The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (28 page)

The twin threat of invasion from overseas and a Catholic fifth column at home shocked the Elizabethan state into a new scale of surveillance. Its effectiveness depended on the willingness of ordinary people to collaborate. English society had always watched itself closely for signs of difference or deviance, although in the ordinary run of things this came down to respectability more than politics. Scolding women were dunked
in the village pond in a wooden see-saw known as a cucking-stool, and adulterers saw themselves paraded in effigy. But when the ‘great matter’ of Henry VIII’s marriage morphed into a Protestant Reformation, the state came to take a far closer interest in the behaviour and beliefs of ordinary people. Parliament broadened the definition of treason to include crimes of thought and word as well as deed. Conversations in private chambers and arguments in taverns became politicised and were duly reported to Cromwell. Compulsory oaths of allegiance bound every subject to their sovereign.

The parallels between the 1530s and the 1580s are telling. Cromwell and Walsingham occupied the same office, principal secretary to the monarch. Both were responsible for policing a reformation among a population that was occasionally welcoming, often uneasy and sometimes actively hostile. The nature of Cromwell’s secret service offers a point of comparison with Walsingham’s fifty years on. Like Walsingham, Cromwell was credited at the beginning of the twentieth century with creating a ‘system of espionage’ and spinning a fine web of agents and spies. In fact, information flooded in through the normal channels of communication between the crown and the shires. Some of Cromwell’s correspondents hoped for advancement: a lucrative parcel of monastic land, or marriage to a wealthy ward of the king. Others informed on their neighbours out of evangelical commitment, or in revenge against a rival. The majority simply saw it as their duty. In Henry VIII’s reign as in Elizabeth’s, the state encouraged this belief with a vigorous propaganda campaign to foster allegiance to the Protestant nation.
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In 1571 Parliament passed an updated version of the legislation introduced by Cromwell to protect the royal dignity from slander. Anyone who denied Queen Elizabeth’s right to the throne, or called her a heretic or a tyrant, would be prosecuted
as a traitor. An accompanying statute forbade Agnus Dei tokens of the sort worn by Cuthbert Mayne. A decade later, the perceived Catholic threat had increased still further. In January 1581 Sir Walter Mildmay, chancellor of the exchequer and Walsingham’s brother-in-law, stood up in the Commons to deliver a lengthy broadside against the mustering forces of the English Catholic mission. Jesuits, ‘a rabble of vagrant friars’, were creeping into the houses of the gentry ‘not only to corrupt the realm by false doctrine, but also, under that pretence, to stir sedition’. Mercy towards the papists had done England no good, he said. The time had come ‘for us to look more narrowly and straitly to them’.
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As members of the privy council, Walsingham and Mildmay shared responsibility for piloting legislation through Parliament. The aggressive Protestant rhetoric of the 1581 session translated into a new statute ‘to retain the queen’s majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’. This preserved the distinction between the spiritual and the political qualities of the English mission which was so crucial to government propagandists. Any priest who celebrated mass faced a year in jail and a fine of two hundred marks. If the fine could not be paid, the priest would stay in prison. His congregation was liable to a year’s imprisonment and fines of one hundred marks. Far more crushing penalties were promised for those who actively campaigned for Catholicism. Anyone who sought to withdraw the queen’s subjects ‘from their natural obedience to her majesty’, or to lure them ‘for that intent’ away from the Church of England, was declared a traitor. The formula ‘for that intent’ emphasised the official argument that Catholicism was treated as treason only if it became compromised with politics. In practice, it proved easy enough to construe Catholic priests as traitors by the nature of their calling. The same 1581 statute raised the financial penalty for refusing to attend the parish church to £20 a month.
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The Jesuit mission provoked a degree of loathing out of all proportion to the dozen or so priests and lay brothers operating in England. Unlike the religious orders of the past, the Society of Jesus exempted its members from wearing a habit and allowed them to conceal their identity. John Gerard dressed as a gentleman, and taught himself falconry and hunting to have a topic of conversation to match his character. Edmund Campion landed at Dover in June 1580 in the more humble disguise of a travelling jewel salesman from Dublin. He was arrested but then released, even though the government had circulated a description and woodcut portraits of Campion and his fellow Jesuit Robert Persons. Still more worrying was the internationalism of the Jesuit order. Active in Ireland and Scotland as well as England and with a single chain of command to the father general in Rome, the Society of Jesus had the ability to launch a co-ordinated assault on the reformed faith throughout the British Isles.
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Jesuits also made skilful use of the printed word. A keen advocate of Queen Elizabeth’s deposition, Robert Persons set up the secret Greenstreet House Press on the outskirts of London soon after his arrival in England. When Walsingham began to close in, it was dismantled and moved to Stonor Park near Henley. Books printed before the press was seized in August 1581 included Campion’s
Decem Rationes
, an academic attack on the intellectual emptiness of Protestantism. A young seminary priest in Oxford named William Hartley managed to smuggle copies into St Mary’s Church, to the horror of the university proctors. Propaganda victories like these prompted Parliament to insert the last piece in the jigsaw of anti-Catholic legislation. In 1585 Jesuits and seminary priests were given a suitably biblical forty days to submit to the queen or flee the realm, on pain of high treason.
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The modern British security services occupy architecturally distinctive office space at Thames House and the ‘Ziggurat’ on Vauxhall Bridge, the subject of a million tourist photographs from the tripping boats on the river. The buildings proclaim the status of the agencies within them, intentionally drawing public attention to their existence. There was nothing so centralised, or so bureaucratic, about the Tudor state. If the Elizabethan security services had a headquarters then it was at Walsingham’s own house in Seething Lane, lying in Tower Ward within the walls of the ancient city of London.

