Ciphers, Disguise, and Invisible Ink: Tools of the Trade with Pete Langman & Nadine Akkerman
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Welcome to "SpyCast", the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week we'll explore some aspect of the past, present or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review so other listeners can find us. It will literally take less than a minute of your time and will really help us out. Coming up next on "SpyCast".
Nadine Akkerman: Sometimes these individuals were recruited from the prisons in London because they had such skills. The spies chiefs just said, Okay, why don't you use those skills working for us instead? [ Music ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: This week's episode is a journey back to the 16th century to explore the spies and tradecraft of the Elizabethan era. A time when spy masters like Sir Francis Walsingham were organizing some of the earliest forms of centralized intelligence in the world. This era is full of fascinating techniques and new and innovative forms of tradecraft. My guests are Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, authors of the new book, "Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade From Elizabeth I to the Restoration". From ciphers and codes to disguise and deception, this book covers it all, and the clever masterminds behind their early usage. In this episode we discuss spy masters of the Elizabethan era, techniques and forgeries, invisible links and seal making, the impact of spies on important historical events like the Spanish Armada, the connection between espionage and religious tension. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are "SpyCast". Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. [ Music ] Well, thanks ever so much for joining me to speak about your book, "Spycraft". Yeah, it's a pleasure to speak to you both.
Nadine Akkerman: Thank you for inviting us.
Peter Langman: Thank you.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Yeah, so I wondered if before we dig into the book and some of the things that you discuss, I found the figure of Arthur Gregory really, really fascinating. So he's one of the characters that you open the book with. So just as a little intro, can you just tell our listeners a little bit more about him? Who was he? Why is he significant, and what is his story? And, because I think that he's such a fascinating figure.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, we love Arthur Gregory, and he returns in almost every chapter of the book. And for us, he epitomizes the many individuals that we try to capture. We're writing about the dangerous trade, the world of espionage, but it's not so much the spies as the Arthur Gregory's of that world, the inventors. He is a man who invents a lot of spy techniques. Normally we don't really have names, but we were lucky to stumble upon Arthur Gregory and study his correspondence. And he gives us these little glimpses of all the secrets he invents for Sir Francis Walsingham and later other spy chiefs as well such as the Cecils. And yeah, he is fascinating because he is in a kind of back room to the spy world, so he's doubly invisible.
Peter Langman: We like to think of him as the early modern Q.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: From the James Bond movies.
Nadine Akkerman: Absolutely.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And what kind of techniques does he invent? Give our listeners a little bit more of an idea about some of the things that he comes up with.
Peter Langman: Well he invents all sorts of things. He works out a way to, or tries very hard to work out a way to, counterfeit seals efficiently and quickly. He works out ways of discovering different invisible inks, and he writes to Walt about several different invisible inks, saying, This is how this works, this is how this works, we can see this by this way. He also works out a way of copying cipher and letters and counterfeiting them very, very quickly. Which is quite a cunning thing, using basically an optical device that he seems to invent doing this. And as well as all that, he's working at closing and opening and closing letters imperceptibly allegedly, and he also designs various things for ships. So he designs weaponry, he says that he's worked out an explosive that's particularly efficient, and he also later on in his life gets paid to help design the defenses of the castle. So he kind of spreads himself around quite a bit. He's kind of a bit of a polymath on the inventor scale.
Nadine Akkerman: He's a mapmaker, a mathematician, he's an engineer. So he brags about his accomplishments without telling us exactly what he invented, so he just gives us glimpses of his skills. He's a fascinating character.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: In the book, you outline that if you were to walk into the room that he was in and look at all of the potions and devices and other things that he had lying around him, you could be mistaken to think that you had walked into an alchemist or a magician's laboratory or something. So I think that's quite interesting, the crossover between magic and espionage, which we can come on to discuss in a little bit. But I thought it'd be quite interesting now just to give our listeners a little bit of an understanding of the time period that we're talking about. So we're talking about from Elizabeth I up until the Restoration. So, could you just expand on that a little bit? About why this period, what's significant, and just help them understand this particular phase of the evolution of espionage that we're looking at.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, we're looking at about a century from the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, that's 1558, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. And that's quite a long period, but we've started looking at it because we wanted to follow the development from kind of amateur world until a world of semi-professionalism. And it's two periods basically within that period, two very different periods of espionage, starting with Elizabethan espionage, which is quite amateur. And you have several spy chiefs who are all competing with each other, are all rivals, you know, they all hate each other, and so they're protecting the information that they gather from their own spy networks. But they're definitely not sharing that information because they're competing for favor from their queen. And then later on, in a period when we have the civil wars starting in England and eventually Oliver Cromwell taking over, where you have really kind of one head of intelligence and these operatives, counter-espionage operatives, collaborating with each other and in one single room rather than spread all out over London. So it becomes much more centralized during this period.
Peter Langman: And I think also you have to remember that when Elizabeth comes to power, comes to the throne, she's just taken over from her now dead half-sister who was Catholic and also married to the King of Spain. So suddenly Elizabeth, who is Protestant, finds herself in a Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics, while the counter-revolutionists, counter-reformation is getting going. So she's beset by enemies, and of course very soon she arrests Mary Queen of Scots who is another Catholic who is also a rival for her throne. Because she has just pretty much as good a claim as she does and she's a cousin, so she knows that all around her there are people plotting her demise. So there's good reason to have people skirting around, looking at seeing who's plotting against her because there are lots of plots going on.
Nadine Akkerman: This is an age of suspicion. Everyone is spying on each other, and they're all constantly imagining plots. Some plots are real, but there is also a lot of suspicion going on this period.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And I think that you make an interesting point in the book when you say that counter to some of the popular conceptions of Elizabethan England, actually England was very isolated and alone, and it wasn't particularly strong. But, you know, nowadays it's perceived as this majestic bulwark of Protestantism. But it was a very fluid time within Europe, especially around the wars of religion. Can you just talk a little bit more about that, please?
Peter Langman: Push was to show how wonderful the Elizabethan world was, to actually present themselves as much more powerful than they were so that the opinion that everyone has of Elizabethan times now is absolutely purely a result of Elizabethan propaganda. This is what we could actually do, what the English could actually do. We had no territory, we had no colonies of any real description, we didn't have Jerusalem, so we were stuck in this tiny little island and what we were very good at was writing. So we had a lot of people who were writing about how wonderful the nation was, and this is the kind of thing that actually ends up pushing the Elizabethan time to this mythical golden age. And you'll find golden ages in every country. The Dutch have a golden age as well later on, but that is a little bit more golden than the Elizabethan golden age. And so the Elizabethan England is very isolated. The Spanish are wanting to conquer them. They are wanting to return them to Catholicism. The Armada is not just a kind of joke, this is something really quite serious and we're quite lucky to get away with that one. But we really, in England, we survived primarily by being an island, so it's more luck than judgment in a lot of ways, because we were quite weak.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: You mentioned the writing that took place during this era, so I just want to go on to discuss an important book that's published during this period which you mentioned. But before we get there, I'm just wondering what percentage of the population can read at this time period? Is it a minority? Is it a majority? If you don't know that's fine, but I'm just curious.
Nadine Akkerman: Well, the debate is still ongoing so people are discussing this. But about 70% of the men are still illiterate in the 17th century. If you think about women, that's a lower rate still, though the literacy amongst the elites and for instance big cities such as London is much higher. But it's certainly not that everybody is reading, definitely not.
Peter Langman: Yes, you also have to remember that reading and writing literacy are different things, so being able to read is a very different thing from being able to write as well, so.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, a lot of people were taught to read but could not write themselves. A lot of people worked with secretaries dictating their correspondence if they wanted to put something on paper. Often writing was a collaborative enterprise. So there are different kinds of literacy.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And I'm curious about the significance, if you can tell our listeners what's the significance of Giambattista della Porta's, tell me if I'm pronouncing this properly, "Magiae Naturalis", Natural Magic, how do you pronounce it, is that correct, and why is it significant?
Peter Langman: It's close enough as a pronunciation. "Natural Magic" is a very important book because in 1558 when it's published, the first edition's in Latin, the first English edition in English translation isn't for another century. There are translations into German and French before that. bBecause it's part of a tradition called the Book of Secrets, where basically people were writing down all these things and the ways of achieving effects, ways of showing off basically, ways of trying to understand the world through physics and through optics and through manipulating things. So the idea of magic and witchcraft are very, very different. So magic effectively basically means physics, means looking at things and working out how the natural world works by doing stuff. So you can present certain effects and say I've done this by using these lenses or putting these chemicals together. So it's all about understanding the world around you, and within it, it has an awful lot of recipes that are very useful for invisible inks. He also writes a book on cyphers, cryptology, cryptography called "DeFertivus". And so these are things that can be mined for useful information. But one of the problems with them is that people think that therefore everyone knows how to do everything, but actually what tends to do in della Porta's work, it tends to give you a basic idea of what kind of ingredients are involved and what kind of thing you have to do, but then you really have to work hard to make it work. It doesn't give you exact instructions. It doesn't say, you know, this many milligrams of this and then you add this for five minutes to that. It's something that you really have to experiment with. So, being able to go from the book to actually making some sort of effect was quite a serious bit of work, which is the whole point.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Help me understand the intellectual environment at this time because it's really, really fascinating to me. You know, this comes along, so natural magic, and the book that discusses natural magic to exert power through knowledge of the natural world and then there's, like, unnatural magic, the occult, you know, that kind of stuff. So it's this really interesting period where human beings are beginning to become more quote-unquote scientific, they're beginning to systematize the ways that they approach the natural world. But there's still quite a lot of crossover between I guess natural magic and unnatural magic. Although Isaac Newton comes along at the end of the time period you look at, he, you know, does occult studies and there's crossovers between people that are taught in the history of physics and people that are associated with the occult and black magic and so forth. So I'm just really interested, can you just tell us, like, this kind of intellectual environment that these people inhabit, what is it like? It's still a world of magic and God and, you know, monsters living in the sea and so forth. Like, yeah, just flesh it out for us, help our listeners understand the type of environment that they viewed when they looked at the world.
