Sir Francis Walsingham Read online

  It is not surprising that throughout England a marriage alliance with Spain was regarded with indignation and horror. Many of Mary’s subjects, whatever their religious convictions, had reason to be hostile to the Habsburg match which took place in July 1554. Within months the popular mood had changed. People who had lit bonfires and cheered Mary through the streets of her capital now threw mud at members of Philip’s entourage and daubed walls with anti-Catholic graffiti. The new reign was not six months old before a widespread plot came to life. In the event, Sir Thomas Wyatt was the only one of the conspirators to take action but his march on London with a band of Kentish supporters was enough to cause serious alarm. Treasons, real and imagined, continued to trouble the regime and early in 1556 an elaborate plot led by Sir Henry Dudley, involving French troops and the support of men close to the court, came near to success.

  By this time the queen’s subjects had other reasons for bitter discontent. England was dragged into the Habsburgs’ latest war with France. The crops failed. An influenza epidemic claimed tens of thousands of victims – and Mary had introduced her version of the Inquisition. She never intended to be a persecutrix and her councillors were at one with Philip in urging a softly softly approach to the religious question. But Mary was shocked to discover that she could not put the clock back. Landowners were not prepared to restore monastic property to the church. Parliament would not relinquish the authority in religious issues it had gained in the 1530s. Bold evangelical preachers could not be easily silenced. Illicit presses poured out anti-government pamphlets. Worst of all from Mary’s point of view, her subjects did not flock back with thankful hearts to the restored mass. Protestantism was driven underground, not exterminated. To the queen’s frustration over the failure of her religious ambitions was added her genuine alarm at rebellion and her growing unpopularity. To assert her authority and that of her bishops she took an increasingly hard line on heresy. Protestant asylum-seekers were expelled. Thousands of men and women were examined about their beliefs. Hundreds were imprisoned. At least 287 were burned at the stake. Over 800 convinced evangelicals fled abroad. Since these were largely well-to-do, educated Protestants who could afford to leave home and settle in a foreign land the loss to the nation was not inconsiderable. Moreover they did not abandon the hope of reconverting England. Some of the exiles became ardent propagandists who flooded their homeland with partisan pamphlets. Others were directly involved in plots against the regime.

  Francis Walsingham did not hurry to join the flood of religious emigrants, even though London was rapidly becoming an uncongenial and even a dangerous place. Forced attendance at the popish mass distressed him and he may well have become a focus of government attention. The first victims of the new regime were those most closely associated with its predecessor. Several of Walsingham’s friends and acquaintances found themselves taken in for interrogation. The government had no widespread extermination policy but as trails were discovered leading to secret presses, unauthorized religious gatherings and the hatchers of plots, they had no alternative but to follow them up. Sooner or later the bishop’s men would come knocking at Walsingham’s door. He knew people who were involved in Wyatt’s rebellion. He was, at the very least, acquainted with John Day, the publisher of subversive literature who had withdrawn to Stamford, from where, financed by William Cooke, Cecil’s brother-in-law, he continued his business. With this and other information in his possession Francis was vulnerable.

  Walsingham had good reasons for quitting England and family matters provided him with the opportunity to do so. At what point Walsingham decided to leave for more congenial and safer climes is not known. We only have tantalizing glimpses of his movements over the next few years. The cities of Basel and Padua feature prominently in the sparse account of his peregrinations but this may be due to the random survival of records and may not indicate the real significance of his sojourn in these places. Right at the beginning of Mary’s reign he could claim a good reason for applying for a passport.

  In 1553 his aunt, Lady Denny, died, leaving a young family of four daughters and three sons as orphans. Jane Denny’s close relatives took charge of the girls and Francis accepted responsibility for their brothers. The boys, all under the age of fourteen, cannot have been in any danger but presumably the family was determined to have them brought up in a good Protestant environment. By the autumn of 1554 the Dennys were at Padua in the charge of John Tamworth (soon to be Walsingham’s brother-in-law). It seems likely that Francis was with them. About this time he enrolled in the university. A year later we find the party in Basel where the Dennys were left in the care of Walsingham’s friends. He then hastened back across the Alps to resume his studies.

  The fact that our knowledge of Francis’ itinerary is so sketchy should not deceive us into dismissing the exile years as unimportant. On the contrary, they were formative. He emerged from this life of scholarly vagabondage with beliefs strengthened, opinions defined, friendships established, understanding of continental religion and politics clarified and character developed. The policies he later pursued in government stemmed directly from his experiences between 1553 and 1558. The 500 or so men of substance and conviction (most of them young) who spent all or part of Mary’s reign in the Protestant hot spots of Europe constituted a kind of evangelical university. They sat at the feet of the leading scholars of the Reformation – John Calvin at Geneva, Peter Martyr Vermigli at Strasbourg (and, later, Zurich), Heinrich Bullinger at Zurich. The exiled community also produced its own notables. Walsingham’s old teacher, John Cheke, went to Padua, as he said, ‘to learn not only the Italian tongue but also philosophically to course over the civil laws’. He devoted part of his time there to lecturing on Demosthenes to his fellow countrymen. John Jewel was a talented Oxford lecturer who had fallen under the spell of Peter Martyr when the latter, attracted to the university by Cranmer, taught there between 1547 and 1553. He followed his hero to the continent and acted as Peter Martyr’s assistant. Richard Cox, formerly Chancellor of Oxford University, turned up at Strasbourg and became famously locked in theological dispute with another exile, the fiery Scot, John Knox. Two bishops, John Bale of Ossory and John Posset of Winchester, used the safety of their European havens to launch anti-papal polemics across the Channel. Posset died at Strasbourg in 1556 but the others went on to be members of the Elizabethan establishment.

