Sir, Your article “Britain’s first spymaster was an Irishman who played patriot game” (July 2) names William Melville as the first person in the country to take this role.
Surely the first, though, was Sir Francis Walsingham in the days of Elizabeth I. It was Sir Francis who sent intelligence reports to Sir Francis Drake.
J. R. EDWARDS, Glossop, Derbys
Sir, Your article mentions that, among the royal presents made to Irish-born 19th-century spymaster William Melville was a silver cigar case from Princess Henry of Battenberg, better known to posterity as Princess Beatrice, youngest child of Victoria and Albert. As well as thwarting the Irish “Jubilee plot” on Queen Victoria’s life, he helped Beatrice’s daughter Ella narrowly to escape assassination by an anarchist bomb at her wedding in Madrid to King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1906.
Beatrice was an adoring mother, but a much more adoring daughter, from whom the gift of a silver cigarcase represented more than a polite formality.
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MATTHEW DENNISON, Author, The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter Nantglyn, Denbighshire