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

by John Cooper

  Walsingham’s career so far had focused mainly on international affairs, the question of the queen’s marriage and the threat to the Protestant faith in the Netherlands. The discovery of Cuthbert Mayne opened his eyes to the danger of the enemy within. Mayne had been captured at Golden Manor near Truro, home to the gentleman courtier Francis Tregian. The raid on Tregian’s house was led by Sir Richard Grenville, Sheriff of Cornwall and a former captain in Queen Elizabeth’s army in Ireland. Grenville had returned from Munster convinced that Catholicism had to be rooted out of English society. He thought like a soldier, and it was in the same terms that he regarded Cuthbert Mayne. The priest’s true allegiance was betrayed by the Agnus Dei which he wore around his neck, a wax disc depicting Christ as the Lamb of God which had been blessed by the pope. A search of Mayne’s chamber turned up ‘divers other relics used in popery’, ‘pernicious trumperies’ contrary to the laws of England.

  Mayne was placed in chains following his arrest and questioned in Launceston jail. Reflecting his higher status, Tregian was imprisoned in the Marshalsea in London before being summoned before Walsingham and the privy council. Mayne’s final interrogation was recorded by a clerk and survives among the state papers in the National Archives. His neat, sloping signature affirms it to be a fair transcript of his replies. Mayne explained that he had arrived in England two years before, his true mission unsuspected by the government agents who were keeping watch on the ports. He was eager to return to his native West Country, and enlisted the help of the Catholic underground in London to secure him a stewardship in Tregian’s household. His cover left Mayne free to roam his protector’s scattered estates, celebrating mass and offering absolution to the Cornish people.1

  Had he been a relic of the medieval world, carrying on his ministry as if the Reformation had never happened, Walsingham might have been less concerned. Catholic clergy ordained in Henry VIII’s or Mary’s reigns were a temporary problem, whittled away by the passage of time. But Mayne fell into a much more dangerous category, the fresh convert to Catholicism. Educated at Oxford University in the early 1560s, he served the established Church as a chaplain at St John’s College before his escape to the seminary at Douai in 1573. Mayne had willingly traded a promising career in the Church of England for the hunted existence of a Catholic missionary priest. He had renounced his loyalty to the queen as supreme governor of the Church. Walsingham knew that there were more young men like him, training in the Low Countries or already at large in England.

  Mayne’s position on the Church of England was uncompromising. No true Catholic should attend his parish church, while taking communion under the new Elizabethan rite was out of the question. This was the language of the continental Counter-Reformation, agreed in Italy in 1564 at a meeting of the Council of Trent. Still more alarming, Mayne hinted at a political dimension to the English Catholic mission. If a foreign prince invaded a realm to restore it to the pope (the Cornish clerk wrote ‘Bishop of Rome’), then Catholics were bound to assist ‘to the uttermost of their powers’. Mayne spoke in the abstract, but the implications of his words were chilling. Cornwall and Devon were the front line of defence against any French or Spanish naval armada, sent on a crusade to reclaim England for the Holy See. Mayne had found shelter with Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, a kinsman of Francis Tregian and virtually a magnate in the West Country. A generation earlier, in Edward VI’s reign, an Arundell had led a huge rebellion in Cornwall and Devon against the Protestant Reformation. It was a disturbing reminder of Catholic strength in England’s exposed western peninsula, nearly twenty years since Queen Elizabeth’s accession.2

  Cuthbert Mayne was the protomartyr of the English Catholic mission: the first of two hundred priests and laypeople to die for their faith prior to the accession of King James in 1603. When England was threatened with foreign invasion in Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s reigns, the crown was able to respond by investing in coastal forts and gun foundries and the royal dockyards. In the 1570s, all of a sudden, the danger seemed to come from within. The coming of the English mission led Walsingham into a bleak landscape of plots and snares, informers and renegade priests, ciphers and torture. Intelligence-gathering and surveillance had traditionally focused on foreign courts; now the national gaze was turning in on itself.

  The influx of priests in Cuthbert Mayne’s image brought a harsh new clarity to English politics. Compromise was denounced and loyalties defined ever more rigidly on both sides of the religious divide. Facing the oblivion of their faith, some Catholics began to contemplate the sort of active resistance to which radical Protestants had been driven in Queen Mary’s reign. As Francis Walsingham exposed successive conspiracies during the 1580s, Protestant prayers and sermons celebrated the last battle against the Antichrist of Rome. Simply to be a Catholic was to renounce the natural duty of a subject to his sovereign.

  The story which is about to unfold, pitting Walsingham and his agents against those who sought to overthrow the Elizabethan regime, is deeply contested. The myth that Catholicism is somehow alien to Englishness has had a long and corrosive effect on the national memory of the British Isles. Focusing on Francis Walsingham inevitably carries the risk of seeing the past through the eyes of the victors. Since Victorian times, Catholic apologists have been fighting back to create their own Elizabethan historical tradition. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 created an urgent need to develop a respectable identity for the English Catholic community. A new history emerged to rival that of the Protestant establishment: a tale of Catholic heroes and martyrs, recalling the persecution of the earliest Christians under the Roman Empire. Research on the reign of Elizabeth was commissioned by the Vatican. In 1886 many of the clergy executed during the English Reformation were beatified, in company with some of the layfolk who succoured them. The campaign has continued into modern times. Several sixteenth-century martyrs were canonised as saints in 1970, including Cuthbert Mayne. Walsingham has no public memorial, whereas Mayne has given his name to a church and several schools. He is remembered on a pilgrimage at Launceston every 30 November.3

  Its actors may be long dead, but the drama of the English Catholic mission remains relevant in a way that few events of the sixteenth century could claim to be. Opinions still polarise along confessional lines. The priests and Jesuits who challenged the Church of England are variously cast as traitors or martyrs. Walsingham appears both as the saviour of Queen Elizabeth and the agent of a tyrannical Tudor state. The reality of politics, however, is rarely this simple. Allegiance might be concealed, loyalties could shift, true conversion was always a possibility. We cannot assume that everyone caught up in the English mission acted out of high principles: intensity of faith, or certainty of political ideology. As we shall see, several of the spies – and some of the clergy – entered this hall of mirrors for their own gain, or the sheer thrill of playing a double game.

  Our own verdict on Walsingham, his effectiveness as a statesman and his political morality, depends on one question above all others. Did English Catholics conspire to undermine the Elizabethan regime and kill the queen? Walsingham claimed to have thwarted numerous attempts on Elizabeth’s life. The most famous of these were led by venerable gentry families, Throckmortons and Babingtons, who dreamed of freeing the Queen of Scots from her English imprisonment. Had Walsingham been less alert, had his security services been less able or attuned, then England might have slumped into the same wars of religion which were crippling France. His critics protest that Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects were loyal to her person, even if not to her religion. The pope may have plotted to destroy her, but the seminary priests of Douai and Rheims were on a spiritual mission; other interpretations reek of Protestant propaganda. The most striking allegation against Walsingham, from the pen of a modern Jesuit, is that he fabricated the Babington plot in a Machiavellian scheme to obliterate Catholicism from the map of England.4

  The massacre at Paris had been a moment of revelation for Walsingham. As in other
Protestants of his generation, it annealed a world-view forged in the fires of Mary’s reign. By the later 1570s, however, the fight for true religion was leaching from Europe into England itself. The Catholic mission from Douai and Rheims propelled Walsingham into an unfamiliar role, from ambassador and administrator to statesman and spymaster. Searching for a metaphor to capture Walsingham’s achievement, the seventeenth-century biographer Sir Robert Naunton described him as the ‘engine’ of the Elizabethan state. ‘Engine’ meant two things to Naunton’s audience: a machine used in warfare, and an instrument of torture.5

  The radicalisation of English Catholicism gave Walsingham the chance to rise in power and status. Birth mattered as much as education and ability in the Elizabethan firmament, and Walsingham was a commoner surrounded by peers. He lived at the heart of the Elizabethan regime, but was hardly a courtier in the sense that contemporaries understood the word. Walsingham wore black in a court obsessed by beauty, and had little time for the gaudy magnificence of monarchy. His plangent Puritanism aggravated the queen. But she knew that he was loyal, and she continued to trust his judgement. The death of Sir Thomas Smith in August 1577 left Walsingham as her senior principal secretary, a promotion which he celebrated with a day’s hunting. In December he was knighted, allowing him to deal with the county gentry on an equal footing. The following year he was appointed chancellor of the Garter, England’s noblest order of chivalry now recast in a Protestant format by Edward VI.6

