A warning. This episode includes some descriptions of violence and torture that some listeners may find difficult.

Incoming transmission. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to True Spies.

Week by week, mission by mission. You'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations.

You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. We knew that if their troops so much has touched down on English soil, we were doomed.

Our small army and hastily assembled militias were no match for what my sources warned us was up to 30,000 of their seasoned men.

We had to keep them from landing. It was the biggest gamble of my career.

Episode 55. Her Majesty's Secret Service.

God's people. They were Satan's people. Power hungry. Corrupt merciless.

We'll start it with a handful of soldiers spread like wildfire through the city. No, it's more like a fever.

Ordinary men and women soon just joining in with the killing. And once they began, they couldn't stop. Even if they'd wanted to.

The words of Sir Francis Walsingham, England's principal secretary of state. Betta known as England's first spy master, the office he held from 1573 to 1590.

Walsingham was the man charged with keeping the Queen of England and her Protestant regime safe.

Inspired by his surviving writings and historical research, True Spies brings Sir Francis back to life to tell his side of the story for the first time.

You have to remember that the Roman Catholic threat was not something that came out of the blue. Neither was the threat cooked up for political gain. It was real and it was growing by the day.

In 1588, Walsingham was to face his greatest challenge. The Spanish Armada. A massive sea-born invasionary force commissioned by the Catholic King of Spain to overthrow the English Queen.

And banish her Protestant religion for good. It's a story of how a fledgling intelligence service grew into the complex organism that it is today.

And how one True Spies vision and a negative spy craft helped ward off the greatest threat to national security since the Norman invasion in 1066.

I knew what these savages were capable of. I'd seen it with my own eyes. It wasn't a choice. It was my calling.

Our story starts in Paris, 1572. It was here as English ambassador to France that Francis Walsingham experienced the Catholic campdown on Protestants first hand.

Francis religious wars had been raging for years. A fragile peace was procured through the marriage of the Catholic French king, Sister Margot, to the Protestant Henry of Navarre.

It was never going to work. The Parisian Catholics regarded the Protestants as animals, witness heretics. Navarre himself was known in court circles as a country pig.

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