Stephen Alford brilliantly evokes a time of surveillance, paranoia, blackmail, plots and torture, when no-one could be trusted, and a single mistake could have changed England's history forever.
Stephen Alford is the author of the acclaimed biography Burghley- William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for fifteen years at Cambridge University, where he was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King's College. He is now Professor of Early Modern British History in the University of Leeds.
Forget Le Carré, Deighton and the rest - this is more enthralling
than any modern spy fiction
*Daily Telegraph*
Absorbing and closely documented ... his accounts of the unmasking
of the Throckmorton and Babington plots are full and gripping, and
he throws much light on the secret agents who exposed these and
similar conspiracies ... Alford vividly evokes this murky world of
codes, ciphers, invisible ink, intercepted letters, aliases,
disguises, forgeries and instructions to burn after reading ...
flowing narrative [and] crisp judments ... engrossing
*Guardian*
Alford brings these men, their worlds and the unfortunate victims
of their espionage vividly out of the shadows. Their interlocking
biographies and adventures combine to produce a portrait of a
mid-to-late Elizabethan England that was ruled by Walsingham's
maxim: "There is less danger in fearing too much than too little"
... [Alford] has brought a dash of le Carré to the 16th century
*Times Book of the Week*
Alford paints a vivid and staggeringly well-researched portrait of
the sinister side of Elizabethan England ... This is a spectacular
book. It sheds new light on plots that most historians have ceased
to explore and brings less famous conspiracies to the attention of
the general reading public
*Herald*
Fascinating ... If you want to know the inside story of this
struggle, the dark heart of calculation and the fight for survival,
then this is the book to read. I know no better
*Spectator*
An enthralling account of the murky shadow-world of Elizabethan
espionage ... The fascination of Alford's book ... lies in its
focus on the worker bees in the intelligence hive. He has delved
deep into encrypted archives to discover the lengths to which
Elizabethan Englishmen were prepared to go to destroy their queen,
or to defend her - and one of the surprises of a story full of
dizzying twists is quite how many of them ended up attempting to do
both ... In a bravura piece of counterfactual storytelling, Alford
describes the moment in an imagined 1586 when one of the many plots
to assassinate Elizabeth finally succeeded ... The heart of the
Tudor state, as Alford compellingly shows, is entirely human in its
darkness
*Times Higher Education*
The Watchers ... provides a genuine - and compelling - reappraisal
of one of the most studied periods in English history: the reign of
Elizabeth I. In exploring the world (or underworld) of Elizabethan
espionage, Alford takes us on a darker, more disturbing and
arguably more fascinating journey through the Elizabethan era than
any other historian of the period ... [He] begins by taking the
reader through a terrifyingly dramatic account of an assassination
attempt in 1586, which leaves Queen Elizabeth mortally wounded ...
It is an imaginary, but startlingly real scenario ... By telling it
here, Alford sets the scene perfectly for the rest of the
narrative, putting the reader in the mindset of the Virgin Queen's
paranoid ministers ... a fascinating cast of characters ...
engaging and perfectly pitched narrative ... Alford weaves together
the bewilderingly complex threads of plots and counterplots so
skilfully that as a reader you are never left floundering
*BBC History Magazine*
Alford ... has delved deeply into 16th-century archives to unearth
a history of the dark underside to the Elizabethan golden age - a
page-turning tale of assassination plots, torture, and
espionage
*Publishers Weekly*
An intimate and revealing exploration of the men who did the
Elizabethan security state's dirty work. Lifting the lid on the
Protestant-Catholic 'cold war' of the late sixteenth century,
Stephen Alford sifts the sources with a forensic eye, bringing to
life the motley collection of self-interested chancers and
drifters, religious and political zealots who watched each other in
the streets of London, Paris and Rome. Leading us into the dark
corners, safe houses and interrogation chambers of this twilight
world, The Watchers paints a fascinating picture of the vast and
nebulous threat facing Elizabethan England - and its determination
to deal with that threat by any means necessary
*Thomas Penn, author of WINTER KING*
Detailed and diligently researched
*Sunday Times*
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