Sir Francis Walsingham Read online

  SIR

  FRANCIS

  WALSINGHAM

  Also by Derek Wilson

  Out of The Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther (2007)

  Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man (2006)

  Charlemagne: The Great Adventure (2005)

  Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys (2005)

  All The King’s Women: Love, Sex and Politics in the Reign of Charles II (2003)

  A Brief History of the Circumnavigators (2003)

  In The Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII (2002)

  The King and the Gentleman: Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell 1599–1649 (2000)

  The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great Voyage 1577–1580 (2000)

  Dark and Light: The Guinness Story (1998)

  The Tower of London: A Thousand Years (1998)

  Sweet Robin: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1997)

  SIR

  FRANCIS

  WALSINGHAM

  A Courtier in an Age of Terror

  DEREK WILSON

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2007

  Copyright © Derek Wilson 2007

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The right of Derek Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84529-138-9

  eISBN: 978-1-47211-248-4

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Jacket image: Sir Francis Walsingham (detail), John de Critz, National Portrait Gallery London; Design: Bob Eames

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction: August 1572, Death in Paris

  1 Background and Beginnings, 1532–53

  2 Travel and Travail, 1553–8

  3 ‘The Malice of This Present Time’, 1558–69

  4 ‘In Truth a Very Wise Person’, 1569–73

  5 ‘To Govern that Noble Ship’, England, 1574–80

  6 ‘God Open Her Majesty’s Eyes’: Foreign Affairs, 1578–80

  7 ‘She Seemeth to be Very Earnestly Bent to Proceed’, 1581–4

  8 ‘Be You All Stout and Resolute’, 1584–8

  9 No Tomb, 1587–90

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  [1] Sir Francis Walsmgham c.1585, attributed to John de Critz the Elder. National Portrait Gallery, London. 1807.

  [2] The Rainbow Portrait by Isaac Oliver. Courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury.

  [3] Hans Holbein made this engraving satirizing the pope’s presumption in receiving homage from the emperor. Courtesy of the author.

  [4] Racking of Catholic priests by Sebastiano Martellini. By permission of the British Library. 4705.a.8.

  [5] Queen Elizabeth with Burghley and Walsingham by William Fairthorne, 1655. National Portrait Gallery, London. D21165.

  [6] Francis duc d’Anjou. Courtesy of the author.

  [7] St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 24th August 1572 (oil on panel) by Dubois, Francois (1529–1584) © Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland/ Photo © Held Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

  [8] The assassination of William the Silent, 1584. Mary Evans Picture Library. 10157890.

  [9] The burning of Thomas Cranmer as illustrated in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. By permission of the British Library. C.37.h.2.

  [10] William Allen (1532–94), from ‘Lodge’s British Portraits’, 1823 (engraving) by English School, (19th century) © Private Collection/ Ken Welsh/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

  [11] The funeral cortege of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) on its way to St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1587, engraved by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) (engraving) by English School, (16th century) © Private Collection/ The Stapleton Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

  [12] The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots. By permission of the British Library. Add. 48027.

  [13] Bernardino de Escalante’s plan for the invasion of England, 1586. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Ms.5785/168.

  PREFACE

  State-sponsored terrorism, hit men paid to eliminate heads of state, mobs fired up by hate-shrieking ‘holy’ men, fanatics ready to espouse martyrdom in the hope of heavenly reward, asylum-seekers, internment camps, the clash of totally irreconcilable ideologies. The list is familiar to us but as well as highlighting some of the problems of twenty-first-century Britain, it also offers an accurate picture of England 1570–90. The middle years of Elizabeth I’s reign were years of crisis, uncertainty and anxiety. A cultural rift had sundered Europe. In the eyes of the major continental powers – France, Spain, the Empire and the Papacy – Henry VIII had committed the unforgivable sin of rending the seamless robe of medieval Christendom. What had emerged (certainly not what Henry had intended) was the first major independent Protestant state. For decades Catholic Europe, in disarray until the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563, was unable to address the problem of the dissident nation but thereafter the forces of Counter-Reformation returned to the offensive, determined to recover lost territories. Top of their agenda was the conquest of heretic England. In 1570, Pope Pius V solemnly declared Elizabeth deposed and her subjects released from their allegiance. France came under the domination of the fanatical leaders of the Guise family, who were determined to avenge the treatment of their kinswoman, Mary Queen of Scots. Philip II of Spain, no less committed to the Catholic cause, commanded the awesome power and wealth of a great trans-oceanic empire and spent years maturing what he referred to as the ‘Enterprise of England’.

  If we fail to appreciate the tensions and fears of those years it is because historical hindsight plays us false. We see the failure of Philip II’s Armada, the exploits of Francis Drake and other pioneer mariners, the Elizabethan renaissance of drama and verse and the era assumes a roseate hue. We are ready to take at face value the idealized image created by Elizabeth’s PR machine in the last decade of the reign: the legend of the Virgin Queen, Astraea, Gloriana.

