Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies

“I think I was probably the first scholar to take an interest in it,” said Alford. “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.”

He began scouring the archives for any paper which looked relevant and had “a little number in the corner” that matched the intelligencer’s number on the contents page. “I just had to hope that the edges of the paper hadn’t been torn. And because the manuscripts were so poorly kept before the 19th century – often stuffed into the chambers in the Tower of London – rats and mice got to some as well. Often, they were stained, sometimes you see teeth marks. It’s a miracle these papers survived at all.”

That's some top-notch historical research right there. There's something very satisfying about finding the exact document(s) you're looking for in a dusty corner of an archive. Also, intelligencer sounds way cooler than spy, almost like a DnD class.

Each agent was paid to secretly send coded reports to Cecil, who decrypted them using the individual, bespoke cypher in each of their files, which also contained a record of their payments and all their secret communications.

“There’s one crew of spies – two brothers – keeping an eye on the Atlantic coast, somewhere near Biarritz, to see if there are any Spanish ships sailing in a new armada or making military and naval preparations. They pretended they were shipping contraband goods between France and Spain, but actually they were going into ports and making reports on naval activity, counting ships and working out what was going on.”

These are such stereotypical spy things that they sound straight out of a movie.

Cool article, thanks for sharing!