The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (29 page)

His choice of metaphor was poignant. Walsingham’s own body was being progressively poisoned by a urinary infection that could incapacitate him for weeks, sometimes months on end. Physical torment could be reconciled with a godly life: Calvinists expected to suffer. But what of the spiritual doubts that may have lurked in his mind? Catastrophes on the scale of William of Orange’s assassination in 1584 implied that God had tested the cause of the reformed Church and found it wanting. When Walsingham broke the news of the Throckmorton plot, it was devoured by Protestants of all classes as proof that England was, after all, a nation of the elect.
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The flow of intelligence into Seething Lane came from many different directions. The regular diplomatic channels of the Elizabethan state are sometimes forgotten in the rush to recreate Francis Walsingham as a spymaster. Like the foreign ambassadors resident at her own court, the queen’s envoys to her brother princes were instructed to keep alert for information that might prove of political or military advantage. The recall of her representative in Spain in 1568 left only two permanent embassies, in Edinburgh and Paris, supplemented by temporary missions as necessary. Balancing the budget had always been a strain for the Tudors, and royal finances were seriously overstretched by Walsingham’s day. Maintaining a magnificent 
presence in a foreign territory could be ruinously expensive. Small as it was, however, the diplomatic corps had a role to play in maintaining the security of the Elizabethan regime, and nowhere more so than in Paris.

For upper-class Catholics unwilling to compromise, Paris was proving to be an attractive place to sit out the reign of Elizabeth. About four hundred English expatriates were living in the city during the 1580s, many of them with families and servants in attendance. Paris offered safety from arrest and an intensely Catholic piety. For a few, it also provided the space to imagine the deposition of the heretical queen who ruled in their native land. Their presence forced Walsingham time and again to focus his attention on France. As Ambassador Sir Henry Cobham reported in 1582, it was depressingly easy for the émigrés to remain in communication with their kin in England. The continuing convulsions of the French wars of religion may have kept alive the prospect of a Protestant monarchy in that country, but they also spawned the threat of a Catholic invasion of England via the Channel ports. Aristocratic exiles like Charles Paget stood ready to assist.

In truth, King Henry III was not obviously keen to fund the English Catholics within his dominions. But they were sometimes observed parading at the royal court, as Sir Edward Stafford informed Walsingham at Christmas 1583. Furthermore, the French king’s caution left the initiative in the hands of the fanatically Catholic Duke of Guise. In 1572 Guise had participated in the murder of Admiral Coligny, sparking an orgy of violence against the Huguenots. By the early 1580s he was courting funding for his Catholic League from the equally hawkish Philip II of Spain. As the Throckmorton plot chillingly demonstrated, Guise was eager to take the fight to England even if Henry III was not.
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Paris wasn’t the only exile centre in France. Writing in 1585,
an informer named Thomas Becknor warned Walsingham about the growing number of English exiles in Rouen. An Act of Parliament had theoretically cut off the revenues of those who travelled abroad without the permission of the crown, but local merchants were providing them with a rudimentary banking system in much the same way that Protestant exiles had been sustained during Mary’s reign. Charles Paget was using a Rouen trader named Barthelemy Martin to deliver money which had been exchanged, for an appropriate fee, with another merchant in London. Catholic exiles were thus finding a way to draw on the rents from their estates, to the frustration of the Elizabethan government.
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The limitations of the traditional diplomatic channels were becoming increasingly evident. Language could significantly hinder the gathering of intelligence. Walsingham was unusual for his fluency in French and Italian, although he struggled with Spanish. Ambassadors who lacked his skills had to work through translators, greatly reducing their opportunity to detect sensitive information. Another problem was the elaborate ceremonial of the Renaissance court, which enveloped foreign envoys and kept them distant from the theatres of politics. Queen Elizabeth herself was a particularly skilled player of this game. Hunting trips and progresses into the shires could be used to dodge ambassadors who were seeking an audience with her. Itineraries were not advertised, and in any case Elizabeth altered them at will, leaving foreign delegations lost in the English countryside.
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The patronage system that regulated the Elizabethan regime could also hamper its response to threats from abroad. Walsingham regarded the business of diplomacy as his own domain and expected ambassadors to report directly to him, but he never quite achieved the monopoly he desired. One man in particular stood up to him, spurning his friendship and deliberately channelling despatches to Lord Burghley as an 
alternative patron. Sir Edward Stafford held the crucial embassy to Paris from 1583 until after Walsingham’s death. Once installed as ambassador, Stafford became increasingly maverick in his behaviour. He pointedly bypassed Walsingham when reporting from Paris, and trespassed on his operations among the English exiles in the city. He openly proclaimed his support for Mary Stuart as Queen Elizabeth’s heir. Incredibly, from 1587 he was also in the pay of the Spanish government as a spy.

