https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3241194.html

The late great John Bossy was a family friend, and my sister's godfather; his best book is still Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, but towards the end of his career he achieved a remarkable coup of winning both the Wolfson History Prize and the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which examined the connections between the Renaissance philosopher and the murky world of espionage in Elizabethan London. This short, dense book concerns one particular wrinkle of the wider story of which Giordano Bruno was also part - identifying the individual who at a crucial moment stole the French ambassador's correspondence and passed it to the agents of Queen Elizabeth.

I came to this soon after reading the story of Alexander Wilson, and it is salutary to reflect on how much intelligence-gathering had changed across the centuries. What we can see of the Elizabethan world is based very much on the transmission of written records; the nascent bureaucracy of the state required hard copies, as it were. Obviously the whispered conversations do not survive, but Bossy feels pretty confident that by putting all the pieces together - and allowing for various mis-dating of key documents over time - he is able to give us a picture of what was happening in and around the French embassy in London in the 1580s, and who it was that exposed the ambassador's secrets.

Having said that, this is a book where the trees are more important than the forest, and I'd have liked a few more signposts along the way to remind us of why the story is important. It's all there, but one has to dig for it a bit, and I think the book needs to be taken as a close sequel to Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which I read a very long time ago. ( )

Like Bossy's earlier work, a bit too dense to be readable and too speculative to be interesting. But I very much like how Bossy lays out his intellectual process for the reader, at the very least, and his revisitations of earlier conclusions. ( )

In the 1580's, Walsingham's spy operations somehow gained access to the correspondence of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière. In this book and its earlier companion to Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, Bossy has attempted to determine the identities of the agents involved.

I liked this book much better than the earlier one. It is still a very scholarly work, with copies of original documents appended, but the writing is much clearer and livelier. In addition, Bossy has translated foreign language quotes. I am also more convinced of his conclusions. Bossy seems to really sympathize with Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissière, who seems very likable and took the fall for the leaks in his embassy.

Bossy also revisits the vexed issue of William Parry, who was at one time claimed to be working for the English, and at another time executed for plotting against them. I felt that he handled it very poorly in his other book, but it was much better explained here. It is still not entirely clear, but that apparently isn't for lack of digging by Bossy.

He seems to have backed off a little on his identification of 'Fagot' as Giordano Bruno, and he is also less harsh towards the English, especially the intelligence community. Whether the reader finds these improvements or not is best left to them.

I would recommend this to people interested in Elizabethan intelligence work, especially Walsingham. Readers may be interested to know that the two books form part of the basis for the thriller Prophecy by S. J. Parris (i.e. Stephanie Merritt) ( )