Stephen Alford’s previous books include Burghley, a biography of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief adviser, and The Watchers, a study of the Elizabethan spy services, with particular emphasis on the 1570s and 1580s. These were the decades of the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot, the Babington Plot and the Stafford Plot, through which Catholic conspirators sought to assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

The title of Alford’s latest work may suggest that the book is a sequel to The Watchers. And in some ways it is: Alford picks up the story of English intelligence more or less where he left off in The Watchers, bringing to life the Catholic conspiracies of the 1590s and early 1600s – most notably, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. But All His Spies could perhaps be more accurately characterised as a sequel to Burghley, for the book is, first and foremost, a biography of Robert Cecil (1563–1612), the second son and political heir of Lord Burghley, whose many duties at the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean courts included oversight of the spy services. 

A close adviser to both Elizabeth I and James I – as well as the mastermind of the transition, in 1603, from Tudor to Stuart rule – Cecil occupied a uniquely powerful position in England, and possibly in all of Europe, at the turn of the 17th century. Referred to