Peter Langman: That's a big question. It's a very eclectic environment.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Sorry, I --
Peter Langman: No, it's, so we'll do small problems first. It's a very eclectic environment.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Yeah, yeah --
Peter Langman: So, Newton's a really good example, because Newton, we all know, is the father of modern physics, but he also was an alchemist. To him, there was no difference. And more than that, his most, for him, the most important part of his works was not his physics work or Principia, "The Principia Mathematica", but actually his works on theology. And he produced I think three million, roughly three million words of theological writings which were the most important part of his work to him. And they worked alongside the mathematical works, because it all went to the same thing. It was all about working out how God worked and how the universe works and what rules and laws God had placed into the universe and into nature. And this is fundamental what everyone was trying to do. The idea of natural magic is that you, the understanding of causes and the causing of effects. So if you understand the cause, you can cause the effect. This is a very Baconian thing. So Francis Bacon comes around at the turn of the century and starts writing and people often call him the father of modern science. It's not really true, but he's a good example of actually, he calls the highest bit of knowledge what we would call physics or cosmology in effect, he calls it natural magic. He's just, he's very happy to use the word magic. As you say, it's very different from the idea of the occult. I mean, the occult, it also isn't quite witchcraft either. The occult just means occluded, it just means hidden. So, I mean, again, you've got occult things which are just things that are difficult to understand and difficult to extract from nature. So you have a lot of people who are trying to understand nature from all sorts of different directions. And some of them for us, like alchemy, seem absolutely crazy, but a lot of the heavy metal chemistry that was done in the 18th century was based on alchemical principles. It was done based on what alchemists had come up with before. So all of these things feed into what were working in the Enlightenment and the latest part of the Scientific Revolution. So it is just, everyone was doing everything and no one really made a great differentiation between these different parts. Though most people agreed that witchcraft was bad, because witchcraft was using evil spirits, and it was using things that you should not be messing with, to actually affect the situation around you and affect the world.
Nadine Akkerman: So yes, so we have della Porta being accused of witchcraft as well. So often some people just could not see the difference and thinking, Oh, if you can make something invisible, then you must be some kind of magician and you might be accused of witchcraft. So he was called to the Inquisition to explain himself what certain experiments he was doing, how he would accomplish certain things. And so he had to be very careful not to be accused of witchcraft and not to be tried as a witch. So it was a very thin line he had to walk.
Peter Langman: Absolutely. And I think, again, it's very important to remember that the Catholic Church was not this behemoth which refused all sorts of scientific inquiry. The idea of Galileo being persecuted by the Catholic Church in the way that everyone says, it just simply isn't true. The Catholic Church actually had some of the greatest scientists on earth at the time. It's just that the way that it conflicted with biblical readings was problematic, because the Bible was interpreted by theologians, not by any scientists. So when scientists like Galileo started saying, This is how you should interpret the Bible, they're just like, Hang on a second, this is not your gig here, this is our gig. You know, We're the theologians, we tell you how that works, and until you can prove that the earth goes round the sun, it doesn't. And at that point there was no proof for that, so the church was actually quite sensible and quite logical in that sense, bizarrely enough, though no one seems to believe it. [ Music ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: In the book, you refer to the men and women of this era of espionage as the dark artificers or artificers. And that's a really interesting term. Can you just unpack that a little bit for us, please?
