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

by John Cooper

  To Protestants who had suffered intimidation and occasionally active persecution during the closing conservative years of Henry VIII’s reign, the liberation of the gospel under Edward was an act of divine providence. Here, at last, was a regime truly committed to reform. Preaching and print began to carry religious debate far beyond the clerical elite to which it had traditionally been confined. The gates of the kingdom of heaven, obscured for so long by ignorance and superstition, were being cleared of weeds and flung open. And yet there were many who struggled to make sense of the new teaching on salvation. A movement which identified itself as unshackling the word of God, giving it back to the poor and unlettered to whom it had been revealed in the time of Christ, also devalued the good works which had always been central to the spirituality of English men and women. Leading a good and charitable life was no longer enough; the Christian soldier must also have faith, defined not as broad belief but as a burning inner conviction, the faith of a convert on the model of St Paul. Only this could weigh against the intolerable burden of human sin on the day of judgement.

  Nowhere did this evangelical energy pulse so strongly as in London, where Walsingham spent the final part of Edward’s reign and possibly the first year or so of Mary’s. He is last recorded in Cambridge in September 1550, although the relevant college accounts for the following year are missing, so he may have been in residence for a few months longer. He is remembered at King’s in a portrait hanging in the hall, a version of the half-length attributed to the Dutch artist John de Critz in London’s National Portrait Gallery. According to the Latin inscription which hung above his grave in St Paul’s Cathedral, Walsingham completed his education with a pilgrimage to Europe to study its languages and laws. He was certainly a gifted linguist, especially in French and Italian. It was probably the death of his stepfather Sir John Carey that recalled him to London. In 1552 he enrolled at Gray’s Inn, where William Walsingham had been a reader and Cecil had also studied during the early 1540s. He may have been testing his vocation as a lawyer like his father, although this does not necessarily follow: having some learning in the law enabled a gentleman to defend his lands against the predatory litigation which increasingly occupied the Tudor courts. More than this, Gray’s Inn offered Walsingham a billet close to Westminster and Whitehall, the hub around which king and court, the privy council and Parliament all revolved.

  Walsingham was about twenty when he came to London. He found it in a ferment that was partly religious and partly social in character. Two years had passed since every altar in the capital had been ousted by a plain communion table. At St Paul’s the iron grates of the choir had been bricked up to prevent traditionalists from engaging in any unauthorised veneration of the sacrament. Preachers denounced the rampant avarice of the ruling class along with the more conventional sins of the city, its want of charity and its addictions to gambling and prostitution. Ordinary people were experiencing sudden personal conversions. An apprentice allegedly turned away from his former riotous living when he heard the lectures at his local church. Other responses to change were more troubling to the authorities. Chroniclers recorded the stories of those who had seen strange omens, three suns in the sky or ghostly soldiers hanging in the air. The atmosphere was fevered, literally so when a mysterious sickness began to strike down both the rich and the poor. Courtiers who contracted the sweat were dancing at nine o’clock and dead by eleven, hence its given name, ‘stop-gallant’. The price of bread rose to heights that had never before been seen, accelerated by bad harvests and the thousands pouring into London in search of work. With no modern economic theory to call on, the privy council blamed the crisis on the sloth of the mayor and aldermen. Preachers came to a different conclusion, detecting the punishing hand of God and calling on their congregations to repent.

  Gray’s Inn lay just outside the walls of the city of London in what John Stow called the ‘suburbs’ north of Holborn and Chancery Lane. The district was still almost rural, the houses and tenements of Gray’s Inn Lane giving way to open fields. Walsingham learned to debate cases within the strict conventions of the common law, familiarising himself with the ossified Latin and Norman French in which writs were sued and judgements delivered. He would also have spent time observing the courts at work in the Palace of Westminster, which had been abandoned as a royal residence early in Henry VIII’s reign. It must have seemed that he had entered a strangely medieval world. But life was not wholly limited to moots and learning by rote. The Inns of Court had a tradition of putting on Christmas plays satirising figures in authority (Cardinal Wolsey had been a target during Henry VIII’s reign) and commenting on contemporary affairs.

  Gray’s Inn had a chapel of its own, where barristers and students gathered to mark the opening and closing of the formal legal terms. Its stained-glass window of St Thomas Becket had dutifully been removed on the orders of Henry VIII. But Walsingham would also have been aware of the radically Protestant ‘Stranger Churches’, the Dutch and French exiles who were offered the same emergency hospitality in London that Martin Bucer had found in Cambridge. The Strangers were given financial support by Edward VI’s government, and the dissolved priory church of the Austin Friars in which to worship. Under their pastor John à Lasco, they created a miniature Zurich in England and prayed they would become a beacon of reform to their hosts. Walsingham’s sympathies with the Stranger community are revealed in the contributions he made to its upkeep following the St Bartholomew’s massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572.9

  Just when it seemed that English religion was being born again, calamity struck with a suddenness that left godly preachers reeling. In April 1552 King Edward contracted what he described in his diary as measles and smallpox. His health had apparently been robust until now, and he recovered to celebrate his fifteenth birthday in October. But the infection reactivated the tuberculosis which Edward must already have been carrying. His journal suddenly broke off in November 1552, implying that his condition had begun to deteriorate. By Christmas he was clearly ill, and by March 1553 the Venetian ambassador reckoned that he was dying. Edward knew it too, and began to draft a document known as the ‘Devise’ to alter the succession to the throne as ordained by Henry VIII.

  The next few months witnessed some of the most extraordinary political manoeuvring of the entire Tudor era. Determined that the Reformation should continue after his death, Edward overturned his father’s will and a 1544 Act of Parliament by asserting the claim to the throne of his Protestant Grey cousins. His two sisters were excluded from the succession: Mary on account of her Catholicism, Elizabeth for her illegitimacy – or, perhaps, the threat which her future marriage might pose to the cause of religious reform. His preferred solution was to name his cousin Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, as ‘governess’ of the realm pending the birth of a Protestant male heir, either to Frances herself or to one of her three daughters. But as he grew weaker, Edward changed his mind in favour of advancing the eldest daughter, Jane, to the throne in her own right. He made the alterations to the ‘Devise’ in his own hand, one of his last acts as king.

  Lady Jane Grey was Edward’s exact contemporary, and a confirmed Protestant. John Foxe records the story that she scorned to curtsy to the consecrated Host when walking through Princess Mary’s private chapel. In May 1553, just days before Edward decided that she would succeed him, Jane reluctantly married the son of his chief minister and de facto governor the Duke of Northumberland. The high politics of Edward’s reign were often self-serving, but even by the standards of the time this was a naked attempt by Northumberland to play the kingmaker and splice his own family into the royal line. The king’s own lawyers sensed treason, protesting that Edward was too young to make a will, but personal monarchy prevailed. Jane was proclaimed queen on 10 July 1553 to a muted and apprehensive London crowd. Nine days later the same crowds were ringing their bells and lighting bonfires for Mary’s accession. Northumberland was executed but Jane Grey spared for the moment, both courses of action
calculated to appeal to the people.

  The surge of support which brought Mary to the throne is sometimes quoted as being the only successful Tudor rebellion; the irony being that it was pro- rather than anti-Tudor. Many of the families who rallied to her standard at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk in the summer of 1553 were stalwarts of the old faith. Mary had defied the heresies of her brother’s reign, preserving the mass in her own household and flaunting her forbidden rosary beads when she rode through London in 1551. Images of the saints appeared in London windows following her accession, evidence that Catholics had been cowed but not converted by King Edward. But Mary enjoyed a broader base of support than this implies, at the start of her reign at least. The Protestant Earl of Sussex commanded her army of supporters in East Anglia. Sir Peter Carew, another committed reformer, saw to it that Mary rather than Jane was proclaimed in his native Devon. Ordinary seamen of the royal navy forced their officers to declare for Queen Mary. To all of these, Henry VIII’s chosen successor seemed preferable to a coup d’état engineered by the Duke of Northumberland.

  Within a few months, however, the situation had changed dramatically. In the spring of 1554 Mary faced a Protestant rebellion of three thousand men, defectors from the London militia among them, which marched from Kent as far as the gates of the city before their leader Sir Thomas Wyatt surrendered to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. His force was barely a tenth the size of the Pilgrimage of Grace that had mustered against the religious reforms of Henry VIII, but Wyatt was an experienced military commander, and he came closer to deposing a ruling monarch than any other rebel leader during the Tudor age. Rumours of a revolt had forced Wyatt to act before he was fully ready. Given a few weeks longer to prepare, the uprising in Kent would have been one thrust of a co-ordinated national rebellion. The Duke of Suffolk had planned to raise Leicestershire, while Carew was deputed to secure the ports of the south-west so that supplies could be run in by the French navy. The revolt claimed to be a protest against Mary’s marriage alliance with Philip of Spain, and this is probably what many of its foot soldiers believed. But its leaders were planning something closer to a revolution: the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, and the proclamation of a Protestant monarchy. Elizabeth could well have been executed in the fallout, although in the event it was Jane Grey who suffered, beheaded in the courtyard of the Tower whilst reciting the fifty-first Psalm.

  Where was Walsingham in all of this? If still at Gray’s Inn, he would have watched the royal commander the Earl of Pembroke deploy his cavalry along Holborn; he would also have seen the queen’s forces part to let Wyatt’s men through, apparently with the aim of attacking the rebels in the rear, although they may have been waiting to see which side the city itself would take. But there is another possibility. Walsingham had recently reached the age of twenty-one stipulated in his father’s will for coming into his inheritance. The manor of Foot’s Cray was now his. The adjacent estate at Scadbury had passed from Sir Edmund Walsingham to his eldest son Thomas, Francis’s first cousin. The Walsingham lands lay in a belt of parishes in north-western Kent that sent men to join Sir Thomas Wyatt’s army. Wyatt himself was well known to the Kentish gentry, having served as MP for the county in 1547 and sheriff in 1550–1. Members of Walsingham’s extended family were implicated in Wyatt’s revolt, just as they had supported Jane Grey. Did he join them? If Walsingham did get himself involved in treason in 1553–4, his decision to flee Queen Mary’s England may have been impelled by politics as much as faith.10

  The failure of Wyatt’s rebellion to depose Queen Mary faced Protestants with a bleak set of choices: to compromise, to resist, or to go into European exile. For the majority who could not afford to emigrate, the dilemma was starker still. The poor had to decide whether to return to the abomination of the mass or be forced beyond the walls of the Church. Excommunication carried with it the growing danger of imprisonment and a violent death. Paying lip-service to the Catholic religion while attempting to remain pure in heart was condemned by Protestant ministers as Nicodemism, named after the Pharisee who would worship Christ only under cover of darkness.

  In London, the sheer size of the city and the complexity of its parish structure offered possibilities for Protestants to gather at its margins. Secret conventicles met in a cloth-workers’ loft and a ship moored at Billingsgate, or took their Bible study groups out into the fields; a kind of internal exile. Their ways of coping were strikingly similar to the tactics that would be used by Catholics when they were driven underground by Walsingham and the forces of state surveillance during the 1570s and 80s. But this sort of zealotry was unusual, even in the capital. Looking back on Mary’s reign, John Foxe numbered the Londoners who had held fast to the faith in the dozens rather than the hundreds. Some form of accommodation with the new environment was far more common, among the political elite as well as the broader population. A Parliament which had voted for evangelical reform in the 1530s proved surprisingly willing to repeal it again once the private ownership of ex-monastic land had been guaranteed. Provincial government continued to function effectively, implying that gentry with Protestant sympathies put their loyalty to the crown before the requirements of their religion. William Cecil had been knighted for his services to Edward VI’s government, but still found himself able to stay in Mary’s England and accept the mass back into his household chapel.11

  Walsingham interpreted his scripture differently from Cecil. In autumn 1555, eighteen months after the failure of the Wyatt– Carew conspiracy and at a time of mounting persecution for Protestants, he arrived in the Swiss city of Basel accompanied by three of his Denny cousins. Henry, the eldest, was fifteen. He and his younger brother Anthony had previously matriculated at Pembroke College in Cambridge. They now registered at the university of Basel, together with Charles Denny and Walsingham himself. All four are described as nobilis in the university register, a mark of their superior social status. Walsingham very soon moved on to Padua in the Veneto region of Italy, leaving the Denny boys in the care of the English community, but he would return to Basel in 1556 and probably remained there for the rest of Mary’s reign. Late in life he recalled his time among the ‘true-hearted Swiss’ with an ageing man’s longing for the clarity of his youth.

  Walsingham and his cousins joined a band of exiles about a thousand strong, sprawled across the Protestant towns of the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederation: Frankfurt and Strasbourg, Geneva and Zurich. Like Walsingham and the Dennys, most were wealthy or well connected. Gentry families and clergymen ejected from the universities mixed with merchants who acted as bankers to the English exodus. John Calvin had published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Basel, and the city was still known for its radicalism twenty years later. Its English congregation elected elders and conducted services according to the reformed Book of Common Prayer. From 1557 they gathered in a rented former convent, the Clarakloster, which combined a dormitory with a chapel: an ersatz Cambridge college in which Foxe could work on his Acts and Monuments or ‘Book of Martyrs’. Three of Foxe’s books would be dedicated to Walsingham, reflecting the affinity between the two men.

  If Basel represented the Reformation to Walsingham, then Padua was an education in the Renaissance. In 1555–6 he was elected consiliarius or spokesman of the small English ‘nation’ of students at the city’s law university. Governed by the republic of Venice, Padua lay outside the imperial sphere of influence which had come to dominate Italy. It was a favourite destination for English travellers. Recent alumni of its universities included the diplomat Richard Morison and the political theorist Thomas Starkey as well as the Catholic humanist and activist Reginald Pole, condemned as a traitor by Henry VIII and invited back to England by Mary to become her Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury. Artists from across the Italian peninsula had studied in fifteenth-century Padua, and its churches and civic buildings were decorated with frescoes by Giotto and Mantegna. Its rich deposit of Catholic ic
onography makes Padua appear a curious place for Francis Walsingham to be, but in fact the city had a reputation as a refuge from the Inquisition. English consiliarii could avoid making any formal declaration of the Catholic faith, with the result that the intellectual traffic between England and Italy survived a Reformation which might otherwise have severed it.

  This may not have been Walsingham’s first visit to Padua. In 1554 a large number of English refugees of conscience had arrived in the city, including the three Denny brothers and Sir John Cheke, pardoned by Mary for supporting Jane Grey but shaken by his imprisonment in the Tower. It’s a fair guess that Walsingham was among this group of émigrés. Both Sir Anthony Denny and his wife Joan were dead, making him the obvious choice to act as protector to their sons in exile. Cheke’s presence in Padua reinforces the likelihood that Walsingham travelled from England to Italy in 1554 following the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion. Cheke passed his time lecturing the English community on the Orations of the Greek statesman Demosthenes. His students included Thomas Wilson, a fellow of King’s and a future privy councillor specialising in the interrogation of political prisoners, and maybe Walsingham too. Wilson would subsequently publish his own translation of the Orations, comparing the tyrant Philip of Macedon with Philip II of Spain. He and Walsingham would work in tandem as principal secretaries to Queen Elizabeth during the Anjou marriage negotiations in the late 1570s.