The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (51 page)

His father pushed him to train as a
goldsmith, a trade ‘the most genteel of any in the mechanic way’. Goldsmiths
were already rudimentary bankers, taking custody of other people’s silver and gold
plate, which could easily be sold, turning foreign coins into local cash sometimes by
melting them down, so rich merchants were the very best kind of friend; Verstegan
arranged to know grandees, to be associated with Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded the
London Exchange. He then stepped up to being a gentleman himself: he wrote. He dedicated
his first book to Gresham, a travel guide to Europe which he mostly stole from a German
book; he added a guide to Catholic feast days, a list that was officially banned in
England, but which he said was a wholesome and useful tool for travellers to work out
dates for fairs and holidays.

That couldn’t last, at least not in
the Protestant England of Elizabeth. Even the friends of Sir Thomas Gresham himself were
learning compulsory discretion; Martin de la Faille, son of one of the richest merchant
houses in Antwerp, was told by his father that it was far too dangerous to handle
political letters any more. Verstegan knew about arrests and executions, about the
forbidden missions to convert or hold the English and the sudden escapes abroad of the
devout, and he didn’t seem to care. He was pulled in ‘for religion’
and imprisoned for a couple of days in the small, dank City prison that usually held
debtors and the occasional martyr; the pretext was that the man who printed his travel
guide had also printed a book of ‘Spiritual Consolation’. Those days had no
effect. Verstegan printed and published a pamphlet on the execution of the Jesuit Edmund
Campion, which
tactlessly quoted the Book of
Revelations. In it the queen’s justice was insulted, and the queen herself linked
indirectly to the Whore of Babylon.

Men went to the gallows for printing such a
text. When Verstegan was arrested one more time he knew he had to run. He broke out of
England and got across to France; for a while he was in Rouen as a propagandist in the
cause of the English Catholic martyrs. This won him friends and infuriated the English
ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, who wrote home to say: ‘I would lose all my
credit but I would bring the Englishman to the gallows, to teach all others by him to be
honester men to their country.’ The papal nuncio intervened, sprang Verstegan from
jail and sent him on to Rome, where his cardinal contact rather tetchily said the Pope
couldn’t be expected to support every Englishman who managed to get to Rome.

Somehow he tacked back to northern France,
but he knew he had to head for Antwerp even if the city was under siege. He had to be at
the heart of the printing trade, which was the heart of the trade in information.

His prospects were good. The Spanish relied
on their diplomats to report what was happening in enemy England, but their embassies
were shut down in wartime. A private intelligence service could fill the gap, and spend
a great deal of Spanish money. Even so, life was not easy for Verstegan. The money from
Madrid did arrive, but not often and not when it was expected. He opened an account to
buy books from the great publisher Plantin in March 1587, and handed over the first cash
sixteen years later in April 1603. ‘Good patient Job,’ he wrote, ‘lost
only all that he had, but he was not molested for payment of that which he did not
have.’

He published an extraordinary work – the
Theatre of Cruelties
, one more illustrated book of martyrs but this time
all of them recent and most of them in England, a few in Ireland, some in France and the
Netherlands, and Mary, Queen of Scots, about to be despatched by an axeman who is almost
dancing with the joy of it all. He showed decent citizens, starched and ruffed, being
escorted out of their ransacked homes. A horse is being persuaded to eat corn out of a
priest’s guts. Bishops have their feet held in the fire, saintly ladies are
crushed
under weight after weight, ears are
cut off, the lights torn out of bodies, and figures in cassocks hang in mid-air from
gallows: the book is truly sensational. It suited Catholic Antwerp, battered as it was,
to know there was such cruelty somewhere else.
⁴⁴

That was only the start of Verstegan’s
work. The Jesuits were back in England, disguised because it was illegal to preach or
convert in a country disturbed by Catholic resistance and Catholic enemies, and worrying
out loud that priests might turn worldly since they could not wear the protection of
their clerical dress. They needed books, information, money, propaganda and contacts.
They needed agents, and the agents’ business was ‘brocage and
spierie’, as the Catholic poet Anthony Copley said – fixing and spying.

