This loss did not blunt his enthusiasm. When Drake came to court with his dream of a plundering circumnavigation, he found in Walsingham his best advocate, for here appeared most clearly the chance to serve mammon and the Protestant cause. Walsingham took on himself the weary task of winning cautious Elizabeth’s assent. Drake was allowed to sail in 1577 and set off backed by the Queen, Leicester, Hatton and Walsingham among others. When Drake returned three years later his profits were said to have repaid his promoters 4,700 per cent on their investment. The success of Drake swept away all memories of Frobisher’s failure, and for the rest of his life Walsingham was an eager supporter of maritime enterprise. He was interested in all projects, warlike, trading, exploration and colonial. He was for sending Drake to the Azores to harry Spain; Edward Fenton to the East in search of trade; and John Davis to the North-West to find that elusive passage. Most unusual and far-reaching of his plans was the support he gave to Humphrey Gilbert’s colonizing ventures on the understanding that Gilbert would take with him certain prominent English Catholics thus ridding the country of their religious influence. As he guided the voyagers through the labyrinth of court intrigue and persuasively put their case to the Queen, so he contributed his own money to the joint-stock companies which launched the expeditions. When Richard Hakluyt came to dedicate his Principal Navigations he could offer it to no fitter person than Sir Francis Walsingham. If, as Hakluyt immodestly claimed, ‘in this most famous and peerless government of her most excellent Majesty, her subjects through the special assistance and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and to speak plainly, in compassing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth’, it was in a large part due to Walsingham.
The encouragement of the English voyages was a great work which Walsingham undertook for the Protestant cause. His ruthless and efficient persecution of English Catholics was the darker side of his Puritan nature. But in this unpleasant task he was only carrying out the wishes of the government; that he used spies, informers and deceit of all kinds, that he countenanced torture and murder of good men, cannot be held against him alone. His methods were the universal methods of his age. He believed in the central Tudor doctrine, that the authority of the State must be preserved at all costs. ‘Our unity’, he wrote, ‘might be a strength to ourselves and an aid to our neighbours, but if we shall like to fall to division among ourselves, we must needs lie open to the common enemy and by our own fault hasten, or rather call upon ourselves, our own ruin.’ It was his duty and his interest to prevent this happening.
Until the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pius V in 1570, Catholics in England were not treated severely. There were fines for recusants who would not accept the state religion, but the Queen only required lip service to legal forms. After 1570 the complication of international affairs sadly condemned the Catholics to persecution. The reconversion of England was the aim of the papacy. The political attack was undertaken by Philip of Spain, and organized by his wily ambassador Mendoza who helped to ensnare Mary Stuart in a tangle of plots. The spiritual onslaught was directed by the expatriate Englishman, Cardinal Allen, and carried out by missioner priests chiefly from the newly formed Society of Jesus. The English defence against this double threat was in the hands of Walsingham. The simple aim of most Jesuits may have been to speak only of religion, but political events made their task impossible. England, after the way of the Reformation, had made religion part of state policy, and acts of faith now constituted acts of treason. After the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572, the English people had a horror of aggressive Catholicism, and the unfortunate connection between Mary Stuart and the bigoted Guise family, the villains of St Bartholomew, made England fearful of Catholic intrigue. Moreover, several priests, influenced by the forthright revolutionary propaganda of Cardinal Allen and Father Parsons, were implicated in the plots of Philip and his agents; the saintly Edmund Campion, the first Jesuit to be caught and executed, in 1581, was innocent of any intrigue, but his companion Parsons, who escaped, was a notorious meddler and plotter.
The plotting of Spain and the advent of the Jesuits caused something of a panic. Parliament met in 1581 and began to draft penal legislation against Catholics. Very large fines were imposed for recusancy and for attendance at Mass; to be converted to Catholicism carried the death penalty; priests of all kinds were to leave the country within forty days under pain of death for high treason. The spying out of Catholics was left to Walsingham and his secret service. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign 187 Catholics had been executed. But the operation of penal laws was only part of the problem. Walsingham was convinced that there could be no security in England so long as Mary Stuart lived. While she was alive, he wrote to Leicester in 1572, ‘neither her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives’. With his usual efficiency Walsingham set out to find the evidence to convict her, for Elizabeth was very reluctant to execute a fellow sovereign. At last, after the foolish Babington conspiracy of 1586, Walsingham had his evidence. Mary was condemned, the Queen signed the warrant, and Mary was executed on 8th February 1587. Walsingham was careful that his colleague William Davison should hand the death warrant, for he knew the Queen. With the hypocrisy of which she was always capable, Elizabeth wanted a scapegoat for Mary’s execution, and visited her guilt on poor Davison whom she dismissed, fined and imprisoned.
Camden spoke of Walsingham as ‘a most sharp maintainer of the purer religion’, and his record against Catholics, both English and foreign, bears this out. But his relations with his fellow Puritans are less easy to follow. Since the Puritans slowly became as grave a threat to Elizabeth’s religious authority as the Catholics had been, Walsingham must have had some difficulty in reconciling his faith with his royal service. That he put the State first can hardly be doubted, otherwise the Queen would never have tolerated him. Perhaps she even deferred the persecution of Puritans until after her faithful servant’s death in 1590. He may also have been useful in her dealings with Parliament. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign Parliament was Puritan in tone and critical of her use of the royal prerogative, so that she had little time for the Commons. She summoned Parliament as infrequently as possible and in typical Tudor style blatantly packed it with her supporters. Walsingham first entered Parliament as a member for Lyme Regis in 1563; at the start of his official career, in 1573, he became one of the members for Surrey and retained this seat for the rest of his life. He was at the same time a member of the Privy Council, and Elizabeth used her councillors who also sat in Parliament, men such as Walsingham and Sir Christopher Hatton, to guide and influence parliamentary decisions in the way she wanted. Walsingham perhaps had an extra use. His brother-in-law was Peter Wentworth, the most outspoken of the Puritan parliamentarians. Walsingham was thus excellently placed to be the middleman, testing and reporting on the Puritan temper for the Queen’s benefit, warning his co-religionists of the limits to the Queen’s patience, and if they overstepped that limit perhaps shielding them from her displeasure.
Elizabeth’s contemptuous handling of Parliament was but an example of the personal rule of the Tudors, yet this despotism was a danger to Elizabethan government. Since all the power was at the court, men were desperate to get there, rightly counting their future, their fame and their wealth to be dependent on the Queen’s patronage. She had about 1,200 places to dispose of in the central administration and she husbanded this resource carefully. Henry VIII, in his last years, had scattered political rewards profusely and unwisely, and Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was to do so again. But Elizabeth was economical and wary. Competition for places under Elizabeth was ferocious, and the more so because there were so few of them. Driven by their new-found ambition, and by gross inflation, the gentry besieged the gates of the court, clamouring for admission. And the best way to gain entry was to have the ear of the ministers and
faction leaders at court. The edifice of Elizabethan administration was built on the shifting ground of bribery and corruption.
This state of affairs was openly recognized, and was no doubt allowed because the crown was poor and could not afford to pay much in salaries. Officials were expected to make up their income through various fees and gifts. The Lord Keeper officially received £919 a year, the Lord High Admiral £200, and the Principal Secretary only £100. Yet in 1601 John Manningham noted that the Lord Keeper’s office was ‘better worth than £3,000 per annum’, the High Admiral’s worth a little more and the Secretary’s a little less. The same practice operated from highest to lowest. ‘There liveth not so grave nor so severe a judge in England’, wrote Samuel Cox, the slippery secretary of Hatton, ‘but he alloweth his poor clerk under him, even in the expedition of matters of greatest justice, to take any reasonable consideration that should be offered him by any man for his pains and travail.’ The Queen herself was not averse to bribes; when Leicester was in disgrace he was advised by friends at court to send her a valuable gift.
The system had its practical advantages for an impecunious monarchy, but it encouraged that crude strain of avarice and venality which everywhere went hand-in-hand with the expansion of trade and the accumulation of wealth in the sixteenth century. And the system was very hard to control. Burghley was certainly a reasonably honest man by the lights of his time; as the Queen’s first minister he was the chief disposer of places, and his watchfulness helped to limit the greed at court. Yet he persistently accepted bribes and payments for the places in his gift and died an extremely rich man. An incorruptible official, like Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Philip Sidney, was almost as rare as the unicorn. As Elizabeth grew old and lost some of her vigilance and Burghley declined into the ‘old Saturnus’ of English government, the venal men flourished: clergymen bought bishoprics, judges sold justice, and great men hired underlings for their factions. The Earl of Essex spent and spent; when he was disgraced at court in 1599 his income was cut off and he grew mad with hurt pride, frustrated ambition and debt. His rebellion in 1601 was the last act of desperation.
Speaking of the court in Mother Hubberd’s Tale, Spenser wrote:
For nothing there is done without a fee:
The courtier needs must recompensed be.
The corrupted morals of government were all too plain in Elizabeth’s last years. ‘I will forbear to mention’, said one of Burghley’s panegyrists, ‘the great and unusual fees exacted lately by reason of buying and selling offices, both judicial and ministerial, as also the privileges granted unto private persons to the great prejudice and grievance of the common people.’ The old Queen herself found her grip slipping as the tide of materialism swept over the kingdom. In 1601 she voiced her resentment to her antiquary, William Lambarde: ‘Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found.’
Walsingham, in an official career of seventeen years, naturally received a good share of the spoils. He received few honours, for Elizabeth gave these out with a mean hand. He was knighted in 1577, became chancellor of the Garter in the next year, and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1587. These posts increased his dignity but not his income. His wealth was based on the many perquisites of his office. He was allowed a farm of the customs, and was given on occasion licences for the export of cloth and wool. The Queen granted him several parcels of land, some of which he retained for his own use and some of which he used for speculation. In the patent rolls of the reign are very many sums of money put down to the name of Walsingham without any explanation. And his influential position made him one of the chief brokers at court, the happy receiver of innumerable gifts and fees for favours done. It was said by Camden that he died in debt having spent his wealth on the secret service he had built up. Certainly he was put to great expense by this and by the complicated debts left to him at the death of his brilliant son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney in 1586. But he always lived in great style and had numerous houses. In London he lived at first in London Wall, near Sir Thomas Gresham, in a house that almost rivalled the financier’s fabulous mansion. Later he moved to Seething Lane where he was a neighbour of the Earl of Essex. But in the manner of great gentlemen his favourite house was in the country just outside London. At Barn Elms, a few miles up the river from Westminster, he kept a large establishment; the stables were said to house sixty-eight horses.
To the observer, Walsingham was composed, calculating and silent. King James of Scotland called him ‘a very Machiavel’. He was in ill health for much of his life, and often had to rest from his strenuous duties. ‘My disease groweth so dangerously upon me’, he wrote to Burghley from France in 1571, ‘as I most humbly desire her Majesty to take some speedy order for some to supply my place.’ The French ambassador in London reported that he had some kind of recurring bladder or kidney trouble, and he became something of a hypochondriac, dosing himself excessively with medicines. Neither his affliction nor his unpalatable medicines was likely to sweeten his temper. Hawking, hunting and sports of all kinds, which the Elizabethans loved, were not for one of such delicate health. He caught some of the contemporary enthusiasm for gardens, and was content to saunter there gently. His powers and his interests were intellectual, not physical.
But at home he was an affectionate man and the pleasant harmony of his private life was at variance with the austere front and unremitting labour of his public appearance. He married twice, both times perhaps more for money than love. Of his second wife Ursula, who bore him two daughters, he seems to have been very fond, and this capable, homely woman supported her husband well all his life. The younger daughter died at an early age; the elder, Frances, grew to be something of a beauty and made two of the most brilliant marriages of the time. In 1583, when she was only sixteen, she married Sir Philip Sidney. This was more a political arrangement than a love match, intended to bind fast the alliance between Walsingham and Leicester, who was Sidney’s uncle. But Walsingham soon came under the spell of his most attractive son-in-law. The young couple stayed in his house, and the grave secretary delighted in the notice which came to Sidney from all sides. When Sir Philip was killed in 1586 Walsingham conscientiously looked after the tangled finances though it cost him dearly. Frances then married the Earl of Essex, a man almost as brilliant as Sidney, but the most wayward, proud and troublesome man in the kingdom.
Walsingham’s Puritan faith did not override his natural generosity; nor did his severe views on religion prevent him from being a man of cultivated refinement. Puritans too often became known for a carping, censorious criticism of art and society, but Walsingham was not one of these. From the early day of his Italian travels he had been something of a dandy. His keen mind and wide reading kept up with art and thought. He took upon himself the duties of patron, and hardly anyone encouraged arts and sciences as faithfully as he did. Much of what he did was for the good of the country. He was a great friend of both Oxford and Cambridge, doing more for Oxford though he himself had been to Cambridge. He pressed forward the English sea voyages and encouraged the writers on discovery and the arts of navigation; Nicholas, Peckham and Horsey dedicated to him the accounts of their travels; and Dr John Dee, inventive scientist and great charlatan, was indebted to him. Hakluyt, in his dedication, commended Walsingham’s ‘wisdom to have a special care of the honour of her Majesty, the good reputation of our country and the advancing of navigation’.
All that can be seen as part of his duty to his Protestant island, but he did not forget his pleasure and his curiosity. Edmund Spenser in an introductory sonnet to the Faerie Queen called Walsingham ‘the great Maecenas of this age’:
As well to all that civil arts profess,
As those that are inspired with martial rage.
Though the compliment, as usual with Spenser, was overdone, Walsingham was well known for his wide interests. He knew poets and wits such as Sidney, Spenser, Thomas Watson and John Harington. He was kind also to the o
bscure; he favoured alike John Rider, the laborious compiler of a Latin dictionary, and Richard Tarlton, the Queen’s fool. Nor was his interest confined to England. No man in the realm had a wider knowledge of continental affairs. He was called the best linguist of his time; and his knowledge of ancient literature was equal to his command of modern languages. He was able to carry off conversation with the greatest in Europe: ‘He could well fit King James his humour with sayings out of Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch or Tacitus, as he could King Henry’s with Rabelais’s conceits and the Hollander with mechanic discourses.’
For all his remarkable talents, the sum of his life was service. ‘You have fought more with your pen’, Drake wrote to him, ‘than many here in our English navy fought with their enemies.’ The bulk of his official correspondence was incredible; there was hardly any business of government that did not come under his eye. He came to public service not only driven by ambition and the hope of gaining wealth, but also fired by a great devotion to the Queen and to the country. The success of Elizabeth’s government depended on the learned, ambitious, patriotic new men like Walsingham, and for the greater part of the reign the compelling character of the Queen and the manifest destiny of England attracted them in sufficient numbers. Walsingham died on 6th April 1590 and his old colleague Burghley recognized that ‘the Queen’s Majesty and her realm and I’ had suffered a great loss, the more so because his kind of service was now hard to find. He died just at the point when Elizabeth’s system began to break down. Greed, fraud and ambition displaced the idealism of former years. The strength of Tudor government rested on the strength of the Tudor despots. Elizabeth was old and weary; the country was no longer in danger; the firm grip of the monarchy relaxed, discipline slipped, corruption thrived and a problematic inheritance gathered to dismay her weak successor.
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 15