The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (15 page)

The painting plays riddles with perspective and motion. Henry VIII sits squarely at the centre of the composition, but the angling of his body allows Queen Elizabeth to become the focal point. She accepts the viewer’s gaze at first, then redirects it by pointing towards the figure of Peace. Elizabeth seems to be walking while her father, brother and sister are frozen in place. An accompanying verse describes the portrait as a ‘show’, and indeed a similar tableau was acted out during a torchlit pageant at Whitehall in June 1572, when Peace arrived in a chariot to seek the help of the queen. De Heere’s method may have been sophisticated, but his meaning was plain enough. Edward and Elizabeth represent the legitimate, and Protestant, line of the royal succession. Where Mary’s Spanish marriage had brought war and persecution, Elizabeth was allowing peace to return. Her diplomacy had won the objective which Henry VIII, with all his massive military spending, was never able to attain: an acknowledgement from the French crown that England was its equal.

The Allegory was a handsome gift. The queen rarely commissioned the portraits which created a cult of devotion around her, preferring to receive them in tribute from her courtiers. For Walsingham, however, its message must have been bittersweet. The language of friendship exchanged by the English and French legations at Blois had done nothing to protect Huguenots from the massacre at Paris. The figure of
Edward by his father’s side was an uncomfortable reminder that the Tudor succession was still unresolved. The portrait spoke of peace at a time when England was heading for war: not a princely contest governed by the rules of chivalry, but a wholly new threat to the survival of true religion. Walsingham’s eyes would inexorably have been drawn to the background of the canvas, where the forces of Catholicism rushed in through an open door.

For a brief while after returning from France, Walsingham was left alone with his family. The final fruitless months of the embassy left him with loans to restructure and debts to repay. His health had taken a hammering. The physical strain of following the French court had compounded the psychological scars left by St Bartholomew. He needed time to reflect and recuperate. The birth of their second daughter helped Francis and Ursula come to terms with the trauma of what they had witnessed in Paris. But the urgency of the times meant that he would not be allowed to rest for long. A new role was already being mapped out for him. Writing to Walsingham in January 1573, the Earl of Leicester had referred to ‘the place all men would have you unto, even for her majesty’s sake’. This could only mean one thing: a seat on the privy council as principal secretary to the queen.

On Monday 21 December 1573 Walsingham rode out from the city of London to Whitehall, the sprawling Henrician palace where the queen liked to keep Christmas. The terse note in his journal, ‘I was sworn secretary’, hardly captures the scale of the responsibility that he was taking on. From this day forward, Walsingham was wedded to the royal presence. As Sir Thomas Smith knew to his cost, Queen Elizabeth expected her secretaries to be constantly on call. Smith had cut his teeth as a secretary during the late 1540s, when the Duke of Somerset ruled in King Edward’s name and the march of reform had seemed
unstoppable. His ‘Discourse of the Common Weal’ had been a pioneering piece of economic analysis. But under Elizabeth, Smith was hobbled by having to obey every petty summons:

what can I write when I can have nothing with daily attending, for the most part three or four times in the day. It makes me weary of my life … I can neither get the other letters signed nor the letters already signed sent away … I would some other man occupied my room who had more credit to get things resolved in time.

Although Smith remained the senior of the two secretaries until his retirement in 1576, it was Walsingham who increasingly took the initiative in managing the queen and council. Smith was in his sixties, tired by government and brought low by cancer of the throat. His youthful social conscience had been eclipsed by the more conventional concerns of the Tudor gentry, the building of a fine house and tomb to perpetuate his memory. In October 1573 his only son was killed on a colonising expedition to Ulster. Smith’s religious commitment, never the dominant feature of his personality, was by now little more than lukewarm. He was not the man to press a Protestant agenda on the queen. Francis Walsingham, by contrast, fully intended to put his faith into action.
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The potential power of a principal secretary had been amply demonstrated in Henry VIII’s reign. Thomas Cromwell used his access to the king to oversee a radical overhaul of Church and state during the 1530s, transforming the secretaryship into one of the great offices of state. Queen Elizabeth had no reverence for Cromwell: he had been instrumental in the death of her mother. But the trust she placed in William Cecil produced a rather similar kind of government. In fact Cecil exceeded even Cromwell in his remit as principal secretary, because a queen was believed to need instruction as well as advice. In 1572 Lord Burghley, as Cecil had now become, exchanged the burden of
constant attendance on Elizabeth for a new role as lord treasurer. Walsingham inherited the tasks which had underwritten Cecil’s power during the first dozen years of the reign: setting the agenda for the privy council, presenting crown policy in the Commons, and sifting the information which was presented to the queen.