The relationship between Stafford and Walsingham had begun well enough. Stafford’s mother was mistress of the robes to Queen Elizabeth. He followed a conventional gentleman’s route from Cambridge to the Commons and a minor office at court as a gentleman pensioner. In the 1570s he was active in French affairs as a courier and made a friend of the Duke of Alençon, hosting him at his own house in 1579. But when a posting to Paris seemed in the offing, Stafford scorned his previous co-operation with Walsingham and hitched his colours to Burghley’s mast. The resulting feud between ambassador and principal secretary was partly personal, but no doubt also ideological, since Stafford did not share Walsingham’s visceral support for the French Huguenots. Walsingham retaliated by directing his searchers to open Stafford’s letters as they arrived at Rye. When Stafford protested, Walsingham replied that he would do well to put future letters ‘in a packet directed to me’ to prevent it happening again. Meanwhile the impetuous ambassador was building up heavy gambling debts in Paris. It was perhaps to pay these that he accepted, first an advance of six thousand crowns from the Duke of Guise for sharing the contents of his diplomatic bag, and then a further two thousand crowns from Don Bernardino de Mendoza, by now the Spanish envoy to France. The bearer of this second sum was Charles Arundel, the English Catholic exile and conspirator.

The jury is still out on the exact nature of Stafford’s treason. 
An agent returning from Paris to England in spring 1586 brought news of the cash-for-secrets deal with Guise and Arundel. And yet Walsingham did not strike, in part because Stafford remained in Burghley’s confidence, but also perhaps to avoid blowing the cover of his informer. A more intriguing possibility is that Walsingham had decided to use Stafford to feed false or baffling information to his Spanish handlers. By 1587, when Stafford was recruited by Mendoza, a sea war between England and Spain was looming and naval intelligence was at a premium for both nations. In April of that year Stafford forwarded Mendoza news, recently received from Walsingham, that the queen was delaying sending out Francis Drake’s fleet to harass Spanish shipping. This was the opposite of the truth: Drake had already sailed on his famous expedition to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cadiz.

