Sir Francis Walsingham (25 page)

One remarkable – and probably ill-advised – aspect of Campion’s ordeal was public disputation. On four separate occasions he was obliged to debate with Protestant theologians several points of doctrine. If this exercise was devised to draw attention to the pernicious opinions of the accused and the fair-mindedness of his accusers (and we should bear in mind that in no Catholic country were Protestant prisoners permitted to air and defend their beliefs in public), it backfired badly. Norton, one of Campion’s adversaries, complained that the prisoner used the events to deliver prepared speeches and that the open invitation to the public enabled the priest’s friends and sympathizers to attend. London was soon awash with pro-and anti-Campion tracts.

The Council, therefore, had to consider carefully how they were
going to proceed judicially against the Jesuits. They decided not to use the recent Act, which could have seen the trial bogged down in religious issues. Instead they fell back on Edward III’s Treason Act of 1351. The prosecution had witnesses, predominantly Charles Sledd, ready to swear that Campion and his colleagues were parties to a plot, hatched in the Rome seminary, to assassinate the queen and stir up rebellion in preparation for an invasion. The trial took place on 20 November in a packed Westminster Hall. The presiding judge was Sir Christopher Wray, Chief Justice of Queen’s Bench who had been in charge of Stubbe’s trial. The prosecutor was Edmund Anderson, the Attorney-General who arrived fresh from the trials of nonconformists in East Anglia. Both were sound establishment men, pledged to defending the status quo against attack from extremists – of whatever colour. Campion handled the defence well and he enjoyed a wide measure of sympathy, particularly when the audience noted that torture had left him unable to raise his right hand in order to enter his plea of not guilty. Onlookers were divided in their opinions. Not so the jury. Eleven days later Campion and two companions were drawn on hurdles to Tyburn to face death by hanging, drawing and quartering.

Then, while the Campion affair was still a
cause célèbre
being argued about in alehouses and market places, something remarkable happened. Within four days of the Jesuit’s death, Thomas Norton, his chief tormentor, was arrested and locked up in the Bloody Tower. His offence was, apparently, having spoken against the Anjou match. If he had offended the queen in this way no evidence survives and Norton was clearly astonished by his sudden arrest. There were certainly sterner critics of Elizabeth’s matrimonial proceedings – some in the Council – who were allowed free speech. The timing cannot have been a coincidence. ‘Rackmaster’ Norton was an unpopular figure and public sympathy for Campion swelled the numbers of those who would have loved to see him behind bars, if not stretched on his own instrument of torture. Norton’s arrest looks very much like a sop to the populace, a move ordered by Elizabeth to demonstrate her even-handedness and also to placate the French.

Norton’s captivity was far from arduous. He remained in the
Tower until March 1582, but was allowed many comforts and privileges. He was furnished with writing materials and fired off several letters to prominent persons proclaiming his innocence. He also received visitors. Among them was Sir Francis Walsingham. The secretary stood by his old friend as far as he could. He interceded with the queen for the prisoner’s release. He promised to take care of Norton’s wife, who was in the early stages of a complete mental collapse. And he gave Norton a new literary commission. He proposed that the fifty-year-old author, poet, lawyer and parliamentarian should draw on his long experience to analyse the English church and set forth ‘such things as are meet to be considered of for the stay of the present corruption in religion’. The result, known as Norton’s
Devices
, was not printed but both Walsingham and Burghley owned manuscript copies and his ideas on reforming, not just the church, but the legal, judicial and educational systems were, we must assume, useful to them in the framing of policy. Norton’s conciliar friends secured his complete return to freedom in April 1582, whereupon he resumed his various activities in close association with Walsingham. He had only two more years of life left but they were hectic. He continued to publish his observations on religious matters and to examine Catholic prisoners. He rebutted the attacks of Catholic pamphleteers. In addition, Walsingham set him to write a massive historical review of important events and personalities since the Norman conquest. Whatever the queen might think of Thomas Norton and however he might be perceived by the people, he enjoyed the friendship, support and confidence of Francis Walsingham to the very end. And he had one last significant service to perform for his patron.

The duc d’Anjou left England on 7 February. Elizabeth played her love games adroitly to the last, accompanying her departing guest as far as Canterbury and there making a major production of their tearful adieus. The Frenchman left with a noble escort led by none other than the Earl of Leicester. In fact, during the marriage negotiations over the preceding months, the queen had increasingly upped the ante, even to the point of demanding that Henry III should close down the Catholic seminary at Rheims. She thus made it impossible
for the French to agree to her terms. Instead of marrying Anjou she supplied him with more funds for his Netherlands campaigns. Unfortunately, the faction-riven Dutch Protestants were quite ungovernable. Also Anjou was no match for Parma, nor could the money the duke was able to raise in France and England outweigh the Indies gold Philip now had at his command. In June 1583 a humiliated Anjou crossed the border back into France. Elizabeth had nothing to show for her investment.

She certainly had not secured a firm alliance with France. Despite Walsingham’s arduous and thankless efforts to manufacture some kind of entente, the Guises and their allies had been working behind the scenes against England. The focus of their attention was Scotland and their aim was to work on the young king and revive the auld alliance. Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny, had made an excellent start. The Frenchification of James VI’s court and the fall of Morton were severe blows to English policy. They put new heart into Mary Stuart. In 1582 the Queen of Scots was forty and had spent more than a third of her life being shunted around various strongholds in the English Midlands. She knew full well that Walsingham kept a close watch on all her servants and visitors and intercepted her letters whenever he could. One of her few distractions was dreaming up new ways of maintaining contact with her supporters in Scotland and France and the London embassies of Henry III and Philip II. Mary’s guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was certainly kept on his toes:

Good Mr Secretary, This Lady’s tailor, Jukes, yet with much ado is [dismissed], and she loth to let him depart. Desiring to retain still all that come to her, she caused him to make sundry things for her, which hath been [the reason for] his stay. I made him to be truly looked unto. Yet, can I not answer but that they might use some [secret] practice with him. I know them so well and their cunning dealings [that] I cannot be of other opinions.
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So Shrewsbury reported in April 1581, but for all his vigilance and the beavering of Walsingham’s agents nothing seriously incriminating came to light.

This was frustrating for the secretary. Scraps of intelligence coming into his office offered glimpses of fresh plots, plans and alliances directed against England but no coherent pattern emerged and certainly nothing that would tie the Queen of Scots to a conspiracy against Elizabeth. Ironically it was those very events that encouraged England’s enemies which provided Walsingham with more valuable information. The fire beneath the pot of Catholic conspiracy was fanned by indignation at Drake’s piracy (Mendoza was so angry about Elizabeth’s support for her corsair that he refused to attend her court after November 1580), by d’Aubigny’s success in Scotland and by the fate of Campion and other priests. Throughout the Catholic world there was an accelerating optimism; a sense that God was about to bring the defiant heretic nation to its knees. Serious plans were discussed at the highest levels. Conspiracies abounded and more and more people were brought into them. This was Walsingham’s opportunity. The increasing number of chains being forged meant that there were certain to be weak links.

While he was in France, in the autumn of 1581, Walsingham probed the Guise circle to discover what he could about how their Scottish connections worked and what their plans were. He observed a worrying euphoria amongst the ultra-Catholics at court. Guise policy which, during the early wars of religion had been a flexible mix of dynastic, religious and political interests, had now settled into a determined crusade, not only to exterminate Huguenots, but also to carry the papal offensive abroad, at swordpoint if necessary. They had formed a national Catholic League and were in cahoots with Philip II. This was the collusion Walsingham had always feared. With d’Aubigny in place in Edinburgh the conspirators regarded the re-conversion of Scotland as virtually a done deal. Their plans were both detailed and ambitious. The principal couriers were the Jesuit Robert Persons, who had recently escaped from England following Campion’s arrest, and William Crichton, a Scottish Jesuit. Persons was in the process of setting up another English seminary on Guise’s estate at Eu in Normandy, about which Elizabeth soon protested in the strongest terms. She instructed her ambassador to demand the closure of the college and not to be
fobbed off with assurances that the establishment was for purely educational purposes.

