Sir Francis Walsingham (26 page)

I write to you, my lord, as the only friend upon whom I repose trust, to know your advice upon a letter Mr Secretary writ me yesterday . . . he would have me write to him secretly. I know that by his means the Queen has had false advertisements of preparations here from his factors and has been incensed that news of importance should come from others.
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As we shall see, Walsingham was keeping a close watch on the ambassador, who had aroused his suspicions. Three years later Stafford was known to be selling information about English naval movements to Guise and Philip. But his dealings with the ambassador are further evidence that Walsingham was a control freak. His unilateral activity was risky and he certainly could not have indulged in it without the support of the Earl of Leicester.

It was clear to him that the key to the Scottish situation was the young king and his bedazzlement with d’Aubigny. Walsingham was in close contact with the anti-French caucus in Scotland and with the fugitive Earl of Angus who was their ally in England. Angus went to
Elizabeth and asked for money to fund a coup. Inevitably the queen declined to be involved. Walsingham, therefore, advanced some of his own capital and helped to organize the plot. All was going well until the secretary heard from Paris that his plans were discovered. He sent messengers galloping northwards to Robert Bowes, who urged the conspirators to accelerate their arrangements. The result was the kidnapping of a king. When James was hunting close to Perth on 7 August a party of horsemen intercepted him and carried him off to the nearby castle of Ruthven, a stronghold of the Earl of Gowrie.

It was round two to the Protestant lords but the match was far from over. D’Aubigny was still at large. He planned a counter-kidnap, which failed. French intrigues were still afoot. Their party was still strong and loyalties on both sides were mutable; that is to say they could be bought. Walsingham urged Elizabeth to open her purse. He received the old answer. In the name of King James his new minders ordered the favourite out of the country. Desperately, d’Aubigny prevaricated. After the counter-kidnap failed he tried to organize support among some of the northern English nobles but his letters were intercepted. Meanwhile, Henry III and the Guises sent a new ambassador, La Mothe Fénélon, to Scotland. He arrived in London en route to take up his assignment, his luggage including chests of French gold. He presented himself at Elizabeth’s court and requested a passport to travel overland to Scotland. At all costs it was vital to prevent the diplomat enabling d’Aubigny to turn the tables by financing his cause and assuring him of military aid. There now ensued an almost comic situation. The queen’s councillors devised stratagem after stratagem to detain Fénélon, while urging their Scottish confederates to eject d’Aubigny with all possible haste. Eventually the impatient ambassador told Elizabeth that, if his passport was not forthcoming, he would create a diplomatic incident by packing his bags and going home. The passport was duly produced and the diplomat, William Davison, was assigned to accompany Fénélon on his journey – with secret instructions from Walsingham to do everything possible to slow him down. When every means to detain the Frenchman had been exhausted he left London at the end of December. And still no word had been received about d’Aubigny’s
departure from Scotland. In fact the exiled favourite set out from Dalkeith about the same time that Fénélon quit London. It had been a close call.

But the constantly changing cloudscape of Scottish events allowed the English government no opportunity to relax. In June 1583 King James was snatched out of Gowrie’s custody. This time the kidnap was engineered by the captain of the royal guard whom Walsingham had been instrumental in putting in place. This is yet one more indication that in the intricate world of national and international factions almost anyone could be bought. French influence was once more in the ascendant north of the border. Walsingham was driven to distraction by the worsening situation. What he learned from his latest intelligence source only added to his alarm.

He had discovered that the French embassy was the clearing house for the secret correspondence reaching Mary from France and Spain. The ambassador, Michel de Castlenau, Sieur de la Mauvissière was a charming, friendly man whom, on a personal level, Walsingham liked. However he was not very astute and had no inkling that the secretary was soon running two spies in his household. The first, Giordano Bruno, a guest under Castlenau’s roof, offered his services to the English government without prompting. Many would-be informants resorted to Walsingham because they knew that he was a willing paymaster hungry for intelligence, and we cannot know to what extent greed and idealism motivated most occupants of the seamy diplomatic underworld. Bruno, however, was in a different category. A Neapolitan scholar, poet and philosopher of distinction, he enjoyed Europewide literary and political connections. In religious matters he was a fence-sitter, opposing the pretensions of the papacy without embracing Protestantism. He enjoyed London’s intellectual scene because of its atmosphere of free debate and was particularly attracted to the Dudley-Sidney circle. He was a well-informed and also a witty correspondent. For instance the
nom de guerre
he chose for himself suggested that in the opinion of Catholic reactionaries he was a heretic; a brand for the burning. He signed his reports ‘Henry Fagot’.

