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

by John Cooper

  Like Leicester and other hawks at the English court, Walsingham was eager to fund the Protestant revolt led by William of Orange and his brother Count Louis of Nassau against the Duke of Alva. ‘If God had not raised up the Prince of Orange to have entertained Spain,’ he wrote to Leicester in July 1572, ‘a dangerous fire ere this time had been kindled in our own home’. Since conflict with Spain was bound to come, Elizabeth should seize the initiative by striking first. But persuading her would not be easy, ‘for that her majesty being by sex fearful, cannot but be irresolute, irresolution being an ordinary companion to fear; a thing most dangerous in martial affairs, where opportunities offered are to be taken at the first rebound’.

  The queen’s counsellors were faced with a choice. If Elizabeth could be convinced that an expedition to the Netherlands would succeed, ‘then fear giving place, reason shall have his full course to direct her majesty to be resolute’. (For Walsingham, reason was gendered male.) The alternative was to threaten her with the consequences of doing nothing, ‘the ruin of her self and state’. This presentation of the queen as a factor to be coaxed and overcome is extraordinary. Her advisers clearly thought like this, may sometimes have talked to each other in these terms, but they rarely put such radical ideas in writing. The potential gains justified the means. Joining the enterprise would ‘advance the cause of religion throughout all Christendom, an act worthy of a Christian prince’. An evil neighbour, and a tyrannical government in the Netherlands, would be overthrown. If Elizabeth refused to commit then Spain could only grow in strength, ‘whose pride is such as he thinketh he may give law to all Christendom’. With the signing of the treaty of Blois and the possibility of English intervention in the Netherlands, Walsingham may have thought that the skies were brightening. In fact, the Protestant faith was about to be shaken by a thunderbolt.30

  In January 1593 the company of actors known as Lord Strange’s Men put on a new production by Christopher Marlowe at the Rose Theatre. The Massacre at Paris depicts a bloodbath of Protestants at the hands of the Guise family and the Duke of Anjou. Multiple murders are played out in full view of the audience. Admiral Coligny is brutally slain and strung up on stage. Huguenots kneeling at prayer are stabbed to death. The Old Queen of Navarre is poisoned by a pair of gloves. Catherine de’ Medici presides over the play, directing the killing to maintain herself in power. But Marlowe lingers longest over Duke Henry of Guise, psychopathically Catholic and as ambitious as Doctor Faustus:

  What glory is there in a common good

  That hangs for every peasant to achieve?

  That like I best that flies beyond my reach.

  Set me to scale the high Pyramides

  And thereon set the diadem of France;

  I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,

  Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,

  Although my downfall be the deepest hell. (I, ii, 40–7)

  As everyone in the theatre would have known, Marlowe based his play on real events that had taken place in France twenty years before. The St Bartholomew’s massacres of August 1572 began with a royal wedding. On 18 August Margaret de Valois, the king’s sister, married the Protestant Prince Henry of Navarre at Notre-Dame. The celebrations brought the Huguenot aristocracy en masse to Paris. Sectarian tension had been tinder-dry for months. Catholics were enraged when a memorial cross erected on the ruins of a Protestant house was removed on Coligny’s orders. Forty Huguenots were killed when they mocked a procession of the consecrated wafer representing the body of Christ. It was rumoured that the king had sent troops to support Louis of Nassau’s fight against the Spanish in the Netherlands. As Catholic preachers thundered against the pollution of a Protestant royal marriage, Coligny was shot and wounded on his way back from an audience with Charles IX. The bullet was fired from a house owned by a servant of the Guise. If Coligny had fled Paris at this point, the Huguenot leadership would have followed him. Instead, he accepted the king’s offer of protection.

  Sunday 24 August was St Bartholomew’s Day, honouring the apostle of Christ who was flayed and beheaded for his faith. Early that morning, Coligny was murdered in his bed by a company of soldiers mustered by the Duke of Guise. Several dozen Huguenot noblemen suffered the same fate at the hands of the king’s Swiss guards and the personal retinue of the Duke of Anjou. As news spread across the waking city, the festivities of a saint’s day deteriorated with terrifying speed into a general assault on the Protestant population. The orgy of violence lasted for three days. Huguenots were cut down wherever they could be found, in their houses and in the street, some subjected to ritualised desecration and others run through on their doorsteps. It was an intimate killing. Catholics who had lived cheek by jowl with Protestants knew where to find their neighbours when they tried to hide. According to one narrative,

  the rascal multitude, encouraged by spoil and robbery, ran with their bloody swords raging throughout all the town. They spared not the aged, nor women, nor the very babes. In joy and triumph, they threw the slain bodies out at the windows, so as there was not in manner any one street or lane that seemed not strawed with murdered carcasses.

  Two thousand Protestants died in Paris, and probably another three thousand in provincial France. The rioters struck at property as well as people, sacking six hundred houses in the capital. Prior to the French wars of religion, a ‘massacre’ had referred to a chopping-block used to carve up meat; now it took in the butchery of human beings.

  Aside from its sheer numbers, the most difficult thing to grasp about the St Bartholomew massacre is the carnival atmosphere in which the slaughter was carried out. Victims were paraded as if they were caught up in a Mardi Gras game. Corpses were dismembered and dragged through the streets, body parts offered for sale in a grisly parody of the butcher’s cart. The killers went about their work in good humour, laughing and joking, stopping off in taverns to drink and sing songs. It was the medieval theme of the danse macabre translated into flesh and blood. The perpetrators believed that they were in the right, doing no more than the king had told them. When a long-dead hawthorn tree in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents began to bloom, it was interpreted as a sign that they were carrying out the work of God.31

  Huguenots both living and dead were dumped into the Seine in acts of ritual purification. More than a thousand bodies were washed up on the banks of the river over the next few days, a horrifying image which resurfaces in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris. As Anjou stabs the Protestant scholar Petrus Ramus in his study, Guise and his brother Dumaine discuss the slaughter raging outside:

  GUISE. My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants,

  Which we have chas’d into the river Seine,

  That swim about, and so preserve their lives.

  How may we do? I fear me they will live.

  DUMAINE. Go place some men upon the bridge,

  With bows and darts, to shoot at them they see,

  And sink them in the river as they swim. (I, vii, 57–63)

  Maybe Marlowe talked to Walsingham about what he had witnessed in the summer of 1572. The idea is tempting, although the playwright also had ample printed evidence to work from: François Hotman’s De Furoribus Gallicis was republished as A True and Plaine Report of the Furious Outrages of Fraunce a year after the massacres. Hotman’s biography of Coligny was also translated for an English audience, as was a scabrous attack on the queen mother by Henri Estienne.32

  Walsingham’s family was with him in the English embassy. His daughter Frances was about five years old, and Ursula was pregnant with their second child. Robert Beale was there too, working as Walsingham’s secretary. By chance the young poet Philip Sidney was also in Paris. St Bartholomew forged a close bond between Walsingham and Sidney, reflected in their political ideas and ultimately in Sidney’s marriage to the sixteen-year-old Frances in 1583. The physician Timothy Bright, who witnessed the massacres as a student, described Walsingham’s house as ‘a very sanctuary’ for Protestants who would other
wise have been slaughtered. Lord Wharton took refuge there when his tutor, an English clergyman, was cut down by the crowd. An Italian historian named Pietro Bizari, who seems to have been working as an intelligencer for Lord Burghley, attributed his own survival to Walsingham’s protection. As we have seen, the Huguenot nobleman the Sieur de Briquemault was not so lucky. The Spanish ambassador in Paris, who decked out his servants in scarlet cloth in celebration of the massacre, claimed that Walsingham himself was lucky to escape with his life.33

  No narrative of St Bartholomew survives among Walsingham’s papers. Knowing that diplomatic despatches could be intercepted, he may have preferred to send a messenger who could recite his report from memory. But simple shock may also have come into it: relatively few witnesses of the massacre were ever able to write about what they had seen. One of the few who did was Robert Beale, who compiled a ‘Discourse after the great murder in Paris & other places in France’ which was probably intended for Lord Burghley’s eyes. The preservation of the queen and English liberty was tied to the survival of Protestantism in Europe:

  I think it time and more than time for us to awake out of our dead sleep, and take heed lest like mischief as has already overwhelmed the brethren and neighbours in France and Flanders embrace us which be left in such sort as we shall not be able to escape.

  If England continued to slumber then Anjou would be married to the Queen of Scots, ‘which matter hath been long a brewing’, and a French battle fleet would follow. Beale saw a direct parallel with the Norman invasion of 1066, when defeat had dissolved the laws and commonwealth of England. Anjou and Mary would be free to divide the land among their followers, just as William the Conqueror had done. England’s defences were weak, her queen desperately vulnerable to poison or treason. The fall of the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle, or the defeat of William of Orange, would allow the forces of Catholicism to concentrate exclusively on England. ‘But the chiefest mischief is to be found inwardly,’ he went on, ‘I mean the faction of the Queen of Scots and papists in this realm’. English Catholics were only pretending to be loyal, and would desert at the first opportunity. Beale had a clear remedy to prescribe: nothing less than ‘the death of that Jezebel’, the Queen of Scots, could save England from civil war. Delay any longer, and ‘our musters, our keeping of watch and ward, our ships will do us little good’. The urgency of Beale’s argument, the repeated references to history and the fate of Christendom, all echo Walsingham’s own rhetoric.34

  For several days it was too dangerous for Walsingham to leave the embassy. When Ursula tried to make her escape, two of the ministers in her escort were recognised and beaten up by the guards at the city gate. Consequently it was Beale who went to court to hear the official explanation for an uprising which the queen mother nonchalantly described as ‘the late accident’. What, he asked with icy courtesy, was he to tell his royal mistress? Walsingham got his answer at a royal audience on 1 September. The king had been protecting himself and his mother against a conspiracy planned by Coligny and his supporters; he desired nothing more than to preserve his friendship with his sister Elizabeth. Walsingham replied in kind. The alliance which his majesty had made with England was firmer than anything achieved by his predecessors, and should not be compromised by recent events. As a diplomat Walsingham was doing exactly what was required of him, protecting the treaty of Blois from those who would have preferred to go to war with England. As a Protestant, however, he was appalled by the turn of events in France. When Walsingham raised the issue of the three English victims of the riots, Charles promised to prosecute the offenders if they could be found. Walsingham’s reply was acid: ‘I showed his majesty it would be hard to produce them, the disorder being so general, the sword being committed to the common people’. This was a loaded reference. The sword in royal iconography represented the power to execute justice; it rightfully belonged to the king, not the crowd. It was as close to direct criticism as his position allowed.35

  Burghley offered Walsingham some spiritual comfort, although his conclusions were hardly encouraging: ‘I see the devil is suffered by the Almighty God, for our sins, to be strong in following the persecution of Christ’s members.’ The massacre was a call to repentance, a belief which Leicester expressed even more forcibly. God had visited his people with ‘the scourge of correction’, he told Walsingham, ‘but our sins deserve this and more’. The only proper response was to hold fast in the faith and pray that God would let them live to see ‘the fall of His and our enemies’. There was a solitary ray of hope: the queen had authorised her ambassador to announce his ‘unwillingness to tarry’ at the French court. Yet Charles IX proved resistant, threatening that Walsingham’s recall would be taken as a breach in diplomatic relations. Sir Thomas Smith likened him to a pin stuck in a hole, needing another to get it out. Walsingham was hundreds of pounds in debt, forced to sell land and to borrow in anticipation of his salary. Pleas to increase his allowance went unanswered. It took until April 1573 for Valentine Dale to be despatched as Elizabeth’s new envoy to France. ‘I daresay you will wish him a speedy passage,’ wrote Burghley with a wry smile.

  A month after St Bartholomew’s Day, Walsingham briefed the privy council on his analysis of Anglo-French affairs. The Huguenot community had been assaulted ‘without pity and compassion, without regard had either of age or sex, without ordinary form of justice’. England was a valuable export market for the wines of Bordeaux, yet the French still looked on its people with loathing. Walsingham’s life was threatened by ‘the disquietness of this state’. All in all, it was a litany of failure:

  Seeing now there is here neither regard had to either word, writing or edict; seeing the king persecuteth that religion with all extremity that her majesty professeth; seeing that they that now possess his ear are sworn enemies unto her majesty, and nourishers of the late amity are separated from him; I leave it to your honours now to judge, what account you may make of the amity with this crown. If I may without presumption or offence say my opinion, considering how things presently stand, I think less peril to live with them as enemies, than as friends.36

  No marriage or resolution of the succession, a peace treaty that was rhetoric rather than substance, and the Catholic party triumphantly ascendant in France. Sailing home in the spring of 1573, Walsingham must have wondered whether the Lord had forsaken the English nation.

  NOTES

  1 Elizabeth’s conformity during Mary’s reign: David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London, 2000), 122–4, 164–5. Bishops: Penry Williams, The Later Tudors (Oxford, 1998), 237.

  2 Bossiney: History of Parliament, The House of Commons 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler (London, 1981), III, 571–2; J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry (Oxford, 2003), 182–4. Elizabethan religious settlement: Jennifer Loach, Parliament under the Tudors (Oxford, 1991), chapter 6; Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, North Carolina, 1980); Williams, Later Tudors, 233–7, 456–7.

  3 Freedom of speech: T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (Leicester, 1981), I, 426. Reformations by public authority: Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925), II, 264–5.

  4 Lyme Regis and Surrey: Hasler, Commons 1558–1603, III, 571. My brother Beale: BL Harley 6035, fol. 47v, 57r.

  5 Archives: Robert Beale, ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary’, BL Additional 48161, reproduced in Read, Walsingham, I, 431; Stephen Alford, ‘State Papers of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I: the Archives and the Documents’, State Papers Online, 1509–1714 (Cengage Learning, Reading, 2007). Gyrfalcon: TNA SP 59/24/445. Trees and gardens: BL Harley 6035, fol. 73, 96; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’ from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin, Camden Miscellany 6 (London, 1870–1), 9; Read, Walsingham, III, 432.

  6 Sarsenet was a soft silk fabric, ‘Saracen’ in origin. Anne Carleill and Pa
rkbury: PRO, PROB 11/47, fol. 241v. Muscovy Company: Read, Walsingham, III, 370–1. Appointment as JP: Hasler, Commons 1558–1603, III, 571.

  7 Ursula: PRO, PROB 11/100, fol. 92r–v; PRO, PROB 11/75, fol. 262v; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 7; C. H. and T. Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858), II, 87; NPG 1705. Don Antonio’s diamond: Read, Walsingham, II, 56–7, 81–2.

  8 Barn Elms: ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 38–40, 48; John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1973), II, 440 and III, 27–8. Horses: TNA SP 12/224, fol. 160–3. Odiham: TNA SP 12/109, fol. 11r; Simon Adams, Alan Bryson and Mitchell Leimon, ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’ in Oxford DNB. Portrait, house and garden: Roy Strong, The Artist and the Garden (New Haven and London, 2000), 47 and plates 49, 50. Dutch gables and banqueting houses: Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture (New Haven and London, 2009), 96, 104–6, 171, 274. Cosyn and Bacheler: S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), I, 880–1 and IV, 827.

  9 English royal arms: John Guy, My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004), 95–6, 105.

  10 Cecil and the ‘casket letters’: ibid., chapters 25–6; Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London, 2008), 151–3.

  11 Franchiotto: TNA, SP 12/47, fol. 84; TNA SP 70/101, fol. 4; TNA SP 12/48, fol. 50; TNA SP 70/122, fol. 167; HMC Salisbury (London, 1883–1976), I, 361. Security: Walsingham to Cecil 20 Dec. 1568, TNA SP 12/48/61, fol. 165r.

  12 The earls’ proclamation: BL Harley 6990, fol. 90. Northumberland’s confession: TNA SP 15/21, fol. 108–15. Other details from K. J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569 (Basingstoke and New York, 2007); Mervyn James, ‘The Concept of Honour and the Northern Rising, 1569’, PP 60 (1973), 49–83; Julian Lock, ‘Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland’ in Oxford DNB.