by Derek Wilson
Walsingham had already incurred the queen’s displeasure over negotiations with the Netherlands. In order to obtain a clear picture of what was happening in that troubled country, in the summer of 1578, she decided to send her secretary on a high-level diplomatic mission. In June Walsingham arrived at Antwerp in the company of Henry, Lord Cobham (presumably included in the mission to give it more social prestige). Their instructions were to find out what Anjou was up to, to offer their services as negotiators between Don John and the Estates General and to spy out the military situation. The diplomats spent three and a half arduous months in the Netherlands. In the height of summer, when plague haunted the cities and waterways, they scuttled back and forth between the regent, the Estates General, the Prince of Orange and the Duke of Anjou. It was an exhausting, frustrating and ultimately fruitless business.
Walsingham and his colleague were kept waiting by all the interested parties, each of whom was watching the situation to see how it could be exploited to best advantage. When discussions did take place it proved impossible to find any compromise acceptable to the regent and the rebels. As for Anjou, Walsingham had the annoyance of his advice being rejected. He had concluded that the duke was a factor to be reckoned with. He recommended that Elizabeth should circumvent him by providing financial aid to Orange. So pressing were the Dutch and so convinced was Walsingham of the lightness of his advice that he raised £5,000 for Orange as an earnest of his government’s good faith. When news of this reached the queen she was distinctly unamused. She had decided that the best way to handle Anjou was to play the marriage card. With the Frenchman fighting her battles for her there was no need to part with a single penny for the rebels’ cause. She berated Walsingham for exceeding his commission and instructed him to recover all monies which had been advanced to the Netherlanders. This was a body blow to the diplomats. They now had to face the wrath of the Estates General and Prince William and to be accused of being the envoys of perfidious Albion. Walsingham reported that Elizabeth’s credit was exhausted and that she would never be trusted again. He did not hesitate to express his feelings to a conciliar colleague:
It is an intolerable grief to me to receive so hard measure at her Majesty’s hands, as if I were some notorious offender. Surely sir, it standeth not with her Majesty’s safety to deal so unkindly with those that serve her faithfully. There is a difference between serving with a cheerful and languishing mind. If there had lacked in us either care, faithfulness, or diligence, then were we worthy of blame . . . When our doings shall come to examination, I hope the greatest fault we may be charged withal is that we have had more regard to her Majesty’s honour and safety than to her treasure, wherein we have dealt no worse with her than with ourselves, having for her services’ sake engaged ourselves £5,000 thick; which doing of ours, being offensively taken, doth make the burden the heavier.15
As if this was not bad enough, Walsingham discovered he was caught up in the murky and sordid events surrounding the death of Don John. The thirty-three-year-old regent died of typhus at Bouges on 1 October. His last weeks had been rendered distressing by military failure and by the suspicion of his half-brother, the king. Relations between them were so bad that John’s secretary, Juan de Escobedo, was assassinated on Philip’s orders. Walsingham became involved because members of the late regent’s suite suspected him of complicity in Don John’s death. Although Walsingham stoutly denied this aspersion he could not distance himself entirely from the seamy events at the regent’s court. The man who was accused of poisoning Don John and who was executed for it in December was Egremont Radcliffe, half-brother of the Earl of Sussex, a young ruffian who occupied the shadowlands of espionage and intrigue where many of Walsingham’s agents had their abode. A headstrong Catholic who had taken part in the Northern Rebellion, Radcliffe was forced to flee overseas and put his services at the disposal of Philip II. In the Netherlands and at the Spanish court he mixed with other English malcontents, among them the Earl of Westmorland and Thomas Stukeley. In 1575 he returned to England, apparently repentant of his earlier crimes and offering to place his knowledge and contacts at the disposal of the English government. Walsingham did not trust him and Radcliffe soon found himself shut up in the Tower. While there he translated from the French a tractate entitled Politique Discourses which advocated unquestioning loyalty to appointed authority. This work, designed to demonstrate his complete change of heart, he dedicated to Walsingham. In May 1578 Radcliffe was secretly set free and sent out of the country, a circumstance which the Spanish ambassador regarded as not a little suspicious. According to a witness who testified some years later, the released prisoner had been seen with the secretary at Hampton Court. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Radcliffe was sent over to the Netherlands in advance of Walsingham’s mission as a useful gatherer of intelligence.
Two other names appear in the fragmentary records of events taking place in the late summer and early autumn of 1578. Alfonso Ferrabosco was an Italian musician who had been until recently in the household of Philip Sidney (soon to be Walsingham’s son-in-law) and was now on his way home to Bologna. He was carrying messages for the English government and, according to diplomatic sources, Radcliffe intended to join him on his journey. Thomas Harrison was an agent of Walsingham who, years later, claimed that he had acted as a go-between for Radcliffe and Walsingham and was lucky to have avoided sharing the latter’s fate. Since Don John was not murdered the question of Walsingham’s complicity does not arise but his need to be kept informed of everything going on in the Netherlands inevitably involved him with unsavoury characters and the hatred he aroused in Spanish court circles was enough to ensure that the worst was readily believed of him.
Having achieved nothing and suffered much, Walsingham could scarcely wait to be recalled. In September he grumbled to Burghley:
He had need to be furnished with patience that shall deal in such sour service as we are employed in, being almost ashamed to show our faces abroad, having entertained them here with hope of the continuance of her Majesty’s favour, and now, in the end, when they stood in greatest need of her assistance, to be as it were quite abandoned. Besides the alienation of this country people’s hearts from her Majesty, which cannot but be perilous both unto herself and her realm, it will render her Highness hateful to the world, many hard speeches being given out against her, which as we hear with grief so cannot your Lordship but also read with grief, if we should set down the same . . . How unpleasant it is to be employed in so unfortunate a service I leave to your Lordship’s good judgement.16
He fully intended to return home as soon as possible and then resign his office.
Of course, he did no such thing. He was soon back in harness at court and involved in the royal marriage fracas. Anjou expertly pursued his courtship, first through his representative, the utterly charming Jean de Simier, then, in August, through a personal visit. Elizabeth demanded of her councillors that each should put his verdict in writing. Walsingham responded with his usual crisp-mindedness. He set out the pros and cons of the union as he believed it would be perceived at home and abroad. The debit side of his balance sheet far outweighed the credit. He rehearsed all the obvious objections, including the disparity of ages and the health risk. He cast serious doubt on Anjou’s motivation and his sincerity. But his principal argument was the religious one. For a Catholic and a Protestant to be yoked together was asking for trouble. He cited the marriage of Henry of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois – the result of which was that ‘most horrible spectacle [of which] I was an eye witness’.17
Elizabeth was not oblivious to the arguments but she was emotionally committed to Anjou. Her ‘Frog’, as she nicknamed him, was a lusty young man and an ardent wooer. He offered her her last chance of romance and she grabbed it. In the face of her determination the majority of the Council prevaricated. When the prince arrived for what was supposed to be a secret visit to his beloved there was general embarrassment at the undignified spectacle of d
alliance between the middle-aged queen and her ugly suitor. Mendoza relished their difficulties: ‘The councillors themselves deny that [Anjou] is here and, in order not to offend the queen, they shut their eyes and avoid going to court, so as not to appear to stand in the way of interviews with him only attending the Council when they are obliged.’18
Walsingham may well have been the only one who did not cloak his disapproval. Leicester certainly felt it necessary to offer his friend some words of warning:
You know her disposition as well as I, and yet can I not use but frankness with you. I would have you, as much as you may, avoid the suspicion of her majesty that you doubt Monsieur’s love to her too much, or that you lack devotion enough in you to further her marriage, albeit I promise I think she has little enough herself to it. But yet, what she would others think and do therein you partly have cause to know . . . You have as much as I can learn, for our conference with her majesty about affairs is but seldom and slender . . . For this matter in hand for her marriage there is no man can tell what to say. As yet she hath imparted with no man, at least not with me nor, for ought I can learn, with any other.19
Unfortunately, where religious sensibilities were concerned, discretion was not a card that Walsingham played skilfully or with conviction. During a conversation with him in early October the queen flew into a rage. She told him his advice was worthless and that all he was good for was protecting heretics. This was almost certainly a reference to the red-hot issue of the hour, the arrest of John Stubbe and his associates. It may be that Walsingham had interceded for the writer. Elizabeth certainly believed, as did others, that The Discovery of a gaping gulf emanated from the Leicester-Walsingham circle. It answered with remarkable precision pro-marriage arguments advanced by Sussex and which can only have been leaked by someone in the queen’s inner circle. The pamphlet was printed by Hugh Singleton who only avoided Stubbe’s fate by virtue of a last-minute pardon. He was noted as a disseminator of Puritan literature and simultaneously with The Discovery he published The Shephard’s Calendar by Edmund Spenser, one of Leicester’s protégés. This poem, dedicated to Philip Sidney, was a much more refined piece of literature but it, too, was critical of the Anjou match. Both works were part of a campaign engineered by councillors opposed to the French marriage. Having failed themselves to change the queen’s mind they used their clientage networks of preachers and writers to work on public opinion, a stratagem which was ultimately successful. It did not help Walsingham in the short term. Elizabeth, furious at the propaganda campaign being mounted against her, banished Walsingham from court. He did not return until the end of the year. Even then he was not granted access to the queen, ‘being still entertained as a man not thoroughly restored to her favour’.20
Very soon after his return Walsingham showed himself to be a man converted. He actually supported the queen’s marriage plans. Had he been chastened by his exile from court? Had friends prevailed upon him not to ruin his career? Had he decided that if Anjou became consort Elizabeth would need advisers around her to counteract his influence? Possibly all these considerations were at work but more important was the fact that events forced foreign policy to lurch in a new direction. The year 1580 saw the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, the ascendancy of d’Aubigny in Scotland, a resurgence of Spanish power in the Netherlands under the leadership of the highly accomplished regent, Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the formal acceptance by Anjou of the sovereignty offered by the Estates General, and early successes for the Irish rebels. Catholic morale was hugely boosted by the growth of Spanish power. More priests were smuggled into England, the most prominent being Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. Mary Stuart’s hopes were resurrected by messages from her co-religionists in Scotland which hinted at Spanish assistance for an armed rescue bid. In this changed situation old, well-tried English policy principles forced themselves to the fore: avoid isolation, encourage Franco-Spanish hostility and prevent the French gaining the upper hand in Scotland. An alliance with France now seemed the most pressing necessity. If that involved a Tudor-Valois marriage, even Walsingham conceded that it might be the lesser of two evils.
In his experience England had never been in a more critical position. The existence of so many Catholic threats only confirmed his conviction that a master plan existed for the overthrow of the English Protestant state. Now he stepped up – almost in desperation – his intelligence-gathering activities. It is no accident that most of the evidence for Walsingham’s activities as Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ comes from the 1580s. His first recorded payment for espionage is the £750 he received in 1582. Six years later he was receiving over £2,000 per annum, and these could well be underestimated figures.
No longer did Mr Secretary rely almost entirely on scraps of information gleaned from correspondence, rumours from the Elizabethan underworld or chance arrest at the ports. He had gathered a team of reliable agents who could be put to work on specific projects. The clandestine activities of Charles Sledd give us some indication of what begins to look like an espionage network. In July 1579 this shadowy figure was despatched to the newly founded English College at Rome, posing as an eager potential Catholic missionary. On his return to London ten months later he provided his patron with a long, detailed written report. It has to be read with caution because there was always a tendency for spies to embellish their information in order to enhance their own importance and, thereby, remain employed. But, if Sledd is to be trusted, his report confirmed Walsingham’s conspiracy theories. The agent assured his employer that the students in Rome did not confine themselves to planning the reconversion of their countrymen. They discussed invasion plans and concluded that a landing at Milford Haven would enable them to march eastwards, gathering support as they approached the capital from the thousands of secret Catholics eagerly awaiting their deliverance. Their own informants had reported that the royal armoury at the Tower of London held inadequate stocks of powder and ordnance to quell an organized rebellion. This was no more than the excited babbling of zealots eager to become cannon-fodder in a holy cause but we know, and Walsingham certainly knew, how frightening and – given the right circumstances – how effective such fundamentalist covens could be.
Sledd returned to England with a list of names and a memory for faces. It did not take long for his knowledge to bear fruit. Within weeks he had busted one cell of immigrant priests in London and arrested two of its members. Sledd was not the only agent set to track down Jesuit priests arriving from their foreign training camps buoyed up with hatred for Elizabeth and her supporters. As a result of the vigilance of Walsingham’s bloodhounds, more than a dozen covert Catholic activists were apprehended within a year. It was then a matter of deciding whether torture or bribery would best serve the cause of tackling the terrorist threat. Walsingham certainly managed to turn some of the captives. As one priest reported to his mentor in Rome, the worst threat to their security came from ‘false brethren’ in Walsingham’s employ.
When it came to provocative acts the English could not claim innocence. This was dramatically demonstrated by the biggest single item of national news for 1580. On 26 September Francis Drake arrived in Plymouth harbour with his ship, the Golden Hind, laden to the gunwales with the spoils of one of the greatest voyages in maritime history. Since setting out at the end of 1577 he had rounded Cape Horn, attacked Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast, captured a treasure-laden galleon and crossed the ocean to trade in the Moluccas, the preserve of Spanish and Portuguese merchant venturers. Sporadic information about the hispanophobe El Draco’s circumnavigational progress had reached Europe in preceding months and, understandably, Philip II was furious. Mendoza, his ambassador, demanded restitution and the public punishment of Drake. Elizabeth’s reaction was to welcome Drake as a hero, confer a knighthood on him and scoop her share of the expedition’s proceeds. Drake’s pioneer voyage and his audacious challenge to Iberian maritime supremacy was a diplomatic embarrassment and one on which the Council
was divided. Burghley was furious with Drake’s piracy and declined a gift of ten gold ingots and Sussex told the captain to his face that he was an ill-bred braggart. They were sore because Drake’s provocative exploits ran counter to their preferred policy of maintaining good relations with Spain. But as far as the queen was concerned money talked. Out of Drake’s massive haul she received something in excess of £150,000. There was no way she was going to relinquish that.
Where did Walsingham stand in all this? If Drake is to be believed, he was the fons et origo of the whole project. According to a manuscript account of the 1590s the secretary summoned Drake to discuss ways in which the Crown might recoup losses inflicted by Spain through the disruption of Netherlands trade, the seizure of ships and goods, and assistance given to enemies of state. ‘He showed me a plot,’ Drake recalled, ‘calling me . . . to note down where I thought [King Philip] might be most annoyed.’21 The two men roughed out a plan for harassing the Pacific coast settlements and seeking a north-west passage by which to return. In a subsequent meeting the two men presented their scheme to the queen, who approved it. Another version of events credits Hatton with initiating the venture but agrees that Walsingham was brought in at an early stage. The clandestine arrangements were covered by a smokescreen of false information. It was given out that Drake’s ships were being fitted out for a trading venture to the Levant. One thing Elizabeth – and doubtless Walsingham – insisted on was that Burghley should be kept in the dark.