Nadine Akkerman: It's Steven Shapin, a historian of the history of science, was talking about these artificers, these men, often men, who we don't really think about, but who were working on the equipment a proto-scientist would need, setting things ready in a kind of laboratory, working behind the scenes, collecting specimens to be studied, for instance. And we thought about the Arthur Gregorys of the world of espionage, and that's why we came up with the term "dark artifices", because it's a similar thing. You don't think about all the people who invented the techniques, who tried to work on them, to perfect them, to work from books like della Porta and making all these recipes before handing them over to the spy chiefs to help them in the spying world.
Peter Langman: One way of looking at it, I suppose, we always think of these artificers as like Beaker from the Muppets. They're the kind of the one on the side, the person who ends up getting blown up, or the person who no one really talks about. So you've got the kind of headline scientist who's the guy who's got the name with all these people running around him, who are the people getting hurt. For example, there was in the 1620s, Francis Bacon saw a demonstration by Cornelius Drebbel of what would basically become the first submarine. And he thought, and he saw a diving boat as well, and he thought, Just a minute, this is interesting. I wonder how that works. So he said, So I get a servant, so I stuck a servant in the bath and stuck a bucket on his head for three quarters of an hour to see what happened. And he said after three quarters of an hour, he started going a bit red and said I couldn't breathe so I let him out. So he's just constantly doing this sort of thing. But you never find out who the servant is.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: It's quite interesting like the case of Arthur Gregory, but tell us how he the era of Elizabeth I. So I'm thinking of Walsingham, you know, commonly taken although you put a question mark over the efficacy of the term, the spymaster of Elizabeth I. So how does Arthur Gregory connect to Thomas Phelippes and Francis Walsingham? And if you can just outline for our listeners, like, how they all connected to Elizabeth I and her reign.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, Sir Francis Walsingham is often described as the spy master of the period, which as you say is a bit of kind of anachronistic term. Because next to Walsingham, you had other spy chiefs such as the Cecils, father and son, but also the Earl of Essex. And they were all having their individual spy networks with men like Arthur Gregory, and Gregory offers his services to Walsingham and later the Cecils after Walsingham's death. He writes to Walsingham saying he wants to work for him, so he's trying to seek employment, so he is not a permanent employee of employee of these men, and he constantly has to beg for money and whether he can do the next job. So he's saying that he can do all these secret things that the spy chiefs would potentially be interested in. And he hopes that he would eventually get an office where he could just stay and do his work. He complains about his poor house and that he has to take care of an aging father and a growing family, and that he doesn't have enough money. At the end of his career, he has an office in the Tower of London, so in that way he's very successful and he gets a reward as well. So he's one of these individuals. He was probably an exception in being successful in getting a more permanent employment in this period. So they were looking for favor from spy chiefs, and these spy chiefs were looking for favor from their queens, so they're competing with each other. But also Arthur Gregory sees that there are a lot of rifles around him, so it's not explicit about his techniques. He is not putting pen to paper and saying, This is exactly how I counterfeit a seal. So he says that he's able to do it, but he will never say that is because I mixed mercury with some other ingredients. Because as soon as he would do so, Walsingham could simply replace him. So he's very careful and he's keeping his secrets close to his chest.
Peter Langman: Yes, I mean, Gregory had actually seen this happen in real time when he was doing some work around the Babington plot and whilst he needed someone to do some copying, instead of using him he used a scrivener called Peter Bales. And so you can see Gregory thinking, Just a minute, I've just been leapt over because someone else is more self-promoting than me. But again, with these spy chiefs, if you have to remember that if you hitch yourself to the wrong spy chief, you're really in trouble. So all those people who hitched themselves to Essex, though the Bacons managed to get away with it, were in trouble when Essex decided to rebel against Queen Elizabeth I. And it's interesting to note that a couple of years before that, Gregory had actually tried to get onto Essex's pay, but luckily Essex wasn't interested, so he ended up with the Cecils instead, which is a bit of a result really, I think.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So it's sort of like getting, it's not a perfect analogy, but it sounds a little bit like getting involved with the world of organized crime. You're entering a world where the stakes can potentially be deadly if you run afoul of power dynamics or shifting balances of power and so forth. So it's sort of a dangerous game to get involved in, is that fair?
Peter Langman: Well yes, I think the difference between organized crime and government is, you know, who's actually got control of the courts, right? They basically do the same thing, so I think that's probably quite the fair analogy. And everything a spy did at that point was basically illegal and if it wasn't illegal, it was immoral. So yes, I don't really see.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, spies are involved with bribery. They cheat and they lie, so it's immoral. And often there are things that are just illegal in other instances such as forgery of documents. Other people would get their ears clipped or their nose slit if they forged a document. And then if you are a spy, you are being asked to do that on the job. So it's a dangerous game, and the lines are very thin.
