Elizabeth's Spymaster (35 page)

Also, the three months I spent in riding to most ports where this army was made, whereof I have given true relation to your honour; anything that your honour shall think convenient for me, either in England or Ireland.
⁹⁰

As we have seen, he was rewarded for his services in Spain.

By the date of Ousley’s letter, around 20, 000 men had been mobilised for the defence of England on land. All were expected to provide their own equipment and probably the majority were thus ill-armed and only partially trained. Attempts had been made to purchase small arms and more armour in Germany but Elizabeth’s exchequer was remarkably bare and stocks of old and rusty equipment stored in the Tower of London and Windsor Castle were less than satisfactory both in quality or quantity. Leicester told Walsingham on 1 August:

A number of burgonets
⁹¹
have arrived from the Tower but not a man will buy one, being ashamed to wear it. The armoury must be better looked to. [There is] a great want of powder and munitions, which is known abroad.
⁹²

But Walsingham and his fellow Privy Councillors knew that if Spanish forces were allowed to land on English soil, their hastily mustered and inexperienced militias would be no match for Parma’s seasoned campaigners. The Spanish had to be held and defeated at sea, and they strove to maintain supplies of gunpowder and shot to the English fleet, sending forty-seven lasts’ of powder off to Portsmouth and the Kent coast between 23 and 26 July.
⁹³
Unfortunately, because of the nature of the running sea battle, little reached the guns of the English ships. Captured Spanish vessels had to be plundered of powder and shot to maintain war stocks. These vital shortages prevented Howard’s gallant captains from administering any kind of killer blow.

In spite of suffering considerable battle damage in the Channel skirmishes, the Armada emerged largely unscathed as an effective fighting
force. The fleet anchored off Calais on 27 July, ready to escort Parma’s troops across the southern North Sea to the invasion beaches in and around the Thames Estuary. But Medina Sidonia had no means to inform Parma of their imminent arrival, and the land-forces commander needed at least six days to fully embark his troops, already seriously depleted in numbers by disease and desertion, from Nieuport and Dunkirk.
⁹⁴
There was a fateful pause in Spanish fortunes.

The nimble English ships were easily able to outmanoeuvre their enemy’s ponderous attempts to come alongside and board them with their superior forces. But the effects of the English broadsides, fired at long range, were disappointing. Now the Armada, resting peacefully at anchor, was a sitting duck for a fresh weapon deployed by Howard: fireships. Eight small vessels were packed with combustible materials – barrels of pitch, tar, wood and oil – turning them into floating incendiary bombs. Just after midnight on 28 July, these were set alight and steered in amongst the Armada. Panic-stricken, the Spanish cut their anchor cables, hoisted sail and headed out into the open sea in great confusion.

As dawn broke, the English, now reinforced with more ships, attacked and battered the Armada with ferocious gunfire off Gravelines, forcing them eastwards until some ships were in danger of running aground on the treacherous sandbanks off the coast of Zeeland.

The wind suddenly veered and drove the Spanish ships northwards, eagerly pursued by the English, like hunting dogs now scenting a famous victory. They were forced to break off the chase as the Armada entered Scottish waters because of their desperate want of fresh water, food and, most importantly, powder and shot. The Spaniards were left to limp around the north coast of Scotland and out into the tempestuous Atlantic, in the hope of steering a course south and to safety in their home ports.

Where English gunnery had failed to destroy, fierce storms devastated the Armada. More than twenty-five ships were wrecked on the west coast of Ireland, drowning around 6, 000 of their soldiers and sailors. Well over 1, 500 survivors were hunted down and killed by English forces in Ireland.

