the scene, and even then the account often reads like a spy's travelogue and who did/said what when, a cohesive narrative it is not, and there are several questions that are left open (what was the significance of Francis Throckmorton's velvet-covered casket that was smuggled out of the house and handed to the Spanish ambassador?).

Though it is clear from the outset that the author intends to shine a spotlight on the men in the shadows and those in government who handled them, it still came as something of a surprise that some of the wider implications were not sufficiently dealt with in my opinion; we hear of the passing of the Act for the Queen's Surety that in the end made it possible to arrest and execute Mary Queen of Scots, and how the government approved of the use of torture to extract information, but I felt there was little else that explored the prevailing mood among England's general population (did the paranoia experienced by Elizabeth's closest advisers extend all the way to the common man and woman on the street?). Where the author is successful, though, is in conveying how dangerously close Elizabeth came to a premature and violent death by describing the numerous plots to invade England and attempts on her life; it's quite miraculous (and no doubt due to the vigilance of the loyal advisers around her) that they never amounted to anything, and Elizabeth died of natural causes in her bed at the age of 69.

An interesting but flawed book that will surely benefit from a second reading.½

It's a very interesting book, and I learned a lot about espionage in the Tudor era. The author does a great job sketching the lives and personalities of men like Thomas Phelippes and William Parry (a spy working for Elizabeth I and a conspirator against her, respectively). Where I think Alford misses the mark, though, is that he fails to really grapple with the big picture: how did the aura of danger and paranoia that surrounded Elizabeth's court affect English politics and society? In particular, Alford seems to take for granted the guilt of the conspirators executed in the last decade or so of Elizabeth's reign, even while acknowledging that there was little evidence against them and that the government moved against them more quickly than they had against other alleged revolutionaries in the past. Particularly in the last half of the book, I thought that Alford had become so interested in Phelippes's antics that he lost perspective. Still, it's a great book if you are interested in the details of the Babington Plot and other cabals against Elizabeth I.

It's a very interesting book, and I learned a lot about espionage in the Tudor era. The author does a great job sketching the lives and personalities of men like Thomas Phelippes and William Parry (a spy working for Elizabeth I and a conspirator against her, respectively). Where I think Alford misses the mark, though, is that he fails to really grapple with the big picture: how did the aura of danger and paranoia that surrounded Elizabeth's court affect English politics and society? In particular, Alford seems to take for granted the guilt of the conspirators executed in the last decade or so of Elizabeth's reign, even while acknowledging that there was little evidence against them and that the government moved against them more quickly than they had against other alleged revolutionaries in the past. Particularly in the last half of the book, I thought that Alford had become so interested in Phelippes's antics that he lost perspective. Still, it's a great book if you are interested in the details of the Babington Plot and other cabals against Elizabeth I.

Some fascinating stuff but rather too much of it. By the end all the spies start to blend together. I preferred S J Parris fictional version using some of the real people.

I thought the history covered in this book was really fascinating, and it was nice to get a book set during Elizabeth's reign that talks about what was going on behind the scenes and abroad instead of focusing solely on her and her own choices and actions.

What keeps me from giving the book a higher rating is that the prose is very choppy and repetitive, and included so much jumping around from one point in time to another and back again that I found it very hard to get engrossed in the narrative. I would still recommend it to Tudor history fans, though!

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2207951.html

this is a study of how the leadership of the English government maintained an intelligence service to protect the realm, in particular the Cecils and Sir Francis Walsingham. I'll say up front that I had a couple of disappointments - there is very little about Ireland, and I'd hoped for at least a passing mention of John Bossy's Giordano Bruno theory and didn't get one. But I was very satisfied with the overall detailed picture of the Queen's advisors, determined to preserve her rule at all costs, much more ruthless than she would have been (as witness her dithering over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots) and also somewhat more anti-Catholic.

It's easy to overlook two very important facts about the historical situation: first, that nobody knew that Elizabeth would live to 1603, and the uncertainty about her succession, which she deliberately fostered to some extent, was profoundly destabilising to those who wanted to think ahead to the next reign; and second, that information just did not really flow between countries - there were no newspapers, statesmen did not give interviews, official communications between rulers and magnates had to be supplemented by intelligence gathered by agents in important centres abroad. One of the tools of statecraft therefore was to have a widespread network of contacts, who would demand regular payment in return for information; this still happens today, of course, but unlike today there was almost no OSINT to check the HUMINT against. Another important point is that most of the information was channeled to the principals directly, and never shown to anyone else except, if really necessary, the Queen.

