The Watchers by Stephen Alford

Mirrour of Mutabilitie
:
    But at that time being very desirous to attain to some understanding in the languages, considering in time to come: I might reap thereby some commodity, since as yet my web of youthful time was not fully woven, and my wild oats required to be furrowed in a foreign ground, to satisfy the trifling toys [idle or foolish fancies] that daily more and more frequented my busied brain: yielded myself to God and good fortune, taking on the habit of a traveller.
    And so in the second half of 1578 Anthony Munday set off on his journey. He knew that he wanted to be a writer. Probably he had no idea that he would also become a spy.
    The story Munday told of his experiences in Rome came out in tantalizing instalments between 1579 and 1582. He had a gift for keeping the readers of his pamphlets guessing. Each part of the tale was a fresh story of derring-do. He called his account his ‘English Roman life’. In it he revealed the secrets of the English College in Rome, where about forty young men were being trained to return to England as priests of the Catholic faith. Munday knew that his Elizabethan readers would be horrified by what they read. Rome, as Munday described it, was a place of sin and danger; it was the heart of the enemy’s camp. Remembering back to what he and his friend Thomas Nowell had thoughtwhen they first arrived in the city, Munday wrote: ‘we might well judge Rome to be Hell itself’.
    The two young men had made that arrival at dusk on Sunday, 1 February 1579, lodging overnight at an
osteria
in the city. The following day they went to find the English College, ‘a house both large and fair’ on the Via Monserrato near the Castel Sante Angelo. As soon as they entered the college, students bustled round them, asking about the latest news from England. A man walked by, carrying dozens of wax candles, gifts from the Pope and blessed by him at high mass that day. It was Candlemas, the commemoration of the purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the presentation of Christ in the Temple. The candles, they were told, were signs of the Pope’s favour.
    The two young travellers were welcomed as pilgrims with eight days’ free lodging. They delivered letters from Paris to the rector of the college, Maurice Clenock (or Morys Clynnog), a Welshman in his early fifties, a graduate of the University of Oxford and a dabbler in plans for the Catholic invasion of England and Wales. Young Nowell and Munday must have been exhausted. The truth hiding behind Munday’s easy heroic narrative was hinted at by Robert Persons, a priest whom they would soon meet in the college. Persons wrote privately of two youths at first turned away from the seminary but eventually admitted because they ‘were like to perish in the streets for want’.
    Munday, however tired he was, had to think on his feet. It was the cost of hiding his true identity. The surname he was using, Hawley, was that of an English gentleman. Anthony was pretending to be his son. The scholars of the seminary, fresh from dinner, took Nowell to one side. But Munday was asked by a priest to walk with him in the garden. The priest, who knew young Master Hawley’s supposed father, asked why he was in Rome. He was not impressed by Munday’s answer. ‘Trust me sir,’ Munday said, ‘only for the desire I had to see it, that when I came home again, I might say, once in my life I have been at Rome.’
    As a gifted writer Munday had a great ear for dialogue. He also knew what his London readers wanted to hear, the horrors and conspiracies of Rome given a voice. So it is no surprise that in the college’s garden the priest denounced the heresy of ‘that proud usurpingJezebel’, Queen Elizabeth, likening her to the queen of Israel whose body (so the Old Testament tells us) was devoured by dogs: ‘I hope ere long the dogs shall tear her flesh, and those that be her props and