The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (5 page)

Where was Walsingham in all of this? If still at Gray’s Inn, he would have watched the royal commander the Earl of Pembroke deploy his cavalry along Holborn; he would also have seen the queen’s forces part to let Wyatt’s men through, apparently with
the aim of attacking the rebels in the rear, although they may have been waiting to see which side the city itself would take. But there is another possibility. Walsingham had recently reached the age of twenty-one stipulated in his father’s will for coming into his inheritance. The manor of Foot’s Cray was now his. The adjacent estate at Scadbury had passed from Sir Edmund Walsingham to his eldest son Thomas, Francis’s first cousin. The Walsingham lands lay in a belt of parishes in north-western Kent that sent men to join Sir Thomas Wyatt’s army. Wyatt himself was well known to the Kentish gentry, having served as MP for the county in 1547 and sheriff in 1550–1. Members of Walsingham’s extended family were implicated in Wyatt’s revolt, just as they had supported Jane Grey. Did he join them? If Walsingham did get himself involved in treason in 1553–4, his decision to flee Queen Mary’s England may have been impelled by politics as much as faith.
¹⁰

The failure of Wyatt’s rebellion to depose Queen Mary faced Protestants with a bleak set of choices: to compromise, to resist, or to go into European exile. For the majority who could not afford to emigrate, the dilemma was starker still. The poor had to decide whether to return to the abomination of the mass or be forced beyond the walls of the Church. Excommunication carried with it the growing danger of imprisonment and a violent death. Paying lip-service to the Catholic religion while attempting to remain pure in heart was condemned by Protestant ministers as Nicodemism, named after the Pharisee who would worship Christ only under cover of darkness.

In London, the sheer size of the city and the complexity of its parish structure offered possibilities for Protestants to gather at its margins. Secret conventicles met in a cloth-workers’ loft and 
a ship moored at Billingsgate, or took their Bible study groups out into the fields; a kind of internal exile. Their ways of coping were strikingly similar to the tactics that would be used by Catholics when they were driven underground by Walsingham and the forces of state surveillance during the 1570s and 80s. But this sort of zealotry was unusual, even in the capital. Looking back on Mary’s reign, John Foxe numbered the Londoners who had held fast to the faith in the dozens rather than the hundreds. Some form of accommodation with the new environment was far more common, among the political elite as well as the broader population. A Parliament which had voted for evangelical reform in the 1530s proved surprisingly willing to repeal it again once the private ownership of ex-monastic land had been guaranteed. Provincial government continued to function effectively, implying that gentry with Protestant sympathies put their loyalty to the crown before the requirements of their religion. William Cecil had been knighted for his services to Edward VI’s government, but still found himself able to stay in Mary’s England and accept the mass back into his household chapel.
¹¹

Walsingham interpreted his scripture differently from Cecil. In autumn 1555, eighteen months after the failure of the Wyatt– Carew conspiracy and at a time of mounting persecution for Protestants, he arrived in the Swiss city of Basel accompanied by three of his Denny cousins. Henry, the eldest, was fifteen. He and his younger brother Anthony had previously matriculated at Pembroke College in Cambridge. They now registered at the university of Basel, together with Charles Denny and Walsingham himself. All four are described as
nobilis
in the university register, a mark of their superior social status. Walsingham very soon moved on to Padua in the Veneto region of Italy, leaving the Denny boys in the care of the English community, but he would return to Basel in 1556 and probably 
remained there for the rest of Mary’s reign. Late in life he recalled his time among the ‘true-hearted Swiss’ with an ageing man’s longing for the clarity of his youth.

