The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (9 page)

A gentleman with court connections and an education in the Renaissance, well-travelled, skilled in languages and the law: such was Francis Walsingham on the eve of his entry into state service. If he did assist Sir Nicholas Throckmorton during his embassies to Scotland in the later 1560s, as the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
tentatively suggests, then it went unrecorded. Walsingham at this point seems barely distinguishable from a host of other gentlemen in the Commons or on the magistrates’ bench, engaging each other in litigation over land and dabbling in the commercial opportunities offered by the widening arc of English trade. In fact, he was more alert than he appeared. Walsingham’s experience of exile had sharpened his senses, attuning him to the heartbeat of the global Protestant cause. When he accepted Secretary Cecil’s request to do some undercover work for the crown, it was to meet a host of threats which would bring England to the brink of invasion and justify the execution of an anointed queen.

Mary Stuart had a surprisingly strong claim to the kingdom of England. Her father James V, whose death in 1542 catapulted Mary to the Scottish throne at only six days old, was the son of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret. This meant that both Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were direct descendants
of Henry VII, Elizabeth as his granddaughter and Mary his great-granddaughter. Mary’s lineage made her an enticing prospect to the English. A determined effort was mounted in the 1540s to win her as a bride for Prince Edward, initially by diplomacy, and when that failed by the rougher wooing of an English invasion. But devastating defeats on the battlefield had the opposite effect from the one intended, driving the Scottish crown into a renewal of its alliance with England’s oldest enemy. Mary was betrothed to the dauphin Francis and taken to France to be educated, crushing English hopes of creating a united kingdom on their own terms. They were married at Notre-Dame in 1558, Mary’s uncle the Duke of Guise acting as master of ceremonies. Francis was proclaimed king the following year.

Under different circumstances Mary’s descent from Henry Tudor would have amounted to little more than a diplomatic flourish, the English royal arms emblazoned provocatively on her plates and furniture during her eighteen-month reign as Queen of France. But when Mary returned to Scotland following Francis’s premature death, several factors came into play which made her seem much less distant from the crown of England. The first of these was the absence of male children in the royal family tree. Henry VIII had tried to deny it, but the descendants of his sister Margaret Tudor were senior in line to those of his younger sister Mary as represented by Lady Jane Grey. Then there was the fallout from the break from Rome and the Reformation. Catholics could not accept the legitimacy of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, nor of the child that had resulted from it. Bizarrely, opponents of Elizabeth’s claim to the throne could cite the king himself in their support. Henry had annulled his union with Anne when presented with evidence of her adultery, making Elizabeth illegitimate by royal proclamation as well as the strictures of the Catholic Church. Parliament
might retrospectively validate the Boleyn marriage, but sufficient doubt remained to be exploited by Catholic propaganda.
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The third factor was the arrival of the Queen of Scots on English soil. On 16 May 1568 Mary crossed the Solway Firth to Cumberland in a fishing boat. Her army had been routed at the battle of Langside, closing a seven-year chapter in which a Catholic and culturally French queen had attempted to govern Scotland in parallel with the same Lords of the Congregation who had overthrown the old Church in an English-sponsored Protestant revolution. The political credit which Mary accumulated during hundreds of miles of progresses around her kingdom was squandered firstly by her marriage to Lord Darnley, which made a bitter enemy of her half-brother the Earl of Moray, and then by her suspected complicity in Darnley’s death by strangulation and explosion in February 1567. Mary could hardly be blamed for her subsequent abduction and probable rape by the Earl of Bothwell, but it was her own decision to marry Bothwell, the prime suspect in Darnley’s murder, within three months of her late husband’s body being found in the garden of the provost’s lodging at Kirk o’ Field. Threatened with execution by the Lords and slandered as a whore by the Edinburgh crowd, Mary was forced to abdicate in July in favour of her son James and a regency government led by Moray. That she then summoned the strength to escape from Lochleven Castle in an attempt to regain the throne illustrates Mary’s astonishing reserves of self-belief, a resilience every bit as steely as that displayed by Mary Tudor when she faced down Wyatt’s rebels, or Elizabeth when she scorned the Spanish Armada.

The Queen of Scots was not seeking permanent political asylum in England. What she needed was a resting-place to rally her forces, and she immediately called on her cousin Elizabeth for help. What she found was an endless house arrest and the barely-concealed hostility of the queen’s chief ministers. Cecil
did all he could to deaden Elizabeth’s instinctive sympathy for Mary. A tribunal examining the ‘casket letters’, a cache of incriminating documents allegedly written by Mary to the Earl of Bothwell, was guided towards its verdict that she had ordered Darnley’s murder. Walsingham’s conclusion was even starker: the Queen of Scots was the agent of the devil. Isolated both from Scotland and the English royal court, powerless to protect James from the Calvinist republicanism being thrashed into him by his tutor George Buchanan, Mary was reduced to calling on France and Spain to agitate for her release. When petitioning failed, the only options were capitulation or conspiracy.
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On the morning of 19 August 1568, Walsingham went to see Cecil to discuss a matter that was too sensitive to commit to paper. Cecil had been receiving some alarming reports from the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Norris, about the activities of the Guise family in support of their kinswoman Mary Stuart. It was believed at the French court that thousands of Englishmen were ready to rise in Mary’s support. Writing partly in cipher, Norris recommended that Cecil should employ an Italian soldier named Captain Franchiotto to investigate. He had been working for the French for many years, but his Protestant faith had now convinced him to defect. Walsingham, who read Italian, became his handler. Franchiotto soon proved his worth, producing lists of suspected agents and warning the queen to beware of poison in her food or her bedding. In October Walsingham heard that twelve troopships were being prepared at Marseilles for an expedition against the north of England. Franchiotto was the veteran in this relationship, Walsingham a mere novice. He had a lot to learn. But he was also able to mobilise his own contacts among the London elite, instructing the lord mayor to provide him with weekly reports about the movement of strangers around the city.