When he realised that Drake had put to sea, Stafford sent an urgent warning to Cadiz which arrived only a day after the town had been burned. Clearly he had other sources besides Walsingham. One of these was his brother-in-law Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral of England, who inadvertently provided statistics on the firepower of the English fleet. Walsingham may have been playing Sir Edward Stafford, but he could not control him. Stafford’s despatches to his Spanish paymasters undoubtedly compromised England’s defence against naval attack. He was never called to account for his actions, and was honourably buried at St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1605.
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Stafford’s tenure of the Paris embassy for most of the 1580s challenged Francis Walsingham’s position at the focal point of Elizabethan diplomacy. Sir Henry Cobham had been provided with a secretary by Walsingham himself, one Francis Needham, enabling him to monitor the ambassador’s correspondence. Stafford’s appointment changed all this, diverting the flow of
information from Paris. As the customary sources of foreign intelligence dried up, so Walsingham was driven towards a new type of statecraft. The security of the Elizabethan regime increasingly came to depend upon a network of agents and informers, paid by Walsingham and reporting directly to him rather than to the queen.
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In 1592 Robert Beale recalled the ‘foreign espials and intelligences’ maintained by Walsingham during the last ten years of his life. The principal secretary ran his network using his own resources as well as an allowance from the crown. A list of ‘sundry foreign places from whence Mr Secretary Walsingham was wont to receive his advertisements’ spanned France, the Low Countries and Germany to Spain, Italy and the Ottoman Empire: a total of forty-six locations, from Constantinople to Algiers. Much of this was simply news, equivalent to the foreign affairs pages of a modern daily paper. The work of this sort of ‘espial’ would nowadays be the domain of the journalist. But among these thousands of despatches were some that were very valuable indeed. They enabled Walsingham to tail exiles in Madrid and Paris, to overhear conversations at the English colleges in Rheims and Rome, and to piece together the jigsaws of conspiracy against the crown.
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Elizabethan England may have lacked a large diplomatic establishment, but its power as a nation of traders was increasingly impressive. Francis Walsingham was able to make his own use of the merchants and factors of the great commercial companies, men who had legitimate reason to travel and linger abroad. Christopher Hoddesdon is a good example. Following several successful years trading in Muscovy and the Baltic, Hoddesdon rose to be master of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg and a financial agent of Elizabeth I. He sent a steady stream of letters to both Walsingham and Burghley, full of the breaking news of Europe: royal marriages 
in the Holy Roman Empire, a Turkish siege in Hungary, exchange rates and shipping movements. Within this onslaught of information was more specific intelligence. In February 1578 Hoddesdon forwarded a report from his own agent in Rome describing Captain Thomas Stucley’s attempt to launch an invasion of Ireland from Civitavecchia, an armada of one leaky vessel with four cannon and a mutinous crew. It helped that there was a family connection between Walsingham and his informant. Hoddesdon was married to Walsingham’s stepdaughter Alice, and he committed his son to Walsingham’s care ‘if God take me away before I return’. They may have shared an interest in falconry, since Hoddesdon sent him a goshawk. He continued filing reports from Emden and Antwerp in the early 1580s.
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Walsingham was a powerful patron for a man like Hoddesdon, whose wealth and status depended on the free flow of trade. As so often in early modern Europe, the quality of the gifts exchanged indicates the value of the relationship. In 1584 Walsingham received a unique and costly present from Constantinople, a leather carpet in the style of the inner apartments or seraglio of the sultan’s palace at Topkapi. Its sender was William Harborne, a London merchant who had been resident in the Ottoman capital since 1578. The English were a welcome supplier of munitions to the Turkish war against Persia, and Harborne was able to negotiate a charter of privileges for English merchants from Sultan Murad III. Queen Elizabeth rarely missed an opportunity for economy, and in 1582 she appointed Harborne her ‘orator and agent’ on the expense account of the newly founded Turkey Company.

Walsingham, too, spied an advantage. Alliance with an Islamic empire that was perceived as the scourge of Christian Europe may seem a strange objective for a Puritan principal secretary, but the Ottomans were a great power in the Mediterranean sea. 
If they could be induced to make war on Spain, Philip II would be forced to deploy ships which could otherwise be used against England. In 1585 Walsingham wrote to Harborne in cipher, ‘your assured loving friend’, instructing him to explain to the vizier how the rise of Spain was threatening the dignity of the sultan. The remedy that Walsingham prescribed was a military strike, either on Spain itself from the coast of Ottoman-controlled Africa, or an assault of naval galleys on Habsburg territories in Italy. Harborne dutifully spent the next three years petitioning the sultan to commit some portion of his forces against Spain, although it turned out that he was too committed to the conflict in Persia to open up another front against Catholic Christendom. In 1588 Harborne exchanged Constantinople for Norfolk, where he wrote an account of his Turkish experiences which was printed in Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations of the English Nation
. Appropriately, the book was dedicated to Walsingham.
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