ESPIONAGE

ESPIONAGE. Early modern Europeans believed spying to be a necessary complement to both warfare and effective government. At home governments were continually on the lookout for dangerous opinions and plotting by their subjects. In dealing with foreign powers, they needed information on opponents' plans and resources: the sizes and movements of their armies, the state of their fortifications, the funds they had available. When campaigning in unfamiliar territory, generals needed informants who could describe local geography and alert them to its dangers and possibilities. All governments sought to provoke dissension among their enemies, encouraging rebellions and suborning rival commanders whenever possible, and as wars wound down, each combatant needed to know as much as possible about what the others would accept in an eventual peace treaty. After about 1650, as governments became more alert to the economic components of power, they also sought a better understanding of the economic conditions of their rivals.

MOTIVES AND PATTERNS OF ACTION

It has not been easy for historians to sort out the complex patterns of espionage that responded to these needs. Documentation concerning spying is inevitably difficult to interpret, and the best studies of early modern espionage have been close examinations of specific cases rather than general histories. Nonetheless, these case studies have established some elements of a general history of early modern espionage. They have shown, first, the remarkable range of opportunities that governments had for recruiting foreign informants at all levels of society. Before about 1650, ideas of patriotism and national loyalty remained weak, and many aristocrats held on to medieval ideas of their political autonomy; when aristocrats believed the state had mistreated them, it was often possible for a foreign government to secure their services. In 1587–1588 the English ambassador to France (a high aristocrat and relative of Queen Elizabeth I [ruled 1558–1603]) used his position to pass English secrets to Spain and send home misleading information about Spanish intentions—this as Spain was preparing to invade England. The ambassador was moved partly by greed and partly by the belief that he had been slighted in his pursuit of influence at court. Fifty years later the Spanish succeeded in securing the services of Henri Coeffier-Ruzé d'Effiat, marquis de Cinq-Mars (1620–1642), a favorite courtier (and possibly a lover) of the French king Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643). Cinq-Mars was moved principally by ambition for a larger political role, which he found blocked by Cardinal Richelieu's (1585–1642) domination of French politics. Even when not moved by greed or ambition, aristocrats were logical targets for espionage efforts. Many had familial connections in other countries, creating divided loyalties and the frequent exchange of information, and it proved easy for well-dressed adventurers to make friendships in the highest social circles and to acquire political secrets in the process.

Farther down the social scale, there were other opportunities for recruiting spies. Political and military leaders were always surrounded by crowds of servants, secretaries, and dependents, many of them poorly paid yet with constant access to important documents. Presumably it was some such source that made possible the immediate diffusion of detailed plans for the Spanish Armada as it prepared to invade Britain. The Spanish government understood the value of these plans and went to great lengths to keep them secret. Yet in 1586 one set of plans reached London within weeks of being drafted, and in 1588, as the armada was about to sail, illicit copies of its final arrangements reached pro-Spanish governments in Florence, Venice, and Rome. Merchants were another crucial source of information. Even the most savage early modern warfare rarely interrupted commercial relations between the combatants, allowing merchants to report regularly on ship movements, public opinion, and a variety of other topics of interest to rival governments. Indeed such reporting scarcely differed from the news reports that merchants drew up as part of their normal business practices. Among the peasantry, especially in border areas long used to smuggling, military commanders easily recruited guides to lead their troops through unfamiliar terrain. At these levels valuable information might cost governments very little money. Whereas it might cost huge sums to bribe important aristocrats, secretaries, merchants, and peasants were ready to supply information for the equivalent of a few days' wages.

GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION

Because information was both so necessary and so readily available, spying remained a private enterprise through the eighteenth century; lords, generals, and politicians all paid for spies who reported directly to them. But over the period espionage services tended to become more centralized in a few government offices, where greater control could be exercised over their activities and greater professionalism could be enforced. In England, Elizabeth I's secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532–1590) established a full-scale espionage service to deal with the Spanish threat. He had agents working throughout Europe and specialized messengers to collect their information. In Louis XIV's (ruled 1643–1715) France also, it came to be understood that espionage services reported to the secretary of state for foreign affairs. Techniques also were marked by this trend toward professionalization. Fourteenth-century governments already used cyphers and codes to keep their messages secret, and in 1466 the Florentine polymath Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) invented a cypher disk system that remained the basis for cryptography through the nineteenth century. The first printed book devoted to coded messages appeared in 1518, and later sixteenth-century publications spread advanced versions of these techniques throughout Europe. In turn governments devoted more resources to decoding one another's messages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they systematically opened diplomatic mail, copied it, and set trained specialists to decoding the contents. During the short span of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), Britain accumulated at least twenty-seven large volumes of messages intercepted from other powers.

