Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  On the 24th of November, the Queen attended a service of thanksgiving at Saint Paul’s, making her way there through cheering throngs in streets bedecked with blue cloth, riding upon a chariot throne with a canopy supported by four pillars, drawn by two white horses. A commemorative medal was struck: a time for mocking humor. It bore the motto veni, vidi, fugit; I came, I saw, I fled.

  And to Mr. Secretary, from Vice-Admiral Lord Henry Seymour, a more subtle tribute.

  “I will not flatter you,” Seymour wrote when it was all over, “but you have fought more with your pen than many have in our English navy fought with their enemies.”

  As was ever his fate, Walsingham had been healthy in times of adversity and crisis; now, almost as soon as the danger to the nation was gone, the danger to himself returned; in mid-September, he was again ill and subjecting himself to the crude torments of physic in search of a cure.

  Leicester died that same month. The loss of his old ally and recent enemy saddened few people besides the Queen (public joy in the victory over the Armada, Camden recorded, was not “anything abated by Leicester’s death”); but it could not have failed to add to Walsingham’s growing intimations of his own mortality.

  The Queen paid Walsingham visits at Barn Elms in 1588 and 1589—an honor, but a mixed blessing given the crushing cost of each royal visit. Walsingham’s finances were still a wreck; the customs farm was a bust. In the spring of 1589, he petitioned the Queen to be forgiven the £12,739 he still owed the Exchequer for its lease over three years. The disruptions to trade and the war with Spain had so cut into revenues that his original pledge to pay £11,000 a year had proved impossible to meet. The Queen agreed; but the books were so convoluted, and then there were various other official expenditures he had made and licenses he had received, that it was hard to tell by the following year whether he owed money to the Crown or was owed money.

  In November 1589, Francis Walsingham prepared a will that provided for an annuity of £100 to his daughter, in addition to an earlier one of £200 he had provided her. He had already conveyed most of his remaining lands to her, retaining a life estate to himself and his wife, but these amounted to only £70 per year in income. “And I will that my body, in hope of a joyful resurrection,” Walsingham instructed, “be buried without any such extraordinary ceremonies as usually appertain to a man serving in my place, in respect of the greatness of my debts and the mean state I shall leave my wife and heir in; charging both my executor and overseers to see this duly accomplished, according to the special trust and confidence I repose in them.”

  In late March 1590, he was still attending the meetings of the Privy Council: two weeks later he was dead. The chronicler Camden wrote that he had “died of a carnosity growing intra testium tunicas”—a fleshy growth within the membrane of the testicles; that, “or rather through violence of medicines.”

  It was an age when stories of how men died and with what pious last words on their lips carried great weight, and Mr. Secretary had made more than most men’s share of enemies in his life; the Catholics were quick to spread a story that was anatomically improbable, but just vile enough to be repeated, of the death of the man they saw as their tormentor: “The Secretary Walsingham, a most violent persecutor of Catholics, died never so much naming God in his last extremities. And yet he had his speech, as he showed by telling the preacher that he heard him, and therefore he needed not to cry so loud—which were his last words. In the end, his urine came forth at his mouth and nose, with so odious a stench that none could endure to come near him.”

  Walsingham died late on the night of the 6th of April; the following night, Camden recorded, he was buried as he had instructed, “by dark in Paul’s Church at London without any funeral solemnity.”

  The men who had served Mr. Secretary the most faithfully landed more or less on their feet. Thomas Phelippes had been awarded a pension of one hundred marks for his role in the Babington case. Nicholas Berden, his cover having finally been blown from his work in Paris, was granted the sinecure in the Queen’s household that he sought: Purveyor of the Poultry. Anthony Standen learned of his patron’s death from a prison cell in Bordeaux, where he had been arrested: supposedly as a Spanish spy, for he had apparently assumed the role of double agent as his cover for earlier spying for the English government. But Standen was able to make contact with Burghley, get himself released from prison, and take up where he had left off, sending reports to his new patron on Spanish shipping and troop movements. In 1593, he at last returned to England to enter the service of the Earl of Essex.

