Shrewsbury, Bess, and Arbella all knew that the government was spying on them. Shrewsbury in particular was bitterly aware that everything he had said and done since the moment he became Mary’s custodian had been reported to the Privy Council, and he knew that the Elizabethan intelligence services operated on an assumption that those they investigated were bound to be concealing secret knowledge which could be extracted from them by fear or force, viewing refusal of full disclosure as criminal in itself regardless of what was being concealed. Mary was both spied on and spy, and as well as intriguing for her own release, the so-called Scandal Letter shows that she took a hand in the disintegration of the Shrewsbury marriage. Bess meanwhile spied on her own family, as shown by letters from her daughter Elizabeth and her ‘bad’ son Henry, and kept a particularly close eye on Arbella, who was a political figure from the moment she was born. So too did others, and although it can neither be proved nor disproved, it seems possible that Arbella was spied on by one man in particular: the playwright Christopher Marlowe.