Elizabeth I’s Secret Agents review: Few monarchs kept such a keen eye on their subjects

You have to go quite close to see that the swirls on her dress are actually a myriad of eyes and ears. Did she ever own such a garish frock?

Elizabeth I’s Secret Agents (2) suggested it was propaganda, rather than poor fashion sense.

Few monarchs this side of Moscow have martialled such an extensive network of ears and eyes against their own subjects.

Fear within is usually something to do with the fear without, and in Elizabeth’s case, as an unmarried Protestant monarch declared a heretic by the Pope, the external threats were teeming.

If interested foreign powers were to back any of her 40,000 Catholic subjects, then Elizabeth’s reign, not to mention her neck, was on the chopping block.

She was lucky in having the support of William Cecil, the low-born adviser who managed her surveillance network.

Like modern spymasters, Cecil knew it wasn’t just about the agents and secret codes, it was also a battle for hearts and minds.

When he presented evidence to Elizabeth I that her relative and friend the Duke of Norfolk was plotting against her, she was appalled, and refused to sign his death warrant.

Her mind was changed, however, as mobs began calling for Norfolk’s death, and a pamphlet circulated, claiming that he was intending to marry Mary, Queen of Scots and become the new Catholic King.

The source of this was Cecil, and his ruse worked splendidly. He didn’t just have printers in his pay, either. Working for Cecil’s Tudor spook service were master forgers, specialist priest-hunters and a young Maths genius, poached from Cambridge University to invent and decipher codes.

(You could almost imagine the TV series…) In spite of this, his efforts to neutralise the threat from Mary, Queen of Scots were almost his undoing.

It might, as some historians mused last night, have had a bit to do with that very English disease, snobbery. As a clever, self-made man, Cecil’s bugbear was the sort of vain, dim, privileged type who filled the courts of Europe, and of which Mary was a prime example.

He was so keen on getting her head chopped off that he underestimated what it meant for Elizabeth to execute a fellow monarch.

He got his way, but Mary’s beheading was such a botch-job (heads resolutely failing to come off necks, small dogs popping out of dresses, barking) that Elizabeth sacked him.

This might have just been more subterfuge, though.

She gave the job to Cecil’s son, a way, perhaps, of seeming to condemn him for Mary’s execution, while keeping him on the payroll. 

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Continuing its glorious tradition of TV-to-do-the-ironing-to, BBC4 gave us ‘A Year in an English Garden’.

Filmed within a walled garden in Sussex, patience and time-lapse magic made us see the plants and trees as never before. Slightly threatening music played as we watched buds appearing on branches, these normal, cheery glimpses of spring somehow becoming potent and dangerous.

The daffodils’ advance, when speeded up, was less Wordsworth, more War of the Worlds. Voiceovers from the gardeners linked the scene to events in space, the turnings of planets, the journey of photons from the heart of the sun.

I’ll never think about Alan Titchmarsh in the same way again.

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Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.

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