Of espionage and bungholes

I like to read Renaissance history and literature because it reminds me where this shit got started. The period is now more formerly known as "early modern Europe," and it does indeed provide a blueprint for what was to become the cultural forms and institutions we have inherited, as a former British colony.

I am reading an old classic, The Elizabethan World by Lacey Baldwin Smith, first published in the year I was born (1966). Lacey went on to write another volume on Tudor England with the subtitle "Politics and Paranoia," which does much to sum up the age and its legacy. The distinctively Tudor brand of politics and paranoia speaks particularly well to 21st century St. Louis, which retains a fedual politics, in many respects, thanks to its almost comic degree of political fragmentation: a small city segregated from a larger county and then divided into an absurdly large number of wards, each a micro-fiefdom - all entrapped in a largely rural state.

This book has me so mired in an atmosphere of politics and paranoia, tonight, that I'm willing to consider it more than mere coincidence that the only other Lacey I have ever heard of (actually, he is a Lacy) is a politician from North St. Louis.

"Rogues grew rich, upright men were disgusted, and almost everybody lost confidence in a government that was rapidly moving from inefficiency into blatant corruption." Is that France in 1559, or St. Louis moving toward 2009? Another reference to "the dangerous union of baronial gangsterism and spiritual discontent" set me to pondering for a long time where I had seen that mix before (pretty much everywhere, around here).

Lacey reads his 20th century context back into their day, just as I am paying our present reality backwards. He writes, "The sixteenth century was no stranger to the fine distinction between hot and cold war." The way he describes ye olde cold war sounds eerily familiar. He writes that both the English queen and the Spanish king "preferred intrigue, diplomatic assassinations, and the quiet fostering of domestic strife to open war." That is still very much the playbook used in the City of St. Louis today. It helps when you have 28 wards and 28 aldermen in and with which to foster (and fester) domestic strife. Let's play: dupe the alderman!

There is one lost art, however, and I would like to see somebody bring it back. All the materials are ready at hand. I am talking about the art of espionage by brewing and selling beer.

It's too good of a trick to have been used only once, but I have only heard about it in connection with the lightweight imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in Chartley Castle. This was a frame job within a frame job, but I'll skip the tangles of history and focus on the espionage technique, which relied upon the bunghole in a keg of beer.

Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, Francis Walsingham, flipped various recusant Catholics into playing double agent against the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. (One guy had a really great name for a flipper, for a double agent: Gilbert Gifford.) They were manipulated to entrap the Catholic queen in a particularly creative way, which is wonderfully described by Lacey:

"Her letters were smuggled in and out of Chartley House in waterproof packages slipped through the bungholes of beer kegs. News from abroad arrived in the French ambassador's diplomatic pouch and was sent on to Mary, but before it was placed in the beer kegs it was deciphered, read and copied by Elizabeth's Principal Secretary, Francis Walsingham. The system satisfied everyone: Mary was lulled into a false feeling of security and received secret news from Europe for the first time for years; Walsingham learned everything Mary read or wrote and waited patiently for the victim to enmesh herself in still another plot; and the astute brewer was handsomely paid by both Mary and Walsingham, as well as receiving an inflated price for his beer."

All of these techniques are still very much in play in the St. Louis of today - the double agency, the entrapment, the lulling into false peace, the encrypted messages, the politically complicit brewer, the inflated price of beer - except for the inspired use of the bunghole.

*

Bunghole image from some guy's trip to Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels.