The central character in Shadow of the Axeand the five Queen’s Intelligencer novels that follow it* is Robert Poley. Like many of the other characters in the books, including especially Elizabeth’s darling, the Earl of Essex, Robert Poley does make an appearance in recorded history. I began to research his life and times more than 25 years ago as he played an important part in the six Elizabethan murder mysteries in which Tom Musgrave was the protagonist (The Master of Defence series). But Poley proved to be so fascinating that I thought he deserved a series of his own. Twenty years after he first appeared in The Point of Death, Poley reappeared in Shadow of the Axe. But this Poley was different, darker, much closer to the real man as the annals of Tudor and Stuart history have presented him. As Irish literary historian Frederick S Boas put it, ‘the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld’, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

There are no extant records of Robert Poley’s birth, baptism, childhood or early education. Likewise there is almost nothing known for certain about his relatives, however it has been speculated that his mother was a member of the influential Blount family, indeed the mother of Poley’s associate Sir Christopher Blount was a Poley. Blount and Poley worked together on several occasions, first for the Earl of Leicester. Blount then went with Leicester to the Low Countries, acted as his Master of Horse and was knighted in 1588. It was soon after the Earl’s death later that year that Blount married Leicester’s widow and so became Essex’s stepfather. Christopher Blount also died on the block after Essex’s failed coup of 1601, some four weeks after his stepson, which forms the central narrative of Shadow of the Axe.

Poley himself is first recorded as being a sizar (a student/servant) at Clare College Cambridge in 1568, so his birth is usually assigned to the early 1550’s. There are no records of his formal graduation, making historians believe he was probably Catholic. (The graduation ceremony included a pledge of allegiance to the Queen not the Pope as head of the Church, which Catholics could not swear.) However, he seems to have spent most if not all of his working life as a spy and informer working for the Protestant secret services run by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burghley and (in due course) Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, later Lord Salisbury, chief minister to James I.

In 1582, Poley married ‘Watson’s daughter’ and, in April 1583, their daughter Anne was baptised. Although the marriage may not have been solemnised in an Anglican church, the baptism was. By this time he was working for Walsingham. Wikipedia observes that he was locked up in the Marshalsea as a result of his attempts at undercover employment. This seems to have been the start of one element of his career as an intelligencer (later famously decried by Ben Jonson as a government spy and eavesdropper). It was his task to appear to be incarcerated as a Catholic recusant when in fact he was collecting intelligence on other Catholics locked up beside him, and passing their identities, contacts, supporters and plans to his Secret Service handlers. He was well enough rewarded for this to be able to entertain his mistress (and conduit in espionage) Joan Yeomans while his unfortunate wife and child vanished from the picture. On his release, he applied to Leicester for work and ended up going to Paris with Charles Blount seeking contact with Thomas Morgan, Catholic spymaster and ardent supporter of the Queen of Scots.

In 1585 we find him with Blount once more in the household of Sir Philip Sidney, probably keeping an eye on Lady Frances, Sidney’s wife and Walsingham’s 16-year-old daughter. Particularly as they were living in his house in Seething Lane while Walsingham himself appears to have been living at a house in The Papey near Bishopsgate.

When Blount went to war on the battlefields of Flanders, Poley seems to have gone to another secret war. The work he had done in Paris paid off. Thomas Morgan wrote, celebrating Poley’s placement in Sidney’s household, at the heart of the English intelligence community. Poley stayed at Seething Lane overseeing household accounts after Sidney followed Blount to the Low countries in November 1585 and remained there until his death in October 1586 after Zutphen, which was caused by an infected leg wound – in spite of Frances’s careful nursing. She was pregnant with their second child and lost it soon after her return with his body. Walsingham paid for his son-in-law’s magnificent funeral which cost so much that he died deeply in debt in April 1590.

The trust of Thomas Morgan and the Catholic spy ring in Europe was maintained and somehow strengthened. Poley was asked to deliver a bundle of letters in secret to the Queen of Scots. He passed these to Walsingham to be decyphered and copied by codemaster Thomas Phelippes before they went onwards apparently untouched. As a consequence, Poley’s standing with the Catholic plotters was enhanced. So was his ability to dig deeper and deeper for the English intelligence service. The next plot he uncovered was one to murder Leicester. He told his old employer about this, and, under Leicester’s orders, wrote back to the plotters requesting more details. The information he then passed on seems to have nipped the murderous scheme in the bud, but without arousing any suspicions in Paris or Brussels, the Parma’s headquarters in the Low countries.

