This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan
London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588.
The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy
to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the
overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in
the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the
warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames.
These include the ambassador, a civilized Frenchman, his wife, his
daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the
chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway
friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet, and comedian Giordano
Bruno, who wrote masterpieces of Italian literature, who was later
burned in Rome for his anti-papal opinions, and who has been
revered in Italy for his honorable and heroic resistance to papal
authority. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable
secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henry III of
France; poets, courtiers, and scholars; statesmen, conspirators,
go-betweens, and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action
takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the
river Thames. The hero or villain, who calls himself Fagot, does
his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears. In the
first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the
spy is identified and his story put together. John Bossy's
brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary skills,
solves a centuries-old mystery. His book makes a major contribution
to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion
in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not
least, it is compelling reading.
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