The Watchers (9 page)

A Protestant commemoration of the massacre in Paris in August 1572, by François Dubois.

Coligny's corpse was mutilated by a mob. Quickly the violence spread throughout Paris. At least two thousand men, women and children were killed, though the number may have been nearer to six thousand; nearly six hundred houses were pillaged. Hundreds of Protestants were marched to the Pont aux Meuniers, executed, and thrown into the River Seine. One heavily pregnant woman was stabbed in the stomach by a business rival of her husband's. The murderer and his accomplices then ransacked their victims' house. At three o'clock on Sunday, 24 August the aldermen of Paris went to the king at the Louvre Palace to tell him that the city was beyond their control. Charles IX, who had sanctioned the killing of Coligny and other Protestants supposedly to prevent another civil war between Catholics and Huguenots in France, appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. The violence was copied in other towns in France. But the horror of what had happened in the houses and on the streets of Paris between 22 and 24 August 1572 was felt far beyond the borders of Charles IX's kingdom.

Queen Elizabeth's advisers heard of the massacre in early September. Even men used to, as they saw it, the duplicity and cruelty of Catholic princes were revolted by the killings. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's lord treasurer, wrote: ‘I see the Devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong in following the persecution of Christ's members.' Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, another councillor and courtier very close to the queen, called the massacre a ‘lamentable tragedy'. All true Christians, he said, looked for revenge at God's hands. God had punished them with the ‘just scourge of correction, by the sufferance of his people thus to be martyred, but our sins do deserve this and more'. Only Protestants' vigilance and repentance would deprive the Devil of final victory. This was a war imagined in cosmic terms, Antichrist and Devil on one side, Christ and God on the other. The queen's ministers sought to understand the ways of providence. But they also looked to practicalities. As soon as the massacre was known at court the Privy Council met in emergency session, the coasts of England were prepared for an invasion and Elizabeth's navy was ordered to put to sea.

The man upon whom Burghley and his fellow councillors relied for information from France was Elizabeth's ambassador at the court of Charles IX. He was a gentleman of Kent and London, about forty years old, whose name was Francis Walsingham. Walsingham left no account of what he saw in Paris that August weekend; like many other eyewitnesses he may have found it too painful to recall the massacre. His house as ambassador was in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain, on the right bank of the Seine near the great Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. With Walsingham were his wife and young daughter as well as Philip Sidney, an eighteen-year-old English gentleman who would one day be Walsingham's son-in-law as well as a distinguished poet. Walsingham surely recognized the danger of the first failed effort at assassinating Admiral Coligny. He may even have heard, coming from the direction of the Louvre, a signal for the killings: in the small hours of the morning of Sunday, 24 August, shortly before the murder of Coligny, the bells of the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois rang out.

Walsingham offered sanctuary for foreigners in peril of their lives. The mob knew this, for it even attacked Walsingham's house. Elizabeth's ambassador was unlikely to have been reassured by the guard King Charles sent to protect him. For weeks after the violence
Walsingham always left his residence in the company of bodyguards, and he was taunted and insulted as he went through the streets of Paris. He sent reports to Elizabeth and her advisers within days of the massacre. He met King Charles and his mother Catherine de' Medici on 1 September. Francis Walsingham, the ambassador of a supposedly heretic queen, negotiated the audience with extraordinary coolness and composure. Charles IX spoke of a plot by Coligny and other Huguenot leaders to kill the royal family. Walsingham, we can be sure, would have taken his own view.

Sir Francis Walsingham went on after his Paris embassy to have a distinguished political career and to build a powerful reputation for his gifts as an organizer of spies and informants. His face is probably one of the most familiar of the Elizabethan court. His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London has been attributed to John de Critz the Elder, the son of Dutch Protestant immigrants settled in London, and an artist who received the benefits of Walsingham's patronage. The portrait shows Sir Francis in about 1585, more than a decade after the massacre in Paris. The ambassador of forty was by now the queen's secretary in his early fifties. We see a half-length picture, Walsingham standing just a little to the left, though he looks directly at us with grey eyes. His brown hair is cropped short, his clipped beard streaked with grey, his moustache fashionably brushed up. He wears a black skullcap and a large white ruff around his neck. Over a black doublet, slashed to show its lining, he wears a black surcoat trimmed with fur. Hanging from a black ribbon is a cameo of Queen Elizabeth set in gold. The impression John de Critz leaves us with is of power and control, a man of authority modestly but richly dressed, the austere loyal servant of Elizabeth.

De Critz's Walsingham of the middle 1580s was no longer a young ambassador. But in Paris he had seen for himself the murders of thousands of his fellow Protestants. Walsingham's embassy in Paris was formative. He had encountered at first hand the work of the Devil; he knew how to make his way through the perilous labyrinth of the Valois court; he understood something of Mary Stuart's kinsmen the Guise. Sixteen months after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, Elizabeth appointed Walsingham as her secretary, the man who sat at the heart of the machine of the Elizabethan state. One of the
secretary's tasks was to secure information for Elizabeth and her Privy Council. To do this he sent out spies. Sir Francis Walsingham, always conscious of the enemy at the gates of both Elizabeth's kingdom and God's, was a practised hand in clandestine affairs. Like other men of authority in her government, he would always do what he saw was necessary to defend the queen and the true religion. As a passionately committed Protestant, Walsingham knew the dangers as well as the attitude of mind needed to face them. As a young man, even before his embassy in Paris, he coined an aphorism: ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little'. For Walsingham, a life in politics confirmed the principle he so neatly expressed.

As they went about their daily lives, ordinary Elizabethans knew something of the dangers threatening their queen and faith. They heard for themselves the words of royal proclamations and of the laws passed by parliament. They talked in the market squares of towns and cities and in shops and taverns, went to church to pray for aid and protection, read or had read to them books and pamphlets and ballads that tried to comprehend a world in which God made the force of his will clearly felt, scourging and punishing his people with the victories of their enemies. They saw public executions for sedition and treason and heard from the pulpits the sermons of Elizabethan clergy and the recantations of Catholic priests who asked for forgiveness. Loyal subjects behaved themselves. Others read controversial books and pamphlets smuggled into England from abroad, causing them perhaps to question the authority of Elizabeth and her government. More dangerous still, some families even sheltered Catholic priests working secretly and illegally in English towns and cities and in the houses of the wealthy gentry and nobility. Many of Elizabeth's subjects knew of the spies and informants who thrived in these shadowy corners of religious faith and political loyalty.

Countries across the ‘Narrow Sea' of the English Channel were at war. The Catholics and Huguenots of France killed one another often, as in Paris in 1572, acting out the rituals of worship, cleansing and purifying the stench of Protestant heresy or smashing the Catholic idols of false religion. The formidable war machine of King Philip of Spain rumbled through the Spanish Netherlands, crushing Protestant
resistance in a long and hard campaign to which English troops would be sent in 1585. English Catholic exiles and émigrés who were either banished from England or found it impossible in conscience to stay at home lived, taught and plotted in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. Some returned secretly to England, successful in evading the watchful eyes and ears of the authorities. From the later 1570s priests taught and trained in Rome and France entered Elizabeth's kingdoms to minister to English Catholics. Many were captured and sent to prison and the gallows. Both sides fought for the truth as they understood and believed it.

These were not years of peace and stability, a golden age of Elizabeth: they were instead some of the most difficult and troubling in the history of Europe. Any Elizabethan who knew something of the world understood very well the significance and meaning of the prayers of public repentance published by the queen's printer in October 1572. In the safety of the parish church he or she prayed to God that the horror of what had happened in Paris would not be repeated in the crowded alleyways of London or on the streets of other towns and cities in the kingdom: neighbour against neighbour, private hatreds turning to murder, corpses thrown into the River Thames. In the rich Elizabethan English of this specially printed book of common prayer, priest and people said:

Hearken to the voice of our prayers, our king and our God: for unto thee do we make our complaint.

