Sir Francis Walsingham (24 page)

The escalation of Jesuit infiltration, the second Desmond Rebellion and the alarming rumours of Spanish invasion preparations had provoked another reversal of government policy. The softly, softly approach was laid aside – for the time being, at least.

Mildmay called for tougher anti-recusancy laws and the taxation necessary to put the nation’s defences in good order to meet any foreign threat. His rousing peroration urged members to do their duty:

The love and duty that we owe to our most gracious Queen, by whose ministry God hath done so great things for us – even such as be wonderful in the eyes of the world – to make us more careful for her preservation and security than for our own: a princess known by long experience to be a principal patron of the Gospel, virtuous, wise, faithful, just; unspotted in word or deed, merciful, temperate, a maintainer of peace and justice amongst her people without respect of persons; a Queen besides of this realm, our native country, renowned through the world, which our enemies gape to overrun, if by force or sleight they could do it. For such a Queen and such a country, and for the defence of the honour and surety of them both, nothing ought to be so dear unto us that with most willing hearts we should not spend and adventure freely.
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The man who stood to second Mildmay’s speech was Thomas Norton, veteran parliamentarian and pamphleteer whom we have already met. The co-author of
Gorboduc
and the translator of Calvin’s
Institution
had consistently busied himself in religious and constitutional issues. He was no fiery-eyed extremist, demanding the abolition of offensive items of clerical dress or the merciless harrowing of all suspected Catholics, but he held very clear opinions that were close to those of his friend and patron Francis Walsingham. Without wanting to see a change of church government he was critical of episcopacy – or, at least, the halfway-house stance of most of Elizabeth’s bishops.
He disapproved of the Anjou marriage on religious grounds. He was committed to the rooting out of recusancy and the apprehension of immigrant priests. In 1578–9 he had been one of the secretary’s intelligence agents in Rome and he was one of the most skilled interrogators of Catholic prisoners, a task which earned him the nickname of ‘Rackmaster’ among his enemies.

We will return shortly to the subject of torture in the war on terror. First let us hear what Norton himself had to say about the appropriate way to handle Catholics:

Touching toleration to papists, I have ever holden, and have published this opinion, that her subjects holding popish heresies upon persuasion of conscience were to be borne withal and relieved by the instruction and the leisure of God’s Spirit to be attended, so long as they did not disturb the church, and held them within allegiance and loyal affections to the queen.
⁶

Walsingham was of much the same opinion. Those whose religious convictions had not yet been reformed could not be coerced into faith. They needed to be educated. He favoured more biting recusancy fines as a means of encouraging offenders to attend their parish churches where they might be brought to truth, in Norton’s words, by ‘instruction and the leisure of God’s Spirit’. Underground sacerdotalism was a more urgent problem The priests who flitted about the shires from hiding place to hiding place were the subjects of a foreign ruler who had set himself to removing Elizabeth Tudor from her throne. However much they disavowed political motives, there was no escape from the logic that they were emissaries of a regime which was financing invasions in Ireland and fomenting plots in England and Scotland. Converts were, by the terms of
Regnons in excelsis
, expected to pray for and give support to military intervention by a Catholic invader. The remembered images of 1572 were still vivid to Walsingham. He had seen what frenzied mobs could do when stirred by their priests and had no reason to doubt that the same would happen in England if Catholics were to gain the upper hand.

Thanks to the energy and efficiency of magistrates, informers and spies, several of these ecclesiastical ‘runagates’ were being arrested but
that only solved one part of the problem. The government still had to decide how to proceed against them. An analysis Walsingham committed to writing in 1586 showed a pragmatic and essentially secular understanding of the problem. He dismissed a policy of wholesale execution. Not only was it morally indefensible, it was counter-productive. Creating martyrs had never been an effective way of halting a religious movement. Walsingham recommended that a few priests should suffer the penalty for treason, ‘for example’s sake’. The rest should be banished or held in secure detention centres (an old idea now resurrected). He even, briefly, advocated a scheme to allow priests and Catholic laymen to emigrate to America.