The second agent was a Scottish theologian and poet, William Fowler, who had found himself in an English jail. The price of his
freedom was to be Walsingham’s mole in the French embassy. So now there were two government spies in Castelnau’s palatial residence, Salisbury Court, close by the notorious Bridewell house of correction, among whose inmates were both Puritan and Catholic undesirables. Neither knew of the other’s activities and the situation bordered on the comic when Bruno warned Walsingham that Fowler was not all he seemed. In fact, Fowler obviously overplayed his hand and this was actually useful to Walsingham, for, while Castelnau was keeping an eye on Fowler, he was oblivious to Bruno’s activities. And Bruno was a real danger to him.

The Italian was a remarkable spy with a real talent for the work. In the summer of 1583 he bribed no less a person than Castelnau’s secretary, Nicolas Leclerc, Sieur de Courcelles, to betray his master’s secrets. Was it jealousy that prompted Leclerc to turn against his employer? Did he hope to elbow the aged ambassador aside and take his job? Leclerc was certainly ambitious and went on to higher diplomatic service. Whatever the truth of the matter, Walsingham was now receiving a steady supply of reports and copied confidential documents from Salisbury Court. From them he learned how Mary Stuart’s communication system worked. Her couriers included Henry Howard, brother of the Duke of Norfolk who had been executed after the Ridolfi plot, and Francis Throckmorton, nephew of the diplomat, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Bruno particularly disliked Howard and made him the victim of a savagely witty literary attack. Both men were covert Catholics and Howard was already under surveillance. It was now revealed that they made frequent nocturnal visits to the embassy. Everything was now going well for Walsingham. He was carefully accumulating evidence and had high hopes of being able to secure the big prize – incontrovertible evidence against Mary that would lead to her trial and execution. All he had to do was wait for the appropriate moment to strike.

Then came the bombshell. In late July Elizabeth ordered him to go to Scotland and sort out in person English relations with the king. Walsingham was furious. He did not want to be away from London at such a crucial time and he was convinced that the Scottish mission was a fool’s errand. According to Mendoza he actually prostrated himself
before the queen, begging her to rescind the order and vowing that he would not drive north even if she threatened to hang him for disobedience. Of course, he did go. It was left for his deputy, Robert Beale, to confide mournfully to England’s man in Paris:

Mr Secretary is to be this day at Berwick. The king goes very violently on with the late change of noblemen, and ‘cannot be entreated to stay’ by her Majesty’s letter praying him not to proceed further until Mr. Secretary’s coming. So I doubt whether he will be able to do any good therein. ‘I fear we have lost too many good occasions of settling that realm for the general quietness of the whole Isle, which will be hard to bring so well to pass hereafter, if things go outward as they have lately begun. The Lord’s will be done.’
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Events turned out just as the brothers-in-law feared. In Scotland the sixteen-year-old king was flexing his intellectual muscles. Understandably suspicious of those who sought to manipulate him, he asserted his right to choose for himself whom to trust. At the moment this did not include the emissaries of his ‘cousin’ Elizabeth. Walsingham was certainly not the wisest of choices as an appropriate person to win over an impressionable, teenage prince. When he was granted an audience he did not hesitate to deliver what, in abstract, reads like a Calvinist sermon. James cannot have enjoyed being told ‘that young princes were many times carried into great errors upon an opinion of the absoluteness of their royal authority and do not consider, that when they transgress the bounds and limits of the law, they leave to be kings and become tyrants.’
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The Earl of Arran, who now held the reins in Edinburgh, complained to Elizabeth of her envoy’s heavy-handedness. This played into the hands of Walsingham’s conciliar opponents and exposed the divisions within government. Walsingham was all for plotting yet another coup with his Scottish allies. Elizabeth still hoped to achieve a compromise by direct talks with Mary. Burghley, Hunsdon and the appeasement group favoured doing a deal with Arran. When Walsingham discovered that other approaches were running concurrently with his own he was, understandably, piqued. It
confirmed his impression that all his efforts were so much wasted time and energy. Months later he wrote to William Davison in Scotland very frankly describing the state of affairs within the Council. We are fortunate in having the first draft of his letter as well as the finished version, which was toned down. What Walsingham first wrote, and obviously felt deeply, was:

