The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I Read online

  THE QUEEN’S AGENT

  Francis Walsingham at the Court

  of Elizabeth I

  JOHN COOPER

  For my father

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Abbreviations in the Notes

  Map

  Prologue

  1 Exodus

  2 Massacre at Paris

  3 Armed with Innocence

  4 The English Mission

  5 Security Services

  6 Bonds and Ciphers

  7 Western Planting

  8 Eleventh Hour

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  1. Aldermanbury and the Church of St Mary, City of London, Ralph Agas c.1561/1603, London Metropolitan Archives/© City of London.

  2. Detail from Edward VI as Prince of Wales, attrib. William Scrots, c.1546, oil on panel, The Royal Collection © 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  3. King’s College Cambridge, Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

  4. Unknown woman, formerly known as Ursula, Lady Walsingham, unknown artist, 1583, oil on panel © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  5. Detail from three-quarter length portrait of Francis Walsingham, reproduced by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire.

  6. La ville cité. Quartier Saint Marcel (Saint Marceau) Truschet/Hoyau, 1552/© Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Dist. RMN/image du MNHN, bibliothèque centrale.

  7. Allegory of the Tudor Succession, attrib. Lucas de Heere, c.1572, oil on panel © National Museum of Wales.

  8. Elizabeth I: Sieve Portrait, Quentin Metsys the younger, 1583, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.

  9. Relic of the skull of St Cuthbert Mayne, Lanherne Convent, Cornwall © Lanherne Friars, Cornwall.

  10. Anthony Babington’s cipher alphabet to the Queen of Scots and Thomas Phelippes’s ciphered postscript, 1586, SP/12/193/54 © National Archives.

  11. Drawings of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Robert Beale? © The British Library Board.

  12. Title-page of General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, John Dee, 1577 © The British Library Board.

  13. Image of Ireland, John Derricke, 1581 © Edinburgh University Library (De.3.76).

  14. Captain Christopher Carleill, Robert Boissard after unknown artist, c.1593, line engraving © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  15. Indian Woman and Young Girl, John White, 1585–6, watercolour © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  16. The Spanish Fleet off the Coast of Cornwall on 29 July 1588, Augustine Ryther (engraver) after Robert Hood, 1590, engraving © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK.

  Abbreviations in the Notes

  BL British Library

  NPG National Portrait Gallery, London

  TNA The National Archives, Kew

  APC Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J. R. Dasent et al. (London, 1890–1964)

  CSP Dom. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, ed. R. Lemon et al. (London, 1856–71)

  CSP For. Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. J. Stevenson et al. (London, 1863–1950)

  CSP Scot. Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland, and Mary, Queen of Scots, ed. J. Bain et al. (Edinburgh, 1898–1969)

  CSP Ven. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, relating to English Affairs, existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown et al. (London, 1864–1947)

  HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission

  STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books … 1475–1640, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer (London, 1986–91)

  VCH Victoria County History of England

  EHR English Historical Review

  ELH English Literary History

  HJ Historical Journal

  HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly

  JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History

  PP Past and Present

  SCJ0 Sixteenth Century Journal

  TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

  WMQ William and Mary Quarterly

  England and Ireland in the Sixteenth Century

  Prologue

  On the feast day of St Bartholomew 1572, a marked man picked his way through the streets of Paris towards the residence of the English ambassador. The Sieur de Briquemault had just seen his sons murdered in front of him, two victims among the thousands of Protestants who were being cut down by their Catholic neighbours. His own survival now depended on reaching Francis Walsingham without being recognised. The road to the suburb of Saint Marceau was well known to Briquemault, who had visited the English embassy several times since Walsingham’s arrival in January 1571. But informants were on the lookout for Protestant Huguenots fleeing the mob justice which had taken hold of the city. Carrying a side of mutton on each shoulder, the aristocratic Briquemault tried to lose himself among the porters and carters who worked the medieval streets of Paris. When he stumbled and fell at the city gate, friendly hands helped him up and hoisted the meat onto his back. The French guards watching for any trouble outside the embassy had no interest in a delivery man, and Briquemault made it inside.

  Walsingham could have refused to help the Sieur de Briquemault. As English subjects and Protestant heretics, the ambassador and his staff were already under threat from the Catholic crowd rampaging through the city. Briquemault had been close to the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny, whose murder on the king’s orders had unleashed the torrent of violence pouring through Paris and provincial France. Giving asylum to such a prominent fugitive could threaten the lives of others, English nationals and their Protestant allies, who had taken refuge in Walsingham’s house. Then there was the safety of his own family to consider, his pregnant wife and his young daughter. The decision was one of the toughest which Walsingham would ever face: to trust in God’s providence and give sanctuary to Briquemault, or to play the politician and turn him in. When the Frenchman refused the offer of money and horses and pleaded on his knees, Walsingham chose to follow his conscience. Briquemault was disguised as a groom and hidden in the embassy stables. His discovery after several days was blamed on one of his own servants, who was spotted in the city and made to reveal the whereabouts of his master. The king demanded that Briquemault be handed over, adding that he would force his way into the embassy if necessary. Even now Walsingham did not give up on his friend, accompanying him to court in a closed coach to petition for his life. It did no good: Briquemault was tried and executed on a charge of plotting with his fellow Huguenots to overthrow the Valois monarchy.1

