Elizabeth's Spymaster (36 page)

The spy master was reported ‘well contented’ with the match. However, the marriage settlement included a clause whereby he undertook to pay or discharge all Sidney’s debts ‘so far as shall amount to £1,500’ (or more than £250,000 in today’s monetary values) and allowed the young couple and their household to live at his home at Barn Elms.
¹³
Just over two years later, in November 1585, a daughter was born. She was christened Elizabeth at the Walsinghams’ parish church of St Olave, Hart Street, around the corner from their London home in Seething Lane, with the queen, her sulks forgotten, and Leicester acting as godparents.
¹⁴
No doubt the Christian name was chosen very deliberately to placate and please her royal susceptibilities.

In June 1586, the young wife, now pregnant again but ‘well and merry’, joined her husband in Flushing in the Low Countries, where he had been appointed military governor.
¹⁵
A Spanish convoy under the Marquis de Vasto and protected by 3, 000 infantry and 1, 500 cavalry moved to resupply the besieged town of Zutphen on the banks of the River Ijssel. Sidney joined the English forces in the trenches around the town and, following the fad amongst cavalry officers of the time, did not wear his full armour – leaving off his cuisses, or thigh defences.
¹⁶
His horse was shot from under him during a second charge against the Spanish troops and he remounted on a fresh charger. As he wheeled to withdraw after penetrating the Spanish lines in a third assault, he was struck by a musket ball in the right leg, just above the knee, shattering his femur. Sidney was taken in Leicester’s barge to Arnhem, twenty miles (32 km) away and given medical treatment at the home of Madame Gruithuissens, the widow of a judge.

On 27 September, Leicester wrote a hopelessly optimistic note to Walsingham, reporting a ‘most comfortable letter’ from the surgeons about his son-in-law’s condition. They were in ‘very good hope’ of his recovery, ‘albeit yesterday evening, he grew heavy and [fell] into a fever. About two o’clock, he fell into exceeding good rest and after his sleep, found himself very well and free from any ague at all.’
¹⁷
Sidney died from gangrene in the early afternoon of Monday 17 October 1586, aged just thirty-one.
¹⁸

Leicester, aghast at the death of his nephew, brought his young widow to Utrecht

till she may recover some strength, for she is wonderfully overthrown through her long care since the beginnings of her husband’s hurt and I am the more careful that she should be in some strength ere she take her journey into England, for that she is with child.
¹⁹

Burghley wrote to Walsingham on 5 November, offering his condolences. Ever practical, the Chief Minister was more smugly concerned with the debts that his colleague was now taking on:

If your authority shall die with him for lack of foresight in making the conveyance for your safety and that you, as the lawyers’ term is, assumed upon yourself, you are in very hard case … I shall be sorry if this is your hazard, which came of love, shall be a teaching to others to adventure with more surety.

You do very well to provide as much comfort as you can for the young lady, your daughter, considering that, as I hear, she is with child, which I wish may prove to be a son for some diminution of all your common grief.
²⁰

Unhappily, Frances’ child, another daughter, died.

Sidney’s estate was insufficient to pay off even a third of his debts, which were estimated at a stupendous £6,000, or
£
1 million in today’s spending terms. Walsingham told Leicester:

This hard estate of this noble gentleman makes me to stay [delay] to take order for his burial until your lordship’s return [from the Low Countries]. I do not see how the same can be performed with that solemnity that appertains without the utter undoing of his creditors, which is to be weighed in conscience.
²¹

In the event, Sidney’s funeral, held over until 16 February 1587, was a grand and awesome spectacle, with 700 mourners winding their way through the thronged streets of London behind the cortege to his grave in the north aisle of Old St Paul’s Cathedral. As it slowly passed to the beat of black-draped and muffled drums, the crowd called out: ‘Farewell, the worthiest knight that lived.’ As befits a Protestant military hero, soldiers from the city’s trained bands fired a two-volley salute as Sidney’s coffin was lowered into the grave.

The funeral came eight days after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringay, and some cynics at court suggested that it was planned deliberately by Walsingham to counter any public mourning over her death. The splendour of the occasion was commemorated by a specially commissioned and expensive book, illustrated with thirty-two plates depicting the procession engraved by the herald and draughtsman Thomas Lant.
²²

In spite of Walsingham’s dedicated service to queen and country, Elizabeth did not shower honours on her faithful spy master, and he had to wait until 1 December 1577 for his knighthood, conferred upon him at Windsor. The queen was strangely loath to ennoble even those close to her, with Burghley being a rare recipient of a barony. With no son to pass a title on to, Walsingham may not have sought such an honour, and the patronage system may also have offended his Puritan ideals. Indeed, shortly before he died, he wrote scornfully:

As for titles, which at first were the marks of power and other rewards of virtue, they are now according to their name … like the titles of books, which for the most part, the more glorious things they promise, let a man narrowly peruse them over, the less substance he shall find in them.