  Even supposedly serious historians colluded in the myth-making. William Camden, Elizabeth’s first biographer (his History of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of England first appeared in complete form in 1630), was quite open about the amount of veneration he mingled with objectivity.

  That Licenciousness accompanied with Malignity and Backbiting, which is cloaked under the counterfeit Shew of Freedom, and is every-where entertained with a plausible Acceptance, I do from my Heart detest. Things manifest and evident I have not concealed; Things doubtfull I have interpreted favourably; Things secret and abstruse I have not pried into. ‘The hidden Meanings of Princes (saith that great Master of History [Polybius]) and what they secretly design to search out, it is unlawfull, it is doubtfull and dangerous: pursue not therefore the Search thereof.’1

  By the time the Civil War had intervened Elizabeth’s reign had assumed the glow of a golden age.

  A Tudor! A Tudor!
We’ve had Stuarts enough.

  None ever ruled like Old Bess in the ruff.2

  So enthused Andrew Marvell in the 1670s.

  His great-grandsire would not have endorsed such a eulogy. There was widespread discontent in late-Tudor England. Queen Elizabeth herself was in part responsible for the insecurity her people suffered. Despite urgent and repeated pleas from courtiers, councillors, parliamentarians and diplomats, she staunchly refused to fulfil what most people regarded as her first obligation: she would not provide the nation with an heir. She rejected the role of wife and mother and she declined to nominate a successor. Worse than that, she tolerated within the borders of her realm a claimant to the crown in the person of Mary Stuart. For more than twenty years the ex-queen of Scotland lived as a virtual prisoner in England and became the focus for plots against the Tudor regime. Mary was the great hope of Catholics at home and abroad. If she could be placed on the throne by a native rising of people loyal to the old faith and aided by a foreign army, the clock could be turned back. England could be restored to that blissful age before Henry VIII had waged war on the pope – or so Catholic romantics fondly believed.

  In English government circles perceptions of the international situation varied. Some believed in the existence of a Catholic conspiracy choreographed in Rome. Others remained convinced that the traditional policy of playing Habsburg and Valois interests off against each other was the best way of ensuring England’s security. Elizabeth, insofar as she can be credited with a consistent policy, adhered to the latter opinion. Francis Walsingham, her ‘foreign minister’, was convinced that the upholders of Protestant truth were locked in a cosmic struggle with the dark powers of papal Antichrist. The relationship between monarch and minister flavoured English politics throughout these crucial years. An understanding of Walsingham is, therefore, of first importance for an understanding of the dynamic of Elizabethan politics.

  Francis Walsingham is a man about whom we know too little and too much. Copious official correspondence survives in the State papers and other deposits but these only relate to the last eighteen years of his life when he was ambassador to France and principal secretary of state. They tell us little about the forty years leading up to his achievement of high office, nor of his private life. Conyers Read’s monumental three-volume biography, written over eighty years ago, helps us very little in this regard, as its title suggests: Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth. In recent years Walsingham’s activities as head of the Elizabethan ‘secret service’ (a somewhat anachronistic expression) have fascinated several writers but his role as ‘spymaster’ covered an even shorter span of time (c.1580–90).

  There was, of course, much more to the man that that. He was, for example, an enthusiastic backer of overseas exploration and merchant venturing. He was a cultured scholar so generous with his patronage that Edmund Spenser called him ‘the great Maecenas of this age’. But his most powerful motivation came from his religion – that Protestantism that he had absorbed in family and Edwardian court circles and which further developed in his years of exile during Mary Tudor’s reign. Some biographers, disinclined to explore Walsingham’s beliefs or considering the evidence too scanty, have been content to apply to him the catch-all name ‘Puritan’. The term does him a disservice, suggesting as it does to modern minds a joyless, bigoted sobersides. Add to that his role as Elizabeth’s spymaster and the identification of Walsingham is complete as a sinister, narrow-minded, Machiavellian power behind the throne.

  If, as I have suggested, the war on terror creates similarities between Elizabeth’s England and our own, there remains, of course, one fundamental difference between the two ages. Religion was central to all aspects of national and international life four and a half centuries ago. Political debate was shot through with it. Walsingham and the queen were both conviction politicians. Both believed that the security of the nation lay in making right religious choices. They simply could not agree what those choices should be. To Walsingham it was axiomatic that England should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its persecuted brethren in France and the Netherlands and oppose the insidious spread of Catholicism with a programme of sound Protestant preaching and teaching. He was supported in this view by a sizeable portion of the political nation. Elizabeth was hesitant about encouraging foreign nationals to rebel against their divinely appointed rulers and was highly nervous of religious radicalism in all its forms. Her understanding of national stability was of all her subjects supporting her church, the Church of England, neither Catholic nor Puritan.

