The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (11 page)

Walsingham’s predecessor Sir Henry Norris was eager to be relieved. His pro-Huguenot stance made him unpopular with the French royal family, while Elizabeth pestered him with unrealistic demands about the return of Calais. Norris had been made to attend the Catholic mass at court, his post tampered with and his servants arrested. Then there was the cost of maintaining a suitable household and horses, employing secretaries and couriers, paying informants and bribes. Elizabeth always had an eye to economy, and she expected her envoys to contribute to the costs of their embassy out of their own pockets. When Walsingham protested that he could not afford the posting to France, the queen replied by raising his daily allowance to £3 6s 8d: a little more than Norris had been paid, but still diplomacy at a discount. He was soon complaining that the expense was ‘like to bring me to beggary’. In September 1571 he petitioned Cecil, now ennobled as Lord Burghley, for relief from ‘the continual increase of charges that groweth on me far
above her majesty’s allowance’. The compensation lay in the close working relationship he developed with Burghley and Leicester, the contact with leading Huguenots, and the chance to promote the Protestant faith. Unlike his royal mistress, Walsingham defined the success of English foreign policy in terms of ‘spiritual fruit’ and the ‘advancement of the gospel’. Four months into his embassy, he set out his political creed in letters to Leicester. ‘Above all things,’ he wrote in April 1571, ‘I wish God’s glory and next the queen’s safety’.
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Walsingham had arrived in France during a lull in the wars of religion. The 1570 peace of Saint Germain gave four fortified towns into the hands of the Huguenots. Condé had been killed in battle, leaving Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France, in command of Protestant forces. Coligny was pro-English and hoped for a marriage between Elizabeth and France, whether in the person of Charles IX’s younger brother Henry, Duke of Anjou, or the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre. He made a point of assuring Walsingham of his devotion to Elizabeth when he came to court in September 1571. Walsingham was encouraged. ‘Generally all those of the religion,’ he wrote to Burghley, ‘who are the flower of France, do make like protestation, assuring her majesty that when occasion or trial shall be offered, she shall find them no less ready to serve her than if they were her own natural subjects’. But Walsingham knew the Huguenots were in a minority. Fiercely opposed to any such alliance were the ultra-Catholic Guise of Lorraine, temporarily out of favour but burning to regain their previous dominance of the court. Soldiers of the Duke of Guise had ignited the first civil war by massacring fifty unarmed Protestants in their makeshift church at Wassy. His brother the Cardinal of Lorraine had a powerful hold over the intensely pious Anjou, who grew pale from his perpetual fasts and vigils. Never far from the Cardinal’s thoughts was his niece Mary, Queen of Scots. As the rightful ruler of
England and a potential bride for Anjou, Mary could seal the union of France and Britain under one Catholic crown.
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Elizabeth had briefed her new ambassador a few days before his departure. Walsingham must keep watch over ‘all manner of their doings there, as well private as public, that may be prejudicial to us or our estate’. He was to support English merchants, and maintain the free flow of trade between England and France. A lengthy clause set out Elizabeth’s attitude to the Huguenots, whose welfare was explicitly linked to the ‘quietness of us and our realm’. Walsingham should impress on the French king how the peace of his own nation depended on observing the rights granted to the Protestants at Saint Germain. Elizabeth addressed Charles conventionally as ‘our good brother’, but she could not resist an arch comment on the wars of religion. Because of his treatment of his Huguenot subjects, Charles had ‘seen and felt the continuance of the troubles of his realm’. A reference to the Queen of Scots and warships in Brittany explains the chill in Elizabeth’s voice. Charles had recently threatened to send French troops into Scotland, where an English army was fighting to prevent Mary’s faction from regaining control. With hindsight, this was the moment when Mary Stuart came closest to being freed from her imprisonment. Elizabeth actually considered it for a day or so, until the privy council gave its judgement: restoring the Queen of Scots could only undermine the crown of England.
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There was another matter, critical to both France and England even though it was unstated in Walsingham’s formal instructions: the marriage of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou. Perhaps the match never looked very likely. Elizabeth was thirty-seven, Anjou nineteen. Elizabeth was supreme governor of a church whose theology and bishops were clearly Protestant; Anjou had fought against the Huguenots, and regarded Elizabeth as a bastard and a heretic. Walsingham’s description of
‘Monsieur’ Anjou was guardedly positive at best, ‘his body of very good shape, his leg long and small but reasonably well proportioned’, three fingers taller than Walsingham himself but his complexion and colour worryingly sallow. Walsingham said nothing about it, but Anjou’s sexuality is also open to question. Following his accession as Henry III in 1574, critics remarked on his fondness for cross-dressing and earrings (in both ears), and his troop of male minions in long hair and bonnets.

