Sir Francis Walsingham (3 page)

William, therefore, built up a corps of valuable contacts in the Tudor establishment but fate sometimes clouded her face from him. His well-connected wife had a succession of five successful pregnancies but they all resulted in girls. Not until 1532 did she present her husband with an heir, who was christened Francis. Two years later, just when everything was going well for him, William Walsingham died. His widow was still in her twenties and had been left well provided for. Despite having five daughters to dower, she was quite a good catch and it was probably not difficult for her family to find another suitable husband for her. Unsurprisingly, the chosen groom was a Hertfordshire neighbour of the Dennys who was also well established at court. John Carey was connected to Anne Boleyn, his brother, William (now deceased), having married Anne’s sister, Mary.

We can now begin to see a picture of the circle in which the young Francis grew up. The social focus of the royal court from the mid–1520s was the Boleyn family. Sir Thomas Boleyn had long been a courtier and diplomat but when the king became involved with his
daughters – first Mary and then Anne – titles, lands and favours were poured out on the Boleyn clan. In 1529 Sir Thomas became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde. Ambitious courtiers now clamoured for his friendship and patronage. This, in turn, meant that they had to support King Henry’s campaign to dump his wife and make Anne his queen. The Walsinghams and the Dennys were on the outer rim of the Boleyn circle. Sir Francis Bryan, Anthony Denny’s patron, was a cousin of the Boleyn girls and dedicated to their advancement. Denny seems to have been groomed by Bryan to succeed him in office, for he became a member of the privy chamber staff in about 1533 and took Bryan’s place as second chief gentleman in 1539. He will certainly have been instrumental in securing Boleyn kinship for his sister by her marriage to Sir John Carey.

But much more was involved in all this than a few ambitious families jostling for power, influence and promotion. The ‘King’s Great Matter’ (the divorce crisis) coincided with the arrival in England of the radical religious ideas of Martin Luther. In 1517 this German monk had challenged the power of the pope to absolve the departed from the pains of purgatory. In 1521 he had defied pope and emperor at the Diet of Worms and been condemned as a heretic but, protected by his prince, he had embarked upon a mammoth programme of books, pamphlets and sermons calling for a root-and-branch reform of the church. This evangelical revival was the cause célèbre of the age. The new ideas touched so many chords of indignation and dissatisfaction among the thinking classes of Europe that they spread with astonishing rapidity. In England students at the universities and the inns of court, merchants, tradespeople and courtiers were eagerly reading banned books smuggled into the country. From 1525 the English New Testament, translated and printed by William Tyndale from the safety of Germany, was being studied with as much clandestine zeal as the bishops were expending in tracking down the subversive volumes and making bonfires of them. The clamour for ecclesiastical reform and spiritual revival coincided with Henry VIII’s personal disagreement with Rome and, though it did not provide justification for the king’s action (Luther actually opposed the divorce), it did provide theological support for resisting papal authority.
It is not surprising that the Boleyns and their friends favoured the new movement (though we should not dismiss this as mere cynical opportunism) and gave cautious support to radical preachers.

Henry VIII failed to appreciate the full implications of the emerging Reformation. He could see that it might be useful to him but he had no desire to be tarred with the brush of heresy. For that reason court evangelicals had to tread warily. One man who saw more clearly than most the revolution in English church and state which might be accomplished was Thomas Cromwell, whose rapid rise to the position of chief minister between 1529 and 1531 took all observers by surprise. Cromwell, a convinced evangelical and ‘a layman of protean talents’,
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convinced the king, not only that he could solve the matrimonial problem, but that he could free the Crown entirely from papal authority and vastly increase its wealth to boot. Cromwell made common cause with the Boleyn faction and embarked on a series of measures that would make the 1530s the most momentous decade in English history.

Francis Walsingham was born, probably, in 1532 and his early years were shaped by the religious fervour and social upheaval of the Reformation. Within months of his birth Henry VIII had married Anne Boleyn and disembarrassed himself of Queen Catherine. Sir Thomas More, the leading opponent of the king’s Great Matter, had resigned as Lord Chancellor and would soon find himself in the Tower. Cromwell had embarked on a series of parliamentary measures which would, one-by-one, sever the cords binding the English church to Rome. Thomas Cranmer, a committed reformer, had been made Archbishop of Canterbury. And, on 7 September 1533, Queen Anne was delivered of a daughter, christened Elizabeth.

Of Francis’ childhood we know nothing but it is reasonable to assume that he spent most of it on his stepfather’s estate at Plashy, Hertfordshire. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he met Princess Elizabeth during these years, for, in 1540, John Carey was appointed bailiff of the nearby royal manor of Hunsdon which was one of the homes where she lived under the guardianship of Margaret, Baroness Bryan, mother of the king’s favourite. It is tempting from what we know of his later life to envisage the young Walsingham as a
quiet, serious and studious boy and this may not be far off the mark. Apart from older sisters, his only regular companions were the two half-brothers his mother bore her second husband. Studious Francis certainly was, for he later showed himself to be cultured, widely read and a master of languages.

As he grew towards manhood in the closing years of Henry VIII’s reign his knowledge of the monumental events convulsing the country steadily grew. He saw abandoned monasteries and the carts trundling along country lanes loaded with stone, lead and the furnishings that had once adorned the houses of monks and nuns. In church he listened to the fiery evangelical preachers appointed by his relatives. He would have been too young to appreciate the threat of civil war in 1536–7 when opponents of religious and social change launched a rebellion in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. He heard his elders discussing the tense situation at court. The aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536 was an anxious time for her supporters and protégés. King Henry, for reasons that may never be clear, had turned violently against his second wife and had her conveyed to the Tower on trumped-up charges of adultery. Francis’ Uncle Edmund was among the small audience who witnessed her execution. Anne received no succour from her family. All her relatives distanced themselves as far as possible from their patroness.

Those at court who favoured evangelical religion feared a backlash but there was no such reversal of their fortunes. The royal household was divided into factions with distinctly religious hues. The see-saw of royal favour raised and lowered first one group, then the other. There were occasional purges of highly placed ‘heretics’. The last one occurred as late as 1546 when the Catholic faction tried to destroy Henry’s sixth queen, Catherine Parr, and, by association, all leaders of the evangelical group. These were anxious days for Anthony Denny, whose wife was one of the queen’s closest friends. However, the overall trend in these years favoured the reformers. Cromwell’s parliamentary campaign progressed steadily. The king replaced the pope as head of the church in England and, in 1539, an officially approved translation of the Bible was set up in every parish church. Even the sudden fall of Cromwell in 1540 proved to be only a
temporary setback. A younger generation of pro-reform men rose to prominence at court – men like Edward and Thomas Seymour and John Dudley. The redistribution of monastic land in effect made all ambitious nobles and gentlemen complicit in the Reformation. Everyone wanted to benefit from the biggest land grab in the nation’s history.

The Walsinghams and their kin were determined not to miss out in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sir Edmund added to the family estate in Kent, acquired houses in London and speculated in parcels of land in various counties. He was a member of the House of Commons in Henry’s last parliament. But the man who emerged as leader of the family’s fortunes was Anthony Denny. He was one of the few attendants who managed to enjoy the king’s friendship and confidence through thick and thin. (Others were Thomas Cranmer and William Butts, the royal physician – both convinced evangelicals.) He was knighted in 1544 and, two years later, achieved the highest privy chamber office of groom of the stool. He was entrusted with the privy purse out of which he made large disbursements on the king’s behalf. Even more importantly, he and his brother-in-law, John Gates, were licensed to apply the sign manual to all royal documents. Henry, bloated and increasingly incapacitated by pain from his ulcerated legs, was often unable to attend to business and so a dye stamp of his signature was made which could be imposed on letters and official papers and later inked-in by a clerk. It was this that, from September 1545, was entrusted to Denny and Gates. It signifies the enormous trust Henry reposed in these two intimates and, of course, it gave them considerable power. Denny became expert in caring for his irascible employer and using his influence to help the cause of reform. He was, for example, able to save fellow evangelicals denounced by their Catholic enemies. He secured the post of tutor to Princess Elizabeth for his old friend and fellow member of St John’s College, Cambridge, Roger Ascham. Tangible proofs of royal favour were showered upon Denny. By the end of the reign his estates in Hertfordshire alone covered 20,000 acres.

