The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (12 page)

when I particularly consider her majesty’s state, both at home and abroad, so far as my poor eye-sight can discern; and how she is beset by foreign peril, the execution whereof stayeth only upon the event of this match, I do not see how she can stand, if this matter break off.

In July the focus of attention shifted from France to Hampton Court. Anjou’s captain of the guard, Grimonville de l’Archant, met the queen to discuss an embassy to conclude the marriage. Again, the religious obstacle proved insuperable. Burghley blamed de l’Archant, but in truth Elizabeth was just as inflexible. Aware that time was running out, Leicester and Burghley suggested that the issue simply be ignored in the marriage treaty.
But Elizabeth would have none of it: without ‘plain dealing’, she told Walsingham, there could only be more controversy. By September de Foix, who had replaced de l’Archant at the English court, was moving the deadlocked debate towards new ground. He called for the appointment of a special envoy from Elizabeth to Charles, or failing that, ‘if the marriage shall not take place, to enter into the treaty of some straiter alliance or confederacy’. It was tacit recognition that the Anjou match was finished. In October the duke declared unequivocally that he would never marry Elizabeth. In spite of all his efforts, Walsingham had failed.
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The months of diplomacy and despatch-writing, the vexatious meetings with Anjou and his mother, all took their toll on Walsingham’s health. In August 1571 Charles IX ordered foreign ambassadors south to the Loire, where he would be meeting the Protestant leader Admiral Coligny at Blois. Walsingham’s departure was delayed ‘by the necessity of taking physic’, and he was soon petitioning Burghley to be allowed back to Paris: ‘my disease groweth so dangerously upon me, as I must most humbly desire her majesty to take some speedy order for someone to supply my place. I hope my life shall stand her in more stead than my death.’ Prompting this letter was a urinary infection which kept Walsingham bedridden between November 1571 and February 1572, and would continue to plague him for the rest of his life. His letter to Leicester also mentions his poor sight, a condition which was worsened by years of close document work by candlelight. In January 1588 he complained of a ‘defluction’ of fluid seeping from his eyes, explaining the marked deterioration in his handwriting as he grew older. Making a diagnosis at this distance is far from easy, but the combination of symptoms – the trouble with his eyes, an inability to pass water, the times when he felt close to death – makes it possible that Walsingham was suffering from diabetes. If this is
right, then the quantities of sugar and saturated fat consumed by the typical Tudor gentleman must have cruelly aggravated his condition. Thomas Smith described the food at the French court as ‘pheasants and partridges, red and white legged, and young peacocks and all other such fine meats, covered and seethened with lard’. Walsingham noted in his journal for November 1571 that his doctors had put him on a new diet. Several of his physicians would double as his couriers and agents during the 1580s.
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Walsingham continued to work in spite of his illness. Late in January 1572 he received some frightening news from Burghley in London. ‘I perceive through God’s good providence’, he wrote in reply, ‘your lordship hath escaped the danger of a most devilish Italian practice’. A pair of plotters had planned to shoot Burghley on his way back from court and rescue the Duke of Norfolk from the Tower using a rope bridge. The identity of one of the conspirators must have shaken Walsingham to the core. Edmund Mather had been secretary to Sir Henry Norris at the Paris embassy, the equivalent of Robert Beale to Walsingham himself. State secrets would have flowed across his desk every day. Mather confessed under interrogation to being a devotee of the Queen of Scots. Once Burghley was dead, Queen Elizabeth would have been his next target.

Mather had talked about his plans in Italian to a Welsh merchant and sometime pirate named William Herle. What Mather didn’t know was that Herle was Burghley’s agent, drawing out the plot to see who else would be implicated. It was a tactic which Walsingham would copy when he took charge of the queen’s security in the later 1570s. Treason at home, his frustration at the Anjou match and his own gnawing illness came together in an outburst of loathing for the Queen of Scots. ‘So long as that devilish woman liveth,’ he exclaimed, ‘neither her majesty must make account to continue her quiet possession of
her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives. God therefore open her majesty’s eyes to see that which may be for her best suertie [protection]’. It was a
cri de cœur
which Burghley shared. Elizabeth reluctantly consented to Norfolk’s execution under pressure from her privy council, but she blocked a bill in Parliament against the Queen of Scots. Burghley confided to Walsingham that he was ‘overthrown in heart’. Fifteen years would elapse before they saw Mary finally brought to justice, giving others the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the northern earls and Edmund Mather.
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The embassy was taken over by Thomas Smith and Henry Killigrew pending Walsingham’s recovery. They found the king and his court at Amboise, dancing to mark the end of the twelve days of Christmas. A brief attempt was made to resurrect the Anjou marriage, Catherine restating her son’s demand to attend mass in his own household. Smith’s retort was bold: ‘Why madame, then he may require also the four orders of friars, monks, canons, pilgrimages, pardons, oil and cream, relics and all such trumperies, which will seem so strange to our countrymen, that in no wise can be agreed.’ Business then turned to the second part of Smith’s commission, a defensive alliance between England and France. Walsingham rejoined the delegation in February, although Smith’s voice continued to dominate their joint reports. Scotland was a potential stumbling-block. The king made a show of loyalty to the auld alliance and the Queen of Scots, ‘my kinswoman, and my sister-in-law, and she was my sovereign’. At this point Killigrew stepped forward, and his reply was as frank as Smith’s had been:

