Sir Francis Walsingham (6 page)

Henry VIII had been invested by parliament with the supreme headship of the English church. His fiat ran in all aspects of the nation’s life – spiritual as well as temporal. Under Edward VI and Mary, the authority of the Crown in matters spiritual had been wielded to swing official policy violently in different directions. Walsingham was astute enough to realize that under a new Protestant regime, which would presumably be led by Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s only remaining reformers would have to rely on the unassailable power of the monarch to carry their policies but, at the same time, that monarch would have to be persuaded to yield to devout, theologically educated spiritual advisers. At best, movement towards a truly ‘purified’ state church might be achieved but only by the skilful application of tact and subtlety.

There was nothing remotely tactful or subtle about a book published in Geneva by John Knox in the spring of 1558.
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
attacked the female rulers of England, Scotland and France (Mary Tudor, Mary of Guise and Catherine de Medici) but it went much further than the indictment of individuals: ‘To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’
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The timing of this diatribe could scarcely have been worse. It
enraged Princess Elizabeth months before her accession and reinforced her dislike of Protestant radicals. Calvin and other leaders hastened to dissociate themselves from Knox’s language. Their problem – and it was one Walsingham shared – was that they agreed with his premise. In the biblical hierarchy of creation women
were
inferior to men, and the sorry state of England seemed to support the scriptural principle. Mary Tudor’s regime was fragile specifically because she was a woman in a man’s world. In matters of policy she deferred to her husband and to forthright councillors like Stephen Gardiner and her own archbishop, Reginald Pole. In dynastic affairs her sole responsibility was to give birth to a healthy heir. Her failure in this regard was a personal and, in Catholic eyes, a national and religious tragedy. How the fact of female dependence on men could be squared with the
fait accompli
of a Protestant queen became the subject of much, sometimes sophistical, debate and, in terms of practical everyday government, the problem would colour the relationship between Elizabeth and her Council.

This, of course, was all in the future as Walsingham continued his continental peregrinations – a mixture of educational programme, cultural grand tour and evangelical pilgrimage. He spent a considerable part of these years not in one or other of the Protestant shrines but in Catholic Padua, pursuing his legal studies. Padua was a dependency of Venice and it was said of citizens of the Serene Republic that they considered themselves Venetians first and Christians second. The Queen of the Adriatic was intensely independent, particularly in its relationship with Rome. In Venetian territory papal authority was kept at arm’s length, senior ecclesiastics were barred from the Great Council, the powers of the Inquisition were circumscribed and clergy enjoyed few special privileges. Venice welcomed strangers of all religious persuasions who could contribute to the commercial or cultural life of the state. If Protestant visitors congregated together for their own type of worship, the authorities did not pry too closely into their activities. Scores of prominent Englishmen enjoyed liberal Venetian hospitality, including Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, the doyen of English Protestants, and Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon.

Padua’s chief claim to fame was its ancient university, already more than 300 years old when Walsingham arrived. He enrolled in its great law school and increased his knowledge by studying with the finest European experts in the
corpus juris civilis.
It is now that we obtain our first glimpse of Walsingham’s character. He obviously impressed both his confrères and his seniors, for, in December 1555, he was elected to the office of Consularius of the English Nation in the law faculty. This meant that he represented and exercised authority over his fellow countrymen. The student body was divided into twelve ‘nations’ according to their place of origin. The chosen representative of each nation looked after his colleagues’ interests and even had a say in the running of the faculty. In return the authorities looked to him to ensure the good behaviour of his compatriots. It was an office requiring tact, firmness and diplomacy: students were no less boisterous in the sixteenth century than they are today. The twenty-three-year-old Walsingham must have possessed a gravitas which commended him to students and teachers alike.

With French, Italian, German, Swiss, Spanish, English and other national contingents all living cheek by jowl in the narrow confines of the medieval city it cannot have been easy to keep the peace but to national rivalries were added religious differences. For the English exiles these were only intensified by news from home. As the Marian persecution grew in intensity Walsingham and all his colleagues had friends and family caught up in the Protestant witch-hunts. Those known to Walsingham included Nicholas Ridley, burned at Oxford, and John Cheke whose capture and forced recantation were a propaganda coup for the new regime. Cheke was kidnapped by government agents near Antwerp, bound and blindfolded and thrown into a ship. Within days he was in the Tower of London, where fear of the stake drove him to recant. Although freed, he went into a rapid decline and died overwhelmed with grief and shame for his betrayal of the truth. Lesser fry also suffered. Walsingham’s contemporary at King’s, John Hullier, was one of the few men to be burned in Cambridge. On a blustery Maundy Thursday he suffered long and terribly as the wind blew the flames away from his body, denying him a quick death. Almost more shocking were the final
indignities heaped upon the gentle Martin Bucer whose sermons and lectures had moved Walsingham and his friends. With great ceremony his remains were dug up after almost six years and burned in the market place.

All the news which reached the exiles was not unwelcome. There were stories of frequent anti-government riots and demonstrations. Public reaction to the burnings was not what Mary and her bishops had hoped. In London, where most of the martyrdoms occurred, citizens resented religious zealots prying into their affairs and the arrest of neighbours. By now many held the queen in ridicule and contempt. The one event that could have saved the situation for Mary was the birth of a male heir. Ironically, it was the queen’s failure to conceive the desired prince which created for her the same dilemma that had faced her father and begun the whole Reformation and Counter-Reformation crisis. In the autumn of 1557 Mary had convinced herself that she was pregnant. Catholic hopes were raised only to be cruelly dashed when after eleven months, the humiliated queen admitted that she had been deceived.

According to rumours emanating from sources close to the throne the queen was constantly on the alert for assassins and was afraid to show herself in public. Pious Protestants had no doubt that all this was God’s judgement on (in the words of John Knox) ‘the wicked Jezebel, who for our sins, contrary to nature and the manifest word of God, is suffered to reign over us in God’s fury’.
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Many were the debates Walsingham must have participated in with his friends about the unique problems which beset a state when its head was a woman. The political attitudes he developed during his years of exile formed the basis of all his thoughts and actions when he became a principal adviser to a female ruler.

No one, including the new queen, knew what to expect of the reign which began on 17 November 1558. When the news of Mary’s death arrived in the English evangelical brotherhoods abroad bells were rung, bonfires lit and flags waved. Services of thanksgiving were held in the churches of the exiled communities. Several men, hoping for positions of influence in church and state, packed their bags in readiness for a speedy return. A great deal of wishful thinking went on. Edwin Sandys (soon to be Bishop of Worcester) reported excitedly to Heinrich Bullinger: ‘The queen has changed almost all her councillors and has taken good Christians into her service in the room of papists and there is great hope of her promoting the gospel and advancing the kingdom of Christ to the utmost of her power.’
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Bullinger, who was well versed in the toings and froings of church politics, urged caution and wariness in letters to his English friends. Sir Anthony Cooke (William Cecil’s father-in-law and one-time tutor to Edward VI) acknowledged receipt of such advice and particularly that the advocates of reform should leave their squabbling behind in Geneva, Zurich and Strasbourg. ‘There is great hope,’ Cooke insisted, ‘that the spirits of the papists are entirely cast down and that they will not offer to attack us, unless our own discord should afford them an opportunity.’
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But if Cooke hoped that the returning exiles would agree to sing from the same hymn sheet he was whistling in the wind.

