Sir Francis Walsingham (15 page)

I have in this assembly found so much dissimulation, having always professed plainness, that I marvel thereat – yea two faces under one hood, and the body rotten, being covered with two visors: succession and liberty . . . they thought to work that mischief which never foreign enemy could bring to pass, which is [my] hatred of my Commons.

Having delivered her rebuke, Elizabeth changed the mood of her oratory. She would not send MPs home muttering, with their tails between their legs.

[D]o you think that either I am unmindful of your surety by succession, wherein is all my care, considering I know myself to be mortal? No, I warrant you. Or that I went about to break your liberties? No, it was never my meaning, but to stay you before you fall into the ditch. For all things hath his time. For although perhaps you may have after me one better learned or wiser, yet I assure you, none more careful over you.
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Specifically, Elizabeth was determined to retain the Crown’s control of all matters religious which had been won by her father. Henry VIII had freed the English church from papal shackles. She would not permit it to be fettered by manacles manufactured in either Rome or Geneva. Given these fundamental differences, the relationship between sovereign and principal secretary was never going to be easy.

One problem facing the holder of the secretary’s office was that it was undefined. It was whatever its holder chose to make of it. Since 1530 there had been thirteen principal secretaries, some serving jointly. Of these, the majority had been little more than senior bureaucrats, preparing Council agendas, recording decisions, obtaining royal signatures or seals to documents, despatching messengers, receiving reports and, in fact, oiling the machinery of government. The two great exceptions had been Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil. They had used their unique position of intermediaries between sovereign and royal Council to become framers of policy.

It was not in Walsingham’s character to be any less influential. Strong convictions coupled with integrity and a tireless capacity for hard work meant that he would, if he remained in office, play a leading role in the Council. The next five years witnessed the steady development of his influence, assisted by the strong bond he enjoyed with the Earl of Leicester. It was a formidable alliance, forged for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. No one was a better conduit to the queen than her old and closest friend, Robert Dudley. When bad news or unwelcome advice had to be conveyed from the Council the earl was usually the appointed messenger and his persuasive powers were formidable. As the 1570s progressed Leicester committed himself increasingly to the Puritan interest. He used his patronage, particularly in the Midlands, to insinuate radical ministers and lecturers into churches. In view of the fact that Protestant zealotry was the one subject on which Dudley and Elizabeth fundamentally disagreed, the extent to which he was prepared to go in support of his radical protégés is remarkable. During the years Walsingham had spent in France battle royal had raged between Leicester and the Bishop of Peterborough, Edmund Scambler, over the behaviour of Percival Wiburn. This ardent preacher had already been deprived of
his benefice in London for refusing to wear ‘popish rags’ when Leicester appointed him to a living in Northampton. Within months Wiburn had set up a Presbyterian style of church order in which clergy and magistrates worked together to uphold a regime of enforced moral standards and attendance at sermons. As soon as the bishop intervened Wiburn turned to his patron for aid. Poor Scambler was in an invidious position. ‘Although your lordship doth like the substance of his doctrine – or the most part thereof, even so do I,’ he patiently explained to the earl, ‘yet know you not . . . as I do, the contentions and [discord] that is in Northampton . . . about matters, ceremonies and things indifferent, about which he showeth as much vehemency as about the principal grounds of religion.’
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By the time Walsingham received a knighthood in December 1577 the quadrumvirate which would guide English affairs for the next, crucial, decade had come into being. Elizabeth ruled with the guidance of her closest confidant, Robert Dudley, her most trusted political adviser, William Cecil, and Francis Walsingham, whom she valued because of his unique grasp of international affairs. Professor Collinson has suggested that we might think of Walsingham as foreign secretary to Burghley’s prime minister. However, the mid-seventies to mid-eighties were to be a period of constant anxiety and frustration and more than once Walsingham came close to resigning.