Verstegan dealt with the skippers who
smuggled priests and books, found passports for anyone who needed them, published their
works and missals where it was legal and made sure they reached England where they were
illegal. He was lucky that he was moving books over the sea and not overland; it was far
too easy to search carts and carriages at every frontier. Even barges on the inland
waterways were not safe; one bargeload of Protestant books, seized between Geneva and
Paris, took eight booksellers almost a week to inventory, and then suppress. It helped
to have diplomatic backing, however indirect; the cook and valet of the French
ambassador in London had a busy trade importing illegal books and sending back, in
return, the better class of any church furnishings they could salvage.

Otherwise, printed pages were shuffled into
heaps of white paper, or rolled and stuffed into barrels; whole books were buried in
loads of raw cloth or raw fibres. They often had to be hidden as they were loaded on
board because in some Netherlands ports the Scots merchants were particularly keen on
stopping seditious books at source. They had to be landed in Scotland and England very
discreetly. Sometimes customs officials could be bribed, but that drew attention to the
cargo; it might be better to take a chance, since London customs officers were notorious
for confiscating books and then selling them on at their high full price. That did at
least mean the books were in England and in use. Anywhere else, it was better to beach
the ship on sands, land the passengers first and then take the books off by
dinghy – ideally at some small port or some
empty beach where there was nobody who thought it worth asking questions. You landed
troublesome books at Burntisland in Fife or in Queensburgh if they were meant for
Edinburgh.

Along with the books went letters: the
letters that made it possible to organize the English Catholics. Some went by the public
post, mostly the Tassis service, which ran out of Italy by way of Frankfurt for Hamburg
letters, via Brussels for Paris and via Antwerp for London; so there was plenty of
traffic in which to hide important messages travelling from Antwerp to England. English
intelligence liked to use mail drops, leaving letters with a London jeweller called
Mulemaker or an Italian called Mynistrale; Verstegan may have done the same. Some
letters even crossed the sea stuffed into the ornamental buttons on a man’s coat.
The public post was a fragile institution, so Verstegan used his own couriers when he
could; the English kept an eye on ‘one Laurence, a book-binder in Antwerp who is a
little, slender man, with a yellowish little beard and lispeth in his speech and
speaketh good French’.

The letters try to sound innocent.
‘Concerning our marchandise,’ Verstegan wrote, ‘… we are lyke to
have heare a very plentifull yeare, so that we may make great commoditie of corne, yf we
be secret in our course.’ Nobody plants corn in secret, so it can’t be a
farmer’s letter; there must be a second meaning, a harvest of souls. When the
Zeeland authorities found letters like this, they wrote pamphlets about the shocking
Catholic use of such mundane language to discuss sacred matters. ‘The marchant
that was arrested continued still in his distresse,’ Verstegan wrote; the merchant
was a priest. As for the sudden appearance in a farmer’s letter of ‘Mr
Garlyke the fishmonger’ who ‘was oute of towne, but he saith he will very
shortly be there and give orders for our affaires’, you might wonder why a
fishmonger is harvesting corn. Mr Garlyke was a Jesuit, most likely.

Verstegan kept a careful eye on his English
enemies and London watched him back: the familiar, obsessional binary game of spying. He
wrote to one Jesuit in England in 1592: ‘181 dothe thinck it best to stay for a
few weekes to send any 239 to any 139 in 25, because Mr 9 m 12 … dothe here by
227 means very much seek to understand which
way and how 181 dealeth.’ That meant: Verstegan, who
was 181, reckons it would be better for a few weeks not to send messages, which is 239,
to any priest (139) in England (25); the reason is that some spy in Antwerp is trying to
find out exactly how Verstegan operates. The spy, Mr 9 m 12, is probably a man called
Robert Poley.

This breathless world could not go on for
ever; the intrigue, the tradecraft, the moral purpose of it all. After Elizabeth’s
death in 1603, the English Mission was no longer a covert mission, there were no more
moles and decoys to run, and the Spanish did not need Verstegan’s tip-offs and
rumours about what was happening in the English court. Verstegan changed business, which
only made it clear how much information and intelligence had become a business.