In the early months of 1581 parliament struggled to come up with legislation which would give the government powers to deal effectively with the Catholic threat. The draconian first draft was considerably watered down in committee and, though we do not know whose guiding hands were the strongest, the statute that eventually emerged enshrined Walsingham’s principle of dealing with proselytization as a political offence. Recusancy fines were swingeingly increased. From one shilling a week they rose to £20 a month. The basis for prosecuting priests was defined as deflecting English people from their allegiance or converting them to Catholicism
with the intention
of undermining their loyalty. The Act made clear that religious belief and even the effort to spread that belief were not
per se
punishable by the state, unless it could be shown that political subversion was intended. The final wording of the ‘Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’ was a piece of masterly lawyerese; it avoided the opprobrium of being an instrument of religious persecution while enabling the courts, whenever they wished, to interpret religious zeal as treasonable intent.

The Act fell a long way short of the measures the parliamentary draftsmen had initially proposed and it has customarily been assumed that the modifications were made on the queen’s insistence. Elizabeth was temperamentally disinclined to ‘make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’. She was also instinctively wary of measures initiated in her Puritan-dominated House of Commons. But the Council – and this certainly included Walsingham – were also
involved in steering the bill to its final form. It was all very well for MPs to indulge in anti-papal oratory but the government had to come up with workable legislation. Any law depended for its effectiveness on the willingness of local courts and magistrates to implement it. Any attempt to impose widespread persecution would have been resented and thwarted in the shires, particularly in those farthest from London. If Walsingham ever needed to be reminded that politics is the art of the possible he had only to reflect on his long and tortuous relationship with the queen. As it was, the new Act allowed Walsingham the freedom to proceed against apprehended priests on an individual basis. No one knew more than he about the men his agents (and other vigilantes) tracked down and other members of the Council frequently deferred to his judgement on the best way to deal with them. Thus it was that Walsingham decided who might be ‘turned’ into government agents, who should remain under lock and key, who ought to be banished and who should suffer the dramatic and sanguinary penalty imposed on traitors.

In the parliament of 1572–83 Walsingham sat as a member for Surrey but there is very little evidence of his involvement in its proceedings. However, he remained in close contact with Thomas Norton who was very active in the 1581 session. He was a principal draftsman of the Recusancy Act and when a new sedition bill came before parliament he tried to turn it into a second specifically anti-Catholic measure. The bill, as proposed, toughened the law on slandering the sovereign and also made it an offence to cast horoscopes or ‘by prophesying, calculation or other unlawful act’ try to determine how long the queen would live or who would succeed her. As the years passed, Elizabeth’s subjects became increasingly anxious about the future and this provided opportunity for necromancers and preachers to impress the gullible with claims of hidden knowledge on the sensitive subject. The proposed Act was not directed against Catholics. Indeed, it was more likely to catch Puritan pamphleteers and preachers. (The memory of Stubbe’s fate was still vivid in people’s minds.) Norton now proposed an amendment which would make it an offence to proclaim that the doctrine of the English church was heretical or schismatic.

Norton had, by this time, interrogated several captured priests. He had been involved in the examination of Cuthbert Mayne and knew at first hand how tricky it had been to secure a safe conviction. The priest had been offered a way of escape: all he had to do was swear allegiance to Elizabeth as supreme governor of the church. This he could not, in conscience, do. Was it then that Norton had the idea of applying a doctrinal litmus test to all suspected Catholics? By whatever route Norton arrived at his amendment, it amounted to bringing religious belief firmly under the umbrella of civil law. So much for Norton’s insistence on toleration! In the event his ploy failed and, within months, this most loyal of the queen’s subjects found himself in the Tower for incurring the queen’s displeasure.

