Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  On the morning of the 8th, Mary was led to the ground floor of the great hall of the castle, directly below the room where she had been tried, mounted three steps to a wooden stage that had been erected, and placed her head upon the block, where it was severed with three blows from the executioner’s axe.

  1584-90: War, at Last

  11

  OLD FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  Sir Francis Walsingham’s public and private muses rarely consulted one another. At the moment when his policy of a dozen years had triumphed, and the bosom serpent at last been slain, he was ill at home, out of favor, broke, bereft.

  In one way he was fortunate: it was Davison who bore the brunt of the Queen’s fury at the failure of the too-clever maneuvering by which she had hoped to throw the blame for Mary’s death on others. Despite the efforts the Council had made to spread the responsibility among themselves, Elizabeth insisted it was Davison alone who had defied her orders not to deliver Mary’s execution warrant; she had him thrown in the Tower, threatened actually to hang him.

  For a while it looked as if she was really going to do it. She obtained an opinion from a judge that it was within her prerogative to do so, and was preparing to secure the support of the rest of her learned judges; Burghley sent a panicked message to the judges urging them to uphold the law: “I think it a hard time if men, for doing well afore God and man, shall be otherwise punished than law may warrant with an opinion gotten from the judges that her prerogative is above the law.”

  In the end, a commission found Davison guilty of contempt and misprision and sentenced him to pay a ten-thousand-mark fine and be imprisoned in the Tower at the Queen’s pleasure. But the fine was never enforced, and Davison was freed in September 1588, and Mr. Secretary Walsingham managed to see to it that his colleague continued to receive his official salary and financial allowances.

  The triumph of Mr. Secretary’s policy toward Spain had brought its share of personal grief, too. By the time of Mary’s execution in February 1587, England was at long last engaged in the open war against Spain in the Netherlands that Walsingham had long sought; and Sir Philip Sidney, Walsingham’s son-in-law and perhaps his only true friend in the world, had been killed in battle there.

  The road to war had been the usual meander through thickets and by-courses, a decade-long series of detours and false starts, frequently driving Walsingham to near-despair. Burghley, ever hopeful of keeping the peace with Spain, had consistently opposed doing anything provocative, and the rift between the two former friends and allies had grown as the grievances between England and Spain had piled up. Besides the rather direct evidence of Spanish evil intentions that had become apparent in Mendoza’s plotting on behalf of Mary, there had been many other flash points. Several small bands of Spanish troops had landed in Ireland, in the name of the Pope; Philip disavowed responsibility. In August 1580, Spain had seized Portugal, following the death of the heirless king, a huge shift in the continental balance of power and another menacing step closer to the shores of England; the Queen cautiously extended diplomatic courtesies and a refuge in London to a rival claimant to the Portuguese throne.

  The following month, September 1580, Francis Drake, a man scarcely better than a pirate as far as the Spanish—and a good many Englishmen, too—were concerned, returned from a three-year voyage of discovery and plunder. He had circled the world; on his way he had worked up the Pacific coast of America picking off one Spanish treasure ship after another. And so Drake sailed into Plymouth Harbor carrying tons of silver and hundreds of pounds of gold, ingots and coins, worth probably £300,000. Burghley insisted it be returned to Spain; the Queen, who was due a huge share of the booty, agreed with Leicester and Walsingham, both investors themselves in the voyage, that Philip had given her ample reason to keep it. Drake’s own huge cut—somehow only £70,000 of what he brought back was ever officially registered—made him fabulously rich, and he quickly bought himself a manor and the respectability he had been lacking. The Queen knighted him and ordered that his ship the Golden Hind be put in dock at Deptford as a permanent memorial to his triumphant voyage. Burghley sourly rejected a gift of ten gold bars, saying he could not in conscience receive stolen goods.

  But it was the deteriorating situation of the Dutch Protestants that had finally begun to force the issue between England and Spain to a showdown. Anjou’s great expedition to champion the Dutch rebels had been a dud; then he had dropped dead of typhoid just a month before the Prince of Orange’s assassination in July 1584; and then the Dutch rebels were left holding on by a thread. They had the provinces of Holland and Zealand in the north; in the south, town after town had fallen to the methodical and merciless siege-and-starvation tactics of Parma, the Italian prince and general who now ruled for Spain in the Netherlands. The besieged towns of Brussels, Antwerp, and Mechlin were the only rebel strongholds in the south still in Protestant hands, and not for long by the looks of it.

  Walsingham had urged that if ever there were a time for action this was it; he pressed the Council for a decision, drawing up a list of precise particulars to be debated and decided:

  Matters to be resolved in Council

  Whether Holland and Zealand, the Prince of Orange being now taken away, can with any possibility hold out unless they be protected by some potent prince.

  Whether it be likely that the King of Spain, being possessed of these countries, will attempt somewhat against her Majesty …

  Whether if her Majesty enter into the matter it will not draw on a war.

  What means her Majesty shall have to maintain and continue the war.

  What charges by estimate the said war will amount unto …

  By what means it is like the King of Spain, if the war shall fall out, will attempt to annoy her Majesty, and how the same may be prevented.

  What way there may be devised to annoy the King of Spain.

  He had a brief moment of hope: “Upon thorough debating of the matter … it hath grown half a resolution that the peril would be so great in case Spain should possess the said countries … it behoove her Majesty to enter into some course for their defense.”

  And then the usual dithering again. The Queen’s long addiction to indecision was both prudence and habit; she had always resisted demands on the Treasury, she was ever wary of committing herself to a course that entailed the risk of failure and blame or that foreclosed the possibility of an easy way out; she had learned from experience that if she temporized long enough many problems just went away. She had long ago perfected the art of tactical delay: if she suspected the Council or her Secretary was preparing to force an issue with her, she would avoid seeing them; if after interminable discussions she at last assented to the drafting of instructions, she would then balk at signing them; if she signed them, she would ask Mr. Secretary to delay sending them.

  But what had been policy had increasingly become instinct: now, more and more, whenever anyone pressed her for a decision she simply lost her temper.

  Burghley, the master at playing to the Queen’s instincts, now held out hope for a complex bit of diplomatic finesse in the Netherlands: a vague promise of English aid to get the French to intervene and carry the burden in the Low Countries, while retaining just enough of an English hand in the affair to keep the French “from acquiring to them the absolute dominion of the countries.” Walsingham insisted that there was no time for such maneuvers; the future threat the French might pose, were they to secure such a hold, was “a matter worthy of good consideration,” he wrote Burghley, “were it not that time hath wrought the necessity of speedy resolution.” The only choices were to back the French wholeheartedly or go it alone wholeheartedly. Even Burghley at this point seemed to go along with the interventionist majority on the Council.

  The end of 1584 had found Walsingham once again ill in bed. But he saw some of the dispatches being sent to ambassadors in his absence and began to believe Burghley was playing a double game, in the Council openly supporting Walsingham’s argu
ments for English intervention, privately with the Queen undermining them.

  An explosion between the two old friends had long been inevitable; it now came, and cleared the air, and did nothing to alter their fundamental differences. Burghley complained that he had heard reports that made him doubt Walsingham’s goodwill toward him; Walsingham wrote back a long and very frank letter admitting it was true, but “so have there the like been made unto me that might have bred the like conceipt.” He had been inclined to dismiss these reports as rumors, the work of mischief-makers seeking factional gain. But then he had learned that Burghley had apparently tried to block a personal petition he had made to the Queen for the grant of a customs farm for the outports, a vindictive move that seemed to confirm “the truth of former reports of your Lordship’s mislike of me.” And so, Walsingham admitted, “thereupon I did plainly resolve with myself that it was a more safe course for me to hold your Lordship rather as an enemy than as a friend”: those same words he had used about the kingdom of France following the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres.