The ‘fair and large’ building noted by the Tudor topographer John Stow has long gone. A Victorian office block now occupies the site, its name – Walsingham House – and a portrait discreetly etched in glass above the entrance the only clues to what once stood here. But an inventory or ‘table book’ offers a window into Walsingham’s study at Seething Lane in about the year 1588. The visitor was confronted with a slew of paper on every aspect of Elizabethan government, from copies of treaties and correspondence with ambassadors to descriptions of the queen’s houses and the Order of the Garter. Plans for provisioning the navy and mustering the army competed for space with reports about the war against piracy. Bundles of manuscripts were sorted into a series of chests. The ‘box of navy, havens, & sea causes’ included descriptions of the fortification of Dover harbour and ‘the discovery of unknown countries’ by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher. A ‘box of religion & matters ecclesiastical’ contained lists of Catholic recusants and papers relating to the reformation in Wales. Chillingly, there was also a ‘box of examinations’ of papists and priests. Other furniture included a black desk and the ‘secret cabinet’ in which Walsingham’s will was found after his death. A ‘book of the maps of England’ probably contained the county surveys by Christopher Saxton which were also prized by Lord Burghley.
The surveyor Arthur Gregorye supplied Walsingham with plans of Dover and the English plantations in Ireland.
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Along with his papers and his books, Walsingham assembled a household of godly administrators at Seething Lane. This cadre of men was doubly bound together by its Protestant devotion and its service of the state. Laurence Tomson, who acted as Walsingham’s secretary for fifteen years, found time to translate the Genevan version of the New Testament into English (which he dedicated to Walsingham) as well as an edition of Calvin’s sermons. Nicholas Faunt, another strongly committed Protestant, was an active intelligencer as well as a secretary to Walsingham, carrying despatches to English agents abroad and sending reports of his own. Robert Beale was also closely connected with Seething Lane, deputising as principal secretary when Walsingham was absent or sick. Their shared memory of St Bartholomew was a powerful bond between these men at the heart of Elizabethan government.

Conyers Read described Walsingham’s household as ‘a perfect hot-bed of Puritanism’. One man, however, stands out from the rest. Walter Williams was another veteran of the French embassy of 1571–3 who subsequently proved his worth delivering letters between England and the continent. By 1582 he was being redeployed in a surveillance operation at home. At the time of the Ridolfi plot, William Cecil had been able to gather valuable information from Catholic prisoners in the Marshalsea via his agent William Herle, imprisoned on a charge of piracy but actually working for the crown as an agent provocateur. A series of ‘secret advertisements’ between August and December 1582 reveals Williams operating in the same role, as an undercover agent eavesdropping on Catholics detained in Rye. His letters to Walsingham describe him sleeping on the floor ‘among thieves and rovers’, trying to persuade his cell-mate to talk. On this occasion, the haul was disappointing. Williams could find no
evidence of a conspiracy against the queen beyond some vague talk about Scotland. A letter intercepted by Walsingham implies that the anonymous ‘papist’ had seen through his fellow prisoner, perhaps alerted by his request for a list ‘of all the rebels beyond the seas, and where their abode is’. On 15 December Williams asked to be released, at which point Walsingham put him in charge of his headquarters at Seething Lane. By August 1583 he was acting as Walsingham’s contact with Laurent Feron, the mole inside the French embassy. Conveniently, Feron’s house in Mincing Lane was only two streets away.
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The challenge facing Walsingham and his secretariat was the sheer wealth of information pouring into his office. It is the perennial problem of those engaged in espionage – how to sift the useful intelligence from the international chatter of news and rumour, propaganda and gossip. Simply reading and archiving the reports filed by diplomats, agents and chancers of all sorts must have been a formidable task for a small team. How much more difficult to make sense of it; to extract the viable conspiracies out of the many that would never get beyond the dreams of a maverick Jesuit, or the posturing of an isolated exile.

There were times when the work seemed overwhelming. His correspondence shows Walsingham to have been haunted by the sickness and decay of the edifice that he sought to shore up. When sixteenth-century people thought about the state, they frequently likened it to the human body. In a letter of March 1575, Walsingham called on medical imagery to describe his relationship with Queen Elizabeth. He had recently discovered that Mary Stuart was in secret communication with the outside world with the aid of a London stationer. To Walsingham, this was a prime chance to be rid of the Scottish ‘bosom serpent’ once and for all. Yet Elizabeth stalled the investigation and forgave Lord Henry Howard, who was clearly implicated. ‘Surely my lord’, Walsingham wrote to Leicester in disgust, ‘her 
majesty’s strange dealings in this case will discourage all honest ministers that are careful for her safety to deal in the discovery of the sores of this diseased state, seeing her majesty bent rather to cover than to cure them’. The morbid language recurred throughout his life. Notes which Walsingham made on ‘the decay and falling away in religion’ in December 1586 pinpointed seminary priests and Jesuits as ‘the poison of this estate’.