Walsingham and his cousins joined a band of exiles about a thousand strong, sprawled across the Protestant towns of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation: Frankfurt and Strasbourg, Geneva and Zurich. Like Walsingham and the Dennys, most were wealthy or well connected. Gentry families and clergymen ejected from the universities mixed with merchants who acted as bankers to the English exodus. John Calvin had published the first edition of his
Institutes of the Christian Religion
in Basel, and the city was still known for its radicalism twenty years later. Its English congregation elected elders and conducted services according to the reformed Book of Common Prayer. From 1557 they gathered in a rented former convent, the Clarakloster, which combined a dormitory with a chapel: an ersatz Cambridge college in which Foxe could work on his
Acts and Monuments
or ‘Book of Martyrs’. Three of Foxe’s books would be dedicated to Walsingham, reflecting the affinity between the two men.

If Basel represented the Reformation to Walsingham, then Padua was an education in the Renaissance. In 1555–6 he was elected
consiliarius
or spokesman of the small English ‘nation’ of students at the city’s law university. Governed by the republic of Venice, Padua lay outside the imperial sphere of influence which had come to dominate Italy. It was a favourite destination for English travellers. Recent alumni of its universities included the diplomat Richard Morison and the political theorist Thomas Starkey as well as the Catholic humanist and activist Reginald Pole, condemned as a traitor by Henry VIII and invited back to England by Mary to become her Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury. Artists from across the Italian peninsula had studied in fifteenth-century Padua, and its churches and civic buildings 
were decorated with frescoes by Giotto and Mantegna. Its rich deposit of Catholic iconography makes Padua appear a curious place for Francis Walsingham to be, but in fact the city had a reputation as a refuge from the Inquisition. English
consiliarii
could avoid making any formal declaration of the Catholic faith, with the result that the intellectual traffic between England and Italy survived a Reformation which might otherwise have severed it.

This may not have been Walsingham’s first visit to Padua. In 1554 a large number of English refugees of conscience had arrived in the city, including the three Denny brothers and Sir John Cheke, pardoned by Mary for supporting Jane Grey but shaken by his imprisonment in the Tower. It’s a fair guess that Walsingham was among this group of émigrés. Both Sir Anthony Denny and his wife Joan were dead, making him the obvious choice to act as protector to their sons in exile. Cheke’s presence in Padua reinforces the likelihood that Walsingham travelled from England to Italy in 1554 following the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion. Cheke passed his time lecturing the English community on the
Orations
of the Greek statesman Demosthenes. His students included Thomas Wilson, a fellow of King’s and a future privy councillor specialising in the interrogation of political prisoners, and maybe Walsingham too. Wilson would subsequently publish his own translation of the
Orations
, comparing the tyrant Philip of Macedon with Philip II of Spain. He and Walsingham would work in tandem as principal secretaries to Queen Elizabeth during the Anjou marriage negotiations in the late 1570s.

If this chronology is correct, we may imagine Walsingham following his former provost and other King’s men to Padua in 1554, taking his Denny cousins with him, before escorting his young charges to Basel. He then spent a year in Padua before a final period in Basel, or other travels unknown. If the details are
uncertain, the conclusion is clear: Francis Walsingham was moulded by the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy as well as the theology of Reformation Germany.

At Gray’s Inn Walsingham had learned about the law as a practical tool of justice and government, debated between barristers and determined by precedent. In Padua he studied civil or Roman law, and the manner of teaching was very different. Lectures focused on the
Corpus Iuris Civilis
of the emperor Justinian and other canonical texts, glossed by medieval commentators. English law was common law, so becoming a ‘civilian’ was of little practical use in the English courts. But civil law still made an impression on the theory and practice of Tudor government. Its pan-European status made it a good training for diplomats like Walsingham and Wilson. More subtly, it taught that statecraft itself was a virtuous pursuit. Thomas Starkey had seen the civil law as the ideal preparation for what he called the ‘politic life’, and its ideas fed into the royal supremacy that Henry VIII declared over the Church of England. It quickened the calling to serve which Walsingham had inherited from his family, although the republican context of his studies in Padua is also significant in light of his later thinking about the state. Principal Secretary Walsingham is too often presented in one dimension, a dour Puritan motivated solely by fear and hatred. The contrast with this image is illustrated by two small domestic details of Walsingham’s time in Italy: he bought a quantity of wine and he invested in a clavichord, a keyboard instrument specially suited to composition.
¹²

