The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (19 page)

On 21 August 1572 Catherine de’ Medici wrote to her ambassador in England proposing that Elizabeth and her son meet on a ship in the Channel between their two realms. The following day, the French Protestant leader Admiral Coligny was shot in Paris. Unlike his brother Anjou, the Duke of Alençon was not personally implicated in the massacres which followed, but he did take part in the siege of the Huguenot citadel at La Rochelle. Persuading the English public to accept a French king-consort would be far more difficult in the aftermath of St Bartholomew, even assuming that a political consensus had pointed in this direction. An exchange of envoys in 1573 kept the marriage theoretically in play, but each side remained courteously deaf to the arguments of the other.

At Easter 1574, while Charles IX lay dying, Alençon was confined to the fortress chateau of Vincennes outside Paris. He was suspected of plotting against his brother Anjou in collaboration with Henry of Navarre, the Protestant and Bourbon claimant to the throne. It must have seemed to Walsingham that the events of August 1572 were repeating themselves. Thomas Leighton was hurriedly sent as a special envoy to the Valois court, and Walsingham re-engaged his former agents in France in order to make contact with Alençon. The ciphered report which he received from Leighton was far from reassuring. Alençon reckoned that he would soon be in the Bastille, and was appealing to England for help. Burghley responded by sending money to bribe his guards, but without success. Elizabeth also attempted to intervene, offering to receive the Duke of Alençon at court, but the invitation was turned
down by his mother. Meanwhile the Count of Montgomméry, the Protestant captain who had fled to England in 1559 after accidentally killing Henry II in a jousting accident, launched an assault into Normandy from his base in Jersey. The Anglo-French entente which had been hammered out at Blois was fast becoming a distant memory. The English diplomat Lord North was treated to the sight of Catherine de’ Medici publicly mocking two dwarfs dressed up as Queen Elizabeth.
²⁷

As France slid back into its wars of religion, Walsingham put the case for military action to the queen. John Casimir’s Protestant army in Germany was in desperate need of funds. The royal navy was ready for action and could be used to harry French commerce. The urgency of the cause called for plain speaking. ‘For the love of God, madam,’ he wrote in January 1575, ‘let not the cure of your diseased state hang any longer in deliberation. Diseased states are no more cured by consultation, when nothing resolved on is put in execution, than unsound and diseased bodies by only conference with physicians, without receiving the remedies by them prescribed.’

Elizabeth responded by offering Casimir’s father Frederick III a loan of 150,000 silver thalers, but only on condition that Calais be returned to her. When the money was actually sent, it had mysteriously shrunk to 50,000 thalers or £15,000 – too little, Frederick protested, to be of any real use. In September Alençon took matters into his own hands, breaking out of Vincennes and declaring himself protector of the commonwealth. From now on, the duke was an independent agent in French politics. Elizabeth was furious when the Huguenots subscribed to Alençon’s ‘Peace of Monsieur’ the following year, but her unreliability as a patron had left them little alternative.
²⁸

A great deal had changed by the time that the uprising in the Low Countries put the Alençon match back on the agenda in 1578. The admission of the former Duke of Anjou, now Henry
III, that he would not be having children had nudged his younger brother Alençon a step closer to the French throne. Alençon had soiled his reputation in the interim by commanding an army against his Huguenot allies, but now he spied an advantage in leading the Dutch revolt against Spain. The Calvinist States of the Netherlands had been abandoned by Elizabeth and were threatened with potential annihilation; they had nowhere else to turn. As the Earl of Sussex bleakly put it to Walsingham in August 1578, ‘the case will be hard both with the queen and with England if either the French possess or the Spanish tyrannise in the Low Countries’. The plotlines of the Dutch revolt and the Duke of Alençon, until now largely separate from each other, had become intertwined. Facing a shift in the European balance of power but unwilling to go to war, Elizabeth attempted to cash in her principal asset while it still had some value.
²⁹

When a marriage alliance had first been proposed during Francis Walsingham’s embassy to Paris, the privy council and Parliament were broadly in favour while the queen repeatedly expressed her opposition. Once the Alençon negotiations resumed, however, it soon became clear that the tables had turned. Elizabeth let it be known that she wanted to be wooed. When Alençon’s personal envoy Jean de Simier arrived in January 1579 bearing gifts of jewels, he was swept into a bizarre world of courtly love by proxy. Elizabeth dallied with him at masques and jousts, hosted intimate interviews and pressed him with love-tokens for his master. He became her ‘Ape’, apparently a pun on the Latin version of his name, although something else may have been implied: monkeys symbolised sensual pleasure in Renaissance art.

Elizabeth’s advisers watched her display of coquetry with disbelief and growing alarm. Sir Walter Mildmay was openly opposed to the match, addressing a personal appeal to his fellow
councillors: which of them would want to see his own daughter married to a papist? Burghley’s opinion is more difficult to read. Memoranda in his hand which apparently promote the match can also be read within the rhetorical conventions of the time, as identifying a case in order to counter it. When he did offer his verdict on the marriage, initially to Elizabeth and then to the rest of the council, it was to speak against it. Only Sussex welcomed the marriage, citing the assurances of Alençon’s entourage that he was content to become Elizabeth’s ‘servant and defender’, and arguing that this was the best way to deflect the duke from his ambitions in the Netherlands.
³⁰

Walsingham’s attitude to Alençon had cooled since the duke’s escape from house arrest at Vincennes. When Elizabeth demanded that her councillors put their individual assessments of the marriage down on paper, Walsingham replied with a treatise on ‘the diseased state of the realm, and how the same may in some kind be cured’. This picked up the imagery of sickness and medicine which he used to harangue the queen for her failure to commit to the Protestant cause in Europe. As a diagnosis of the threats to her regime at home and abroad, it made for grim reading. Her subjects were unnerved by the queen’s unwillingness either to marry or to name a successor. There was no religious unity in the realm. Popular devotion was diverting towards the Queen of Scots ‘in respect of religion and the expectation she hath of this crown’. The rulers of France and Spain were both enemies to Elizabeth, and might act against her when their internal troubles had calmed. Then there was King James of Scotland, soon perhaps to make a foreign marriage alliance of his own, which would leave England encircled by hostile states.

Having reviewed the state of national security, Walsingham turned specifically to the Alençon match. There was the personal impact on the queen to consider. Elizabeth would be in physical
decline while the duke was still in his prime; a common cause of unhappiness in marriage, as Walsingham pointed out. Given the queen’s unwillingness to take a husband, any pressure to do so might hasten her death. This objection was less plausible in 1579, when Elizabeth was doing as much of the running as her suitor, but another was sharply relevant: ‘the danger that women of her majesty’s years are most commonly subject unto by bearing of children’. Elizabeth was in her forty-sixth year, improbably old by Tudor standards to be delivering her first child. For Walsingham and her other Protestant councillors, the chance to settle the succession had offset their opposition to a Catholic consort. Now the birth of an heir had to be weighed against the risk that Elizabeth would die in the attempt, leaving England’s future to be determined by a French duke and a Scottish queen. Far from healing the lesions in the body politic, the marriage could easily ‘breed some broil in England’.

Walsingham’s greatest fear was the ‘diversity in religion’ which would follow in Alençon’s wake. For him this was the crux of the issue, ‘a matter principally to be weighed by Christian counsellors in giving advice to a Christian prince’. The prosperity of a kingdom depended wholly on the goodness of God. The people must place their trust in providence, not be ‘carried away by human policy’. History had proved that mighty potentates were bridled when they defied the will of God. Walsingham’s thoughts returned again to the massacre at Paris: ‘And what success is to be looked for of those marriages that are not made
a domino
, grounded upon human policy, let the dolorous success of the King of Navarre’s marriage teach us.’ Faith alone, ‘soundly without wavering’, was sufficient to secure God’s protection – a message stretching from the sixteenth-century reformers back to St Augustine and the epistles of St Paul.
³¹

