Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair [Hardcover]

Professor John Bossy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 23, 1991

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 Frenchman, his wife and 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 Burno. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henri III of France; poets, courtiers and scholars; statesment, 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 villian, 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1583, Giordano Bruno, a Catholic priest from Italy, arrived in London and joined the household of Michel de Castelnau, the French ambassador. It was an uneasy time, with Spain and France plotting to replace Queen Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots and make England a Catholic realm. While researching Castelnau's activities, Bossy (a history professor at York University in England) became convinced that Bruno, under the alias Henry Fagot, had secretly provided information about goings-on in the ambassador's home to one of Elizabeth's ministers, aiding the effort to keep Mary from the throne. "Fagot" was never unmasked, but Bruno aroused the Church's wrath in other matters and was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600. Potentially an absorbing adventure, Bossy's unraveling of the centuries-old mystery of the identity of Henry Fagot is too wordy, didactic and repetitious to satisfy either general readers or those with a special interest in the period. ( Nov.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

It takes considerable courage and incontrovertible evidence to propose, as Bossy (History/Univ. of York) does, that Giordano Bruno, an Italian ``national saint'' burned at the stake in 1600 for defying the Pope, spent three years (1583-86) as an anti- Catholic spy at the pro-papal French Embassy in London. According to Bossy, Bruno--an excommunicated Neapolitan friar who sometimes used the alias of a priest named Henry Fagot--served the religious needs of the ambassador's family and of the English Catholic sympathizers who found refuge at the embassy, birthplace of the conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and release Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned for the past 19 years. As Fagot, Bruno claimed that he learned of the plot during confession, leading to the arrest, torture, and ultimately the execution of several English noblemen and contributing to the decision to execute Mary as well. If this story is true, then Bruno was not just a spy but a fraud, impersonating a priest, and a traitor, betraying the French king and the ambassador, and all of this for rather vague reasons--neither for money nor power but to undermine the credibility of the papacy and because it appealed to his taste for practical jokes. From this story, it is difficult to tell how Bruno acquired his reputation for brilliance, charm, wit, courage, and integrity, for Bossy depicts a ``smart operator'' and a ``dishonorable'' one, argumentative, abrasive, the author of ``soporific'' dialogues whose speculations on science and cosmology were eccentric and unoriginal. Regrettably, the significance of Bruno and even of the conspiracy is lost in Bossy's presentation- -obscure, convoluted, turgid, weighted with chronologies, false clues, obfuscation, irrelevant letters, artificially designed mysteries--such as a whole chapter arguing for the ``coincidence'' of Fagot and Bruno's similarities when Bossy is about to reveal that they are the same man. However correct his facts, however indisputable his conclusions, Bossy compromises them by his melodramatic presentation--which is probably more suitable to fiction. A bewildering and frustrating read. (Illustrations.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (October 23, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300049935
• ISBN-13: 978-0300049930
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,955,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book of great learning, February 5, 2008

By 

Hugh Claffey (Co. Kildare Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (Paperback)

Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome in 1600, after a seven year investigation into his beliefs by Venetian and Vatican authorities. His is a cause which has attracted a significant amount of attention in Italy over the years, however he is less well known in the rest of Europe. He was ordained a priest, though his travels in England France and Germany led him to practice his priesthood spasmodically and in a rather unorthodox manner. He has left behind writing of some significance.
John Bossy has analysed his writings, and concentrates on Bruno's time in the residence of the French ambassador to Queen Elizabeth's court in the 1580s. It was a rather fraught time, France, a Catholic nation, favoured an alliance with Mary Queen of Scots, then a prisoner of Elizabeth's. Spain, the superpower of the era, favoured Elizabeths violent overthrow, and the Pope had authorised her assassination. You can imagine the levels of diplomacy required of the (moderately Catholic) French Ambassador. One small facet of this discretion was the fact that Bruno, the embassy's chaplain, was described as a man-servant. Bossy uses an acute knowledge of the era, as well as cross references from various English and Continental sources to identify Bruno, as the spy who signed himself Faggot. Elizabeth's spy-master, Walsingham, alive to the various threats to her Majesty, needed as much information on Catholic conspiracies as was possible, and Bruno, as confidant and confessor, was well positioned to supply him with it.
Through the book, Bossy gives an overview of the intricacies of the international diplomacy, in particular the play for France, prior to the accession of Henry of Navarre, who in the 1580's was seen as a Protestant champion, but eventually converted to Catholicism to ascend the French throne (`Paris is worth a mass'). Bossy also makes a creditable, but speculative, description of Bruno's inner motivations, which, given the deception and dissimulation necessary in his role as spy, were not necessarily coincident with either his writings or his testimony to various authorities.
In general the book demonstrates great learning, though is perhaps fixated by the English part of the tale. This is entirely understandable, as the historian in Bossy, concentrates on the era and references with which he is most at ease, and, it must be said the revelation of the Bruno/Faggot identity is quite a coup. I would have appreciated more information about the final years of Bruno's life, though Bossy refers us to other
authorities for this.