Walsingham recalled his education many years later in a letter to one of his nephews about to travel abroad. It would be hard to find a clearer manifesto of the value of ancient learning to the study of statecraft, a central tenet of the Renaissance mindset. Walsingham prescribed a daily routine of prayer, scripture and translation: specifically an epistle of Tully (Cicero) into French, 
and out of French into Latin. History came next. ‘For that knowledge of histories is a very profitable study for the gentleman, read you the lives of Plutarch,’ he wrote, ‘also Titus Livius and all the Roman histories, as also all books of state both old and new’. The intention of all this reading was to ‘mark how matters have passed in government in those days’ in order ‘to apply them to these our times and states’. He should also keep his eyes open, study foreign fortifications, and observe the men of state around princes, captured by Walsingham in an architectural metaphor as ‘conduit pipes, though they themselves have no water’. In 1580 the soldier poet Philip Sidney penned a similar letter to his friend Edward Denny, another of Walsingham’s cousins, recommending the same core ingredients – ‘an hour to your Testament, and a piece of one to Tully’s
Offices
’ – but adding Machiavelli and Holinshed’s
Chronicle
to the mix.
¹³

By comparison with their countrymen scattered through Switzerland and Germany, the English émigrés in Venice and Padua were closely knit and politically active. Their individual biographies reveal a web of connections to the executed Duke of Northumberland and the Wyatt–Carew plotters. Several had estates in the west of England, where any Protestant liberating force was likely to land first. The grandest of the exiles was the Earl of Bedford, who had carried messages between Wyatt and Princess Elizabeth in 1554 and was now assembling a household of disenchanted Protestant aristocrats in Venice. The Cornishman Henry Killigrew had sailed to France to secure royal backing for Wyatt’s rebellion; his manor house commanding Falmouth harbour might prove crucial to any future attempt to oust Queen Mary. John Ashley, whose wife Kat was Elizabeth’s governess, was suspected of smuggling anti-Marian propaganda from Padua into England. The Venetian authorities encouraged any such political agitation against Mary and her husband Philip because it suited their anti-Spanish foreign policy.

In January 1556 Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, enrolled to study law at the university of Padua. Courtenay’s father the Marquis of Exeter had been a first cousin to Henry VIII, a gentleman of the privy chamber and a personal friend of the king. But as Henry became increasingly paranoid in his later years, so Exeter’s Yorkist lineage had come to tell against him. His execution on a fabricated charge of treason in 1538 left his son as one of very few remaining noblemen with royal blood in his veins. Thomas Wyatt had hoped for a marriage between Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay, a Protestant and English regime as opposed to a Catholic and largely Spanish one. Courtenay survived the furore by turning informer on his co-conspirators, yet he remained obsessed by his lineage and alive to any initiative that might make him a king consort. The Venetian ambassador in England encouraged Courtenay’s pretensions to power in 1554, supplying Wyatt with artillery from a ship in the Thames. Now Venice itself became the focus of Protestant plotting. The adventurer Henry Dudley wanted to lead a French invasion of Devon and Cornwall, seizing Exeter as a bridgehead before marching on to London. Courtenay got as far as selling land to pay for men and supplies, but he died in suspicious circumstances in September 1556; murdered by poison, it has been suggested, on the orders of Philip of Spain. Francis Walsingham was the English
consiliarius
during Courtenay’s time in Padua. He also seems to have been close to the Earl of Bedford, since he was elected to Parliament early in Elizabeth’s reign to represent towns within Bedford’s gift. Beyond these bare facts, his role can only be guessed at. But whether as observer or agent, Walsingham was apprenticed in Padua into a world of subversion and conspiracy.
¹⁴