You know [Hunsdon’s] passion, whose propinquity in blood doth somewhat prevail here, especially being countenanced by [Burghley] who doth use [Hunsdon] as a counterpoise to [Leicester] though, God wot, he be but a weak one. [Burghley] hath always liked to entertain [circuitous] courses, which groweth from lack of resolution in him, which, I pray God, may not prove the destruction of England.
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The links between Walsingham and Leicester had recently become even stronger by the marriage of the secretary’s daughter, Frances, to Dudley’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. The ceremony took place on 21 September, while Walsingham was still in Scotland. One cannot help wondering whether Elizabeth’s determination to send Walsingham out of London was to deprive him of the pleasure of attending the wedding of his only child. (His other daughter had died in 1580.) She had opposed the alliance ever since it had been mooted in 1581. There was no logical reason for disapproval of a match that most regarded as eminently suitable. The prospect of other people’s married happiness, especially those connected with the court, often aroused her jealous spite. Castelnau reported that the two councillors now united by their marriage had incurred the queen’s ‘grande jalousie’. Walsingham, naturally, was very distressed that Elizabeth, despite his long and faithful service, could not bring herself to offer her royal blessing to his daughter and son-in-law. This was yet one more burden piled upon the already overloaded wagon of his loyalty. Philip Sidney had no house of his own. Indeed, as a part of the nuptial agreement, Walsingham paid off his son-in-law’s debts. So, the newlyweds moved in with Sir Francis and Lady Ursula at Barn Elms and their town house, now located in Sydon or Seething Lane, at the eastern edge of the City, close by the Tower.

With matters as they were in the English and Scottish courts it is not surprising that Leicester sent word to his friend in September 1583 to return as soon as possible. It was still another month before Walsingham could get back to a desk, doubtless piled with urgent business. Unmasking what would become known as the Throck-morton plot was now his most urgent task but before that he was diverted by the need to examine a madman. A certain Warwickshire gentleman, John Somerville or Somerfield, had been received into the Roman church by Hugh Hall, a priest. He subsequently announced his intention of going to court to assassinate the queen where he hoped to see the head of this ‘serpent and viper’ set up on a pole. He was, naturally, brought to London where Walsingham examined him to see whether he had any connection with a wider Catholic conspiracy. He concluded that the poor man posed no threat and, had the times been different, Somerville might have been consigned to Bedlam and quietly forgotten. As it was he and Hall and Mr Arden, Somerville’s father-in-law (whose only crime was that he had known of Somerville’s insane ravings and concealed them from the authorities), were indicted for treason and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

A few days later, Mendoza reported this and other items of gossip to Parma. His letter is worth quoting at some length because it indicates how jittery the whole court, from Elizabeth downwards, had become. Somerville, he reported, had been committed to Newgate, where he:

hanged himself with his own garters the day before he was to be executed with his father in law, who suffered accordingly . . . the Earl of Northumberland [is detained], his guard being Captain Laydon. The Earl of Arundel is to remain a prisoner in his own house, and the Countess his wife, who was in the castle of Arundel, being with child, is to come hither; who is a very brave lady, a great Catholic and a servant of [Elizabeth]. Mr. Shelley, a rich gentleman of Sussex, has been arrested on suspicion of having aided the lords who have gone to France in their embarkation. [Lord Paget and Charles Arundel] . . .