The principal secretary’s symbol of office was the signet, the most personal of the three royal seals which authenticated orders to officials and grants of crown patronage. The privy seal traditionally had its own keeper, while the great seal was held by the lord chancellor. But when Lord Howard of Effingham died in 1573, the post of lord privy seal was left unfilled. Walsingham was able to profit from the queen’s economy. Custody of the privy seal had passed to him by the mid-1570s, tightening his grip over the writs and warrants generated by the crown. Burghley was still chief minister; no one could rival his personal relationship with Elizabeth. But Walsingham had become the kingpin of English government.
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As he recorded in his journal, Walsingham was soon in conference about the gathering political crisis in Ireland. Several days of shuttling between the queen, the privy council and Lord Burghley were concluded by Elizabeth’s departure on 12 January for Hampton Court, with Walsingham in close pursuit. A principal secretary was never out of the saddle for long. In March the queen moved on to the palace at Greenwich where she and her father had both been born. This was the familiar rhythm of Elizabeth’s court, and her council had learned to live with it. Much more disruptive were the queen’s progresses around the south of England. Elizabeth spent the summer of 1574 making her way in slow stages to Bristol, where she was saluted by pageants and a fusillade of guns, and Walsingham was briefly reunited with his wife. A schoolboy dressed as Fame squeaked the city’s speech of welcome:

No sooner was pronounced the name, but babes in streets gan leap;
The youth, the age, the rich, the poor, came running all on heap,
And, clapping hands, cried mainly out, ‘O blessed be the hour,
Our queen is coming to the town, with princely train and power’.

The return journey was equally unhurried, taking in Sir John Thynne’s building works at Longleat and the Earl of Pembroke’s house at Wilton, then onward to Salisbury and the royal houses of Oatlands and Nonsuch. By the time that she returned to the centre of her realm, the queen and her government had been away for four months.

Elizabeth I did not travel light. Hundreds of baggage carts transported all the regalia of monarchy into the shires, from the queen’s wardrobe to the accoutrements of the royal kitchens. Progresses connected the Tudor crown to the nobility and gentry who governed the shires. For Elizabeth they also addressed a more personal need, convincing her that she was loved by her people. In the country as at the royal court, magnificence was the handmaid of her rule. And yet Smith was exasperated by what he called ‘this trotting about in progress’, which made ‘many things to be unprofited and longer deferred than is convenient’. Walsingham shared his irritation. ‘Banqueting and pastime’ took the queen out of the physical context of government, giving her the opportunity to dodge and delay. Elizabeth revelled in the confusion, altering itineraries on a whim and throwing months of planning into disarray. In privileging drama and display over administrative detail, she was her father’s daughter.
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Where the queen led, her ministers and favourites had to follow. The privy council had long since outgrown its origins as the meeting of a king with his warrior aristocracy. In the words of its clerk Robert Beale, the Elizabethan council was responsible for despatching ‘matters of estate either at home or abroad’. No
Act of Parliament declared that the queen had to heed her councillors’ advice, but neither did anyone doubt their competence to act for the crown. The nobility had their place around the table more on merit than on rank. George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury and the custodian of Mary, Queen of Scots, looked the most like a medieval regional magnate. The other earls on Elizabeth’s council – Leicester, his brother Warwick, Sussex – owed their titles to the Tudors. They joined Burghley as lord treasurer, the two principal secretaries, and the chief officers of the queen’s household. The full council numbered sixteen members in 1574, although some of these were backwoodsmen and attended mainly on ceremonial occasions. Urgent business was transacted by an inner circle formed around Burghley, Walsingham and Leicester.