One survivor of the shipwrecks, Francisco de Chéllar, wrote afterwards
of the horrors experienced by the stranded Spaniards, recounting how Sir William Fitzwilliam, Lord Deputy of Ireland and English military commander

set out at once with 1, 700 soldiers in search of the wrecks and the people who had escaped. There could not have been very many, fewer than 1, 000 men, roaming naked, unarmed, in the places where each ship foundered. Most of these, the governor caught and hanged at once. He inflicted other penalties too and imprisoned the people he found sheltering us, doing them all the injury he could.
⁹⁵

By the autumn, when the last ships straggled back into Spanish waters, of the mighty Armada totalling 130 ships only sixty got home. More than 20, 000 Spanish sailors and soldiers had perished on the voyage. Medina Sidonia told Philip in limp explanation: ‘The troubles and miseries we have suffered cannot be described to your majesty. They have been greater than have any been seen in any voyage before.’
⁹⁶

The astrologers’ prophecies of disaster had come all too true for the Spanish. But England had been saved. Despite Walsingham’s pleas, the queen immediately began to stand down the English forces to save money. On 18 August, Drake wrote to him:

I will not flatter you, but you have fought more with your pen than many have in our English navy fought with their enemies, and but that your place and most necessary attendance about her majesty cannot be spared, your valour and desserts in such place opposite to the enemy had showed itself.
⁹⁷

Even Elizabeth showed some gratitude to her spy master. After the exertions of the summer of conflict, he had fallen sick again. On 14 September, the Clerk of the Signet, Thomas Windebank, wrote to Walsingham:

After her majesty had read these letters, the first thing she said was to know how you did … I answered that you had begun your physic [medicine] yesterday because you would lose no time.

Her majesty… willed me to write to you, that such as having power to seek and take remedy in time for any [of] their griefs were like to find remedy and she hoped you should do so.

Whereupon I said that… [God] had given you health and strength in these late occasions of troubles to attend to the service and spared you from sickness hitherto.

Her majesty confirmed my saying with many gracious and comfortable words towards you.
⁹⁸

Here was a rare moment when the queen at last showed some compassion for her loyal spy master. The defeat of the Armada had been a triumph for his intelligence-gathering and the crowning moment of his long and arduous career in her service.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Death in Penury

I will that my body, in hope of a joyful resurrection, he buried without any extraordinary ceremonies as usually appertain to a man sewing in my place, in respect of the greatness of my debts and the mean state I shall leave my wife and heirs in,’

WILL OF SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM, SIGNED 12 DECEMBER 1589.
¹

Francis Walsingham suffered a fraught, stormy relationship with Elizabeth. As her Principal Secretary of State, earning an annual salary of £100
²
plus the provision of two hot meals a day, he was responsible for implementing her wishes and decisions and the instructions of her Privy Council. He also supplied guidance and advice on the thousand and one issues – legal, political and diplomatic – that demanded her urgent attention on a day-to-day basis. His duties as head of overseas espionage and chief of security at home meant that he was frequently the unwelcome bearer of grave and tumultuous news.

No such relationship ever runs smoothly, but in the fevered atmosphere of rumour and intrigue that surrounded Elizabeth’s court, he often had to endure the sharp edge of her tongue and the devious attempts of his opponents to discredit him in her eyes.

Walsingham, in turn, was often frustrated, sometimes in total despair,
at her constant pig-headed procrastination on those military and diplomatic issues (as well as her cheese-paring in spending) that he saw as vital to the interests of both throne and state. She sometimes became locked almost in a state of denial about the imminent dangers confronting her crown – indeed, her life – and it took a brave, perhaps reckless, official to shine the cold light of reality upon her false sense of security. All too frequently, Walsingham was destined to be that unlucky official.

Furthermore, there is evidence that at times she disliked intensely her spy master and secret policeman. Alone amongst her ministers and advisers, his counsel was always frank, sometimes even censorious, and frequently shorn of some of the polite niceties of court etiquette. His letters of reproach and remonstrance must have been difficult for
Gloriana,
God’s chosen sovereign of the realm of England, to read, let alone tolerate, amid the splendour and panoply of her monarchy.

