Elizabeth's Spymaster (30 page)

They did not even give her time to commend her soul to God … [Elizabeth] the queen orders her ambassador to inform this king [Henry III] of it and assure him, as she will more fully by a special envoy, that the deed was done against her will. Although she had signed the death warrant, she had no intention of having it carried out.

She cannot avoid blaming herself for having trusted anyone but herself in such a matter.
⁸⁶

Mendoza’s informant was Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris. Here, then, is Elizabeth’s own version, her own ‘spin’, on these tragic events, for diplomatic consumption. At home, her rage against her government ministers and advisers had to be public to be believed. By now feeling somewhat better, she enquired of her learned judges whether her royal prerogative could be used to hang the wretched Davison without the tiresome formality of a trial. A cornered and panic-stricken Burghley sent a messenger with a desperate civil servant’s appeal to them to consider their advice to the queen very carefully: ‘I think it is a hard time if men, for doing well before God and man, shall be otherwise punished than law may warrant with an opinion gotten from the judges that her prerogative is above the law.’
⁸⁷

But Elizabeth was not to be moved in her righteous anger at what she saw as a betrayal of her trust. She eventually referred Davison’s case to the Court of Star Chamber, where he appeared on 28 March, accused
of dire disobedience in issuing the death warrant and of concealing the proceedings from her. He was inevitably found guilty of misprision,
⁸⁸
fined the huge sum of 10,000 marks (or
£
1,080,000 in today’s monetary values) – ‘too much for Davison, yet little for his offence’
⁸⁹
– and returned smartly to the Tower to be detained there at the queen’s pleasure. In the event, Elizabeth having firmly and publicly made her point, the fine was never imposed and Davison was released nineteen months later after a letter from Burghley and Walsingham to Sir Owen Hopton, Lieutenant of the Tower, ordered that Davison be moved ‘in a secret manner’ to private custody.
⁹⁰
He was never employed in royal service again, but continued to draw his salary as Secretary of State and, thanks to Walsingham’s influence, continued to receive some of his official perks.

Burghley also remained out in the cold. The queen’s fury against the Lord Treasurer was increased, like petrol being poured onto a fire, by the dispatches sent to London by Stafford in Paris regarding the anger felt there at Mary’s death; so much so that Walsingham ordered him to stop sending them, for his reports ‘increased the more her majesty’s offence against her Council’. On 15 March, after she condescended to receive Burghley but had immediately fallen into another rage, the Lord Treasurer wrote to the queen:

I am so wounded in the heart with the late sharp and piercing speeches of her majesty to myself in the hearing of my lord of Leicester and Mr Secretary Walsingham, expressing therewith her indignation, at such time as I was called to her presence for matters of the Low Countries; myself giving no occasion by any speech of the matter of the queen of Scots, until her majesty did charge me therewith as since regarding, in great anguish of heart, the weight of her majesty’s displeasure so settled and increased …

I have certainly felt of long time many sharp effects for doing my duty, yet now being so publicly, in town, in court, and field known, as I daily find it, her majesty is so grievously offended with me, whereby my enemies may presume that her ears are open to any sinister calumniations to be devised against me for anything I shall do in this time of disfavour.

I am therefore urgently moved to live wanly in token of the reverend fear I bear to her majesty to forbear all voluntary public actions of state, wherein I am not by her majesty expressly commanded, until I may be relieved to have her presence.
⁹¹

His old rival at court, Leicester, wrote to him on 9 April, suggesting that the harshness he was experiencing at the queen’s hands was because his ‘place and credit heretofore with her makes it heavier to you and more noted to the world than to all the rest …’ He also added these ponderous words of comfort:

So my good lord, being most heartily sorry for your absence as much for her majesty’s and the realm’s service as for your own particular, I will leave you to His protection that rules all and can give you more true comfort in an hour than all the world can do in the longest man’s life.
⁹²

Eventually, Elizabeth realised she could ill afford to shun the political skills and acumen of so experienced a minister as Burghley, and after a few late outbursts – calling him traitor, and wicked wretch – he was received back into the bosom of her good esteem.

Walsingham, meanwhile, as befits a man of the shadows, kept his head down and quietly carried on with his official duties. Elizabeth knew she could not afford to lose the services of both of her Chief Ministers, and consequently he escaped much of her disfavour, having the dubious advantage of being at home sick until the middle of February 1587 and therefore absent from court during the critical period. However, any triumph, any satisfaction he may have felt at the destruction of his enemy Mary Queen of Scots was to be short-lived.

England now faced a more grievous clear and present danger.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Defeating the Armada

‘This I am sure of: if her majesty would have spent hut 1, 000 crowns to have had some intelligence, it would have saved her twenty times as much,’

CHARLES HOWARD, LORD EFFINGHAM, ADMIRAL OF THE ENGLISH FLEET. FROM HIS SHIP
THE BEAR,
TO WALSINGHAM, 24 JANUARY 1587.
¹

Many believe that the execution of Mary Queen of Scots triggered, or at least accelerated, King Philip II of Spain’s ambitious and financially crippling plans to assault England. In truth, the genesis of the invasion was more the anger caused in 1585 by Francis Drake’s plundering, burning voyage to the West Indies and Leicester’s expedition to the Low Countries.
²
These were the English actions that finally goaded the Spanish into preparations for an amphibious offensive. The plans were made despite Philip’s strong misgivings that an attack on Elizabeth’s realm might provoke France – fearing total encirclement by his dominions – into an uncomfortable and unlikely alliance with England.

