The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (8 page)

Elizabeth’s interpretation of her royal prerogative provoked a series of skirmishes in the parliaments that followed, with controversy focusing on the Book of Common Prayer. William Strickland introduced a bill in 1571 aimed at Protestantising the Prayer Book, while Peter Turner tried to replace it with the Genevan order of service in 1584. If a Puritan ideology of opposition did exist in the Elizabethan House of Commons, as some historians have claimed, then there is no evidence that Walsingham shared it. His attitude to royal power was shaped by the writings of resistance theorists as well as his deep Protestant faith, but Parliament was not the place to pursue reform. Walsingham never made a major speech in the Commons, unlike his firebrand brother-in-law Peter Wentworth, who described Parliament without freedom of speech as ‘a very school of flattery and dissimulation and so a fit place to serve the devil’ – a challenge to the crown which carried him to the Tower. Walsingham’s strategy was distinctly different. In 1578 he urged the English community of Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp not to abandon the Prayer Book for a more Protestant service: 

I would have all reformations done by public authority … If you knew with what difficulty we retain that we have, and that the seeking of more might hazard that which we already have, you would then deal warily in this time when policy carrieth more sway than zeal.
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Whatever his private doubts, he could appreciate the political value in having one form of public prayer.

In 1563 Walsingham was returned to the Commons for Lyme Regis, another borough under the Earl of Bedford’s influence; he would subsequently sit as a knight of the shire for Surrey. Cecil took an interest in his election, noting in a memorandum ‘Mr Walsingham to be of the House’. Sir Walter Mildmay, who had married Walsingham’s elder sister Mary in 1546, may have played a role in bringing him to Cecil’s notice. Mildmay was another Gray’s Inn lawyer, an administrator rather than a politician who had worked with Cecil as a commissioner and councillor in Edward VI’s reign. His presence on the privy council from 1566 adds Mildmay to the list of crown servants, courtiers and parliamentarians who were related to Walsingham. Peter Wentworth was married to Francis’s sister Elizabeth. Another sister, Christiana, married firstly John Tamworth, keeper of the privy purse – a position once occupied by Sir Anthony Denny – and then William Dodington, an official in the royal mint. Katherine Astley, Queen Elizabeth’s first chief gentlewoman of the privy chamber, was Denny’s sister-in-law and thus related to Walsingham by marriage.

The closest of these family connections threading through government was also the longest-lived. Robert Beale was the senior clerk of the privy council, a Marian exile who had studied in Strasbourg and Zurich. He worked for Walsingham as a secretary during the Paris embassy of 1571–3, and later deputised for him as secretary of state during Walsingham’s frequent absences from the council table. Friendship became 
kinship when Beale married Edith St Barbe, sister of Walsingham’s second wife Ursula. Beale was a strong reformer, favouring the Protestant 1552 Prayer Book over the compromise settlement of 1559 and arguing that the power of bishops should be reduced. To Walsingham he was ‘my brother Beale’, a political ally and a friend.
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Apart from his election to Parliament, much of Walsingham’s life during the 1560s is a frustrating blank. Robert Beale helps to explain why the documentary trail goes cold. A lengthy essay dating from 1592 describes the office of principal secretary which his brother-in-law had filled for so long. Aware of his own advancing years, Beale was worried about the continuity of government. He was particularly keen that paperwork should be maintained and passed on intact to the next generation of crown servants. In Henry VIII’s reign there had been a chamber in the Palace of Westminster where the records of state were kept separate from the private papers of the principal secretary. But the practice had fallen into neglect, ‘whereby no means are left to see what was done before or to give any light of service to young beginners’. The result was that, following Walsingham’s death, ‘all his papers and books both public and private were seized on and carried away’.

Beale’s plea for a permanent archive is remarkable for its day. It would ultimately be answered by the creation of the Public Record Office in 1838, when piles of mouldering manuscripts were moved out of the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey into purpose-built accommodation in Chancery Lane. Victorian editors created order out of chaos, sifting out the principal records of government and sewing the individual manuscripts into volumes. Much of the Walsingham archive came to rest here, in the domestic and foreign series of the state papers. Other material descended to the British Museum, originally belonging to the records of state but extracted by 
antiquaries and collectors like Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose portrait greets visitors to the manuscript reading room of the British Library at King’s Cross.

Walsingham’s public career can be reconstructed in forensic detail. But the letters and account books which might have recreated the texture of his domestic life – the hospitality and patronage which he dispensed, the furnishing of his houses, his private thoughts and devotions – are nearly all lost. Of no use to later secretaries, they were simply thrown away. If Walsingham had founded a political dynasty in the manner of William Cecil, his personal archive might have been preserved as Cecil’s was at Hatfield House. As it is, only hints and fragments remain. We know that Walsingham enjoyed falconry because Sir John Forster, warden of the middle march with Scotland, presented him with a prized gyrfalcon. Other gifts included plants collected from the new worlds overseas which the English were beginning to explore. Walsingham noted that he went to see a garden while ambassador in Paris in 1571. His journal for 1583–4 couples the planting of elms and hawthorn in his own garden with urgent issues of state: the making of ciphers, the interrogation of Catholic priests and traitors, and the fortification of Dover harbour. Distinctions between public and private had little meaning for Walsingham. A garden was simultaneously a place of retreat and display, its triumph of order over nature a recognised metaphor of statecraft during the Renaissance. The portrait of Prince Edward at Hunsdon had made the same claim, the garden beyond the window symbolic of the royal estate which he would all too soon inherit.
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At least something of Walsingham’s family life can be recovered. In 1560 his mother Joyce died and was buried beside her husband in the church of St Mary Aldermanbury. When Francis chose to marry two years later, it was within the same London merchant community that he looked for a bride. Anne 
Carleill was recently widowed, a woman of means with a young son and an older daughter. Her late father, Sir George Barnes, was Lord Mayor of London in 1552–3 and had helped to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. They had no children of their own, although Walsingham supported his stepson Christopher Carleill during a military career spent mainly in the Netherlands and Ireland. Anne’s father and first husband were founder members of the Muscovy Company, incorporated in 1555 to spearhead England’s trade into Russia, while her daughter Alice Carleill married the Baltic trader Christopher Hoddesdon; his reports kept Walsingham informed about shipping movements and dissident Catholics during the 1570s and early 1580s.

By marrying Anne Carleill, Walsingham strengthened his family ties with the city of London and gained admission to a circle of speculators in the new frontiers of English trade. In 1569 he became an ‘assistant’ or director of the Muscovy Company. For her part Anne acquired a guardian for her son during his minority, and the social cachet of a husband with connections to the royal court. Foot’s Cray was sold, and the couple leased the manor of Parkbury in Hertfordshire. Walsingham had his first taste of crown service as a justice of the peace. But their marriage of mutual convenience was short-lived. Anne made her will, ‘sick of body’, in July 1564. Within four months she was dead, bequeathing Francis £100 and the custody of her son Christopher, with an earnest entreaty to see him ‘virtuously brought up in learning and knowledge’. The contents of her wardrobe were distributed among Walsingham’s sisters, suggesting the women had become friends: a damask gown with a kirtle of satin for Christiana, a pair of sables for Elizabeth, and a purse of purple silk and gold for Mary. Other bequests included a diamond, a ‘book of gold’ with a chain, and several sums to purchase remembrance rings – a Protestant alternative to the masses and obits of the past. A feather bed 
with bolster and blankets, its valance of needlework and curtains of sarsenet in red and green, offers a glimpse of the costly fittings at Parkbury.
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Walsingham did not mourn for long. In 1566 he married again, and this time it would last until his own death twenty-four years later. Ursula St Barbe was the daughter of a Somerset gentleman. Her first husband Sir Richard Worseley had been a landowner in the Isle of Wight, and Ursula brought the estates of Carisbrooke Priory and a house at Appuldurcombe as her dowry. Wight was burned by a French raiding party in 1545 and the Worseley house seems to have been fortified, since Ursula’s two sons were killed there by an explosion of gunpowder soon after their mother’s remarriage. A legal dispute over rights to the property grumbled on for several years. Walsingham’s earliest surviving letter is a request to a friend for help in wooing Ursula ‘from her resolution of sole life’, and the couple continued to correspond when royal service kept them apart. Mary, the younger of their two daughters, died as a child in 1580. But Frances, named after her father, would wed two of the brightest-burning courtiers of the Elizabethan age: the poet Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586 fighting the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, and then the doomed royal favourite the Earl of Essex.

