by Derek Wilson
In the time of the ambassages of M. La Mott and Mr Mauvesieur [Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon and Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de la Mauvissiere, French ambassadors 1568–75 and 1575–85 respectively] he had some of [their] secretaries that betrayed the secrets both of the French and Scottish dealings. In Scotland he was well beloved of many of the nobility, ministers and others, whom he relieved when they were banished into England. With money he corrupted priests, Jesuits and traitors to betray the practices against this realm.
Walsingham’s labours in this aspect of his job demanded Herculean fortitude combined with Minerval wisdom. The torrent of information pouring on to his desk had to be sifted and assessed, as did the trustworthiness of those who supplied it. ‘Be not credulous, lest you be deceived,’ Beale advised. ‘Hear all reports but trust not all. Weight them with time and deliberation and be not liberal of trifles. Observe them that deal on both hands [ie double agents] lest you be deceived.’ And when the intelligence had been assimilated and the necessary letters written to forward it elsewhere, messengers had to be despatched, for which purpose Walsingham kept a stable of sixty horses.
Beale’s final advice was couched in pious terms:
Beware that before God and the whole world you can give a good account of your councils and actions to be void of impiety, covetousness, envy, maliciousness, injustice and fraud.
Wherefore you must be circumspect and pray to God, from whom every good gift proceedeth, to direct you by his holy Spirit. Do nothing against his word, which ought to be your lantern, way and direction. First, briefly examine all your Councils and actions according to the rule of the Ten Commandments, doing nothing that is prohibited in any of them, for (as the Apostle sayeth), ‘no evil action can produce a good result’.
And the Prophet cryeth out a woe unto them that take council without him and [do] grievous things, who shall not escape in the day of the visitation of the Lord.
Grieve not your own conscience and keep yourself as near as you may to the maintenance of the laws and liberties of the land. Decline from evil and do good. Beware of too much worldly policy and human wit.
Walsingham certainly kept his inner eye focused on such sound evangelical advice but in the hard world of devious sixteenth-century politics it was not always easy to live by it.
Viewed from the point of national religion there is a common misconception that Elizabeth’s reign presents us with a mirror-image of Mary’s: there was an official national church and those who opposed it were persecuted. Mary burned Protestants. Elizabeth had Catholics hanged, drawn and quartered. Under both regimes men and women of conscience took themselves into exile. Succoured by their co-religionists, many engaged in propaganda attacks on the land of their birth and a few indulged in political action. Such a simplistic analysis may appeal to the British instinct of sympathy for the underdog and that variety of toleration which appeals to an agnostic age – a toleration born of expediency out of indifference. In the sixteenth century few, if any commentators believed (or were bold enough to state openly) that all faiths are equally valid or invalid and may, therefore, coexist peacefully within the state. When Walsingham complained to Catherine de Medici about the 1572 massacres, she responded that King Charles was determined to have only one church in France – just as, she cannily pointed out, Elizabeth would only tolerate one English church. In the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign Richard Hooker asserted in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity what his royal mistress certainly took as axiomatic, that an Englishman and a Christian were the same animal viewed from different perspectives. Political loyalty and religious devotion were intertwined and demonstrated in conformity of worship.
What does not follow from this is that Catholic and Protestant regimes dealt in the same way with dissidents or adopted the same strategies for world mission. Rome’s religion was power based. Its procedures for dealing with heretics had been honed over centuries. The Inquisition ferreted them out. The Index identified books possession of which was proof of enmity towards the truth. Ecclesiastical courts tried and condemned suspects. Pressure was brought to bear on princes and aristocrats to see sentences carried out. By such well tried processes almost 300 Protestants went to the stake in Mary Tudor’s reign. During the forty-four years that Elizabeth was on the throne, 183 Catholics were executed. And, of course, the figure pales into insignificance compared with the severe campaigns of repression carried out by Catholic regimes in Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands and some of the small central European states.
Catholic and Protestant mindsets concerning the eradication of heresy were very different. Their attitudes had both political and theological aspects. All sixteenth-century rulers of church and state removed dissidents in order to preserve unity and uniformity. For centuries this had been the motive, whether openly acknowledged or not, for disposing of stubborn heretics. But there had to be justification for imposing a capital sentence. The Catholic mantra which vindicated the decision to hand over a condemned heretic to the secular arm for execution was: ‘We destroy the body to save the soul.’ The errant member was removed from the world of men so that he could lead no more of them astray and despatched to purgatory where he could atone for his sins and, perhaps, ultimately attain blessedness. Protestants did not believe in purgatory. The individual had to make his peace with God in this world, for beyond it there awaited only the final judgement. Therefore, to put someone to death was to remove from him the possibility of salvation once and for all. The church had no ‘licence to kill’. No one could be cut off from the living on the grounds of faith. Vengeance belonged only to God. Elizabeth and even her more radical councillors were not prepared to do his job for him. They prided themselves that they did not descend to the barbarity of the auto da fé and the government-sponsored lynch mob.
But it was their duty to preserve the integrity of the state. The Act of Uniformity had required clergy to use the Book of Common Prayer on pain of forfeiting a year’s salary and the laity were instructed to attend divine service or pay a fine of one shilling. For the first ten years of the reign this legislation was enforced sporadically and without the vigour that a centrally directed campaign would have provided. Then had come Pius V’s declaration of war in the bull Regnans in Excelsis and the Ridolfi plot. Following these scares, parliament tightened the recusancy laws in 1571. Yet, as far as English Catholics were concerned, life went on much as before. Occasionally an order went out from the Council to magistrates and bishops to draw up lists of people who absented themselves from their parish churches but any ‘persecution’ was for the most part half-hearted. It took the terrorist and invasion scares of the 1580s for the government to tighten the screws on English Catholics.
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Walsingham could not have reached the pinnacle of his public career at a more critical time for the nation. It was not just that the French massacre sounded a wake-up call for all who had reason to fear a reinvigorated Roman Catholicism. The pontificate of Gregory XIII saw the centralization of papal power and the energetic application of the Counter-Reformation. The new pope urged Philip II to lead a crusade against the heretic island and encouraged the plots of free-enterprise zealots. Confronted with the anxieties of English Catholics who had no desire to seek the queen’s death, Gregory absolved them from active conspiracy, but he did not backtrack from his conviction that the removal of Elizabeth was a major plank of papal policy.
Since that guilty woman of England rules over two such noble kingdoms of Christendom and is the cause of so much injury to the catholic faith, and loss of so many million souls, there is no doubt that whosoever sends her out of the world with the pious intention of doing service, not only does not sin but gains merit.12
So wrote Gregory’s secretary of state in his master’s name.
But the pope understood well that state-sponsored terrorism was not the only effective means of reclaiming lands lost to Rome. It had to be accompanied by a campaign for winning hearts and minds. This mis
sionary endeavour he entrusted to the Society of Jesus. Under his patronage the Jesuit College at Rome expanded rapidly to become one of the major educational institutions of Europe, and similar training establishments sprang up elsewhere. The most significant for England was the English College at Douai in the southern Netherlands. It was founded in 1568 by William Allen, an Oxford graduate who had dedicated himself to the reconversion of his homeland. Allen knew that time was not on his side. Natural wastage and government activity were steadily removing the stock of priests prepared clandestinely to teach the old religion. Failing a successful Catholic rising (something for which he also worked), it would be necessary to look to the next generation to keep the faith alive. Douai College (removed to Rheims in 1578) received young Englishmen to be trained as priests to restock the Catholic church. The first such was ordained in 1574. From this beginning sprang the English Mission. Year on year groups of priests were smuggled into England to succour the small communities of recusants (those who ‘recused’, ie refused, to worship according to the reformed English rite) and to preach and baptize in secret conventicles. The hunting down of these immigrant priests became a major difficulty to government throughout the rest of the reign. It provided the Catholic cause with martyrs and a wealth of romantic cloak and dagger legends about brow-beating Protestant vigilantes being cleverly outwitted by householders who concealed priests in secret rooms.
‘Oh, that the Lord would bow the heavens and come down, and bridle the mouths of the papists, Turks and schismatics!’13 So Bishop Cox of Ely apostrophized his friend Heinrich Bullinger in January 1575. Wherever England’s leaders looked they saw trouble on every side. The Islamic threat still seemed very real. Suleyman the Magnificent had died in 1566 and thereafter the Ottoman Empire went into a slow decline but Europeans had grown accustomed to fearing the Turk, and defence of the eastern boundary and the Mediterranean littoral still consumed large quantities of blood and treasure. The fact that Cox bracketed the activities of Catholic and Puritan propagandists together with the mullahs of a totally alien religion indicates how aggravated the leaders of England’s religious establishment were with those of their fellow countrymen who claimed to espouse the same Christian faith but who refused to accommodate themselves to the Elizabethan settlement. Catholic infiltrators and Puritan preachers were alike anathema to those of the moderately Protestant Church of England, by law established. Members of the establishment were, by definition, those who craved that permanence and stability which was represented by the queen and the bishops. Elizabeth certainly regarded the English Reformation as a done deal. Religious controversy was a thing of the past and those who sought to rake it up – whether Catholic or Puritan – were enemies of the state. An increasing majority of English men and women supported this point of view, if for no other reason than that they wanted a quiet life – and after forty years of religious turmoil who could blame them?
But the fury of Bishop Cox betrayed a complete lack of understanding for the enthusiasts of either side. His thinking was not spiritual or even theological, but political. Here is this establishment man in full flood against the Puritans:
These disputants of ours are so shuffling and so tenacious of their own opinion, that they will give way to no one who opposes their judgment . . . To give you an instance of their candour, they are zealously endeavouring to overthrow the entire order of our Anglican church. Night and day do they importune both the people and the nobility, and stir them up to abhorrence of those persons who, on the abolition of popery, are faithfully discharging the duties of the ministry; and they busy themselves in everywhere weakening and diminishing their credit. And that they may effect this with greater ease and plausibility, they bawl out to those harpies who are greedily hankering after plunder . . . that the property and revenues of the cathedral churches ought to be diverted to I know not what other uses . . . At first they attacked only things of little consequence; but now they turn every thing, both great and small, up and down, and throw all things into confusion; and would bring the church into very great danger, were not our most pious queen most faithful to her principles, and did she not dread and restrain the vanity and inconsistency of these frivolous men.14
Cox was bothered about the challenge to royal and episcopal authority (and, the cynic might add, to his own status and economic wellbeing). Ultimate authority was the essential point at issue. For Catholics and Puritans it lay not in the queen but in the pope and the Bible respectively.
The new secretary found himself walking a tightrope. He was a member of the political establishment, sworn to be loyal to the queen and her religion. But he was also a Bible-based Protestant with a tender conscience who believed passionately that England’s safety and its very existence as a holy nation depended on completing the Reformation. He extended his patronage to preachers and writers and even supported an underground press which attacked the continued use of mass vestments and the ‘unscriptural’ rule of the church by bishops, priests and deacons. Walsingham soon came to be tarred by his enemies with the brush of Presbyterianism and it was only royal favour which saved him from being openly attacked by members of the religious establishment. When the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford complained about one of Walsingham’s protégés whom, they said, wanted to strip the ancient foundation of some of its ‘papistical’ assets, they acknowledged that their real quarrel was with Walsingham, though they did not dare to say so openly. The minister’s overt Puritanism drew him closer to the Dudley circle. Indeed, to a large extent he sheltered under Leicester’s wing. One of the more remarkable aspects of England’s remarkable governing quadrumvirate was the fact that Elizabeth trusted and worked with men whose religious convictions she loathed. However, by no means did the queen abdicate her responsibility to her church. On occasions she could and did act in defiance of her closest advisers.
Matters came to a head for Walsingham very early on. In May 1575, Matthew Parker, the moderate Archbishop of Canterbury, died. The man backed by Burghley and Walsingham to become senior primate was Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of York. Unlike Parker, Grindal had been a Marian exile and returned to England a thoroughgoing Calvinist. Elizabeth was wary of accepting the advice of her leading councillors and it was not until Christmas Eve that she finally signed the warrant for Grindal’s appointment. Walsingham and his colleagues were in no doubt about how tricky the relationship between Elizabeth and her archbishop was going to be. As soon as his appointment was confirmed, Grindal received a cautiously unsigned letter, probably from Walsingham, which set out the expectations of those who had supported his candidature:
It is greatly hoped for by the godly and well-affected of this realm that your lordship will prove a profitable instrument in that calling; especially in removing the corruptions in the Court of the Faculties [the ecclesiastical body which granted dispensations from such canon laws as those aimed at preventing such customs as pluralism and marriage within the prohibited degrees] . . . I could wish your lordship to repair hither with as convenient speed as ye may, to the end that there may be some consultation had with some of your brethren how some part of those Romish dregs remaining in [the Church and] offensive to the godly, may be removed. I know it will be hard for you to do that good that you and your brethren desire. Yet . . . somewhat there may be done. Herein I had rather declare unto your lordship at your repair hither frankly by mouth what I think than to commit the same to letters.15
Grindal was not slow in embarking on a reforming programme. He set out to remove some of the practices Puritans considered offensive. He put his weight behind a strengthening of the recusancy laws, and he inaugurated an initiative designed to win hearts and minds but also to introduce Calvinist teaching and practice by the back door. This was the publication of the Geneva Bible, a move in which Francis Walsingham was heavily involved. The version of the holy text beloved by the returned exiles had never found favour with many of the bishops, who objected to the radical glosses which adorned its margins. Though not
suppressed, the Geneva Bible was not enthusiastically endorsed by the establishment. Now that the Puritans had a friend at Lambeth they were determined to make good this omission. Walsingham recommended for the task Christopher Barker, a protégé whose printing premises were located in St Paul’s Churchyard, where the proprietor proudly displayed the Walsingham heraldic device of a tiger’s head. In 1576 Barker immediately set about producing four editions of the Bible, some in pocket format for personal use, others designed to be read in households or set up in churches. These were followed by a version which was more explosive.
Laurence Tomson, a fine scholar and linguist, was a member of Walsingham’s secretarial staff. He was now set to make a fresh translation of the New Testament incorporating glosses by Theodore Beza, who had taken over leadership of the Geneva church after Calvin’s death in 1564. Beza was much more forthright in asserting what he believed to be the form of church polity sanctioned by Scripture and which, needless to say, did not square with the structure of the English church. As if that was not pointed enough, another edition of the Geneva Bible appeared in 1578 which incorporated a Puritan version of the Prayer Book. In this every ceremony and even every word offensive to Puritans (e.g. ‘priest’) was expunged. It would be impossible to overestimate the impact of this missionary endeavour. The aim to place a ‘sound’ version of the Bible in every home was, in large measure, successful. Two books above all were formative of the national psyche until well into the seventeeth century – Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and the Geneva Bible.