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

by John Cooper

  Francis Walsingham had a copy of Santa Cruz’s report in his hands by April 1586, only days after Philip himself had seen it. This extraordinary intelligence coup was achieved by Antony Standen, an English Catholic émigré who had come to rest in Florence and assumed a new identity as Pompeo Pellegrini. Walsingham was sometimes prepared to overlook the activities of his agents’ families when the quality of information was high, which may explain why Standen agreed to work for him. Or perhaps it came down to patriotism, an unwillingness to see England overrun by Spain in the name of religion. Whatever his motivations, he was a first-class spy with unrivalled access to the enemy camp. As a friend of the Tuscan ambassador to the Spanish court, Standen was able to take soundings of current opinion on the English question. He also recruited an agent of his own, the brother of a trusted servant of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, who sent letters to Standen from Lisbon by way of the diplomatic bag at Madrid. Standen travelled to Spain in person in the spring of 1588, from where he was able to report to Walsingham directly. His reward would be ‘reintegration to her highness’s favour’ and a pension of £100 – the same sum that Gilbert Gifford received for unearthing the Babington plot.6

  Thirty years before, Philip of Spain had helped his wife Mary Tudor to shepherd the English people back into the fold of the true faith. Now the chance to resume the re-Catholicisation of England stirred him to the core. And yet some doubts remained: the military wisdom of opening up another front before the Netherlands was finally reduced to order, and the sharply political problem of what to do with Elizabeth once her kingdom had been conquered. She was, after all, his sister-in-law and a former candidate for his hand in marriage. Officially Philip and Parma continued to talk the language of peace until the last possible moment, though Walsingham dismissed this as a feint to split the States from their English allies and buy time to assemble an armada. Lord Howard of Effingham, admiral of the fleet, shared his sense of scepticism: ‘Sir, there was never, since England was England, such a stratagem and mask made to deceive England withal as is this treaty of peace’. Whatever his previous reservations, the martyrdom of Mary Stuart in February 1587 convinced Philip that God would absolve him of striking against an anointed monarch. Having shed tears over Mary and ordered a requiem mass, he gave the word to assemble the fleet at Lisbon. In the words of Walsingham’s counterpart at the Spanish court, it was time to put England ‘to the torch’.7

  Faced with a decision which might provoke a war, Elizabeth’s instinct was usually to back away. But for a few critical weeks in the spring of 1587, the balance of power at court was turned upside down. Enraged and shaken that Mary had been executed without her express command, Elizabeth did as she had never done before and banished Burghley from her presence. Suddenly Walsingham and Leicester had the opportunity to present their case for war without interference from the lord treasurer. Intelligence gathered in Portugal and Spain had the desired effect on the queen, and she duly authorised Drake ‘to impeach the joining together of the King of Spain’s fleet’. Drake was exultant. He set out from Plymouth on 2 April 1587 with a farewell salute to Walsingham. It is a biographer’s dream of a letter:

  I thank God I find no man but as all members of one body to stand for our gracious queen and country against Antichrist and his members … The wind commands me away. Our ship is under sail. God grant we may so live in His fear as the enemy may have cause to say that God doth fight for her majesty as well abroad as at home, and give her long and happy life, and ever victory against God’s enemies and her majesty’s.

  In his haste to engage the enemy, Drake succeeded in outrunning the letter countermanding his orders which he correctly anticipated would soon be chasing him. Ignoring the fortified harbour at Lisbon, he sailed onward south and east to the port of Cadiz. For its sheer daring as well as its role in disrupting preparations for the Spanish Armada, the raid on Cadiz has never been forgotten. Walsingham’s heart must have surged when he read Drake’s description of the scene: five merchantmen and one of Santa Cruz’s own galleons looted and sunk, four cargo ships taken and a further two dozen stripped and burned at anchor, and a squadron of Philip’s galleys repulsed and humiliated, all under a hail of artillery fire from the shore. The English fleet then sailed to Sagres on the Algarve, where the castle was bombarded into surrender and a monastery was ransacked and set on fire. Drake told the tale in the language of the Old Testament, casting the Catholic Spanish as ‘upholders of Baal or Dagon’s Image, which hath already fallen before the ark of our God with his hands and arms and head stricken off’. But there was also hard detail in his reports to Walsingham, wooden casks to the weight of 1,600 tons ‘consumed into smoke and ashes’ along with the nets on which the Spanish navy depended for its supply of salted fish. Drake’s ships and soldiers were not in Sagres for long, but they succeeded in deterring Philip’s Mediterranean fleet from joining the force assembling at Lisbon. If Elizabeth’s countermand had reached him in time, the Spanish Armada might well have launched a year earlier than it did.8

  The delay proved a godsend to those charged with readying England’s defences. The threat of a French invasion back in the 1530s had been met by a chain of coastal forts and gun batteries to the latest designs, paid for with the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries. But once Henry VIII’s Reformation windfall had been spent, the full burden of maintaining fortress England had fallen on the ordinary revenues of the crown. The consequences were all too predictable. The Elizabethan military engineers tasked with preparing to repel a Spanish attack discovered that once-proud castles had been weakened and left obsolete by two generations of neglect. A survey of artillery forts in Dorset in the early 1580s found their wooden platforms rotten and their guns dismantled. Walls were in danger of sliding into the sea. Spanish forces landing in Cornwall or Devon would have encountered defences which had hardly altered since the days of Henry VIII. There had long been talk of a new fort on Plymouth Hoe, but nothing was achieved until several years after the Armada had come and gone. The massive bulwarks at Pendennis Castle above Falmouth harbour and Star Castle in the Isles of Scilly both date from the 1590s rather than any earlier.

  The royal docks at Portsmouth fared rather better. In February 1584 Walsingham had authorised the hiring of several hundred pioneers to repair and extend the fortifications around the town. But the earthworks were far from complete by the time the Armada sailed, partly because the labour force had been reduced to just a hundred on the orders of the queen. On the opposite side of the Solent, the lion’s share of the money spent on Carisbrooke Castle had gone on a superior new dwelling for Sir George Carey. Upnor was a rare example of a new-build Elizabethan castle, offering some protection to the Medway and the important anchorage at Chatham, yet incapable of defending itself from an attack on the landward side; a fault which it shared with many Tudor fortifications. The Essex port of Harwich was allocated £1,000 for defences only in 1588, while Ipswich had to fend for itself by employing Walsingham’s surveyor and counterfeiter Arthur Gregorye to build it a gun platform.9

  In the words of the privy council to the citizens of Hastings, ‘the strength of her majesty’s navy is their surest defence, and of the whole realm’. Given the chronic degree of overstretch in the royal finances, the strategic decision to concentrate on warships rather than shore defences made good sense. A campaign of construction and purchase since the early 1570s had furnished Elizabeth with a fleet of thirty-four ships by 1587, although a dozen were of less than 250 tons’ burden and only ten had been designed with gunnery rather than close-quarter grappling in mind. Supplemented by vessels taken up from trade or supplied by the London livery companies, the entire English fleet numbered fewer than sixty ships. With a fair wind and a blessing from God, they could hope to deflect and defeat an invasion armada if not to destroy it outright. But even the newest race-built ships needed harbours where they could shelter and replenish, and here the geography of the coastline east of Portsmouth presented the government with a major
headache. The ancient ports of Winchelsea, Rye and Sandwich had all silted up by the later sixteenth century, making them useless to the great galleons of the royal navy. That left only Dover at the narrowest point of the Channel, a scrape between two cliffs offering limited protection from the fierce tides and prevailing winds. Until, that is, Francis Walsingham initiated one of the most impressive civil engineering projects undertaken by the Elizabethan state.

  Walsingham had become aware of Dover’s potential in 1576, when he appointed the navigator William Borough to report on the possibility of building a better haven for the navy. A plan was hatched to take advantage of a great bank of shingle which had drifted down from the remnants of earlier Tudor experiments to create a harbour. After several false starts, Walsingham found the right overseer in the mathematician and MP Thomas Digges. A pupil of John Dee and his acknowledged ‘mathematical heir’, Digges had already proved his worth by surveying the strength of Dutch fortifications during Walsingham’s and Cobham’s embassy in 1578. He was also a committed Protestant, a prime mover of the 1584 bond of association to legislate for a provisional government in the event of Elizabeth’s assassination and a keen supporter of intervention in the Netherlands. Digges’s theoretical understanding of the formidable challenges at Dover was complemented by the practical experience of Paul Ive, a military engineer who had also seen service in the Low Countries. Ive would dedicate his treatise The Practise of Fortification jointly to Walsingham and Cobham in 1589.

  Walsingham handled virtually all the paperwork generated by the works at Dover. Reginald Scot’s history of the project praised him as ‘the man without whom nothing was done, directing the course, and always looking into the state thereof’. Walsingham’s manuscript journal of 1583–4 gives us a glimpse of him running the operation from Seething Lane, despatching orders and authorising payments for men and materials. Hydraulic experts were brought over from Flanders to refine the sophisticated system of groynes and sluices devised by Digges and Ive. But it was local know-how from Romney Marsh which underpinned the strength of Dover harbour. The key to success turned out to be the mixture of chalk and ‘ooze’, or mud, used in constructing the walls. Digges recognised that Romney men were ‘the only and fittest workmen’ for the task, so long as they were properly supervised. Throughout the summer of 1583, hundreds of Kentish carts transported building materials down to Dover. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed recorded the songs and laughter of the drivers as they tipped their loads into the water. As the local gentleman Sir Thomas Scott triumphantly reported to Walsingham, two months of effort achieved what had been expected to take two years, and at a fraction of the cost of using timber and stone. For the first time, the English navy had a usable harbour on the Channel coast closest to the continent.10

  The tremor radiating out from Francis Drake’s 1587 assault on Cadiz was felt by Walsingham’s sources across Europe. Watching the Spanish reaction from his viewpoint in Florence, Antony Standen described how the Devon pirate (who had his own symbol, 22, in Standen’s cipher alphabet) ‘hath put a great terror among that people’. According to Edward Stafford, the pope was now sneering that the King of Spain was ‘a coward that suffered his nose to be held in the Low Countries by a woman’. Philip had been humiliated in his own realm by a mere mariner. Captain Thomas Fenner, who took part in the raid, judged it a miracle ‘that so great an exploit should be performed with so small loss’. Drake basked in the adulation, but was under no illusions about Spain’s ability to recover. His despatches to Walsingham and Leicester contained the same urgent warning: ‘the like preparation was never heard of nor known, as the King of Spain hath and daily maketh to invade England’. Philip had powerful allies, and his store of provisions was sufficient to keep an army of forty thousand in the field for a whole year. Singeing his beard at Cadiz had only delayed the inevitable. Drake’s appeal to Walsingham sounded an alarum as clearly as in any Shakespeare play: ‘Prepare in England strongly, and most by sea. Stop him now, and stop him ever. Look well to the coast of Sussex … It is the Lord that giveth victory.’11

  The challenge facing Walsingham and the council lay less in establishing the existence of the Armada, which was obvious, than in working out what Philip II intended to do with it. Reports were frequently contradictory, not least because Spanish plans were themselves so fluid. When the fleet still wasn’t ready by the winter of 1587, Philip amazed the Duke of Parma by urging him to launch an assault across the Channel without it. Further confusion was caused by a turnover in the Spanish high command. Santa Cruz’s death in February 1588 meant that the helm passed to the Duke of Medina Sidonia, an amiable grandee who by his own admission ‘had no experience either of the sea or of war’ and was a martyr to sea-sickness. Santa Cruz’s battle plans and files were jealously guarded by his secretary, and his successor had to make an impassioned appeal to the king to be allowed to see them. Medina Sidonia did his best to make sense of the chaos at Lisbon harbour, but his natural deference to his sovereign was a poor substitute for the robust decision-making of Santa Cruz.

  Drake suspected that the Armada might drop anchor off the Sussex coast, where the Throckmorton plotters had hoped to welcome a Spanish landing back in 1583, but in truth the intended landing-zone kept on shifting. Ireland remained a plausible target until late in the day, where Catholic insurgents might be expected to do Philip’s work for him. The Isle of Wight was also considered as a bridgehead, a plan which would very quickly have exposed Sir George Carey’s folly in building a fine house before reinforcing the defences at Carisbrooke. Meanwhile every month that the Armada didn’t sail cost the Spanish crown another seven hundred thousand ducats, testing the discipline and sapping the morale of soldiers and sailors confined to port. Finally the Isle of Thanet was decided upon, an unfortified spur of land on the eastern tip of Kent. Parma’s seventeen-thousand-strong Flanders army would be joined by a similar number who had sailed from Spain, while the faster ships of the Armada patrolled the approaches to the Medway and the Thames. Thanet was also symbolically important, the place where St Augustine of Canterbury had begun his mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Catholic Christianity. By choosing to land here, Philip II could portray his invasion as the second liberation of the English people from pagan heresy, nearly a thousand years since the first.

  Comparatively little thought seems to have gone into the shape of the post-invasion regime in England. It was deeply unlikely that Philip would want to rule in person, while the execution of the Queen of Scots had put paid to ideas of a puppet government under Mary and the Duke of Parma. The sealed orders which Medina Sidonia intended to hand to Parma plotted more than one possible outcome. The Armada was to avoid battle unless forced into it, focusing on preserving its artillery pieces and marines and making its rendezvous at Gravelines. Once the troop transports had been escorted across the Channel, everything would depend on the scale of English resistance. If the landing became bogged down or failed, Parma was authorised to negotiate with Queen Elizabeth. Spanish terms would be, firstly, the free exercise of the Catholic faith in England, and a passport for religious exiles to return home; secondly the surrender of the cautionary towns to King Philip, together with any other parts of the Netherlands in English hands; and finally the payment of damages for acts of piracy against Spanish interests. As for the queen’s ministers, Lord Burghley might just have survived – he had, after all, made his peace with the Spanish once before – but Walsingham’s execution would have been non-negotiable.12

  To see the Spanish Armada as a kind of gunboat diplomacy, an attempt to enforce Catholic toleration rather than to annihilate English liberty and religion, goes against more than four centuries of national myth-making. To be fair, Parma’s sealed orders would only come into play if the land campaign began to falter; conquest was the prime objective, at least in the eyes of the commander in the field. But a parallel strategy of negotiating from a position of military strength makes some sense of Philip II’s protracted peace talks, dismissed
as a ruse by Walsingham. It would also be consistent with the attitude of a man who, even though he had once been King of England, displayed little interest in ruling it again.

  Following Drake’s capture of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario on the first day of the battle, the English had the chance to question her officers and crew about the intentions of the Armada. The aristocrat Don Pedro de Valdés was haughty and obstructive, maintaining that it wasn’t the place of a subject ‘to judge the actions of his prince’, but other prisoners of war in London’s Bridewell were quicker to talk. Their replies suggest that, as in many large armies, speculation was rife among the soldiers and mariners who made up the Armada. The master of the Rosario claimed not to know where the army would have disembarked, though he was clearer about its purpose – ‘to conquer the land and to set up the mass’ rather than to subjugate the English people, many of whom were expected to rise up in support of their liberators. The ship’s doctor wondered if Philip’s nephew the Viceroy of Portugal might have been installed as Governor of England, whereas the captain of the Rosario reckoned that Parma was the likelier candidate. ‘It was a question among them,’ as he told his interrogators, ‘if the Duke of Parma should conquer this land, who should then enjoy it, either the king or the duke; and it was suspected that it would breed a new war between them’. Regarding tactics, however, all were agreed: captains and ordinary soldiers had determined ‘to put all to the sword that should resist them’.13