a position of control, a channel through which minor agents could gain access to Sir Francis. One of these informers attendant upon Thomas, wishing ‘secret recourse to Mr Secretary’, was none other than ‘Sweet Robyn’, Robert Poley. In the tangled brier of names that grows to fill Kit’s early life, this is one to be remembered, a bud to be plucked and placed alongside those of Wriothesley, Thomas Walsingham and Tom Watson, as we carefully watch them blossom.
As this social brier spread, so Kit’s intellectual tendrils curled and thrust themselves in unexpected directions. Friends such as Ralegh and Northumberland encouraged the questioning that had begun during his first days at Cambridge, a journey from the Christian viewpoint where doubt was a sin, to one where it was a virtue. Europe had been rocked by the claims of Copernicus, and the discovery of cultures that seemed to predate the Creation. It was a philosophically alarming world, where two great Christian factions were clashing, but where for people like Kit, God could no longer be trusted. If you wanted knowledge you had to flirt with the Devil. Or worse. It is around this time that rumours grew of Kit’s ‘atheism’ and his interest in the occult. He is supposed to have won over one Thomas Fineaux, who began studies at Bene’t in Kit’s last term there. In a way rather reminiscent of Doctor Faustus conjuring ‘in some bushy grove’, Fineux ‘would go out at midnight into a wood, & fall down upon his knees, & pray heartily that the devil would come, that he might see him (for he did not believe there was a devil) ‘.
Kit was not alone in his dilemma. Scientific curiosity had doubt as a handmaiden. The question arose that if you could no longer trust God, then whom could you trust? This was a time of psychological turbulence, uncertainty, reinvention – the figures that emerged from it as rock-like have become fixed as cultural icons. It is not for nothing that we now prefer to call this English Renaissance the ‘Early Modern Period’ – it is the period of upheaval during which England’s cultural world was made.
As the recall of Thomas Walsingham to become a controller of London headquarters at Seething Lane in 1584 shows, Sir Francis was, by the mid-1580s, beginning to formalise his organisation and expand. In April 1583 he had three men reporting from Paris, nine from Antwerp, and two from Middelburg and Strasbourg; by 1585 his intelligencers abroad had grown to fifty. The reason for such expansion lay primarily in events in the Low Countries. The Duke of Parma’s campaign against the Protestant north was reaching a high point. Antwerp had been drawn into the battle zone and by June 1584 was under siege; in the same month Parma’s key opponent, William of Orange, was assassinated. Just a few weeks before, François, the Duke of Anjou, had died and with him the hope of French resistance to Parma, as the country sank into internal conflict over succession to the throne. England was now being drawn into the fray.
In May 1585 the Dutch were to offer sovereignty of the United Provinces to Elizabeth. The hawks on the Privy Council, Walsingham and Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, said ‘aye’, but Lord Burghley and the doves gave a firm ‘nay’, as they thought that such a move risked outright war with Spain. In the end, Elizabeth turned down the Dutch offer because she too foresaw ‘long, bloody wars’ with one of the most powerful countries in Europe. She had already dispatched embassies to Denmark and to German princes to see if they would join in a Protestant League against the Spanish, but to no avail. English involvement was inevitable. Eventually, in August, she signed the Treaty of Nonsuch at the sumptuous pleasure palace built by Henry VIII at Cheam – so named because there was ‘none such like it in the realm’ (the royal equivalent of calling your house Dunroamin’).
Elizabeth agreed to send a force to support the Dutch, reluctantly naming Robert Dudley commander, with the warning not to ‘hazard a battaile without great advantage’. When Leicester precociously named himself ‘governor-general’ of the United Provinces, a move that implied sovereignty and which riled the Spanish, she was furious. Meanwhile, the Dutch had found a military genius in William of Orange’s successor, Maurice, who was hotly intent on war with Spain, and good at it.
Throughout all of this Elizabeth needed intelligence from France, the Low Countries and from Spain. She also needed to know what was going on in Leicester’s camp, to monitor the movements of the increasingly powerful Maurice of Orange, and to judge the mood in the courts of Denmark and of the German princes. This was the field in which Kit became engaged. Curiously, it was his interest in theatre that got him the job. Dramatists, as one would imagine, were more suited to spying than other writers, given the cloak-and-dagger antics of Elizabethan espionage. Complicated ciphers and invisible inks were commonplace; messages were smuggled inside beer barrels; seals were forged, couriers drugged; men disguised themselves as beggars and passed themselves off as members of other nationalities. Tradition has it that Kit deeply impressed Sir Francis with a scheme of getting a cipher-key to the conjuror Dr Dee (who was by this time living in Bohemia). He proposed shaving the head of a servant, who had eye trouble, inking the code on his pate, then allowing the hair to grow back and hide it. The man was sent to Dr Dee on the pretext that the writing on his head was a part of a spell that would help the great doctor effect a cure. The advantage of the plan was that not only was the message invisible in transit, but that the unsuspecting servant, who had been told that revealing the presence of the spell would destroy it, could not double-cross them. (Servants were usually the weakest link in a chain of espionage as their loyalty was easily bought.) Maybe Sir Francis would not have been so admiring had he known that the young poet had stolen the idea directly from Herodotus. Kit also came up with the idea (taken this time from Aeneas Tacticus) of writing a message on a tree leaf which was used to cover an apparently putrid ulcer on the leg of someone disguised as a beggar. Plagiarism, as well as deception, was evidently becoming something of a strong point.
Such disguises and complicated plots of betrayal and counter-betrayal were very much the stuff of the theatre of the time. What is more, if one is looking for the perfect cover, a travelling theatre company proves ideal – it would have access not only to burghers and market place, but to the heart of the local court. A player could pick up on gossip below the stairs, and would be within earshot when the lords were drunk, and a poet with such a company would penetrate upper social strata with an ease that few other means would allow. An English theatre company on the Continent might move with the immunity of jesters where English diplomats feared to tread.
Such companies existed. Kit had already briefly travelled with one, on his jaunt replacing William Peeters. Not only were companies touring on the Continent, but there were English players wherever an eager spymaster might have wished them to be. There are records of Maurice of Orange licensing English players, a troupe accompanied Leicester to the Low Countries; there were English players in the Danish court on at least two occasions, and in towns all over Germany throughout the period.
Known generically as the Englische Komödianten or ‘English comedians’, these troupes of players were resoundingly popular. They performed in the energetic, rag-bag gallimaufrey style that had so enthralled the young Kit in Canterbury, which corrupted students at Cambridge, and which was filling the London amphitheatres to the brim: a mixture of music, playing and acrobatics that quite astounded those who saw it. The English comedians’ spontaneity and vividness so enthused audiences that it revolutionised northern European theatre, turning what had previously been stiff, formal recitation into drama. For the first time this was theatre in its own right, not presented for religious instruction or as part of a festival. And people turned out in their thousands to watch. In Frankfurt, according to the sixteenth-century traveller Fynes Moryson, both men and women ‘flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and Action, rather than heare them, speaking English which they understand not’, and at Elsinore in 1585, the citizens flocked so ‘wonderfully’ to a performance in the town hall courtyard, that they broke down a wall. This popularity is especially surprising because, as Fynes Moryson remarks, so few of the audience understood the language. English was an island tongue with little continental currency. In court, a simultaneous translator might be employed as a sort of living surtitle, but this did not often happen in the market place. (Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with the popularity