Elizabeth desired a church that was united and Protestant. United, because, as events over the last quarter of a century had demonstrated, religious division was a political nuisance and potentially expensive.
Protestant, because Catholicism meant putting her people (and herself) under the authority of the pope and she was not prepared to surrender the total power achieved by her father. If she was under any illusion at all about how difficult it would be to settle the realm after the changes and chances of the previous three reigns she was very speedily disabused. In London Protestant extremists expressed their new freedom by pulling down altars and abusing priests. Catholics were no less forthright. The Bishop of Winchester, preaching at Mary’s funeral, had demanded that returning Protestant exiles should be hunted down and put to death. On the first Sunday after her accession Elizabeth had her chaplain, Dr William Bill, preach the public sermon at St Paul’s Cross. The following week the Bishop of Chichester mounted the same pulpit and denounced everything Bill had said. ‘Believe not this new doctrine,’ he ranted, ‘it is not the gospel, but a new invention of new men and heretics.’
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For this contumely the queen sent Bishop Christopherson to prison, where, soon afterwards, he died. Elizabeth replaced him with the zealous returned exile, William Barlow. Other problems were not resolved so easily. The vast majority of bishops and senior ecclesiastics were Marian appointees, ready to resist change doggedly. They could not be summarily sacked without cause.

The same was not true of the royal Council. Elizabeth removed most of her half-sister’s advisers from office and replaced them with men of her own choosing. The criteria on which she based her selection (advised by her right-hand man, William Cecil) were Protestant conviction and ‘steadiness’. By that word I mean men who were not fanatical in the expression of their opinions. Elizabeth had no intention of replacing Mary’s dogmatic Catholic councillors with doctrinaire evangelical ones. Though she admitted two or three returning exiles to her intimate body of advisers, she preferred men who had either made their peace with Mary or lived quietly during her reign.

One of Elizabeth’s chosen confidants was Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford. After his sojourn in Geneva and Venice he had returned to England in 1557 and was received by Queen Mary, probably at the urging of Philip II, who needed the help of England’s nobility in his
war with France. Russell was one of the captains who took part in the siege of St Quentin in that year. In the early days of the new reign it was Russell who became the main hope of the returning exiles. Rudolph Gualter, minister in Zurich, wrote fulsomely to the earl:

in your journey into Italy last year by way of Zurich you made such diligent inquiry into all things which make for the cause of the church and of religion, that it was easy to be perceived that this cause was far more dear to you than all other things whatever . . . I now rejoice the more both for yourself and for England, as I understand that you are advanced by the queen’s majesty to the highest dignity.
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Russell had, indeed, been raised to the highest dignity. He was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and the city of Exeter and Lord Warden of the Stannaries. This made him the most powerful man in the west of England and he saw it as his responsibility to accept leadership of what rapidly became an evangelical ‘party’. ‘I can truly promise,’ he reported to Gualter in January 1560, ‘that this our religion, wounded and laid low as it were with a whirlwind by the tyranny of the time, and now, by God’s blessing, again beginning in some measure to revive, will strike its roots yet deeper and deeper . . . As far as I can, I am exerting myself in this matter to the utmost of my poor abilities.’
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Russell instituted several ‘sound’ preachers to vacant benefices. But, in the early months of the reign, the strategic priority was to ensure a strong Protestant representation in parliament. The establishment of the official national religion was the first task to be undertaken by Elizabeth’s first parliament. It was vital for the reformers to win the debate and they knew they had a fight on their hands. The upper house was dominated by bishops and Catholic peers. Therefore, it was vital to engineer a Protestant majority in the Commons. Russell, aided by Cecil and other friends, ensured that the West Country (still one of the more conservative areas of England) returned some good evangelicals. Thus it was that Francis Walsingham became MP for Bossiney (Tintagel), Cornwall.

Since the writs for the new parliament went out in December and
the assembly convened on 23 January, it is clear that Walsingham lost no time in returning home. Letters must have passed to and fro as soon as the news of Elizabeth’s accession reached the continent. He was offered the Cornish seat and promptly accepted. The mayor and half a dozen or so burgesses (the only people eligible to vote) duly did their duty by his lordship and Walsingham, after what can only have been a brief visit to his home, was on his way to Westminster.