Sir Francis Walsingham (10 page)

Elizabeth’s impounding of the ‘heaven-sent’ Spanish gold, reported here by Bishop Grindal, marked a dramatic shift in relations between London and Madrid. It was not uncommon for maritime traffic through the Narrows to seek shelter from bad weather or pirates which was why English goodwill was so important to Spain. In November 1568 five ships carrying much-needed coin for Alva put into Plymouth and Southampton. It was an opportunity Elizabeth could, quite literally, not afford to ignore. She resorted to legal technicalities to justify hanging on to the treasure. The truculent Spanish ambassador, Guerau de Spes, protested loudly and also urged Alva to take reprisals against English vessels and merchants in the Netherlands. Alva, in turn, responded with his usual outraged impetuosity, imposing trade sanctions which did more damage to the commerce of his own territory than it did to England’s. So far from backing down, Elizabeth imposed reprisals against Spanish goods and merchants. What is important about this argument is not the rights and wrongs of it, but the mutual suspicion and the suppressed hostility which provoked it.

England and Spain were already moving towards a state of cold war; this incident simply precipitated something that was in train anyway. The Spanish government was pledged to the full restoration of papal Catholicism. England was emerging as the major obstacle to the achievement of this objective. The one person at the centre of international affairs who refused to believe (or, perhaps, refused to acknowledge) the inevitability of confrontation was Queen Elizabeth. For her, war with fellow monarchs was both economically disastrous and morally repugnant. It was probably for this reason that, in the early weeks of 1569, William Cecil summarized the state of the realm’s affairs for the edification of his royal mistress. He pointed out that the years of peace England had enjoyed were the result of good fortune which could not be expected to last. Spain had been preoccupied with its war against the Turks and its need to subdue rebellion in the Netherlands. France was riven by religious strife. Scotland’s rulers were dependent on English goodwill and their ex-queen still carried the stigma of Darnley’s murder. But all this was likely to change. Islamic hopes had received a severe blow with the death of Suleyman the Magnificent. Protestant minorities were being suppressed in the Low Countries and France. As long as Mary Stuart lived she was the hope of Catholics both sides of the border and a potential marriage prize for royal families intent on making mischief for England. He urged Elizabeth to accept the reality of the situation and shoulder her responsibilities as a Protestant monarch. She should help to establish a reformed European bloc by allying with Denmark, Sweden and the German Protestant princes, while giving generous aid to persecuted Calvinist minorities and strenuously enforcing the Act of Uniformity at home.

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.’
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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.
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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.

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 was 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.
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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.
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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.