I say, let a man by doing worthy acts deserve honour and although he do not attain it, yet he is much happier than he that gets it without dessert.
²³

Elizabeth did, however, grant him a number of offices. He was appointed to the long-awaited Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster in June 1587. This post administered and protected the royal interests within the duchy and brought with it a regular fee of £142 16s, together with a
£4
allowance for ink and paper. Burdened by all his other duties, Walsingham’s administrative skills may not have shone in dealing with the duchy’s tenantry and other issues connected with the estates. A letter written in 1595 by an individual who had been tasked to come up with reforms in its governance suggests that his management style was none too successful:

Seeing those matters far past and so far out of all course that I saw no manner of reformation was likely to take place, I did therefore cast all my notes into the dungeon of silence for that I would be deemed to be a busybody…

In my conscience that honourable gentleman [Walsingham] was abused by such in whom he put his trust who are right
worthy… to be called to answer for such … disorders as have been by them committed.
²⁴

Walsingham was also appointed Chancellor of the Order of the Garter on 22 April 1578, which came with a pension of £100 a year together with lodgings within the walls of Windsor Castle and a daily allowance for food. He held this post of dignity and honour for nine years before being succeeded by his old friend Sir Amyas Paulet in 1587. Elizabeth also granted him lands and revenues: the manor of Barnes in 1579; Odiham in Hampshire in August 1585; Little Otford in Kent in 1587; and manors in Durham and York in March 1588. He also enjoyed a number of local appointments: Chief Steward of Salisbury, with an annuity of
£62
8s 4d; High Steward of Ipswich, Winchester and Kingston upon Thames; and Recorder of Ipswich in Suffolk. He was also
Custos Rotulorum,
or the queen’s representative or guardian of her interests, in Hampshire.

Elizabeth also presented Walsingham with a large allegorical painting depicting the Tudor family group. In the centre was the seated Henry VIII, shown presenting the Sword of Justice to his son, Edward VI, kneeling beside him on his right. On the left was Mary, his daughter by Catherine of Aragon, and her husband, Philip II of Spain, behind whom, significantly in propaganda terms, stood a figure of Mars, the bringer of war. Opposite was Elizabeth herself, portrayed with figures of Peace and Plenty, treading underfoot the weapons of discord. Inscribed in gold letters at the foot of the painting was this doggerel verse:

The Queen [to] Walsingham this Tablet sent

Mark of her people’s and her own content.
²⁵

This gift represented a rare public display of her appreciation of the services of the man she called ‘Her Dark Moor’ because of his swarthy appearance. The painting has been attributed to the Flemish artist Sir Antonio Moro, alias Mor van Dashorst. As he died in Antwerp around 1575, the picture might have been given to Walsingham soon after his appointment as Secretary of State in 1573, and its theme of peace may link it to the Treaty of Bois, signed the year before, in which he took a
leading role.
²⁶
Just as likely, it was already hanging in one of Elizabeth’s royal apartments and she merely had the inscription added before handing it over as a gift later on in her reign.

More profitable was Walsingham’s success in securing from the queen her lease of the customs of all the important western and northern ports for six years from 17 August 1585, at an annual rent of £11,263 os
yd.
²⁷
This was basically a privatisation of the state’s collection of customs dues on goods imported and exported from Plymouth,
²⁸
Fowey, Exeter, Poole, Bridgwater, Bristol, Gloucester, Milford, Cardiff, Chester, Berwick, Newcastle, Hull, Boston, King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth. His hopes for profit, however, were seemingly quickly dashed. In the first three years, he paid the royal exchequer £21,050 instead of the £33,789 is 9
d
agreed under the lease, and Walsingham claimed in 1589 that the shortfall was caused by the ‘fear of war’ with Spain and other constraints on trade, which caused a decline in revenues.
²⁹
On 28 May 1586, he wrote to his brother-in-law Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asking that the £829 owed in customs dues by Sir Walter Raleigh and others be accepted as part of his payments required by the customs agreement.
³⁰
Elizabeth, surprisingly for one so careful of the contents of her purse, forgave the debt and accepted a much-reduced annual payment of £7,000 for the remainder of his lease.

In reality, as Conyers Read has demonstrated,
³¹
Walsingham
was
making a generous margin out of the administration of the customs: £2,053 in 1585–6; £3,852 in 1586–7; £6,695 in 1587–8 and £1,765 in 1588–9, revenue in the latter years reduced by the impact of the Armada on maritime trade. Overall, he was taking a handsome fifty-eight-per-cent profit annually out of the business, but much of it was probably being used to augment secret service funds.

There is little doubt that Walsingham had a ready eye for commercial opportunity. On 30 January 1584, William Paget wrote to him proposing a project to supply ‘marble out of Ireland’ to the North African coast for building purposes. ‘Mr Alderman Starkey has communicated this [plan] to the earl of Leicester,’ he announced, and strongly advised the Secretary to be a partner in the venture.
³²
Walsingham was also involved in the
export of unfinished cloth, receiving licences in September 1574 to trade in 8,000 broad cloths or kerseys over four years, and permission for a further 200,000 over the next eight years.
³³
Here, he almost certainly sold his rights on to trading companies such as the Merchant Adventurers.

Walsingham paid out £25 as one of the financial backers for Martin Frobisher’s first unsuccessful expedition in 1576 to discover the elusive Northwest Passage around North America and on to the Far East, and probably £200 for a second voyage in search of precious metals. But Frobisher returned in September 1577 with only 200 tons of iron pyrites – fool’s gold – in the hold of his ship. Despite this disaster, Walsingham was inveigled into putting up more than £800 for a third voyage in 1578 that proved just as disappointing. More profitable was his probable investment in Sir Francis Drake’s plundering cruise along Spanish settlements on the west coast of North America in the late 1570s.

Walsingham also secured from the queen a charter on 11 June 1578 enabling the explorer Sir Humfrey Gilbert
³⁴
to find and colonise ‘remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed of any Christian prince or people’ for the ‘inhabiting and planting of our people in America’. Some of the financial backing for this enterprise may have come from Catholics in England, and there is no doubt that Walsingham actively encouraged these voyages of discovery, seeing a Catholic colony in North America as an elegant method of ridding himself of some troublesome citizens. He successfully urged Bristol merchants to support the project and his stepson Christopher Carleill, or Carlyle, was active in convincing the Muscovy Merchants in London to make a substantial investment. Gilbert set sail with five ships on 11 June 1583 and landed in Newfoundland, but was lost at sea when his tiny vessel
Squirrel
foundered off the Azores on the return journey.