. . . her Highness certainly knoweth that the foundation of the same seminaries and houses is only to instruct such young persons as may be cunningly allured thither, from whence afterwards they are returned with charge to seduce her majesty’s subjects from their true allegiance, due unto her, unto the obedience of such as by bulls and censures have sought and do seek her Majesty’s deprivation and ruin; as may be verified by the examinations of sundry of them which have been taken in this realm, and by such writings and instructions as have been taken with them, and therefore her Majesty can in no wise repute them in the number of her good subjects.
¹⁰

Persons was despatched to Lisbon to meet Philip with a request for 8,000 troops. Crichton would return to Scotland with a view to receiving the young king into the Catholic church. Those who knew James well believed that his conversion might be achieved on the offer of a suitably large financial inducement. If necessary, the king was to be brought into France. Mendoza, meanwhile, was in touch with malcontent English nobles in the north, who were to join with a Scottish army once a Catholic regime had been established north of the border. An intercepted letter from Mary Stuart to James Beaton, her representative in Paris, revealed that she was apprised of the general outline of the plot.

This information reaching Walsingham in bits and pieces over the weeks and months led to frenzied and diverse activity. For her part, Elizabeth preferred to deal with her fellow royals. She sent Beale to Sheffield Lodge where Mary was currently being held to see whether it might be possible to reach an accommodation. The Queen of Scots offered a deal: she would recognize Elizabeth as lawful occupant to the English throne and forswear all discussion with foreign powers if she were allowed to return to Scotland to rule jointly with her son. When Beale reported back his royal mistress was disposed to give Mary the benefit of the doubt. Partly to please Anjou, she authorized some lessening of Mary’s confinement and assured her of her goodwill.
Walsingham, meanwhile, was at his wit’s end with Elizabeth’s inability or unwillingness to recognize the Scottish queen’s duplicity. By now he had a good idea of what was brewing and of Mary’s involvement in it. Confirmation came with an important surveillance coup in May. One of the couriers being used by Mendoza was an agent posing as an itinerant tooth-puller. He aroused the suspicion of Sir John Forster, Warden of the Middle March. The messenger was arrested and though he escaped (probably through bribery) he left some of his belongings behind. Concealed in the back of a mirror Forster discovered Mendoza’s letters to Crichton. These told Walsingham virtually all he needed to know about the ominous league of forces operating against England. It must have been with an I-told-you-so air that the secretary reported to the queen on the machinations of her enemies and insisted that she intervene in the affairs of young King James and grasp the nettle of dealing with his mother. But any such action struck at the heart of Elizabeth’s conviction that the persons of anointed sovereigns were inviolable. She would not countenance encouraging Scottish subjects to defy their king. Walsingham’s frustration knew no bounds. Since Elizabeth seemed determined to be her own worst enemy, he now took the policy initiative of personally intriguing with his allies among the Scottish nobility.

As the international situation grew more and more tense and dangerous through the 1580s we find Walsingham increasingly acting alone in his concern for the safety of his queen, his country and his religion. In his official letters he was at pains to indicate to ambassadors and foreign correspondents that he was conveying the instructions of the queen or the ‘lords of the Council’ but often he was keeping his superiors in the dark and pursuing his own courses. He was at the centre of the widest and most effective intelligence web. He possessed the best overview of international affairs. Therefore he felt he knew better than anyone else the appropriate action that should be taken. The next step, if he could not win his argument in debate, was to go it alone. The temptation to act independently is one that faces many guardians of national secrets. The name J. Edgar Hoover comes very readily to mind. Like the FBI chief, Walsingham was impatient with
his political leaders. He regarded the queen as being incapable of consistent action, Burghley as being too cautious and deferential towards Philip II, and the rest of the Council as being too often distracted by factions and personality clashes. Accordingly, he played his cards close to his chest, letting out information to his colleagues, and even his mistress, on a need-to-know basis. Thus, for example, he instructed the English ambassador in France to write certain elements of his report in a ‘by-letter and not in your general letter, which I must needs show to divers of my lords, and so either make them privy to the contents of the cipher or vex them if I send it undeciphered’.
¹¹
When Walsingham discovered that the ambassador in Scotland, Robert Bowes, was reporting to Burghley, as well to him, he remonstrated. He ordered Bowes to communicate directly to him, in cipher, so that no one at court could open his letters and read them whenever he was not there. Another diplomat, Edward Stafford, ambassador to France, was so worried by Walsingham’s methods that he complained to Burghley: