Sir Francis Walsingham Read online

  Walsingham, by now a trusted friend and colleague of the secretary, agreed with this assessment. Cecil knew his man. Walsingham was passionate about his faith, a straightforward, no-nonsense advocate of reform. He was an earnest patriot with a touch of the xenophobe about him. He also – and this was more to the point – had extensive connections throughout Europe. We have already seen several examples of the kind of correspondence between members of the European evangelical brotherhood who assiduously passed on whatever information and gossip came their way. We need not doubt that Walsingham was in frequent receipt of such letters. Through the Huguenot churches in London and his agents on the south coast Walsingham kept a close watch on cross-Channel comings and goings. In August 1568 he furnished Cecil with a list of suspicious foreigners who had recently entered the country. By this time Walsingham had become one of the few discreet men the secretary could trust to deal with his own secret agents.

  One such as Thomas Franchiotto or François, an Italian Protestant living in France and employed there to ferret out the machinations of the Guises. In 1568 Cecil entrusted to Walsingham the interrogation of Franchiotto. The result was a vague, though nevertheless alarming, warning that Catholic activists were plotting to poison the queen. There was a growing number of such reports from about this time. Many lacked substance but all had to be taken seriously – the eternal problem of officials in charge of national security. With Franchiotto’s aid Walsingham worried away at the intelligence from France. Members of the Guise faction were talking about sending aid to their kinswoman, Mary Stuart, and provoking Catholic rebellion in England but it was no more than talk; the French court wanted to maintain friendly diplomatic relations with England. When Franchiotto passed on information about troops being embarked in Marseille for an assault on England he may well have been exaggerating in order to underline his usefulness to his paymasters.

  Cecil probably entrusted this espionage project to Walsingham because he was preoccupied with a much more sensitive and difficult foreign policy problem which involved him in almost daily attendance on his royal mistress. The Scottish regent, James, Earl of Moray (Mary’s half-brother), had sent to Westminster copies of Mary’s correspondence (the so-called Casket Letters) which purported to prove her complicity in Darnley’s murder. His objective was to justify Mary’s deposition in the eyes of the English queen. The letters were a clever mish-mash of documents from Mary’s hand put together with interpolations in such a way as to leave no doubt about Mary’s guilt. Moray knew it. Cecil knew it. Elizabeth suspected it. She wanted her sister queen to be exonerated and restored to her throne. Cecil was determined that this should not happen. When a tribunal was set up to examine the evidence he manipulated the proceedings. Elizabeth refused to be manoeuvred. She simply called a halt to the investigation. Mary’s guilt or innocence was left undecided. No one was satisfied – except Elizabeth, who was becoming highly adept at the game of not committing herself.

  Walsingham had clearly made up his mind on the matter and was anxious to do what he could to help. ‘I am willed by [Franchiotto],’ he wrote to Cecil, ‘to advertise you that if for the discovery of the Queen of Scots’ consent to the murder of her husband there lack sufficient proofs, he is able (if it shall please you to use him) to discover certain that should have been employed in the same murder who are here to be produced.’22 This was not intelligence gathering; it was intelligence manipulation. It would be easy to accuse Walsingham of dishonesty but truer, I believe, to charge him with excessive zeal. Determined to protect queen and country from the blight of Catholicism, he was ready to be persuaded that papist plots were everywhere and that Mary Stuart was an unprincipled woman who was an important part of the international conspiracy. If he saw conspirators under every bush it was a fault he readily acknowledged. ‘There is less damage in fearing too much than too little,’ he advised Cecil. It may well have been his partisanship that kept him away from court. From the vantage point of his ideological mountaintop Walsingham saw, or thought he saw, the whole political landscape in hard-edged clarity and found Elizabeth’s irresolution frustrating. Writing to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, less than three years later he observed:

  I conceived great hope by your letter of the 16th of August that her Majesty would have taken profit of the late affairs, but finding in her Majesty’s letters lately received not so much as any mention made thereof maketh me utterly to despair thereof . . . I beseech your Lordship, do not give over to do what good you may, for it concerneth as well God’s glory as her Majesty’s safety.23

  Cecil may well have concluded that, valuable as Walsingham was, he would scarcely fit in well at court. However, he might be just the man for the vacant embassy in Paris.

