Secret Dossier Reveals Queen Elizabeth I's Network Of Spies: Report

A document titled "The Names of the Intelligencers" has now disclosed the hidden network of spies of England and Ireland's former Queen Elizabeth I.

The single sheet of paper has been lying undisturbed in the National Archives for over a century, as per a Guardian report.

The report also mentioned that this paper is part of a 428-year-old secret dossier that once belonged to Robert Cecil, the spymaster for Queen Elizabeth. Cecil is also the man who discovered the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Putting this document together with the dossier shows how Cecil used a secret spy network to watch European kings and queens for England.

Historian Stephen Alford, who is also a professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds, found the list nearly 15 years ago. He believes it was England's “first properly organised secret service”. Alford has been working to reconstruct Cecil's files on each spy ever since he found the document.

“There were lots of names listed – some I recognised, people in or close to the privy council of Elizabeth I, and lots I didn't know. Eventually, I realised that the numbers next to their names were folio numbers and that this was really a contents page. That was a lightbulb moment,” said Mr Alford as per the report.

The list of spies had been placed in a “miscellaneous” folder by Victorian archivists. As per Mr Alford's beliefs, Cecil began to write the document in 1596. 

Mr Alford thinks that he is “probably the first scholar” to take an interest in this document. He also said, “The Victorians had a habit, where if they came across papers that didn't make sense to them, that were a little mysterious and couldn't be filed away in a neat and tidy way, they would scratch their heads and then stick them in a miscellaneous folder and ignore them. And that's where historians now find really interesting stuff.” 

Mr Alford searched through old archives for relevant papers marked with small numbers matching the index. Many papers were damaged from poor storage in the Tower of London, often by rats and mice leaving stains and even bite marks. Despite these challenges, the documents survived.

Before Mr Alford's research, scholars believed Cecil had only a few scattered spies. However, he discovered Cecil had a well-organised network of over 20 spies in cities like Lisbon, Calais, Brussels, Seville, Rome, Amsterdam, Scotland, Sweden, and other places. Mr Alford said, “He (Cecil) chose merchants because they travel, can read and write, speak European languages and have networks of their own.”