Then there were his recurrent absences from court, mostly due to illness, but occasionally departures in high dudgeon at the way his advice had been ignored, or because he felt slighted, insulted even, by Elizabeth’s jibes or tantrums, and her failure to acknowledge his loyal services. On 22 December 1582, he wrote from his country home at Barn Elms to Sir Christopher Hatton:

In men’s absence from court, envy often work[s] most malicious effects and therefore I… pray you, as my friend, to procure [ensure] that I may enjoy the orderly course of justice, not to be condemned unheard. I trust there will be no fault found with my absence for… I see no use, for the present, of my service.

And if there were, I hope as it has not been hitherto, so shall it never be found that I shall prefer my particular before the public.
³

When Elizabeth havered over sending Drake to interdict the Armada preparations, Walsingham was singled out to suffer her sharp tongue. He told Hatton:

I hear that I stand in so hard terms with her majesty as I fear any persuasion I can use further … of Sir Francis Drake’s voyage will
hurt more than help. I am blamed as a principal counsellor thereof… although I did concur with the rest in a matter of advice.
⁴

On other occasions, he defended colleagues before the throne – but paid dearly for such temerity with the testy monarch. In June 1584, for example, Elizabeth became affronted by George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, and Walsingham sought to intercede with her on his behalf. But this only increased her anger and ‘seeking to qualify her displeasure’ he ‘received hard speeches himself.
⁵

Once she
had
made a decision, she could be wholly obdurate. The queen selected Walsingham to embark on an almost hopeless diplomatic mission to Scotland in July and August 1583, despite his earnest pleas not to go. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, whilst hardly an impartial observer, reported triumphantly that Walsingham, then still sick, threw himself at Elizabeth’s feet and swore by ‘the soul, body and blood of God’ that he would not travel to Scotland, even if she ordered him to be hanged for it.
⁶
Walsingham knew he would be blamed for any failure in the mission and told a colleague:

I shall be ready to set forward about the 13th or 15th [of August], though it be with as ill a will as ever I undertook any service in my life, finding … that things are now grown into so bad terms as I fear … I shall be [un]able to do any good there and therefore I would most willingly abide [avoid] the journey if by any means I might do it without her majesty’s extreme displeasure.
⁷

The queen could also be spiteful. She vehemently opposed the marriage of Sir Philip Sidney to Walsingham’s sixteen-year-old daughter Frances. Her motivation remains unclear, other than mere unkind caprice, or perhaps her ire was sparked by fears that Leicester, Sidney’s uncle, would become closer to Walsingham through the marriage, and a new power bloc would emerge at court.
⁸
Her principal Secretary of State was away sick in March 1583 when she objected to the love match and he wrote a bitter and disappointed letter from Barn Elms, again to Hatton:

I think myself bound to you for your honourable and friendly defence of the intended match between my daughter and Mr Sidney. I do find it strange that her majesty should be offended withal…

I hope that her majesty shall weigh the due circumstances of place, person and quality [so] there can grow no just cause of offence.

[It] may be thought a presumption for me to trouble her majesty with a private marriage between a free gentleman of equal standing with my daughter. I had well hoped that my painful [painstaking, conscientious] and faithful service done unto her majesty had merited that grace and favour at her hands [and] that she would have countenanced this match with her gracious and princely good likes.
⁹

He added that if the queen raised the issue again, she should understand that the match was near ‘concluded and [you should] let her know [what a] just cause I shall have, to find myself aggrieved if her majesty shall show her mislike thereof.
¹⁰
The queen’s disapproval continued into May, when Roger Manners wrote to his father Edward, Third Earl of Rutland, that ‘Mr Secretary… is somewhat troubled that her majesty conceives no better of the marriage … but I hope shortly all will be well.’
¹¹
And so it proved. Despite Elizabeth’s transparent displeasure, the couple were married on 21 September 1583 and the following July, Walsingham settled on them some of his substantial properties and lands in Wiltshire and Surrey.
¹²