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

by John Cooper

  The twin threat of invasion from overseas and a Catholic fifth column at home shocked the Elizabethan state into a new scale of surveillance. Its effectiveness depended on the willingness of ordinary people to collaborate. English society had always watched itself closely for signs of difference or deviance, although in the ordinary run of things this came down to respectability more than politics. Scolding women were dunked in the village pond in a wooden see-saw known as a cucking-stool, and adulterers saw themselves paraded in effigy. But when the ‘great matter’ of Henry VIII’s marriage morphed into a Protestant Reformation, the state came to take a far closer interest in the behaviour and beliefs of ordinary people. Parliament broadened the definition of treason to include crimes of thought and word as well as deed. Conversations in private chambers and arguments in taverns became politicised and were duly reported to Cromwell. Compulsory oaths of allegiance bound every subject to their sovereign.

  The parallels between the 1530s and the 1580s are telling. Cromwell and Walsingham occupied the same office, principal secretary to the monarch. Both were responsible for policing a reformation among a population that was occasionally welcoming, often uneasy and sometimes actively hostile. The nature of Cromwell’s secret service offers a point of comparison with Walsingham’s fifty years on. Like Walsingham, Cromwell was credited at the beginning of the twentieth century with creating a ‘system of espionage’ and spinning a fine web of agents and spies. In fact, information flooded in through the normal channels of communication between the crown and the shires. Some of Cromwell’s correspondents hoped for advancement: a lucrative parcel of monastic land, or marriage to a wealthy ward of the king. Others informed on their neighbours out of evangelical commitment, or in revenge against a rival. The majority simply saw it as their duty. In Henry VIII’s reign as in Elizabeth’s, the state encouraged this belief with a vigorous propaganda campaign to foster allegiance to the Protestant nation.7

  In 1571 Parliament passed an updated version of the legislation introduced by Cromwell to protect the royal dignity from slander. Anyone who denied Queen Elizabeth’s right to the throne, or called her a heretic or a tyrant, would be prosecuted as a traitor. An accompanying statute forbade Agnus Dei tokens of the sort worn by Cuthbert Mayne. A decade later, the perceived Catholic threat had increased still further. In January 1581 Sir Walter Mildmay, chancellor of the exchequer and Walsingham’s brother-in-law, stood up in the Commons to deliver a lengthy broadside against the mustering forces of the English Catholic mission. Jesuits, ‘a rabble of vagrant friars’, were creeping into the houses of the gentry ‘not only to corrupt the realm by false doctrine, but also, under that pretence, to stir sedition’. Mercy towards the papists had done England no good, he said. The time had come ‘for us to look more narrowly and straitly to them’.8

  As members of the privy council, Walsingham and Mildmay shared responsibility for piloting legislation through Parliament. The aggressive Protestant rhetoric of the 1581 session translated into a new statute ‘to retain the queen’s majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’. This preserved the distinction between the spiritual and the political qualities of the English mission which was so crucial to government propagandists. Any priest who celebrated mass faced a year in jail and a fine of two hundred marks. If the fine could not be paid, the priest would stay in prison. His congregation was liable to a year’s imprisonment and fines of one hundred marks. Far more crushing penalties were promised for those who actively campaigned for Catholicism. Anyone who sought to withdraw the queen’s subjects ‘from their natural obedience to her majesty’, or to lure them ‘for that intent’ away from the Church of England, was declared a traitor. The formula ‘for that intent’ emphasised the official argument that Catholicism was treated as treason only if it became compromised with politics. In practice, it proved easy enough to construe Catholic priests as traitors by the nature of their calling. The same 1581 statute raised the financial penalty for refusing to attend the parish church to £20 a month.9

  The Jesuit mission provoked a degree of loathing out of all proportion to the dozen or so priests and lay brothers operating in England. Unlike the religious orders of the past, the Society of Jesus exempted its members from wearing a habit and allowed them to conceal their identity. John Gerard dressed as a gentleman, and taught himself falconry and hunting to have a topic of conversation to match his character. Edmund Campion landed at Dover in June 1580 in the more humble disguise of a travelling jewel salesman from Dublin. He was arrested but then released, even though the government had circulated a description and woodcut portraits of Campion and his fellow Jesuit Robert Persons. Still more worrying was the internationalism of the Jesuit order. Active in Ireland and Scotland as well as England and with a single chain of command to the father general in Rome, the Society of Jesus had the ability to launch a co-ordinated assault on the reformed faith throughout the British Isles.10

  Jesuits also made skilful use of the printed word. A keen advocate of Queen Elizabeth’s deposition, Robert Persons set up the secret Greenstreet House Press on the outskirts of London soon after his arrival in England. When Walsingham began to close in, it was dismantled and moved to Stonor Park near Henley. Books printed before the press was seized in August 1581 included Campion’s Decem Rationes, an academic attack on the intellectual emptiness of Protestantism. A young seminary priest in Oxford named William Hartley managed to smuggle copies into St Mary’s Church, to the horror of the university proctors. Propaganda victories like these prompted Parliament to insert the last piece in the jigsaw of anti-Catholic legislation. In 1585 Jesuits and seminary priests were given a suitably biblical forty days to submit to the queen or flee the realm, on pain of high treason.11

  The modern British security services occupy architecturally distinctive office space at Thames House and the ‘Ziggurat’ on Vauxhall Bridge, the subject of a million tourist photographs from the tripping boats on the river. The buildings proclaim the status of the agencies within them, intentionally drawing public attention to their existence. There was nothing so centralised, or so bureaucratic, about the Tudor state. If the Elizabethan security services had a headquarters then it was at Walsingham’s own house in Seething Lane, lying in Tower Ward within the walls of the ancient city of London.

  The ‘fair and large’ building noted by the Tudor topographer John Stow has long gone. A Victorian office block now occupies the site, its name – Walsingham House – and a portrait discreetly etched in glass above the entrance the only clues to what once stood here. But an inventory or ‘table book’ offers a window into Walsingham’s study at Seething Lane in about the year 1588. The visitor was confronted with a slew of paper on every aspect of Elizabethan government, from copies of treaties and correspondence with ambassadors to descriptions of the queen’s houses and the Order of the Garter. Plans for provisioning the navy and mustering the army competed for space with reports about the war against piracy. Bundles of manuscripts were sorted into a series of chests. The ‘box of navy, havens, & sea causes’ included descriptions of the fortification of Dover harbour and ‘the discovery of unknown countries’ by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher. A ‘box of religion & matters ecclesiastical’ contained lists of Catholic recusants and papers relating to the reformation in Wales. Chillingly, there was also a ‘box of examinations’ of papists and priests. Other furniture included a black desk and the ‘secret cabinet’ in which Walsingham’s will was found after his death. A ‘book of the maps of England’ probably contained the county surveys by Christopher Saxton which were also prized by Lord Burghley. The surveyor Arthur Gregorye supplied Walsingham with plans of Dover and the English plantations in Ireland.12

  Along with his papers and his books, Walsingham assembled a household of godly administrators at Seething Lane. This cadre of men was doubly bound together by its Protestant devotion and its service of the state. Laurence Tomson, who acted as Walsingham’s secretary for fifteen years, found time to translate the Ge
nevan version of the New Testament into English (which he dedicated to Walsingham) as well as an edition of Calvin’s sermons. Nicholas Faunt, another strongly committed Protestant, was an active intelligencer as well as a secretary to Walsingham, carrying despatches to English agents abroad and sending reports of his own. Robert Beale was also closely connected with Seething Lane, deputising as principal secretary when Walsingham was absent or sick. Their shared memory of St Bartholomew was a powerful bond between these men at the heart of Elizabethan government.

  Conyers Read described Walsingham’s household as ‘a perfect hot-bed of Puritanism’. One man, however, stands out from the rest. Walter Williams was another veteran of the French embassy of 1571–3 who subsequently proved his worth delivering letters between England and the continent. By 1582 he was being redeployed in a surveillance operation at home. At the time of the Ridolfi plot, William Cecil had been able to gather valuable information from Catholic prisoners in the Marshalsea via his agent William Herle, imprisoned on a charge of piracy but actually working for the crown as an agent provocateur. A series of ‘secret advertisements’ between August and December 1582 reveals Williams operating in the same role, as an undercover agent eavesdropping on Catholics detained in Rye. His letters to Walsingham describe him sleeping on the floor ‘among thieves and rovers’, trying to persuade his cell-mate to talk. On this occasion, the haul was disappointing. Williams could find no evidence of a conspiracy against the queen beyond some vague talk about Scotland. A letter intercepted by Walsingham implies that the anonymous ‘papist’ had seen through his fellow prisoner, perhaps alerted by his request for a list ‘of all the rebels beyond the seas, and where their abode is’. On 15 December Williams asked to be released, at which point Walsingham put him in charge of his headquarters at Seething Lane. By August 1583 he was acting as Walsingham’s contact with Laurent Feron, the mole inside the French embassy. Conveniently, Feron’s house in Mincing Lane was only two streets away.13

  The challenge facing Walsingham and his secretariat was the sheer wealth of information pouring into his office. It is the perennial problem of those engaged in espionage – how to sift the useful intelligence from the international chatter of news and rumour, propaganda and gossip. Simply reading and archiving the reports filed by diplomats, agents and chancers of all sorts must have been a formidable task for a small team. How much more difficult to make sense of it; to extract the viable conspiracies out of the many that would never get beyond the dreams of a maverick Jesuit, or the posturing of an isolated exile.

  There were times when the work seemed overwhelming. His correspondence shows Walsingham to have been haunted by the sickness and decay of the edifice that he sought to shore up. When sixteenth-century people thought about the state, they frequently likened it to the human body. In a letter of March 1575, Walsingham called on medical imagery to describe his relationship with Queen Elizabeth. He had recently discovered that Mary Stuart was in secret communication with the outside world with the aid of a London stationer. To Walsingham, this was a prime chance to be rid of the Scottish ‘bosom serpent’ once and for all. Yet Elizabeth stalled the investigation and forgave Lord Henry Howard, who was clearly implicated. ‘Surely my lord’, Walsingham wrote to Leicester in disgust, ‘her majesty’s strange dealings in this case will discourage all honest ministers that are careful for her safety to deal in the discovery of the sores of this diseased state, seeing her majesty bent rather to cover than to cure them’. The morbid language recurred throughout his life. Notes which Walsingham made on ‘the decay and falling away in religion’ in December 1586 pinpointed seminary priests and Jesuits as ‘the poison of this estate’.

  His choice of metaphor was poignant. Walsingham’s own body was being progressively poisoned by a urinary infection that could incapacitate him for weeks, sometimes months on end. Physical torment could be reconciled with a godly life: Calvinists expected to suffer. But what of the spiritual doubts that may have lurked in his mind? Catastrophes on the scale of William of Orange’s assassination in 1584 implied that God had tested the cause of the reformed Church and found it wanting. When Walsingham broke the news of the Throckmorton plot, it was devoured by Protestants of all classes as proof that England was, after all, a nation of the elect.14

  The flow of intelligence into Seething Lane came from many different directions. The regular diplomatic channels of the Elizabethan state are sometimes forgotten in the rush to recreate Francis Walsingham as a spymaster. Like the foreign ambassadors resident at her own court, the queen’s envoys to her brother princes were instructed to keep alert for information that might prove of political or military advantage. The recall of her representative in Spain in 1568 left only two permanent embassies, in Edinburgh and Paris, supplemented by temporary missions as necessary. Balancing the budget had always been a strain for the Tudors, and royal finances were seriously overstretched by Walsingham’s day. Maintaining a magnificent presence in a foreign territory could be ruinously expensive. Small as it was, however, the diplomatic corps had a role to play in maintaining the security of the Elizabethan regime, and nowhere more so than in Paris.

  For upper-class Catholics unwilling to compromise, Paris was proving to be an attractive place to sit out the reign of Elizabeth. About four hundred English expatriates were living in the city during the 1580s, many of them with families and servants in attendance. Paris offered safety from arrest and an intensely Catholic piety. For a few, it also provided the space to imagine the deposition of the heretical queen who ruled in their native land. Their presence forced Walsingham time and again to focus his attention on France. As Ambassador Sir Henry Cobham reported in 1582, it was depressingly easy for the émigrés to remain in communication with their kin in England. The continuing convulsions of the French wars of religion may have kept alive the prospect of a Protestant monarchy in that country, but they also spawned the threat of a Catholic invasion of England via the Channel ports. Aristocratic exiles like Charles Paget stood ready to assist.

  In truth, King Henry III was not obviously keen to fund the English Catholics within his dominions. But they were sometimes observed parading at the royal court, as Sir Edward Stafford informed Walsingham at Christmas 1583. Furthermore, the French king’s caution left the initiative in the hands of the fanatically Catholic Duke of Guise. In 1572 Guise had participated in the murder of Admiral Coligny, sparking an orgy of violence against the Huguenots. By the early 1580s he was courting funding for his Catholic League from the equally hawkish Philip II of Spain. As the Throckmorton plot chillingly demonstrated, Guise was eager to take the fight to England even if Henry III was not.15

  Paris wasn’t the only exile centre in France. Writing in 1585, an informer named Thomas Becknor warned Walsingham about the growing number of English exiles in Rouen. An Act of Parliament had theoretically cut off the revenues of those who travelled abroad without the permission of the crown, but local merchants were providing them with a rudimentary banking system in much the same way that Protestant exiles had been sustained during Mary’s reign. Charles Paget was using a Rouen trader named Barthelemy Martin to deliver money which had been exchanged, for an appropriate fee, with another merchant in London. Catholic exiles were thus finding a way to draw on the rents from their estates, to the frustration of the Elizabethan government.16

  The limitations of the traditional diplomatic channels were becoming increasingly evident. Language could significantly hinder the gathering of intelligence. Walsingham was unusual for his fluency in French and Italian, although he struggled with Spanish. Ambassadors who lacked his skills had to work through translators, greatly reducing their opportunity to detect sensitive information. Another problem was the elaborate ceremonial of the Renaissance court, which enveloped foreign envoys and kept them distant from the theatres of politics. Queen Elizabeth herself was a particularly skilled player of this game. Hunting trips and progresses into the shires could be used to dodge ambassadors who were seeking an audience with h
er. Itineraries were not advertised, and in any case Elizabeth altered them at will, leaving foreign delegations lost in the English countryside.17

  The patronage system that regulated the Elizabethan regime could also hamper its response to threats from abroad. Walsingham regarded the business of diplomacy as his own domain and expected ambassadors to report directly to him, but he never quite achieved the monopoly he desired. One man in particular stood up to him, spurning his friendship and deliberately channelling despatches to Lord Burghley as an alternative patron. Sir Edward Stafford held the crucial embassy to Paris from 1583 until after Walsingham’s death. Once installed as ambassador, Stafford became increasingly maverick in his behaviour. He pointedly bypassed Walsingham when reporting from Paris, and trespassed on his operations among the English exiles in the city. He openly proclaimed his support for Mary Stuart as Queen Elizabeth’s heir. Incredibly, from 1587 he was also in the pay of the Spanish government as a spy.

  The relationship between Stafford and Walsingham had begun well enough. Stafford’s mother was mistress of the robes to Queen Elizabeth. He followed a conventional gentleman’s route from Cambridge to the Commons and a minor office at court as a gentleman pensioner. In the 1570s he was active in French affairs as a courier and made a friend of the Duke of Alençon, hosting him at his own house in 1579. But when a posting to Paris seemed in the offing, Stafford scorned his previous co-operation with Walsingham and hitched his colours to Burghley’s mast. The resulting feud between ambassador and principal secretary was partly personal, but no doubt also ideological, since Stafford did not share Walsingham’s visceral support for the French Huguenots. Walsingham retaliated by directing his searchers to open Stafford’s letters as they arrived at Rye. When Stafford protested, Walsingham replied that he would do well to put future letters ‘in a packet directed to me’ to prevent it happening again. Meanwhile the impetuous ambassador was building up heavy gambling debts in Paris. It was perhaps to pay these that he accepted, first an advance of six thousand crowns from the Duke of Guise for sharing the contents of his diplomatic bag, and then a further two thousand crowns from Don Bernardino de Mendoza, by now the Spanish envoy to France. The bearer of this second sum was Charles Arundel, the English Catholic exile and conspirator.