In December Walsingham received information from Paris
that France and Spain were engaged in an operation in England ‘for the alteration of religion and the advancement of the Queen of Scots to the crown’. Details were few, and he hesitated before troubling Cecil with such a vague report. But the ‘malice of this present time’ had convinced him; every scrap of intelligence had to be taken seriously. He concluded with statements which were already defining his outlook on the world: ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little’, and ‘there is nothing more dangerous than security’. What Walsingham was warning against was a
false
sense of security, the complacent assumption that the queen’s safety would be guaranteed by the love and loyalty of her people. It was an alert to the most powerful man in government that the danger of rebellion and assassination was real and urgent. Within months Elizabeth was facing a crisis of the sort which had most haunted her father, a Catholic rising in the northern reaches of the realm. Unlike the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, the rebellion of 1569 was prepared to call on foreign support to secure a Catholic succession.
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The heartland of the northern rising was in Yorkshire and Durham, the same counties which had risen against Henry VIII’s Reformation. The protesters marched under the banner of the Five Wounds, symbolising the presence of Christ in their midst. Richard Norton, Sheriff of Yorkshire and a living link with the Pilgrimage of Grace, had worn the same badge of the Five Wounds more than forty years before. Foot soldiers, priests and horses were dressed in tabards painted with a red cross, the ancient symbol of the Crusades. A flag bearing the slogan ‘God Speed the Plough’ recalled earlier generations of rural revolt. Images of the saints and heraldic pennons added to the gorgeous array.

Mass was celebrated wherever the rebels went. At Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding, the plain communion table stipulated by the Prayer Book was symbolically cast aside. The
women and young people of Sedgefield rebuilt their altar and holy-water stoup and warmed themselves round a bonfire of Protestant books. A mother from County Durham entrusted her baby to a midwife to be christened by a Catholic curate. The most spectacular offering of the mass was at Durham Cathedral, which had recently witnessed the burning of St Cuthbert’s banner and now sought absolution in the name of the pope. By 18 November, when they paused at Boroughbridge on the great north road, the rebel force had swollen to six thousand. The majority were yeomen farmers rather than labourers, men of substance in their communities and the backbone of the militia. Their faith bound them together, and they mustered like an army.

The 1569 rising was led by two magnates whose families had ruled large swathes of the north for centuries, nominally for the crown but often on their own account. Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, was a cradle Catholic adrift in the restored Church of England. He was now in his mid-twenties, and gloomily aware that Neville influence was fading. Even so, he would probably have remained loyal to the crown had it not been for his wife Jane, a sister of the Duke of Norfolk. A plan had recently been hatched by Leicester and Throckmorton to marry Norfolk to Mary Stuart, who was in the process of divorcing the Earl of Bothwell. Privy councillors saw a chance for a peaceful union with Scotland if Elizabeth had no heir. To Mary it offered a dignified route out of captivity, and maybe a future role as queen mother. The problem was Elizabeth herself. Furious that the succession had been debated behind her back, she recalled Norfolk to court and flung him in the Tower. Fearing a similar fate, Westmorland raised his standard in a Catholic plot to capitalise on the Queen of Scots.

His brother in arms was Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Revolt in the name of religion ran in Northumberland’s
blood. His father Sir Thomas Percy had been executed following the Pilgrimage of Grace. Like Westmorland he had been forced to watch as royal appointees trespassed on his territory. In 1568 the crown awarded itself the profits from the copper mines on his estates, an affront which may have quickened his decision to be reconciled to the Catholic faith. When the two earls took their stand, they did so in the name of protecting Queen Elizabeth from the heretical advisers who surrounded her. Their proclamations called on the people to rise ‘as your duty towards God doth bind you, and as you tender the common wealth of your country’. They said nothing about the Queen of Scots, but this was sheer calculation. Interrogated by Lord Hunsdon before his execution in York, Northumberland denied that they had intended to depose Elizabeth while freely admitting the importance of Mary:

What was the intent and meaning of the rebellion? Ans., Our first object in assembling was the reformation of religion and preservation of the person of the Queen of Scots, as next heir, failing issue of her majesty, which causes I believed were greatly favoured by most of the noblemen of the realm.

The leaders of the rebellion concealed another element of their plan from their followers. Northumberland had made contact with Don Guerau de Spes, the new Spanish ambassador in London. De Spes was a religious militant, eager to snatch at any opportunity to reconvert the English to Catholicism. Westmorland would ultimately join the Spanish army in the Netherlands when the rebellion fell apart. Both of the earls hoped for military support from the ‘Iron Duke’ of Alva, the Governor of the Netherlands, hence their diversion to capture the port of Hartlepool where Spanish troops and supplies could be landed. Yet they boldly played on fears of invasion and the patriotic duty of English subjects: ‘divers foreign powers do
purpose shortly to invade these realms, which will be to our utter destruction, if we do not ourselves speedily forfend the same … if foreigners enter upon us we should all be made slaves and bondsmen to them.’ This can only have been a deliberate smokescreen. The rank and file believed they were marching in a loyal Catholic crusade, while their leaders were deeply steeped in treason. Would the northern earls have been content with recognising Mary as Elizabeth’s ‘next heir’ if their cavalry had succeeded in capturing her? The government recognised the danger and moved Mary from Staffordshire to Coventry, thereby depriving the revolt of its key objective. Threatened by a royal army and deserted by their captains, the rebels surrendered to the queen’s mercy; hundreds would be hanged under martial law.
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