MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

All His Spies

The Secret World of Robert Cecil

Stephen Alford

$26.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English
Penguin Books Ltd
23 September 2025
The untold story of Robert Cecil, the ultimate Tudor spy-master

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.

Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth's chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies.

All His Spies is a wonderfully engaging and original work of history. Many readers are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently. Cecil's sureness of purpose, his espionage network and good luck all conspired to keep England uninvaded and to create a new 'British' monarchy which has endured to the present day.
By:  
Imprint:   Penguin Books Ltd
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 35mm
Weight:   500g
ISBN:   9780141991832
ISBN 10:   0141991836
Pages:   448
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Stephen Alford is the author of the highly acclaimed The Watchers- A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth and is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for fifteen years at Cambridge University, where he was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King's College. He is now Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Leeds.

Reviews for All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil

Alford triumphs… in recreating the historical moment. By immersing himself in Cecil’s vast archive, he draws the reader deep into his working environment, capturing the closeness of his study and the chaos of the court… this is turn-of-century England as it really was – dangerous, gritty, on a knife edge -- Jessie Childs * The Times * A compelling portrait of a pivotal, yet often neglected, figure in Elizabethan and Jacobean politics. Alford's account of Robert Cecil and his spy network bristles with narrative energy and succinctly wise judgement -- Peter Marshall One of the greatest biographies, a masterwork beautifully, intensely written and researched -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore


See Also