  The two men exchanged another pair of letters, open, frank, thankful of each other’s honesty, assuring one another of their friendship: so different from the usual dissimulating obsequiousness or touchy self-pity of the courtier. And so they agreed to disagree.

  Burghley continued to drop hints to the Queen that, given the expense and uncertainty of war, it would be best not to provoke the Spaniards, that the best way to protect England was to fortify the coasts and rely on the militia; and Walsingham, beside himself as ever, countered that the militia, its recent improvements notwithstanding, was woefully unprepared to fight a professional army, and that the only sure defense of the realm lay in keeping the Spanish occupied elsewhere. “It is dangerous that by sudden invasions men shall be drawn to the use of his weapons before he hath skill how to use it,” Walsingham pointed out; the truth was that the men who were to guard the home front “never saw the face of the enemy and their captains are void of experience.”

  By May 1585, Elizabeth was coming around, egged on by her fury at Philip’s sudden seizure of English merchant ships in Spanish harbors; but then the Dutch had begun balking at the terms of the treaty of assistance, haggling over the Queen’s demands that Flushing and other towns be turned over to English control as surety for the repayment of the costs. Walsingham now turned with exasperation on the Dutch commissioners: “You are trying to bring her into a public war in which she is to risk her treasure and the blood of her subjects against the greatest potentates of the world and you hesitate meantime at giving her such security as is required for the very defense of the provinces themselves.”

  The haggling continued; Antwerp fell; at last, in August 1585, a deal was reached. England would send 6,400 foot soldiers, 1,000 horse, provide £126,000 a year to maintain them; an English nobleman would be placed in command of the army. England would hold Flushing and Brill as security, the Dutch to repay all expenses at the conclusion of the fighting.

  “You see, gentlemen, that I have opened the door, that I am embarking once for all with you in a war against the King of Spain,” Elizabeth grandly told the Dutch commissioners when all was signed. “Very well, I am not anxious about the matter, I hope that God will aid us and that we shall strike a good blow in your cause.”

  Mr. Secretary knew her Majesty’s ways with doors: there was no door she would ever open very wide, no door even when opened that she could not shut again; so he did what he could to stick his foot in the gap. Or, failing that, keep his own back door open. And so, through the spring and summer of 1585, even as he fought the open battle in the Council, Mr. Secretary pursued a series of secretive stratagems, clever and crude, fair and foul.

  The Turks were one back door: a long shot, but a brilliant effort. In April 1585, Mr. Secretary had sent his old and trusted agent Jacobo Manucci to Constantinople for a discreet word with the English commercial agent; perhaps it might be possible to induce the Sultan to divert some of the forces from his current war with Persia and undertake a demonstration against Spain instead. In October, Mr. Secretary sent word to try again, laying out a clever series of arguments, his usual combination of cold logic and appeal to superstition and prejudice. The King of Spain was already the most powerful monarch of Christendom. He was now, under cover of attempting to subdue “the rest princes of Christendom who differ from him in faith,” seeking to draw all of Europe under him. Once that happened, there could be little doubt that he would turn next to the empires of the Sultan. Even now the growing reputation of the King of Spain inevitably meant a corresponding decline in the Sultan’s reputation as a power to be feared. There were rumors that the Sultan was already so terrified that he was fawning upon the King and “forced to beg his peace.” Old prophecies were flying about Europe that the Sultan’s empire was soon to be broken.

  But with England and Spain at war, now was the time to act; if Spain were assailed from two sides simultaneously, there was no question but that the King of Spain would “sink under so heavy a burden.” Even if the Sultan merely made a show of preparing for sea with his naval forces to “hold the King of Spain in suspense,” it might serve to good purpose by keeping his forces tied up while her Majesty struck against his might in the Low Countries.

  But in the end, the Turks would not be drawn.

  More successful by far were several schemes Mr. Secretary advanced for stealthy raids by English privateers and small naval squadrons upon Spanish interests across the breadth of its vast empires. In the early spring of 1585, he outlined the first of these in a paper entitled “Plat for the Annoying of the King of Spain.” It proposed sending three warships to snap up the Spanish fishing fleet on the Newfoundland Banks. This time his political timing was fortunate, for Philip’s arrest of English shipping provided an undeniable justification for such retaliation. Elizabeth approved the plan, and Sir Walter Raleigh was ordered to send a squadron after the Spaniards. They returned with “a good number of Spanish vessels” and six hundred Spanish seamen prisoners.

  At about the same time, a far more audacious bit of stealthy maritime enterprise was moving forward. In 1577, Walsingham had been one of the private subscribers of Sir Francis Drake’s fabulously successful voyage. He had since backed and promoted other voyages of discovery that promised to combine private profit, scientific discovery, English interests, and Spanish discomfiture. By the summer of 1585, Drake had had plans for a second voyage in the works for over a year; this would be a raid on the West Indies, with the aim of seizing the Spanish treasure fleet carrying gold from the New World. Preparations had dragged on; investors were slow delivering their promised cash; Elizabeth, keen on profit, had put up £10,000 herself but then hesitated to authorize so provocative an endeavor.

  But Philip’s actions settled it at last; in July, the mission was on again, and the Privy Council issued Drake letters of marque authorizing him to attack Spanish ships. Then more delays; when Drake finally got away from Plymouth on the 14th of September, he was so fearful Elizabeth would by now have changed her mind again that he threw his stores aboard in disarray so he could be gone on a favorable breeze. Then the winds changed, and it took a week to clear the coast; Drake ordered that if forced into port the fleet should make for Ireland or France, so as to remain out of the Queen’s reach.

  It was a far less profitable voyage than his last one—Drake missed intercepting the treasure ships—but it nonetheless succeeded in wreaking a satisfying degree of havoc among Spain’s possessions in the West Indies, what with landing parties looting churches, seizing cannon and military stores, burning settlements, and extorting ransoms. By the following spring, word had come back to Europe of Drake’s exploits, and Mr. Secretary’s spies in Italy reported that the news had shaken Philip’s credit with the Genoese bankers: they had just refused him a loan of a half million crowns.

  Mr. Secretary drew up one other plan in the summer of 1585 to secretly tighten the grip on the policy he had so long sought, which even now
kept threatening to slip through his fingers just as it was within his grasp. His truce with Burghley of the previous January notwithstanding, Walsingham now launched a bit of scurrilous intrigue against Burghley himself, aimed at weakening his opposition to the war; or, failing that, to discredit him baldly.

  One of Walsingham’s venerable agents was William Herle: he had worked for Burghley years ago, as the prison stooge who had offered to help Charles Baillie slip ciphered messages to the Bishop of Ross; he had been Walsingham’s go-between with the agent Henry Fagot; he had undertaken more respectable diplomatic missions as well. Now, on Walsingham’s orders, Herle turned his talents upon Burghley. Herle wrote the Lord Treasurer warning him that he was being spoken of far and wide as an enemy of the Protestant cause in both France and the Netherlands; that people were also saying that he was looking out only for himself, that he had too many splendid houses and too vast an income, that it was said no one could expect the Queen’s smallest favor without going through him.

  Burghley was sufficiently rattled that he replied with a long defense of himself. Then Walsingham, through Herle, tried to entangle Burghley in a complex scheme that had been talked of for minting English coins in the Low Countries, where they were trading at a considerable premium over their gold value; Herle said that it could net the Queen £10,000 a month and still leave Burghley a cut of £1,000 a month. Burghley spat out the bait, sternly replying to Herle, “I were to blame if I would not assent to her Majesty’s profit… . But for any offer to myself, I do utterly refuse either such or less sum… . I marvel that any malicious discourses can note me a councilor that do abuse my credit for my private gain.”