  But others were lost—lost along with the knowledge of secret methods that Walsingham had so painstakingly assembled and so jealously carried with him to his grave. His secretary Robert Beale tried to salvage some of it in the guide he assembled for Walsingham’s possible successor; Beale lamented that Mr. Secretary himself, perhaps “more private than were fit for her Majesty’s service,” had scrupulously neglected to provide for the “instruction and bringing up others in knowledge to be able to serve her Majesty.”

  Some other of the pieces of Mr. Secretary’s secret service were gathered up by Burghley and by the increasingly ambitious Essex, Frances Walsingham’s second husband; but though Burghley had experience and Essex enthusiasm, their growing political rivalry inevitably meant a loss of much that Walsingham had built. Essex had money and youth, but he was no Walsingham. Determined to make his mark in secret affairs, he claimed to have discovered that the Queen’s physician, a Portuguese Jew named Roderigo Lopez, was in the pay of Spain and had been offered fifty thousand crowns to poison her. Burghley’s son Robert Cecil defended Lopez, and the man himself insisted that all he had done was to make contact with some Spanish officials, and that only at Walsingham’s behest to draw out useful information; but with Walsingham gone and Essex determined to give the Cecils one in the eye, he prosecuted the matter with relentless zeal and saw Lopez convicted and hanged.

  Essex did at least lavish money on the support of many of Mr. Secretary’s old agents in their old work, Phelippes included; yet all that ended for good in 1601, when, half mad and driven by jealousy of the Cecils, Essex attempted a bizarre coup against the Queen’s ministers that ended in his execution.

  Frances Walsingham had three sons and two daughters by Essex, the most famous being Robert Devereux, the 3rd Earl of Essex, who inherited something from both his Essex and Walsingham forebears: becoming the Puritan parliamentary general of the seventeenth-century civil wars.

  There had been much talk of making Sir Edward Stafford the next Principal Secretary, but somehow he never quite got the job: another of Walsingham’s subtler legacies, no doubt. The post lay vacant for several years and finally was given to Robert Cecil. But the office itself soon decayed; with Cecil’s successors, its holder became little more than a clerk who handled routine business.

  And yet: something had been born that could never die. Mr. Secretary had not only won the war, he had won the battle. England’s star had risen to heights none had dared imagine possible; England had defeated the Armada of the mightiest empire in the world, had made Elizabeth’s prestige soar throughout the courts of Europe, had heartened Spain’s enemies, had placed England irrevocably on the side of Protestant Europe in a political and military struggle against Catholicism. And in an age when violence and brute force were still the only things most men understood, there were now—in the memories and experience of at least some select band of men who knew, and buried away in the files of state papers however disordered and obscure and picked over and expunged—the traces of another way of looking at things. Knowledge is never too dear: not a thought most sixteenth-century men of action would have subscribed to, but an idea that would never again quite disappear from the halls of power, especially the halls of power of outnumbered nations with democratic leanings facing the power of tyrants.

  Two days after Walsingham’s death, the Spanish agent in London sent King Philip a letter bearing the news. “Secretary Walsi
ngham has just expired, at which there is much sorrow,” he wrote.

  “There, yes!” Philip jotted in the margin when he read it several weeks later. “But it is good news here.”

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  The indispensable starting point for any treatment of Walsingham is Conyers Read’s three-volume Mr. Secretary Walsingham. Based on an exhaustive study of manuscript sources, it has stood the passage of eighty years remarkably well. Though many today would quibble with some of his interpretations, his research remains unsurpassed. And no one could possibly improve upon the perfect anecdote that Read found to end his account of Walsingham’s life, so I have not tried to—and merely acknowledge my debt here.

  I have included here a brief survey of the key sources I consulted for each section. A complete list of these sources, with full citations, is found in the bibliography.