  Chapter 4

  ‘IN TRUTH A VERY WISE PERSON’

  1569–73

  Sometime in the early autumn of 1569 a political pamphlet hit the booksellers’ stalls. It was entitled A Discourse touching the pretended Match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots. Its author chose to remain anonymous. However, on two manuscript copies that have survived, the little diatribe is attributed to Walsingham. Was this really the first of his very few ventures into print? To answer that question we need to understand the crisis that provoked it and decide what it was meant to achieve.

  During these crucial and sometimes perilous months the two important centres of activity were the Council chamber and the northern border lands. Cecil’s behaviour over the seizure of the Spanish gold had opened up a rift among the queen’s advisers. Norfolk and Arundel headed a group incensed by policies which, in their opinion, needlessly provoked the hostility of Spain and they used this diplomatic ‘blunder’ as a crowbar with which to lever the secretary out of office. They tried to have Cecil arrested at the Council table and hustled off to the Tower but a plot that might have worked in her father’s day would be quite alien now, given Elizabeth’s attitude towards her ministers. Just as Cecil had gone about policy-making without consulting his colleagues, so this faction began planning their own alternative national strategy. Royal marriages were, as ever, uppermost in councillors’ minds and, at some point during their brainstorming, the idea emerged of marrying Mary Stuart to the Duke of Norfolk. The proposed theory was that this would facilitate Mary’s restoration, which Elizabeth desired, ensure that Scotland pursued pro-English policies, pacify the major powers and dampen smouldering Catholic discontent at home. But there were those in the plot whose designs were more sinister. There was little cohesion among the schemers (which largely explains their eventual failure). Variations of the plan were abroad, designed to make it appeal to as many supporters as possible. There were those who saw in the scheme nothing more than the solution to the succession problem. Mary’s right of inheritance would be restored but with a husband who was, outwardly, a conformist Protestant, the religious settlement would be safe. Then there were covert or overt Catholics in league with de Spes, the Spanish ambassador, and papal agents who hoped to make Mary and Norfolk the figureheads of a movement to remove Elizabeth (by violence if necessary) and restore the old faith.

  In the early stages of the intrigue Norfolk and his colleagues sought to widen support for their plans. They sounded out several members of the old nobility, especially the leaders of the northern (and more conservative) shires such as the Earls of Westmorland (Norfolk’s brother-in-law) and Northumberland. In August they secured a majority within the Council for the marriage of Mary to a peer of the realm (as yet unnamed). Cecil, still feeling insecure after the earlier attack and also severely ill with gout, had no alternative but to go along with this outwardly. That did not prevent him working against the scheme in his own subtle ways. One of these may have been commissioning the Discourse touching the pretended Match.

  The author confined himself strictly to a consideration of the character and motivations of Norfolk and Mary and then went on to discuss whether the ex-queen should be married to an Englishman or to a foreign prince. Needless to say, he wa
s not flattering about either of his subjects. Mary was ‘a Papist, which is evil, or else an Atheist, which is worse’. She was in alliance with Catholic forces abroad who were set on overthrowing the Protestant regime in England. As to Thomas Howard’s faith, all the writer was prepared to say was that he was not ‘settled in Religion’. He painted a picture of a popular young nobleman whose affability was a cloak for ambition and who was so weak-willed that he would soon be in thrall to his Scottish wife.1

  The Discourse must have been written between August and early October 1569, for, after that, events moved rapidly and none of the changed circumstances are referred to in the pamphlet. It certainly expressed or supplemented arguments Cecil was not able to put forward in Council and seems to have been intended for circulation among those members of the political nation who were being canvassed by the Norfolk party. It has some similarities to a memorandum Cecil had drawn up three years earlier when he was worried about the possibility of Robert Dudley marrying Elizabeth. Then he had set out the pros and cons of the queen’s match with Dudley as opposed to a union with Cecil’s preferred candidate, the Archduke Charles of Austria.