When it wasn’t trailing the queen on progress, the privy council often met in the Star Chamber in the old royal palace of Westminster. The room overlooked the Thames, its ceiling of azure blue emblazoned with stars of gold leaf. Tapestries of Tudor roses and the royal arms reminded councillors that they exercised the power of monarchy. Two or three times a week, more frequently as the reign drew on, the council came together to agree how the realm should be governed. Reports from ambassadors and bishops were received, debated and acted upon. The preparedness of coastal defences and the navy was constantly reviewed. Foreign trade and the conduct of English merchants overseas were monitored. Endless letters flowed in from the magistrates and town corporations who enforced crown policy in the provinces. With a change in props, a green cloth on the table instead of the usual red, the council was transformed into the court of Star Chamber with a special jurisdiction over riot. The separation of powers meant nothing in the sixteenth century.
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Tudor government can look like a Heath Robinson machine,
an intricate assembly which had no very obvious way of functioning. Yet the Elizabethan privy council managed to address an astonishing range of issues while keeping even the remote reaches of the kingdom under surveillance. On 31 May 1574, for instance, ten councillors gathered at Greenwich to face a typically eclectic agenda. Burghley, Smith and Walsingham sat alongside five peers of the realm, including Lincoln as lord admiral and Sussex as lord chamberlain of the royal household. The first item for discussion was the Inns of Court. Regulations were issued covering every aspect of their activities, from the conduct of moots to the attendance of students at divine prayer. The council then moved on to provincial business. Orders for military musters were sent to the sheriffs and justices of the coastal counties. A religious dissident named John Appleyard was consigned to the care of the Dean of Norwich. An arrest warrant was put out for an Italian goldsmith who had been counterfeiting coins in Scotland. Arbitration was offered in a long-running rent dispute in Dorchester. A docket was issued for the transportation of timber from the New Forest for the fortification of Guernsey. All this in just one meeting, on one relatively uneventful day. A principal secretary had to ‘understand the state of the whole realm’, from its geography and military resources to the hotspots of Catholic recusancy and the strength of the nobility.
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Beale’s ‘Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary to Her Majesty’ was one of two advice manuals written in 1592 by men who had served under Walsingham. The second, a ‘Discourse Touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate’, was the work of Walsingham’s confidential secretary and agent Nicholas Faunt. The coincidence in date suggests that the secretaryship was being re-thought following Walsingham’s death in 1590. Beale’s treatise examined the relationship between secretary, queen and council while Faunt’s
focused on the staff in his household, but on two key matters they spoke with a single voice. The first was the remarkable range of business handled by the principal secretary, from foreign affairs to the maintenance of the common peace: ‘staying the ill affected from evil courses, encouraging the well affected, making arbitraments and good agreements betwixt subjects’, as Faunt put it. Burghley and Walsingham are sometimes cast in modern terms as prime minister and foreign secretary, but this distinction simply doesn’t work. Walsingham’s role as royal secretary, and his growing responsibility for the queen’s safety, meant that he was deeply absorbed in domestic affairs.

The second point of agreement is more surprising. Both authors were openly critical of Walsingham’s lax attitude towards security. ‘Burthen not yourself with too many clerks or servants as Sir Francis Walsingham did’, cautioned Beale. ‘Let your secret services be known to a few’, copying the good example of Lord Burghley. Faunt’s critique of his former master was even sharper:

by experience I can say that the multitude of servants in this kind is hurtful and of late years has bred much confusion with want of secrecy and despatch in that place. For if in a principal servant to the secretary, secrecy and faithfulness be chiefly required, what trust can there be reposed in many? And if many be employed in matters of secrecy, who shall think himself principal in trust?