  1572: MURDER IN PARIS

  Key documents relating to the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, including the accounts of Sassetti and the Venetian and papal ambassadors, are found in Potter, ed., French Wars of Religion; Soman, ed., Massacre of St. Bartholomew; Layard, Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Knecht, French Wars of Religion, provides a very useful summary of key events and sources.

  Noguères, Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and Erlanger, Saint Bartholomew’s Night, have reconstructed the events in narrative form; though they provide many important and colorful details, their depiction of the inner councils of the French Court are based on sources that recent scholarship has for the most part dismissed as later propagandistic inventions. Kingdon, Myths About the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres, and Sutherland, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, provide a careful assessment of the sources taking into account this well-founded skepticism. Kingdon, along with Strype, Annals of the Reformation, also documents the reaction to the massacres across Europe.

  Digges, ed., Compleat Ambassador, reprints a large collection of Walsingham’s official correspondence with the English government during these critical events and his later missions abroad. Important original drafts of several of these letters are in the BL Cotton MSS, notably Vespasian F vi ff. 163-64, Walsingham to Sir Thomas Smith, 2 September 1572; and Vespasian F vi f. 169 and following, Walsingham to Privy Council, 24 September 1572. Catherine de Médicis’s correspondence with the French Ambassador to England, recounting her meetings with Walsingham following the massacres, is in Fénélon, Correspondance, vol. 4.

  1532-72: MAKING OF A SPYMASTER

  Most of what is known about Walsingham’s family background and early life is found in Webb, Miller, and Beckwith, History of Chislehurst , with some additional details (culled from a variety of impressively miscellaneous sources) in Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham. Read also reprints in full Walsingham’s advice to his nephew, a manuscript that has since been destroyed by fire.

  The chroniclers—Camden’s History, Naunton’s Fragmenta Regalia, and Lloyd’s State Worthies—offer the earliest published character sketches of Walsingham. His paradoxical role in establishing a troupe of stage players for the Queen is discussed in McMillim and MacLean, Queen’s Men. The Calendar of State Papers, Simancas is the source for the Spanish agent’s comments on Walsingham as a “heretic” (De Guaras to Zayas, 7 November 1574).

  The demographic and social background of Tudor England and the nature of Tudor law, government, and taxation are developed in rich detail in Rowse’s classic England of Elizabeth; Palliser, Age of Elizabeth, updates this perspective with more recent research, notably the rigorous study of the demographics of the Elizabethan age by the Cambridge Group. Guy, Tudor England, is another excellent survey full of insights and remarkable facts. The records of Walsingham’s London parish, Registers of St. Olave, Hart Street, provide an interesting snapshot of the social milieu of sixteenth-century London, as well as the dates for a (very) few events in Walsingham’s personal life, notably the baptism of his granddaughter.

  Somerset, Elizabeth I, a solidly researched as well as extremely lively and readable work, has the wonderfully vivid details of the Queen’s character, her tastes, her attitudes toward religion, and her swearing. William Cecil’s background and role in Elizabeth’s government are covered in Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil.

  The English Reformation and the religious settlement of 1559 is an immense and complex subject with an immense and complex literature to match. I have relied mainly on the above-mentioned works by Rowse and Palliser, and also on MacCaffrey’s Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy and Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime; Guy, Tudor England; and McGrath, Papists and Puritans. John White’s funeral sermon for Mary Tudor is in Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, with additional details recounted in Starkey, Elizabeth.

  The life and character of Mary Queen of Scots is choked with romance and legend; Somerset, Elizabeth I, is a superb guide through this morass, as is Guy, Queen of Scots; Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, has a lot of reliable detail and a lot of debatable interpretation.

  Walsingham’s warning to Cecil that there is “less danger in fearing too much” is in PRO SP 12/48 no. 61. His propaganda pamphlet against the Norfolk marriage is reprinted in full in Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham. Norfolk’s marriage plot and arrest in 1569 and Cecil’s quiet role are discussed in Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil. The orders from the Privy Council to Walsingham to detain and interrogate Ridolfi, and Walsingham’s letter mistakenly expressing confidence in Ridolfi, are in PRO SP 12/59 nos. 3 and 11, and SP 12/74 no. 12.

  All of the key documents concerning the Ridolfi plot and its discovery are reprinted in Murdin, ed., Burghley Papers; Mary’s correspondence with Ridolfi is in Labanoff, ed., Lettres; the acidic views of de Spes, Alva, and Philip are found in Calendar of State Papers, Simancas, for this period; and Plowden, Elizabethan Secret Service, offers an exceptionally clear and straightforward narrative of the events of the plot. The case of Charles Baillie is recounted in the Dictionary of National Biography entry under his name, and the prison ruse with Dr. Story in Pollitt, “Abduction of Doctor John Story.”

  1573-83: MR. SECRETARY

  Walsingham’s town houses are mentioned in Stow, Survey of London.

  The office of Principal Secretary and its duties are described in Faunt, “Discourse,” and in Robert Beale’s memorandum reprinted in Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham. Rowse, England of Elizabeth, has a short but excellent discussion of the role of the Privy Council and the Secretary; Read, The Tudors and Government of England, also provide much helpful background. Walsingham’s “table book,” which lists all of the books and documents in his charge is in BL Stowe MS 162. The “Journal of Walsingham,” which covers 1570 to 1583 (with some notable gaps, particularly the St. Bartholomew massacres), lists Walsingham’s official correspondence and extremely brief accounts of his activities; “Journal of the Secretary’s Office 1585,” BL Harley MS 6035, is even more cryptic but has some important clues about his secret doings; “Entry Book of Letters and Papers Kept for Sir Francis Walsingham,” PRO 12/45, is a random grab bag of official correspondence and memoranda.

  The list of places from which Walsingham received reports is in PRO SP 12/232 no. 12. The ruse played on the Archbishop of Casel in France is recounted in Digges, ed., Compleat Ambassador. Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham, contains numerous examples of the men recruited by him and the work they did. The record of secret funds approved for Walsingham’s use is in PRO SP 12/229 no. 49.

  The report of the white cross and wolf are in Calendar of State Papers, Simancas, 7 Nov. 1574. The translated text of Regnans in Excelsis is given in Pollen, English Catholics. McGrath, Papists and Puritans, thoroughly covers the anti-recusancy laws and the missionary priests; Challoner, Missionary Priests, tells many of their individual adventures and gruesome ends.

  The documents relating to the Cockyn case are in PRO SP 53/10, nos. 10-16.

  Read, “Walsingham and Burghley,” discusses the growing rifts between the two on the Privy Council. Stubbs’s Gaping Gulf and some of the ballads about the Anjou
match have been reprinted in the modern edition edited by Lloyd E. Berry. Walsingham’s personal finances are discussed in the last two chapters of Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham; the estimate of the profit he made from the sale of his cloth-export licenses is based on the Earl of Sussex’s sale to a trading consortium in 1577 of licenses for twenty thousand cloths for the sum of £3,200, noted by Somerset. A reference to the death of Walsingham’s daughter Mary is in a letter of condolence from Paulet in July 1580, BL Cotton MS Titus B ii f. 345.

  Mauvissière’s character is discussed in Bossy, Giordano Bruno and Under the Molehill, which are also the source for the exhaustive case identifying Fagot and the leaker in the French embassy. Although these books make for demanding reading, and some of his interpretations and conclusions have been disputed, Bossy’s research into this matter is without parallel, a tour de force of meticulous detective work and analysis, drawing together an extraordinary range of sources and evidence. Copies of Fagot’s first reports to Walsingham are in PRO SP 52/31 no. 26 and SP 53/12 no. 61.

  1583-87: THE BOSOM SERPENT

  The official account of the Throckmorton Plot was published in A Discoverie of the Treasons. Bossy, Under the Molehill, reprints many of the key documents in the secret correspondence and is now the definitive authority on Walsingham’s behind-the-scenes role in the affair.