Now Francis’ family enjoyed that prominence which showed itself in favourable marriage alliances for his sisters. Mary married Sir Walter
Mildmay, the youngest son of Cromwell’s principal agent in the dissolution of the monasteries. No one was better placed to profit from the sale of lands and Mildmay senior built an extremely impressive mansion at Moulsham, near Chelmsford, in the heart of his new estates. Walter trained in the law and joined his father in the Court of Augmentations, the body set up to administer confiscated church property. He was well on the way to a prosperous career. Elizabeth married Geoffrey Gates, brother of Anthony Denny’s friend and colleague, Sir John Gates, and, on his death, Peter Wentworth, heir to considerable estates in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Essex and Surrey. Peter and his brother became prominent (and vociferous) parliamentarians in Elizabeth’s reign. It is highly significant that all the leading members of this familial network were prominent religious radicals. They represented that constituency of home counties’ squires with influence at court and in the City upon which Tudor government largely relied. Eleanor Walsingham was married to William Sharington, member of the privy chamber and a protégé of Sir Francis Bryan. The two remaining girls, Barbara and Christiana, also married into substantial families with court connections.

There can be no doubt about the origins of Francis Walsingham’s evangelical beliefs. He grew up in an atmosphere of radical religion and loyalty to the house of Tudor. His convictions can only have been strengthened when he left home to continue his education. In the year following Henry VIII’s death (1547) he matriculated at King’s College, Cambridge. Now he found himself in the company of volatile students who brashly argued their opinions on all matters political and religious.

Walsingham was at King’s College from 1548 to 1550. The timing for an eager and impressionable student could scarcely have been more crucial. With the accession of the nine-year-old Edward VI the brakes which had been sporadically applied to the Reformation were now released. The leaders of the government – Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and (from the autumn of 1549) John Dudley, Earl of Warwick (and later Duke of Northumberland) – were Anthony Denny’s friends and fellow evangelicals. At the beginning of the new
reign Denny was appointed to the royal Council and served there till his death in September 1549. Archbishop Cranmer had their support in bringing radical religious change to every parish in the land. The Latin mass was swept away and a new Prayer Book in English was appointed to be used in all churches. To drive home the radical change in the religion of England the reformers were determined to purify church interiors and rearrange the furniture. Altars were replaced by plain tables, often brought out into the chancel or nave. New pulpits and lecterns were installed to emphasize that the ministry of the word was more important than the celebration of the sacrament. Before the new reign was many months old an injunction went out in the king’s name ordering clergy to ‘take down, or cause to be taken down and destroy’ all images which had become objects of veneration or foci of pilgrimage.

In several of the Cambridge colleges radicals went at their task with a will. Builders, plasterers, painters and labourers were everywhere carrying out demolition work and making good the damage. At Christ’s workmen spent two days ‘helping down with images and mending the pavement under Christ’s image’. In Jesus university dignitaries supervised the removal of six altars. Scaffolding was erected in Queens’ so that painters could whitewash offending tableaux. At newly founded Trinity College the bursar sold off £140 worth of mass vestments and altar plate. And at King’s Francis Walsingham arrived in time to witness the dismantling of the high altar.
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Most senior academics needed little urging to oversee the sweeping away of objects of superstition. Cambridge was the intellectual home of the English Reformation. It was here a generation earlier that Thomas Cranmer had encountered the works of Luther. His close colleague, Nicholas Ridley, had progressed from Master of Pembroke to Bishop of Rochester. Hugh Latimer, fellow of Clare and since 1535 Bishop of Worcester, was the most celebrated preacher of the age. Roger Ascham of St John’s, the foremost scholar of the age, as well as being tutor to Princess Elizabeth, held the post of University Orator. Twenty-five Cambridge men had perished as martyrs for the reformed faith between 1531 and 1538.