3.0 out of 5 stars A potentially interesting tale opaquely narrated, October 2, 2011

By 

Elizabeth A. Root (Laurel, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (Paperback)

This book sounded very interesting, especially since I had just read S. J. Parris' (i.e., Stephanie Merritt's) historical thriller, Prophecy, her second novel starring Giordano Bruno, which is apparently inspired by this. Bossy is clearly a learned man who has sifted a great deal of material to come to his conclusions. Bossy has included a number of charming maps of London showing the location of Salisbury Court. He also has Fagot's letters in both the original French (apparently Fagot's French was very original!), and translated. It is an interesting puzzle, with significant moral issues, and I am very fond of historical puzzles: Lizzie Bordon, Elizabeth Canning, Richard III, bring them on. Bossy also promises to tell it as a story, without giving away his premise in the beginning, so it should have a narrative arc. Alas, I think Bossy lacks a great deal as a narrator. I also came to suspect that the solving the puzzle was not really the purpose of the book, so much as a justification for Bossy's poor opinion of Bruno in other regards.

This proved to be a little too scholarly for me. Literary criticism and philosophy are not among my favorite subjects, and I have little taste for combing through and interpreting the minutia; the fact that scholars debate so much about the hidden meanings is not encouraging to me. I also wonder if Bruno, and for that matter other people, are consistent enough to be analyzed like this. This is not of failure of Bossy's, just my being the wrong audience, so I say it as a fact, not a criticism. However, this is not helped by the fact that Bossy does not always translate foreign terms. Some of them can presumably be found in the appended texts, but it would be better to have them explained in context. Sometimes a point is completely opaque to me because I have no idea what is being said, and I don't even get the gist in context. Again, the reader must decide if their linguistic skills (French, Italian and Latin) are likely to be up to this.

On the other hand, perhaps I'm dense, but I sometimes had trouble following what Bossy was saying even when discussing what should be straightforward events. On the last pages of chapter 3, he talks about "the case of the (presumably) spurious conspirator William Parry. Sometime in January, Parry had arrived in London with a story of how he had taken a religious vow to assassinate the queen ... in Paris ... with two cardinals as his sponsors. ... He had reported all this to Elizabeth on his return to England and was ... awaiting a letter of encouragement and indulgence from the pope which duly reached him ... at the end of March. ... " [elisions added]

What is going on here? Parry reported to Elizabeth in January that he had made a vow to assassinate her, and was left at liberty for for at least two months? Then what happened? Did any or all of this actually occur, or did Parry (or someone else) just claim it did? What does Bossy mean by "spurious": that Parry didn't exist; or was a fabulist; or a double agent and provocateur?

Thinking at length about this, I finally came to the conclusion that it would make the most sense if Parry was working for Walsingham and trying to get Elizabeth's enemies to show their hand. Then in the beginning of chapter 5, it is revealed that Parry was arrested and executed, apparently about a year later, so I have no idea what "spurious" means, or what happened in between times. Obviously he didn't succeed in his mission of killing Elizabeth, but it was sporting of him to warn her. [added later: In his book [...], Stephen Budiansky explains the Parry affair (pp. 137-138). In January 1584, Parry told Elizabeth that as part of his investigation into a conspiracy to assassinate her, he had taken the oath to kill her, and the letter from Cardinal Ptolomeo Gallio that arrived in March was corroboration of his claims. Elizabeth accepted that he was only exposing the conspiracy and he was pardoned. A year later, he was denounced for taking part in another conspiracy, and this time he was found guilty and hanged.]

A certain amount of Bossy's case relies on proving that Bruno acted as a priest, which was improper, given that he was excommunicated, and the argument depends upon his being the only priest in the household. I find this a bit puzzling. Wasn't there a priest on hand during the years before Bruno arrived; what happened to him? To someone who didn't know much about him, Bruno could get away with performing priestly functions, although he would later claim to the Inquisition that he never broke the rules of excommunication. Bossy makes the point that, on trial for his life, Bruno was not always honest with the inquisition. But I would suppose that people like Castelnau knew his background; he was rather famous. According to another biography that I read, Henri III sent him out of France precisely because he was too controversial for many Catholics. I wouldn't think that they would want to rely on an excommunicated priest, and perhaps they didn't count him as a priest. If true, this would undermine the argument that they would regard him as a priest and not require another priest in the household, and support the idea that Bruno was telling the truth about his status as a gentleman-servant. It doesn't destroy Bossy's case, but it does put a certain hole in his argument.

I would recommend this for people who have an interest in this time, place, and these people, but not as a general work.

There is a companion work to this book: Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story that examines the leaks from the French Embassy from another aspect, fingering a second agent for Walsingham. I think that it is a superior book in almost all ways.

4.0 out of 5 stars Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, September 12, 2011

By 

corvid111 "corvid111" (Biddeford, Maine) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (Hardcover)

Although I have yet to finish the book many of my questions and previous suppositions about Bruno and the Elisabethan court have been illuminated. The book reads like a spy novel and I am enjoying it immensely.