Fire and water cannot be together, the one is contrary to the other. The league is made for a perpetual and strait amity betwixt you and the queen’s majesty of England, and you would treat for the queen’s most mortal and dangerous enemy. This cannot stand together, you must take her now for dead.
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On 17 April 1572 Smith was able to inform Burghley that ‘at last Mr Walsingham and I have concluded the league’. Neither party would assist the enemies of the other, and the French agreed not to intervene in Scotland on Mary’s behalf. True, the succession was no nearer to being resolved. But as the queen mother pointed out, there was always the Duke of Alençon, seventeen years old and sporting the beginnings of a beard. The task of formally ratifying the treaty of Blois fell to Edward Fiennes de Clinton, Earl of Lincoln and lord high admiral. Lincoln had fought with Henry VIII in Normandy, and supervised the English withdrawal from Boulogne in 1550. Simultaneous ceremonies were held on both sides of the Channel in June 1572, Smith’s reports bringing out all the colour of the celebrations in Paris. Lincoln travelled to the Louvre in the king’s coach, while Walsingham and Smith followed with the Duke of Anjou. The treaty was sworn on the high altar of the Church of Saint Germain, the English delegation sitting in a side chapel while vespers was sung (to ‘very good musick’, according to Smith). Supper was held in an open banqueting house in the garden of the Tuileries, where Walsingham and Smith were presented with gifts of gold and silver plate weighing 472 ounces. Days of dining, acrobatics and fireworks culminated in a massive bonfire, into which a bag of live cats was dropped from a crossbar for the benefit of the king, who particularly enjoyed entertainment of this sort.
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The treaty of Blois signalled a sea change in English foreign policy. It severed a relationship with Spain which had been sealed by Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to Arthur Tudor more than seventy years before. The friendship with Burgundy, as the Spanish Netherlands were sometimes still known, stretched back even further. Renouncing alliances which had served England so well required a major shift in the psychology of government. Fortunately for us, Walsingham addressed this
problem by putting down his thoughts on paper. The result, ‘Whether it may stand with good policy for her majesty to join with Spain in the enterprise of Burgundy’, is an awkward document in several ways. The title is confusing to a modern reader. ‘Join with’ means to join in battle with, to oppose. The manuscript exists in several copies of a lost original, its attribution dependent on the similarity of its language to Walsingham’s official letters. This particular text, however, was never intended to be seen by the queen, which is precisely what makes it so valuable. Within an analysis of the pros and cons of war, Walsingham set out his thinking about being ruled by a woman.

Like Leicester and other hawks at the English court, Walsingham was eager to fund the Protestant revolt led by William of Orange and his brother Count Louis of Nassau against the Duke of Alva. ‘If God had not raised up the Prince of Orange to have entertained Spain,’ he wrote to Leicester in July 1572, ‘a dangerous fire ere this time had been kindled in our own home’. Since conflict with Spain was bound to come, Elizabeth should seize the initiative by striking first. But persuading her would not be easy, ‘for that her majesty being by sex fearful, cannot but be irresolute, irresolution being an ordinary companion to fear; a thing most dangerous in martial affairs, where opportunities offered are to be taken at the first rebound’.

The queen’s counsellors were faced with a choice. If Elizabeth could be convinced that an expedition to the Netherlands would succeed, ‘then fear giving place, reason shall have his full course to direct her majesty to be resolute’. (For Walsingham, reason was gendered male.) The alternative was to threaten her with the consequences of doing nothing, ‘the ruin of her self and state’. This presentation of the queen as a factor to be coaxed and overcome is extraordinary. Her advisers clearly thought like this, may sometimes have talked to each other in these terms, but they rarely put such radical ideas in writing. The potential gains
justified the means. Joining the enterprise would ‘advance the cause of religion throughout all Christendom, an act worthy of a Christian prince’. An evil neighbour, and a tyrannical government in the Netherlands, would be overthrown. If Elizabeth refused to commit then Spain could only grow in strength, ‘whose pride is such as he thinketh he may give law to all Christendom’. With the signing of the treaty of Blois and the possibility of English intervention in the Netherlands, Walsingham may have thought that the skies were brightening. In fact, the Protestant faith was about to be shaken by a thunderbolt.
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In January 1593 the company of actors known as Lord Strange’s Men put on a new production by Christopher Marlowe at the Rose Theatre.
The Massacre at Paris
depicts a bloodbath of Protestants at the hands of the Guise family and the Duke of Anjou. Multiple murders are played out in full view of the audience. Admiral Coligny is brutally slain and strung up on stage. Huguenots kneeling at prayer are stabbed to death. The Old Queen of Navarre is poisoned by a pair of gloves. Catherine de’ Medici presides over the play, directing the killing to maintain herself in power. But Marlowe lingers longest over Duke Henry of Guise, psychopathically Catholic and as ambitious as Doctor Faustus:

What glory is there in a common good
That hangs for every peasant to achieve?
That like I best that flies beyond my reach.
Set me to scale the high Pyramides
And thereon set the diadem of France;
I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,
Although my downfall be the deepest hell. (I, ii, 40–7) 

As everyone in the theatre would have known, Marlowe based his play on real events that had taken place in France twenty years before. The St Bartholomew’s massacres of August 1572 began with a royal wedding. On 18 August Margaret de Valois, the king’s sister, married the Protestant Prince Henry of Navarre at Notre-Dame. The celebrations brought the Huguenot aristocracy en masse to Paris. Sectarian tension had been tinder-dry for months. Catholics were enraged when a memorial cross erected on the ruins of a Protestant house was removed on Coligny’s orders. Forty Huguenots were killed when they mocked a procession of the consecrated wafer representing the body of Christ. It was rumoured that the king had sent troops to support Louis of Nassau’s fight against the Spanish in the Netherlands. As Catholic preachers thundered against the pollution of a Protestant royal marriage, Coligny was shot and wounded on his way back from an audience with Charles IX. The bullet was fired from a house owned by a servant of the Guise. If Coligny had fled Paris at this point, the Huguenot leadership would have followed him. Instead, he accepted the king’s offer of protection.