Ursula Walsingham’s presence can best be detected in the ceremonial life of the court. She followed her husband to Paris when he was made ambassador, and was entertained by the French royal family in April 1571. As Francis rose in status, so Ursula took her part in the rituals of gift exchange which surrounded Queen Elizabeth. At new year 1579–80 she presented the queen with a pair of gloves set with gold buttons: an astute choice, since Elizabeth was known to be deeply proud of her hands. The following year she gave a jewel in the form of a scorpion, wrought in agate and gold with sparks of diamond 
and ruby. In 1581 Ursula took custody of a valuable diamond belonging to the Portuguese royal pretender Don Antonio, his pledge of support for a planned attack on Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Walsingham described her in his will as ‘my most well beloved wife’, ‘my most kind and loving wife’. She would outlive him by twelve years, her own will listing a resident minister among her numerous other servants. Two cooks were left an annuity of £3 each while a waiting-woman, Alice Poole, received a generous £50. Other bequests were made to the minister and the poor of the parish of Barnes, indicative of her godly faith. A portrait once thought to be Dame Ursula and datable to 1583, depicting a strong-featured woman in ruff and cap with a chain around her neck, has now been demoted to an ‘unknown woman’ by the National Portrait Gallery.
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Ursula’s main occupation was running the household, initially at Parkbury and from 1579 at Barn Elms on the south bank of the Thames. Robert Beale’s house was in Barnes, and Richmond Palace was close by. So was the company of the scholar and astrologer Dr John Dee, and his magnificent library, at Mortlake. From his stair down to the river Walsingham could be rowed with the ebbing tide to Westminster and onwards to Elizabeth’s other great palace at Greenwich. The queen visited Barn Elms several times during the 1580s, the movement of the court marked by church bells ringing at Lambeth. She is also known to have stayed at another of Walsingham’s houses, Odiham in Hampshire. In November 1578 Walsingham invited the Earls of Leicester and Warwick for ‘a Friday night’s drinking after the ancient and catholic order’ at Odiham, a rare example of his sardonic sense of humour.

A survey taken in 1589 records sixty-eight horses stabled at Barn Elms, implying that this was the headquarters of Walsingham’s formidable postal system. Little else is known about the house, which was demolished long ago. But there is a
tantalising clue as to how it once looked. A three-quarter-length portrait traditionally thought to be of Francis Walsingham includes a fashionable gabled house set in a formal garden, visible through an open window and clearly the property of the sitter. The artist can only be guessed at, and in recent years the date has also been challenged. Roy Strong argues for the 1620s on the basis of the similarity of the architecture to the prodigy houses built by ambitious courtiers during the reign of James I. And yet the face is unnervingly similar to the authenticated portraits of Walsingham: the angular features and narrow nose, the dark hair beginning to recede, the same cut of moustache and beard. The ruff and embroidered doublet and cuffs are more elaborate than in other portraits, but the black garb clearly denotes a senior man of government rather than a country gentleman. The modest size of the property seems right for a principal secretary whose income was nothing like that of William Cecil, who was capable of building on the grandest scale at Theobalds and Burghley. Conyers Read evidently believed in the portrait, which forms the frontispiece to his 1925 three-volume biography of Walsingham.

If this is Francis Walsingham and his house on the Thames, then Barn Elms was modelled on strict Renaissance principles of order and symmetry. Dutch gables would still have been a novelty in Elizabeth’s reign, but they had begun to appear on a number of other gentry houses. Walsingham was a strong supporter of the Dutch revolt against the Habsburgs, and it is conceivable that this is reflected in his choice of architectural style. The central tower suggests a banqueting house of the sort often found in Elizabethan mansions, a place for host and guests to withdraw to dessert. The garden is accessed by a grand doorway flanked by classical columns, a tunnelled arbour with domed pavilions giving way to flower beds and lines of fruit trees. Judging by the forty-odd books dedicated to Walsingham, 
his library at Barn Elms included works of philosophy, exploration and music as well as religion. John Cosyn’s
Music of Six and Five Parts
was a collection of psalm settings ‘for the private use and comfort of the godly’. But the mixed consort pieces ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’s good morrow’ and ‘The Lady Walsingham’s conceits’, presented by the gifted young lute-player Daniel Bacheler, brought a lighter tone to their life together.
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