All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil

"The author, in his acknowledgements, says it is not a biography as much as a portrait, and that is a fertile subject for analysis. It’s a portrait of Robert Cecil, the spymaster. That may be anachronistic, but the extraordinary thing about Robert Cecil, who followed his father as one of the chief ministers of Elizabeth I, was his amazing network of spies and informants. Stephen Alford, working from original sources, has redrawn the web and the spider at the centre of it, and shown how the Elizabethan state maintained itself against threats, both external and internal, through surveillance. Again, that’s a word that may seem out of time, but is highly relevant for an era of the surveillance of subversive activity in the British realm. It’s a very subtle, probing, interesting analysis of the way that a state is run, but also of how a person achieves primacy among a range of rivals and enemies, and sometimes allies, and remains at the centre of power until the very end of his life. He ended life as Marquis of Salisbury, still a family of influence and note in English life. It also shows how the tangled web of Elizabethan power politics affected the way that the state is run. This would be of immense, long-lasting importance from then on. There are also wonderful concrete details, the telling details, of where a person lives, how they furnish their house, celebrates the great events of their life. He vividly recreates the tapestry, at the centre of which is this extraordinary figure, Robert Cecil. I say ‘extraordinary.’ He is both extraordinary and ordinary, as many very senior civil servants are. Perhaps I should have said that it’s like the ur -Sir Humphrey, the civil servant, or the originatory figure that culminated in ‘M’ of the James Bond books. Well, I mustn’t give the impression that Stephen Alford likens his character to M, but we are talking about a surveillance state, and about the polite ruthlessness with which a civil service tends to be manipulated and institutionalised, especially when there are external threats to the state, as is clearly the case in Elizabethan England—and, one could also say, in 21st century Britain. So it may be frivolous, but not entirely irrelevant, to draw the line forward to M at the centre of his web."