Walsingham, with his aggressive, almost fanatical desire to protect and promote his fledgling Protestant religion, had long feared Spanish military action against England. In October 1585, the spy master wrote to William Harborne,
³
sent at his suggestion three years before to become English ambassador at the Turkish court in Constantinople, instructing him to
persuade the Turks to attack Spanish interests in the Mediterranean, or indeed the southern coast of Spain itself.

These pre-emptive strikes would serve as an archetypal diversionary tactic, focusing Spanish attention onto the Turks rather than the English. This ambitious diplomatic master stroke vividly demonstrates not only Walsingham’s firm grasp and understanding of the complete European picture, but also the breathtaking depth of his strategic vision, as well as his full appreciation of the value of sea power. Harborne had actually first received these orders verbally the previous April via Walsingham’s trusted Florentine agent Jacomo Manucci, but now, impatient for action, the Secretary confirmed his instructions in cipher. Recent Spanish successes in the Low Countries were likely to foment ‘hot wars’ between England and Spain, and therefore Harborne was to

use all your endeavour and industry on that behalf… for… it is most evident that if the said king [Philip II] might be kept thoroughly occupied, either by some incursion from the coast of Africa in itself, or by the galleys of the Grand Seigneur [the Sultan of Turkey] in his dominions in Italy or otherwise, as may be best considered of you in those parts.

With the order taken to annoy him from this side of Europe, his power should be so weakened and divided as it would be no small advantage to her majesty presently, but to all Christendom hereafter.

The limbs of the devil [Catholic Spain and Muslim Turkey] being thus set against one another by means thereof, the true church and doctrine of the Gospel may, during their contention, have leisure to grow to such strength as shall be requisite for suppression of them both …

Let them [the Turks] understand that there could never be … better occasion than at this time that he [Philip] is entered into a quarrel with her majesty who shall have the means to give him such annoyance on this side of Europe that if the Sultan will embrace the opportunity of assailing him on the other side, there is no question but that he shall sink under… so heavy a burden.
⁴

At the very least, Walsingham suggested that Harborne should convince the Turks to make a show of mobilising their ships in the west to threaten the Spanish and thereby distract them from mounting any hostilities against England.

A war fought on two fronts against Spain – with the eventual prize being the ascendancy of the Protestant religion in Europe! It must have been the stuff of Walsingham’s most compelling and pleasant daydreams; but, always realistic, he would also have known from the outset that success looked remarkably unlikely.
⁵
Harborne laboured hard for three years to fulfil these grand, sweeping plans, but was constantly defeated by the Turks’ total preoccupation with the fighting on the eastern borders of their empire against Persia and by their lack of naval resources to attempt a fresh military adventure elsewhere.

During this period, Walsingham was desperately short of reliable informants in Spain. The English merchants based there supplied intelligence on a somewhat haphazard basis, and their activities were further limited when Spain imposed a trade embargo on English ships in May 1585 and denied its ports to them. His earliest report that an armada of warships and military transports was being assembled and troops being mustered in the Spanish possessions in Italy came to England via a merchant who landed at Dartmouth in Devon in December 1585.

Initially, Walsingham, after sifting through a pile of conflicting reports from Spain in early 1586, was not convinced of the immediacy of the threat of the Armada, dismissing stories of shipping movements and warlike preparations as mere ‘Spanish brag’.
⁶
He wrote to Leicester on 24 March that the Spanish threat ‘(as the report that came from Lisbon the tenth of this month), will prove nothing this year and I hope less the next’. Then doubts began to gnaw insidiously at his self-confidence and certainty. That same month, the spy master sent Antony Poyntz (who was in the service of the Spanish ambassador in Paris) to Spain to gather more intelligence. But Poyntz was a double agent, serving both sides, as he admitted to Walsingham, who clearly planned to use him to supply disinformation to the Spaniards.

In fact, Walsingham’s instincts were entirely correct. Detailed planning for the invasion had only been submitted to the Spanish king for approval two weeks earlier, on 12 March, envisaging the deployment of 556 ships of all types, including 150 ‘great ships of war’, 85, 332 sailors and soldiers and a further 8, 890 gunners and cavalry. Philip firmly vetoed these plans as far too grandiose and expensive and instead initially relied for his land forces on the 30, 000 battle-hardened veterans drawn from the Duke of Parma’s army in the Low Countries, to be transported across to England in towed flat-bottomed barges.
⁷
The Armada was also to carry roughly the same number of soldiers as Parma’s multinational contingent.

The true import of all that activity in the Spanish ports may have been revealed to Walsingham through one of his spies in Rome, one of many placed there to monitor and report on the exiled English Catholics and the seminarists still being sent into England.

One account, first written eighty years after Walsingham’s death, tells how he learnt from a well-placed source in Spain of a letter from King Philip, written, for security, in his own hand, to Pope Sixtus V, briefing him on the invasion plans. The English agents in Rome were then alerted, and one of them bribed, threatened or in some way induced an august but possibly venal member of the pontiff’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to steal (or more likely copy) the Spanish king’s letter, safely locked up in the Pope’s writing desk or cabinet in the Vatican. This was apparently achieved by stealing Sixtus’s keys out of his pocket while he slept.
⁸

It is a nice story and probably apocryphal, but certainly confirmation of the Spanish intentions against England later did come from Rome, when Philip informed the full college of cardinals of his invasion plans in order to secure their support in the event of the Pope’s death. Their collective noun perhaps should be a ‘chatter’ of cardinals, as the intelligence quickly leaked out and very soon after was gratefully received in London.

By February 1587, information on the Spanish preparations for invasion was flowing more strongly to Walsingham. An assessment of the strength of the gathering Armada, with the displacement and location
of seventy-six vessels in northern Spain and elsewhere, is listed in a document in Lord Admiral Howard’s hand.
⁹