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

by John Cooper

  Walsingham did not mourn for long. In 1566 he married again, and this time it would last until his own death twenty-four years later. Ursula St Barbe was the daughter of a Somerset gentleman. Her first husband Sir Richard Worseley had been a landowner in the Isle of Wight, and Ursula brought the estates of Carisbrooke Priory and a house at Appuldurcombe as her dowry. Wight was burned by a French raiding party in 1545 and the Worseley house seems to have been fortified, since Ursula’s two sons were killed there by an explosion of gunpowder soon after their mother’s remarriage. A legal dispute over rights to the property grumbled on for several years. Walsingham’s earliest surviving letter is a request to a friend for help in wooing Ursula ‘from her resolution of sole life’, and the couple continued to correspond when royal service kept them apart. Mary, the younger of their two daughters, died as a child in 1580. But Frances, named after her father, would wed two of the brightest-burning courtiers of the Elizabethan age: the poet Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586 fighting the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, and then the doomed royal favourite the Earl of Essex.

  Ursula Walsingham’s presence can best be detected in the ceremonial life of the court. She followed her husband to Paris when he was made ambassador, and was entertained by the French royal family in April 1571. As Francis rose in status, so Ursula took her part in the rituals of gift exchange which surrounded Queen Elizabeth. At new year 1579–80 she presented the queen with a pair of gloves set with gold buttons: an astute choice, since Elizabeth was known to be deeply proud of her hands. The following year she gave a jewel in the form of a scorpion, wrought in agate and gold with sparks of diamond and ruby. In 1581 Ursula took custody of a valuable diamond belonging to the Portuguese royal pretender Don Antonio, his pledge of support for a planned attack on Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. Walsingham described her in his will as ‘my most well beloved wife’, ‘my most kind and loving wife’. She would outlive him by twelve years, her own will listing a resident minister among her numerous other servants. Two cooks were left an annuity of £3 each while a waiting-woman, Alice Poole, received a generous £50. Other bequests were made to the minister and the poor of the parish of Barnes, indicative of her godly faith. A portrait once thought to be Dame Ursula and datable to 1583, depicting a strong-featured woman in ruff and cap with a chain around her neck, has now been demoted to an ‘unknown woman’ by the National Portrait Gallery.7

  Ursula’s main occupation was running the household, initially at Parkbury and from 1579 at Barn Elms on the south bank of the Thames. Robert Beale’s house was in Barnes, and Richmond Palace was close by. So was the company of the scholar and astrologer Dr John Dee, and his magnificent library, at Mortlake. From his stair down to the river Walsingham could be rowed with the ebbing tide to Westminster and onwards to Elizabeth’s other great palace at Greenwich. The queen visited Barn Elms several times during the 1580s, the movement of the court marked by church bells ringing at Lambeth. She is also known to have stayed at another of Walsingham’s houses, Odiham in Hampshire. In November 1578 Walsingham invited the Earls of Leicester and Warwick for ‘a Friday night’s drinking after the ancient and catholic order’ at Odiham, a rare example of his sardonic sense of humour.

  A survey taken in 1589 records sixty-eight horses stabled at Barn Elms, implying that this was the headquarters of Walsingham’s formidable postal system. Little else is known about the house, which was demolished long ago. But there is a tantalising clue as to how it once looked. A three-quarter-length portrait traditionally thought to be of Francis Walsingham includes a fashionable gabled house set in a formal garden, visible through an open window and clearly the property of the sitter. The artist can only be guessed at, and in recent years the date has also been challenged. Roy Strong argues for the 1620s on the basis of the similarity of the architecture to the prodigy houses built by ambitious courtiers during the reign of James I. And yet the face is unnervingly similar to the authenticated portraits of Walsingham: the angular features and narrow nose, the dark hair beginning to recede, the same cut of moustache and beard. The ruff and embroidered doublet and cuffs are more elaborate than in other portraits, but the black garb clearly denotes a senior man of government rather than a country gentleman. The modest size of the property seems right for a principal secretary whose income was nothing like that of William Cecil, who was capable of building on the grandest scale at Theobalds and Burghley. Conyers Read evidently believed in the portrait, which forms the frontispiece to his 1925 three-volume biography of Walsingham.

  If this is Francis Walsingham and his house on the Thames, then Barn Elms was modelled on strict Renaissance principles of order and symmetry. Dutch gables would still have been a novelty in Elizabeth’s reign, but they had begun to appear on a number of other gentry houses. Walsingham was a strong supporter of the Dutch revolt against the Habsburgs, and it is conceivable that this is reflected in his choice of architectural style. The central tower suggests a banqueting house of the sort often found in Elizabethan mansions, a place for host and guests to withdraw to dessert. The garden is accessed by a grand doorway flanked by classical columns, a tunnelled arbour with domed pavilions giving way to flower beds and lines of fruit trees. Judging by the forty-odd books dedicated to Walsingham, his library at Barn Elms included works of philosophy, exploration and music as well as religion. John Cosyn’s Music of Six and Five Parts was a collection of psalm settings ‘for the private use and comfort of the godly’. But the mixed consort pieces ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’s good morrow’ and ‘The Lady Walsingham’s conceits’, presented by the gifted young lute-player Daniel Bacheler, brought a lighter tone to their life together.8

  A gentleman with court connections and an education in the Renaissance, well-travelled, skilled in languages and the law: such was Francis Walsingham on the eve of his entry into state service. If he did assist Sir Nicholas Throckmorton during his embassies to Scotland in the later 1560s, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tentatively suggests, then it went unrecorded. Walsingham at this point seems barely distinguishable from a host of other gentlemen in the Commons or on the magistrates’ bench, engaging each other in litigation over land and dabbling in the commercial opportunities offered by the widening arc of English trade. In fact, he was more alert than he appeared. Walsingham’s experience of exile had sharpened his senses, attuning him to the heartbeat of the global Protestant cause. When he accepted Secretary Cecil’s request to do some undercover work for the crown, it was to meet a host of threats which would bring England to the brink of invasion and justify the execution of an anointed queen.

  Mary Stuart had a surprisingly strong claim to the kingdom of England. Her father James V, whose death in 1542 catapulted Mary to the Scottish throne at only six days old, was the son of Henry VIII’s older sister Margaret. This meant that both Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots were direct descendants of Henry VII, Elizabeth as his granddaughter and Mary his great-granddaughter. Mary’s lineage made her an enticing prospect to the English. A determined effort was mounted in the 1540s to win her as a bride for Prince Edward, initially by diplomacy, and when that failed by the rougher wooing of an English invasion. But devastating defeats on the battlefield had the opposite effect from the one intended, driving the Scottish crown into a renewal of its alliance with England’s oldest enemy. Mary was betrothed to the dauphin Francis and taken to France to be educated, crushing English hopes of creating a united kingdom on their own terms. They were married at Notre-Dame in 1558, Mary’s uncle the Duke of Guise acting as master of ceremonies. Francis was proclaimed king the following year.

  Under different circumstances Mary’s descent from Henry Tudor would have amounted to little more than a diplomatic flourish, the English royal arms emblazoned provocatively on her plates and furniture during her eighteen-month reign as Queen of France. But when Mary returned to Scotland following Francis’s premature death, several factors came into play which made her seem much less distant from the crown of England.
The first of these was the absence of male children in the royal family tree. Henry VIII had tried to deny it, but the descendants of his sister Margaret Tudor were senior in line to those of his younger sister Mary as represented by Lady Jane Grey. Then there was the fallout from the break from Rome and the Reformation. Catholics could not accept the legitimacy of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, nor of the child that had resulted from it. Bizarrely, opponents of Elizabeth’s claim to the throne could cite the king himself in their support. Henry had annulled his union with Anne when presented with evidence of her adultery, making Elizabeth illegitimate by royal proclamation as well as the strictures of the Catholic Church. Parliament might retrospectively validate the Boleyn marriage, but sufficient doubt remained to be exploited by Catholic propaganda.9

  The third factor was the arrival of the Queen of Scots on English soil. On 16 May 1568 Mary crossed the Solway Firth to Cumberland in a fishing boat. Her army had been routed at the battle of Langside, closing a seven-year chapter in which a Catholic and culturally French queen had attempted to govern Scotland in parallel with the same Lords of the Congregation who had overthrown the old Church in an English-sponsored Protestant revolution. The political credit which Mary accumulated during hundreds of miles of progresses around her kingdom was squandered firstly by her marriage to Lord Darnley, which made a bitter enemy of her half-brother the Earl of Moray, and then by her suspected complicity in Darnley’s death by strangulation and explosion in February 1567. Mary could hardly be blamed for her subsequent abduction and probable rape by the Earl of Bothwell, but it was her own decision to marry Bothwell, the prime suspect in Darnley’s murder, within three months of her late husband’s body being found in the garden of the provost’s lodging at Kirk o’ Field. Threatened with execution by the Lords and slandered as a whore by the Edinburgh crowd, Mary was forced to abdicate in July in favour of her son James and a regency government led by Moray. That she then summoned the strength to escape from Lochleven Castle in an attempt to regain the throne illustrates Mary’s astonishing reserves of self-belief, a resilience every bit as steely as that displayed by Mary Tudor when she faced down Wyatt’s rebels, or Elizabeth when she scorned the Spanish Armada.

  The Queen of Scots was not seeking permanent political asylum in England. What she needed was a resting-place to rally her forces, and she immediately called on her cousin Elizabeth for help. What she found was an endless house arrest and the barely-concealed hostility of the queen’s chief ministers. Cecil did all he could to deaden Elizabeth’s instinctive sympathy for Mary. A tribunal examining the ‘casket letters’, a cache of incriminating documents allegedly written by Mary to the Earl of Bothwell, was guided towards its verdict that she had ordered Darnley’s murder. Walsingham’s conclusion was even starker: the Queen of Scots was the agent of the devil. Isolated both from Scotland and the English royal court, powerless to protect James from the Calvinist republicanism being thrashed into him by his tutor George Buchanan, Mary was reduced to calling on France and Spain to agitate for her release. When petitioning failed, the only options were capitulation or conspiracy.10

  On the morning of 19 August 1568, Walsingham went to see Cecil to discuss a matter that was too sensitive to commit to paper. Cecil had been receiving some alarming reports from the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Norris, about the activities of the Guise family in support of their kinswoman Mary Stuart. It was believed at the French court that thousands of Englishmen were ready to rise in Mary’s support. Writing partly in cipher, Norris recommended that Cecil should employ an Italian soldier named Captain Franchiotto to investigate. He had been working for the French for many years, but his Protestant faith had now convinced him to defect. Walsingham, who read Italian, became his handler. Franchiotto soon proved his worth, producing lists of suspected agents and warning the queen to beware of poison in her food or her bedding. In October Walsingham heard that twelve troopships were being prepared at Marseilles for an expedition against the north of England. Franchiotto was the veteran in this relationship, Walsingham a mere novice. He had a lot to learn. But he was also able to mobilise his own contacts among the London elite, instructing the lord mayor to provide him with weekly reports about the movement of strangers around the city.

  In December Walsingham received information from Paris that France and Spain were engaged in an operation in England ‘for the alteration of religion and the advancement of the Queen of Scots to the crown’. Details were few, and he hesitated before troubling Cecil with such a vague report. But the ‘malice of this present time’ had convinced him; every scrap of intelligence had to be taken seriously. He concluded with statements which were already defining his outlook on the world: ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little’, and ‘there is nothing more dangerous than security’. What Walsingham was warning against was a false sense of security, the complacent assumption that the queen’s safety would be guaranteed by the love and loyalty of her people. It was an alert to the most powerful man in government that the danger of rebellion and assassination was real and urgent. Within months Elizabeth was facing a crisis of the sort which had most haunted her father, a Catholic rising in the northern reaches of the realm. Unlike the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, the rebellion of 1569 was prepared to call on foreign support to secure a Catholic succession.11

  The heartland of the northern rising was in Yorkshire and Durham, the same counties which had risen against Henry VIII’s Reformation. The protesters marched under the banner of the Five Wounds, symbolising the presence of Christ in their midst. Richard Norton, Sheriff of Yorkshire and a living link with the Pilgrimage of Grace, had worn the same badge of the Five Wounds more than forty years before. Foot soldiers, priests and horses were dressed in tabards painted with a red cross, the ancient symbol of the Crusades. A flag bearing the slogan ‘God Speed the Plough’ recalled earlier generations of rural revolt. Images of the saints and heraldic pennons added to the gorgeous array.

  Mass was celebrated wherever the rebels went. At Kirkbymoorside in the North Riding, the plain communion table stipulated by the Prayer Book was symbolically cast aside. The women and young people of Sedgefield rebuilt their altar and holy-water stoup and warmed themselves round a bonfire of Protestant books. A mother from County Durham entrusted her baby to a midwife to be christened by a Catholic curate. The most spectacular offering of the mass was at Durham Cathedral, which had recently witnessed the burning of St Cuthbert’s banner and now sought absolution in the name of the pope. By 18 November, when they paused at Boroughbridge on the great north road, the rebel force had swollen to six thousand. The majority were yeomen farmers rather than labourers, men of substance in their communities and the backbone of the militia. Their faith bound them together, and they mustered like an army.

  The 1569 rising was led by two magnates whose families had ruled large swathes of the north for centuries, nominally for the crown but often on their own account. Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, was a cradle Catholic adrift in the restored Church of England. He was now in his mid-twenties, and gloomily aware that Neville influence was fading. Even so, he would probably have remained loyal to the crown had it not been for his wife Jane, a sister of the Duke of Norfolk. A plan had recently been hatched by Leicester and Throckmorton to marry Norfolk to Mary Stuart, who was in the process of divorcing the Earl of Bothwell. Privy councillors saw a chance for a peaceful union with Scotland if Elizabeth had no heir. To Mary it offered a dignified route out of captivity, and maybe a future role as queen mother. The problem was Elizabeth herself. Furious that the succession had been debated behind her back, she recalled Norfolk to court and flung him in the Tower. Fearing a similar fate, Westmorland raised his standard in a Catholic plot to capitalise on the Queen of Scots.

  His brother in arms was Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Revolt in the name of religion ran in Northumberland’s blood. His father Sir Thomas Percy had been executed following the Pilgrimage of Grace. Like Westmorland he ha
d been forced to watch as royal appointees trespassed on his territory. In 1568 the crown awarded itself the profits from the copper mines on his estates, an affront which may have quickened his decision to be reconciled to the Catholic faith. When the two earls took their stand, they did so in the name of protecting Queen Elizabeth from the heretical advisers who surrounded her. Their proclamations called on the people to rise ‘as your duty towards God doth bind you, and as you tender the common wealth of your country’. They said nothing about the Queen of Scots, but this was sheer calculation. Interrogated by Lord Hunsdon before his execution in York, Northumberland denied that they had intended to depose Elizabeth while freely admitting the importance of Mary:

  What was the intent and meaning of the rebellion? Ans., Our first object in assembling was the reformation of religion and preservation of the person of the Queen of Scots, as next heir, failing issue of her majesty, which causes I believed were greatly favoured by most of the noblemen of the realm.