The three-part PBS series "Queen Elizabeth's Secret Agents" is a briskly paced and informative introduction to the origins of our modern security state.
The programs focus on the how the father-son team of William and Robert Cecil played a major role in developing an English espionage network that is arguably the prototype of the CIA. While the Cecils' objectives were to protect the lives of the monarchs, Elizabeth I and James I, the tentacles of their sophisticated intelligence operation extended to ferreting out Catholic recusants in Protestant England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The commentators for the programs were excellent, especially Jerry Brotton, who described the Cecils' spy network as "an endless labyrinth." Sophisticated techniques were developed for intercepting correspondence and decoding encrypted messages. Torture was widely practiced to extract secrets, and traitors were held up for example with gruesome public executions.
All three of the programs were lively and informative. While there might have been greater coverage of Francis Walsingham, the series was nonetheless successful in demonstrating how intelligence gathering, ruthless power politics, and the acts terrorism in Tudor and Stuart England figure in the emergence of our modern world.
The programs focus on the how the father-son team of William and Robert Cecil played a major role in developing an English espionage network that is arguably the prototype of the CIA. While the Cecils' objectives were to protect the lives of the monarchs, Elizabeth I and James I, the tentacles of their sophisticated intelligence operation extended to ferreting out Catholic recusants in Protestant England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The commentators for the programs were excellent, especially Jerry Brotton, who described the Cecils' spy network as "an endless labyrinth." Sophisticated techniques were developed for intercepting correspondence and decoding encrypted messages. Torture was widely practiced to extract secrets, and traitors were held up for example with gruesome public executions.
All three of the programs were lively and informative. While there might have been greater coverage of Francis Walsingham, the series was nonetheless successful in demonstrating how intelligence gathering, ruthless power politics, and the acts terrorism in Tudor and Stuart England figure in the emergence of our modern world.