In establishing their networks, spymasters were aided by the growing assumption that governments should maintain representatives in one another's capitals. Permanent embassies were first employed by the Italian states of the fifteenth century; after 1500 the practice was taken up in northern Europe in response to the intensification of international rivalries during these years. Each country's embassy formed a pole around which spies clustered. Ambassadors of course were formally instructed to learn as much as possible about the country they resided in and were ready to bribe locals for that purpose. But host countries also acquired information from embassy staffs. In late-sixteenth-century London the wandering Italian philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) ingratiated himself with the Spanish ambassador, even taking up lodging in the ambassador's residence. He used this intimacy to uncover networks of Catholic missionaries in Britain, whom he promptly named to the English authorities.

Bruno's example illustrates the complex motives that might underlie early modern espionage. Most spies acted from self-interest, but Bruno and many others saw themselves as combatants in the great religious struggles that followed the Protestant Reformation. In Bruno's case this meant primarily hatred of the Catholic Church, which had persecuted him for heresy and would eventually have him burned at the stake in 1600, and a commitment to thwarting Catholic regimes wherever possible. After 1685, when Louis XIV expelled about 300,000 Protestants from his domains, France replaced Spain as the most visible threat to Protestantism's existence. In the face of these attempts at Catholic hegemony, religious exiles accepted the risks that spying entailed because of their sense that they were participants in a great ideological struggle against evil opponents. From his Dutch exile, the Calvinist theology professor Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713) organized a network of spies to observe French ports and sought to encourage Protestant rebellion within France itself. (In turn the French government succeeded in placing an informer within this group and learned about most of its doings.) Jewish exiles, forced to leave Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1580, were another group of potential informants, especially useful because many of them had contacts across Europe.

Because so much early modern European warfare concerned religion and because fomenting rebellion abroad was a normal tool of foreign policy, governments did not distinguish clearly between internal and external espionage. All maintained significant numbers of police spies to report on the opinions and doings of their own populations. The police spies of eighteenth-century Paris accumulated an enormous documentation on the "bad opinions" they overheard in taverns and other public spaces; such reports of disaffection commonly led to arrests and lengthy imprisonments. In Spain and Italy governmental policing of this kind was reinforced by the inquisitorial activities of the Catholic Church. In the late sixteenth century the Spanish Inquisition maintained a staff of about twenty thousand salaried "familiars" charged with collecting information on their neighbors' opinions and practices.

How much did all this activity matter for the course of European international politics? For individuals the consequences of espionage might be dire. Walsingham's spies entrapped numerous Catholic plotters, many of whom were executed after being tortured to name accomplices. Walsingham's ability to intercept and decipher their correspondence with Mary Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots; ruled 1542–1587) ensured her execution and thus had implications for British high politics. In the late seventeenth century, however, there developed something of an espionage stalemate among the European states. All governments had specialists proficient in code breaking and information gathering, and none gained much tactical advantage from them. Even earlier, their espionage successes had confronted states with another paradox: they now often found themselves burdened with too much information without the capacity to organize it and act on it effectively.

See also Diplomacy; Inquisition; Military; State and Bureaucracy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bély, Lucien. Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV. Paris, 1990.

Bossy, John. Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. New Haven and London, 1991.

Haynes, Alan. Invisible Power: The Elizabethan Secret Services, 1570–1603. Wolfeboro Falls, N.H., 1992.

Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. New York, 1967.

Parker, Geoffrey. The Grand Strategy of Philip II. New Haven and London, 1998.

Read, Conyers. Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth. Cambridge, Mass., 1925.

Thompson, J. W., and S. K. Padover. Secret Diplomacy: A Record of Espionage and Double-Dealing, 1500–1815. London, 1937.

JONATHAN DEWALD