And yet the marriage had its attractions to everyone except Anjou himself. Catherine de’ Medici spotted a way to detach her son from the Guise. Charles resented his younger brother’s popularity and wanted him out of France. England would gain a military ally against Spain. The queen herself gave it to be understood that she was determined to take a husband. Much has been made of Elizabeth’s words to her first parliament in 1559: ‘And in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin’. Less often quoted is an earlier part of the same speech: ‘whomsoever my chance shall be to light upon, I trust he shall be … as careful for the preservation of the realm and you as myself’. Elizabeth modelled her monarchy on that of her father, and she knew it was her duty to settle the succession.
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Walsingham can hardly have relished the prospect of another foreign Catholic becoming King of England. The Earl of Leicester, a committed Protestant and a distant cousin of Ursula Walsingham, might have seemed a better candidate. But recent English history rang some warning bells. Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville had been an accelerant in the Wars of the Roses, showing how destabilising a match between monarch and subject could be. Leicester’s reputation had also been scarred by the rumour that he was involved in the death of his wife Amy Robsart. For Walsingham, a French match was a
necessary concession within a much bigger strategic game. As ambassador in France he had a chance to build a defence alliance against the gathering forces of Spain. Extracting Anjou from the clutches of the Guise would strike a blow against the partisans of Mary Stuart. In the longer term, and God willing, there might be an heir. The birth of a child – better still, a male child – would calm the waters which had been rocking the ship of state since the 1540s. This is how Walsingham came to collaborate with Burghley to make a success of the Anjou match. As he explained to the French diplomat Paul de Foix, if he failed it would ‘be for lack of judgement and experience, and not for lack of goodwill’.
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Discussions began in secret on 12 March 1571 in the garden of the new Tuileries Palace, where Catherine de’ Medici met Elizabeth’s personal envoy Lord Buckhurst. Twelve days later, Walsingham was instructed how to reply to the possibility of a proposal. Elizabeth explained how the ‘solicitation of our loving subjects generally did induce us, for their sakes, to hearken to motions of marriage’. She dropped a hint that she might welcome an approach from Anjou. In everything that counted, however, the queen was uncompromising. Her starting point was that she would accept nothing less than Emperor Charles V had offered in 1554 when the marriage treaty was sealed between Mary and Philip of Spain. This was a fair demand in one sense: English honour would be compromised if Elizabeth was treated any less handsomely than her sister had been. A similar pre-nuptial agreement had been proposed to another of Elizabeth’s suitors, the archduke Charles of Austria, in 1565. But the Spanish marriage had been a remarkably good deal for England. Philip was denied the dignity of a coronation, exercising sovereignty through the person of his wife. His Spanish retinue was debarred from holding English offices. It was an unacceptably emasculated kind of kingship, and Philip
forswore the treaty before he signed it. Persuading Anjou to accept the role of royal consort on this model would require some hard bargaining.

At least Philip and Mary had shared a common Catholic vision. For a prince as pious as Anjou, the religious restrictions which Elizabeth laid down were every bit as objectionable as the limits on his political power.

Monsieur shall not have authority to exercise the form of religion in England, that is prohibited by the laws of our realm … And as for his allowance of our religion, although we wish he might in conscience like it (and if he did understand the form thereof, truly we do not mistrust, but he would not mislike it) yet we shall only require his presence in our oratories and churches.
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The Anjou match allows us to glimpse the personal religion of a queen who famously didn’t want to make windows into men’s souls. Elizabeth is often portrayed as a
politique
, her Church settlement the genesis of a cosy Anglican compromise. Yet the prayers that she composed, and the music which she patronised in the Chapel Royal, reveal a queen whose faith was every bit as intense as that of her brother and sister. Her defence of sacred ritual was sometimes misinterpreted as Catholic in its sympathies, but to Elizabeth there was no contradiction between tradition and reform. The key, for her, was ordered worship. A queen who kept a crucifix in her private chapel could also deny her husband the Catholic sacrament of the altar.

Elizabeth’s instructions placed Walsingham in a dilemma. He strongly approved of the hard line she was taking, and adopted a similar stance when French counter-proposals required the ‘free exercise’ of religion for Anjou and his servants. Allowing the mass in Anjou’s household, he argued, would alienate the queen from her loyal subjects and encourage the spread of sedition. But Walsingham could also see that Elizabeth’s
stipulations, if presented in the manner that she proposed, would scotch a marriage which was the best hope of preserving the stability of the English commonwealth. That is why he decided that ‘somewhat swerving from the precise course of her majesty’s instructions’ – in short, keeping quiet about religion when necessary – was the best course of action. Walsingham was robust with de Foix, pointing out that Anjou had flirted with Protestantism when younger, ‘and therefore that if it please [Anjou] to water those seeds, he should be able easily to discern that the change of his religion should breed unto him no dishonour at all, it being no less fault to continue in error, than commendable to come from error to truth’. But his flexibility also reveals Walsingham’s subtlety as a politician, working closely with Burghley to secure the alliance on which English security depended. If that meant moulding the words of the queen to fit the circumstances, so be it.
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Talks about talks dragged on through the spring and summer of 1571. Anjou wanted a coronation immediately after the wedding, a full role in government and a mint of money to run his household. The sum of £60,000 was suggested, equivalent to one-fifth of Elizabeth’s annual income, which he expected to keep as a pension if she died childless. For her part, Elizabeth accepted that Anjou would not be forced to take communion as part of the wedding service. But she refused his request to practise his Catholicism ‘in secret place and manner’ on grounds that it would encourage others to flout the law. Nor would she allow him to be crowned. When Catherine complained to Walsingham about the harshness of English demands, Elizabeth offered to salve Anjou’s conscience by sending him a copy of the Book of Common Prayer. This contained, she alleged, ‘no part that hath not been, yea that is not at this day used in the Church of Rome’. If its English language was unpalatable, then Anjou was free to worship from the Latin translation of the Prayer
Book in use at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, or the French version prepared for the Channel Islands.
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This was disingenuous on Elizabeth’s part. Whatever language it was in, holy communion according to the 1559 Prayer Book was very different from the Catholic mass. But nor was it intended to be a wrecking tactic. Elizabeth had a lot to gain by marrying, and she continued to signal her willingness to be courted. In conversation with Walsingham, Anjou was prepared to praise Elizabeth for her gifts of mind and body, ‘the rarest creature that was in Europe these five hundred years’. Regarding freedom of religion, however, he was as immovable as the queen herself. He was also quoted as saying that marriage to a heretic was out of the question. Walsingham clutched at straws, hoping that the match could still be salvaged. Anjou’s Catholicism derived from his mother’s influence, he explained to Burghley on 21 June. De Foix had offered assurances that within a year Monsieur ‘would be as forward to advance religion as any one within our realm’. Freed from the conventions of diplomatic language, Walsingham opened up with startling frankness in a private letter to the Earl of Leicester. The marriage was simply too important to let go: