Sir Francis Walsingham

by Derek Wilson

  True to form, she did neither – or rather she tried to do both at the same time, with inevitably disastrous results. Her positive acts were twofold. She entered into a treaty with representatives of the States General, promising men and money for their nationalist struggle and she authorized Drake to harass Spanish shipping in order to distract Philip from the Netherlands and also in the hope of gaining booty to finance the military operation. The second part of the plan was the only one about which the queen could be said to have shown any enthusiasm. The prospect of a cash return on her investment of ships and money was alluring. Also Philip inadvertently came to her aid by seizing some English merchant vessels. Elizabeth could thus claim that she had been provoked into ordering reprisals. Yet even the maritime scheme fell victim to her changeableness. For almost a year it was by turns on and off. Drake, as he gathered and provisioned his fleet, was repeatedly frustrated by the latest order arriving from the court. At last, on 14 September, even though his preparations were not complete, he grabbed the opportunity to set sail. As one of his captains, Christopher Carleill (Walsingham’s stepson) explained to Mr Secretary, ‘because the wind being fair upon our coming from Plymouth we were loth to lose the same for any small matters, coming so rarely as it doth there, and withal we not the most assured of her Majesty’s perseverance to let us go forward’.14

  Similar dithering hampered relations with the States General. Leicester, Hatton, Burghley and Walsingham handled negotiations with the Dutch representatives. Throughout July and August a series of meetings took place, some at Burghley’s town house and some at Walsingham’s residence in Seething Lane, and were occasions of exceedingly hard bargaining. The major points at issue were twofold – sovereignty and money. The States General wanted Elizabeth to assume absolute authority and to back it with such a military force as should be able to drive Parma from the land. Such a prospect appalled the queen. She was prepared to lend her allies the wherewithal to fight a defensive campaign, against the collateral of certain port towns that her troops would garrison. As to sovereignty, that was out of the question since it manifestly implied conquest. She would only consent to send a senior nobleman in charge of her forces in a purely military capacity. Eventually, some sort of agreement was cobbled together and enshrined in the two treaties of Nonsuch.

  It must be said that Elizabeth and the States General deserved each other. The leaders of the United Netherlands were hopelessly divided among themselves over their political and religious objectives. While some were insistent on ceding sovereignty to a foreign protector, others were defensive about their freedom and determined to maintain tight control of any army Elizabeth sent over. English aims and objectives were equally divided. The conciliar hawks were, as usual, Leicester and Walsingham, though on Netherlands affairs they now had the support of Hatton. As the military campaign progressed through 1586 the queen got cold feet and was ready to listen to any scheme which might enable her to disengage honourably. Within the Council an appeasement faction developed of men who, either out of conviction or a desire to curry favour with their mistress, actively promoted peace. There were also those who stood to gain from a cessation of hostilities, men such as Sir James Croft, Controller of the Household, who was receiving a pension from Philip. At one time there were as many as five separate overtures being made to Philip’s representatives. Needless to say such parleys were carried out in secret. This gave rise to a situation in which Elizabeth and members of her government were scheming against and even spying on each other. This was the background to the ill-fated Netherlands campaign, which we must now consider in brief outline.

  In August 1585 the seasoned general, Sir John Norreys, was despatched with the first detachment of English troops to go to the aid of Amsterdam. He arrived too late but the die had been cast. The Dutch pressed Elizabeth to send Leicester as her deputy and he was eager for the command but it was late September before she could bring herself to agree. Dudley immediately set about making the necessary arrangements. He raised a loan in the City. He requisitioned arms and armour from the royal arsenal in the Tower. He wrote to 200 friends and dependants requesting them to join him with their own bands of armed retainers. Then, in the small hours of 27 September he was awoken to receive a message from Walsingham:

  My very good lord, her majesty sent me word . . . that I should speak unto your lordship that her pleasure is you forbear to proceed in your preparations until you speak with her. How this cometh about I know not. The matter is to be kept secret. These changes here may work some such changes in the Low Country as may prove irreparable.15

  Ten weeks later uncertainty was still in the air, causing Leicester to appeal to Burghley:

  as there can be no good, or honour, fall to this action, but it must be wholly to the praise and honour of her majesty, so whatsoever disgrace or dishonour shall happen (growing for lack of our good maintenance) but it will redound to her majesty also. Her majesty, I see, my Lord, often times doth fall into mislike of this cause, and sundry opinions it may breed in her withal, but I trust in the Lord, seeing her highness hath thus far resolved and grown also to this far execution as she hath, and that mine and other men’s poor lives and substances are adventured for her sake, and by her commandment, that she will fortify and maintain her own action to the full performance of that she hath agreed on . . . if her majesty fail with such supply and maintenance as shall be fit, all she hath done hitherto will be utterly lost and cast away and we, her poor subjects, no better than abjects.

  Leicester knew full well that his work could be undermined, not only by Elizabeth’s half-heartedness and disinclination to spend money, but also by backstabbing colleagues. There was a real note of pathos in his closing appeal to Burghley:

  I beseech your lordship have this cause even to your heart . . . have me only thus far in your care, that in these things which her Majesty and you all have agreed and confirmed for me to do, that I shall not be made a metamorphosis [and] that I shall not know what to do.

  He added a worried postscript:

  My lord, no man feeleth comfort but they that have cause of grief, and no men have so much need of relief and comfort as those that go in these doubtful services. I pray you, my lord, help us to be kept in comfort, for we will hazard our lives for it.16

  Leicester eventually landed at Flushing on 10 December. He was received with all the glitzy adulation of a visiting potentate. Over the next two and a half weeks he made a stately progress and was feted everywhere with bonfires, banquets, plays, masques and fireworks. Elizabeth and Leicester were extolled in poetry and song as the saviours of the Dutch people. The Netherlanders made it abundantly clear that their expectation was for a semi-regal governor and not just a military commander who, like Anjou, might desert them and leave them to face Spanish retribution. Leicester wrote home for instructions – and for money for garrison troops who were on the point of mutiny over arrears of pay. He received no reply and decided to act on his own initiative. On 25 January, at a solemn ceremony in The Hague, the Earl of Leicester was invested with ‘highest and supreme commandment’ in the United Provinces.

  It is not clear exactly when Walsingham and his colleagues received Dudley’s official report of this momentous event. Burghley responded on 7 February but Elizabeth had learned of her representative’s flouting of her wishes days before. One of her ladies had heard the news in a private letter and enthusiastically tittle-tattled it round the court. The story grew in the telling and by the time it came to Elizabeth’s ears its colourful details included plans being made by the grandiloquent Leicester to bring his wife over to the Low Countries at the head of a sumptuous train that would put Elizabeth’s own suite in the shade. Nothing could be better calculated to send the queen into a frenzy than the prospect of the Countess of Leicester, her hated rival for Dudley’s affections (she was permanently barred from the court), lording it in princely style. She dictated a scorching reprimand and would have sent it post-haste if Burghley and Walsingham had not d
one their utmost to delay her. However, if they hoped for a cooling off period they were disappointed. The letter despatched on 10 February expressed the queen’s fury at being betrayed by someone ‘raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us above any other subject of this land’.17

  We may suppose that Dorothy Stafford, mistress of the robes, felt particular satisfaction at seeing the queen’s anger kindled against Dudley. Later in the year, when Leicester was seeking permission to return from the Netherlands, Edward Stafford took the opportunity to pour out his venom to Burghley: ‘I would keep him where he is and he should drink that which he hath brewed. Her Majesty is not for his tarrying there bound to do more than she should see fit, but I would keep him there to undo himself and sure enough from coming home to undo others.’18

  The ambassador had, or believed he had, fresh cause for grievance with Leicester’s ‘spirit’, Francis Walsingham. It took the form of a running dispute over Michael Moody, one of Sir Edward’s servants. Moody is another of those enigmatic shadowy characters who features in Walsingham’s espionage network. He had been employed as courier by Mr Secretary in the early 1580s but was on Stafford’s embassy staff in late 1583. Months later he was in London acting as an agent for his master and, when Sir Edward ordered his return to Paris in October, Moody refused, claiming that he was engaged in business for Walsingham. By the following January Stafford learned from a third party that there was quite a different reason for Moody’s detention in London. His informant reported, as Stafford explained to Walsingham, that ‘the said Michael was a bad man and a conveyor of letters to papists and from papists under the colour of sending to me letters about mine own business’.

  Stafford was indignant on two counts. He felt ‘greatly wronged’ that Walsingham had detained Moody without saying a word to his master. More important, though, was the ambassador’s conviction that conspiracy and personal animosity were at work. He suspected that:

  Some evil meaning body [ie person] to me is the cause of it; as since my departure I find not so good dealing as I think I have deserved, by divers bad speeches and rumours spread abroad of me; and that this is but a way invented by some perchance that deceive both you and me, to leave in suspense the cause of the blame of my man, to leave it to men’s standing to discourse whether any fault, or part of it, may not be in me. Other bad speeches in mine absence do make me doubt the worst in this: but as they be as false as they that have sowed them be wicked, so I must bear them, and be a pack-horse in that till I be out of this place, and content myself with the faithfulness of my actions, that in the mean time shall give them the lie deep enough.19

  Was he referring to the Leicester caucus? He was careful to assure Walsingham that he had no doubt of the secretary’s honest dealing but such asseveration was no more than the formal courtesy required in official correspondence. We do not have Walsingham’s reply but apparently it did not fully satisfy the ambassador. In March he assured Mr Secretary that he had no intention of defending Moody if he had done something wrong but he wanted to know exactly what it was that his servant was accused of.

  The historian would also like to know, for two years later Moody’s name crops up again in relation to a mysterious assassination plot. And not only Moody’s. Sir Edward Stafford had a younger brother, William, who seems to have been little more than a court hanger-on. In 1585 he was pulling whatever strings came to hand in an effort to gain some honourable employment. Edward tried, without success, to obtain a commission for his brother in Leicester’s Netherlands army. William seems to have been more successful in seeking Walsingham’s patronage, for in June he wrote effusively to the secretary. ‘There is no man living to whom I am so beholden,’ he claimed. ‘If I should live to see my blood shed in your cause I should think it but some recompense for the great good I have received at your hands.’20 Thereafter, for more than a year, the names of Michael Moody and William Stafford disappear from the records. When they re-emerge it is in a much more sinister context.

  Meanwhile, in the fateful year 1586, Walsingham had a multitude of problems pressing down on him. He was increasingly isolated at court in his support for the Netherlands war. Negotiations with Scotland had reached a critical stage. In France the Guise faction was triumphant and Henry III virtually a prisoner in his own palace. That Philip II was making detailed plans for the invasion of England was common knowledge. And over all these disturbing developments loomed the ever-present problem of what to do with Mary Stuart. England in 1586 found itself in a situation not dissimilar to that of England in 1939. An awesome power was spreading across the continent. An English expeditionary force was fighting a losing battle across the Narrow Seas. Fifth columnists were active within the realm and the peace-at-any-price lobby had a powerful voice in government. It has not always been realized just how vital Francis Walsingham’s contribution was in holding queen and country to a constant course throughout these dire months.

  He used every stratagem at his command – espionage, counterespionage, overt championing of the international Protestant cause, covert undermining of Catholic endeavours. He confronted the queen openly to her face and worked secretly behind her back. Nor was this duplicity undertaken without personal cost. Walsingham was no amoral Machiavellian. Quite the reverse. As a Puritan he understood the virtues of honesty and plain dealing. As a politician striving to defend those virtues he was only too aware that he often had to muffle his conscience. He periodically gave way to despair and often exploded in fits of hitherto uncharacteristic bad temper. His recurrent physical ailments played their part in his state of mental agitation and this year, 1586, would bring him news which threatened to tip him over the edge of sanity. The character which emerges through all these trials is one deeply coloured with heroism. Walsingham was a man driving himself towards an early grave in the service of a thankless queen who seldom acknowledged how much she was indebted to him.

  In the Netherlands English hopes rapidly unravelled. Militarily affairs went from bad to worse. Everyone was to blame for the failure. Leicester was a poor general who antagonized his senior officers and who found liaison with the Dutch very difficult. Military realities, orders from Elizabeth and instructions from the States General pulled him in different directions. His funds and supplies were inadequate because he constantly, and sometimes fruitlessly, had to apply to his laggard paymasters for the necessities of war. If Elizabeth resented his assumption of the governorship of the United Provinces, the States General stripped his title of any meaning by trying to control him and by undermining his endeavours. When Dudley took strong counter-measures to assert his authority, this only provoked more opposition. Town governments, despairing of their English allies, threw their gates open to Parma and Leicester’s army was whittled away by the desertion or mutiny of his unpaid troops.

  In the Council, Walsingham, Hatton and Burghley continued to support Leicester (though Burghley was not above following his own agenda). They were constantly opposed by Whitgift, Lord Cobham, Lord Buckhurst and Sir James Crofts. Persuading Elizabeth to authorize fresh troops or finance generally resulted in open argument and clandestine audiences with the queen. It was this constant bickering that was largely responsible for the irregularity of treasury disbursements to Leicester. Walsingham found the situation debilitating. ‘The opinion of my partiality continueth,’ he told Dudley in March, ‘nourished by factions, which makes me weary of the place I serve in and to wish myself among the true-hearted Swiss.’21

  But it was the jittery queen who made his life a real misery. She was terrified of provoking Spanish aggression. Reliable reports reaching London indicated that Drake’s activities were proving a valuable distraction to Philip and obliging him to keep a sizeable fleet patrolling the Atlantic and to seek new loans from Italian bankers. Elizabeth was heartened by such news but it only took one contrary report to rouse her anxiety. Once, she had the master of a merchant vessel newly returned from Spain brought before her and quizzed him about what he had seen. H
e told her of a force of twenty-seven ships being assembled in Lisbon and a rumour that it was to be sent to England. Elizabeth immediately flew into a rage. She threw a string of oaths at Walsingham and, for good measure, hurled her slipper at him as well. She reasoned that one way to prevent Leicester committing acts of aggression was to keep him short of funds but, of course, this only increased the tension. It was in April that Walsingham learned that Elizabeth and some of her councillors had been engaged in secret peace talks through various intermediaries. His response was both indignant and pragmatic. He reported to Leicester:

  I have let her Majesty understand how dangerous and dishonourable it is for her to have such base and ill affected ministers used therein. Morris, the Comptroller’s man, is both a notable papist and hath served Monsieur [Anjou] heretofore as a spy. If either your Lordship or myself should use such instruments I know we should bear no small reproach.22

  But he also advised his colleague that, since peace arias were so much in vogue, he would be well advised to provide himself with a song sheet and out-sing his rivals.

  Considering the kind of men Walsingham habitually employed, it was distinctly hypocritical of him to complain about Crofts’ agent. In his current dealings with Scotland Mr Secretary was hand-in-glove with one of the biggest blackguards to grace (or disgrace) the world of international diplomacy. Patrick Gray, commonly known as the Master of Gray, first made his appearance at the Scottish court in the train of Esmé Stuart. He was at that time pro-French and a professing Catholic (having originally been brought up a son of the kirk). He was similar to Stuart in being plausible and devilishly handsome – the sort of companion the young James loved. This politico-religious chameleon was driven by insatiable personal ambition. Gray was back in France when Stuart’s faction was overthrown and remained there closely in cahoots with the Guises and the Queen of Scots’ party. He returned to Scotland in the summer of 1583 and, on discovering that he had really been a Protestant all along, wormed his way into the trust of the reigning favourite, the Earl of Arran. In October 1584 Gray was sent across the border as an ambassador to bring about a permanent settlement of Anglo-Scottish relations.