  But the two men who would make the biggest impact in the next reign were William Whittingham and John Foxe. It was they who gave England the two books which changed it for all time. Whittingham who, though a layman, became minister to the English community at Geneva, supervised the production of a new translation of the Bible. Its Calvinistic tone shaped the theological thinking of two generations of English Christians and it was not superseded until the appearance of the Authorized Version in 1611. Foxe gave his fellow countrymen a bestseller which set in aspic their perception of the Church of Rome – the Acts and Monuments of the Christian Religion, better known as the Book of Martyrs.

  This enormous and immensely influential work, which went through four editions (each larger than the one before) during the author’s lifetime, covered the entire history of the Christian church and, in particular, those members of it who had died for their faith. Foxe continued the work of fellow exiles, notably John Bale and another religious refugee Edmund Grindal (later to be Archbishop of Canterbury), and their writings were not mere academic exercises produced by men with time on their hands. They sprang form the anguished need of the 1550s émigrés to find answers to such questions as ‘Why was God permitting the slaughter of his English saints?’, ‘How had the Catholic church fallen into such grave error?’, ‘What role was England destined to play in the establishment of the true faith?’ and ‘How did all this fit in with the divine eternal scheme of things?’ These were certainly questions which were exercising Walsingham and we shall not understand his later career if we do not address the deep concerns that he and his fellow asylum-seekers felt
or the theological and philosophical mindset they developed to deal with those concerns.

  Bale and Foxe, like their fellow evangelicals at Basel, had no doubt that England was marked by providence for a special destiny. Their writings combined Biblicism and nationalism. Bale’s Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Catalogus traced the history of England from such illustrious semi-mythical figures as Brutus, Joseph of Arimathea and King Arthur down to the mid-sixteenth century. In parallel it chronicled the development of the papacy, represented in the early centuries by faithful and devout pastors but, from the time of Boniface VIII (1294–1303), by agents of Antichrist, who tried to usurp the temporal authority of kings and emperors. But human history was not just played out on the temporal plain. Bale’s prayer was the same as Milton’s, a century later:

  what in me is dark

  Illumine, what is low raise and support;

  That in the height of this great argument

  I many assert eternal Providence,

  And justify the ways of God to men.4

  Everything that happened was predestined by God and foretold in his word, particularly in the Book of Revelation. St John’s vision was the key to:

  all the chronicles and most notable histories which hath been written since Christ’s ascension, opening the true natures of their ages, times and seasons. He that hath store of them and shall diligently search them over, conferring the one with the other, time with time, and age with age, shall perceive most wonderful causes. For in the text [of Revelation] are they [the causes] only proposed in effect, and promised to follow in their seasons, and so ratified with other scriptures, but in the chronicles they are evidently seen by all ages fulfilled.5

  Bale, followed by Foxe, asserted that the story of the Christian centuries centred on the struggle between the ‘true’ church, the elect of God, and the agents of Antichrist working both inside and outside the institutions of religion. As far as England was concerned this theme was intertwined with the independence of the state from foreign subversion. Henry VIII had expelled the pope and instituted reform of doctrine and liturgy. Inevitably, the beast of Revelation was fighting back, hence the dreadful persecution currently raging, but his days were numbered and the endtime was near. This was the theological foundation upon which Walsingham and the returning exiles built all their thinking about English politics:

  the effect of the propaganda initiated by the Marian exiles would be felt in all phases of public life in the reign of Elizabeth. Government would more and more have to be carried on to the accompaniment of discussion by men with the confidence in their own opinions bred by such a faith, an increasingly passionate interest in the affairs of the realm, and a familiar apparatus of images and ideas for speculation, expression and communication. Nothing like this on any such scale had ever happened in England before.6

  However, it was far from true that all the refugees returned home with a uniform politico-religious programme to advance. Factions within the Protestant camp centred around the issue of whether or not the Reformation had gone far enough. Conflict flared up at Frankfurt over the form of worship to be used in the English church there. Richard Cox argued for the use of Cranmer’s 1552 Prayer Book. But John Knox rejected it as a half-papist ‘mingle-mangle’. Soon other exile communities were divided between those who looked for a continuation of the Edwardian tradition and those who wanted to purify doctrine and liturgy – which meant adopting thoroughly Calvinist patterns. The use of the word ‘Puritan’ to designate this party seems to have originated in Basel.