  In Elizabethan English, ‘secretary’ still meant ‘keeper of secrets’. Walsingham’s principal secretaryship brought a special responsibility for the queen’s safety. In principle the government had collective responsibility for the Catholic question, but Walsingham’s fellow councillors soon began to defer to him. Within days of Cuthbert Mayne’s arrest, the Bishop of London was complaining that ‘the papists marvellously increase both in numbers and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves, from the church and service of God’. Catholics were turning into recusants, refusing to have anything to do with their parish church – precisely what Mayne had been teaching his Cornish flock.7

  What the Bishop of London had detected was a quiet revolution in the culture of Catholic England. The state church re-established by the 1559 Parliament was solidly reformed in character. The liturgy was translated from Latin into English, as it had been during Edward VI’s reign. Mass became communion, and doctrine began to shadow the language of Calvinism. The clergy had to swear to their belief in predestination – that God had chosen those who will be saved ‘before the foundations of the world were laid’. But the Elizabethan religious settlement left many feeling bewildered and deprived, especially in the remoter parts of the kingdom. Anyone over fifty would have remembered the rich devotional world of damask vestments and processional banners which had existed before Henry VIII’s break from Rome. A younger generation had seen the fabric of Catholicism restored by Queen Mary, when empty niches were refilled with images and the great festivals of Corpus Christi and Rogationtide were revived. Even relics had re-emerged. Looking back on his childhood in Queen Mary’s reign, the Catholic author Nicholas Roscarrock could remember seeing the casket of St Piran paraded through the Cornish countryside.8

  Traditionalists regretted the vigorous stripping of the altars which was carried out in Elizabeth’s name after 1559, yet the great majority were able to compromise with the regime during its early years. Parish records and bishops’ visitations prove that medieval or Marian church fabric often escaped the initial assault of the Elizabethan iconoclasts. Surviving altars and holy-water stoups provided a link with the liturgical past. Numerous churches retained the rood screens which divided the priest’s domain of the chancel from the laity in the nave, while some had held onto their carved images of Christ and the saints. Clergy with distinctly un-Protestant opinions were able to weather the Elizabethan Church settlement. Until a new ministry could be trained in the universities, the Church of England had to rely on priests ordained before the Reformation or in Mary’s reign. The vicar of Morebath, a sheep-farming community on Dartmoor, came to the village in 1520 when Henry VIII was still a devout Catholic. He was there fifty years later, still brewing beer to sell in aid of church funds.9

  Another explanation for Catholic conformism can be found in the English parish. The celebration of holy communion reinforced the ties of community; a service according to the Book of Common Prayer was better than none at all. Recusancy risked excommunication, and this was a dreadful sanction in a society that feared isolation from church and neighbours. The excommunicated were barred from the essential rites of passage provided by the Church: marriage, baptism, even burial on consecrated ground. In December 1584 the family of a Leeds Catholic named Richard Lumbye attempted to bury him in the churchyard, only to be halted at the lychgate by the curate and churchwardens. Because Lumbye had chosen to withdraw from his neighbours in life, he had no right to lie with them in death. Time, and parish fellowship, were powerful allies of the Church of England.10

  A third factor was the queen herself. Elizabeth’s own faith was a curious hybrid, combining Lutheran ideas with a respect for traditional structure and liturgical dignity. Her unwillingness to concede Alençon the freedom of Catholic worship contrasted with the crucifix and candles which she stubbornly kept on the altar of the Chapel Royal. Her bedside cabinet contained a book of Latin prayers which Elizabeth had copied out as a gift to her father, and her patronage of William Byrd ensured the survival of English sacred music. Pope Pius IV offered to confirm her settlement of religion if she would only recognise his jurisdiction in England. The first generation of Catholic intellectuals who took refuge in Louvain in the 1560s did not find it difficult to reconcile their theological stance with a continuing sense of loyalty to the queen. Thomas Dorman affirmed that Elizabeth was ‘the image of God in earth in all civil and politic government’, while Thomas Stapleton protested that Catholics were her ‘most loyal and obedient subjects’ except in matters of conscience. Until the early 1580s, Catholic political thought was dominated by the doctrine of non-resistance.11

  If the tide of government policy had turned against the Catholics, then the ebb-and-flow history of the earlier Reformation suggested that all was not lost. Time, and God’s providence, might revive their fortunes. So they generally came to church, listened to the English collects and psalms, and prayed for the safety of the queen. A new term of art entered the English language: the ‘Church papist’, who took part in the rites of the established Church in spite of his or her traditional faith. The bravest of the Church papists advertised their contempt for Protestant services by reading devotional works of their own, or muffling their ears during offensive sermons. Women, who were less likely to be literate, could pray their outlawed rosary beads. Most Catholics, however, were content not to draw attention to themselves. The requirement to take communion two or three times a year could be dodged by claiming to be out of charity with a neighbour. At home, a quiet regime of fasting according to the old Catholic cycle – on Fridays, Ember days, during Lent – perpetuated the memory of the pre-Reformation calendar.12

  What disturbed this equilibrium, forcing Walsingham and the powers of the Elizabethan state to redefine English Catholics as traitors, and hound their priests as outlaws? A decade after Elizabeth’s accession, a biting anxiety began to afflict the Catholic community. Unless it took more positive action, it might soon cease to be. Parishes which had initially hung onto their costly Catholic fabric were now disposing of their obsolete chalices and vestments. The failed uprising of the Catholic northern earls in 1569 convinced the churchwardens of Morebath that their silken tunicle, worn by a sub-deacon during the old Latin liturgy, had become a liability. With an eye for economy, they recycled it into a covering for the wooden communion table that had replaced the ancient altar. Like a myriad similar decisions by wardens in other parishes, it was tacit recognition that the Catholic mass would never be sung again.13

  Numerous secret Catholic congregatio
ns survived the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, served by priests who resigned their posts in protest at the 1559 settlement of religion. By the mid-1570s, however, the supply of breakaway clergy was dwindling as death claimed the pre-Reformation generation. Deprived of their Latin primers and annual saints’ plays, the English people were beginning to forget their Catholic devotions and old processional routes. Meanwhile, parish life was becoming attuned to the reformed rhythms of the Church of England. The turning of the seasons was measured by the collects of the Book of Common Prayer rather than by saints’ days and sacred drama. From the later 1560s, bell-ringing and bonfires for the queen’s accession day offered a replacement for the medieval holidays of Candlemas and Corpus Christi. The privy council was sufficiently confident to release prominent Catholic prisoners from the Marshalsea in 1574, including John Feckenham, the last abbot of Westminster Abbey. There was a new spirit of English patriotism in the air. ‘Our England’, exclaimed Bishop Horne of Winchester, ‘is sailing with full sails and a prosperous breeze’.14

  Within and beyond the walls of the established Church, Catholic culture was in danger of bleeding away. The tourniquet was supplied by an exiled Lancashire gentleman and Oxford academic, William Allen. Walsingham and Allen were direct contemporaries: their characters were both formed by the political and religious upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century. But their response could hardly be more different, since Allen was destined to become a cardinal and the spiritual leader of the English Catholic community. In 1568 Allen set up a college in Douai in the Netherlands to educate Catholic émigrés from the English universities. At first he was content to play a waiting game. When God chose to strike down the heretical regime of Queen Elizabeth, Allen would be waiting to deploy a new church leadership in England. But when the rising of the northern earls and the 1571 Ridolfi plot both failed to restore a Catholic government to England, Allen began to see a different meaning in contemporary events. God must have another purpose for the English students who were by now flocking to Douai. Looking back to the persecution of the early Church, ‘the old example of the Apostles in their days’, Allen found the model of the missionary priest: a preacher in private houses rather than a parish church, free to move between congregations.