Elizabeth's Spymaster (44 page)

7
35 Henry VIII cap. 1.

8
NA PRO E 23/4/1 – Henry VIII’s will, dated 30 December 1546. See Hutchinson, pp.210–16, for details regarding how the contents of the will enabled a Protestant
coup d’etat
to form the government of Edward VI.

9
‘Sadler Papers’, Vol. II, p.325.

10
Wine sediment or dregs.

11
John Lothrop Motley,
Rise of the Dutch Republic,
3 vols., New York, 1904; Vol. I, p.297.

12
Around £542,000 at today’s prices. Was he claiming compensation?

13
Sharp, p.387.

14
Ibid.

15
Ibid., p.143.

16
Ibid., p.173.

17
Ibid., p.143.

18
Percy, born in 1528, had his estates restored by Mary I in 1557, his father having being attainted. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in May 1895. His wife Anne, Countess of Northumberland, took a very active part in the rebellion. Sir George Bowes reported: ‘His wife, being the stouter of the two, hastened him and encouraged him to persevere, and rode up and down with their army from place to place’ (Sharp, p.77). She fled to Flanders after the collapse of the rebellion, whilst Elizabeth fumed at her escape: the Countess ‘behoved to be burnt and merited it well’, according to the queen. See Somerset, p.301. She died of smallpox in 1591.

19
Neville was attainted for treason in 1571, thereby losing his estates. He died in Nieuport in Flanders in 1601.

20
Busse, p.14.

21
The austere and moral Pius, a former inquisitor in Milan and Lombardy, was Pope from 1566–72. He was beatified in 1672 and canonised by Clement XI in 1712.

22
Fuller, pp.93–4. Pius, ‘constrained of the necessity to betake ourselves of the weapons of justice against her, not being able to mitigate our sorrow that we are drawn to take punishment upon one whose ancestors the whole state of Christendom have been so much bounden … do out of the fullness of our Apostolic power, declare the aforesaid Elizabeth, being an heretic and a favourer of heresies, and her adherents … to have incurred sentence of Anathema and to be cut off from the unity of the body of Christ. And moreover, we do declare her to be deprived of her pretended title to the kingdom and of all dominions, dignity and privilege whatsoever and also the nobility, subjects and people of the said kingdom and all other which have of any sort sworn unto her, to be for ever absolved from any such oath and all manner of duty…’ All were commanded and interdicted ‘not to obey her, or her… mandates and laws and those that shall do the contrary, we do likewise inundate with the like sentence of Anathema’.

23
It was nailed onto the gate between two and three in the morning on
25 May, the feast of Corpus Christi. The perpetrator, a wealthy Catholic gentleman called John Felton, of Bermondsey Abbey, Southwark, had received copies of the bull in Calais and was arrested within twenty-four hours. Felton, ‘a man of little stature and of black complexion’, was tortured on the rack three times and executed in St Paul’s churchyard on 8 August 1570. He reportedly uttered the name of Jesus while the public hangman held his still-beating heart in his hand. Felton, whose wife had been a maid of honour to Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary I and the widow of her auditor, was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886.

24
Queen Mary I, Elizabeth’s half-sister and predecessor on the throne of England.

25
This refers to Wyatt’s Rebellion of 1554, which sought to prevent Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain. It was crushed in the western suburbs of London in early February. Elizabeth had been implicated in the conspiracy because of her close contacts with two of the ringleaders, Sir William Pickering and Sir James Crofts. Elizabeth was dispatched to the Tower, but the treason case against her was eventually dropped through the influence of her great-uncle William Howard, the Lord Admiral. See Somerset, pp.47–55.

26
CSP Rome, Vol. II, p.551.

27
Margaret, who died in 1541, was the grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots.

28
CSPF,
1572–4,
p.93. Letter from Walsingham to the Earl of Leicester, 31 January 1572.

Chapter One

1
Payments or bribes.

2
Written much later in his life, when he was Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary of State. The advice was contained in a manuscript book owned by George Finch MP of Burley on the Hill, Rutland, but it was destroyed in a nineteenth-century fire. Walsingham told his nephew to read the classical histories ‘to mark how matters have passed in governance in those days, so have you to apply them to these our times and states and see how they may be made serviceable to our age…’ Cited by Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham,
Vol. I, pp.n-12.