  There can be no doubt that Francis Walsingham’s sympathies lay with this more austere section of the Protestant community. His precise legal mind easily sifted truth from semi-truth and falsehood. He discerned principles clearly and, perhaps too readily, saw complex issues in stark black and white. At the same time he was very aware of political realities. Calvinist polity involved the creation of a godly commonwealth governed by a twofold system of secular rulers and ministers of religion. Those who held the power of the sword under God were to submit to spiritual councillors in all matters of morality and church discipline. This was difficult enough to achieve in a city state such as Geneva. The problems attendant on converting to such a regime the ancient monarchy of England with its long-established governmental and judicial systems were daunting to contemplate. Furthermore, the sermons and writings of Calvin and other Reformed ministers were scarcely flattering in their references to contemporary monarchies.

  The courts of princes . . . were represented by Calvin as nests of ambition, hypocrisy, flattery and servility. He singled out particularly the corruption of judges and the venality of judicial office, as well as the advancement of the unworthy, as being the order of the day there. Advancement, if it is achieved, is no more than ‘fetters of gold’, and the sensible man is content with a private station, for ‘there will be, I say, more liberty in many a poor man’s house, than in those great pits, the courts of princes’. He noted also a ‘theology of the court’, which prostitutes itself to the service of the powerful. And . . . he identified ‘flatterers of princes’ as one of the main threats to the sinceritas fidei in his time.7

  Henry VIII had been invested by parliament with the supreme headship of the English church. His fiat ran in all aspects of the nation’s life – spiritual as well as temporal. Under Edward VI and Mary, the authority of the Crown in matters spiritual had been wielded to swing official policy violently in different directions. Walsingham was astute enough to realize that under a new Protestant regime, which would presumably be led by Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s only remaining reformers would have to rely on the unassailable power of the monarch to carry their policies but, at the same time, that monarch would have to be persuaded to yield to devout, theologically educated spiritual advisers. At best, movement towards a truly ‘purified’ state church might be achieved but only by the skilful application of tact and subtlety.

  There was nothing remotely tactful or subtle about a book published in Geneva by John Knox in the spring of 1558. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women attacked the female rulers of England, Scotland and France (Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise and Catherine de Medici) but it went much further than the indictment of individuals: ‘To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’8

  The timing of this diatribe could scarcely have been worse. It enraged Princess Elizabeth months before her accession and reinforced her dislike of Protestant radicals. Calvin and other leaders hastened to dissociate themselves from Knox’s language. Their problem – and it was one Walsingham shared – was that they agreed with his premise. In the biblical hierarchy of creation women were inferior to men, and the sorry state of England seemed to support the scriptural principle. Mary Tudor’s regime was fragile specifically because she was a woman in a man’s world. In matters of policy she deferred to her husband and to forthright councillors like Stephen Gardiner and her own archbishop, Reginald Pole. In dynastic affairs her sole responsibility was to give birth to a healthy heir. Her failure in this regard was a personal and, in Catholic eyes, a national and religious tragedy. How the fact of female dependence on men could be squared with the fait accompli of a Protestant queen became the subject of much, sometimes sophistical, debate and, in terms of practical everyday government, the problem would colour the relationship between Elizabeth and her Council.

  This, of course, was all in the future as Walsingham continued his continental peregrinations – a mixture of educational programme, cultural grand tour and evangelical pilgrimage. He spent a considerable part of these years not in one or other of the Protestant shrines but in Catholic Padua, pursuing his legal studies. Padua was a dependency of Venice and it was said of citizens of the Serene Republic that they considered themselves Venet
ians first and Christians second. The Queen of the Adriatic was intensely independent, particularly in its relationship with Rome. In Venetian territory papal authority was kept at arm’s length, senior ecclesiastics were barred from the Great Council, the powers of the Inquisition were circumscribed and clergy enjoyed few special privileges. Venice welcomed strangers of all religious persuasions who could contribute to the commercial or cultural life of the state. If Protestant visitors congregated together for their own type of worship, the authorities did not pry too closely into their activities. Scores of prominent Englishmen enjoyed liberal Venetian hospitality, including Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, the doyen of English Protestants, and Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon.

  Padua’s chief claim to fame was its ancient university, already more than 300 years old when Walsingham arrived. He enrolled in its great law school and increased his knowledge by studying with the finest European experts in the corpus juris civilis. It is now that we obtain our first glimpse of Walsingham’s character. He obviously impressed both his confrères and his seniors, for, in December 1555, he was elected to the office of Consularius of the English Nation in the law faculty. This meant that he represented and exercised authority over his fellow countrymen. The student body was divided into twelve ‘nations’ according to their place of origin. The chosen representative of each nation looked after his colleagues’ interests and even had a say in the running of the faculty. In return the authorities looked to him to ensure the good behaviour of his compatriots. It was an office requiring tact, firmness and diplomacy: students were no less boisterous in the sixteenth century than they are today. The twenty-three-year-old Walsingham must have possessed a gravitas which commended him to students and teachers alike.