The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I

by John Cooper

  ‘Kent is the key of all England’, wrote the traveller and antiquary John Leland in the 1530s. Henry VIII had spent much of his childhood at Eltham Palace, four miles from Foot’s Cray. The Walsingham lands lay in a belt of arable farms and small estates that sent their wheat to the ever-expanding city of London. Livestock was raised on the salt marshes of the nearby Thames estuary. Timber and cloth travelled from the forests of the Weald, where an embryonic iron industry met the demand for cannon to arm Henry VIII’s navy. To the east the road ran towards the River Medway at Rochester and onward to Canterbury, the ecclesiastical capital of England.

  Kent was a landscape of ancient settlement, closely governed and prosperous. But its society was also experiencing some unsettling changes under the Tudors. Wealth was becoming concentrated in the hands of relatively few gentlemen and yeomen farmers, causing friction within a social order which was supposed to be fixed and harmonious. Population was rising fast, while people were increasingly on the move in search of work. As a justice of the peace for Kent and under-sheriff of London, Francis Walsingham’s father was faced with the consequences of this demographic revolution in the form of growing problems of vagabondage and crime. At its most acute, economic discontent began to shade into politics. Kentish cloth-workers refused to pay a forced loan to fund the king’s wars in France, following a tradition of resistance to unjust taxation which stretched back past Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450 to memories of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt.

  The Church was traditionally a force for stability in turbulent times. Sermons and prayerbooks taught that people should submit to adversity and focus on the life of the world to come. But this bedrock was also shifting in response to events in Lutheran Germany, and its trade links with Europe meant that Kent was one of the first English counties to feel the tremors. In 1530 a joiner named Thomas Hitton was caught importing heretical books at Gravesend and burned at the stake on the orders of Bishop Fisher. Two priests and a carpenter who criticised devotional images and praised the works of Martin Luther were faced with a stark choice, to recant or to die for heresy. Kent had a history of religious radicalism to match its tradition of rebellion. The secretive community of the Lollards, who had been reading an English Bible and criticising the doctrine of purgatory for a hundred years, was strong in Maidstone and the Weald. But figures like Hitton represented the advance guard of a new movement, inspired by Lutheran ideas about the priesthood of all believers and justification by faith; and unlike the Lollards, its converts were determined to evangelise.

  Disturbed by the spread of heresy in their midst, Catholics received comfort from an unlikely source. Elizabeth Barton was working as a serving maid when her graphic visions of heaven and the deadly sins first brought her to the notice of the authorities. An investigation into the ‘holy maid of Kent’ pronounced her to be orthodox, and she subsequently took her vows as a Benedictine nun in Canterbury. But as the movement to break from Rome gathered pace, Barton’s revelations acquired a sharply political edge. Having spoken in the pope’s defence and called for the burning of Protestant books, she told the king that he would not survive a month on the throne if he divorced Katherine of Aragon. Henry was outraged, and put her under Sir Edmund Walsingham’s guard in the Tower. She was hanged and beheaded for treason at Tyburn in 1534, alongside the Canterbury monks who had promoted her as a prophetess.2

  Francis Walsingham was born during this watershed of the English Reformation. The king’s personal dislike of Luther meant that it was not until the early 1530s that an official campaign got under way; and reform, when it came, was driven by Henry’s need to settle the succession rather than any commitment to Protestant theology. In 1533 the Act of Appeals declared that ‘this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king’. A thousand-year allegiance to the papacy was not so much severed as declared to have been an illusion. The English Church was subject to kings rather than foreign potentates, just as it had been before the pope had usurped the rightful power of the crown. Printed for proclamation to the king’s subjects, the Act unleashed a barrage of positive and negative propaganda. Henry VIII was hailed as the lion of Judah and Christ’s lieutenant on earth, while the pope was vilified as the Antichrist. The royal supremacy over the Church was preached in every parish, taught in every school and catechism class. Heads of household had to swear an oath to uphold it.

  Walsingham belonged to a generation of English men and women who had never known how to pray for the pope. Viewed from their perspective, the Reformation seemed like a rebellion of young people against their elders. Henry VIII’s erratic relationship with religious reform left many causes for them to fight. Church services were still largely in Latin, incomprehensible to most of the people attending them. The king would not permit any dilution of the traditional teaching on the mass, a reworking of Christ’s sacrifice in which bread and wine were miraculously transformed into body and blood. Chantry priests were still singing for the souls of the departed in purgatory. And yet the Bible was openly preached in English from 1539, while parish churches were being cleared of their images of the saints. Targets of the iconoclasm in Kent included the ‘rood of grace’ at Boxley Abbey, whose moving eyes and lips were exposed as a fraud in the market-place at Maidstone, and the sumptuous shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Catholicism was becoming tainted with superstition and trickery. It was also increasingly derided as foreign, unpatriotic, ‘Roman’. Protestant scholars such as John Leland and John Bale searched the historical record for proof of England’s special place within Christendom. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign this nascent sense of nationhood would peak in the belief that the English were an elect people, a new Israel en route for the promised land. It was a conviction which Walsingham would share.3

  William Walsingham died in 1534, the year that saw Henry VIII proclaimed as supreme head of the Church of England and the holy maid of Kent carted to execution. Francis, his only son, was no more than three years old. William signed himself ‘esquire’ in his will, as did his own father James Walsingham. Sixteenth-century society divided itself up into ranks or orders marked out by forms of address, the order of precedence in church, even the cut and colour of their clothing. ‘Esquire’ places Francis Walsingham’s father and grandfather among the lesser gentry. They owned land and displayed a coat of arms, became magistrates and sat on the commissions that monitored London’s drinking water, but remained below the first tier of families which sent knights of the shire to Parliament and exchanged gifts with the king at new year. As for his soul, William committed it ‘to Almighty God our blessed Lady Saint Mary and to all the holy company of heaven’. His work as under-sheriff would have required him to keep a watchful eye for heresy within his London jurisdiction. If he had any Lutheran leanings of his own, he kept them to himself.

  Having provided for the marriage of his five daughters, William left the rest of his property to Joyce, ‘my well-beloved wife’, during his son’s minority. Sixteenth-century legal documents are not known for their displays of emotion, so it seems that Francis’s parents had developed a real affection for each other, perhaps had even married for love. Joyce was named as an executor, together with Sir Edmund Walsingham and one of William’s fellow under-sheriffs. His death left Joyce a widow at twenty-seven, a property-owner with contacts at court and young enough to have more children. Within a couple of years she had married again. Her new husband was the courtier Sir John Carey, brother to the William Carey whose wife Mary Boleyn (the ‘other’ Boleyn girl) was Henry VIII’s mistress for a time in the early 1520s. This proved to be another useful political connection. William and Mary’s son Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, was Walsingham’s near contemporary and a cousin (or, according to gossip, half-brother) to Queen Elizabeth.

  Francis very probably went to live with his mother and stepfather at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, a royal manor where Sir John was bailiff. Princesses Mary and Elizabeth and Prince Edward all sp
ent time there in the 1530s and 40s, and Henry VIII is also known to have visited. In 1546 Edward had his portrait painted at Hunsdon, the gables and tall Tudor chimneys of the house visible through an open window behind the prince. Francis may also have spent time on Sir Anthony Denny’s estates nearby, or with his grandfather at Scadbury. Frustratingly, nothing else is known about his childhood. Any private papers in the Walsingham archive were weeded out from the records of state after his death, taking much of his personal life with them. But assuming that Joyce Walsingham shared her brother Anthony’s reformed religion, it is fair to speculate that she was the source of the Protestantism that defined Francis’s world-view and career.4

  The first formal record of Walsingham’s education is his admission to King’s College, Cambridge early in Edward VI’s reign. The college accounts reveal that he was paying quarterly bills for food and lodging by June 1548. He matriculated as a member of the university in November and remained in residence for at least two years, leaving sometime in 1550–1. There is no evidence that he took a degree, although this was not unusual for someone of his rank: formal qualifications were mainly for those seeking a career in the Church. His background allowed Walsingham to claim the status of a fellow commoner, giving him social privileges over poorer scholars in chapel and hall. But conditions at King’s would still have been spartan, closer to the life of a medieval monk than to the luxurious indolence enjoyed by later generations of gentleman students.

  The college of Walsingham’s day was cramped and cold, one small court huddled behind a fortified gatehouse. Land levelled a century earlier for a great complex of quadrangles remained empty and unbuilt on. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge still moved to the rhythms of the recently dissolved monasteries, private study and prayer interspersed with lectures in Latin and Greek. Student rooms were fireless, windows shuttered rather than glazed. Discipline at King’s could be enforced by flogging and the stocks. But the college also provided security and fellowship, a combination of austerity and privilege in which a sense of communal identity could take deep root. Walsingham’s time at Cambridge placed him among a body of five or six hundred men, many of whom would rise to become the governors, scholars and churchmen of Elizabeth’s reign. It also put him at the fulcrum of England’s spiritual renewal.

  Cambridge students had been among the first to imbibe the new religious ideas coming in from the European continent. Opposite King’s College lay the White Horse inn or ‘little Germany’, where Lutheran study groups had gathered in the 1520s. Officially the university took a strong stand against heresy. Under the chancellorship of John Fisher, graduates were required to repudiate the errors of Luther and John Wyclif and to affirm their belief in Catholic doctrine. But when Fisher was succeeded by Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, the orthodoxy changed dramatically. Royal injunctions abolished the teaching of canon law and revised the theology curriculum. The officers of the colleges and the university were ordered to surrender their ‘papistical muniments’ to the crown. King’s advertised its loyalty by paying to have the injunctions painted on a board, while the whole university was required to attend mass in Great St Mary’s to pray for King Henry VIII. There was to be no room for doubt about the new ordering of Church and state. The charter of Trinity College, drawn up a month before Henry’s death, specified the fight against the pope as part of its mission.5

  Walsingham’s arrival at King’s in the spring of 1548 coincided with two major events in the life of the college. The first was the completion of the stunning sequence of stained glass that had been gradually installed in the chapel over the previous thirty years. The construction of King’s Chapel had begun as a monument to Henry VI and the house of Lancaster, but its decoration was utterly Tudor. A pageant of royal iconography framed the lives of the Virgin and Christ that were celebrated in the glass: union roses, the royal arms, Prince Edward’s fleur-de-lis, the badges of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Parr. The result rivalled the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey as a showcase of dynastic symbolism. One window dating from the 1520s pays homage to Henry VIII as Solomon receiving the tribute of the Queen of Sheba, a theme which was also taken up by the court painter Hans Holbein. With the break from Rome the image acquired a more specific resonance, the emperor who built a new temple in which his people could worship.6

  The second event was the resignation of the provost of the college, George Day, and his replacement by John Cheke. They were similar men in some ways: Day a royal chaplain and frequently at court, Cheke a tutor to the royal children. Both were devotees of classical Greek, and indeed Cheke had been Day’s pupil at St John’s College. But the Renaissance humanism which they shared led them in different directions. Day supported the royal supremacy over the Church while remaining a conservative in terms of doctrine. Henry VIII approved of his loyalty and appointed him Bishop of Chichester. But when Henry was succeeded by Edward VI, the fellows of King’s took advantage of the altered atmosphere to purge the Catholic practice of private masses from their college chapel. Day promptly resigned as provost. He was deprived of his bishopric three years later for refusing to replace altars with the wooden tables decreed by the new Protestant rite.

  The new head of King’s was a scholar rather than a clergyman. As a junior fellow at St John’s, Cheke had attracted a circle of students devoted to the study of Greek. They set themselves apart by speaking the language in the style set out by the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam. In the modern world, where knowledge of classical Greek has faded almost beyond recovery, it is difficult to comprehend why such a dry academic question should provoke the controversy that followed. Stephen Gardiner, who was appointed chancellor of Cambridge following Cromwell’s execution in 1540, ordered harsh punishments for anyone using the Erasmian rather than the medieval pronunciation. Erasmus was no Protestant; but by opening up the question of biblical translation, his Greek New Testament made a breach in the old Church through which the floodwaters were cascading by the 1540s. Cheke backed down and was appointed tutor to Prince Edward in 1544, devising a curriculum based on languages, scripture and history. He continued in post after 1547, weaning the young king onto Cicero, rhetoric and finally Greek.

  Cheke’s duties kept him often at court, but his impact on Walsingham’s Cambridge was profound. In 1549 he conducted a visitation of the university to test its compliance with Protestantism and refashion its teaching along humanist lines. He was appointed Lady Margaret professor of divinity the same year. His counterpart as regius professor was the eminent German theologian Martin Bucer, whose attempts to find consensus between the reformed churches of Europe may have moulded Walsingham’s own belief in Protestant unity in face of a common Catholic enemy. Bucer lectured to large crowds on St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and contributed revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. When he died in 1551, his funeral procession ran to three thousand. Walsingham’s tutor Thomas Gardiner wrote verses mourning his death. So complete was Bucer’s identification with Protestantism that his bones were exhumed in Mary’s reign and burned in a posthumous attempt to obliterate his heresy.

  Walsingham drank deeply from this wellspring of reform. Cambridge refined the faith which his mother had taught him, while exposure to Bucer’s teachings put him in touch with the European Reformation. An education in the classics induced another powerful impulse in Walsingham and his contemporaries, to enter the service of crown and state. Cheke’s collaborator in Greek philology was Thomas Smith, professor of civil law, who was ambassador to France in the 1560s and worked alongside Walsingham as senior principal secretary between 1572 and his death in 1577. Cheke and Smith both taught Roger Ascham, who devised a programme of Christian and classical studies for Princess Elizabeth and was appointed her Latin secretary when she became queen. The most famous of Cheke’s pupils was William Cecil, twelve years Walsingham’s senior, who became an accomplished classicist and married Cheke’s sister Mary. Cecil advanced to be the greatest statesman of his generation, lo
rd treasurer and Baron of Burghley. For twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign, the government of England would depend on the ability of Cecil and Walsingham to co-operate.7

  The stained glass of King’s College Chapel survived the iconoclasm of both the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries and can still be seen more or less as Walsingham knew it, a final flourish of sacred Catholic art in England. Its depictions of the assumption and coronation of the Virgin Mary became controversial almost as soon as they were installed but were saved, ironically enough, by the Tudor royal imagery threaded through them. Beyond the sheltering walls of King’s, Edward VI and his governors led the attack on the sin of idolatry. The compromise between tradition and reform which had held Church and state together during Henry VIII’s last decade was swiftly abandoned by the council ruling in the young king’s name. Churchwardens were ordered to deface or destroy all the devotional images that had survived the purges of the 1530s. Four thousand chantries and colleges singing masses for the dead were dissolved. Altars were removed and priests given permission to marry. The new English prayer book stipulated communion in both bread and wine and left out the symbolic elevation of the Host, provoking riots in several parts of the country and a full-scale rebellion in Cornwall and Devon. Further reforms in 1552 converted the Eucharist into an act of commemoration, and ended the practice of anointing the baptised and the dying. As the Protestant propagandist Richard Morison recalled during Mary’s reign, ‘The greater change was never wrought in so short space in any country since the world was’.

  The king’s own role in this is hard to quantify. There was no regency; Edward ruled. But he was also subject to the guidance of men like Walsingham’s uncle Anthony Denny. What evidence there is suggests a boy who internalised everything that Cheke and his other tutors could teach him. When he was eleven, Edward collected scriptural passages on the subjects of idolatry and justification by faith and translated them into French as a gift for his uncle the Duke of Somerset. Another exercise was to compose a treatise on the papal supremacy. Deploying arguments for and against in typical humanist fashion, Edward came to the conclusion that the pope was a tyrant, ‘the true son of the devil’ and an Antichrist on earth. He also kept a notebook of the numerous sermons he heard at court. The contrast with his father, who had transacted royal business whilst listening to mass, must have been obvious.8