Peter Langman: Yes, losing is a bad thing. Being on the winning side is perfectly fine, being on the losing side is really not good.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Yeah, there's a great quote that you have in the book where opening letters and so forth is punishable by means of a fine and by the guilty party being, quote, "set upon the pillory in some open market, town or other open place, and they're to have both his ears cut off and also his nostrils to be slit and cut and seared with a hot iron, so they may remain for a perpetual note or mark of his falsehood." Not your best Tuesday if that happens to you, huh?
Peter Langman: There was one who, if I remember right, whose actual ear was nailed to the pillory. They took it and they just nailed him to it by his ears, just because they were just bored that day I suppose and wanted to do a bit more fun, but I don't know.
Nadine Akkerman: It's a brutal punishment for just a forgery of some documents. But of course then these people were sometimes recruited, and so that's why you see spies coming from all walks of life. So sometimes these individuals were recruited from the prisons in London because they had such skills. So then the spy chiefs just said, Okay, why don't you use those skills working for us instead.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So there's a fine line between criminality and espionage tradecraft.
Peter Langman: Yes and it's generally rubbed out, I think.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And Arthur Gregory as well, just to clarify it for our listeners, he excels in opening letters and forging seals and basically dealing with that whole stage of intercepting and reading letters, and then trying to reassemble them so that other parties don't know that they've been read. So this is kind of the area that he focuses on, right?
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, absolutely. He gained some fame during his lifetime. It's already mentioned in 1616 by William Candon in "The History of the Reign of Elizabeth I", and it's a line that all historians quote. So a lot of historians know the name Arthur Gregory, but they have never really thought to think what that actually means, because Candon says he is really an expert in sealing and refolding letters. And that sounds simple enough, but I think it's very important to be reminded that the letter in the 16th and 17th century was not a letter like we imagine letters to look like today. We probably imagine the gummed envelope when we think about letters now, but that was a 19th century invention. In this period, they would use the writing sheet to write a letter, and then they would fold that same sheet into a little envelope, so it became its own sending package, its own sending device. It's a technique we call letter locking. And just imagine that you could fold a letter in a thousand different ways. You need to think about origami birds. These were kind of intricate packages. And he could sort of refold these letters in a similar way and peek inside them and forge counterfeit seals, which was also a very special technique.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And is Arthur Gregory involved in the Babington plot, or the measures taken against the Babington plot? So the attempt to depose Elizabeth I and put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, is he involved in that?
Nadine Akkerman: Yeah, he pops up again when they sort of know that Mary Queen of Scots was plotting against Elizabeth I and the Babington plot is basically a famous plot to overthrow and assassinate Elizabeth and place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne and it's the most well-known plot because Mary Queen of Scots is then executed in the end. He's called in at the very end when a lot of documents need to be copied quite quickly and he, I think at that point he thinks of a technique. He watches Thomas Philippus, the code breaker who has to copy all these symbols and that just takes forever. And that's when he starts to think about, Okay, what if we had a technique coming close to almost a copying machine that could really help us copy documents quickly.
Peter Langman: Yes, and it seems that this is difficult to tell, but it seems at this point he actually designed something, he actually worked something out, works out the way to actually do it, because he always seems to be thinking on these terms. And Phelippes, of course, we have to remember that Phelippes learnt his trade on embassy, during the embassy of Sir Amis Paulette, who is also the keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots at the time. So all of these people are constantly interleaving with each other. And when Phelippes was in France, he was in France with Francis Bacon, and Francis Bacon also designed a very, what he said was, an unbreakable cipher. But the idea that Gregory came up with was about copying, about copying things quickly because they had to deal with a large volume of information at once, and they weren't sure at that point whether they were going to put it all back or were going to keep it. They ended up keeping everything obviously, because the next thing they would do was send it to a hire. But he's always thinking about these things and always trying to work out how he can make the whole process better. Because if he can make it better without letting anyone know how he's doing it, he's going to get more employment.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: So he's very much a freelancer looking for work.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes constantly, he's constantly saying, I can do this for you, first with Walsingham and then later with the Cecils. I am the best forger of handwriting, I can refold all your letters, I can copy them quickly, I can make a little cipher machines for you. He's constantly coming up with these new inventions. It's a bit like the mad scientist.
