Review
------
Forget Le Carré, Deighton and the rest - this is more
enthralling than any modern fiction (Rupert Christiansen
Daily Telegraph)
Absorbing and closely documented ... his accounts of the
uning 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 (Keith Thomas 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
(Dan Jones 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 (Alan
Judd 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 (Helen
Castor 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 (Tracy
Borman 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 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)
About the Author
----------------
Stephen Alford is the author of the accled
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.