A Most Secret Service: William Herle and the Circulation of Intelligence

Abstract

Wherwith humbly comendyng me to your Lords good favor, I take mi leve for this tyme, desyrows with mi harte, that ye wolld employe me yn somwhatt yn these parts, and therewith to yngrave yn her majesties gracyows oppynion, the remembrance of a zelows poore servant of hers. In the later half of the sixteenth century, England’s ministers relied on unofficial and private information networks to supply information about foreign and domestic subjects. Among the admixture of these crown- and privately-funded networks were structures of communication and exchange built upon patronage relationships, and these societal bonds were constructed and maintained in part by the transmission of fresh and sensitive intelligence by letter and in person. Within Elizabeth I’s Privy Council, William Cecil Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex were the key ministers significantly responsible for compiling copious and diverse tranches of information, with an impressive geographical, political, religious and social scope. In this essay I propose to interrogate the relationships between these ministers and their agents, by examining the epistolary forms and strategies deployed in the intelligence letters of William Herle.2 I will focus on a particular sequence of Herle’s correspondence addressed to Walsingham, Leicester and Burghley, written at a critical point in English intervention in the Low Countries conflict. I intend to use this cache of letters as a case-study, to see what Herle’s epistolary legacy can reveal about the important role played by unofficial agents, intelligencers and spies in the diplomatic context.KeywordsEarly Modern PeriodPrivy CouncilPatronage NetworkAssassination AttemptDiplomatic ActivityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.