Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  Some, like William Cecil, older, established, prudent, with much to lose in lands and offices and little to gain from an overnice fidelity to one religion or another, conformed to the restored Catholic faith. Others, younger, or more ardent, or with less to lose, fled. Eight hundred, mostly gentlemen, merchants, clergymen, chose to save their religion and their skins abroad; three hundred, mostly ordinary people whose stubbornness, zeal, poverty, or inertia led them to try to retain both at home, were burned at the stake during Mary’s reign.

  Walsingham, young, ardent, prudent, fled: and so began the far less conventional part of his education. He was gone for five years; he became fluent in French and Italian; the foremost linguist among the Englishmen of his day, it was later said. In Padua, he studied Roman civil law. Everywhere, he got to know men of all kinds. “Books are but dead letters,” he would advise a nephew years later, when that young man was setting out on his own travel of discovery. “It is the voice and conference of men that giveth them life and shall engender in you true knowledge.”

  He was speaking to his nephew but he was speaking of his own young self: study Spanish, Italian, French, Latin; practice translating passages from one to another every day; read the lives of Plutarch, the histories of ancient Rome, “books of State both old and new … as well profane as holy”; ponder what lessons from past governments might apply to the present. But also take careful note of the “manners and dispositions” of the people one met everywhere.

  Of the nobility, gentry, and “learned sort,” men of power and influence,

  have their company as much as in safety of conscience and peace of God you may: that you see the inclination of each man the way he is bent, whether it be marshal or counselor, a plain, open nature, a dissembling and counterfeit, whether he be in credit with his people, and what pension he hath from abroad, how inclining toward the neighbors bordering upon him.

  Be “civil and companionable to all” such men; but take no sides and make no commitments.

  But also get to know the lesser sort, the “men of experience as the world calleth them,” the secretaries, notaries, and agents of princes, the men who in truth control the machinery of government. “Though themselves they have no water,” Walsingham advised, they are the “conduit pipes” for the affairs of state and the counsel of princes. Through them one can learn of the daily dealings of the state, “whether they appertain to civil government or warlike affairs”; through them one can influence events.

  When Protestantism later returned to England, the convention of the time drew a distinction between those men of affairs who were Puritans and those who the French called politiques: those who sought to make the pure religion the test of all policy, and those who counseled caution and compromise when the interests of the state and the realities of politics demanded it. Walsingham was ever a Puritan, a Puritan in fundamental conviction; but his travels had stamped him a very politique in method and manner, in knowledge of the world, and in equanimity in dealing with its imperfections.

  He liked Italy, and trees. He was later said to have been able to match wits with King James VI of Scotland “with sayings out of Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch or Tacitus”; or Henry of Navarre “with Rabelais”; or “the Hollander with mechanic discourses.”

  He made wry, self-deprecating jokes, jokes about a supposed rumor that he would be hanged for his mishandling of negotiations in the Low Countries, jokes about his supposed perfections as a husband. In the midst of the maddening marriage negotiations with Anjou in France, he had written a friend, Thomas Heneage, about Anjou’s character:

  Though he be choleric yet lacketh he not reason to govern and bridle the same. And you know that these natures are the best natures and commonly prove the best husbands. Or else should not you and I be in the highest degree in such perfection as we are. Yet in this matter we shall do well not to be judged neither by Mrs. Heneage nor Mrs. Walsingham because they are parties.

  When he could afford it, he became a patron of the arts and sciences, supporting voyages of discovery, the search for the Northwest Passage, makers of Latin dictionaries, needful poets and writers, Oxford colleges, the study of civil and international law. He engaged in a lengthy correspondence about the Gregorian calendar. He wrote a treatise on how to train soldiers without excessive waste of powder. He was curious about the science of navigation. Robert Hakluyt dedicated the first edition of his collection of tales of discovery to Walsingham, thanking him for his support and encouragement by “letter and speech.”

  Walsingham’s fellow Puritans railed against the evils of the theater; “lascivious writhing,” “bawdy fables gathered from idolatrous heathen poets”; “the cause of sin is plays,” said one Puritan preacher, with the smug certainty of ignorance that made Puritan preachers ever so tiresome. Walsingham, seeing the possibilities of advancing the Protestant cause through plays with patriotic and historical themes, created a company of actors, the Queen’s Men, under the direct patronage, and control, of the Crown. When the prim London authorities tried to limit the new troupe’s performances, Walsingham calmly remonstrated with them, and got his way.

  A Puritan and a Renaissance man, a strange and powerful combination: a zealot who knew how to keep his mouth shut.

  But a Puritan all the same. “This Walsingham is of all heretics the worst,” sputtered the Spanish agent in London. The Queen more than once called him a “rank Puritan”; and there was no doubting what she thought about Puritans, rank or otherwise. They were smug, they were bores, they were nitpickers, and with their constant demands for ever-more Protestant reforms in the Protestant Church of England, the church of which Elizabeth was Supreme Governor and which she considered quite adequately reformed as it was, thank you very much, they were a threat to the very social order and royal supremacy.

  The Puritans’ direct-pipeline-to-God self-righteousness was an affront in itself. One especially earnest, or foolhardy, Puritan dared deliver to the Queen a book reproving her Majesty for her frequent habit, in her not infrequent moments of anger, of blasphemously swearing: swearing “by that abominable idol the Mass, and often and grievously by God, and by Christ, and by many parts of his glorified body, and by saints, troth, and other forbidden things.” An impressive repertoire of oaths, popish and profane: it scandalized the Puritans and perfectly summed up what the Queen felt about the place of religion, which was once a week, orderly, decorous, every Sunday, a piece of smoothly working social machinery ordained by God through the sovereign to an obedient people and that was the end of it. The Queen disliked and distrusted evangelical fervor, was constantly vexed by the endless theological disputes over “trifles,” was simply bored by the tedious issues of church administration, so keen a contrast with her quick interest in affairs of state. The Archbishop of Canterbury came to complain about the difficulties of finding learned ministers to fill the thirteen thousand parishes in England. “Jesus!” the Queen exclaimed. “Thirteen thousand!”

  But it was probably no more than one of her little jokes that she called Walsingham a “rank Puritan.” Walsingham the Puritan was sober, ascetic, formally devout enough; Walsingham the Puritan politique had his eyes on a bigger fish than whether ministers of the church should wear vestments, or whether the sign of the cross should be omitted during baptisms. He knew better than to tax the Queen with her oaths, or with the cases of Puritan divines who had fallen afoul of the church hierarchy for their too-zealous preaching. He once advised his fellow Puritans against instituting any change in the service at the English merchants’ chapel in Antwerp, pointing out that, though he personally liked the form of prayer they were proposing, reforms must be made with due authority and uniformity, lest chaos reign—and the Queen take offense. “Thank God for what we presently enjoy, having God’s word sincerely preached and the Sacraments truly administered,” Walsingham cautioned them; “the rest we lack we are to beg by prayer and attend with patience.”

  But there was never any of the smarmy religiosity of the mo
ck devout in Walsingham’s frequent allusions to God; when he spoke of God’s will and judgment, or his guiding wisdom and care, it was always more by way of reference to a given, a touching of the stone of underlying faith: faith in the ultimate triumph of rightness, though never a substitute for human judgment and action, or man’s obligation to do what needed to be done here and now to serve God’s plan on earth. What plainly appealed to Walsingham in Puritanism was its no-nonsense realism, its renunciation of superstition and magic, its seriousness of purpose, its extolling of hard work, its purity; sober black garb sat well on a man who wished the world to know he had no time for frippery. He left the hot Gospel zeal to others.

  Anyway, the Queen liked making her little demeaning jokes about the men around her and their quirks and personal appearances. Some thought Walsingham “satanic”-looking, but that was hindsight, after his reputation as a master counter-plotter and spymaster was well established, after people had been writing forever about his ability to wait upon men’s souls with his eyes, after he had seen the great enemies of the realm to their ends: Mary Queen of Scots to the executioner’s block in an ancient castle in Northamptonshire; the invading Spanish Armada to shipwreck and slaughter on the wild coasts of Ireland.

  His long, pointed face, and pointed black beard, and dark—or was it just sallow?—complexion made Elizabeth think not of a devil but of a Moor, and that was what she called him: “Moor,” or “Ethiopian.” It became a standing joke between them: for Walsingham, a self-deprecating way to tell her Majesty exactly what he thought, and turn aside her anger at his temerity in daring to tell her exactly what he thought, as few others did. “The Laws of Ethiopia, my native soil,” he once pleaded to the Queen when daring to offer some particularly frank advice, “are very severe against those that condemn a person unheard.”

  A joke, and yet: there was something undeniably sinister about a man in dark and somber clothes in a Renaissance court filled with velvets and silks and furs and pearls and canary yellows and blood-red scarlets; a man immune to the usual vices of passion and vanity and boastfulness and anger in an age of swagger and lustfulness and sanctimony; a man who kept what he learned to himself; a man who looked enough like a Moor to be called one, even in jest.

  Like many who would occupy positions of power and trust in Elizabeth’s inner circle, Francis Walsingham was a gentleman rather than a member of the old nobility that once held sway at the court of English kings, that still did hold sway in most foreign lands.

  Not that being even a gentleman meant as much as it once had. “As for gentlemen, they be made good cheap in England,” Walsingham’s old friend and colleague Sir Thomas Smith observed without any particular censure. “For whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the universities, who professeth the liberal sciences, and, to be short, who can live idly and without manual labor, and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman … shall be taken for a gentleman.” The heralds would register anyone who had £10 a year in income from land or £300 in movable goods and—for a suitable fee, needless to say—would produce a coat of arms and a pedigree grafting him on to some supposed ancestor of the same name dredged up from the rolls. The heralds made thousands of these grants in Elizabeth’s reign.

  There were plenty of jokes and satires about arrivistes braying to be called gentlemen (“I will be a gentleman whatsoever it costs me!” exclaims a character in one of Ben Jonson’s plays), but no one lost by it; the heralds got their fee, the Crown got another taxpayer added to the rolls of the taxpaying gentry, and the former town tradesman or country yeoman or sailor or soldier or clergyman who had made some money and bought his way into the countryside got the status and social entrée he coveted. “Gentility is nothing but ancient riches,” William Cecil told his son, and by Elizabeth’s time not even very ancient riches at that. Francis Walsingham’s ancestors a few generations back were shoemakers and vintners and merchants; by his grandfather’s generation they had become country gentlemen living off the estates that shoes and wine and trade had bought.

  The strident Elizabethan insistence on rank and status and the cult of ancestry was only a nervous reflection of the very eruption of social mobility that was taking place, and the explosion of wealth that propelled it. In an age of invention and expansion, active men found money to be made everywhere: in the woolen trade, in coal, in the new machinery of blast furnaces, in the manufacture of soap and steel and wire, in voyages of discovery and trade and plunder. “Profit,” the Spanish Ambassador in London sneered, was to the English “like nutriment to savage beasts”: the old hauteur of the noble born to the upstart go-getter. Sir Francis Drake brought back treasure worth £300,000 from his round-the-world voyage, a 4,700-percent return for his shareholders. When Sir Walter Raleigh made a mere 100 percent profit on one voyage, he remarked in disgust that he should have sent his fleet a-fishing instead.

  Land was what still made a gentleman, but land was to be had. Dissolving the monasteries and seizing their property, and selling off two-thirds of it for quick cash, Henry VIII had thrown a fifth of the entire productive land of the country onto the market. The rising gentry were the chief beneficiaries. With the land came more new power, for, in the crazy literal-mindedness of English property law, the new owners of monastic properties came into possession of feudal and religious privileges that clung to those lands, notably the right to tithes that had earlier been impropriated by the now dissolved religious orders. Impropriated tithes had originally been the rector’s share from the income of the parish that by law was assigned to the church; as the monasteries conveniently found, you didn’t really need to supply a rector when a cheaper vicar could do the job just as well out of his own, lesser share of the tithes. And so the rector’s share became the monastery’s. And what had been good enough for the monasteries was good enough for the new lay impropriators, who now simply pocketed the money, or sold the impropriation to other lay investors. The advowson, the right to name a clergyman to a benefice, was usually sold by the Crown along with the land as well, and this too could be resold by the new lay owner as a valuable commodity—or retained to give the nouveau-riche country gentleman a remarkable say in the character of religious observance in his district.

  So the gentry was rising, while the nobility was having its own problems. There were still great feudal lords who lived and acted like medieval princes in their castles with their personal armies and retinues of archaic offices of stewards and bailiffs and constables and castle-greaves, but there was no shortage of hints that past glories were fading. By Elizabeth’s accession, the nobility had been pared down to fifty-seven peers, among them but a single duke; half had been created only a generation or two earlier. Elizabeth wanted to keep it that way: she created only eighteen new peers in her entire half-century-long reign, half as many as in the previous half-century.

  Some lords still had fabulous incomes from huge landholdings, but with their titles came fabulous expenses: entertaining scores to dinner every night; putting on a show of a hundred retainers in matched livery wherever they went; dropping the amounts that a man in such a position was expected to drop on “hawks, hounds, horses, dice, cards, apparel, mistresses,” as the Earl of Northumberland cautioned his son against from his own bitter, or not so bitter, experience; and then finally staging elaborate funerals for themselves when they nobly expired, spending thousands of pounds to outfit all the mourners in new clothes, and on gifts of rings by which all would remember the great late departed. While he was still alive, a nobleman was particularly expected to entertain the Queen on her regular progresses, and to do so in a manner commensurate with his rank; he would be lucky to escape a royal visit £3,000 the poorer. William Cecil, the commoner whose devoted service to the Queen’s government she rewarded with a barony, endured a dozen of these visits. He turned down the Queen’s offer of an earldom for fear it would ruin him.

  The medieval lords with their medieval tradition as men of arms were still the ones to w
hom the Queen would turn for the command of military expeditions, and when it came to social privilege and entrée to the glittering orbit of the Court, the nobility carried the day as always. The Queen loved ostentation; she loved dancing and gambling; she loved hunting; she loved seeing men who could afford to dress well in crimson satin and velvet and gold lace and loathed those who did not; she loved anachronistic displays of jousting with courtiers got up as picturesque knights with picturesque chivalrous names like the Blue Knight or Knight of the Tree of the Sun, risking life and limb and reciting verses of devotion to her; she loved receiving outrageously costly New Year’s Day gifts, a gold jewel in the shape of a pelican sprinkled with rubies, a tiny clock studded with diamonds, an ostrich-feather fan with an engraved golden handle, a dress of white satin embroidered in silk and gold thread and garnished with pearls.

  Her notion of society was a hierarchy set in granite, ordained by God from the beginning of time, with the lords in their natural place at the top. She once reproved Philip Sidney for answering back an insult from the Earl of Oxford: the Earl had arrogantly ordered Sidney to get off the tennis court so he could play, Sidney had replied that the Earl ought to ask him nicely, the Earl called Sidney a “puppy,” and Sidney called the Earl a liar. When the Queen heard about it, she admonished Sidney that “the gentleman’s neglect of the nobility taught the peasant to insult upon both.”

  But the Queen was no fool; when it came to making the government run, she turned to the sharp, educated, ambitious gentry from the start, not the nobility. Almost all of the key men on her Privy Council were commoners, or peers of her own creation; for the first time in history, the Council was in the hands of university-educated laymen, men of the Renaissance Enlightenment, men more interested in the world than in defending some customary place of privilege in it.