The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
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For a while Elizabeth flirted with Walsingham’s plan. In March 1571 she instructed him to find out, typical of her, ‘what are the meanest sums of money to be demanded’. By the following month she had had second thoughts and abandoned the enterprise. She was simply not prepared to fund Count Louis on the scale which was required. The involvement of the Duke of Anjou, whom the Dutch rebels saw as a potential protector, was a major factor: there was no sense in spending English money to establish French supremacy in the Low Countries. Burghley also had a hand in the decision, arguing that English trade with the Dutch ports had to take priority. Walsingham was dismayed at the queen’s attitude, but he cannot really have been surprised. Fifty thousand crowns spent now, he wrote gloomily to Burghley, might have saved three hundred thousand in the future. Spain had been provoked and would not forget the insult, ‘as shall well appear when opportunity of revenge shall be offered’. When the Sea Beggars were evicted from Dover in March 1572 and captured the port of Brill, England lost the chance to shape the Dutch revolt in its own image.14
Walsingham had wanted intervention in the Netherlands as an act of state. The queen, and probably Burghley too, preferred that English engagement should be led by volunteers. Theirs was the subtler strategy, enabling Elizabeth to play up to Protestant expectations while retaining a degree of deniability. In July 1572 the Devon gentleman Sir Humphrey Gilbert transported more than a thousand troops across the Channel to skirmish with the Spanish in Zealand. A graduate of the increasingly savage war in Ireland, Gilbert had forced any Gaelic Irishman hoping to parley to approach him along an avenue of severed heads. His troops in the Netherlands were under orders to maintain the fiction that ‘they went without either licence or knowledge of her majesty, to do nothing but relieve the native people from their oppression’. In truth the privy council kept a close eye on Gilbert, directing him to secure Flushing and Sluys against the French as well as the Spanish. He was recalled to England in November, apparently in disgrace, although Walsingham would have need of him in the future.15
So long as he was an ambassador Walsingham enjoyed a certain freedom of movement, carrying out the queen’s wishes but also formulating foreign policy on the ground. As principal secretary, however, he was one relatively junior voice on the privy council. Walsingham was forced to watch as Elizabeth and Burghley patched up the relationship with Spain. A trade embargo, imposed in 1569 after some diplomatic sabre-rattling over the detention of four Spanish bullion ships, was lifted in 1573. The queen was outraged when Orange impounded English merchantmen attempting to run his blockade on the River Scheldt. A new governor of the Netherlands, Don Luis de Requesens, exchanged envoys with Elizabeth’s court. When she requested that English Catholic exiles be expelled from the Spanish Netherlands, Requesens agreed on condition that Elizabeth ejected the Dutch rebels from her own dominions.
Walsingham was deeply alarmed. Such a show of amity was ‘but entertainment for a time’, he told the diplomat Daniel Rogers, ‘for Christ and Belial can hardly agree’. Belial, from a Hebrew word meaning wickedness or destruction, was a scriptural synonym for the Devil. Walsingham was quoting St Paul’s exhortation to shun idolaters: ‘what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?’ The arrival in 1574 of a new envoy from Spain, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, prompted Walsingham to write to Burghley in protest. Mendoza came with honeyed words to ‘lull us asleep for a time, until their secret practices be grown to their good and full ripeness’. He concluded with a prayer, ‘God be merciful unto us’. The imagery of sleep recurs in a letter exhorting Burghley to return to court in January 1575. The queen urgently needed to look to her estate, Walsingham warned, not to ‘slumber as she doth in a weak security’.16
The collapse of peace talks between Requesens and the Dutch rebels in summer 1575 signalled the end of a movement which had portrayed itself, however tenuously, as a loyal protest for religious toleration. William of Orange finally renounced the sovereignty of Philip II, and revolt turned into revolution. A delegation was soon in England to request aid for the independent States of the Netherlands. It was led by Philip Marnix, Baron de St Aldegonde and one of Orange’s most trusted aides. Orange had described Walsingham to Daniel Rogers as ‘the chiefest friend he had in England’. Now he told his agents to put themselves in Walsingham’s hands. Their mission was simple: to offer Queen Elizabeth the overlordship of the Netherlands. If she refused, then the French crown would be next in line.
Walsingham knew what the royal reaction was likely to be. True to form, Elizabeth retreated into her privy chamber and slammed the door on the court, denying access to everyone until her gentlewomen threatened to break their way in. The council was left to come up with a response. Leicester, Bedford and Mildmay thought that England should openly support the rebels. Sir Nicholas Bacon agreed that assistance should be sent to Orange, but only in secret. Walsingham rehearsed the arguments which he had put before queen and council during his embassy in France. Wars in pursuit of dynastic ambition, to enlarge the dominions granted to a ruler by God, were unacceptable. But wars ‘grounded on necessity, not for sovereignty but for safety, not to enlarge but to retain’, were entirely just. Spanish councillors had denied the Dutch their legitimate request for ‘freedom of conscience and the maintenance of their liberties’. Spain made no secret of its hostility to England, and a Netherlands under Spanish domination was a threat to national security. These were practical justifications, but Walsingham also made a compelling spiritual case. A Catholic league had been formed ‘for the rooting out by violence of all such as profess the gospel’. What could be more proper than for a prince to fight for true religion?17
Walsingham’s devotion to the Dutch cause provoked the queen into one of her periodic rages. According to the Baron de Champagney, who acted as an envoy between Requesens and the English court, Elizabeth gave Walsingham a public dressing-down for his interference and cuffed a lady-in-waiting in her fury. This wasn’t out of character; Elizabeth hated being pressed to make decisions, especially in matters which she regarded as her personal prerogative. Her relationship with her principal secretary was often tense. In 1586 she threw a slipper in Walsingham’s face when she discovered he had been playing down the threat of a Spanish invasion to prevent resources being diverted from Leicester’s campaign in the Netherlands.
But Elizabeth also had a flair for the theatrical in politics. The rebuke to Walsingham may have been staged for the ambassador’s benefit, and indeed Champagney came in for some histrionic treatment. One moment the queen was in full flow against Spanish tyranny: ‘Your master’s intention is to draw a girdle around my realm, thinking that he has only to do with a woman. My father would never have allowed you to go so far as you have done, and I, woman that I am, will know how to look to it’. Soon afterwards she was bidding him to pull up a chair, so the two could talk as friends. Champagney knew where he stood with Walsingham, ‘not so much a Calvinist as a Puritan – or even worse’. But he departed England bewildered about Elizabeth’s true intentions, like so many of her own servants. His one consolation was that St Aldegonde had fared no better. A mooted loan of £100,000 dissolved into thin air when the queen guillotined debate in the House of Commons, so that he too left with nothing.18
Starved of foreign capital and facing dwindling tax revenues from towns disrupted by the fighting, Orange was forced to detain the fleet of the English Merchant Adventurers at Flushing. Elizabeth came close to taking this as an act of war. Walsingham joined in the general condemnation, though he had reasons of his own for doing so. The actions of the rebels ‘will marvellously exasperate her majesty against them’, he wrote in anger to Beale, ‘and draw her to make herself a party perforce against them’. His solution to the crisis took him far beyond the remit of a principal secretary to the queen. In a letter clearly intended for Orange, Walsingham explained what he needed to do ‘for the satisfaction of her majesty’. Point by precise point, he set out the terms in which Orange should ap
ologise to queen and council: how his overthrow by the Spanish would place England in peril, and how he might be forced to turn to the French if Elizabeth should abandon him. Orange took the advice, and a collision between Elizabeth and the States of the Netherlands was avoided. Walsingham knew the queen’s habits better than anyone, and he had put his knowledge at the disposal of a foreign prince. There could be no clearer example of a foreign policy driven by faith.19
For a time it looked as if the Dutch revolt might end in a truce. In January 1577 the States-General, representing most of the Netherlands except Holland and Zealand, voted to accept Philip II’s brother Don John of Austria as governor in return for the withdrawal of Spanish troops. More remarkably, the States also promised to maintain the Catholic faith. The southern Netherlands had been slower to convert to Calvinism than the merchant towns of the north, and the nobility was growing fearful of the gospel of liberation which the masses were finding in the Bible. Orange rejected the peace and petitioned Elizabeth to sign a treaty with the Protestant provinces, but she continued to deal with both sides. Walsingham was ill again, and could do little to help him. Fortunately for Orange, Don John’s willingness to negotiate with rebels finally snapped. The citadel of Namur was seized as a base from which he could crush the States-General once and for all. A month later the South American treasure fleet arrived in Seville with two million ducats of bullion, allowing Philip II to raise loans to begin the reconquest of the Netherlands.20
The forces of Spain and the States met on 31 January 1578 at the abbey town of Gembloux. Spanish cavalry inflicted a crushing defeat on a larger rebel force, slaughtering several thousand and forcing the rest into headlong retreat. The rout had major consequences for the future geography of the Low Countries. Flanders and Hainaut now began to seek an alternative destiny as the ‘obedient’ provinces of the Spanish Netherlands, leaving the north to fight on alone. The turnaround left Elizabeth facing a dilemma of the kind which she hated so much: to commit English troops, with all the risks this might entail, or to do nothing, leaving the future of the Dutch revolt to be determined by the French. A loan to the German Calvinist leader John Casimir enabled him to march an army against Don John and bought Elizabeth some time, but it was far from being a long-term solution. Her two chief ministers offered conflicting opinions, indicative of their diverging attitudes to foreign affairs. Walsingham urged the queen to intervene. Once properly fortified, the Dutch towns would be more than capable of resisting a Spanish reconquest. Burghley was sympathetic, but sceptical that the rebel States could survive a sustained assault. Mediation was the better course; and as so often, it was Burghley’s advice that appealed. Turning down Leicester’s request to lead the resulting peace mission to the Low Countries, Elizabeth opted instead for Lord Cobham and a reluctant Francis Walsingham.
There was no skimping on the scale of the 1578 embassy. Walsingham and Cobham were accompanied by more than sixty English gentlemen when they landed at Dunkirk on 21 June. Money and gifts were liberally cast about. Walsingham’s expenses alone came to £1,300, sending him further into debt. The showiness was all part of the queen’s strategy, a demonstration of English power to the States and Spanish alike. Cobham was the tenth baron of his line, with a career as a royal envoy stretching back to the reign of Edward VI. As lord warden of the Cinque Ports and constable of Dover, he knew a lot about fortifications. Elizabeth hoped to broker a peace in the Netherlands, but she also wanted an expert assessment of the strength of Orange’s camp. Walsingham and Cobham despatched riders to reconnoitre the Dutch coast and hinterland and assess the attitude of the population to the rebel cause. Sir William Pelham and George Carew reported on Ghent, which they judged to be both well defended and spiritually sound. Sermons were being preached in former friary churches, and the citizens were eager for English support. Don John and the pope were derided as ‘devils scattered upon the face of the earth’, while Orange and Elizabeth were welcomed as the instruments of God.
Walsingham was awestruck when he was taken to see the States’ army outside Antwerp, ten thousand foot soldiers and another eight of cavalry. ‘If God, who is the disposer of victory, withdraw not courage from them’, he enthused to Leicester, ‘there is great hope of their good success’. Orange himself was ‘the rarest man in Christendom’. It was clear to the ambassadors that the States would neither compromise on religion nor voluntarily yield any territory. Seeing little prospect of a settlement in the Netherlands and hearing rumours of Don John’s support for the Queen of Scots, Walsingham and Cobham came to a firm conclusion: England must take the initiative before the French decided to do so.
They got their answer in a letter from the privy council. The queen was not inclined to lend any more money to the States. Worse, she was now making demands for the return of such loans as had already been advanced. Walsingham’s friends at court alerted him that he was suspected of a lack of commitment to her chosen policy of peace. Burghley, who understood Elizabeth’s changeability only too well, attempted to console him: ‘however she misliketh matters at one time, yet at another time she will alter her sharpness, specially when she is persuaded that we all mean truly for her and her suerty’. Leicester was more angry, and less inclined to forgive. His hard words to the queen had had no effect, he told Walsingham in a letter written on the night of 20 July. ‘Never stood this crown in like peril.’ Since the entreaties of her counsellors had come to nothing, only God could now defend her.
Walsingham was shattered by the news. ‘It is an intolerable grief to me,’ he confided to Sir Christopher Hatton, ‘to receive so hard measure at her majesty’s hands’. The worst he could be accused of was having more regard to the queen’s safety than to her treasure. The two ambassadors were reduced to raising £5,000 as a private loan to preserve any degree of credit with the States. But it wasn’t enough to restore English honour, which was being held in contempt. Walsingham poured out his frustrations in a letter to Burghley. Those involved in such ‘sour service’ as they were needed to have patience, ‘being almost ashamed to show our faces abroad’. The States had been entertained with the hope of royal favour, then abandoned when they stood in greatest need. John Casimir was rueing the day that he had ever left Germany. The queen’s behaviour risked making her ‘hateful to the world’. It had also deflected the Dutch into the arms of a new protector in the form of Francis Hercules, Duke of Alençon and brother of the King of France. And to the dismay of Elizabeth’s Protestant councillors, a royal wedding was suddenly back on the cards.21
When a collection of documents illustrating Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations was published under Dudley Digges’s name in 1655, the compiler drew a contrast between the two French princes who had successively wooed the queen. The Anjou match of 1571–2 was little more than a ruse to draw the Huguenots into the net at Paris, ‘I mean the barbarous and bloody massacre on St Bartholomew’s eve’. But an alliance between Elizabeth and the Duke of Alençon had been ‘really intended’, by senior figures on the English privy council as well as by the French themselves. As to Elizabeth’s own mind in the matter, ‘a thing doubly inscrutable, both as she was a woman and a queen’, he was forced to admit defeat.
Digges’s evidence and related manuscripts in the National Archives and the British Library reveal that Elizabeth’s own ministers were every bit as mystified about what she really wanted. ‘I would to God’, wrote Walsingham to Burghley in 1581 during another doomed mission to the French court, ‘her highness would resolve one way or the other touching the matter of her marriage’. Walsingham entered the negotiating process more open to a French alliance than his Protestant ideology might imply. His visceral objection to a Catholic king-consort was offset by other priorities, to resolve the succession and to secure an ally against the menace of Spain. But the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre left him haunted by another royal wedding between a Catholic and a Protestant, one which had ignited a pogrom against the Huguenots of Paris; ‘of which most horrible spectacle I was an eye w
itness’, as Walsingham recalled in the margin of a treatise setting out the pros and cons of the Alençon match. The longer the talking went on, moreover, the less chance that a prince would be born.22
The idea of Elizabeth marrying Alençon was first mooted in the spring of 1572, during the negotiation of the treaty of Blois. Following the Duke of Anjou’s declaration that he could never marry a heretic, Catherine de’ Medici had swiftly offered up his younger brother in his place. Alençon had just turned seventeen, while Elizabeth was thirty-eight. The gap between their ages really mattered to the queen, as the Duke of Montmorency discovered when he brought Alençon’s proposal to England under cover of the celebrations for the new alliance. The French delegation had to work hard to convince Elizabeth of the benefits of the match. Marriage would make her throne more secure, as well as satisfying the desires of her subjects. Alençon’s youth was actually an advantage for the queen, ‘parcequ’elle estoit accoustumeé à commander seulle’. Sir Thomas Smith sent extravagant encouragement from his own vantage-point in France. Alençon was as rich as Anjou while also being more moderate, more flexible and altogether ‘the better fellow’. Admittedly, Anjou was taller and fairer. But Alençon was ‘not so obstinate and froward, so papistical, and so foolish and resty like a mule as his brother is’. In short, he was ten thousand times superior to Anjou. Foreseeing Elizabeth’s likely reaction, Smith urged Burghley to bring his own pressure to bear: ‘My lord I pray you, move the queen’s majesty to lose no time, and not to procrastinate as her highness is wont’.23