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

by John Cooper

  If this chronology is correct, we may imagine Walsingham following his former provost and other King’s men to Padua in 1554, taking his Denny cousins with him, before escorting his young charges to Basel. He then spent a year in Padua before a final period in Basel, or other travels unknown. If the details are uncertain, the conclusion is clear: Francis Walsingham was moulded by the intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy as well as the theology of Reformation Germany.

  At Gray’s Inn Walsingham had learned about the law as a practical tool of justice and government, debated between barristers and determined by precedent. In Padua he studied civil or Roman law, and the manner of teaching was very different. Lectures focused on the Corpus Iuris Civilis of the emperor Justinian and other canonical texts, glossed by medieval commentators. English law was common law, so becoming a ‘civilian’ was of little practical use in the English courts. But civil law still made an impression on the theory and practice of Tudor government. Its pan-European status made it a good training for diplomats like Walsingham and Wilson. More subtly, it taught that statecraft itself was a virtuous pursuit. Thomas Starkey had seen the civil law as the ideal preparation for what he called the ‘politic life’, and its ideas fed into the royal supremacy that Henry VIII declared over the Church of England. It quickened the calling to serve which Walsingham had inherited from his family, although the republican context of his studies in Padua is also significant in light of his later thinking about the state. Principal Secretary Walsingham is too often presented in one dimension, a dour Puritan motivated solely by fear and hatred. The contrast with this image is illustrated by two small domestic details of Walsingham’s time in Italy: he bought a quantity of wine and he invested in a clavichord, a keyboard instrument specially suited to composition.12

  Walsingham recalled his education many years later in a letter to one of his nephews about to travel abroad. It would be hard to find a clearer manifesto of the value of ancient learning to the study of statecraft, a central tenet of the Renaissance mindset. Walsingham prescribed a daily routine of prayer, scripture and translation: specifically an epistle of Tully (Cicero) into French, and out of French into Latin. History came next. ‘For that knowledge of histories is a very profitable study for the gentleman, read you the lives of Plutarch,’ he wrote, ‘also Titus Livius and all the Roman histories, as also all books of state both old and new’. The intention of all this reading was to ‘mark how matters have passed in government in those days’ in order ‘to apply them to these our times and states’. He should also keep his eyes open, study foreign fortifications, and observe the men of state around princes, captured by Walsingham in an architectural metaphor as ‘conduit pipes, though they themselves have no water’. In 1580 the soldier poet Philip Sidney penned a similar letter to his friend Edward Denny, another of Walsingham’s cousins, recommending the same core ingredients – ‘an hour to your Testament, and a piece of one to Tully’s Offices’ – but adding Machiavelli and Holinshed’s Chronicle to the mix.13

  By comparison with their countrymen scattered through Switzerland and Germany, the English émigrés in Venice and Padua were closely knit and politically active. Their individual biographies reveal a web of connections to the executed Duke of Northumberland and the Wyatt–Carew plotters. Several had estates in the west of England, where any Protestant liberating force was likely to land first. The grandest of the exiles was the Earl of Bedford, who had carried messages between Wyatt and Princess Elizabeth in 1554 and was now assembling a household of disenchanted Protestant aristocrats in Venice. The Cornishman Henry Killigrew had sailed to France to secure royal backing for Wyatt’s rebellion; his manor house commanding Falmouth harbour might prove crucial to any future attempt to oust Queen Mary. John Ashley, whose wife Kat was Elizabeth’s governess, was suspected of smuggling anti-Marian propaganda from Padua into England. The Venetian authorities encouraged any such political agitation against Mary and her husband Philip because it suited their anti-Spanish foreign policy.

  In January 1556 Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon, enrolled to study law at the university of Padua. Courtenay’s father the Marquis of Exeter had been a first cousin to Henry VIII, a gentleman of the privy chamber and a personal friend of the king. But as Henry became increasingly paranoid in his later years, so Exeter’s Yorkist lineage had come to tell against him. His execution on a fabricated charge of treason in 1538 left his son as one of very few remaining noblemen with royal blood in his veins. Thomas Wyatt had hoped for a marriage between Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay, a Protestant and English regime as opposed to a Catholic and largely Spanish one. Courtenay survived the furore by turning informer on his co-conspirators, yet he remained obsessed by his lineage and alive to any initiative that might make him a king consort. The Venetian ambassador in England encouraged Courtenay’s pretensions to power in 1554, supplying Wyatt with artillery from a ship in the Thames. Now Venice itself became the focus of Protestant plotting. The adventurer Henry Dudley wanted to lead a French invasion of Devon and Cornwall, seizing Exeter as a bridgehead before marching on to London. Courtenay got as far as selling land to pay for men and supplies, but he died in suspicious circumstances in September 1556; murdered by poison, it has been suggested, on the orders of Philip of Spain. Francis Walsingham was the English consiliarius during Courtenay’s time in Padua. He also seems to have been close to the Earl of Bedford, since he was elected to Parliament early in Elizabeth’s reign to represent towns within Bedford’s gift. Beyond these bare facts, his role can only be guessed at. But whether as observer or agent, Walsingham was apprenticed in Padua into a world of subversion and conspiracy.14

  How much ought we to read into the fact that Walsingham chose exile during Mary’s reign, while William Cecil made his peace with the new regime? Cecil’s behaviour was not quite the dignified retreat that might be expected of a man who had been a royal secretary and privy councillor during the most radical phase of Edward VI’s Reformation. He positioned himself for two possible futures, serving Queen Mary on two diplomatic missions but also acting as steward of Princess Elizabeth’s lands. His new year’s gift of gold to the queen in 1555 hints that he was open to a place in government, and he developed an unlikely friendship with Cardinal Pole, the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation in England. While Walsingham was sharing the Clarakloster with John Foxe, Cecil dined with Pole and gratefully accepted the stewardship of his manor of Wimbledon.

  Cecil was a dozen years older than Walsingham, with a lot more to lose by going into exile. He was already an experienced administrator, with links to Elizabeth which could bear fruit if Philip and Mary failed to produce an heir. He was married, with a young family and a growing portfolio of property to defend. Walsingham’s public life had barely begun; compared to Cecil, he had little to detain him in England. The different situations of the two men make their decisions easier to understand. But character must also have come into it. Walsingham wasn’t forced into exile, unlike the married Protestant ministers or the London printers who lost their livelihoods under the new administration. He could have trodden the broad path of conformity and compromise, making the most of his father’s reputation in the law and the city or cashing in his Cambridge connections to find a position in royal service. He could have copied his cousin Thomas Walsingham, who attended Cardinal Pole as he travelled through Kent on his triumphal return to England in November 1554. Instead he chose the narrow path, banishing himself in Basel among the theology students whose company he had shared at university. Cecil and Walsingham had many aspects of their outlook in common, but their experience of Mary’s reign creates a sharp divide between them: one with a politician’s pragmatism, the other unwilling to be a reed bending before the wind.15

  In the spring of 1555, grim news began to reach the exiles about their co-religionists back home. The re-Catholicisation of England had begun positively enough, recovering and repairing devotional art, replacing altars and images, and celebrating mass with all the veneration that could
be mustered. Money which might have restored the monasteries went instead to the universities and new seminaries to train up a better class of clergy. Dissidents were to be won over by education and preaching, and there was talk of a Catholic Bible in the English language. Many people must have welcomed the certainty of ceremony. With the return of the mass, however, came the means to police it. In December 1554 Parliament voted to resurrect the medieval heresy laws which Edward VI had repealed. Since church courts could not carry out a sentence of death, the condemned were handed back to the crown for execution, tainting the queen with the persecution which soon followed. The penalty for heresy was to be burned alive: a foretaste of the fires of hell but also a total destruction of the body, leaving nothing to answer Christ’s call on the day of resurrection.

  The incineration of heresy began with the Bible translator John Rogers at Smithfield in early February 1555. Executions in Gloucester and Suffolk soon signalled that Protestants in the provinces had as much to fear as those in the capital. Lichfield, Chester, Exeter and Guernsey would all witness public burnings over the next three and a half years. Two hundred and eighty-four people were executed in all, the last five of them at Canterbury only days before Mary’s death. Another thirty died in prison of trauma or neglect.

  The burnings swiftly accrued their own world of ritual. Protestants tried to die with fortitude, singing psalms and reassuring each other of the better world to come: they were convinced there was no purgatory to fear. The condemned kissed the stake or prostrated themselves in prayer before it, echoing the traditional Good Friday ceremony of creeping to the cross. Their supporters made flimsy white shrouds for them to wear, a reference to the army of martyrs in the Book of Revelation but also grimly practical: thick clothes prolonged the agony in the flames. The Kentish martyr Christopher Wade dipped himself in pitch and cried out to the crowd to beware the Whore of Babylon before he burned with his hands held to heaven. Watching him die was the nine-year-old Richard Fletcher, who would preach at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay in 1587. While relic-hunters scrabbled in the ashes for fragments of burnt bone, the Church unloosed a fusillade of sermons and print. Miles Hogarde’s The Displaying of the Protestants mocked the willingness of heretics to die in a ‘fool’s paradise’. Catholic spectators at Wade’s execution pelted him with wooden faggots when he tried to shout down the chaplain preaching next to his pyre.

  Accompanying the executions was an extraordinary campaign of surveillance and coercion. Eamon Duffy has drawn attention to the ‘microscopic’ scrutiny to which ordinary people were subjected during Mary’s reign. Adoration of the body of Christ during mass was non-negotiable. Congregations were monitored for anyone looking away during the elevation of the Host or choosing to sit behind a pillar. A magistrate from Kent known as ‘Justice Nine-Holes’ bored through the restored wooden rood-loft so he could spy on the people of his parish. Weekly communion and Lenten confessions could not be evaded. Women who chose not to receive the sacrament before childbirth were reported as suspect. Men known to have good voices in Edward VI’s reign were forced to join the church choir. Anyone who refused the traditional rites of the Church on their deathbed was denied Christian burial. In Queen Mary’s England, the beauty of holiness was restored by force.

  The holocaust reached its height in London. Sixty-five people were burned in or close to the capital, and many more in the wider diocese of London. Eighteen men and women went to their deaths in just six weeks in the spring of 1556. One of them was blind, another disabled. At a mass burning at Stratford-le-Bow only the men were tied to stakes, leaving the women loose among the flames. The Bishop of London was Edmund Bonner, more a lawyer than a preacher and prone to outbursts of violent anger. Four years’ imprisonment in the Marshalsea prison in Edward’s reign had given him a searing sense of grievance, and he presided over the excommunication of heretics in his diocese with meticulous attention to detail. Enraged by the stoicism of a Protestant weaver from Shoreditch, Bonner seized his hand and held it over a candle until the flesh peeled. To Foxe he was Bloody Bonner, ‘persecutor of the light and a child of darkness’.

  Historians have tried to deal with these events by putting them in context. They point out that both Protestants and Catholics accepted that burning was a suitable death for a heretic. They note the relative insignificance of the English statistics on a European scale of persecution. But if the idea of burning for heresy was less shocking than we might think, the identity of the victims sent shudders of horror through a society which truly valued the ties of community and neighbourliness. Senior clergy like Bishop John Hooper and Archbishop Cranmer might have been regarded as legitimate targets, although even this cannot be assumed. The authorities were clearly nervous about public support for Hooper, and hooded him during his final journey from London to Gloucester. But high-profile heretics were followed to the stake by a procession of lesser martyrs: popular preachers, tanners and fullers too poor to escape into exile, the elderly, those too young to have experienced pre-Reformation Catholicism. Fifty-six of them were women. The campaign to eradicate false doctrine had strayed far beyond its initial mandate from Queen Mary to ‘do justice to such as by learning would deceive the simple’.16

  Spurred on by the news from England, a handful of the English émigrés began to question the doctrine that monarchs were the Lord’s anointed. These radical thinkers were a minority voice even within the community of exiles, and they had little enough impact at the time. The Shorte Treatise of Politike Power by the former Bishop of Winchester John Ponet summoned an array of biblical and historical examples to argue that it was lawful to depose a tyrant, but its publication in 1556 came too late to influence the actions of Thomas Wyatt or Peter Carew. John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women argued passionately that the idea of a woman ruling over a nation was ‘repugnant to nature’ and ‘the subversion of good order’. But the book appeared in 1558, the year of Mary’s death. The significance of these texts was only truly felt in Elizabeth’s reign, when this subversive strand of English political thought was supplemented by the writings of Dutch and French Protestants; men close to Francis Walsingham. His exile in Basel and Padua provided Walsingham with more than a taste of the Reformation and Renaissance, more even than an apprenticeship in spycraft and conspiracy. It altered his perception of monarchy itself, and ensured that his relationship with Queen Elizabeth would never be as simple as that of mistress and servant.17

  NOTES

  1 Walsingham family, London and Kent: E. A. Webb, G. W. Miller and J. Beckwith, The History of Chislehurst: Its Church, Manors, and Parish (London, 1899), 30–6, 111–32; Karl Stählin, Die Walsinghams bis zur Mitte des 16 Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1905); William B. Robison, ‘Sir Edmund Walsingham’ and Reavley Gair, ‘Sir Thomas Walsingham’ in Oxford DNB; Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925), I, 1–13; Joseph Foster, Register of Admissions to Gray’s Inn (London, 1889), 2. Baptismal rite: Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), 280–1. Henry VIII jewel: PRO, PROB 11/42B, fol. 137v. Aldermanbury: PRO, PROB 11/25, fol. 70v; John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), under ‘Cripplegate warde’.

  2 Key of all England: John Chandler, John Leland’s Itinerary (Stroud, 1993), 245. Society and church in Kent: Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution (Hassocks, 1977), 3–23; Michael Zell, ‘The Coming of Religious Reform’, in Michael Zell (ed.), Early Modern Kent 1540–1640 (Woodbridge, 2000), 177–206; Diane Watt, ‘Elizabeth Barton’ in Oxford DNB.

  3 Act of Appeals: Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–28), III, 427. Rebellion of youth: Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, PP 95 (1982), 37–67. Rood of Boxley: Zell, ‘Religious Reform’, 199.

  4 William Walsingham’s will: PRO, PROB 11/25, fol. 70v. Sir John Carey: Read, Walsingham, I, 13–14.
Hunsdon: Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England (New Haven and London, 1993), 49, 80–1.

  5 Cambridge and King’s: King’s College, Cambridge Archive Centre, KCAR 4/1/6 commons book 1549–50, KCAR 4/1/1 mundum book 1547–53; Read, Walsingham, I, 14–16; D. R. Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, volume I: to 1546 (Cambridge, 1988), 69–71, 228 and chapter 13; Victor Morgan, A History of the University of Cambridge, volume II: 1546–1750 (Cambridge, 2004), 16–17, 119–21.

  6 Chapel glass: H. G. Wayment, The Windows of King’s College Chapel Cambridge (London, 1972), 1–6, 55–6.

  7 Provosts of King’s: Malcolm Kitch, ‘George Day’ and Alan Bryson, ‘Sir John Cheke’ in Oxford DNB. Bucer: Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, North Carolina, 1980), 58–60. Gardiner: C. H. Cooper and T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858), I, 515. Cheke and Cecil: Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London, 2008), 17–21.

  8 King Edward and the Reformation: Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), 14–41, 102; Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480–1642 (London, 2003), 58–85.

  9 Portraits: R. Ormond and M. Rogers (eds), Dictionary of British Portraiture (London, 1979), I, 146; NPG 1704, 1807. St Paul’s epitaph: Henry Holland, Monumenta Sepulchraria Sancti Pauli (1614), STC 13583.5 [17–19]; Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses, II, 89–90. Gray’s Inn: Foster, Gray’s Inn, 22; Stow, Survey of London, under ‘The suburbes without the walles’; Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), 33–5. Religion in London: Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), chapters 10–12; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), 272.