by Derek Wilson
However, there is a line of approach which enables us to augment the bare catalogue of land transactions and wills. Walsingham was a man of his time. Indeed, his life is incomprehensible without a consideration of the momentous events which occurred throughout six decades of religious, political and social revolution. This was an age in which prominent men had to take sides, to declare themselves for the old faith (Catholicism) or the new (Protestantism or, more accurately, evangelicalism). The motives for such a declaration might be religious conviction, self-advancement or a combination of the two and there were always those who skilfully mastered a Vicar of Bray-style flexibility. Nevertheless, we can deduce much about mid-Tudor men and women by the company they kept and the familial alliances they made. The Walsingham genealogical tree is, therefore, informative.
The Walsinghams of the fifteenth century (which is as far back as we need to go) were in trade but already upwardly mobile. Francis’ great-great-grandfather was a shoemaker and his great-grandfather a vintner. Both were honoured men in their professions, prominent members of their respective guilds and well known in London society. They had accumulated property in the capital and – a mark of true gentility – owned a modest country place in Kent (Scadbury Manor, Chislehurst). From this solid base the next generation took a further significant step up the social ladder. James Walsingham was put to the law and, by the time Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, grabbed the Crown in 1485, he was well established in the London courts. It could not have been a more propitious time for following a legal career.
The English had (and still have) an ambivalent attitude towards lawyers. They were seen as men who could manipulate ancient statutes to their own advantage, who favoured the rich against the poor and were not averse to taking bribes. At the same time, anyone seeking justice had to employ the experts and by 1500 more than 3,000 new suits per annum were being presented in the courts of the capital alone. The law was a hard trade to master but a lucrative one to follow. More importantly, it was becoming a stepping-stone to that place where real fortunes were to be made – the royal court. For half a century the fate of rival royal dynasties had been decided by baronial armies. The new king decided that the weight of his regime would be borne not by steel blades but by paper statutes. He would employ the nation’s best legal brains to strengthen his position and secure the succession for his heirs. Over the ensuing decades the balance of the royal Council changed; the barons and senior ecclesiastics who had assumed that they were indispensable to the government of the country had to make room for new men, versed in the law and loyal only to the Crown.
James Walsingham, Francis’ grandfather, never made it to the very top of the tree – membership of the royal Council – but he was one of the leaders of royal society: a justice of the peace, member of various royal commissions and Sheriff of Kent in 1486–7. He consolidated his position in the county and acquired a grant of arms from the College of Heralds. And he ensured that his two sons would be drawn to the attention of the king. When he died, full of years, in 1540 he had cause for satisfaction that his family had received significent marks of royal favour. He could not, however, have foreseen that his youngest grandson, Francis, was destined to become one of the nation’s leaders. His greater expectations were focused on the career of his son and heir, Edmund.
The young extrovert prince who came to the throne in 1509 as Henry VIII sought his companions among macho, athletic, patriotic Englishmen like himself. It was no coincidence, therefore, that Edmund received a martial training. In 1513 he gathered some retainers about him and joined the 20,000-strong force being hurriedly assembled on the northern border by the Earl of Surrey to ward off a Scottish invasion. The ensuing victory at Flodden was one of the most bloody and decisive ever achieved in the long history of Anglo-Scottish warfare. Several captains were afterwards knighted by Surrey – among them Edmund Walsingham. The young man’s exploits were brought to the attention of the king and Edmund’s place among the young blades of the court was secured. He appeared frequently in the tiltyard as an accomplished horseman and exponent of sixteenth-century martial arts. In 1520 he was chosen as one of the knights to accompany the king to France for the sumptuous diplomatic display which has gone down in history as the Field of Cloth of Gold. It was a signal sign of Henry’s confidence in Edmund that, in 1521, he gave him charge of England’s major fortress-prison, the Tower of London. The man responsible for the Tower was the Constable and, for most of this period, that was Sir William Kingston, but it was the Lieutenant who actually resided there and was responsible for day-to-day administration.
Sir Edmund Walsingham was destined to be Lieutenant of the Tower during its most bloody and controversial years. Henry VIII ruthlessly used the grim stronghold for cowing opposition to his policies, disposing of possible Yorkist rivals and for applying the ‘final solution’ to some of his marital entanglements. Among the notable prisoners incarcerated there and executed within the walls or on the adjacent hillside were Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Marquess of Exeter, the Countess of Salisbury, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. There were many more smaller fry who faced torture, deprivation and the axe in Henry’s police state.
Edmund Walsingham proved himself to be the ideal jailer and guardian of the Tower’s grisly secrets. He carried out his duties without flinching and was ever determined to demonstrate his unreserved loyalty. In reality, he could do no other. The men and women entrusted to his care had incurred the royal displeasure. To show sympathy for them would be to run the risk of arousing Henry’s mercurial ire. He might – and did – lament to Sir Thomas More that he was unable to make his quarters more comfortable but, as he explained, ‘Orders is orders’. We can gauge something of Sir Edmund’s temperament from the case of John Bawde. Bawde was one of the lieutenant’s own servants. He fell under the spell of Alice Tankerville, a prisoner in Coldharbour within the Tower of London. So besotted was he that he tried to help her to escape. The bid failed and his complicity was revealed. Sir Edmund’s rage (doubtless fuelled by fear for his own position) was boundless. He had Bawde thrown into Little Ease, the Tower’s most notoriously vile cell. The prisoner was subsequently racked, condemned in a speedy trial and hanged in chains.
While Sir Edmund was leading an eventful life at the centre of power, his younger brother, William, was being groomed to take over the family responsibilities in Kent. He followed his father’s profession, held senior positions in London’s legal establishment and was prominent in the affairs of his shire. He steadily added other lands to the family’s holdings and, by 1530, was well established as a substantial gentleman with court connections. But William’s fortunes were mixed and his aspirations far from being smoothly accomplished. He married, sometime in the early 1520s, Joyce Denny, daughter of Sir Edmund Denny, a minor courtier on the staff of the Exchequer. Perhaps the introduction to a court colleague was effected by William’s brother. The union, moderately important at the time, was to prove extremely influential in the later years of Henry’s reign. Joyce’s brother, Anthony, was another of that small army of hopefuls seeking preferment at court. He was fortunate in finding a short cut to royal favour. There were scores of men who held posts in the innermost chambers of the court but few of them could count themselves as the king’s friends. One of the privileged band of intimates was Sir Francis Bryan, soldier, diplomat and tiltyard companion of the king. Bryan was a gentleman of the privy chamber and trusted by Henry with delicate diplomatic missions, including an embassy to Rome in connection with his intended divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Anthony Denny, William Walsingham’s brother-in-law, was a member of Bryan’s entourage and his patron ensured his steady, but unspectacular, promotion. By the mid-1530s Denny was a groom of the chamber, one of those who attended the king most intimately. He was an educated, cultured man of pleasing disposition and Henry increasingly warmed to him.
William, therefore, built up a corps of valu
able contacts in the Tudor establishment but fate sometimes clouded her face from him. His well-connected wife had a succession of five successful pregnancies but they all resulted in girls. Not until 1532 did she present her husband with an heir, who was christened Francis. Two years later, just when everything was going well for him, William Walsingham died. His widow was still in her twenties and had been left well provided for. Despite having five daughters to dower, she was quite a good catch and it was probably not difficult for her family to find another suitable husband for her. Unsurprisingly, the chosen groom was a Hertfordshire neighbour of the Dennys who was also well established at court. John Carey was connected to Anne Boleyn, his brother, William (now deceased), having married Anne’s sister, Mary.
We can now begin to see a picture of the circle in which the young Francis grew up. The social focus of the royal court from the mid–1520s was the Boleyn family. Sir Thomas Boleyn had long been a courtier and diplomat but when the king became involved with his daughters – first Mary and then Anne – titles, lands and favours were poured out on the Boleyn clan. In 1529 Sir Thomas became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde. Ambitious courtiers now clamoured for his friendship and patronage. This, in turn, meant that they had to support King Henry’s campaign to dump his wife and make Anne his queen. The Walsinghams and the Dennys were on the outer rim of the Boleyn circle. Sir Francis Bryan, Anthony Denny’s patron, was a cousin of the Boleyn girls and dedicated to their advancement. Denny seems to have been groomed by Bryan to succeed him in office, for he became a member of the privy chamber staff in about 1533 and took Bryan’s place as second chief gentleman in 1539. He will certainly have been instrumental in securing Boleyn kinship for his sister by her marriage to Sir John Carey.
But much more was involved in all this than a few ambitious families jostling for power, influence and promotion. The ‘King’s Great Matter’ (the divorce crisis) coincided with the arrival in England of the radical religious ideas of Martin Luther. In 1517 this German monk had challenged the power of the pope to absolve the departed from the pains of purgatory. In 1521 he had defied pope and emperor at the Diet of Worms and been condemned as a heretic but, protected by his prince, he had embarked upon a mammoth programme of books, pamphlets and sermons calling for a root-and-branch reform of the church. This evangelical revival was the cause célèbre of the age. The new ideas touched so many chords of indignation and dissatisfaction among the thinking classes of Europe that they spread with astonishing rapidity. In England students at the universities and the inns of court, merchants, tradespeople and courtiers were eagerly reading banned books smuggled into the country. From 1525 the English New Testament, translated and printed by William Tyndale from the safety of Germany, was being studied with as much clandestine zeal as the bishops were expending in tracking down the subversive volumes and making bonfires of them. The clamour for ecclesiastical reform and spiritual revival coincided with Henry VIII’s personal disagreement with Rome and, though it did not provide justification for the king’s action (Luther actually opposed the divorce), it did provide theological support for resisting papal authority. It is not surprising that the Boleyns and their friends favoured the new movement (though we should not dismiss this as mere cynical opportunism) and gave cautious support to radical preachers.
Henry VIII failed to appreciate the full implications of the emerging Reformation. He could see that it might be useful to him but he had no desire to be tarred with the brush of heresy. For that reason court evangelicals had to tread warily. One man who saw more clearly than most the revolution in English church and state which might be accomplished was Thomas Cromwell, whose rapid rise to the position of chief minister between 1529 and 1531 took all observers by surprise. Cromwell, a convinced evangelical and ‘a layman of protean talents’,1 convinced the king, not only that he could solve the matrimonial problem, but that he could free the Crown entirely from papal authority and vastly increase its wealth to boot. Cromwell made common cause with the Boleyn faction and embarked on a series of measures that would make the 1530s the most momentous decade in English history.
Francis Walsingham was born, probably, in 1532 and his early years were shaped by the religious fervour and social upheaval of the Reformation. Within months of his birth Henry VIII had married Anne Boleyn and disembarrassed himself of Queen Catherine. Sir Thomas More, the leading opponent of the king’s Great Matter, had resigned as Lord Chancellor and would soon find himself in the Tower. Cromwell had embarked on a series of parliamentary measures which would, one-by-one, sever the cords binding the English church to Rome. Thomas Cranmer, a committed reformer, had been made Archbishop of Canterbury. And, on 7 September 1533, Queen Anne was delivered of a daughter, christened Elizabeth.
Of Francis’ childhood we know nothing but it is reasonable to assume that he spent most of it on his stepfather’s estate at Plashy, Hertfordshire. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he met Princess Elizabeth during these years, for, in 1540, John Carey was appointed bailiff of the nearby royal manor of Hunsdon which was one of the homes where she lived under the guardianship of Margaret, Baroness Bryan, mother of the king’s favourite. It is tempting from what we know of his later life to envisage the young Walsingham as a quiet, serious and studious boy and this may not be far off the mark. Apart from older sisters, his only regular companions were the two half-brothers his mother bore her second husband. Studious Francis certainly was, for he later showed himself to be cultured, widely read and a master of languages.
