The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (18 page)

There was no skimping on the scale of the 1578 embassy. Walsingham and Cobham were accompanied by more than sixty English gentlemen when they landed at Dunkirk on 21 June. Money and gifts were liberally cast about. Walsingham’s expenses alone came to £1,300, sending him further into debt. The showiness was all part of the queen’s strategy, a demonstration of English power to the States and Spanish alike. Cobham was the tenth baron of his line, with a career as a royal envoy stretching back to the reign of Edward VI. As lord warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover, he knew a lot about fortifications. Elizabeth hoped to broker a peace in the Netherlands, but she also wanted an expert assessment of the strength of Orange’s camp. Walsingham and Cobham despatched riders to reconnoitre the Dutch coast and hinterland and assess the attitude of the population to the rebel cause. Sir William Pelham and George Carew reported on Ghent, which they judged to be both well defended and spiritually sound. Sermons were being preached in former friary churches, and the citizens were eager for English support. Don John and the pope were derided as ‘devils scattered upon the face of the earth’, while Orange and Elizabeth were welcomed as the instruments of God.

Walsingham was awestruck when he was taken to see the States’ army outside Antwerp, ten thousand foot soldiers and
another eight of cavalry. ‘If God, who is the disposer of victory, withdraw not courage from them’, he enthused to Leicester, ‘there is great hope of their good success’. Orange himself was ‘the rarest man in Christendom’. It was clear to the ambassadors that the States would neither compromise on religion nor voluntarily yield any territory. Seeing little prospect of a settlement in the Netherlands and hearing rumours of Don John’s support for the Queen of Scots, Walsingham and Cobham came to a firm conclusion: England must take the initiative before the French decided to do so.

They got their answer in a letter from the privy council. The queen was not inclined to lend any more money to the States. Worse, she was now making demands for the return of such loans as had already been advanced. Walsingham’s friends at court alerted him that he was suspected of a lack of commitment to her chosen policy of peace. Burghley, who understood Elizabeth’s changeability only too well, attempted to console him: ‘however she misliketh matters at one time, yet at another time she will alter her sharpness, specially when she is persuaded that we all mean truly for her and her suerty’. Leicester was more angry, and less inclined to forgive. His hard words to the queen had had no effect, he told Walsingham in a letter written on the night of 20 July. ‘Never stood this crown in like peril.’ Since the entreaties of her counsellors had come to nothing, only God could now defend her.

Walsingham was shattered by the news. ‘It is an intolerable grief to me,’ he confided to Sir Christopher Hatton, ‘to receive so hard measure at her majesty’s hands’. The worst he could be accused of was having more regard to the queen’s safety than to her treasure. The two ambassadors were reduced to raising £5,000 as a private loan to preserve any degree of credit with the States. But it wasn’t enough to restore English honour, which was being held in contempt. Walsingham poured out his
frustrations in a letter to Burghley. Those involved in such ‘sour service’ as they were needed to have patience, ‘being almost ashamed to show our faces abroad’. The States had been entertained with the hope of royal favour, then abandoned when they stood in greatest need. John Casimir was rueing the day that he had ever left Germany. The queen’s behaviour risked making her ‘hateful to the world’. It had also deflected the Dutch into the arms of a new protector in the form of Francis Hercules, Duke of Alençon and brother of the King of France. And to the dismay of Elizabeth’s Protestant councillors, a royal wedding was suddenly back on the cards.
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When a collection of documents illustrating Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations was published under Dudley Digges’s name in 1655, the compiler drew a contrast between the two French princes who had successively wooed the queen. The Anjou match of 1571–2 was little more than a ruse to draw the Huguenots into the net at Paris, ‘I mean the barbarous and bloody massacre on St Bartholomew’s eve’. But an alliance between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alençon had been ‘really intended’, by senior figures on the English privy council as well as by the French themselves. As to Elizabeth’s own mind in the matter, ‘a thing doubly inscrutable, both as she was a woman and a queen’, he was forced to admit defeat.

Digges’s evidence and related manuscripts in the National Archives and the British Library reveal that Elizabeth’s own ministers were every bit as mystified about what she really wanted. ‘I would to God’, wrote Walsingham to Burghley in 1581 during another doomed mission to the French court, ‘her highness would resolve one way or the other touching the matter of her marriage’. Walsingham entered the negotiating process
more open to a French alliance than his Protestant ideology might imply. His visceral objection to a Catholic king-consort was offset by other priorities, to resolve the succession and to secure an ally against the menace of Spain. But the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre left him haunted by another royal wedding between a Catholic and a Protestant, one which had ignited a pogrom against the Huguenots of Paris; ‘of which most horrible spectacle I was an eye witness’, as Walsingham recalled in the margin of a treatise setting out the pros and cons of the Alençon match. The longer the talking went on, moreover, the less chance that a prince would be born.
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The idea of Elizabeth marrying Alençon was first mooted in the spring of 1572, during the negotiation of the treaty of Blois. Following the Duke of Anjou’s declaration that he could never marry a heretic, Catherine de’ Medici had swiftly offered up his younger brother in his place. Alençon had just turned seventeen, while Elizabeth was thirty-eight. The gap between their ages really mattered to the queen, as the Duke of Montmorency discovered when he brought Alençon’s proposal to England under cover of the celebrations for the new alliance. The French delegation had to work hard to convince Elizabeth of the benefits of the match. Marriage would make her throne more secure, as well as satisfying the desires of her subjects. Alençon’s youth was actually an advantage for the queen, ‘
parcequ’elle estoit accoustumeé à commander seulle
’. Sir Thomas Smith sent extravagant encouragement from his own vantage-point in France. Alençon was as rich as Anjou while also being more moderate, more flexible and altogether ‘the better fellow’. Admittedly, Anjou was taller and fairer. But Alençon was ‘not so obstinate and froward, so papistical, and so foolish and resty like a mule as his brother is’. In short, he was ten thousand times superior to Anjou. Foreseeing Elizabeth’s likely reaction, Smith urged Burghley to bring his own pressure to bear: ‘My lord I pray you, move the queen’s
majesty to lose no time, and not to procrastinate as her highness is wont’.
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Walsingham was more reticent about singing Alençon’s praises, not least because of the young duke’s appearance. A bout of smallpox had left him disfigured, and he also suffered from an irregularity of the spine. Elizabeth later devised a pet name for him, ‘Frog’, perhaps a reference to his bandy legs; it predates English jokes about frogs and the French by two centuries. The queen was already sensitive to the lewd gossip which marriage to a much younger man could bring. Alençon’s pockmarked face and lack of height made matters worse, potentially compromising the royal magnificence which Elizabeth held so dear.

