Sir Francis Walsingham (28 page)

Three days later Sir Edward Stafford passed on information he had received in Paris from a ‘reliable source’ close to the Spanish ambassador. Other similar atrocities, he reported, were in preparation, including attacks on Elizabeth. ‘There is no doubt that she is a chief mark they shoot at and, seeing there were men cunning enough to enchant a man, and to encourage one to kill the Prince of Orange in the midst of Holland, and a knave found desperate enough to do it, we must think that hereafter anything may be done.’
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This merely confirmed intelligence Walsingham and other councillors were receiving via their various continental networks.

One such item had recently reached Walsingham from the unstable William Parry, a man he and Burghley had both employed as a spy and who fancied himself as a freelance agent able to play the field – an attitude which resulted in his ultimate downfall. Parry had been in France monitoring the activities of William Crichton and Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart’s agent. He ingratiated himself with the English Catholic community and, in an attempted sting operation, he proposed a scheme for Elizabeth’s assassination. The details were forwarded to Rome for the pope’s blessing and in March, by which time Parry was back in London, the following carefully worded reply arrived from Gregory’s secretary of state: ‘His holiness . . . cannot but commend the good disposition and resolution which you write you have towards the public service and benefit: wherein his holiness does exhort you to persevere and to bring to effect that which you have promised.’
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Parry triumphantly produced this at court and it had the desired effect. Burghley and Walsingham were impressed and Elizabeth received him warmly. But the intrigue-obsessed adventurer did not receive the material rewards he considered his due and it was
this that drove him to fresh scheming. He thought to repeat the stratagem that had proved successful once. This time his victim was Edmund Neville, another of Walsingham’s intelligencers who had spent some years in Philip II’s Netherlands army. Both sides, not unreasonably, suspected Neville of being a double agent and Parry thought it would be an easy matter to entrap him and, by so doing, further enhance his own reputation. His mistake lay in taking this initiative independently. He drew Neville into another supposed assassination plot. But the prey turned hunter. Neville laid an information against Parry in February 1585. If the stakes had not been so high, the situation would have been farcical. As it was, the Council could not allow such disorderly activity to jeopardize serious espionage activity. Both men were marched off to the Tower. Parry now fell foul of a conciliar plot. The government needed to stir up popular support by giving maximum publicity to assassination conspiracies. They put Parry on trial and Sir Christopher Hatton, the most unscrupulous of the conciliar hawks, concocted a version of the fictional plot which cast Parry in the role of a real, if incompetent, murderer who had already made two unsuccessful attempts on Elizabeth’s life. On 2 March Parry went to his death, loudly protesting his innocence. Neville was left to rot in the Tower for fourteen years.

While all this was going on Walsingham uncovered more details of a
real
plot. Fortuitously, William Crichton fell into his hands. While en route from France to Scotland the Jesuit courier’s ship encountered a Dutch vessel. He was taken prisoner and immediately put on trial for implication in the death of Prince William. However, news having reached England, the government requested Crichton’s extradition and he was handed over. He tried to destroy the evidence he was carrying but enough torn fragments were recovered to enable Walsingham to piece together the overall design. Unfortunately it only related to the earlier Guise plot to attack England via Scotland, which had been aborted by the fall of Esmé Stuart. However, Walsingham, who examined Crichton personally in his own house, was able to gather further proof that Mary was party to the French plans to depose Elizabeth.

It was decided to place her under even stricter surveillance. In the
following January she was moved for a whole year to the dank and malodorous castle at Tetbury, Staffordshire, the most depressing of all the eight English residences in which she was held. The Earl of Shrewsbury, who had been her guardian for years, was now considered too easy-going for the job and was relieved of his charge. Walsingham was able to install his friend, Sir Amias Paulet, who took up his post the following spring. A Calvinist and a former ambassador to France who had espoused the Huguenot cause, Paulet well understood the Guise faction and their determination to stop at nothing in the name of international Catholicism. He was not the sort of man to be disarmed by Mary’s charm, as she quickly discovered.

Paulet behaved with formal courtesy towards his charge but made it clear that he would stand no nonsense from her. He examined all her incoming and outgoing correspondence. He tore down her cloth of state, answering her protests with the retort that there was but
one
queen in England. And he made spot searches of her rooms. He forbade any contact between Mary’s servants and his own staff and submitted them to body searches whenever they left or returned to the castle. He was soon able to boast to Mr Secretary, ‘I cannot imagine how it may be possible for them to convey a piece of paper as big as my finger.’ There was more to Walsingham’s behaviour than a desire to isolate the Queen of Scots. It was also meant to goad Mary into rash, desperate behaviour in trying to communicate with friends and supporters and to provoke her into written indiscretion. Walsingham was determined that she should condemn herself so irrevocably that Elizabeth could not avoid taking the only means left of removing the greatest threat to her security.

Crichton, meanwhile, languished in the Tower. We might have expected Walsingham to subject the prisoner to everything in the fortress’s torture armoury but, although Crichton remained in custody for two years, it seems that he was treated with scrupulous correctness. He was a foreign national and so could not, technically, be racked. In all probability this would not have saved him if he had been suspected of any serious plot against the queen’s person. He was actually exonerated from that by no less a person than William Parry,
who testified that Crichton, when asked for his advice about the assassination of the queen, had counselled against it. Apparently the government believed or disbelieved Parry as it suited them. Crichton was released in 1586 and, of course, immediately resumed anti-English activity. Two years later, when the ships of Philip’s stricken Armada were being driven up the North Sea to their doom, Crichton went in pursuit to try to persuade their captains to invade Scotland.

One area of Catholic activity Walsingham was especially interested in was the propaganda machine. Both sides were pumping out pamphlets and broadsheets illustrated with lurid woodblock pictures in a direct assault on public opinion. Some dealt with the central issues of faith and politics but others relied for their impact on character assassination. In 1584 two items from foreign Catholic presses illustrative of both types reached England. William Allen’s
A true, sincere and modest Defence of the English Catholics that suffer for their faith
. . . was a 250-page broadside in response to William Cecil’s twenty-page pistol shot,
The Execution of Justice in England not for Religion but for Treason.
The other, anonymous, work was a horse of a very different colour.
The Copy of a Letter written by a Master of Arts at Cambridge,
commonly known as
Leicester’s Commonwealth
was, simply, the vilest piece of vitriolic libel in the whole history of
La Calumnia.
It sought to deflect indignation from Catholic activists by pointing out that Puritans constituted the most seditious element in English society. It then went on to attack the foremost patron of Puritans, Robert Dudley. It accused him of every crime and moral defect its author(s) could dream up. Leicester was portrayed as a monster who would have rivalled Iago, Rodrigo Borgia, Machiavelli and Don Juan in the pursuance of his ambitious, lustful and vengeful career. His prime objective, according to
Leicester’s Commonwealth,
was the removal of all claimants to the throne and ultimately of Elizabeth herself in order to gain supreme power.

As Philip Sidney observed in a hastily written defence of his uncle (never printed), the book was ‘so full of horrible villainies as no good heart will think possible to enter into any creature’. But, of course, there were people ready to believe the gist of the book or to assume that there was no smoke without fire. People have always enjoyed
salacious gossip about celebrities and the author(s) of
Leicester’s Commonwealth
judged their market well. What they misjudged was the government’s response. Elizabeth’s Council might be afflicted by factions and personality clashes but when one of their number was attacked they were united in their condemnation. The queen issued a proclamation against seditious books and authorized a riposte, probably drawn up by Walsingham, to be sent to the Lord Mayor of London, in which she denounced the libel as ‘such as none but the devil himself could deem to be true’ and asserted that she regarded the abuse as ‘offered to her own self’.
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Although she was protected from much of the malicious gossip that circulated at all levels of society, enough reached her ears to act as something of an antidote to the absurd levels of flattery to which she was subjected daily. Did she know that the Earl of Oxford and his cronies swapped jokes about her at their private dinner parties? Mary Stuart certainly made sure that the queen was informed when her hostess, the Countess of Shrewsbury, tittle-tattled about royal sexual adventures and Elizabeth’s long list of paramours. The queen had now turned fifty. She had neglected to provide the realm with an heir. The political and religious future was uncertain so it was not to be wondered at if respect and patriotic emotion were on the wane. Given this worrying background, a damage-limitation exercise was vital. Walsingham was instructed to track down the origin of the canard and to suppress its distribution.

Almost immediately his men picked up Ralph Emerson who came to England that summer to further the Catholic propaganda campaign. This was an information coup because Emerson had for the last few years been at the very heart of the Jesuit mission to England. He had crossed the Channel as a servant to Campion in the first wave of the Catholic ideological invasion and narrowly escaped capture. Thereafter he had established himself at Rouen, which was the forward headquarters of the mission presided over by Robert Persons. This was where the streams of Catholic resentment and intrigue converged. Here refugees like Paget and Arundel met up with Mary’s envoy, Thomas Morgan, with Allen’s latest missionary recruits and with Crichton and other members of the Guise network. ‘Little’
Ralph Emerson, as he was known, had made a speciality of discovering new entry routes to England – unwatched coves and creeks where disguised priests might be landed and byways along which they might travel to safe houses. Although we have no details of Emerson’s interrogation, it is inconceivable that Walsingham’s agents would not have worked on him to extract all that he had to tell them. Within a couple of years more than a hundred Catholic activists were being held in various prisons throughout London, not including the Tower, an indication that Walsingham’s vigilance was bearing so much fruit that the detention system was under pressure. Emerson was lodged at the Counter (or Compter) in Poultry, one of the sheriff’s jails in the very heart of the city. He remained in custody for twenty years and only emerged as a dying paralytic at the beginning of the next reign.

Walsingham seems to have been remarkably successful in his censorship of
Leicester’s Commonwealth.
He exposed another conduit in the shape of Castelnau’s butler who was running a private colportage enterprise. Agents at the ports were vigilant at sniffing out smuggled consignments. The book circulated on the continent in English and in translations but the propagandists simply lacked the organization to engineer widespread circulation in England. So unsuccessful was this particular enterprise that, to this day, only a handful of copies of the original edition survive. Walsingham transferred his energies to tracking down the source of the hate campaign.

This meant probing the activities of the Paris-Rouen exile community, something which immediately presented Walsingham with a problem. His principal source of information should have been the ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, a man for whom he had growing mistrust. Stafford was unreliable for three reasons. He had a pathological hatred of the Earl of Leicester. By extension, he disliked Walsingham and, as we have seen, reported to Burghley behind the secretary’s back. His second problem was that his wife was related to Charles Arundel, one of the leading Catholic activists. Thirdly he had a gambling problem and was constantly short of money.

Stafford probably owed his appointment to his mother who was mistress of the robes and one of the queen’s closest companions. He had connections with the Dudley family and when, in 1578, Leicester
wanted to disembarrass himself from a matrimonial entanglement with the Dowager Lady Sheffield, Stafford became involved. The earl’s marriage to Lady Stafford had been kept secret and it now suited him to disavow the union in order to espouse Lettice Knollys. Hurriedly, Stafford became the husband of Leicester’s discarded wife, much to the queen’s displeasure. The whole business was shabby in the extreme, though it must be said that the complex mechanism of deception and covert relationships was driven by the throbbing engine of Elizabeth’s jealousy. Stafford was, seemingly, content with his new wife but the whole affair left a nasty taste in his mouth and accounts largely for his animosity towards the Dudley-Walsingham axis. He was from the beginning and remained Burghley’s man in Paris.

Walsingham kept a close watch on the ambassador, even to intercepting his private correspondence. He was particularly anxious about Stafford’s relationship with Charles Arundel, Lady Stafford’s cousin. Arundel had been a gentleman of the privy chamber who had lost his position, he believed, as the result of a personal vendetta by prominent courtiers. The trouble seems to have begun, in 1581, with the disintegration of the Earl of Oxford’s coterie, to which he belonged. Oxford and his cronies flirted with anti-establishmentarian – and therefore fashionable – Catholicism but, when news of their illicit activities reached the queen’s ears, the little clique fell apart in an orgy of denials and mutual recriminations. Arundel fled to France where he became involved with the Paget brothers and began Catholic plotting in earnest. But he did not forget his personal animosity. A written diatribe against Oxford accused him of atheism, treason, homosexuality and attempted murder. Arundel was a vicious-minded troublemaker who thrived on intrigue, though he was probably unfortunate to get mixed up in the impracticable Throckmorton plot. His story demonstrates that we should be careful of generalizations about Catholic plots. Many ingredients went into the toxic brew of discontent aimed at turning Englishmen against Elizabeth and her court. Indeed, the presence in Paris and Rouen of arrogant, displaced courtiers with their own agendas was more a hindrance than a help to Persons, Guise and all those driven by
ideology. Unstable gentlemen and aristocrats with families and sequestered estates in England were vulnerable to bribes. Walsingham was certainly able to turn Charles Paget with promises of restitution in return for information. The alliance of Catholic forces in France was very insecure.