  The incident passes unnoticed in the traditional version of Walsingham’s career, yet it says a lot about the courage of the man who served Queen Elizabeth as ambassador, principal secretary and chief of security. His efforts to save a fellow Protestant from being slaughtered were recorded by Walsingham’s agent Tomasso Sassetti, in one of the comparatively few coherent accounts of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres. A reader of Machiavelli and a friend of the historian Lodovico Guicciardini, Captain Sassetti had volunteered for Elizabeth’s army in Ireland before Walsingham recruited him for his embryonic secret service. He took his place in a network of news and intelligence which would ultimately stretch from Constantinople to the new-found lands of Canada and Virginia.
Francis Walsingham is justly famous as a spymaster, a pioneer in cryptography and an expert in turning his enemies into double agents paid by the state. Catholic plots against Elizabeth were allowed to run just long enough to expose the full extent of their support. Less familiar is Walsingham’s role in Elizabethan foreign policy, his long struggle with the issue of the queen’s marriage and his promotion of English plantations in Ireland and America. His life in royal service saw him fighting other battles, against the canker of court faction as well as the illness which was gradually poisoning him. Where others would have crumpled under the burden of government, Walsingham stayed by Elizabeth’s side until the twin threats of the Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada had been neutralised.

  Walsingham often wielded power over the lives of others. The destruction of Mary Stuart has been attributed to him by both critics and admirers, though Walsingham exonerated himself of any blame: she had conspired to destroy his mistress, and consequently she deserved to die. The execution of Catholic missionary priests is harder to justify. Walsingham was responsible for protecting the queen from assassination, and he saw it as his duty to use every weapon in his arsenal. Imprisonment, torture and a state-sponsored campaign of intimidation were all employed to drive Catholics into conformity with the established Church of England. Walsingham’s agents infiltrated the English Catholic community at home and in exile, tempting the radicals in their midst to break cover by standing up for what they believed.

  Modern lawyers would condemn this as entrapment, but again Walsingham’s conscience was clear. Hidden treason would always reveal itself in the end, just as a witch could never fully conceal the pact which she had made with the devil. England was engaged in a war; literally so in the Netherlands and on the oceans from the mid-1580s, but also in spiritual combat against the forces of the Antichrist, whether in the form of the pope or the Guise family or Philip II of Spain. The need to convince Elizabeth of this fact was Walsingham’s most urgent priority during the two decades which he spent as her adviser and principal secretary. He presented himself to the world as the queen’s agent, carrying out her policies and protecting her from harm. The full picture may surprise anyone who thinks that Tudor England was governed solely by personal monarchy. Walsingham was loyal and true to Elizabeth, devoted his life to her service; but he also cajoled her, clashed with her, and ultimately authorised the beheading of Mary Stuart without her knowledge. Queen Elizabeth I believed that she was in command of the ship of state, but Francis Walsingham was often at the tiller.

  NOTES

  1 Briquemault and Sassetti: John Tedeschi, ‘Tomasso Sassetti’s Account of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, in A. Soman (ed.), The Massacre of St Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents (The Hague, 1974), 143, where Briquemault is called Bricamore; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin, Camden Miscellany 6 (London, 1870–1), 4–5, 10, 13; Dudley Digges, The Compleat Ambassador, or, Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth (London, 1655), 270–1, 345. The Briquemault incident is not mentioned in Conyers Read’s account of St Bartholomew: Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925), I, 219–22.

  1 Exodus

  In 1529 a London lawyer named William Walsingham used the proceeds of his thriving practice to buy the manor of Foot’s Cray, a dozen miles out of town on the road to the Kentish coast. As he and many like him were discovering, it was a good time to be a barrister. The name of Walsingham was well known in London, and William was able to trade on his contacts in city government and the royal household. King Henry VIII chose him to report on the possessions of the disgraced minister Cardinal Wolsey, and he was elected to a prestigious readership at Gray’s Inn. In 1532 he was appointed under-sheriff of London, the highest position which a city lawyer could hope to achieve. His wife Joyce had already given him daughters who could be married into prominent families; all that he now lacked was a son.