In June 1586 Poley became involved in the first major coup of his career. The next thing he was asked to do by Morgan and his associates, as a member of the Walsingham household and secret courier to the Queen of Scots, was to arrange passports for Sir Anthony Babington and Thomas Salisbury from Walsingham. As Poley apparently tried to do this under Walsingham’s direct orders, he became a popular member of Babington’s circle, unmasking (though quite possibly instigating) a plot to murder Elizabeth, release Mary and aid the Catholic invasion that would put Mary on the throne. Poley’s penetration of the Babington circle was so deep that when Babington was being hanged, drawn and quartered on 20th September 1586, he was still famously worried about his ‘sweet Robin’.

Poley is recorded as being locked in the Tower of London for the next two years, perhaps to protect his undercover identity as a Recusant Catholic conspirator. His incarceration may have been more ‘on paper’ than ‘in fact’ but he was definitely there in December 1586 when it was generally believed that he poisoned Richard Creagh the Archbishop of Armagh, a powerful voice in the Catholic cause and longtime occupant of the Tower in consequence, using poisoned cheese.

Poley was definitely out by 1588, but there is nothing recorded about any part he took either at sea or on land against the Spanish Armada. It seems, however, that his cover as a double agent was damaged if not blown. He was apparently promoted to being a case officer with responsibility for the Low Countries and northern France. He was also very active as a courier carrying vital documents to and from France, the Netherlands (his bailiwick so to speak), Denmark (home of James of Scotland’s wife and therefore important to the Council) and Scotland (as it became more and more obvious that the childless Queen of England would be succeeded by the Queen of Scots’ son). Poley’s reputation, especially as courier between London and Edinburgh was unmatched at this period.

Payments to Poley the courier seem to have stopped in 1601. With the death of the ‘Old Guard’ (Leicester 1588, Walsingham 1590, Burghley 1598) not only that responsibility for intelligence passed to the next generation but brought two men head to head – the tempestuous, spoilt Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, younger son of Lord Burghley who had taken over the reins of his father’s network long before the old man died. After 1601, all the payments Poley received seem to have come from Cecil, so there is no doubt about Poley’s allegiances.

These are the facts that underlie the fiction of Shadow of the Axein which Poley (in a story inspired by Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) arranges for himself to be discredited, charged with a felony, taken to court and thrown in jail – where he befriends a member of Essex’s household and eases himself into that dangerously suspicious circle to reveal to Cecil the Earl’s plans for a revolution as they slowly and fatally come together. And the shadow of the axe does, in fact, loom over many of the characters in the story.

But Poley was by no means finished. He was joined in Burghley/Cecil’s spy network by the young enfant terrible playwright Christopher Marlowe. There can be no doubt that the two men knew each other, because they were together at the rooming house of Burghley’s relative Mistress Eleanor Bull alongside Ingram Frizer and Nicholas Skeres on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 30th 1603 when, as a consequence of a disagreement over the bill (the recknyng as the post mortem has it) Marlowe was killed when the blade of a dagger belonging to Frizer was run several inches into his brain through the right eye. As Marlowe and his friend Tom Watson had done on the occasion of an earlier death in which they were involved, Poley and his two associates stood and waited for the authorities.

After the post-mortem and due process which found Frizer not guilty of Marlowe’s murder by reason of self defence, Poley vanished for some weeks. This whole incident, its background and outcome has proved a fertile ground for all sorts of theories and speculations, academic and artistic. To which the final Poley novel, Shadow of a Spy, is set to add.

Poley then vanishes from the pages of history – though not from the pages of my fiction for he enjoys two more adventures after Marlowe’s death (The Main Plot vs. Raleigh and the Gunpowder Plot vs. Guy Fawkes) before he finally retires (as it is actually believed he may have done) to a quiet old age as a Yeoman Warder (Beefeater) in the Tower of London which he knew so well.

The Queen’s Intelligencer novels in chronological order by date the stories start:

• Shadow of aQueen: December 1560 – February 1587
• Shadow of the Tower: January 1570 – July 1603
• Shadow of Poison: September 1576 – June 1594
• Shadow of a Spy: April 1585 – December 1594 (still awaiting publication)
• Shadow of the Axe: September 1599 – February 1601
• Shadow of Treason: April 1603 – January 1606