  This fundamental clash of opinions created intense frustration and tension between the queen and her secretary of state. She found his plain speaking at time offensive and he was frequently driven to distraction by her moral squirming. It is surprising that they could work together at all. Yet work together they did through this time of national testing. Therefore exploring their extraordinary relationship illuminates for us what was at stake in these years. Generations of biographers and historians have sought to explain what made Elizabeth tick. It is high time we explored the motivation of Francis Walsingham.

  INTRODUCTION

  AUGUST 1572, DEATH IN PARIS

  They cut down Mathurin Lussault on his own doorstep. The householder answered an insistent knocking and when he opened the door a neighbour, screaming obscenities, ran him through. His son rushed downstairs to see what the fracas was about. He was grabbed and stabbed several times. He staggered into the street, where he died. Mathurin’s wife, Françoise, threw herself from an upstairs window in a bid to escape the assassins. She broke both her legs in the fall. Friends tried to hide her but, by now, the mob’s blood was up. They were forcing their way into homes in their search for more victims. Finding Françoise, they dragged her through the streets by her hair. They cut off her hands in order to get her gold bracelets. What was left of the poor woman was impaled on a spit and paraded through the streets of Paris as a gory trophy, before being dumped in the Seine which was already streaked with red.

  On the streets panic reigned. Church bells were ringing. Shots were being fired. As the carnage intensified the air filled with more human sounds – shouts of triumph, religious slogans, screams of fear. The English ambassador to the court of Charles IX threw open his casement in the usually quiet Faubourg St Germain to see what the commotion was about. He was not left long in doubt. Terrified men and women came battering on his door begging for asylum. When the servants let them in they babbled out their tales of barbarism and inhumanity. Tales the like of which the forty-year-old Francis Walsingham had never heard before. As the day wore on more and more fugitives packed into the house. Then soldiers arrived – royal soldiers – demanding that the enemies of the state be handed over. Francis, though fearful for the life of himself and his family, stood firm. He was able to save the foreign nationals sheltering beneath his roof but the few French Protestants who had sought shelter there he was forced to surrender. They joined the toll of more than 2,000 men, women and children massacred in Paris on St Bartholomew’s Day – not far short of the number who perished there during the Terror of 1793–4.

  This traumatic experience had a formative impact on Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador. He was disgusted by the behaviour of the mob, indignant at the implication of the king and his mother in the atrocity and appalled at his own powerlessness to help the afflicted. These tragic events undergirded his political convictions thereafter and the advice he gave his sovereign. But they did not change his fundamental beliefs that Rome was the whore of Babylon and Catholics the very limbs of Satan. One thing he knew with an unshakable certainty: the religion responsible for such ghastly atrocities must never ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, be allowed to re-establish itself in England.

  Chapter 1

  BACKGROUND AND BEGINNINGS

  1532–53

  There is a sense that tombs and graves bring us close to the departed. It is understandable that people should think of memorials as ma
terial conduits to their deceased loved ones. It is perhaps less intelligible for historians to seek contact with their subjects by visiting their final resting places. Fortunately, no such temptation besets the biographer of Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1590 his remains were quietly and honourably interred in St Paul’s Cathedral. His memorial, along with scores of others, vanished without trace in the fire of 1666 and the subsequent buliding of Sir Christopher Wren’s basilica. Interestingly, a similar fate befell the tombs of Francis’ parents. William and Joyce Walsingham were members of the congregation of St Mary Aldermanbury, close by the Guildhall, and were, presumably, interred there. Like the cathedral, St Mary’s suffered in the Great Fire of London. Also like St Paul’s it was rebuilt in Wren’s neoclassical style. Sadly, its afflictions were not over. The Blitz of 1940–1 destroyed the new church. After the war it was rebuilt – but not in situ. A strange fate awaited it. Its stones were meticulously numbered and shipped across the Atlantic to Fulton, Missouri, where they were reassembled on the campus of Westminster College as a memorial to Sir Winston Churchill.

  So we can make no physical contact with Elizabeth’s minister or his immediate antecedents. In a way it is fitting that this should be so. It adds something to the mystique of a man who was self-effacing in his lifetime and who has remained something of an enigma ever since. Walsingham was that rarity among members of the Tudor establishment – a man who reached the political heights not by greasing palms, elbowing aside rivals and flattering his sovereign and her close attendants, but by talent, industry and the honest application of his principles. It is largely for this reason that a gauze screen of vagueness obscures his early career. There is no trail of correspondence with the rich and powerful such as an ambitious man might leave. There are few references in his later writings to his parentage and the self-conscious steps by which he reached the summit of Elizabeth’s government. Diligent search among local archives has disclosed all that is known and probably all that ever will be known about Sir Francis’ origins.