Peter Langman: And he also is regularly writing to them saying, Give me an office, give me a wage so I can be in the Tower all the time so that if any time I'm needed, I'm there ready and waiting so that you don't suddenly have to send a messenger out to me and I might be away or whatever. So he's just saying put me on the job, give me a give me a wage and give me an office, this is what he wants and constantly, which is something that doesn't really happen for another 40, 50 years, obviously not for him.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And I think it's quite interesting in the book when you point out that the boundary between, you just mentioned Phelippes and the boundary between diplomat, secretary, spy, these types of positions, it's pretty fluid at this time period. There's not the diplomatic corps over here and MI6 and CIA over there. There's crossover and people that work for the Queen are also doing diplomacy and also doing some spying, and it's a much more, yeah, the job title if it was published on LinkedIn would be a bit more broad-ranging than what you would see today, right?
Nadine Akkerman: Oh absolutely. The term spy is as slippery as the individuals it tries to describe. You have ambassadors being called, also called in this period honorable spies, which also implies there is such a thing as a dishonorable spy as well. So it's, you have secretaries, and secretaries are not mere copiers. The term says they are the "keeper of secrets". So it's in their, in the definition itself that they too deal with matters of secrecy. I think the cultural historian Peter Berg says there's no such thing as a spy in this period. There's a lot of spying, but there's no such thing as a spy.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: I like that. And a couple of Roberts pop up in the book quite frequently. So Robert Cecil and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, can you just briefly tell our two listeners a little bit more about them and why they matter for this story?
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, well, Robert Cecil is the son of William Cecil, Lord Burley, and he just becomes one of these other spy chiefs who basically compete with Walsingham at the time. And Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, is a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, who also signs letters saying that he is her eyes, using a kind of little emotical sign in his letters with eyes as well. So he also wants to spy for her. So they all are saying, We can provide you with proper information. And Robert Cecil, like Walsingham, is Secretary of State at a certain point. So there, so you see that Secretaries of State also become responsible for gathering intelligence. So I guess that these men also sort of show there's no such thing as one spy master. It's a much more complicated world. [ Music ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: I think it would be quite interesting as well to talk about the gunpowder plot. So that happens during this period, and The Spanish Armada as well. Do some of the figures that we've spoke about so far, Robert Cecil, Robert Dudley, Arthur Gregory, Phelippes, do any, are they all involved in either The Spanish Armada or the gunpowder plot?
Peter Langman: Well intrinsically yes. Phelippes is well known at this point for having decoded one of the Spanish letters about the Armada. Though what no one seems to pay attention to is that he says it took him 20 days to do it. It's not something that was done overnight. So he had a very, how important it was and actually what happened to the Armada again is another match entirely, but certainly he was known for having provided great service at this point. And of course he provided even greater service during the Babington plot, which is one of the reasons that the Armada was pushed ahead to when it took place anyway, because the Spanish were so incensed that they'd chopped off Mary's head. The gunpowder plot, of course a bunch of these people were either dead or not really in circulation by this point. But during the aftermath of it, Arthur Gregory was taken out of retirement because they needed his special skills again. So while he wasn't used in the initial investigation, when they were trying, when they'd actually caught the main ringleaders of it, they were, when the government were basically thinking, Is this any bigger? Do we, is there, are there all these tendrils everywhere? We need to find out. He was used in this, in a kind of very complicated intelligence sting operation, which involves taking people in prison and making sure they communicated with each other, and then intercepting all their letters. And he was involved in this because he had the ability to copy letters that were written in invisible ink, which of course is, you know, as you can imagine, not the easiest thing to do.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And just for our listeners that might not be familiar, The Spanish Armada, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but The Spanish Armada 1588, and the bottom line is it's this huge fleet of Spanish ships that attempt to invade England, but because of the weather and some other reasons, it's unsuccessful and a lot of the fleet is wrecked. Is that fair, or feel free to, like, paraphrase that and if you know better terms.
Peter Langman: Fundamentally. Certainly the idea of what actually happened with the Armada kind of changes as people on a regular basis, but the general thinking now is that yes, it was partially the weather, partially the Spanish being too keen to do it at the wrong time when they weren't really ready, and also that our naval tactics were a lot better suited to the war that was about to be fought. So all of these things that happened together meant that the idea of invading England, luckily for the English, didn't work out very well. But there was, I mean by 1603, 1604 there were, you know, rumors that another Armada was being organized. So the idea of an Armada never really, was that 1613?
Nadine Akkerman: 1613.