Given these two factors, Alford makes it almost uncontroversial, though of course potentially very dangerous, that Walsingham essentially framed Mary Queen of Scots for execution through the Babington Plot; although Babington himself, who was only 24, was clearly a rather slender reed for the restoration of Catholicism, Mary was an ever present temptation for someone more competent while she lived. Walsingham and Cecil were ruthless, but they had seen the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and indeed had perpetrated plenty of sectarian violence themselves; they knew perfectly well what awaited them in the event of a further change of official ideology. Elizabethan England, providing security at home for economic stability and some encouragement of culture, at the cost of repression of the surviving loyalists to the former regime and paranoia about their foreign allies, seems not so very different from Pinochet's Chile, or the less corrupt Eastern European countries under Communism.

An interesting and engrossing book detailing the activities of the network of spies and informers, the ‘Watchers’ of the title, set up and run by Walsingham, Essex, Burleigh and Robert Cecil to protect Elizabethan society from the catholic threat. Alford cleverly illustrates the perceived magnitude of the threat when he describes an imagined assassination attempt on Elizabeth by catholic agents and the ensuing chaos when she dies from her wounds.

Alford concentrates on the ordinary men in the network, the ones recruited and paid ad hoc – many ended up in debt - the double and, in one case, triple agents, collecting information and sending it back, by letter, to their masters. He details how letters were intercepted, decrypted, and sent on their way – a device used most famously to break the Babington Plot and to force the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots – how torture was used for force confessions, and how catholic spies were become double agents.

Its easy to draw parallels between those Watchers and the recent revelations of the lengths today’s Elizabethan watchers will go to in order to protect society and there are lessons here - the manipulations and use of entrapment in the Babington Plot is a good example - are a timely reminder that we should also consider just how far we want the state to go to preserve our way of life.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1564792.html

A very interesting biography of Elizabeth 's chief minister, who basically ran England from her accession in 1558 to his death in 1598 (and had held the same office of Secretary of State, though with less power, during the earlier reign of her younger brother). I found it generally more interesting, though in places more frustrating, than David Loades' The Cecils which I read two years ago.

Alford is excellent at the big picture. The book is beautifully organised - in general chonologically, with occasional excursions into family life or household economics (facilitated by Burghley/Cecil's obsessional record keeping) - and he usually has interesting things to say about what it meant to Burghley to be in a position of such political power, while running a growing household. He's also very good at cautioning against Whiggism: Burghley did not know that Elizabeth would live to 1603, that she would never marry, that the Spanish Armada would fail, that Mary Queen of Scots would lose their decades-long battle of wits. I found it fascinating that Burghley/Cecil was so heavily involved with the intellectual leadership of the time, as was his second wife Mildred; even more fascinating that, while keeping meticulous records of his own correspondence and affairs, he was apparently instructing printers to generate largely fictional and utterly propagandistic pamphlets describing the issues of the day, which of course in the days before newspapers, and in a society where information was heavily censored, meant that he largely controlled public political discourse.

Burghley/Cecil was also a keen genealogist, but Alford has him as a man of Lincolnshire (rather than Wales as Loades has it), and the evidence is in his favour. Indeed, there is very little about Wales in this book, but lots about Scotland, which Cecil had first visited in the train of the English army during the Rough Wooing. Alford has Cecil obsessed with securing stability and Protestantism in Scotland, in order to secure England's rear from the Catholic enemies on the Continent; Mary Queen of Scots became a direct threat to that policy, and had to be neutralised. Alford's analysis of Burghley/Cecil's Scottish policy is particularly lucid and convincing. Slightly frustratingly, given my own interest, Ireland appears only as a background issue - my ancestor Sir Nicholas White comes up as a correspondent to whom Cecil/Burghley would confide his concerns, though of course with an eye to the possible interception of the correspondence.

I'm sorry to say that I found some serious flaws in the book. Alford's prose is sometimes clunky and often repetitious. His efforts to get inside Burghley's head do not always succeed. An early and unsuccessful chapter deals with how Burghley (then plain William Cecil) dealt with the nine day reign in 1553 of Lady Jane Grey/Dudley, in a situation where he was still Secretary of State (as he had been for Edward VI) but faced with the crumbling of the new queen's rule from the moment her accession was proclaimed. Alford concentrates on the tension between Cecil's loyalty to the wishes of the dying teenage king and his obligations under the law passed by Henry VIII. To me the much more interesting story is that Cecil obviously spotted that Jane was dead in the water from the word go, and made sure he had not signed a single document which could demonstrate that he was seriously complicit in her attempt to take power - which is pretty impressive given that he was the chief minister of the government. He obviously could not know whether Mary would take months, weeks or days to take power (in the end it was only days) but equally obvously saw what was going to happen from pretty early on and made his plans accordingly.

So, a bit annoying in places but generally enlightening and stimulating, if you are interested in the period.