by Derek Wilson
Walsingham’s gut feeling was against yoking his queen together with a Catholic consort. In such a situation who would exercise the greater influence? Anjou was not just of the Roman persuasion: he was an ardent Catholic young man under the sway of the Guises. On the other hand, England needed a secure Protestant dynasty in order to survive the international Catholic conspiracy. Elizabeth had to have an heir. This was a real dilemma and Walsingham explained to Burghley how he had struggled with it:
I was very much perplexed what course to take . . . But when I beheld her Majesty first, how she in her own judgement did think it expedient for her to marry; secondarily that if her Majesty did mean to marry abroad this was the only gentleman fit for her to marry; thirdly the discontentment of her subjects for not marrying: fourthly, how presently she is beset with a number of foreign practices, the execution whereof only stayed upon the event of this natal; I then resolved that it was most fit for me to forget myself and to think only of her Majesty and her safety.11
Dutifully, he threw himself into the negotiations which dragged on for over a year. They failed finally upon the religious issue: Elizabeth was not prepared to grant her prospective husband full and unfettered practice of his faith. That, at least, was the official diplomatic sticking point. The deeper reality was that, when it came to the crunch, Elizabeth could not face sacrificing herself on the altar of matrimony.
This left a relieved Walsingham able to concentrate on the more congenial task of bringing into being a union of states to counteract the forces of the Counter-Reformation. Walsingham believed that war with Spain was inevitable. He knew from his various contacts and paid agents that, though the Enterprise of England might be forced down Philip’s agenda by more pressing items such as war in the Mediterranean and the Netherlands, it would never be abandoned. The Ridolfi plot and current events in the Low Countries bore sufficient evidence of the utter ruthlessness of Catholic reactionaries. For fanatics the pope’s blessing sanctified any and every kind of evil – treason, murder, massacre, invasion. The Roman juggernaut was a fearful thing and it would need a stout barrier to halt its progress. Walsingham, therefore, favoured the creation of a defensive Anglo-French treaty which might later be extended to embrace the German Protestant states. In strongly advocating this change of policy he was moving beyond the role of ambassador and becoming more a councillor in absentia. His frustration arose from the difficulty of persuading his superiors to share his assessment of the international situation. From his location at the very hub of European diplomacy he had a clear view of the movement of events but often his was a voice crying in the wilderness. Rather like Winston Churchill in the 1930s, Walsingham prophesied impending disaster unless precautions were taken in advance. But Elizabeth was not convinced about Spanish hostility and the French government was seized by political paralysis.
Catherine and Charles formed no consistent programme because they were at the mercy of Catholic and Huguenot factions. In England Reformation had either advanced or retreated because the Crown had given a clear lead and been ready to crush all dissidents. The country was still bitterly divided but the Elizabethan settlement held because Catholic aristocrats had been neutered by shows of force and outmanoeuvred by government intervention in regional politics. In France things were very different. The aristocratic parties headed by the Guises and Coligny had considerable backing throughout the country and did not hesitate to appeal over the king’s head to potential supporters in foreign courts. Religious rivalry even intruded itself into the royal family. The duc d’Anjou regarded himself as a Catholic champion and this made his brother, the king, look favourably on Coligny and his friends. Catherine had two major concerns: not to be shouldered aside by any of the faction leaders and to prevent a further outbreak of civil war. But she was almost powerless against the scheming of the politicians, the mental weakness of the king and the fervid religious passions of the populace stirred up by priests, preachers and pamphleteers.
The invidious position of the Crown is well illustrated by an event all Paris was talking about in December 1571. Under cover of darkness a group of workmen armed with picks and crowbars made their way to the rue St Denis accompanied by a troop of the royal guard. They arrived at a gap in the street of modest houses, a place where until two years earlier a dwelling had stood. It had been the home of the de Gastines family who had been arrested and two of whom had been hanged for holding Protestant meetings and worship. Spurred on by power-crazed clergy, their neighbours had then torn the house down to purge the district of all taint of heresy, erecting in its place a crucifix to mark the triumph of the ‘true’ faith. It was this memorial of persecution that the king ordered to be removed. A self-confident monarch would have made a show of the event, leaving no doubt to the Parisians just who was in charge. Instead, the work was carried out in nocturnal secrecy and under armed guard for fear of a Catholic backlash.
If it is difficult for a modern secular society to understand the intense mutual hatred which possessed Catholic and Protestant combatants in sixteenth-century France, it is only necessary to consider the murderous violence with which rival Sunni and Shia Muslims confront each other in today’s Islamic world. The parallel is very close: the legitimizing of violence in a ‘holy’ cause, the interlacing of religion and politics; the fiery oratory of mullahs; the cult of martyrdom; above all the conviction that actions in this world carry eternal consequences of blessing or damnation in the world to come. Events in the early months of 1572 confirmed the international character of the threat facing the Protestant states of Europe. In January Burghley wrote to describe an assassination attempt he had recently escaped. Two young Catholic hotheads had been set up by Borghese, de Spes’ steward, to shoot the secretary. The would-be assassins were executed on Tower Hill with maximum publicity and Borghese spent an uncomfortable month in prison before being sent packing after his master.
In May the Catholic church celebrated the election of a new pope. The elevation of Ugo Boncompagni as Gregory XIII was ominous news for England. Gregory was known as an energetic reformer who might be expected to expend enormous energy in the fight against heresy. He was, moreover, a close friend of Philip II. Walsingham was under no illusion about the difficulty of the task facing him. Together with representatives of William of Orange, the German Protestant princes and the Huguenot leaders he laboured to bring about the desired alliance. His principal in this endeavour was the veteran Protestant scholar and councillor, Sir Thomas Smith, sent over by Elizabeth as her special envoy. Negotiations dragged on and on. Catherine and Charles were reluctant to indicate their abandonment of Mary Stuart’s cause and even more hesitant about agreeing to support England in the event of attack by a Catholic power. However, on 19 April 1572, Smith and Walsingham at last were able to sign the draft Treaty of Blois.
The new agreement was a remarkable achievement which marked a change of foreign policy direction for both nations. England and France threw in their lot together against the might of Spain. There was the distinct prospect that neighbouring states might join the alliance. Furthermore Charles and Catherine effectively stopped supporting Mary Stuart. Blois might have, for a few years at least, preserved the European balance of power and obliged Philip to reassess his policy towards England and the Netherlands. But such an optimistic outlook failed to take account of the sheer malign energy of the Guises and their religious fanaticism. In the third week of August 1572, the leaders of the Catholic faction made a bid to annihilate their enemies. Coligny and his friends were at the summit of their influence. They had come to Paris to celebrate the marriage of Margaret de Valois, the king’s sister, to the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. What was designed as part of the programme of reconciliation was denounced by preachers on the Guise payroll as a ‘perverse, Godless union’. On the morning of 22 August a hired assassin took a shot at Coligny as he returned from the Louvre where he had been in conference with the king. According to legend at the vital moment the admiral knelt to adjust his overshoe
s and took the force of the arquebus blast on his right arm and not in his chest. While the would-be murderer made his planned getaway on horseback Coligny was led away bleeding profusely. But his wound was not mortal. All it achieved was to stir up the Huguenot hornets’ nest.
That was good enough for the Guises. Indeed, it may have been precisely what they intended. At a hurried meeting with the king and the queen mother the decision was taken to exterminate the Huguenot leadership (so conveniently gathered in Paris) and to put out the story that Coligny and his associates were planning a coup, which made a pre-emptive strike both urgent and necessary. In the small hours of Sunday 24 August the duc de Guise set out with a troop of a hundred personal and royal guards to tour the lodgings of a score or more Protestant activists and slaughter them in their beds. Thus began the St Bartholomew’s Massacre. As news of the atrocity and the king’s support for it spread, lynch mobs rampaged through the city in an orgy of bloodletting. Where the Catholics of Paris led, their counterparts in the provinces followed. No precise figures for the carnage can be given but 3,000 deaths in the capital and 10,000 more nationwide are generally accepted to be a modest estimate. France experienced no tragedy on this scale until the Terror of 1793–4.