  The pamphlet could have been engineered by Cecil but equally it could have been circulated by some opportunist partisan hoping to curry favour with the secretary. In March 1570 it provoked a counterblast – Answer to a little book that was published against the marriage of the Duke of Norfolk and the Scottish Queen. The anonymous author had no doubt that the Discourse emanated from one of the London Puritan ‘brotherhoods’ which he proceeded to paint in lurid colours:

  The grand captains among them will seem to have intelligences, yea sometimes from Councillors, such is their audacity. For this is a general rule amongst them that he hath most commendation of them that can learn most news. It anything happen either abroad or at home otherwise than they would have it then straight, their forge is full trimmed till that they have put abroad in lieu of that three or four lies. Thus they spend their time in brewing of mischief, sometimes by devising such pretty pamphlets as this before, sometimes in sending or throwing of letters without name, wherein they have singular felicity to show their rhetorical indicting, sometimes in setting a preacher at work to rail where they list, and for a change of exercise they will make fair weather where they most hate, to see if they can suck out any poison there to set at work their restless mills.2

  This is basically an accurate picture of the close Puritan congregations who were energetic in exchanging news with their Calvinist friends at home and abroad and in bringing pressure to bear on the leaders of church and state.

  Now Walsingham was certainly a member of just such a congregation as the Answer castigated. His church, St Giles Cripplegate, was a hotbed of Puritanism. In 1565 the vicar was Robert Crowley, one of the City’s leading firebrand preachers and ringleader of the extremist clergy who objected to wearing the vestments (‘popish rags’) prescribed by the Prayer Book. His incumbency did not last long. In April 1566 he made a scene at a funeral because the lay clerks were wearing surplices. He was promptly deprived of his living. His place was taken by John Bartlett, the lecturer (ie independent preacher supported by the parish), who was not a whit less outspoken than Crowley. The Bishop of London tried unsuccessfully to silence him also and, when Bartlett insisted that it was his duty to instruct his flock, he was placed under house arrest. This provoked an enormous backlash in the parish. Sixty St Giles’ ladies besieged the bishop in his palace and it was several hours before they were persuaded to disperse. Not to be deprived of ‘sound’ preaching, the people of St Giles now secured the services of a young zealot by the name of John Field who was a close colleague of John Foxe and was helping the historian to edit the latest edition of Acts and Monuments. Field rapidly grew to be as effective a leader of radical opinion as his predecessor had been. Not only did he organize like-minded clergy into an anti-espicopal brotherhood, he also co-authored the Admonition to the Parliament, a trenchant pamphlet urging further reform and spiced with such invective as the denunciation of Elizabeth’s Prayer Book as ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass book, fall of abominations’. It is scarcely surprising that Field also fell foul of the ecclesiastical establishment and ended up doing a spell in Newgate jail.

  This was the kind of Christian ministry under which the Walsinghams sat Sunday by Sunday and with which we may assume they were, at least broadly, in sympathy. The extremists were much encouraged by the support of top people. Crowley boasted that he had ‘friends enough to have set the whole realm together by the ears’.3 It was largely as a result of supporters in high places that Crowley was later restored to St Giles Cripplegate – though it is significant that he had by then somewhat modified his views. By the mid-seventies the Dudley brothers – Robert, Earl of Leicester and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick – had clearly emerged as the political leaders of a Puritan party. Francis Walsingham was, by then, identified as one of their party. He formed a link between the worlds of headstrong religious extremism and the court and Council. But this does not mean that he was, himself, an ultra-radical.

