Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  And so did much of the public: to the Queen’s uncontained fury. London bookmakers were laying two-to-one against Anjou’s even coming to England to press his suit, three-to-one against the marriage taking place. Preachers in pulpits denounced the very notion of the Queen’s wedding a Catholic. Elizabeth threatened to have them whipped. Ballads made the rounds; “A Most Strange Wedding of the Frog and the Mouse,” for one, and the one that ended:

  Therefore, good Francis, rule at home, resist not our desire,

  For here is nothing else for thee, but only sword and fire.

  In September 1579, a pamphlet appeared that sent the Queen into a fury that surpassed all her previous outrage and mortification. The author was John Stubbs, a lawyer and country gentleman with strong Puritan ties. The title, unwieldy but unmistakable, was The discovery of a gaping gulf wherein England is like to be swallowed by an other French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banns by letting Her Majesty see the sin and punishment thereof. The text was a masterpiece, combining intimate knowledge of the very arguments that been advanced by opponents of the marriage during secret debates within the Council with a propagandistic appeal to national pride, racial prejudice, detestation of papistry, and none-too-subtle hints that Anjou was syphilitic and the French in general infected with heretical and depraved ideas. “This sickness of mind have the French drawn from those eastern parts of the world, as they did that other horrible disease of the body, and, having already too far westward communicated the one contagion, do now seek notably to infect our minds with the other,” Stubbs declared in his slashing prose. The Queen was being “led blindfold as a poor lamb to the slaughter” by “this odd fellow, by birth a Frenchman, by profession a Papist, an atheist by conversation, an instrument in France of uncleanness, a fly worker in England for Rome and France in this present affair, a sorcerer by common voice and fame… . This French marriage is the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our Church.”

  Stubbs and his printer were swiftly discovered and arrested. They were tried and convicted of being “authors and sowers of seditious writings”; on the 3rd of November 1579, each had his right hand stricken off in the marketplace in Westminster. The chronicler Camden related that after the blow fell Stubbs “put off his hat with his left hand and said with a loud voice, ‘God save the Queen!’ ” The crowd “was altogether silent,” either out of horror at the punishment, pity toward the man, “or else out of hatred of the marriage, which most men presaged would be the overthrow of religion.”

  It was never proved, but Elizabeth suspected that some members of the Council were behind Stubbs’s work; rumors in Paris certainly linked Walsingham to it; it certainly was his style of logic and invective brilliantly allied, the appeal to both “reason” and “humors.” Walsingham’s young and close friend Philip Sidney, the brilliant courtier and poet, had also written something that showed familiarity with the inside arguments objecting to the match; though much more tactfully put, it was still highly Puritan and highly provoking.

  And so it was upon Walsingham that the Queen’s remaining wrath fell. She exploded that the only thing he was good for was to be “a protector of heretics” and bade him “begone.” Walsingham left the Court and remained away for the rest of the year. Though he kept his office for now, his future was uncertain.

  Walsingham had acquired a country estate, Barn Elms, from the Queen in February of that year, having sold his manor in Kent; it was to Barn Elms he now repaired. Barn Elms stood on a bend of the Thames in Surrey, between London and Richmond: a fine home, surrounded by the elms that gave it its name, glimpses of the drifting river curving along its boundary. Walsingham was a country gentleman by convention; that was what all great men were; but as much as he liked Barn Elms there was unmistakably something of exile in his fate. Though he fussed a bit about his trees, he never had the air of the passionate gardener. And as for other country pursuits, his diaries contain but a single reference to hunting, one day at Windsor. He owned ninety-one horses, sixty-eight of them at Barn Elms, but his poor health often precluded his riding himself. It was exile.

  At least his finances had improved considerably since his days of penury doing her Majesty’s service in Paris. The office of Secretary carried a salary of £100; his appointment to the ancient and honorable office of Chancellor of the Garter in 1578 brought a pension of £100; and his estates brought in a few hundred more; but he had made something like £17,000 from the sale of licenses to export 108,000 pieces of cloth that the Queen had granted him over the previous five years.

  But he could not have been happy at Barn Elms; he had taken ill yet again in August 1579 and was tormented by his obstructed bladder all autumn. A few months into the year 1580, his second daughter, Mary, age seven, died.

  In the end, the Anjou courtship became simply a farce, a bit of political theater that dragged on three scenes too long, a joke even to the Queen, as she admitted in moments of privacy and candor.

  Elizabeth still coyly hoped to get the French to counterbalance the might of Spain, without actually committing herself to anything; she sadly told the French that she could not proceed with marriage because her subjects opposed it, but she would seek a treaty of friendship and common cause between the two countries.

  Mr. Secretary was welcomed back at Court in early 1580; all seemed to have been forgotten. That year, he also moved his London home to a house on Seething Lane, on the northwest boundary of the Tower Ward, where he enjoyed the company of many well-to-do neighbors in “fair and large houses,” the Earl of Essex among them.

  The following year, Walsingham was sent to Paris to lead the delicate negotiations over the French treaty himself. But it was the same old half-measure. The Queen would entertain a defensive alliance only; any English aid to advance the war against Spain in the Netherlands would have to be completely secret. And, even more infuriatingly, she kept hinting at reviving the possibility of marriage. Walsingham furiously wrote to Burghley from Paris that all of this diplomatic overcleverness was merely destroying the Queen’s credibility; he reported that it was being said that “when her Majesty is pressed to marry then she seemeth to affect a league and when a league is yielded unto then she liketh better of marriage. And when thereupon she is moved to assent to marriage, then she hath recourse to the league, when the motion for the league or any request is made for money then she returneth to marriage.”

  A weaker or less confident man would have been left chastened and gun-shy by his earlier chastisement and banishment by the Queen, but Walsingham again did not mince words; he boldly told Elizabeth that the French were no fools, that the King of France saw that Elizabeth hoped to goad France into open war with Spain in the Netherlands, and then, when “he should be embarked, your Majesty would slip the collar.”

  And so Walsingham came home empty-handed: followed hard on his heels by Anjou himself, full of ardent protests of his love for his mistress; the Frenchman also knew how to put the rituals of courtship to good use. It finally cost the Queen £60,000 in promised “loans” to get him to go, and to embark upon his own promised expedition into the Low Countries.

  Though Elizabeth affected great tears and lamentations over the departure of her suitor, the Spanish Ambassador, Bernardino de Mendoza, passed on a story he had heard that in the privacy of her bedroom the Queen had danced with joy at the thought of being rid of her “frog” once and for all.

  It was not long after Mr. Secretary’s return to Court in 1580 that he once again began picking up trails of new Catholic intrigues from his far-flung network of reporters, spies, and purloiners of secret correspondence. The young King James of Scotland was said to be falling dangerously under the sway of his fascinating and dashing French cousin, Esmé Stuart, seigneur d’Aubigny, who had arrived on the scene at the behest of the Guises to assert his claim to the earldom of Lennox. A letter from the Bishop of Ross to Rome was intercepted in Paris; it told of plans by a junta of pro-French Scottish lords to advance the
cause of Mary and Catholicism. A Scottish Jesuit, William Creighton, had traveled to Rome and met with the Pope. A letter from Mary to the Archbishop of Glasgow was intercepted and deciphered: she pressed to have the Pope, or the King of France, or the King of Spain, supply the pro-French faction in Scotland with fifteen or twenty thousand crowns in money and five or six hundred arquebusiers. One of the pro-French Scottish lords had been seen in the Low Countries trying to buy arms. The English Catholic refugees abroad were said to be in high spirits. A papal agent in Boulogne got in touch with information to sell, that the Pope and the Duke of Guise were said to be hatching some new scheme for the invasion of England.