Peter Langman: 1613. I was only a decade off. But, I mean, this fear continues. So they're always, everyone's always worried about the Spanish because the Spanish have so much money because of all the South American gold they've nicked.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And it's quite interesting, we've discussed letters a few times and I think it's easy to overlook from the modern vantage point the importance the letters played in this period, which you discuss in the book. Because apart from word of mouth, this is, like, almost the only form of communicating from one person to another.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, absolutely, the humble letter really is the only means of communication over long distance, apart from using a private bearer, which is much more expensive and has its own problems. You only have this one communication device. So it's the one communication device that everyone tries to manipulate and everyone is focused upon. And you see at the end of the period in the book, around the 1650s, the way they are making the Secret Service, if you can call it that, more professional is by founding the post office. So the post office is founded not to deliver people's mail, but to intercept people's mail and to read messages. All the letters are being funneled through London so they can quickly be opened and resealed. So it's really the device that everyone focuses on in this period.
Peter Langman: Yes, and as a result of that, the really serious battles in espionage were fought basically on the letter front. Because this is where the information, because having control over the information really was what was important. So you could win or lose just by your ability to manipulate these techniques.
Nadine Akkerman: Of course there's eavesdropping, but even then you need to communicate that information to your spy chief. So you need to put pen to paper and write your message. So you need to be able to manipulate that particular piece of paper in the best possible way.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And I'm sure that you've been asked this several times, but because of the time period this takes place in, is Shakespeare in any way part of the story? Maybe not, or maybe in some of the plays that he puts on? Or, I think it could be interesting to even discuss Christopher Marlowe, who as I understand it is rumored to have been a spy. You know, as scholars of this period, is that true? Yeah, just very briefly on Elizabethan literature, is there any kind of connection to that and this world of natural magic?
Peter Langman: I think that there's several. I think the idea that Marlowe was a spy is pretty much accepted. Shakespeare, we have no evidence particularly that he was a spy, but if you look at "Hamlet", the whole play is based on surveillance, it's all about surveillance, as is "Much Ado About Nothing". It's all about people overhearing things and noting what each other is saying and then acting intelligently or otherwise based on what information they had gleaned, whether that information is good or not. There is a kind of Shakespearean aspect in some ways that later on in the century where when during the Civil War, when many Royalists are trying to escape from after battles that have gone wrong, especially Charles II, they dress up as women. This is becoming quite common at this point. It seems to be the best way, they think, to actually escape is to become a woman and so no one will pay any attention to them. Which of course is a very Shakespearean, it's entirely "Twelfth Night", all over again, isn't it? So that's certainly one thing. And the idea of spying and secrecy is shown through Francis Bacon's works. I mean, he talks an awful lot about spying, about merchants and spies. And he writes the book, I think, called "New Atlantis", which again is based on surveillance from a distant time which is totally and utterly unknown by the people in Europe. So yes, these things, these ideas get everywhere.
Nadine Akkerman: Ben Johnson also worked as a spy or operated as a spy as well, so that's how it comes back into his plays as well. But that is also accepted.
Peter Langman: Yes, absolutely. And the idea of cryptography and cryptology didn't come about because of it, but it was very closely connected with the idea that words had meanings beyond meaning, so words can actually make things occur. The idea that you go back to the kind of the biblical idea of language where in the Garden of Eden, Adam saw an animal, called it a name, and that was it, that was what it actually was, it was the essence of the animal in the name. So the idea of what you can communicate through words beyond the actual word itself is something that's very, very seriously important for cryptology.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And tell us a little bit, just as we get towards the end of the interview, tell us a little bit more about the idea of the black chamber, which comes up in the book a few times and what was a black chamber, and tell us a lot about more about it.
Nadine Akkerman: When Oliver Cromwell thought about founding the post office, he basically started a black chamber. You need to imagine 10 men and hopefully a couple of women. We knew that on the continent a lot of women were involved, but we haven't found them in the black chamber in England. But they were sitting around a table and each had their own assorted task. One would be specialized in refolding letters. Another one would focus on counterfeit seals. You had linguists there who could translate letters. You had your code breakers who could decode letters. And people could reseal the documents really quickly, could copy them. So black chamber is really kind of a production line. And we see them popping up all over Europe quite later in the century and they become known as cabinet noirs. But they started quite early on the continent in Brussels with a postmistress called Alexandrine, who was also responsible for the post to and from England, from the continent to England. And it is that kind of thing that Cromwell copies using John Thurloe as his spy chief, where it becomes the production line.
Peter Langman: Yes, it's very much turning into from individual spies doing individual spy things, to a kind of bureaucratic way of doing espionage, which, of course, is the way that most espionage services work now. There are very few people on the front line, most of them are analysts, and that's kind of what was happening there. Most people are intercepting things like at Bletchley Park, you've got all these letters, they were intercepting them all, were checking them all, and then sending them on their way. So we're getting all this information which we can then cross-reference and manipulate as we choose.