In works of period fiction and also in some popular non-fiction accounts Francis Walsingham has become ‘her majesty’s spymaster’; a sinister figure who created an intelligence web for trapping those he regarded as enemies of the state. It is not difficult to see why this Machiavellian image finds such ready appeal. Puritans are never popular and critical commentators always enjoy pointing out flaws in religiously earnest ‘hypocrites’. Sympathy for the hapless Queen of Scots inevitably spawns animosity for the man who was her nemesis. Walsingham lacked star quality. He was a dour workaholic, not a court exotic like Dudley or Hunsdon, or a political genius like Cecil. It is easy, therefore, to force him into the mould of a dark master of intrigue. Such an oversimplification obscures his real contribution to the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign.

Francis Walsingham certainly did head up an official intelligence
and counter-intelligence service. But we must be careful in using such terms. England in the 1570s and 1580s bore some comparison with England in the 1970s and 1980s. The country was in a state of cold war in a world where powerful ideological rivals were counterpoised. Suspicion, anxiety and fear coursed like stimulants through the bloodstream of international relations, keeping diplomats and statesmen on the alert. This is the climate in which espionage most luxuriantly flourishes. Governments desperately need to know what their potential enemies (and, indeed, their allies) are planning. Accurate intelligence has to be gathered as rapidly as possible. If communication is unreliable or too slow the results may be disastrous. But we must not allow our conception of Walsingham’s activities to be coloured by the cloak-and-daggery of twentieth-century espionage. Elizabethan intelligence-gathering was unsophisticated, haphazard and non-specialized. Today’s MI5 and MI6 agents are subordinate to their political masters. They are charged with gathering information by employing informants, moles and high-tech surveillance technology. They make reports to their political masters. It is the latter who decide what action if any should be taken. Billions are lavished by the major powers on the gathering and analysing of intelligence (and they can still make the most appalling mistakes).

Sixteenth-century methods were different, not only in being, inevitably, more crude, but also more diffuse. There was no specialist body at the service of the queen and her councillors. The queen and her councillors
were
the ones who gathered and assessed intelligence and acted on it. Elizabeth, Dudley, Burghley, Walsingham, the leaders in church and state – all had their own networks. Nor should we assume that news about the activities of foreigners and potential native troublemakers was always pooled for the good of the state. Individual Council members were not above carrying on their own negotiations without the knowledge of their colleagues and Elizabeth certainly went behind the backs of her advisers. For example, in 1581 the queen and Leicester spent several months in secret correspondence with d’Aubigny, James VI’s favourite, at the very time that official policy was bent on undermining the Frenchman’s influence. And there were certainly occasions on which Walsingham withheld
from the queen information which, be believed, would provoke an unhelpful response.

Intelligence-gathering was only one of Walsingham’s many activities. We can learn a great deal about the scope of his responsibilities and his handling of them from a treatise written by Robert Beale, someone who knew Walsingham and his methods better than most. Beale was ten years younger than the man who became his patron. Like Walsingham he had a legal and bureaucratic background but, more importantly, he shared Francis’ Puritan faith. If anything, he was even more extreme in his views. In Mary’s reign, though he was only a teenager, he went into exile in Strasbourg and Zurich. By the time of his return Beale was well versed in law and theology. In 1564 he went to Paris where he later found employment with the English ambassador, Sir Henry Norris. Walsingham inherited Beale when he took over the embassy in 1570 but was certainly acquainted with him before then for it must have been sometime in the 1560s that Beale married Walsingham’s sister-in-law, Edith St Barbe (Ursula Walsingham’s sister). Beale acted as his brother-in-law’s secretary in Paris and shared with him the harrowing events of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre. Shortly afterwards, doubtless on Walsingham’s recommendation, Beale was advanced to the position of clerk to the Council. When Walsingham was secretary Beale was his right-hand man. Theirs was more than just a professional relationship. When Walsingham moved to a more commodious London residence in Aldgate Ward, called the Papey, Beale built himself ‘a fair house’ in nearby St Mary Street. When in 1579, Walsingham was granted by the queen the lands of what he modestly called a ‘cottage’ at Barn Elms on the Surrey bank of the Thames near Richmond Palace as his principal country dwelling, Beale also relocated there. The two families were obviously very close. Professionally, Beale enjoyed his superior’s complete trust. He deputized for Sir Francis when the latter was absent from the Council board and was often employed as Walsingham’s emissary in sensitive situations.

