A while ago I read a book about espionage at the time of Elizabeth 1; although I love history, ‘modern’ history is not really my particular interest, it was the espionage aspect of the book which appealed.
I suppose maybe because I read mostly fiction and like to engage with characters, I found it was the personalities of the period and their relationship with each other which was the most fascinating. I have written before about one of the people who featured in this time of spies and spying, Thomas Phillips or Phellipes who was a ‘private agent’ and decipherer of codes. He spoke several languages but seems unassuming to look at, quite short and with the terrible scars of small pox on his face. Not very much is known about him, so I’m not sure quite why I have become fascinated by this unassuming, shadowy figure.
His father was a cloth merchant and land owner, fairly well off but of by no means really rich. Thomas was born in about 1556 and by the time he was in his twenties, having been to Trinity College Cambridge, he was working for Sir Francis Walsingham in Paris as a secret agent; he’s already shown he was a gifted decipherer and code-breaker and was one of Walsingham’s best and most trusted men. The threats to England in those days were seen to be from the Catholics, the Catholic countries of mainland Europe and Catholic Englishmen who had fled to the continent in fear of their lives.
From the mid 1580’s, most of Thomas’s work was to deal with information received, either through letters to him from agents abroad or through intercepted mail which needed decrypting. Letters were written in code sometimes, or in invisible ink made from various things including onion juice – surely the smell would have been a bit of a give away! I’m sure when we were children we wrote secret messages to each other in milk… or was it lemon juice? However, Thomas did continue to travel abroad, including to France and the Netherlands to investigate particular matters and intrigues. As well as being a gifted linguist and code-breaker, Thomas was also an excellent forger and is suspected of having gorged an incriminating post script to a letter which sealed the fate of Mary Queen of Scots..
In the 1590’s however, Thomas’s fortunes changed. Maybe he was no longer trusted in the same way, maybe he was greedy and asked for too high fees. His father had died in 1590, and he fell into debt and in 1596, at the age of forty he was sent to prison for a debt of £11,000 and goodness knows how much that would be equivalent to today. he was released a year later without having paid the debt and began to work in espionage again. He had been very much part of the conspiracy to have Mary Queen of Scots beheaded and the new King James 1 couldn’t forgive him for that. For the next twenty or so years he was in and out of prison, including a spell in the Tower of London, burdened by his debt, and even though he helped arrest the conspirators in the gunpowder plot, he soon became forgotten.
His past services to the country and his loyalty to the monarch forgotten and he died, probably in prison in 1626, aged about seventy. I have no idea whether he married or had children, but I feel sure he must have… maybe there are descendants of his today who are proud of their distant ancestor who although not as dashing as James Bond, had a more eventful and dangerous life than the fictional spy!
Lois Elsden 