As he grew towards manhood in the closing years of Henry VIII’s reign his knowledge of the monumental events convulsing the country steadily grew. He saw abandoned monasteries and the carts trundling along country lanes loaded with stone, lead and the furnishings that had once adorned the houses of monks and nuns. In church he listened to the fiery evangelical preachers appointed by his relatives. He would have been too young to appreciate the threat of civil war in 1536–7 when opponents of religious and social change launched a rebellion in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. He heard his elders discussing the tense situation at court. The aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536 was an anxious time for her supporters and protégés. King Henry, for reasons that may never be clear, had turned violently against his second wife and had her conveyed to the Tower on trumped-up charges of adultery. Francis’ Uncle Edmund was among the small audience who witnessed her execution. Anne received no succour from her family. All her relatives distanced themselves as far as possible from their patroness.
Those at court who favoured evangelical religion feared a backlash but there was no such reversal of their fortunes. The royal household was divided into factions with distinctly religious hues. The see-saw of royal favour raised and lowered first one group, then the other. There were occasional purges of highly placed ‘heretics’. The last one occurred as late as 1546 when the Catholic faction tried to destroy Henry’s sixth queen, Catherine Parr, and, by association, all leaders of the evangelical group. These were anxious days for Anthony Denny, whose wife was one of the queen’s closest friends. However, the overall trend in these years favoured the reformers. Cromwell’s parliamentary campaign progressed steadily. The king replaced the pope as head of the church in England and, in 1539, an officially approved translation of the Bible was set up in every parish church. Even the sudden fall of Cromwell in 1540 proved to be only a temporary setback. A younger generation of pro-reform men rose to prominence at court – men like Edward and Thomas Seymour and John Dudley. The redistribution of monastic land in effect made all ambitious nobles and gentlemen complicit in the Reformation. Everyone wanted to benefit from the biggest land grab in the nation’s history.
The Walsinghams and their kin were determined not to miss out in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sir Edmund added to the family estate in Kent, acquired houses in London and speculated in parcels of land in various counties. He was a member of the House of Commons in Henry’s last parliament. But the man who emerged as leader of the fa
mily’s fortunes was Anthony Denny. He was one of the few attendants who managed to enjoy the king’s friendship and confidence through thick and thin. (Others were Thomas Cranmer and William Butts, the royal physician – both convinced evangelicals.) He was knighted in 1544 and, two years later, achieved the highest privy chamber office of groom of the stool. He was entrusted with the privy purse out of which he made large disbursements on the king’s behalf. Even more importantly, he and his brother-in-law, John Gates, were licensed to apply the sign manual to all royal documents. Henry, bloated and increasingly incapacitated by pain from his ulcerated legs, was often unable to attend to business and so a dye stamp of his signature was made which could be imposed on letters and official papers and later inked-in by a clerk. It was this that, from September 1545, was entrusted to Denny and Gates. It signifies the enormous trust Henry reposed in these two intimates and, of course, it gave them considerable power. Denny became expert in caring for his irascible employer and using his influence to help the cause of reform. He was, for example, able to save fellow evangelicals denounced by their Catholic enemies. He secured the post of tutor to Princess Elizabeth for his old friend and fellow member of St John’s College, Cambridge, Roger Ascham. Tangible proofs of royal favour were showered upon Denny. By the end of the reign his estates in Hertfordshire alone covered 20,000 acres.
Now Francis’ family enjoyed that prominence which showed itself in favourable marriage alliances for his sisters. Mary married Sir Walter Mildmay, the youngest son of Cromwell’s principal agent in the dissolution of the monasteries. No one was better placed to profit from the sale of lands and Mildmay senior built an extremely impressive mansion at Moulsham, near Chelmsford, in the heart of his new estates. Walter trained in the law and joined his father in the Court of Augmentations, the body set up to administer confiscated church property. He was well on the way to a prosperous career. Elizabeth married Geoffrey Gates, brother of Anthony Denny’s friend and colleague, Sir John Gates, and, on his death, Peter Wentworth, heir to considerable estates in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Essex and Surrey. Peter and his brother became prominent (and vociferous) parliamentarians in Elizabeth’s reign. It is highly significant that all the leading members of this familial network were prominent religious radicals. They represented that constituency of home counties’ squires with influence at court and in the City upon which Tudor government largely relied. Eleanor Walsingham was married to William Sharington, member of the privy chamber and a protégé of Sir Francis Bryan. The two remaining girls, Barbara and Christiana, also married into substantial families with court connections.