  In April 1580, a letter was intercepted in France and sent to Mr. Secretary. It was from Rome to a friend of Dr. Allen’s, and it reported that two English Jesuit priests had just left Rome “for the English harvest.” The appearance of these first Jesuit-trained missionaries, now joining Dr. Allen’s seminarians, sent new tremors through the defenders of religion in England; everyone had heard tales of the Jesuits, and Parliament reacted with more draconian defenses of Protestantism. A fine of twenty pounds a year was imposed on Catholics who refused to come to church, two hundred marks on anyone who sang mass, one hundred marks on anyone who heard mass; penalties of high treason were decreed for the act of withdrawing anyone from the Church of England or securing anyone’s obedience to Rome.

  In July 1581, the most famous of the Jesuit missionary priests, Edmund Campion, once a distinguished Fellow at Oxford, was tracked down by a Catholic informer and carried to London, bound hand and foot with a paper stuck in his hat that declared in great capital letters, CAMPION THE SEDITIOUS JESUIT. He was mercilessly racked in the Tower and periodically dragged out to dispute on theological topics at public sessions that were intended to discredit Catholicism but which, it soon became clear, were only creating sympathy for Campion’s pitiful state and calm steadfastness.

  Convicted of treason, Campion was taken to Tyburn on the morning of the 1st of December; called upon to confess, he declared to the assembled crowd, “I am a Catholic man and a priest. In that faith have I lived and in that faith do I intend to die; and if you esteem my religion treason, then am I guilty. As for any other treason, I never committed, God is my judge. But you have now what you desire.” And so he was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

  Walsingham had had nothing to do directly with Campion’s interrogation or trial, but he clearly viewed Campion as one of those “few for example’s sake” who ought to be executed. From Paris, where he had gone on business, Walsingham wrote Burghley, “I pray her Majesty may take profit of Campion’s discovery by severely punishing the offenders, for nothing has done more harm than the overmuch lenity that hath been used in that behalf.”

  But in the bigger picture, Mr. Secretary was again less concerned about the role of these invading priests as missionaries than about their role in more serious threats to the state—and the information they might be privy to about such threats. And though Campion had spoken the truth about his innocence of treason, other Jesuits possibly could not make the same claim. And so, when in May 1582 another courier at another border was taken, and was found to be carrying messages from the Spanish Ambassador Mendoza to the Jesuit Creighton, and the information reached Mr. Secretary in London, it was soon clear to him that a new and more dangerous phase in the shadow war had indeed begun.

  The courier had been disguised as an itinerant dentist when he was captured by a patrol of the Warden of the Middle Marches on the wild lands along the Scottish border. The “dentist” had promptly bribed the men to secure his release, but he left behind some of his gear, including a looking glass. This was delivered to the Warden, who examined it and found a hidden compartment containing the messages.

  Their contents now made clear the full dimensions of the plot whose shadowy outlines only had so far been apparent. It was clear it involved Mary, Philip, Guise, and the Jesuits, all in league together. An invasion of Scotland would be followed by the conversion of the young King James to Catholicism—and then an invasion of England, which would place Mary on the throne.

  A few months later, evidence reached Mr. Secretary that the French Ambassador in London had been acting as the key agent in a new system of secret couriers that was once again carrying messages between Mary’s supporters and the imprisoned Scottish Queen. Officially, Mr. Secretary was first shown any letters from the French Ambassador to Mary, and they were then sealed up in a packet for delivery. Unofficially, the embassy, it was now apparent, had found some means to circumvent this official inspection to pass along more sensitive correspondence.

  The immediate threat in Scotland was dealt with in August 1582, when, prodded by the English government, yet another coup took place, and a group of Protestant lords seized King James yet again and ousted Lennox and his pro-French and pro-Catholic circle.

  The problem of Mary’s secret correspondence Mr. Secretary now proceeded to tackle with far more subtlety than the last time around. The French Ambassador was an old friend of Walsingham’s. Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissière, had been one of the French gentlemen-at-arms sent to escort Ambassador Walsingham safely to Court in the terrible days immediately following the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres. Mauvissière had been ambassador in London since 1575. He was a cultured and decent man, now in his sixties; though he did not speak English he liked England and the English, got on well with Elizabeth, enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances in England. He gave excellent dinners at his residence in Salisbury Court, which stood on the river just outside the western city wall, near the Fleet River and Bridewell Prison. His English friends were many of the leading lights of the age, among them the adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Sir Philip Sidney. He was a sincere Catholic who disliked radical Protestantism, but he was also a Renaissance man of the world, an old-fashioned ambassador and a civilized man who cared more about the ennobling friendship of the intellect than the mean divisions of ideology.

  He believed in friendship: his charm and weakness. He often exchanged courteous notes with Walsingham, assuring his “dear friend” that “you will find me frank and open and ready to do the best offices I can devise.” When Mauvissière was beset by scurrilous rumors, “attacking my honor by a gross invention to charge the French in general: inciting a worthless hussy of a woman to make wicked statements about me and of my acts,” it was to Walsingham he sent his plea, a plea that bespoke friendship and a bit of injured bewilderment; he, Mauvissière, had served Elizabeth honestly one way or another for twenty-two years, had never complained of anything before, but surely Mr. Secretary his friend could do something to stop these rumors for his sake.

  Walsingham did view the ambassador as his friend. Not that that stopped him from at once setting a spy upon the ambassador’s household in an effort to penetrate Mary’s secret correspondence.

  The first attempt went almost nowhere. A Scottish theologian and poet named William Fowler had landed in prison upon arriving from France in the autumn of 1582. The Queen of Scots owed his family money, which gave him a pretext for calling on Mauvissière if he was released from prison, which Mr. Secretary was quite willing to arrange to do on terms. Soon Fowler was haunting the embassy and offering to do the French Ambassador a good turn by keeping him informed of Scottish affairs. But Fowler had turned up nothing of much importance even after six months of this.

  It was then, quite out of the blue, that a letter addressed to Mr. Secretary arrived, reporting a small but intriguing tidbit concerning the French Ambassador’s affairs:

  24 April 1583, counting in the French calendar, the ordinary post from the King of France arrived in London at the ambassador’s house. In this packet the Duke of Guise sent a letter to the ambassador beseeching him to handle the affairs of the Queen of Scots in England as secretly as he can, and for doing so he will give him a benefice worth 1500 French livres… .

  Other short reports from this mysterious correspondent followed every few days
. The writer was a man who quite assuredly resided in the French Ambassador’s house; he wrote in terrible French; and he signed himself—almost surely a jocular pseudonym—Henry Fagot. His reports to Mr. Secretary noted the comings and goings of visitors at the embassy; there were some who came only under dark of night, some only at midnight. They passed on word of money transferred to the Queen of Scots, and of reports received from France that the Duke of Guise himself was intending to be in Scotland “sooner” than anyone expected.

  And then, for a few months, nothing more was heard from Henry Fagot; and then a report of a rather different order broke the silence with a crash. Fagot began with some more small matters:

  Monsiegneur I have been a long time without writing to you, the cause of it being that I had not found anything worth writing. But now Monsiegneur that I found something that merits it I would like to let you know. There are two sellers of papist books in the ambassador’s house, the cook and the butler. Every two months without fail each makes a trip to France, to sell church ornaments that they buy in this realm and to bring back papist books… .

  And then came the bombshell:

  Monseigneur I also tell you that if your excellency wishes I have made the ambassador’s secretary so much my friend that if he is given some little bit of money that there is nothing he will not let me know, and all that touches the Scottish Queen and the secret writing in which her letters are written. You should know that after your excellency has inspected any packet of letters addressed to her, he can insert others without anyone knowing at all.