Stephen Alford 51
Gilbert as an agent, but it did help him to survive. It is significant,
I think, that a letter recording a family arrangement for the delivery
of one hundred Crowns to Gilbert was received and endorsed by
Phelippes. Gilbert’s uncle in Rouen, Hugh Offley, had seen to the
delivery of the money to Paris by means of one Bartholomew Martin.
Gilbert wrote to his father, John, to ask him ‘to paie the same to my
uncle Offley or the valey [value] therof with the exchange which
ther shall be courant in london’.
23
Beyond these apparently ad hoc
payments to agents, one wonders whether a more regular system of
budgeting from secret funds was set up for men like Thomas Barnes
and Gilbert Gifford.
Couriers travelling abroad would cover their own costs and then
recover the money, by a signed warrant, from the Lord Treasurer of the
Chamber. When, after a brilliant piece of detective work by J. Leslie
Hotson in 1925, historians and literary scholars began to interest them-
selves in the part played by Robert Poley in the death of Christopher
Marlowe, Eugénie de Kalb found in the declared accounts of the
Treasurer of the Chamber twenty-six warrants for payments to Poley for
his journeys abroad between 1588 and 1601. Poley went to France, the
Low Countries, Northumberland and Scotland often on ‘her Majesty’s
special service’. To The Hague, in May and June 1593, he carried letters
in post ‘for her Majesties speciall and secrete afaires of great ympor-
taunce’. For this journey alone, a month’s travelling from the court at
Croydon to The Hague and then back to Nonsuch Palace, Poley was
reimbursed £30, or something like £3,500 today.
24
When we consider
the frequency with which trusted agents working at home and abroad
would ask for sums of £20, £10 and £15, and certainly when we take
into account the pension of £100 a year granted to Gilbert Gifford in
Paris in 1587, we can see how far the secret budget, however compli-
cated it is to calculate or wherever the money came from, must have
been stretched.
Agents tended to report directly to Walsingham or to Phelippes or
Francis Mylles. Aliases were used, both by agents and also by Phelippes.
Occasionally a writer relied upon Phelippes or Mylles to identify him by
his handwriting, signing with a formula like ‘He whom you know’. Both
Nicholas Berden and Maliverey Catilyn did this. From Paris in 1588 Gerard
Gifford, the brother of Gilbert, wrote ‘To his very ffrende Raphe husbande
merchaunt’. Husband was Thomas Phelippes.
25
Nicholas Berden worked
under the name Thomas Rogers.
26
Gilbert Gifford was Nicholas Cornellis
or Cornelys in letters to Thomas Morgan, Thomas Phelippes, and Sir
Francis Walsingham; and William Luson in Paris to Thomas Phelippes,
9780230239760_05_cha03.indd 519780230239760_05_cha03.indd 51 11/8/2010 1:00:51 PM11/8/2010 1:00:51 PM
10.1057/9780230298125 - Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture, Edited by Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14