O Lord, the counsel of the wicked conspireth against us: and our enemies are daily in hand to swallow us up.

They gape upon us with their mouths: as it were ramping and roaring lions.

But thou O Lord art our defender: thou art our health and our salvation.

We do put our trust in thee O God: save us from all them that persecute us, and deliver us.

O take the matter into thy hand, thy people commit themselves unto thee: for thou art their helper in their distress.

Save us from the lions' mouths, and from the horns of the unicorns: lest they devour us, and tear us in pieces, while there is none to help.

It was in these dangerous and uncertain times, driven on by the thrill of a great adventure, that two young Englishmen arrived at the port of Boulogne in the summer of 1578. They were quickly caught up in one of the spasms of religious war in northern France. They saw ‘cruel and heavy spectacles' of killing and came close to danger themselves, robbed by soldiers and stripped down to their shirts. They sought safety in Amiens, where an English Catholic priest called Father Woodward gave them help. The two young men then went to Paris and there played a little at espionage, handing over the letters of English Catholics they had met to Elizabeth's ambassador at the French court, Sir Amias Paulet. From Paris they moved to Lyons. In Milan, where they arrived on Christmas Eve, they lodged in the palace of Cardinal Charles Borromeo. From Milan they went to Bologna, Florence and Siena, and then finally to Rome, where they enrolled in the English seminary to study grammar. One of the young men, Thomas Nowell, signed the register of the seminary using his real name. His friend used a false one, writing the Latinized ‘Antonius Auleus'. In English he probably called himself Anthony Hawley, though in fact his name was Anthony Munday.

Munday, eighteen years old and a restless soul, was a budding writer and young adventurer who fell into spying by accident. On his travels he grasped an opportunity, quickly realizing that he was able to tell the extraordinary tale of how he had seen and heard for himself the wicked conspiracies of Queen Elizabeth's Catholic enemies. When Munday returned at last from Rome to London he sold his story, writing pamphlets and short books in lively and vigorous English. He wrote for Londoners like himself – those perhaps in trade or business,
young lawyers, civic officials or merchants' apprentices, browsing the shops of booksellers and stationers near St Paul's Cathedral – and in learning his craft as a popular writer he showed that he had a show-man's touch for dramatic timing. In London he also gave public evidence against young priests who had been his friends in Rome. The priests, like Munday himself, had by then come back to England. Unlike Munday, they were captured by the authorities, imprisoned and tried for treason. Munday, confronting his former friends with the evidence of their conspiracies, helped to see them to the gallows. All of this happened within the space of two years, between February 1579, when Nowell and Munday arrived in Rome, and the priests' trials in November 1581. What began for Anthony Munday as the adventure of an impetuous young man became a deadly serious career as an unofficial agent of Elizabeth's government.

He was the son of Jane and Christopher Munday, who on 13 October 1560 had him baptized at St Gregory-by-St Paul's, a church built tight against the south-west transept of London's great Gothic cathedral. Near by was the hall of the Stationers' Company, the trade body of Elizabethan printers and booksellers, whose shops were clustered around the cathedral's churchyard. Here stood the great Paul's Cross, an octagonal pulpit with a lead roof, where Londoners came to hear public sermons and recantations of religious error. The pulpit was at the heart of the busy city.

Elizabethan London was a crowded, suffocating, jostling world of pleasure, business and life. The old city was bounded by its ancient walls and gates as far east as the Tower of London and as far west as Bridewell Palace on the River Thames. Beyond Fleet Street and the Temple Bar one entered Westminster and the world of law and politics, dominated by the grand houses of the nobility and the law courts of Westminster Hall but above all by the royal palace of Whitehall. South of the Thames from London Bridge was Southwark, with its bear gardens, inns and taverns, theatres and brothels, Bankside and the Paris Garden. London Bridge was built high with shops and houses; from it were displayed on poles the severed heads of traitors. An armada of small boats carried passengers up and down the river between wharves and landing steps that led to an intricate warren of alleyways and streets. Taking a boat on the Thames for a few pennies
was the easiest way to move quickly through a congested and chaotic city.