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

by John Cooper

  The leaders of the rebellion concealed another element of their plan from their followers. Northumberland had made contact with Don Guerau de Spes, the new Spanish ambassador in London. De Spes was a religious militant, eager to snatch at any opportunity to reconvert the English to Catholicism. Westmorland would ultimately join the Spanish army in the Netherlands when the rebellion fell apart. Both of the earls hoped for military support from the ‘Iron Duke’ of Alva, the Governor of the Netherlands, hence their diversion to capture the port of Hartlepool where Spanish troops and supplies could be landed. Yet they boldly played on fears of invasion and the patriotic duty of English subjects: ‘divers foreign powers do purpose shortly to invade these realms, which will be to our utter destruction, if we do not ourselves speedily forfend the same … if foreigners enter upon us we should all be made slaves and bondsmen to them.’ This can only have been a deliberate smokescreen. The rank and file believed they were marching in a loyal Catholic crusade, while their leaders were deeply steeped in treason. Would the northern earls have been content with recognising Mary as Elizabeth’s ‘next heir’ if their cavalry had succeeded in capturing her? The government recognised the danger and moved Mary from Staffordshire to Coventry, thereby depriving the revolt of its key objective. Threatened by a royal army and deserted by their captains, the rebels surrendered to the queen’s mercy; hundreds would be hanged under martial law.12

  Walsingham had been reluctant to ring the alarm bell too soon. He knew he lacked experience, hence the caveats in his letter to Cecil of December 1568. But his source in Paris was insistent: the monarchies of France and Spain were conspiring to undermine English security. As the northern rising and events in London soon proved, he had every reason to be concerned. Within days of Walsingham’s warning, de Spes had called on the French ambassador in London with a bold proposal. The two powers should sink their differences and force Elizabeth to get rid of her chief minister. De Spes said he knew ‘of no greater heretic in this world’ than William Cecil. Even more remarkably, the queen should be told to return to the Catholic fold or face a total trade embargo. De Spes exceeded his brief, and soon found himself confined to quarters. But he had a collaborator, a man whose story would be told by English propagandists long after de Spes had been forgotten. His name was Roberto di Ridolfi, and his manoeuvring was so deft that we still cannot be sure whose side he was on.

  To the London merchant community, Ridolfi was a respectable Florentine banker and a financial agent for William Cecil. Unknown to the English, however, he was also a secret envoy of the pope. Since 1566 he had been handling the money sent by Pius V to fund political Catholicism in England. Ridolfi was the ideal choice for this kind of work. His profession as a merchant gave him freedom of movement around the courts of Renaissance Europe. Banking contacts in Florence enabled him to move money around by bills of exchange, avoiding the problem of transporting large quantities of coin. In September 1569 he used this method to transfer the best part of £3,000 from de Spes to the Bishop of Ross, Mary Stuart’s representative in London. But a transaction on such a huge scale was hard to conceal. Suddenly nervous that Ridolfi might be more than he seemed, Cecil and Leicester ordered him taken to Walsingham’s house for questioning.

  In 1569 Walsingham’s London home was the building known as the Papey in Aldgate ward, a converted medieval hospital for the relief of poor chantry priests. Here Ridolfi could be interrogated while his cover, which might prove useful to the English government, was preserved intact. Cecil and Leicester wrote to Walsingham as ‘our very loving friend’, illustrating how high he was rising in their confidence. Gradually Ridolfi began to talk to his captors. He knew about the conspiracy to marry Mary to the Duke of Norfolk. The money which he passed on to Norfolk’s servants and the Bishop of Ross had originated with the pope. Elizabeth herself became involved in the investigation. Observing that some of Ridolfi’s answers were ‘far otherwise than the truth is’, she offered to be lenient in exchange for a frank disclosure of his dealings with the Queen of Scots. Walsingham was authorised to search his house for evidence. Finally, a month after he had taken Ridolfi into custody, Walsingham was told to free him on bail with a lecture not to meddle any more in affairs of state.

  Elizabeth claimed to be acting out of clemency, the love which she bore to Ridolfi’s countrymen. Something about this does not ring true. Ridolfi was freed two days after peals of church bells in Yorkshire and Durham had raised the countryside in revolt – sheer folly, unless Cecil and Walsingham had some purpose in mind. Nothing is made explicit, but the shadow of a deal lurks behind Ridolfi’s order of release: the promise of information in return for a suspended sentence, perhaps, or the prospect of advancing in royal service. If this did not persuade him, there was an unmistakable note of threat behind the queen’s words. A harsher examination, she said, would reveal more than Ridolfi had so far volunteered. Walsingham was to impress on him just how fortunate he was.

  Was Ridolfi turned during his weeks in Walsingham’s house? There are two contrasting ways of reading the rest of his story. Before the northern rebellion ignited, Ridolfi had told the French ambassador that he held a commission from the pope to work with sympathetic English nobles, specifically the Duke of Norfolk, to restore Catholicism to England. On regaining his liberty, he apparently returned to the task he had been set. In March 1571 he made his way to Rome, where the pope endorsed his plan for another Catholic uprising, led by Norfolk and backed by Spanish troops, to put Mary on the English throne. But when the Bishop of Ross’s courier Charles Bailly was arrested at Dover, the web of threads between Ridolfi and Mary Stuart’s agents was severed. Norfolk was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1572. Mary survived for the time being, protected by the queen from a Parliament which was baying for her blood. Ridolfi slipped away to serve the Medici dukes in Florence, where he retired many years later as a senator.

  Maybe Walsingham and Cecil made a catastrophic error of judgement in November 1569, leaving Ridolfi at liberty to plot against queen and state. Philip II was genuinely won over to an active policy against England. Had the Duke of Alva not been such a sceptic, it is possible that a Spanish armada could have been launched in the early 1570s rather than 1588. If Ridolfi was working as a double agent, then his cover was exceptionally deep, and his handlers were playing a dangerous game. And yet there are indications that this is just what he was doing. Ridolfi left England for Rome after a personal interview with the queen, who gave him a passport and two horses as her blessing. He was surprisingly lax about security, writing to Mary in plain text. Other letters were ciphered, but Elizabeth somehow got hold of a key. The Ridolfi plot precipitated Norfolk’s downfall, which suited Cecil, and it might have done the same for the Queen of Scots.

  There is another snippet of evidence that Walsingham persuaded his man to change sides. A year after the northern rebellion, Ridolfi and Walsingham were in conversation once again. The subject this time, so he reported to Cecil, was England’s relationship with Flanders and France. Evidently he still thought of Ridolfi as an asset. The way Walsingham wrote about him suggests that the two men had discovered a rapport during their strange experience of sharing a house. They were direct contemporaries after all, both from merchant families, and they had Italy in common. Walsingham told Cecil that Ridolfi ‘would deal both discreetly and uprightly, as one both wise and who standeth on terms of honesty and reputation’. Honesty and reputation seem like curious words to use of Roberto di Ridolfi. Either Walsingham had begun his career in royal service with an intelligence coup of major proportions, or he had been utterly and humiliatingly fooled. The queen, at least, seems to have believed his side of the story. By the time that he wrote this letter, Francis Walsingham had been named as the new English ambassador in France.13

  English attitudes towards the French during the sixteenth century mingled fear with admiration. The ‘auld alliance’ between France and Scotland meant that English monarchs often faced a war on two fronts. Henry VIII revived the ancient
claim that kings of England were rulers of France as well, but the footholds which he won in Normandy were fleeting. Boulogne was sold back by the government of Edward VI, while the garrison town of Calais was reconquered by the French in the dying days of Mary’s reign. France was a great power, boasting a population six times that of England. Its taxation system could sustain lengthy campaigns overland and a modern naval base at Le Havre. Yet centuries of war had bred something else between the two nations, a shared belief in chivalry and a common language of power. King Charles IX was inducted into the Order of the Garter early in Elizabeth’s reign, while the English were keen to copy the ceremonial of the French court. The religious gulf, too, was less than it might appear. The French Calvinist Church was one of the largest in Europe, with artisans and nobles proving the quickest to convert. The crown may have remained Catholic, but it was also resistant to any increase in the power of the pope. As a centralised monarchy ruling over a religiously plural people, France was more akin to England than either Spain or the Holy Roman Empire. It was also the most likely place for Queen Elizabeth to seek a husband.

  English Protestants had particular reason to keep a close eye on France. By the early 1560s a million Huguenots, as French Calvinists were known, were engaged in bloody struggle for survival. The French wars of religion were played out against a dynastic backdrop uncannily similar to that of Tudor England. Like Henry VIII, King Henry II of France was succeeded by three of his children in turn following his death in a jousting accident in 1559. Francis II became king at fifteen but died in December 1560, leaving Mary Stuart as a widow. His brother Charles inherited the throne aged just ten. The seizure of the regency by the queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici, prompted a struggle for power which soon slid into civil war. Catholic churches were despoiled from Rouen to the Rhône. A vicious guerrilla campaign was fought in the Midi. As France tore apart along fault-lines of faith, communities fell into grisly crowd violence. Not content with violating devotional images and Protestant Bibles, people began to turn on their neighbours. Atrocity stories gained rapid currency, inflated by propaganda but based on murders and mutilations which were only too real. On progress through Maine in 1564, the king was told about a widowed Protestant noblewoman slaughtered in her own house alongside her children and chambermaids, their corpses left for pigs to feed on. Gangs of young Catholic men patrolled the towns of Provence, stoning Protestants to death and burning the bodies. Huguenots were dehumanised as vermin, a polluting stain which had to be washed out of French society.14

  The French wars of religion were a mixed blessing to the English. A nation divided against itself was less capable of pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, and more likely to seek accommodation with its ancient enemy. But there was also the possibility that the uproar in France would foretell, or even spark, a similar conflagration in England. The fear that France represented an alternative destiny was fed by rumours of Catholic armies waiting to be mobilised in the north and west of England. It was also heightened by English memories of their own civil wars a century before. An obvious remedy was to ally with the Huguenots, and a deal was duly struck in 1562 with their leader the Prince of Condé. English troops would occupy Le Havre and Dieppe in exchange for the return of Calais when the Protestants won the war. But the towns proved difficult to hold, the Huguenots made peace with their Catholic countrymen, and the expedition collapsed amid a savage bout of plague. English honour had been hazarded and forfeited, while the queen’s aversion to war had been vindicated. Persuading her to pursue a hawkish foreign policy would henceforth be more difficult than ever.

  Francis Walsingham landed in France on New Year’s Day 1571 and made his way to Paris for an audience with Charles IX and his mother. There were no permanent embassy buildings in this period; ambassadors had to make their own arrangements. It has always been assumed that Walsingham lived in the Faubourg Saint Germain, an expensive suburb colonised by nobles retreating from the bourgeois values of the city. In fact a document written by the soldier and agent Tomasso Sassetti reveals that Walsingham’s house was in Saint Marceau. South of the city walls and on the left bank of the Seine, this was a very different place from the fashionable Saint Germain. Cloth-workers and tanners toiled in small workshops, where the smell of dyestuffs and animal hides hung heavy in the air. Its location and industrial character made Saint Marceau a natural centre of Protestant activism. Calvinists could worship openly in the building they called the Temple, while the English ambassador could entertain aristocrats and intellectuals like Hubert Languet and Petrus Ramus without arousing too much attention. Captains Sassetti and Franchiotto also visited the embassy, implying that Walsingham was already building up a network of operatives in Paris.15

  Sixteenth-century ambassadors were more than civil servants. They represented the person of the prince as well as the state, and were treated with the courtesy which their dignity demanded. The French court was widely hailed as the most splendid in Europe, although Walsingham’s letters home typically focused on policy more than pageantry. Describing a dinner put on to welcome him, he noted that ‘we lacked no store of good meat’; pomp and ceremonial did not come easily to him. Sir Thomas Smith partook of French hospitality with much more relish when he joined the embassy a year later:

  Nine or ten cooks in my kitchen, butlers, victuallers, and officers of the king’s house appointed to serve me. Of meat, wine, bread, candles, plate, and all such things as if I were a young prince, and all of the king’s charges. Minstrels and music more than I would have and a controller of the king’s house to see me served, from time to time attending on me as if I were a duke; two messes [meals] a day served with all delicacies.

  The Spanish ambassador in Paris, admittedly not an unbiased witness, described Walsingham as blunt and uncourtly, a man who dressed entirely in black. Yet he was also a natural negotiator, and he soon managed to achieve a clear line of communication with Catherine de’ Medici.16

  Walsingham’s predecessor Sir Henry Norris was eager to be relieved. His pro-Huguenot stance made him unpopular with the French royal family, while Elizabeth pestered him with unrealistic demands about the return of Calais. Norris had been made to attend the Catholic mass at court, his post tampered with and his servants arrested. Then there was the cost of maintaining a suitable household and horses, employing secretaries and couriers, paying informants and bribes. Elizabeth always had an eye to economy, and she expected her envoys to contribute to the costs of their embassy out of their own pockets. When Walsingham protested that he could not afford the posting to France, the queen replied by raising his daily allowance to £3 6s 8d: a little more than Norris had been paid, but still diplomacy at a discount. He was soon complaining that the expense was ‘like to bring me to beggary’. In September 1571 he petitioned Cecil, now ennobled as Lord Burghley, for relief from ‘the continual increase of charges that groweth on me far above her majesty’s allowance’. The compensation lay in the close working relationship he developed with Burghley and Leicester, the contact with leading Huguenots, and the chance to promote the Protestant faith. Unlike his royal mistress, Walsingham defined the success of English foreign policy in terms of ‘spiritual fruit’ and the ‘advancement of the gospel’. Four months into his embassy, he set out his political creed in letters to Leicester. ‘Above all things,’ he wrote in April 1571, ‘I wish God’s glory and next the queen’s safety’.17

  Walsingham had arrived in France during a lull in the wars of religion. The 1570 peace of Saint Germain gave four fortified towns into the hands of the Huguenots. Condé had been killed in battle, leaving Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France, in command of Protestant forces. Coligny was pro-English and hoped for a marriage between Elizabeth and France, whether in the person of Charles IX’s younger brother Henry, Duke of Anjou, or the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre. He made a point of assuring Walsingham of his devotion to Elizabeth when he came to court in September 1571. Walsingham was encouraged. ‘Generally all those of the reli
gion,’ he wrote to Burghley, ‘who are the flower of France, do make like protestation, assuring her majesty that when occasion or trial shall be offered, she shall find them no less ready to serve her than if they were her own natural subjects’. But Walsingham knew the Huguenots were in a minority. Fiercely opposed to any such alliance were the ultra-Catholic Guise of Lorraine, temporarily out of favour but burning to regain their previous dominance of the court. Soldiers of the Duke of Guise had ignited the first civil war by massacring fifty unarmed Protestants in their makeshift church at Wassy. His brother the Cardinal of Lorraine had a powerful hold over the intensely pious Anjou, who grew pale from his perpetual fasts and vigils. Never far from the Cardinal’s thoughts was his niece Mary, Queen of Scots. As the rightful ruler of England and a potential bride for Anjou, Mary could seal the union of France and Britain under one Catholic crown.18

  Elizabeth had briefed her new ambassador a few days before his departure. Walsingham must keep watch over ‘all manner of their doings there, as well private as public, that may be prejudicial to us or our estate’. He was to support English merchants, and maintain the free flow of trade between England and France. A lengthy clause set out Elizabeth’s attitude to the Huguenots, whose welfare was explicitly linked to the ‘quietness of us and our realm’. Walsingham should impress on the French king how the peace of his own nation depended on observing the rights granted to the Protestants at Saint Germain. Elizabeth addressed Charles conventionally as ‘our good brother’, but she could not resist an arch comment on the wars of religion. Because of his treatment of his Huguenot subjects, Charles had ‘seen and felt the continuance of the troubles of his realm’. A reference to the Queen of Scots and warships in Brittany explains the chill in Elizabeth’s voice. Charles had recently threatened to send French troops into Scotland, where an English army was fighting to prevent Mary’s faction from regaining control. With hindsight, this was the moment when Mary Stuart came closest to being freed from her imprisonment. Elizabeth actually considered it for a day or so, until the privy council gave its judgement: restoring the Queen of Scots could only undermine the crown of England.19