Elizabeth I's Secret Agents (2017) User Reviews

Well-Produced Program With Excellent Commentators

[lavatch · 8/10 · 12 February 2018]

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.

No Fact Checkers or Editors?

[irene_dwyer · 3/10 · 29 January 2018]

The only reason I give this even three stars is because the program highlights an interesting topic and a rarely examined period in English history. However, I can't remember the last documentary I watched that had so many errors and omissions. Some of the small mistakes might not matter to anyone but a history wonk. For example: Mary was not Elizabeth's "first cousin"; they were first cousins once removed and thus a generation apart. Mary was not "ill educated". She wrote competent prose and poetry, played several musical instruments and learned French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, and Greek in addition to speaking her native Scots. Cecil did not merely "work his way up" from commoner status and thus hold a grudge against the nobility. His father and grandfather had been minor court officials. He was a premier scholar, as was his second wife; both studied with Elizabeth's tutor Roger Ascham and Cecil had been employed by Elizabeth prior to her accession to the throne. One error, however, undermines the whole program: When this episode moves from the Duke of Norfolk's execution to Mary the narrator begins by telling us that Catholic Mary, "...having been driven from Scotland by her Protestant subjects is now living in the north of England." What? Mary was forced to abdicate in favor of her one-year old son James in July 1567 by a coalition of Protestant lords led by her illegitimate half-brother the Earl of Moray. Moray then became regent for the infant James. Mary fled to England--seeking Elizabeth's protection--in 1568. Elizabeth, who had been subsidizing the Protestant party in Scotland for at least ten years, promptly put Mary under house arrest. At the time this program begins to focus on Mary (1586) she had been imprisoned, however luxuriously, for nearly twenty years. Kate Malby, the historian assigned to the topic of Mary alludes to this but I wondered at this point if the historian narrators had even been shown the overall script. I doubt a Tudor/Stuart historian would have ignored the implication that Mary was living freely in England. The program then goes on to describe Mary's execution but fails to inform the viewer that she had first been properly charged, tried and convicted of treason. There were a number of problems with the trial (Mary had no counsel, was not shown the evidence against her, etc.) but she was not summarily executed merely because Cecil wanted her gone.

Factually Incorrect

[thesirenhazel · 3/10 · 30 January 2022]

For a documentary, something you would expect to tell facts, it is remarkably incorrect. For example: William Cecil was never spymaster, and nor was his son, something a quick google will tell you; Walsingham, who within the first half an hour isn't mentioned, was the spymaster for a period of nearly 17 years from 1573; Cecil came from a wealthy family, with his father being an Earl, something the documentary also dismisses. It's entertaining but for the inaccuracies which meant I never finished the first episode.

Slow Documentary

[greg-helton-tx · 4/10 · 29 January 2018]

This show is mislabeled a drama. It is a documentary. There's an unseen narrator and historians speaking to the screen. There is no dialog or action. Art and drawings are shown and occasionally person in costume walking through a castle, garden or dungeon.

Events unfold slowly. Ten minutes is spent examining Mary's delay in signing the letter committing to the treasonous plot and the wait for Elizabeth to sign the death warrant.

This documentary is below average.