3
Some writers give the year of his birth as 1536, but as he is named in his father’s will, dated 1 March 1534, this is clearly wrong. He was probably born at his father’s house in Chislehurst in Kent.

4
For an account of Anthony Denny and his true role in the Henrician government, see Hutchinson, pp.151–8.

5
‘DNB1’, Vol 59, p.228. He died in 1550 and was buried in the Scadbury Chapel of Chislehurst Church, Kent.

6
Webb, Miller and Beckwith, p.126.

7
BL Harleian MS 807, fol.4. Other pedigrees of the Walsingham family are in Harleian MS 1, 174, fol.53 and Add. MS 5, 520, fol.173, the latter being probably an eighteenth-century copy based on Glover’s earlier work.

8
LPFD Henry VIII, Vol. IV, pt. ii, p.1, 170. Henry’s letter to the Common Council of the City is dated 17 November from Greenwich Palace and Catherine’s 19 November. Some opposition was encountered: a second ballot was required for him to be appointed. The Common Serjeant was the legal adviser to the Lord Mayor.

9
Webb, Miller and Beckwith, p.377.

10
He was appointed bailiff of the royal manor of Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, in 1540, and was knighted in 1547, very soon after Edward VI became king. John Carey was the brother of William Carey, who married Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary.

11
The college possesses a portrait of Walsingham, painted in 1587 by an unknown artist.

12
According to his Latin epitaph, now lost, in Old St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

13
Stäahlin, pp.89–90.

14
His stepfather died in 1552. Her funeral, on 6 April, was described by the London merchant tailor Henry Machyn, who today would be called an undertaker. Unfortunately, he names the wrong church as the venue, gives the wrong year and misspells the surname of Joyce’s second husband. It was, however, a grand affair, with ‘four great [wax] tapers and four torches and two dozen and a half of scutcheons of arms [heraldic shields]’. See: John Gough Nichols,
The Diary of Henry Machyn
…, Camden Society, London, 1848, p.193.

15
The eldest, Elizabeth, first married Geoffrey Gates, whose thuggish brother John was Sir Anthony Denny’s ‘fixer’ in Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber and who died for his role in the abortive accession of Lady Jane Grey. Following Geoffrey’s death, she married Peter Wentworth of Lillingstone Lovell, Oxfordshire. The marriage of their daughter Mary is recorded in the Kent visitations of 1574 and 1592 by Robert Cooke,
Clarenceux Herald.
See ‘Visitations’, p.124. The second-eldest sister Barbara married Thomas Sidney, ironically the lord of the manor of Walsingham in Norfolk. Eleanor married Sir William Sherington and Christiana married firstly John Tamworth, a member of the royal household, and secondly William Dodington, an officer of the Mint.

16
The Walsingham arms appear, quartered with Mildmay, in a window in the hall at Emmanuel College.

17
Naunton, p.20.

18
Griffin provides the blazon for Walsingham’s arms, recorded in the herald’s visitation of Kent in 1592, ‘Visitations’, p.39. The motto is given by Philpot in BL Harleian MS 3, 917, fol.2.

19
It met for the first time on 12 January 1562.

20
NA PRO PROB 11/47 PCC 32 S
TEVENSON.
Also cited by Webb, Miller and Beckwith, p.380. The reference to ‘exhibition’ is provision for the child’s education.

21
She was the daughter of the Somerset gentleman Henry St Barbe and held lands in her own right in Boston, Lincolnshire, and elsewhere in that county.

22
Worsley was Captain of the Isle of Wight. Appuldurcombe, ‘the valley of the apple trees’, was formerly a cell of the Benedictine monastery at St Mary Montsburg in Normandy, in the diocese of Coutances, founded by Richard de Redvers c.1090. See: Sir William Dugdale,
Monasticon Anglicanum,
Vol. I, London, 1718, p.73. An engraving of the house in 1690 is in Worsley, facing p.181. It was pulled down in 1710 by Sir Richard Worsley, Governor and Vice Admiral of the Isle of Wight, and a new house constructed. See: Percy Stone,
Architectural Antiquities of the Isle of Wight, 2
vols., privately printed, London, 1891, Vol. I, p.57. A description of the later house is given in Nikolaus Pevsner and David Lloyd,
Buildings of England: Hampshire and the Isle of Wight,
Harmondsworth, 1967, pp.29, 729 and 800.

23
Worsley, pp.216–17 fn. This account was by Sir John Oglander, who heard a first-hand account of the accident from James Worsley, one of the survivors.

24
NA PROB 11/48 PCC 35 C
RYMES
and M
ORRISON,
dated 9 March 1566, in Latin.

25
Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham,
Vol. I, p.29 and Worsley, p.217.

26
Stählin, p.199. The name is London slang for priests and came from its use since 1430 by a fraternity or brotherhood of St Charity and St John the Evangelist, to house ‘poor impotent priests’. The residents ‘becoming lame or otherwise into great poverty, were here relieved, as to have chambers, with certain allowance of bread, drink and coal, and one old man and his wife to see them served and to keep the house clean’. The fraternity was suppressed in 1548 by Edward VI’s government. See Stow, Vol. I, p.146.

27
Its full dedication was the parish church of ‘St Mary the Virgin, St Ursula and the 11, 000 Virgins’, after the expedition throughout Europe staged by the latter saint and her cohorts of virgins. She suffered martyrdom by beheading. A sign showing an axe hung over the church’s east end: hence the nickname.
The building disappeared early in Elizabeth’s reign and its lower part was rebuilt as a free grammar school. See: Wilberforce Jenkinson,
London Churches Before the Great Fire, London, 1917, p.105.

28
Stählin, p.194.

29
Painting NPG 1705. Not on public display in 2005. Oil on panel, measuring 15½ × 13¼ in. (394 x 340 mm).

30
HMC, ‘Finch’, p.18.

31
Stählin, p.194, fn.4.

32
NA PRO PROB 11/75 PCC 33
DRURY.

33
NA PRO SP 46/17, fol.18.

34
A letter from Sir Thomas Smith, Walsingham’s fellow Secretary of State, to Burghley on 7 January 1573 talks of his attempts to persuade the queen to recall Walsingham from France as he was ‘undone, having been at great charge, all things waxing so dear, and his wife being here and great with child’. See BL Harleian MS 6, 991, no.9.

35
Sir Amyas Paulet, who had just ended his tenure as English ambassador in Paris, wrote to Walsingham on 16 July 1580 offering his sympathies on Mary’s death. See BL Cotton MS Titus B ii, fol.345.

36
SPD,
Edward VI, Mary & Elizabeth, 1547–80,
p.278.

37
Throgmorton (1515–71) was appointed ambassador in Paris in 1560 and was captured by Catholic forces at the battle of Dreux in 1562. He was sent to Scotland in an attempt to prevent the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to Lord Darnley in 1565 and was imprisoned in 1569 on suspicion of being sympathetic to the rebels in northern England. Throgmorton Street in the City of London is named after him.

38
SPD,
Edward VI, Mary & Elizabeth 1547–80,
p.314, 18 August 1568. Cited by Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham,
Vol. I, p.55.

39
Richings, p.117.

40
Ibid., p.123. In January 1569, Mary promised de Spes that with the aid of Philip II, she would be queen of England in three months and the realm returned to Catholicism. See Labanoff-Rostovsky, Vol. II, p.237 and ‘Cal. Spanish’, Vol. II, pp.97ff. De Spes was not so sanguine. He believed that the ‘English hate the very name of foreigner and they wish the change to be made in a way that shall not hand them over to any other nation’, Richings, p.157. How well he knew the English!

41
Richings, p.123. The Spanish ambassador’s London home was at Winchester House, Southwark.

42
Naunton, p.60.

43
Richings, p.134.

44
Stählin, p.203.

45
SPD,
Edward VI, Mary &
Elizabeth, 1547–80,
p.315.

46
Ibid., p.317.

47
Ibid., p.320. Dated 21 October 1568.

48
Ibid., p.324.

49
Letter dated 20 December 1568. Cited by Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham,
Vol. I, p.58.

50
She was the daughter of Sir John Leyland of Cunswick, Westmorland, and had married Thomas Lord Dacre, who died in July 1566, leaving her with four young children. Norfolk married her on 29 January 1567 in London ‘without any rejoicing or demonstration’. See Williams, p.127.

51
Robinson, p.52.

52
The others were Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex (the Lord President of the Council of the North), and Sir Ralph Sadler. Other delegates were to be appointed by Mary Queen of Scots and the Regent of Scotland, James Stewart, Earl of Moray.

53
He was strangled after escaping from a house at Kirk o’ Field on the edge of Edinburgh, which was destroyed by an explosion set off in an attempt to assassinate him. See Guy, pp-299–303.