These complex parliamentary manoeuvrings indicate how tense and divisive the Catholic problem was. Faced with the mounting likelihood of invasion and the present fact of infiltration, Walsingham and his colleagues might have responded by creating draconian laws which would have filled the prisons and kept the executioners busy for years. This was, in reality, not an option. Firstly because of the size of the problem. The arrest of thousands of Englishmen on suspicion of treason – even if the courts could be induced to prosecute – would have been intolerably divisive and would have played into the hands of England’s enemies. But pragmatism was not the only, or the main, reason for pursuing a more cautious policy. Massive state persecution was morally indefensible. The proof of that lay ready to hand. Spain had gone down that route and ended up as a police state. France had gone down that route and ended up in ungovernable chaos. So Walsingham, who shared Norton’s abhorrence of popery and his longing to cleanse England of Romish defilement, refused to accept his friend’s apparently simple solution.

The Commons – or, at least, its Puritan majority – could not allow the session to end without continuing to press the need for further church reform. Even those who were prepared to accept episcopal government were scandalized by the abuses which remained to be addressed, such as non-residence, the poor educational quality of many clergy, and heavy-handed discipline of radicals. After much earnest debate the house deputed four councillors – Walsingham, his
co-secretary Thomas Wilson, Hatton and Mildmay – to present their grievances to a committee of bishops. Reporting back to the house, Mildmay acknowledged, on behalf of the queen, that earlier parliamentary complaints had been ignored by the clergy. He assured members: ‘her Majesty would eftsoons commit the same unto such others of them as with all convenient speed, without remissness and slackness, should see the same accomplished accordingly, in such sort as the same shall neither be delayed or undone.’
⁷

Elizabeth did, indeed, take the matter up with the bishops and exhorted them to redress such grievances as they should decide needed to be dealt with. The result was, of course, that nothing happened. Inevitably, several members felt that, once again, they had been fobbed off by the queen with empty answers. Norton was reported to the Council as one of the malcontents. In his defence he insisted that, while being highly critical of the bishops, he had not spoken ill of the queen.

Norton, like Walsingham, now belonged to the older generation of Puritans. If some of his opinions and actions seem to be mutually contradictory it is probably because he was sensitive to the challenge of younger Puritans who were more extreme and more demonstrative. They viewed their elders as compromisers and yesterday’s men. Norton was anxious to show that he yielded nothing to the young Turks in zeal but, in fact, he had inevitably mellowed and had learned that confrontation was not the most effective way of securing change – certainly with a queen like Elizabeth. Walsingham found himself in much the same position. His attitude towards impatient reformers was still: ‘If you knew with what difficulty we retain what we have and that seeking of more might hazard . . . that which we already have, you would then deal warily in this time when policy carrieth more sway than zeal.’
⁸

As we have seen, part of Walsingham’s strategy in dealing with the Jesuit menace was to make examples of the more notorious offenders. In July 1581 his agents achieved a major coup. Acting on information received, a local magistrate arrived at Leyford Grange, near Wantage, the home of a known recusant, with an armed posse. They subjected the house and outbuildings to an inch-by-inch search but it was only
after many hours that they discovered three priests cowering in a secret room. One of them was Edmund Campion, a star of the English mission, a man of considerable intellect who, before his defection to Rome, had been marked out by the queen for special favour. Walsingham was just about to embark for France and it was from beyond the Channel that he wrote urging Campion’s prosecutors to throw the book at him.

The captives were conveyed to London and, because the Council ordered that their arrival should be made into a public spectacle, they were paraded through the streets of the capital, tied securely to their horses. Campion bore a placard bearing the words ‘Edmund Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. After a few days in the Tower Campion was brought to the house of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Bromley, to be examined on behalf of the Council by Leicester and Hatton. They were doubtless anxious about the impression he would make at his forthcoming trial, as was the queen. Campion was recognized by all who knew him as sweet-natured, clear-headed and a gifted orator. He was careful not to condemn himself by any unguarded word and his examiners ordered that he be returned to prison and, if necessary, put to the rack. Walsingham, still in France, played no part in the subsequent interrogation which went on for almost three months but Beale deputized for him and Thomas Norton took care of the application of torture.