  Regular registers of baptisms weren’t introduced until the later 1530s, so the year of Francis Walsingham’s birth is uncertain. But if we count back from his admission to King’s College, Cambridge then it was probably 1531 or 1532, the twenty-second year of King Henry’s reign. Nor is the place known for sure, although Foot’s Cray seems more likely than the family’s London home near Aldermanbury in Cripplegate ward; mothers of means usually chose to have their babies away from the filth and pestilence of the city. Francis would have been christened as soon as he could safely be carried to the parish church, in a rite that was rich in sacramental ceremony. The devil was exorcised with salt and holy oil before the baby was immersed in the font and wrapped in a chrisom cloth. Children who died before they could be cleansed of original sin were believed to go into limbo rather than heaven, hence the urgency of getting them to baptism.

  Some pedigrees trace the ancestry of the family back to the village of Little Walsingham in Norfolk. It would be ironic if Francis Walsingham, who grew to loathe Catholicism, could be connected to one of the greatest sites of pilgrimage in medieval England. Henry VIII prayed at Walsingham in thanks for the birth of his short-lived son Henry in 1511, before the Reformation swept away its shrine to the Virgin Mary. But the link with Norfolk is probably apocryphal. The earliest reliable evidence dates from fifteenth-century London, where the Walsinghams emerged as property-owners and members of the prestigious Vintners’ Company. In 1424 the merchant Thomas Walsingham bought a country manor at Scadbury near Chislehurst, so staking his claim to be a member of the gentry. It was a pattern that would define the English upper class for centuries to come: owning land was a social passport out of the world of commerce. Thomas’s grandson James had a long career, serving Henry VII as sheriff of Kent in 1486–7 and travelling to France with Henry VIII in 1520. He witnessed the fantastical Field of Cloth of Gold as one of the king’s honour guard. James Walsingham had two sons, Edmund – who inherited the estate at Scadbury – and William, who was Francis’s father.

  Edmund Walsingham scrambled a rung or so higher up the social hierarchy. He earned a knighthood fighting the Scots at Flodden, and accompanied his father to France in 1520. Two years later he attended King Henry during the visit of the emperor Charles V to England. The sword and helmet that once hung above his tomb are now preserved at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. His wife Anne owned a jewel depicting Henry VIII within a golden heart, a visible statement of her family’s standing at court. In 1521 Sir Edmund was appointed lieutenant of the Tower of London, giving him day-to-day responsibility for the prisoners held there. He found himself guarding both the Protestant translator John Frith, burned for heresy in 1533, and Frith’s great enemy Thomas More, beheaded in 1535 for his refusal to accept Henry VIII’s supremacy over the Church of England. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and another Catholic martyr, complained of harsh treatment at Walsingham’s hands. The duties of lieutenant included supervising the torture of suspected traitors on the rack. Forty years hence, his nephew Francis would be authorising the same methods of interrogation.

  William Walsingham had no prospects of a landed inheritance, so he turned to London and the law. Like Thomas More, he prospered on the legal business of the city. John Stow’s Survey of London describes Aldermanbury as a street with many fair houses ‘meet for merchants or men of worship’, with a conduit of fresh water running down the middle. St Mary Aldermanbury had a churchyard and a cloister where the curious could see a shank bone reputedly belonging to a giant. William Walsingham asked to be buried in the church, and left its high altar a symbolic shilling in his will. Any monument to him would have been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, while the Wren church that replaced it was reduced to rubble during the Blitz and removed to Fulton, Missouri as a tribute to Winston Churchill. But a memorial to Sir Edmund survives in Chislehurst parish church next to a tablet to his grandson Thomas, who probably did some intelligence work for Sir Francis Walsingham and was a close friend of Christopher Marlowe.1

  If William Wal
singham enjoyed a degree of contact with the royal household, then his wife was even better connected. Joyce Walsingham was the younger sister of the Protestant courtier Sir Anthony Denny. As one of the principal gentlemen of Henry VIII’s privy chamber, Denny was the closest thing that the king had to a friend during the 1540s. His position as keeper of the privy purse made him responsible for Henry’s huge personal expenditure on buildings, artwork and gambling. As groom of the stool, the gentleman in charge of the king’s close-stool or portable toilet, Denny regulated access to the royal apartments during the last two years of Henry’s reign. He also took charge of the dry stamp, a facsimile of the king’s signature which empowered him to authorise documents as if they had been signed by Henry in person.

  This was a remarkable concentration of power, based on closeness to the king rather than bureaucratic office. When the royal doctors decided that the time had come for Henry VIII to prepare for death in January 1547, it was Denny who had the unenviable task of telling the king. Denny kept his faith in reform even when Henry grew suspicious of Protestant radicalism, and he was among those who ensured that the young Edward VI was advised by councillors of the right religious persuasion. Protector Somerset appointed him as Edward’s guardian during his own absences from London fighting the Scots, and he was still close to the throne when he died in 1549. One uncle entrusted with the Tower of London, another at the core of the king’s court: these were powerful connections for a London lawyer’s son. The tradition of royal service ran in Francis Walsingham’s blood.