Number-crunching is irrelevant. What matters is the impact of the massacre on those who had to find their way through the diplomatic debris it had scattered far and wide across Europe. The massacre underlined in blood ‘the polarization of rival religious creeds after the closing session of the Council of Trent’ and ‘meant that politicians increasingly saw themselves as combatants engaged in a cosmic confrontation between right and wrong’.12 Gregory XIII ordered a celebratory Te Deum and issued a medal depicting an angel brandishing a sword and the triumphalist legend ‘Huguenots slaughtered’. In Rome the French purge was hailed as the greatest triumph of truth over error since the eradication of the Cathars, three centuries earlier. In the Low Countries the Duke of Alva broke into an uncharacteristically devout paean of praise: ‘The events in Paris and France are wonderful, and truly show that God has been pleased to change and rearrange matters in the way that He knows will favour the conservation of the true church and advance His holy service and His glory.’13 Burghley wrote in a more subdued tone to Walsingham but he, too, invoked Providence: ‘I see the Devil is suffered by the Almighty God for our sins to be strong in following the persecution of Christ’s members.’14
Sadly, we do not have any record of Walsingham’s immediate reaction. Possibly his outrage was too fierce to be expressed in writing. The messenger he sent to London with his report of the massacre was doubtless entrusted with a full verbal account of the ambassador’s distressing experiences during the days of chaos. We have to rely on later references by Walsingham and others. ‘Many of my countrymen, partly of acquaintance and partly of the noble houses of this realm . . . had all tasted of the rage of that furious tragedy, had not your honour shrouded them.’15 So reminisced Timothy Bright who, as a young medical student, was caught up in the mêlée and for whom the terrifying memory was still vivid seventeen years later.
Francis and his wife were woken early by the sounds of church bells and distant gunfire. They came from across the river to the ambassadorial residence on the Faubourg St Germain. Walsingham sent to know what was happening. When his servants returned with disjointed but alarming news Walsingham knew that he had two responsibilities – to protect his own household and to succour any of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects who might be in danger. He had all doors and windows barred and bolted and he sent to the king to demand protection. Later in the morning a troop of royal guards arrived to keep the mob away from the house. If the Spanish ambassador is to be believed, the action came too late to save two of the ambassador’s servants who had been dragged out and butchered by a gang of Catholic thugs. Already men and women fleeing for their lives were besieging the embassy. Walsingham welcomed them in – Englishmen, Germans, Netherlanders and a few French Huguenots – and certainly saved several lives. The refugees exchanged tales of the horrors they had witnessed in the clamorous, foetid, high-summer streets. One of the victims of lawlessness was a young Englishman who had arrived only the day before the troubles to take up the post of tutor to the sons of a resident English nobleman. When accosted by the rabble he was given no chance to explain his presence. He was a foreigner! He was a Protestant! That was enough for him to be cut down where he stood. Days later Walsingham complained to the king that three of his countrymen had been murdered. Several more had been subjected to dreadful indignities. Three of them had been ‘treated’ to a horse ride through the capital so that they might see for themselves the piles of corpses in the streets and the bodies floating in the Seine.
As soon as a measure of calm had been restored Walsingham sent his wife and daughter back to England and sought an audience with Charles. It must have been hard for him to preserve the niceties of diplomatic protocol and he had, understandably, reached the conclusion that neither the king nor his mother could be trusted. His own inclination was to quit France at the earliest opportunity but for that he had to await instructions from home. His superiors were urgently considering their position against a background of popular outrage. Huguenot refugees were pouring into the country begging asylum – with all the difficulties that always provokes. Preachers harangued their congregations, pointing out that those – like Alva and Charles IX – who professed papal religion were sworn enemies of the Gospel of peace and reconciliation. Angry pamphleteers demanded reprisals, particularly the immediate trial and execution of Mary Stuart and the tearing up of the Treaty of Blois. For the government matters were not that simple. Recent policy had been based on forging friendly links with France in order to forestall Spanish aggression. Elizabeth could not afford to be at odds with both leading Catholic states. Moreover, despite the St Bartholomew horrors, Catherine de Medici was once more urging an Anglo-French marriage alliance – this time between Elizabeth and the youngest French prince, the due d’Alençon. When Walsingham was summoned to the queen mother’s presence he found her trying to unshackle herself from the results of the August events. Like Elizabeth, she was manoeuvring for a position that would allow her maximum freedom of movement. Having obtained his queen’s permission, Walsingham begged leave to quit the French court. The king refused, assuring the ambassador that he desired the continuance of good relations with England.
Walsingham was totally unconvinced. As well as the shock he had received on 24 August and the days following, he felt personally betrayed. He had laboured tirelessly in the cause of Anglo-French amity. He had overcome his own initial reservations. He had convinced himself and his superiors that Charles and Catherine’s protestations of friendship were genuine. Now he had to report to the Council that he had been wrong. A month after the bloodbath he reported:
Your Honours, by the King and his mother’s answers, may see great protestations of amity. I am sorry that I cannot yield that assurance thereof that heretofore I have done, where I may seem to have dealt overconfidently, but I know that your Honours do consider that my error in that behalf was common with a great many wiser than myself, and therefore I hope you do hold me excused.
Seeing now there is here neither regard had to either word, writing or edict, be it never so solemnly published, nor to any protestation made heretofore to foreign princes for the performance of the same;
Seeing the King persecuteth that religion with all extremity that her Majesty professeth . . .
Seeing that they that now possess his ear are sworn enemies unto her Majesty . . . seeing that the King’s own conscience . . . maketh him to repute all those of the religion, as well at home as abroad, his enemies . . .
I leave it to your Honours now to judge what account you may make of the amity of this crown. If I may without presumption or offence say my opinion, considering how things presently stand, I think less peni to live with them as enemies than as friends.16
In November, writing to Burghley about Charles IX, he
stated bluntly: ‘I never knew so deep a dissembler.’17
Walsingham had to endure his residence in France for a further six months. It was an uncomfortable experience. He was obliged to further policies he did not believe in and negotiate with people he did not trust. At court there were gaps in the personnel which had once been filled by friends now slain. On every day spent in the capital he had to pass houses still bearing the white crosses daubed there by Catholic persecutors to mark the dwellings of doomed Huguenots. The winter of 1572–3, spent separated from his family in what he could only consider an alien land, was long and bitter for him. To make matters worse, by February he had run out of money and was obliged to remain in Paris when the court moved to Moret.
Relief came at last in mid-March. Walsingham received news that the queen had appointed a successor who would be taking up his appointment within weeks. To be fair to the queen and the Council, they had not been unsympathetic to Walsingham’s pleas for recall. The problem had been finding someone of Walsingham’s calibre to replace him. At least one distinguished courtier who had received the black spot had wriggled out of the honour being offered him. On 19 April he took his leave of the king. Charles expressed his complete satisfaction for everything he had done in the service of Anglo-French amity. Walsingham was, Charles declared, ‘in truth a very wise person’. It was not an accolade the Englishman can have found reassuring or flattering.
More gratifying was the message recently received from the Earl of Leicester. ‘You know what opinion is here of you and to what place all men would have you unto, even for her Majesty’s sake . . . the place you already hold is a councillor’s place and more . . . for oft-times, councillors are not made partakers of such matters as you are acquainted withal.’18 During his embassy and perhaps for some time before, Walsingham had enjoyed the confidence of Leicester and Burghley. They had shared with their protégé some of their own opinions, anxieties and aspirations – matters they could not open up to conciliar colleagues. Walsingham was the queen’s appointee but he understood well the dynamics that operated within the power triangle at the centre of English politics. ‘I conceived great hope by your letter of the 16th of August, that her Majesty would have taken profit of the late affairs,’ he wrote to Leicester in 1571. ‘But finding in her Majesty’s letters lately received not so much as any mention made thereof maketh me utterly to despair thereof . . . I beseech your Lordship, do not give over to do what you may, for it concerneth as well God’s glory as her Majesty’s safety.’19