Description
Book SynopsisElizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby (1536-1593) is the biography of William Ashby, Elizabethan intelligence agent and diplomat who served as ambassador to Scotland during the Spanish Armada crisis. It provides a fresh social, political and foreign policy insight from the perspective of a gentleman spy who took part in some of the most important events of his time. Much of the book is focused on the Anglo-Scottish geo-political relationship during the decade of 1580-1590, with its machinations and bizarre background stories. Prior to Ashby’s ambassadorial appointment, he served as a senior ‘intelligencer’ for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster.
Trade Review"[A] fascinating, exciting, and at times all too familiar tale of political conspiracies, double agents, personal rivalries and the perennial quest, by states and by individuals, for power and control...Tim Ashby is to be commended on this excellent tribute to his distant relative, which is also an illuminating account of life in Tudor and Stuart times."—The Edinburgh Reporter
Table of ContentsCONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Prologue – ‘the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors’
Part One – Early Life
Chapter I - Education
Chapter II - Exile
Chapter III – Return to an unhappy land
Part Two – On Her Majesty’s Service
Chapter IV – Walsingham’s Intelligencer
Chapter V – The Queen’s vacillation
Chapter VI – Low Countries reconnaissance operation
Chapter VII - Purgatory in the Low Countries
Chapter VIII – Brigands on the Rhine
Part Three – Scotland
Chapter IX - Anglo-Scottish animosity
Chapter X – Walsingham’s failed diplomatic mission
Chapter XI - Universal miscontent in the country
Chapter XII – The Armada cometh
Chapter XIII – Ashby’s ambassadorship to Scotland
Chapter XIV – The approach of the Spaniards causes Ashby to make offers
to the King
Chapter XV – A necessary play of penitence
Chapter XVI – ‘... the great ship was blown in the air’
Chapter XVII – Ashby reveals to James a plot against him by his own lairds
Chapter XVIII - The lairds’ open insurrection
Chapter XIX – Fowler’s defamation of Ashby
Chapter XX - Ashby tarries in Edinburgh while the King seeks his bride
Chapter XXI – Vindication
Chapter XXII – A last plot foiled before death’s gloomy shade
Appendix I - Sir Robert Naunton
Appendix II - Dramatis Personae
Bibliography
Notes
