The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
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The plantation of Munster represented a personal triumph for the principal secretary. Walsingham had been promoting plats ‘for the reformation of Ireland’ since the landing of fitz Maurice and the revolt of the Earl of Desmond. His client Sir Edward Waterhouse had been the first to flag the opportunity to achieve ‘a thorough reformation … if English be planted’ in Munster. Waterhouse’s preference was for a colony ‘totally inhabited by natural English men’, augmented if necessary by Old English brought in from the Pale; the ‘natural inhabitants’ of the province came a poor third. Edward Fenton described the region to Walsingham in terms which anticipated Richard Hakluyt’s evocation of the new world: ‘a fruitful and pleasant country such as the sun cannot shine on better’, which if properly governed ‘would maintain thousands of loyal and dutiful subjects’ and add handsomely to the queen’s coffers.
Fenton wrote before the worst of the famine, but the belief remained widespread that Ireland offered a ladder to those with some capital and a willingness to settle. Walsingham imagined a society strictly ranked, with the gentry at its summit and three classes of farmers (‘chief’, ‘good’ and ‘other’) as the middling sort, descending to copyholders and humble cottagers at its foot. A feudal hierarchy long since eroded at home could be reinvented in Ireland, complete with courts leet and courts baron, a demesne farm for the lord, and tenants who had to ride to war when summoned. The land was divided up into ‘seignories’ rather than parishes in another medieval throwback. The army officers who followed in the second wave of plantation found additional inspiration in the empire of Rome, whose soldiers had settled to farming and fashioned themselves as gentlemen. For a man like John Cooper of Somerset, one of the queen’s ceremonial guards who acquired estates in Cork, the plantation in Munster was a chance to join the colonial aristocracy. A propaganda pamphlet claimed that a landowner could do better on £50 a year in Ireland than he could for £200 in England.21
One of the first English settlers to receive his seignory in Munster was Edward Denny, who became lord of six thousand acres at Tralee in County Kerry. In a public demonstration of his support for the plantations, Walsingham joined his cousin as an undertaker. His decision to invest may have been influenced by a report filed by Wallop describing a lucrative alum mine nearby. Walsingham had a number of mining interests in England, and had already used his agents to locate copper and silver mines near Youghal. He was also behind a scheme to grow woad and madder to supply dye to the infant Irish textile industry. Walsingham’s experiment as an Irish planter didn’t last for long, probably because of the debts he inherited following the death of Sir Philip Sidney. But it implies he was still close to his mother’s family, thirty years since he had mentored the young Denny brothers during their exile in Basel.22
The resettlement of Munster was well under way by the time that Walsingham followed Sidney to the grave. Justices of the peace were proclaiming the good news up and down the English counties, encouraging skilled workers and their families to join the migration. Carpenters and thatchers, butchers and wheel-wrights, all were needed for peopling of the Irish Utopia. The men travelled to Ireland first, sending for their wives and children once rudimentary houses had been put up to accommodate them. Reports filed by the undertakers in 1589 estimated the English population in Munster as approaching three thousand. Convoys of ships left Southampton ferrying timber and harness to manufacture English ploughs, furnaces and ore to smelt iron. Preserved food sustained the colony until it could become self-sufficient.
The logistics of moving a grand household over to Ireland can be traced in the accounts of Sir William Herbert, beneficiary of more than thirteen thousand acres in Kerry. Herbert administered his seignory from the Earl of Desmond’s former house at Castleisland, which was lavishly converted into an image of Elizabethan England. The interior was furnished with tapestries and linen and silver plate. A mill and a brewhouse were built, an orchard and hopyard planted and formal gardens laid out. New stables housed the horses which their master brought over from Wales. Only the well-stocked armoury, with its handguns and pikes and pair of cannon, warned that Herbert’s Irish estates were a long way from the settled shires of home.23
After generations of conflict, it seemed that English roots were finally becoming planted in Irish earth. Walsingham’s client Richard Bingham was not alone in writing of his concern for the ordinary folk of Ireland, condemned to live in poverty by their greedy Gaelic lords. Upending the existing social order could be justified on grounds of bringing justice and prosperity within the reach of the common people. All too often, however, such expressions of sympathy were nothing but empty rhetoric. Soldiers like Sir Nicholas Malby made no pretence of fellow feeling with the Irish poor. A scorched-earth policy was an effective means to bring rebels back into obedience; ethics didn’t come into it. A regime of deliberate cruelty, ‘to consume them with fire and sword, not sparing neither old nor young’, made sound military sense.
Violence was inevitably met by violence, an ideology of conquest by an ideology of resistance. James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald had introduced a note of patriotism into his appeals to the Old English community to defend ‘this noble Ireland’, ‘our dear country’ against the heresy of Elizabeth. This language of Irishness was picked up by Hugh O’Neill, leader of the rebellion in Ulster and an aspiring king of all Ireland, who linked faith and fatherland ever more explicitly in an attempt to maximise his appeal. Quite how deeply the English were rooted was revealed in 1598, when it took O’Neill’s allies just two weeks to destroy the Munster colony. Both sides agreed that the uprising was fuelled by hatred between the local and the settler population. Far from solving the problem of ruling Elizabeth’s second kingdom, the plantations championed by Walsingham and Burghley were sowing the seeds of a new Irish nationhood.24
The month of June 1586 found Walsingham’s stepson Christopher Carleill as captain of the Tiger, a royal ship of 160 tons, bound for Roanoke Island on the Outer Banks of modern-day North Carolina. Martin Frobisher sailed nearby on the Primrose, while the fleet was commanded from the Elizabeth Bonaventure by Sir Francis Drake. Carleill had served a stint in Ireland as garrison commander at Coleraine, and would shortly return to Ulster to govern the massive Norman fortress at Carrickfergus. For the present, his orders were to offer passage home to the first tentative English settlers in America. The evacuees from Roanoke included the artist John White, whose drawings of Algonquian Indians at work and play remain a priceless record of their culture, and the scientist Thomas Harriot, who had taught himself some of the local language and went on to publish a best-selling Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.
Carleill was a trader as well as a naval commander and adventurer. His family’s strong associations with the Muscovy Company made Christopher the ideal choice to escort a convoy of merchantmen sailing to Russia in 1582. But the war between Tsar Ivan the Terrible and Frederick II of Denmark meant that the Muscovy trade was losing money, hence his interest in pursuing other options. In 1583 Carleill published a Discourse upon the Hethermoste Partes of America, contrasting the hazards and expense of trading into Russia, Turkey and Italy with the relative ease of crossing the Atlantic. A trading colony situated about the 40° line of latitude (running between the modern cities of Philadelphia and New York) would benefit from the best of all worlds. The region to the north was rich in salmon and cod and whales, lush hides and thick furs, pitch and ships’ masts. The west and south would supply the olives and wine currently imported into England from southern Europe; wild grapes could already be found in plenty, or so Carleill claimed. Wax and honey could be traded for ‘trifles’ with the local population, who might become a market for English cloth as their society improved.
There was another inducement for Carleill to prefer the new world over the old: the freedom to practise religion in the plain form intended by Christ. The Discourse promised that godly traders, their families and employees would have no ‘confessions of idolatrous religion enforced upon th
em, but contrarily shall be at their free liberty of conscience’. Carleill’s main concerns were the supply of commodities and the potential to make a profit; this was not quite yet the Puritan dream of a city on a hill. Nonetheless, the association between America and the freedom to worship plainly, at such an early date, is very striking. Carleill’s stepfather would surely have approved.25
Manuscript copies of Carleill’s proposals survive among the state papers, suggesting that he played the petitioning game as well as going into print. Another aspiring planter to benefit from Walsingham’s position at court was Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who became the paper proprietor of vast estates in North America. Gilbert had been under something of a cloud since his adventure to the Netherlands in 1572, but Walsingham stood by him. Writing from his native Devon in 1578 before his first attempt to reach America, Gilbert reflected on the depth of his debt:
Sir, knowing you to be my principal patron as well in furthering and procuring me her majesty’s favour and licence for performance of this my sea voyage … as occasion shall serve, make me partaker of your good speeches to her majesty for the better supportation of my poor credit with her highness.
Gilbert fell out with a fellow commander before the expedition had even begun, prompting an angry vindication of his own good conduct; Elizabeth observed archly that he was not a man of ‘good happ by sea’. The fact that he was allowed to sail again in 1583 owed everything to Walsingham, who subscribed £50 to his scheme to establish an English colony in America.26
Whether to accept the imperial destiny being presented to her by ambitious courtiers and explorers was a surprisingly tough calculation for Queen Elizabeth. The kingdom which she ruled was a comparatively weak power, lacking the resources to fund the military on the scale of France or Spain, and mired in a costly campaign in Ireland. If Philip II mobilised to defend his mastery of the new world, the consequences for England could be catastrophic. Then again, the imagery of empire offered Elizabeth new ways to assert her sovereignty at a time when domestic political tensions were running high. The extension of her dominions overseas might enable her to live up to the model of monarchy established by Henry VIII, whose memory Elizabeth selectively revered.
There was also the chance it might make her some money. The news from America, whether eyewitness reports or speculation and hearsay, always returned to the same theme: the unexploited richness of the land. Elizabeth loved to gamble at cards, which gives some context to her decision to invest £1,000 in Martin Frobisher’s 1577 return voyage to dig for gold on Countess of Warwick’s Island (now known as Kodlunarn), where the trenches left by English miners can still be seen. Walsingham advanced £200 of his own money once Frobisher’s sample of ore had been broken up and tested for its precious metal content. Even if the search for gold proved to be a fool’s errand, the crown would still benefit from the import duties on any goods shipped from America. So too would Walsingham, who was granted the customs revenues from the western and northern English ports in 1585 in return for a fixed annual payment to the crown. Any increase in the value of the trade would go to him.27
Another consideration pressed on the queen’s conscience. Licensing her subjects to occupy America in her name could prove to be strategically useful; it might even be profitable. But was it legal? For an answer based on something more than patriotic enthusiasm, she turned to John Dee. Elizabeth had faith in Dee, who had studied the heavens to cast the best day for her coronation and kept her up to date with developments in natural philosophy. An eclectic education and a magpie mind had given Dee some understanding of Roman law, codified by the emperor Justinian during the sixth century and theoretically still regulating international relations in sixteenth-century Europe. If English settlement in America were to go ahead, it was vital that foreign powers – most obviously, Philip of Spain – couldn’t use it as a pretext for war.
Dee’s solution, set out in a series of treatises and explained in personal audiences with Elizabeth, Burghley and Walsingham, was a palimpsest of Roman law and Arthurian myth which only he could have come up with. When Francis Drake returned from his circumnavigation laden with treasure looted from South America, sparking a stern protest from the Spanish ambassador, Dee had his answer already prepared. As the descendant of King Arthur, Elizabeth had a prior claim to North America (Dee called it Atlantis) which pre-dated Columbus’s discoveries by a thousand years. Perhaps aware that not everyone would share his belief in Arthur’s exploits (and Lord Burghley was certainly sceptical), Dee buttressed his case by appealing to ancient legal precedent. Spain may have asserted her sovereignty over the northern parts of America, but she had done nothing to occupy the land; and physical occupation, under Roman law, was an essential part of establishing legal title.28
The library which Dee had assembled in his house at Mortlake was one of the most extensive in England, far larger and more eclectic than the university or college libraries in Oxford and Cambridge; three thousand books and a thousand manuscripts, according to Dee’s own calculation. It was also a storehouse for all sorts of equipment relating to exploration and discovery. Sea compasses and a lodestone, a quadrant, and two Mercator globes covered with Dee’s own annotations were all on public display. An inner chamber was reserved for more arcane objects, such as the mirror of Aztec obsidian with which Dee could talk to angels. One chest was full of documents relating to ‘divers Irelandish territories, provinces, and lands’, while another contained Dee’s collection of maps. Sooner or later, anyone who was serious about sailing to the new world had to beat a path to Dee’s door. Martin Frobisher, who knew how to be a privateer but had no experience of sailing the north Atlantic, spent the six weeks prior to his first voyage of discovery being tutored by Dee in the theory of navigation. In November 1577 it was Gilbert’s turn to visit the library. Three years later the queen herself came to Mortlake, returning the rolls of evidence with which Dee had sought to convince her of her right to occupy Atlantis.
Dee was in the habit of writing in the books which he owned, building up over the years to a kind of diary by marginalia. Public and personal events mingled with his observations of the tides, the stars and the weather. The first recorded meeting between Dee and Walsingham took place in November 1577, no doubt connected with the north-west passage and the publication of the General and Rare Memorials. Dee was also called on to explain the appearance of a comet shaped like a Turkish sword, and the macabre discovery of a doll of Queen Elizabeth in Lincoln’s Inn fields with a pin driven through its breast. A year later he was briefed by Leicester and Walsingham before a trip to Germany on some sort of government service. In September 1579 Dee noted that he had had a dream about Walsingham. No details are recorded, although he had another dream the same night in which he saw himself naked with his skin patterned like velvet. In 1582 both men were involved in preparing a report for Burghley on the desirability of converting to the Gregorian calendar by jumping ten days, which would have put England in sync with papal Europe. Dee suspected that the Catholics had got their maths wrong and put forward an amended plan of his own, but the Archbishop of Canterbury rejected the whole notion unless a consensus could be reached among the Protestant churches. (The decision was postponed in Britain until 1752, by which time eleven extra days would be necessary.)
The web of connections between principal secretary and propagandist of empire continued to grow. On 23 January 1583 Walsingham paid a visit to Mortlake, an easy journey from Barn Elms or the court at Richmond, where he found Sir Humphrey’s brother Adrian Gilbert, ‘and so talk was begun of North-West Straights discovery’. The following day Dee and Gilbert met Walsingham in secret at Robert Beale’s house in Barnes, where ‘we made Mr Secretary privy of the N. W. passage, and all charts and rutters were agreed upon in general’, a rutter being a mariner’s guide to sea routes and tides. In February it was Lady Walsingham who ‘came suddenly into my house very freely’, followed by her husband and the poet Edward Dyer, who shared Dee’s enthusiasm both for westward
expansion and for alchemy. In March 1590, only weeks before the death of her husband, Ursula Walsingham would stand as godmother to Dee’s daughter Madinia.29
The fourth man around Beale’s table on 24 January 1583 was John Davis, who had travelled up from Devon to seek official backing for his own attempt to find a way through the Arctic ice to China. Davis and his friend Adrian Gilbert had been involved in a dispute with Dee some years earlier, but were now sufficiently reconciled to make a joint appeal for funding from the merchant communities in London and Exeter. Dee then set off for Poland, at which point his house and library were ransacked, possibly by protesters against his magical practices, although associates and ex-pupils were certainly involved. Davis was among those helping themselves to books and instruments.
Walsingham took the lead in Dee’s absence, drafting proposals for a north-west passage company with staple towns at London, Dartmouth and Plymouth. Gilbert entrusted the ensuing expeditions of 1585–7 to John Davis, and so it was that the Davis Strait between Baffin Island and Greenland acquired its European name. The discovery of a great cod bank in the strait created the opportunity to draw Lord Burghley into the enterprise. Burghley was less closely aligned with new world projects than Walsingham, consistent with his altogether more conciliatory foreign policy. But he was an avid collector of maps, including the 1570 world atlas by Abraham Ortelius, which he annotated with details of Martin Frobisher’s voyage of 1576. He was also keen to see a strong English fishing fleet, on grounds that subjects who were well fed were less likely to rob and to riot. When Davis returned to England with a sample of Canadian cod preserved in a barrel, Walsingham advised him to show a chunk of it to Burghley. He may have allowed himself a private smile at the thought of the lord treasurer being ceremonially presented with a slab of salted fish. But the tactic worked: Burghley became a sponsor of English expeditions to the St Lawrence to fish for cod and whale, and kill walrus for their ivory and oil – an alternative to Spanish olive oil for the soap-makers of Bristol.