He used his contacts; he was given a
monopoly on importing English cloth into Flanders. He tried to sell the Spanish a
cunning device that would stop water going stagnant and allow their ships to stay at sea
longer; then he tried to persuade them of a scheme to cut the Dutch out of the carrying
trade between the Baltic and the Mediterranean. He did rather well. He took up
journalism and poetry; he was even a humorist. He wrote for the broadsheet usually known
as the
Nieuwe Tijdinghen
, which came out three times a week, and continued when
it became the
Wekelijcke Tijdinghen
, which came out only once a week because
nobody wanted to read about the Spanish when they were being defeated. The commodity
that he traded was fact and information and rumour, and he may well have gone on
providing more private newsletters for money, but he was no longer quite a spy; he had
graduated at last to being a proper hack.

He chose his time and his city well. The
first English-language newspapers appeared in Amsterdam in the 1620s, translations of
the very graphical Dutch news sheets, and came to London just as news in general did:
across the North Sea, by way of Antwerp. If the North Sea were not open, England could
not know what was happening abroad. John Pory of the
London Intelligencer
complained in 1632 that ‘touching forraine news, we can have but very little
because it is now a fortnight since we had any post from Antwerp’. The world
around the sea was addicted already to fact, news, information, intelligence.

Twenty-eight people crowded on the machine with Prince
Maurits at the helm: the sailing chariot devised by Simon Stevin, engineer, book-keeper,
king of numbers. His famous toy went skimming the sands close to The Hague, two sails
billowing, four great wheels turning, flags standing proud in the wind and a prince with
a chance for mischief. ‘At one moment, for fun and in order to play a trick on his
gentlemen, his Excellency steered the chariot into the sea, which movement struck many
with great fear; but as he moved the helm in good time the chariot struck the beach
again and sped along its former course.’

The sailing chariot was something Dutch
sailors had seen in the Orient, a Chinese invention; this one was devised as a pastime,
a kind of compliment paid by a tutor to his student, a scholar to his prince and patron.
Stevin had known Maurits since their days in the small community of students at Leiden;
he was with him all through the war that followed, his tent pitched close to the prince
during many sieges; he was physically so close to power he never seems to have written
letters of advice or letters asking favours, so close we can’t quite tell if the
two men were friends or only colleagues.

He was the prince’s tutor in
mathematics, which also meant the sciences of navigation and fortification and how to
aim a gun, and the prince was his patron and protector even when Stevin’s ideas
were officially outrageous. Stevin said the Earth went round the sun, and the very
Calvinist geographer Ubbo Emmius let it be known that ‘if these things are true,
as I understand them, the writer vehemently declares that Moses is a liar and the entire
Holy Scriptures are untrue. I regret that the name and the studies of the Prince are
sullied by this filth.’ The prince did not even blink.

Stevin thrived in his first years at Leiden.
He registered for the university, a good move since students paid no tax on wine, beer
or books, and only a year later he had his first patents: for ingenious machines to
dredge the sand and mud out of the canals in Delft, including a large net that could be
opened and closed from the surface above. That same year, 1584, a passing fanatic shot
Maurits’s father dead on the stairs of his quarters in Delft, and he died with
impeccably tasteful last words: ‘My God, my God, have pity on me
and on this poor people.’ The death could truly have
been a pitiable moment for the rebels because William had been the great leader of the
revolt against the Spanish; but his son took over his role, step by step, first the
ruler of a couple of the United Provinces, then the general in charge of the army that
had to fight for the survival of the whole United Provinces, then ruler of them all and
a prince. His life was formed by war and its urgent needs, and so was Stevin’s;
his brilliant, practical and didactic mind was needed all the time. There were a hundred
problems to solve, and without answers the war and the nation would be lost.

The urgency Roger Bacon once felt, faced
with the stories of Mongol hordes, was now producing a stream of new devices and
technology. Stevin became an army engineer and then a quartermaster for ten years. He
devised sluices, pumps, dredgers, windmills, even a combined spade, axe and pick so
soldiers needed only one tool when digging; he thought this important since digging
‘is held to be one of the principal causes of Maurits’ famous victories in
the besieging of cities’. He wrote a treatise on fortifications without doing too
much study of what happened in the field, but it turned out sound enough to change the
tactics of real-life soldiers: polygon forts, five bastions or more, surrounded by
double canals. When he wrote about longitude he devised a way to sail directly to any
port without bothering about how to calculate longitude at sea, which was a conundrum
not to be solved for decades. The constant tension between the practical and the sheer
beauty of mathematical theory kept him fascinated.