Nadine Akkerman: Yeah, if you think back at the beginning of this period, you have Walsingham who, if he needs a document forged, he first goes to Arthur Gregory to do a bit of forgery of handwriting. But if that letter then also is full of cipher symbols he needs to bring that same letter to Thomas Phelippes who's perhaps on the other side of London. So it's a bit kind of cumbersome and it takes a long time, whereas if you have these men in the same room, things can be done much more quickly and time is really of the essence. But it's no good sort of breaking a code and then telling you that the Queen would be assassinated in two hours' time. So, or time is the worst enemy of a counter-espionage agent.
Peter Langman: Yeah I mean it's interesting also to note what you're saying about Phelippes, about finding Phelippes, at one point he was in prison and they were still going to him. So that he was actually put into prison for debt, and when they needed something decoded they would take it to him and that's actually seemed quite convenient. But maybe this is when they started to realize that having people in the same place was quite useful. Except that it was unfortunately for Phelippes, it was prison. He wasn't very happy about that, obviously.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: I'm just wondering if you, when you look at the current world of espionage and intelligence, do you see commonality with this earlier era or is it just so completely different that you would say it's a different universe, you have to understand it completely on its own terms? I'm just trying to get a sense of, like, how the modern era would relate to the era that you study in the book and vice versa?
Peter Langman: I don't, I mean, I know nothing about modern spying. I'm not a spy, but as far as I can tell --
Nadine Akkerman: As far as we know.
Peter Langman: As far as I'm going to admit, I think that there's an awful lot of overlap, because what it looks like with modern espionage, is it was all a matter of interpretation of data. It's a matter of capturing data, interpreting data, and analyzing data. And that's fundamentally what started to happen. And it was happening right at the beginning, it just happens on a more industrial and bureaucratic scale by the end of this period. So I think to a degree you see the kind of birth of modern espionage maybe in this end period, just in those few years where the black chamber was operating in interregnum England. Even though it kind of goes back to the way it was before a little bit, for that little period you see this kind of bureaucratic almost like GCHQ, just a small version of it.
Nadine Akkerman: Yes, letter locking is just the first instance of document security. It's the way our emails are now still decrypted and code breaking is still based on mathematical analysis and frequency analysis.
Peter Langman: As it was then.
Nadine Akkerman: As it was then. So some, there are similar principles operating even though we live in a very different world, of course.
Peter Langman: And we still recently have had the Russians poisoning people in Salisbury. I mean, just a few years ago in England there was that poisoning where the Russians decided to put one of the, then there's a couple of times with polonium and with, I can't remember, was it ricin the other one? But, I mean, it's the same kind of thing, it's using poison to assassinate people that you don't like. It's also part of the game, and that was happening back then too, so that has always happened.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: And just to close out, Giambattista's "Natural Magic", would it be an interesting read for our listeners? Should they go to Amazon and buy it, or is it kind of a thousand pages, very dry and weighty, or apart from buying your book, would you encourage them to have a look at that one?
Nadine Akkerman: I would definitely encourage people to have a look even though it's a very long piece of work. But the thing is that there's still so much to be discovered if you look at all these recipes, and just sort of find out what were they actually doing. I think that was something that surprised us most, when we started to experiment, remake some of these recipes that weren't poisonous. So people of course need to watch out that they don't start to use quicksilver. But if there are ingredients that you can use, it's quite telling to actually see how you fake a seal to make your own cast. So there's a lot of fun to be discovered in della Porta, absolutely.
Peter Langman: And also it's very neatly organized by number, so you can find things very easily, and it's all kind of like you have chapters on making things with light, and you have chapters on making things with mirrors, and you have chapters on faking handwriting, all this kind of stuff so it's really and brewing and all sorts of stuff, so it is quite fun.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Wow. Well this has been really, really amazing to speak to you both and yeah, congratulations on the book. Like I say, it's very well written and I love the illustrations and it's, yeah, it was a great book.
Peter Langman: Thank you very much.
Nadine Akkerman: Thank you. [ Music ]
Dr. Andrew Hammond: Thanks for listening to this episode of "SpyCast". Please follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please tell your friends and loved ones. Please also consider leaving us a five-star review. Coming up next week on "SpyCast".
Speaker 1: My most recent role at the CIA was as Deputy Director for Digital Innovation, and that is a role where I led one of the five directorates that comprise the CIA.
Dr. Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org, or on x @intlspycast. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com/ podcast/spycast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes and full transcripts. I'm your host, Andrew Hammond, my podcast content partner is Erin Dietrick. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughn III, Emily Coletta, Emily Rens, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tre Hester and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage-related artifacts, The International Spy Museum. [ Music ]
