Gardez mon secret: Giordano Bruno and the historian's spy story

Between April 1583 and October 1585 Giordano Bruno lived in the French embassy in London. In the same period a series of letters in French were addressed by someone who called himself Henry Fagot to Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. The mysterious Fagot was a spy and gave an important contribution to the uncovering of some plots against the monarch. Was he Bruno? In the 1990s an English historian, John Bossy, wrote two books to support this thesis. Most of his points sound convincing, especially considering the general context of Bruno’s self-assigned mission of bringing about a moral and religious regeneration of Europe.