The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
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The jury is still out on the exact nature of Stafford’s treason. An agent returning from Paris to England in spring 1586 brought news of the cash-for-secrets deal with Guise and Arundel. And yet Walsingham did not strike, in part because Stafford remained in Burghley’s confidence, but also perhaps to avoid blowing the cover of his informer. A more intriguing possibility is that Walsingham had decided to use Stafford to feed false or baffling information to his Spanish handlers. By 1587, when Stafford was recruited by Mendoza, a sea war between England and Spain was looming and naval intelligence was at a premium for both nations. In April of that year Stafford forwarded Mendoza news, recently received from Walsingham, that the queen was delaying sending out Francis Drake’s fleet to harass Spanish shipping. This was the opposite of the truth: Drake had already sailed on his famous expedition to ‘singe the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cadiz.
When he realised that Drake had put to sea, Stafford sent an urgent warning to Cadiz which arrived only a day after the town had been burned. Clearly he had other sources besides Walsingham. One of these was his brother-in-law Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral of England, who inadvertently provided statistics on the firepower of the English fleet. Walsingham may have been playing Sir Edward Stafford, but he could not control him. Stafford’s despatches to his Spanish paymasters undoubtedly compromised England’s defence against naval attack. He was never called to account for his actions, and was honourably buried at St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1605.18
Stafford’s tenure of the Paris embassy for most of the 1580s challenged Francis Walsingham’s position at the focal point of Elizabethan diplomacy. Sir Henry Cobham had been provided with a secretary by Walsingham himself, one Francis Needham, enabling him to monitor the ambassador’s correspondence. Stafford’s appointment changed all this, diverting the flow of information from Paris. As the customary sources of foreign intelligence dried up, so Walsingham was driven towards a new type of statecraft. The security of the Elizabethan regime increasingly came to depend upon a network of agents and informers, paid by Walsingham and reporting directly to him rather than to the queen.19
In 1592 Robert Beale recalled the ‘foreign espials and intelligences’ maintained by Walsingham during the last ten years of his life. The principal secretary ran his network using his own resources as well as an allowance from the crown. A list of ‘sundry foreign places from whence Mr Secretary Walsingham was wont to receive his advertisements’ spanned France, the Low Countries and Germany to Spain, Italy and the Ottoman Empire: a total of forty-six locations, from Constantinople to Algiers. Much of this was simply news, equivalent to the foreign affairs pages of a modern daily paper. The work of this sort of ‘espial’ would nowadays be the domain of the journalist. But among these thousands of despatches were some that were very valuable indeed. They enabled Walsingham to tail exiles in Madrid and Paris, to overhear conversations at the English colleges in Rheims and Rome, and to piece together the jigsaws of conspiracy against the crown.20
Elizabethan England may have lacked a large diplomatic establishment, but its power as a nation of traders was increasingly impressive. Francis Walsingham was able to make his own use of the merchants and factors of the great commercial companies, men who had legitimate reason to travel and linger abroad. Christopher Hoddesdon is a good example. Following several successful years trading in Muscovy and the Baltic, Hoddesdon rose to be master of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg and a financial agent of Elizabeth I. He sent a steady stream of letters to both Walsingham and Burghley, full of the breaking news of Europe: royal marriages in the Holy Roman Empire, a Turkish siege in Hungary, exchange rates and shipping movements. Within this onslaught of information was more specific intelligence. In February 1578 Hoddesdon forwarded a report from his own agent in Rome describing Captain Thomas Stucley’s attempt to launch an invasion of Ireland from Civitavecchia, an armada of one leaky vessel with four cannon and a mutinous crew. It helped that there was a family connection between Walsingham and his informant. Hoddesdon was married to Walsingham’s stepdaughter Alice, and he committed his son to Walsingham’s care ‘if God take me away before I return’. They may have shared an interest in falconry, since Hoddesdon sent him a goshawk. He continued filing reports from Emden and Antwerp in the early 1580s.21
Walsingham was a powerful patron for a man like Hoddesdon, whose wealth and status depended on the free flow of trade. As so often in early modern Europe, the quality of the gifts exchanged indicates the value of the relationship. In 1584 Walsingham received a unique and costly present from Constantinople, a leather carpet in the style of the inner apartments or seraglio of the sultan’s palace at Topkapi. Its sender was William Harborne, a London merchant who had been resident in the Ottoman capital since 1578. The English were a welcome supplier of munitions to the Turkish war against Persia, and Harborne was able to negotiate a charter of privileges for English merchants from Sultan Murad III. Queen Elizabeth rarely missed an opportunity for economy, and in 1582 she appointed Harborne her ‘orator and agent’ on the expense account of the newly founded Turkey Company.
Walsingham, too, spied an advantage. Alliance with an Islamic empire that was perceived as the scourge of Christian Europe may seem a strange objective for a Puritan principal secretary, but the Ottomans were a great power in the Mediterranean sea. If they could be induced to make war on Spain, Philip II would be forced to deploy ships which could otherwise be used against England. In 1585 Walsingham wrote to Harborne in cipher, ‘your assured loving friend’, instructing him to explain to the vizier how the rise of Spain was threatening the dignity of the sultan. The remedy that Walsingham prescribed was a military strike, either on Spain itself from the coast of Ottoman-controlled Africa, or an assault of naval galleys on Habsburg territories in Italy. Harborne dutifully spent the next three years petitioning the sultan to commit some portion of his forces against Spain, although it turned out that he was too committed to the conflict in Persia to open up another front against Catholic Christendom. In 1588 Harborne exchanged Constantinople for Norfolk, where he wrote an account of his Turkish experiences which was printed in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation. Appropriately, the book was dedicated to Walsingham.22
Ambassadors and semi-official envoys like William Harborne inhabited a courtly world, defined – at least on the surface – by codes of chivalry and amity, and displayed in exaggerated etiquette. The queen’s image abroad was one aspect of her government that Elizabeth treated with deadly gravity, since it was by her own reputation that the strength of her regime was assessed. England was underpopulated and militarily under-resourced by continental standards, and this made it all the more vital that the queen should visibly appear to emanate power and dignity. Where diplomacy shaded into espionage, it could not be allowed to compromise the public face of the English monarchy. This set a limit to the intelligence operations of the official channels of state.
Look underneath that patina of royal magnificence, however, and there was another layer to the Elizabethan security services: the semi-professional intelligencers who existed to collect, decrypt and interpret information regarding the enemies of the established regime. One of the remarkable features of Walsingham’s secret service was its social inclusiveness, from young members of the gentry down to the jailbirds and petty criminals of the Elizabethan underworld. It is tempting to draw a comparison with modern agencies like Bletchley Park in the early 1940s, a melting-pot of grammar-school boys, dons and debutantes. At a time when even modes of dress were prescribed by Parliament according to hierarchy, Walsingham was willing to recruit talent wherever it lay.
At the social summit of the Elizabethan secret service lay men who were educated at university or the Inns of Court, fluent in classical languages and English common law. Robert Beale was one of these. Another, almost certainly, was the poet Christopher Marlowe. Speculation about his work for Walsingham in the mid-1580s adds just the required dash of spice to
Marlowe’s biography, which is otherwise scant in crucial details. It seems to provide a context for the subversiveness of such plays as Dr Faustus and Edward II. It might also explain his sordid death with a knife in the eye at a Deptford rooming-house. Marlowe’s outrageous atheism, and his uncertain but passionate sexuality, contrast dramatically with the steely Puritanism of Walsingham’s other administrators and agents in the field.
Unfortunately, this portrait of Marlowe rests on evidence that is both limited and tainted: an absence from his Cambridge college in the mid-1580s, and a slew of slanders after his death. Rumour clung to Marlowe in his own lifetime, courted by the poet himself, and his myth has only grown in the telling. But one place-name recurs in the sources, implying that Marlowe was somehow involved there: the French city of Rheims, home to Cardinal Allen’s college for missionary priests and the target of a sustained operation by Francis Walsingham.
We know that Marlowe’s time as a spy was brief: a few months while reading for his MA at Corpus Christi in 1584–5, and a reprise in the Dutch port of Flushing in 1592. According to the ledgers of the college buttery (from bouteillerie, where the bottles are kept, hence an account of food and drink consumed) he disappeared from Corpus for the duration of Michaelmas term 1584. He was absent again between April and June 1585, and was noticeably more lavish in his spending on his return. Then silence until June 1587, when the privy council directed the University of Cambridge to award him his MA. It also wanted the rumour suppressed that Marlowe was intending to defect to Rheims. These unusual orders were justified on grounds that Marlowe had been employed ‘in matters touching the benefit of his country’.
Who was Marlowe working for? Although he reported to Lord Burghley on occasion, there is circumstantial evidence that Francis Walsingham was his principal paymaster. Marlowe’s life as a playwright was entwined with that of Thomas Walsingham, a young second cousin of Sir Francis who fashioned himself as a literary patron while couriering government letters between England and Paris in the early 1580s. If Thomas recruited Marlowe, then he may also have been his handler at Seething Lane. When the authorities came to arrest Marlowe in May 1593, they looked for him at Thomas Walsingham’s manor of Scadbury in Kent. Within the month, Thomas was one of the mourners at Marlowe’s funeral. The 1598 edition of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham by its editor. As for the nature of his secret service, Marlowe would have been too easily recognised to be a plausible plant in Cardinal Allen’s seminary. Then again, he hardly needed to leave England to serve the state: he was already in a position to trail Cambridge men who were contemplating the road to Rheims.23
The two sides of Kit Marlowe, atheist and spy, come together in his relationship with Richard Baines, another Cambridge MA with a connection to Rheims. Baines was already working for Walsingham when he was ordained a Catholic priest there in 1581. He was a valuable mole within the seminary until he was identified as an explorator, a ‘lurking spy’ in William Allen’s Latin. Marlowe knew Baines as a man whose career was virtually finished, scarred by the torture he had endured in the town jail in Rheims following his discovery. Walsingham’s intelligencers varied in their response to the close quarters in which they were required to work. In some, it fostered an esprit de corps founded on patriotism or faith. Others found it stifling. Baines detested Marlowe, and made a record of his provocative conversation. His account of Marlowe’s atheistical table-talk, his ‘scorn of God’s word’, created an atmosphere around the poet that prompted others to think they could profit from his murder.24
Investing in Marlowe may have paid Walsingham a dividend of a different kind. A London playhouse was one of very few venues where politics could be publicly discussed, and consequently the crown took an interest in what was put on. For Walsingham Marlowe may have represented a man on the inside, a literary equivalent of Richard Baines in the seminary at Rheims. A parallel strategy was to offer protection to the actors themselves. In 1583 Walsingham instructed Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney to form the company of Queen’s Men. Whatever his motives, Walsingham’s patronage of plays and players forces us to refine the received image of a relentlessly dour Puritan.
Dogged by rumours of homosexuality and crypto-Catholicism, Marlowe lay at one end of the spectrum of agents employed by Walsingham. At the other was Maliverny Catlyn, who wrote from Rouen in April 1586 promising ‘such service as might witness my duty to religion, her majesty’s person, and my country’s preservation’. By his own account, Catlyn had served as a soldier in the Low Countries before successfully penetrating the English Catholic exile community in France. He revealed the true tone of his faith in a sermonic address to Walsingham on what he called ‘the daily abuse of stage plays’: ‘such an offence to the godly,’ wrote Catlyn, ‘and so great a hindrance to the gospel, as the papists do exceedingly rejoice at the blemish thereof’. While two hundred proud players paraded in silks, five hundred people starved on the streets of London. Every theatre, declared Catlyn, should pay a weekly pension to the poor.
Notwithstanding his contempt for the Elizabethan stage, Catlyn must have been a convincing actor. Walsingham embedded him as a prison spy in Portsmouth and then the Marshalsea, where he was assured by one of the prisoners that a Franco-imperial invasion and a popular Catholic uprising would free them before the harvest was in. Catlyn forwarded the news to Walsingham ‘with all speed, with all expedition’. As Walter Williams had found before him, the life of a stool-pigeon was never easy. Catlyn struggled to get hold of paper and ink and to allay the suspicions of his jailer, ‘who in truth useth me like a prisoner committed for high treason, so that I was forced to charge him in her majesty’s name to deliver this to your honour’. When Walsingham had discovered all he could, Catlyn was transferred to survey the strength of Catholicism in the north.
His diatribe against stage plays implies that religious zeal motivated Catlyn to volunteer for Walsingham’s secret service. He identified the English nation with God’s people in the Old Testament, numbering himself among the elect: ‘the Lord of Hosts will surely forsake to dwell amongst the tents of Israel if the sins of the people do still provoke him’. Elsewhere, however, we find Catlyn attempting to serve both God and Mammon. His letter from Rouen called Walsingham’s attention to ‘my poor living, the defect whereof drives me sometimes to a non-plus; for being the youngest son of a younger brother, my position was only seven feet of inheritance, which has constrained me to seek my living hic et ubique [here and everywhere]’. A few months later he wrote again asking for money, or else ‘I and mine are like to keep the coldest Christmastide that hitherto we ever tasted’. Walsingham sent him £5, hardly generous if Catlyn’s household aspired to any sort of gentility.25
This seems to have been how Elizabethan spies were rewarded, ad hoc and for operations carried out. Again, it looks so different from the established security agencies of the modern state. But Walsingham’s system had the advantage of keeping his operatives hungry to serve, and personally loyal to him. It also acted as a check on costs, a vital consideration given the queen’s notorious reluctance to part with money. The financing of the Elizabethan security services is difficult to trace in the archives. Funds were authorised by warrants issued under the privy seal rather than voted by Parliament or paid through the formal crown machinery of exchequer and treasury. This made things easier for Walsingham, who had physical custody of the privy seal by the mid-1570s, but also problematic for the investigating historian, since a fire in 1619 consumed many of the privy seal warrants. The records which do survive, augmented by a list of payments ‘for secret service’ compiled by signet clerk Thomas Lake (nicknamed ‘Swiftsure’ for his efficient despatch of business), reveal an annual grant to Walsingham of £750 in 1582. This rose to about £2,000 in the mid-1580s and dropped to some £1,200 when the crisis of the Spanish Armada had passed. Ordinary crown revenue was about £300,000 per annum, implying that Elizabeth’s security services accounted for two-thirds of one per cent of her go
vernment’s spending. But this would be misleading, for two reasons. Intelligencers were often rewarded not in cash but in kind, for instance with the stewardship of a profitable royal estate. Secondly, Walsingham’s substantial debts at his death suggest that he had been paying his agents out of his own resources when state subventions did not suffice.26
Walsingham’s willingness to buy information greatly increased the reach of his secret service, but it also created unease among his peers. In Robert Beale’s words, ‘with money he corrupted priests, Jesuits and traitors to bewray the practices against this realm’. Beale was his colleague and brother-in-law, a fellow pilgrim in the journey towards the Protestant promised land. His advice to a future principal secretary included a warning not to copy Walsingham too closely: ‘seeing how much his liberality was misliked, I do not think that you can follow the like example’. William Camden also hinted that Walsingham had crossed the line into entrapment: ‘the Papists accused him as a cunning workman in complotting his businesses, and alluring men into dangers’. Camden’s tone is defensive, but his epitaph and Beale’s treatise provide some evidence from the Protestant side that Walsingham put his Protestant conviction before his respect for the law; just as Catholics have always claimed.27