The ‘delicacy of her majesty’s eye’ was not the only just impediment. Walsingham repeatedly complained about English courtiers who spoke against the marriage simply to keep themselves in royal favour, ‘having neither regard unto her majesty nor to the preservation of our country from ruin’. Elizabeth was, in Walsingham’s famous phrase, ‘the best marriage in her parish’, while Alençon was the best suitor to have wooed her. But the ‘necessary remedy’ prescribed by Parliament was being thwarted by the corruption of court politics, bringing him to despair of the queen’s safety.

Walsingham laid out the advantages of the Alençon match in a letter to Lord Burghley. If his looks could be discounted, the duke had many of the qualities to be desired in a husband for the queen. There were also grounds for hope regarding his religion. Walsingham reckoned that Alençon could be guided to conformity with the Church of England once detached from the influence of his family. Sir Thomas Smith agreed. Now that Anjou had become a partisan of the ultra-Catholics, Alençon’s household was a ‘refuge and succour’ for Huguenots seeking royal service. From an English perspective, his degree of distance
from the French throne actually made him a more attractive prospect than his brother. If Queen Elizabeth’s husband inherited the kingdom of France, then England might be reduced to a satellite state. Beyond such high political concerns was the expectation, shared by Elizabeth’s male counsellors, that marriage (and, by implication, sex) could only improve the queen’s indifferent health. Childbirth was good for women because, in Smith’s memorable phrase, it ‘doth clear their bodies, amend their colour, prolong their youth’. The pains which afflicted Elizabeth in her cheek and face were attributed by Burghley to her spinsterhood.
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Alençon’s proposal demanded a response from the queen. On 23 July 1572 she wrote to Walsingham from her summer progress to tell him that she could not agree to the marriage, citing the ‘absurdity’ which the world might see in her choice of partner. The gap in their ages was simply too great. The queen had also received a fuller description of the scars on the duke’s face, about which Walsingham himself had remained tactfully quiet. Four days later came another letter to Walsingham, which Elizabeth claimed was consistent with her first answer but actually modified it in one very significant detail. Because she valued the French alliance so highly, she was willing for Alençon to ‘come hither in person’ to present his suit. Only then would she finally make up her mind. Recognising that France would lose face should the duke be rejected on grounds of his appearance, Elizabeth suggested that the visit could be secret and private, ‘without any outward pomp or show’.

If Alençon had been bluffing when he offered to meet the queen, then Elizabeth had called it. Why these two contradictory letters, sent in such close succession? Walsingham was instructed to present them both at the French court, where they caused a good deal of confusion. Perhaps this was the point: if Elizabeth had no intention of taking a husband, then there was at least a
clear diplomatic advantage in keeping negotiations going as long as possible. Shifting her stance might also help to quieten the clamour in the council chamber and Parliament for her to marry. Or maybe the two letters represent what Susan Doran has called the queen’s ‘perplexity’, the sheer difficulty of making up her mind on an issue in which domestic and foreign policies were so densely intertwined. This would fit with what we know about Elizabeth’s character, her shunning of decisions on many of the great questions of state.
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There is an alternative explanation, unmistakably hinted at in Walsingham’s instructions. The queen was willing to consider marrying Alençon, but only if the French could offer something extra in return. Elizabeth was fully aware that the duke’s youthfulness was a weak excuse for breaking off the marriage talks. The French delegation could reasonably argue that if this was such a sticking-point, she should have been plain from the start. Artfully anticipating this objection in her 23 July letter to Walsingham, Elizabeth explained that she had been waiting to see if ‘any such further matter might be offered with this match, as might counterpoise in the judgement of the world, the inconvenience of the difference of the age’.

All parties knew what this meant: the return of Calais to the English crown. This isolated remnant of Henry V’s empire in France had been taken by the French only months before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, and she felt the loss as painfully as her half-sister Mary had done. In practical terms, the capture of Calais was not of much significance. English merchants had little difficulty in porting their operations elsewhere, and men of government probably welcomed the saving to a hard-pressed exchequer. The French were understandably affronted at the idea that Elizabeth should be compensated for deigning to marry Alençon. Her ministers could see what the queen could not, that there was little strategic value in one vulnerable garrison
town in northern France. But Calais was symbolic of English sovereignty, and Elizabeth felt compelled to recover it. She clung to the belief that diplomacy could win back what her sister had lost through war – the same message that was encoded in Lucas de Heere’s Allegory of the Tudor Succession.
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