A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

did lapse with the death of the Queen? No? It should be known. If anyone doubts their seriousness, remember the plot to destroy the government and parliament with gunpowder in 1605. I am sure King James will remember that business, a very close thing. I was myself called back to help with it, then abandoned again afterwards.

To return to my story: we had learned of new plots against the life of the Queen. Some were serious, others the fantasies of strange or lonely minds, others again the vengeful desires of men consumed by grievance. As always, the mad were made use of by the bad and part of my duty was to weigh the seriousness of these threats, sifting evidence in the New Library.

Even that, however, was not my main concern that summer. This was a secret Jesuit mission into our realm to recruit young men to be trained abroad as priests who would then return to fan the embers of discontent. We knew the mission was launched, we knew the English priests who led it – Robert Persons and Edmund Campion – and that at least one other priest was infiltrated with them. We knew too that they had recruited seven young men to send secretly to the seminary at Rheims. All this was from correspondence one of our spies had been entrusted with, which I had copied and deciphered. But we had no idea where in the kingdom these men were nor the names they used, though we did know that Campion passed himself off as a jeweller and Persons as a military man.

I was working on this one summer morning when Nicholas Faunt burst into the New Library. I say ‘burst’ because Nicholas, a busy, bustling hirsute man who was one of Sir Francis’s private secretaries, never merely entered a room but immediately seemed to fill it. ‘Thomas, you are bidden with me to Barn Elms,’ he said loudly. ‘Mr Secretary has a task for you. It is urgent, we must leave now.’

He had a boat waiting. The tide was against us and so the journey took longer than it should have, which gave more time for Nicholas to tell me what was afoot. He was not supposed to, of course, but he was one of those self-important men keen for you to know that he knew things you didn’t. He couldn’t resist hinting at them and, provided you didn’t show too much curiosity, might eventually tell you half the story unprompted. It was a serious failing in a private secretary but he was loyal, energetic and efficient, and otherwise served his master well. Thus I learned that my task involved the insertion of a spy into a group of conspirators. It had to be someone entirely unsuspected, an apparent sympathiser uncontaminated by previous involvement with us. Nicholas had himself suggested this particular spy, a man a few years younger than himself whom he had known at school in Canterbury and who was now at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Nicholas himself had been. His name was Christopher Marlowe. He was apparently well versed in theology, familiar enough with the ways of the old faith to pass for a Catholic while remaining soundly Protestant. But he was not extremely so, he was no Puritan.

‘He is a scholarship boy, he needs money, as does his family, he is willing and discreet,’ said Nicholas. ‘Term has ended and the college supposes him travelling home to Canterbury, as he will after the excursion we intend for him. Mr Secretary has interviewed him and pronounced him suitable.’

‘Where is the excursion?’

‘That I am not at liberty to say.’ Nicholas compressed his lips and gazed across the rippling grey water. He was trying to imply that telling me would be a step too far but I suspected he didn’t know and didn’t like to admit it. So it proved when Sir Francis received me alone in the study of his great house at Barn Elms, overlooking the orchards towards the river. ‘Nicholas has doubtless revealed to you what you are to do.’

‘Only in part, sir.’

There was almost a smile. ‘What he won’t have told you is that you are to take the young man into Berkshire, to a house sometimes called Moore Place, otherwise Lyford Grange, near Wantage, about half a day’s ride from Oxford. The owner is Francis Yate, a gentleman who is currently visiting the Tower as a guest of Her Majesty. His house has long been a hive of recusants. They hide priests and hold masses there and also house some English nuns who earlier fled to Belgium, but have now returned because of the persecutions. Our quarries, the two Jesuits Persons and Campion, are somewhere in that area and I suspect may seek temporary refuge in Lyford Grange. Not a wise choice since it is widely known for what it is, but they are not well-versed in secret ways and Campion particularly is of an open and free nature. Secrecy is not natural to him. A man called George Eliot is charged by the sheriff with security in the area and will be investigating the household. He will not know that you are in the area and you should have nothing to do with him. Apart from our young man, there will be another agent, a man called Frizer, deployed by my Lord Leicester to gain access to the house. He is Leicester’s man, nothing to do with us and you must have nothing to do with him either. Your task is to insert Master Marlowe into that household without anyone suspecting him. We need our own man there. Or woman.’

The search for these two Jesuits had been my main concern for some weeks. They had landed at Rye in Sussex and then disappeared. How Mr Secretary should have known they were in Berkshire I had no idea, but like the fox he knew many things and no one but him was privy to all.

‘They were recently in Oxford