  When we turn to the Discourse what strikes us is that it does not exude fanaticism. Despite the assertion of the author of the Answer, there is no hint in the Discourse of violent Puritan polemic or religious radicalism. The author accepts the ecclesiastical status quo and commends the queen’s leniency in not pursuing the enemies and critics of her church. ‘God be thanked,’ he comments, ‘that hath so provided for the continuance of religion as he hath given us a prince that favoureth religion.’ The writer does allow himself the observation that lack of sound preaching has encouraged popery on the one hand and atheism on the other but there is no suggestion that he is anything other than a loyal member of the English church. He sticks carefully to his chosen subject and if he is dissatisfied with the Elizabethan religious settlement he keeps quiet about it. He pens a reasoned case that Mr Secretary himself could happily have identified with.

  What does emerge from the pamphlet is that its author was informed about foreign and domestic affairs. He seems well acquainted with the Guise family – ‘a race that is both enemy to God and the common quiet of Europe’. He knows that Murray, the Scottish regent, is so well disposed to Elizabeth that ‘during his government she may assure herself of most perfect union’. His honest analysis of the religious sympathies of the English people is that two-thirds of them are inclined towards Catholicism. Here is an author with his finger on the pulse of current affairs.

  So far, the attribution of the Discourse to Walsingham seems to hold up. However, in the concluding paragraphs an argument is advanced which it is difficult to imagine Walsingham assenting to. The author recommends marrying off Mary to a Spanish or French prince on the grounds that this would sow discord between the two leading Catholic powers. Although Walsingham was among the few political figures in England who embraced a conspiracy theory based on a Rome-Paris-Madrid axis, he would not have advocated such a risky policy of placing in the hands of Valois or Habsburg aspirants a valid claim to the Crown of England. In fact the Discourse was the work not of Walsingham but of his close contemporary and fellow lawyer, Thomas Norton.

  Norton was one of the up-and-coming politicians of the day and a vigorous, if moderate, Puritan reformer. He married the daughter of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had been burned by Mary. Norton threw himself zealously into everything he undertook. As well as pursuing his legal profession, he wrote political pamphlets and poetry. With Thomas Sackville he created the early English tragedy Gorboduc, a play heavy with contemporary political comment. He entered the Commons in the first parliament of Elizabeth’s reign and became one of its most active members, particularly interesting himself in the cause of church reform. He worked in committee with John Foxe and the Puritan publisher, John Day, to produce a modified version of the Prayer Book which, they hoped, would create a consensus on such vexed questions as vestments. Alas, nothing ever came of the this ei
renical initiative. It has long been known that, in later years, Walsingham was Norton’s patron and that he found the pamphleteer a useful mouthpiece for his own policies. We can now see that the connection between the two men was so close from the earliest days of Elizabeth’s reign that Walsingham could be identified by some contemporaries as the author of the Discourse.

  In the real world of politics the situation rapidly developed beyond the point of academic debate about the Howard-Stuart marriage. In mid-September Elizabeth confronted Norfolk and his nerve broke. He took himself off to his estate at Kenninghall without royal permission. The queen angrily summoned him to return but when he did set out for Windsor (Elizabeth had been sufficiently alarmed to take up residence in her most secure palace) he got no farther than the Chilterns. He was met on the road by armed guards who conveyed him to Burnham, Buckinghamshire, and the house of Paul Wentworth, Walsingham’s brother-in-law. Here the duke was detained in strict isolation until a military escort arrived on 4 October to convey him to the Tower. Howard’s allies were thrown into confusion. Most followed their political instinct and hastened to distance themselves from the unfortunate earl. But in the north, Westmorland and Northumberland panicked. Ordered to present themselves to the Council to be examined for their part in the conspiracy, they raised the standard of revolt. With about 5,500 men they overwhelmed Durham and marched on southwards, intent on reaching Tetbury Castle in the Derbyshire Peaks, where Mary Stuart was lodged. For many of the little army who marched behind banners displaying the five wounds of Christ this was a Catholic crusade reminiscent of the Pilgrimage of Grace a generation earlier. An appalled merchant reported the news that soon reached London: