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

by John Cooper

  Walsingham was more reticent about singing Alençon’s praises, not least because of the young duke’s appearance. A bout of smallpox had left him disfigured, and he also suffered from an irregularity of the spine. Elizabeth later devised a pet name for him, ‘Frog’, perhaps a reference to his bandy legs; it predates English jokes about frogs and the French by two centuries. The queen was already sensitive to the lewd gossip which marriage to a much younger man could bring. Alençon’s pockmarked face and lack of height made matters worse, potentially compromising the royal magnificence which Elizabeth held so dear.

  The ‘delicacy of her majesty’s eye’ was not the only just impediment. Walsingham repeatedly complained about English courtiers who spoke against the marriage simply to keep themselves in royal favour, ‘having neither regard unto her majesty nor to the preservation of our country from ruin’. Elizabeth was, in Walsingham’s famous phrase, ‘the best marriage in her parish’, while Alençon was the best suitor to have wooed her. But the ‘necessary remedy’ prescribed by Parliament was being thwarted by the corruption of court politics, bringing him to despair of the queen’s safety.

  Walsingham laid out the advantages of the Alençon match in a letter to Lord Burghley. If his looks could be discounted, the duke had many of the qualities to be desired in a husband for the queen. There were also grounds for hope regarding his religion. Walsingham reckoned that Alençon could be guided to conformity with the Church of England once detached from the influence of his family. Sir Thomas Smith agreed. Now that Anjou had become a partisan of the ultra-Catholics, Alençon’s household was a ‘refuge and succour’ for Huguenots seeking royal service. From an English perspective, his degree of distance from the French throne actually made him a more attractive prospect than his brother. If Queen Elizabeth’s husband inherited the kingdom of France, then England might be reduced to a satellite state. Beyond such high political concerns was the expectation, shared by Elizabeth’s male counsellors, that marriage (and, by implication, sex) could only improve the queen’s indifferent health. Childbirth was good for women because, in Smith’s memorable phrase, it ‘doth clear their bodies, amend their colour, prolong their youth’. The pains which afflicted Elizabeth in her cheek and face were attributed by Burghley to her spinsterhood.24

  Alençon’s proposal demanded a response from the queen. On 23 July 1572 she wrote to Walsingham from her summer progress to tell him that she could not agree to the marriage, citing the ‘absurdity’ which the world might see in her choice of partner. The gap in their ages was simply too great. The queen had also received a fuller description of the scars on the duke’s face, about which Walsingham himself had remained tactfully quiet. Four days later came another letter to Walsingham, which Elizabeth claimed was consistent with her first answer but actually modified it in one very significant detail. Because she valued the French alliance so highly, she was willing for Alençon to ‘come hither in person’ to present his suit. Only then would she finally make up her mind. Recognising that France would lose face should the duke be rejected on grounds of his appearance, Elizabeth suggested that the visit could be secret and private, ‘without any outward pomp or show’.

  If Alençon had been bluffing when he offered to meet the queen, then Elizabeth had called it. Why these two contradictory letters, sent in such close succession? Walsingham was instructed to present them both at the French court, where they caused a good deal of confusion. Perhaps this was the point: if Elizabeth had no intention of taking a husband, then there was at least a clear diplomatic advantage in keeping negotiations going as long as possible. Shifting her stance might also help to quieten the clamour in the council chamber and Parliament for her to marry. Or maybe the two letters represent what Susan Doran has called the queen’s ‘perplexity’, the sheer difficulty of making up her mind on an issue in which domestic and foreign policies were so densely intertwined. This would fit with what we know about Elizabeth’s character, her shunning of decisions on many of the great questions of state.25

  There is an alternative explanation, unmistakably hinted at in Walsingham’s instructions. The queen was willing to consider marrying Alençon, but only if the French could offer something extra in return. Elizabeth was fully aware that the duke’s youthfulness was a weak excuse for breaking off the marriage talks. The French delegation could reasonably argue that if this was such a sticking-point, she should have been plain from the start. Artfully anticipating this objection in her 23 July letter to Walsingham, Elizabeth explained that she had been waiting to see if ‘any such further matter might be offered with this match, as might counterpoise in the judgement of the world, the inconvenience of the difference of the age’.

  All parties knew what this meant: the return of Calais to the English crown. This isolated remnant of Henry V’s empire in France had been taken by the French only months before Elizabeth acceded to the throne, and she felt the loss as painfully as her half-sister Mary had done. In practical terms, the capture of Calais was not of much significance. English merchants had little difficulty in porting their operations elsewhere, and men of government probably welcomed the saving to a hard-pressed exchequer. The French were understandably affronted at the idea that Elizabeth should be compensated for deigning to marry Alençon. Her ministers could see what the queen could not, that there was little strategic value in one vulnerable garrison town in northern France. But Calais was symbolic of English sovereignty, and Elizabeth felt compelled to recover it. She clung to the belief that diplomacy could win back what her sister had lost through war – the same message that was encoded in Lucas de Heere’s Allegory of the Tudor Succession.26

  On 21 August 1572 Catherine de’ Medici wrote to her ambassador in England proposing that Elizabeth and her son meet on a ship in the Channel between their two realms. The following day, the French Protestant leader Admiral Coligny was shot in Paris. Unlike his brother Anjou, the Duke of Alençon was not personally implicated in the massacres which followed, but he did take part in the siege of the Huguenot citadel at La Rochelle. Persuading the English public to accept a French king-consort would be far more difficult in the aftermath of St Bartholomew, even assuming that a political consensus had pointed in this direction. An exchange of envoys in 1573 kept the marriage theoretically in play, but each side remained courteously deaf to the arguments of the other.

  At Easter 1574, while Charles IX lay dying, Alençon was confined to the fortress chateau of Vincennes outside Paris. He was suspected of plotting against his brother Anjou in collaboration with Henry of Navarre, the Protestant and Bourbon claimant to the throne. It must have seemed to Walsingham that the events of August 1572 were repeating themselves. Thomas Leighton was hurriedly sent as a special envoy to the Valois court, and Walsingham re-engaged his former agents in France in order to make contact with Alençon. The ciphered report which he received from Leighton was far from reassuring. Alençon reckoned that he would soon be in the Bastille, and was appealing to England for help. Burghley responded by sending money to bribe his guards, but without success. Elizabeth also attempted to intervene, offering to receive the Duke of Alençon at court, but the invitation was turned down by his mother. Meanwhile the Count of Montgomméry, the Protestant captain who had fled to England in 1559 after accidentally killing Henry II in a jousting accident, launched an assault into Normandy from his base in Jersey. The Anglo-French entente which had been hammered out at Blois was fast becoming a distant memory. The English diplomat Lord North was treated to the sight of Catherine de’ Medici publicly mocking two dwarfs dressed up as Queen Elizabeth.27

  As France slid back into its wars of religion, Walsingham put the case for military action to the queen. John Casimir’s Protestant army in Germany was in desperate need of funds. The royal navy was ready for action and could be used to harry French commerce. The urgency of the cause called for plain speaking. ‘For the love of God, madam,’ he wrote in January 1575, ‘let not the cure of your diseased state hang any longer in deliberatio
n. Diseased states are no more cured by consultation, when nothing resolved on is put in execution, than unsound and diseased bodies by only conference with physicians, without receiving the remedies by them prescribed.’

  Elizabeth responded by offering Casimir’s father Frederick III a loan of 150,000 silver thalers, but only on condition that Calais be returned to her. When the money was actually sent, it had mysteriously shrunk to 50,000 thalers or £15,000 – too little, Frederick protested, to be of any real use. In September Alençon took matters into his own hands, breaking out of Vincennes and declaring himself protector of the commonwealth. From now on, the duke was an independent agent in French politics. Elizabeth was furious when the Huguenots subscribed to Alençon’s ‘Peace of Monsieur’ the following year, but her unreliability as a patron had left them little alternative.28

  A great deal had changed by the time that the uprising in the Low Countries put the Alençon match back on the agenda in 1578. The admission of the former Duke of Anjou, now Henry III, that he would not be having children had nudged his younger brother Alençon a step closer to the French throne. Alençon had soiled his reputation in the interim by commanding an army against his Huguenot allies, but now he spied an advantage in leading the Dutch revolt against Spain. The Calvinist States of the Netherlands had been abandoned by Elizabeth and were threatened with potential annihilation; they had nowhere else to turn. As the Earl of Sussex bleakly put it to Walsingham in August 1578, ‘the case will be hard both with the queen and with England if either the French possess or the Spanish tyrannise in the Low Countries’. The plotlines of the Dutch revolt and the Duke of Alençon, until now largely separate from each other, had become intertwined. Facing a shift in the European balance of power but unwilling to go to war, Elizabeth attempted to cash in her principal asset while it still had some value.29

  When a marriage alliance had first been proposed during Francis Walsingham’s embassy to Paris, the privy council and Parliament were broadly in favour while the queen repeatedly expressed her opposition. Once the Alençon negotiations resumed, however, it soon became clear that the tables had turned. Elizabeth let it be known that she wanted to be wooed. When Alençon’s personal envoy Jean de Simier arrived in January 1579 bearing gifts of jewels, he was swept into a bizarre world of courtly love by proxy. Elizabeth dallied with him at masques and jousts, hosted intimate interviews and pressed him with love-tokens for his master. He became her ‘Ape’, apparently a pun on the Latin version of his name, although something else may have been implied: monkeys symbolised sensual pleasure in Renaissance art.

  Elizabeth’s advisers watched her display of coquetry with disbelief and growing alarm. Sir Walter Mildmay was openly opposed to the match, addressing a personal appeal to his fellow councillors: which of them would want to see his own daughter married to a papist? Burghley’s opinion is more difficult to read. Memoranda in his hand which apparently promote the match can also be read within the rhetorical conventions of the time, as identifying a case in order to counter it. When he did offer his verdict on the marriage, initially to Elizabeth and then to the rest of the council, it was to speak against it. Only Sussex welcomed the marriage, citing the assurances of Alençon’s entourage that he was content to become Elizabeth’s ‘servant and defender’, and arguing that this was the best way to deflect the duke from his ambitions in the Netherlands.30

  Walsingham’s attitude to Alençon had cooled since the duke’s escape from house arrest at Vincennes. When Elizabeth demanded that her councillors put their individual assessments of the marriage down on paper, Walsingham replied with a treatise on ‘the diseased state of the realm, and how the same may in some kind be cured’. This picked up the imagery of sickness and medicine which he used to harangue the queen for her failure to commit to the Protestant cause in Europe. As a diagnosis of the threats to her regime at home and abroad, it made for grim reading. Her subjects were unnerved by the queen’s unwillingness either to marry or to name a successor. There was no religious unity in the realm. Popular devotion was diverting towards the Queen of Scots ‘in respect of religion and the expectation she hath of this crown’. The rulers of France and Spain were both enemies to Elizabeth, and might act against her when their internal troubles had calmed. Then there was King James of Scotland, soon perhaps to make a foreign marriage alliance of his own, which would leave England encircled by hostile states.

  Having reviewed the state of national security, Walsingham turned specifically to the Alençon match. There was the personal impact on the queen to consider. Elizabeth would be in physical decline while the duke was still in his prime; a common cause of unhappiness in marriage, as Walsingham pointed out. Given the queen’s unwillingness to take a husband, any pressure to do so might hasten her death. This objection was less plausible in 1579, when Elizabeth was doing as much of the running as her suitor, but another was sharply relevant: ‘the danger that women of her majesty’s years are most commonly subject unto by bearing of children’. Elizabeth was in her forty-sixth year, improbably old by Tudor standards to be delivering her first child. For Walsingham and her other Protestant councillors, the chance to settle the succession had offset their opposition to a Catholic consort. Now the birth of an heir had to be weighed against the risk that Elizabeth would die in the attempt, leaving England’s future to be determined by a French duke and a Scottish queen. Far from healing the lesions in the body politic, the marriage could easily ‘breed some broil in England’.

  Walsingham’s greatest fear was the ‘diversity in religion’ which would follow in Alençon’s wake. For him this was the crux of the issue, ‘a matter principally to be weighed by Christian counsellors in giving advice to a Christian prince’. The prosperity of a kingdom depended wholly on the goodness of God. The people must place their trust in providence, not be ‘carried away by human policy’. History had proved that mighty potentates were bridled when they defied the will of God. Walsingham’s thoughts returned again to the massacre at Paris: ‘And what success is to be looked for of those marriages that are not made a domino, grounded upon human policy, let the dolorous success of the King of Navarre’s marriage teach us.’ Faith alone, ‘soundly without wavering’, was sufficient to secure God’s protection – a message stretching from the sixteenth-century reformers back to St Augustine and the epistles of St Paul.31

  These were the terms in which Walsingham preached to the queen and council. The blots and scribblings out, the arguments carried into the margins and the frenetic handwriting, bespeak the speed and passion with which he wrote. Walsingham’s treatise matched the mood of many other Protestants in court and country. A Lenten sermon in the presence of the queen called the martyrs of Bloody Mary’s reign to mind. The government banned the exposition of any scriptural texts which could be construed as relevant to the match, but popular culture proved less easy to censor. A recycled ballad about the marriage began to do the rounds, a skit on the queen’s pet name for Alençon. It was still in circulation centuries later as a children’s song:

  A frog he would a-wooing go. Heigh-ho, says Rowley!

  A frog he would a-wooing go,

  whether his mother would let him or no,

  With a roly-poly, gammon and spinach.

  In July a bullet came close to the barge in which Elizabeth and Simier were being rowed. The queen chose to see it as an accident rather than a failed assassination, and pardoned the terrified waterman who had fired it. Even so, it was thought prudent to tighten the gun laws within the precincts of the court.

  The arrival of Alençon in person in August 1579 sparked a fresh outburst of anti-French feeling. As the duke disappeared for a fortnight into the queen’s privy chamber, pamphlets and sermons combined in a collective howl of patriotic protest. An anonymous poem was nailed to the door of the Lord Mayor of London, proclaiming allegiance to Elizabeth so long as she defied the ‘foreign yoke’ and openly threatening the duke:

  Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our desi
re;

  For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.32

  One of the boldest critics was a London lawyer and Protestant polemicist named John Stubbs. His Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is Like to be Swallowed was a scorching indictment of the Alençon match, ‘the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our church’. Marriage to a Catholic was a sin which would bring down the wrath of God, and draw queen and country into captivity under the French. The duke himself came in for a thunderous attack. Alençon was a serpent come ‘to seduce our Eve, that she and we may lose this English paradise’. Since Elizabeth was being led ‘blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter’, it was the responsibility of others to wake her from her bewitchment. Stubbs concluded by calling on the English people to heed his warning: first the nobility and privy council, as ‘tutors to the common weal’; then bishops and royal courtiers, who might have some influence with the queen; and finally the common folk, though their role was restricted to praying that this plague be lifted from ‘Christian Israel’.

  Elizabeth knew how to parry Protestant agitation in church and Parliament. But Stubbs went further than her sternest critic in the Commons would have dared. He had pinpointed a moment of political crisis, and his solution seemed dangerously close to republicanism. Worse, his opinions had been broadcast to the shires in a thousand printed copies. When she first heard about Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf, the queen wanted him dead. Although she was persuaded to settle for a lesser charge than treason, the punishment meted out was horribly symbolic: Stubbs’s writing hand was chopped off in three blows, watched by an ominously silent Westminster crowd. The victim managed the obligatory ‘God save the queen’ before he blacked out, but his scaffold speech had pointedly referred to the lack of mercy shown to him. It did the government no favours that Stubbs was prosecuted under a revived Marian statute devised to silence Protestant writing and preaching.33