These were the terms in which Walsingham preached to the queen and council. The blots and scribblings out, the arguments
carried into the margins and the frenetic handwriting, bespeak the speed and passion with which he wrote. Walsingham’s treatise matched the mood of many other Protestants in court and country. A Lenten sermon in the presence of the queen called the martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign to mind. The government banned the exposition of any scriptural texts which could be construed as relevant to the match, but popular culture proved less easy to censor. A recycled ballad about the marriage began to do the rounds, a skit on the queen’s pet name for Alençon. It was still in circulation centuries later as a children’s song:

A frog he would a-wooing go. Heigh-ho, says Rowley!
A frog he would a-wooing go,
whether his mother would let him or no,
With a roly-poly, gammon and spinach.

In July a bullet came close to the barge in which Elizabeth and Simier were being rowed. The queen chose to see it as an accident rather than a failed assassination, and pardoned the terrified waterman who had fired it. Even so, it was thought prudent to tighten the gun laws within the precincts of the court.

The arrival of Alençon in person in August 1579 sparked a fresh outburst of anti-French feeling. As the duke disappeared for a fortnight into the queen’s privy chamber, pamphlets and sermons combined in a collective howl of patriotic protest. An anonymous poem was nailed to the door of the Lord Mayor of London, proclaiming allegiance to Elizabeth so long as she defied the ‘foreign yoke’ and openly threatening the duke:

Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our desire;
For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.
³²

One of the boldest critics was a London lawyer and Protestant polemicist named John Stubbs. His
Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf
whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed
was a scorching indictment of the Alençon match, ‘the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our church’. Marriage to a Catholic was a sin which would bring down the wrath of God, and draw queen and country into captivity under the French. The duke himself came in for a thunderous attack. Alençon was a serpent come ‘to seduce our Eve, that she and we may lose this English paradise’. Since Elizabeth was being led ‘blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter’, it was the responsibility of others to wake her from her bewitchment. Stubbs concluded by calling on the English people to heed his warning: first the nobility and privy council, as ‘tutors to the common weal’; then bishops and royal courtiers, who might have some influence with the queen; and finally the common folk, though their role was restricted to praying that this plague be lifted from ‘Christian Israel’.

Elizabeth knew how to parry Protestant agitation in church and Parliament. But Stubbs went further than her sternest critic in the Commons would have dared. He had pinpointed a moment of political crisis, and his solution seemed dangerously close to republicanism. Worse, his opinions had been broadcast to the shires in a thousand printed copies. When she first heard about Stubbs’s
Gaping Gulf
, the queen wanted him dead. Although she was persuaded to settle for a lesser charge than treason, the punishment meted out was horribly symbolic: Stubbs’s writing hand was chopped off in three blows, watched by an ominously silent Westminster crowd. The victim managed the obligatory ‘God save the queen’ before he blacked out, but his scaffold speech had pointedly referred to the lack of mercy shown to him. It did the government no favours that Stubbs was prosecuted under a revived Marian statute devised to silence Protestant writing and preaching.
³³

It was whispered around the court that Walsingham had something to do with the
Gaping Gulf
. Stubbs alleged under
interrogation that a privy councillor had prior knowledge of the pamphlet and did nothing to halt its publication. Walsingham has speculatively been identified as this unnamed patron, although it could just as well have been Leicester or Hatton or Mildmay. He may well have had some sympathy for Stubbs, but he would not have welcomed every aspect of his argument. Walsingham’s obsessive care for the queen’s safety made him cautious about Puritan petitioning in the Commons and beyond, and the portrait of Elizabeth as a lovelorn maiden leading her nation towards ruin was not one which he would have wanted hawked around in public. John Stubbs was enough of a lawyer and politician to have come up with his arguments for himself.
³⁴