In 1592, the seasoned diplomat, Sir Edward Wotton, was angling for the post of principal secretary (vainly, as it transpired) and Robert Beale wrote for him an account of what was involved. As well as
providing a list of the senior bureaucrat’s duties, it also provided an insight into Walsingham’s methods, not all of which Beale approved.

The secretary’s usefulness – and his power if he chose to wield it – lay in his omniscience. As the framer of the Council’s agenda he knew (theoretically, at least) all its business and could manipulate discussion. He received diplomatic despatches, correspondence from foreign courts and the hundreds of letters which arrived weekly from all sorts and conditions of men and women, most of them suing for royal favours. The secretary had to use his judgement to sift the wheat of important affairs from the chaff of matters to be delegated to other government officers. Items for Council debate had to be skilfully arranged so that pressing affairs could be dealt with promptly. The secretary had to make digests of complex documents ‘lest the rest of the Lords will not have them all read, or shall not have leisure’.
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Meticulous records of Council business had to be kept by the clerks – as much for the secretary’s own security as for general efficiency. If resolutions were not signed as having been approved by the members present, the secretary could find himself stranded; his colleagues denying knowledge of any decision which might prove unpopular with the queen.

The first and easily overlooked characteristic of Walsingham’s tenure of office is that the Council emerged as a government parallel with the monarch. Technically its role was advisory and administrative but in that it gave long and detailed consideration to all important issues and in that the queen was never present at its deliberations there was an inevitable separation between Crown and Council and the authority of the latter grew. Before Walsingham’s time it was normal for the group to converse three or four times a week. By the Armada year Council meetings were almost a daily phenomenon and lasted several hours. This, doubtless, reflects the growing complexity of international affairs but also indicates Walsingham’s diligence. Inevitably, councillors, who were busy men with household and other responsibilities, could not maintain 100 per cent attendance and the secretary was, at times, hard pressed to ensure a quorum. In these years there were about twenty Council members but normally between six and nine turned up for meetings, the most
regular being Leicester, Burghley, Walsingham, Sir Francis Knollys (Treasurer of the Household), Sussex (Lord Chamberlain), Lord Howard of Effingham (Lord Privy Seal) and Sir James Croft (Controller of the Household). These men constituted a kind of executive cabinet. As Professor Collinson has observed ‘at times there were two governments uneasily co-existing in Elizabethan England: the queen and her council’.
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Elizabeth was determined to maintain her supremacy and she never allowed her advisers to forget that that was exactly what they were – advisers. She could and did on occasion countermand their decisions. This could be incredibly frustrating for Walsingham and his colleagues, who believed, usually correctly, that having debated a subject at length and taken account of all the relevant facts, they knew better than their mistress what was needed. ‘My Lords here have carefully and faithfully discharged their duties in seeking to stay this dangerous course, but God hath thought good to dispose otherwise of things, in whose hands the hearts of all princes are.’
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So the long-suffering Walsingham wrote to the President of the Council of the North in April 1581. The colleagues had authorized a force of 1,000 men to cross the border. Subsequently Elizabeth had sent instructions that this force be reduced by half. Only hours later she had decided that there was to be no military action at all.

It is hardly surprising that Beale’s advice included stratagems for handling the equivocating queen. He should keep a list of important things that needed to be done in order to be able to advance them whenever his mistress was in a good mood. Forewarning of that mood was vital: ‘Learn before you access her Majesty’s disposition by some in the privy chamber with whom you must keep credit . . . When her highness is angry or not well disposed trouble her not with any matter which you desire to have done, unless extreme necessity urge it.’ Since Elizabeth had an almost pathological aversion to committing herself to any course of action, her secretary should be ready with diversionary tactics: ‘When her highness signeth, it shall be good to entertain her with some relation [i.e. anecdote] or speech whereat she may take some pleasure.’ As Beale knew, such subtleties did not come easily to Walsingham. Though cunning in his dealings with adversaries,
he preferred plain speaking in court and Council. Because he was a man of strong convictions he tended to feel personally affronted when the queen rejected his advice. Beale doubtless had his old friend’s difficulties in mind when he counselled: