Sir Francis Walsingham (38 page)

Of which [misconception] of the said Queen and misunderstanding of the absoluteness of her Majesty’s government, she thinketh meet she should by your Lordship be better informed: For although her Highness doth carry as great regard unto her Council as any of her progenitors have done, and hath just cause so to do in respect of their wisdom and fidelity, yet is she [ie Mary] to be [made to] understand that they are Councillors by [royal] choice and not by birth, whose services are no longer to be used in that public function than it shall please her Majesty to dispose of the same.
¹⁷

If councillors, claiming the greater interest of the commonwealth, were allowed to meddle with succession issues, on what other areas of prerogative might they not also encroach, using the same excuse?

The very same problem presented itself to the advisers of the ‘impossible’ woman who occupied the English throne. Sir Francis Knollys expressed it to the assistant secretary Thomas Wilson in these terms:

I do know that it is fit for all men to give place to her majesty’s will and pleasure, and to her [passions], in all things that touch not the danger of her estate; but I do know also that if her majesty do not suppress and subject her own will and her own [passions] unto sound advice of open counsel in matters touching the preventing of her danger . . . her majesty will be utterly overthrown.
¹⁸

For Walsingham and his Puritan colleagues there was only one basis for ‘sound advice’. In 1586 Mr Secretary confided to Leicester, the
queen ‘greatly presumeth [on] fortune, which is but a [very] weak foundation to build upon. I would she did build and depend upon God, and then all good men should have less cause to fear any change of her former good hap’.
¹⁹
Genuine as was Walsingham’s loyalty to Elizabeth, he had a higher commitment to the cause, and it was this that emboldened him to speak plainly to the queen. God’s truth was enshrined in Protestantism. It was the onward march of the Gospel against papist superstition and rank unbelief which was always his prime concern. The difference between his own motivation and the queen’s was very succinctly stated in that throwaway line in his letter to Leicester. Elizabeth did, indeed, trust to fortune. She did not possess and, therefore, could never understand the religious passion which both powered Walsingham’s life and informed his political philosophy.

Elizabeth would have been furious to know that her close attendants believed she did not trust in God. She was regular in attendance at her chapel. She often carried a little book which contained her own hand-written prayers. Part of one reads:

Create in me, O Lord, a new heart and so renew my spirit within me that Thy law may be my study, Thy truth my delight, Thy Church my care, Thy people my crown, Thy righteousness my pleasure, Thy service my government, Thy fear my honour, Thy grace my strength, Thy favour my life, Thy Gospel my kingdom, and Thy salvation my bliss and my glory. So shall this my kingdom through Thee be established with peace; so shall Thy Church be edified with power; so shall Thy Gospel be published with zeal; so shall my reign be continued with prosperity; so shall my life be prolonged with happiness; and so shall myself at Thy good pleasure be translated into immortality.
²⁰

Yet however Elizabeth may have regarded her own piety, to her Puritan advisers (who, after all, knew her very well) she was not their kind of Christian. ‘Popish dregs’ adorned her chapel. She employed Catholic musicians to perform the divine office. She favoured celibate clergy. She was lukewarm (at best) in her support of persecuted
Protestants abroad and in her prosecution of Catholics at home. She was more concerned with outward uniformity than the building of a holy nation. Above all, she had no love of a preaching ministry, the principal tool, as the Puritans saw it, for winning the hearts and minds of the people.

Historians have debated whether Elizabeth was indifferent to religion or even atheistical. The truth is more subtle and revolves around two fixed points. The first was her conviction that the royal authority achieved in both state
and
church by her father must be safeguarded at all costs. The second was her own religious upbringing. Like most people, Elizabeth’s basic attitudes were formed by the time she reached her mid-teens. In Catherine Parr’s entourage she had been influenced by what might be labelled ‘humanistic Lutheranism’. When English Protestantism moved on in the decade after 1547 Elizabeth did not move with it. Therefore she could do nothing but oppose, both temperamentally and intellectually, the Calvinistic and Zwinglian trends of the progressives. Sensing herself to be at odds with her most trusted advisers, she could not commit herself to a clearly thought out religious policy. This was Walsingham’s understanding of the situation. In a memorandum of 1578 he identified the three major ills which plagued the nation:

First, discontentment in the subjects for that her Majesty seeketh neither by marriage nor establishing of succession to provide for the continuance of the happy quiet they enjoy under her blessed government.

The second, the disunion of the subjects minds in respect of the diversity of religion.

The third, the falling away in devotion of the subjects of this realm unto the competitor [Mary Stuart] in respect of religion and the expectation she hath of this crown.
²¹

We cannot open a window into Elizabeth’s soul but, as far as the outworking of her beliefs in policy is concerned, Walsingham was right, she did ‘presume on fortune’ rather than God. That is, she was reactive, waiting on events, rather than being motivated by any politico-religious philosophy.

So it was that, throughout the crisis years of the reign, England found itself in the extraordinary position of being governed by an executive whose two principal components were engaged in an intermittent tug o’ war. There was a conflict between a monarch determined to maintain her own freedom of action, ring-fenced by prerogative, and a body of advisers who had a responsibility for the wellbeing of the nation. That basic clash of interests manifested itself over and again in the queen’s outbursts of rage, in her banishing outspoken councillors from court and in councillors taking themselves into voluntary exile. We have seen over and again how Walsingham incurred royal displeasure for speaking his mind and we have read some of the many grumbles he, Burghley, Leicester and others exchanged about Elizabeth’s behaviour.

We would be just as wrong automatically to take such complaints at face value as we would to accept uncritically the queen’s frequent assertions of her commitment to the wellbeing of her subjects. My belief is that we come closer to the truth by grappling with the clash of ideas, ideals and beliefs that marked the relationship between the last Tudor and her closest advisers. Elizabeth’s outlook on life had been shaped by her earlier experiences. If she was determined to be her own woman it was because for the first twenty-five years of her life her destiny, and even her continued existence, had been decided by others. If she was parsimonious it was because her father had squandered an immense fortune and thus put the Crown in pawn to parliament. If she was sceptical of religious enthusiasm it was because she had seen England batted to and fro by Catholic and Protestant partisans. She had learned the arts of survival by not allowing herself to be enslaved by principles. Under Edward VI she had been a Protestant. During Mary’s reign she had attended mass.

Walsingham, by contrast, had never deviated from the convictions he had espoused in his family circle and at university. Rather than being content to survive during Mary Tudor’s reign he had taken himself abroad, deepened his radical beliefs and seen at first hand the bitter cosmic struggle between the rival versions of Christianity. He understood in a way that Elizabeth never could the irreconcilability of Rome and Geneva. Everything he experienced in subsequent years
served to underscore his convictions – Elizabeth’s excommunication, the St Bartholomew’s Massacre, the French wars of religion, the suppression of Protestantism in the Netherlands, the state-sponsored terrorism of Madrid and Rome, the treason and near-treason of Catholic infiltrators. Elizabeth believed a
via media
could be pursued which would satisfy the bulk of her subjects. Time proved her right. She believed that an imposed ritual uniformity could make all Englishmen her kind of Protestant. Time proved her wrong. Walsingham was convinced that an extensive preaching ministry would reach hearts and minds and produce a godly commonwealth. Thanks to Elizabeth and Whitgift that theory was never put to the test. The England that emerged from the crisis years 1570–90 was, in large measure, the result of these diverse viewpoints.

The Tudor Age is one which has for us an undying fascination. The members of the ruling dynasty were remarkable people. England began its movement towards a dominant position in world affairs. Unprecedented ideological conflict touched the lives of every individual. Native and immigrant artists and writers have left us impressions of England’s version of the Renaissance. Yet one of the most notable features of the nation’s political life is the roll call of gifted royal servants, from Thomas Wolsey to Robert Cecil, who maintained the machinery of government and were creative forces in the fashioning of a new national identity. In
As You Like It,
which Shakespeare wrote within a decade of Walsingham’s death, the shepherd Silvius expatiates on the meaning of ‘love’:

It is to be all made of faith and service

. . . All made of passion, all made of wishes;

All adoration, duty and observance,

All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,

All purity, all trial, all obedience.

Transfer those words from the romantic context to that of affection for queen and country and you have a fair portrait of Francis Walsingham.

1
   W.T. MacCaffrey, ed.,
William Camden – The History of the most renowned and victorious Princess Elizabeth, late queen of England,
Chicago, 1970, pp.5–6

2
   H.M. Margdiouth, ed.,
Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell,
1952, 1, p.195

1
   D. MacCullough,
Reformation,
2003, p.199

2
   H.C. Porter,
Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge,
Cambridge, 1958, p.68

3
   
Ibid.,
p.54

4
   J. Fortescue,
A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of England,
trs R. Mulcaster, 1567, fol. 114v–115

5
   J. Bruce, ed.,
Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leycester during his Government of the Low Countries,
Camden Society, 1844, p.192

1
   J.G. Nichols, ed.,
Chronicles of Queen Jane and of Four Years of Queen Mary,
Camden Soc., Old Series, XLVIII (1890), 2. xi, p.272

2
   
Ibid.,
p.11

3
   L. Serrano, ed.,
Correspondencia diplomatica entre España y la Santa Sede,
Madrid 1914, I, p.316. Quoted in P. Pierson,
Philip II of Spain,
1975, p.167

4
   J. Milton,
Paradise Lost,
Bk 1

5
   See W. Haller,
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation,
1963, p.64

6
   
Ibid.,
p.75

7
   H. Höpfl,
The Christian Polity of John Calvin,
1982, pp.162–3

8
   D. Laing, ed.,
The Works of John Knox,
Woodrow Soc. (1846–64), IV, p.373

9
   
Ibid.

1
   H. Robinson, ed.,
The Zurich Letters,
1st series, 1842, pp.4–5

2
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., 1845, p.l

3
   
Ibid.,
1st ser., p.4

4
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., p.9

5
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., p.37

6
   
Ibid.,
1st ser., p.8

7
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., pp.12–14

8
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., p.5

9
   See P.W. Hasler,
The House of Commons 1558–1603,
III, p.572

10
   
Ibid.,
III., p.573

11
   Surrey Record Office, Loseley Correspondence, 3/56

12
   State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth, XLVIII, 61

13
   R.B. Wenham,
Before the Armada: The growth of English Foreign Policy, 1485–1588,
1971, p.239

14
   H. Robinson,
op.cit.,
2nd ser., p.250

15
   See M.P. Holt,
The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629,
Cambridge, 1995, p.44

16
   
Ibid.,
p.62

17
   H. Robinson,
op.cit.,
1st ser., p.252

18
   
Ibid.,
1st ser., pp.149–150

19
   
Ibid.,
2nd ser., p.168

20
   
Ibid,
1st ser., pp.208–210

21
   See Conyers Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the policy of Queen Elizabeth,
1925, I, p.57

22
   Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Bath preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire, HMC, V, Talbot, Dudley and Devereux Papers, 1533–1659, 1980 (Hereafter referred to as ‘Cal. Bath MSS’), p.184

23
   
Ibid.

1
   It is printed in full in Conyers Read,
op.cit.,
I, pp.68f

2
   
Ibid.,
p.79

3
   See P. Collinson,
The Elizabethan Puritan Movement,
1967, p.82