Sir Francis Walsingham (34 page)

The official story was that Stafford made his confession to Walsingham early in the new year. He and des Trappes were then arrested and confined in the Tower and Châteauneuf was placed under house arrest. Subsequently he was examined by a committee of the Council (not including Walsingham). The ambassador confirmed that Stafford had come to him with a hair-brained scheme and that he had totally
rejected it. He could not, however, avoid the charge of having concealed knowledge of a conspiracy. The outcome of all the brouhaha was that Moody went back to jail for another three years, des Trappes and Stafford spent a few months in the Tower before being quietly released, and Châteauneuf was kept under close surveillance for a month and forbidden to communicate with his superiors. By May the whole incident was forgotten and Elizabeth joked with the ambassador that it had all been an unfortunate misunderstanding. On balance, it seems more likely that Walsingham was among those who were duped rather than being the originator of the plot. He was ill most of the winter, as well as being alienated from the court. The fact that Châteauneuf was rendered
hors de combat
until after Mary’s execution suggests the object of the exercise may have been the closure of diplomatic channels during the tense days leading up to the tragic final scene in the drama of the two queens. Elizabeth or Burghley are more likely to have been the principal actors in this non-conspiracy.

The story of the last traumatic days leading up to Mary’s death is well known. The details do not greatly concern us because Walsingham, who had striven hard to bring about the Queen of Scots’ ruin, was very little involved. His physical disorders exacerbated by mental stress had brought him very low. The unfortunate official who deputized for him was William Davison, appointed as his assistant in December. On 1 February Elizabeth summoned Davison to her and signed the death warrant. As she did so she made a grim joke. ‘Go and tell Walsingham,’ she said, ‘the grief would grow near to kill him outright.’ It now required the great seal, which was appended by Lord Chancellor Hatton the same day. At the same time Elizabeth instructed Davison to bid Walsingham write a letter to Paulet hinting that he might save everyone a great deal of trouble by despatching his prisoner himself. Mr Secretary, though still unwell, had now moved to Seething Lane in order to be more accessible. He did as instructed, knowing full well that Paulet would reject so dishonourable a suggestion. It was Burghley who took over arrangements for the performance of the deed. He called together the available councillors and they planned to see the warrant executed without the queen’s
foreknowledge. The authorizing document was endorsed by all and brought to Walsingham’s sick bed for his signature. On 3 February Robert Beale was despatched to find the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent, who had been selected to oversee the execution. In later years he would hint angrily that Walsingham had pleaded illness in order to assign this risky task to a deputy. By the 7th the earls were at Fotheringhay. So was the executioner, a man personally recommended by Walsingham for the job. At eight o’clock on the morning of 8 February it was all over. All over, that is, for Mary Stuart. For the others involved in the tragedy the fallout would be catastrophic and there would be important work for Walsingham still to do for queen and country.

Walsingham must have been relieved not to have been in the direct firing line of the queen’s wrath in the immediate aftermath of Mary’s execution but his absence from court may well have also been welcome to Elizabeth and there is the possibility that it was engineered. As usual the queen had expected to have her cake and eat it. She had wanted Mary out of the way but she had not wanted to shoulder the responsibility for her execution. So when the Queen of Scots was beheaded on her direct order, signed with her hand and endorsed with her great seal, she had to find some way of convincing foreign courts that she had not intended her warrant to be acted on; that one of her minions had exceeded his orders. Had Walsingham been at his post in those crucial February days he would have been the obvious fall guy but Elizabeth would not have wanted to dismiss and utterly disgrace such a valuable servant. So it was highly convenient that William Davison, a comparative nobody, was standing in for the secretary when the death warrant was signed, despatched and acted on.

This raises the question of whether Walsingham’s merely marginal involvement in the final act of Mary Stuart’s life was all it seemed. Was he really as ill as he claimed? Was he assiduously keeping out of trouble? Or were others implicit in his absence? Did he deliberately allow Davison to take the rap for him? Or was he innocent of his friend’s humiliation? The Davison of whom we are allowed shifting glimpses through the mists of time looks like one of nature’s victims. Despite having rendered valuable service in missions to Scotland and
the Netherlands for twenty years, he seems never to have learned pragmatism. He was a zealous Puritan and, perhaps, remained rather naïve. He enjoyed the friendship of Leicester and Walsingham, who shared his opinions but not his forthright expression of them. It was Davison on whom Mr Secretary urged caution in 1578: ‘it were very dangerous that every private man’s zeal should carry sufficient authority of reforming things amiss.’ A careful understanding of political realities, Mr Secretary suggested, would persuade Davison to ‘deal warily in this time when policy carrieth more sway than zeal’.
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Davison was with Leicester in the Low Countries in 1585–6 and it was he whom the earl despatched to Elizabeth to explain why he had disobeyed orders in assuming the governorship of the rebel state. Stoically the emissary bore the brunt of the queen’s fury, though at one point he, like others before him, contemplated resignation. What he found harder to stomach was Leicester’s reaction. The disgraced favourite tried to put the blame for his actions on Davison’s shoulders. ‘You did chiefly persuade me to take this charge upon me,’ without waiting for the queen’s approval, he asserted.
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It was probably quite true that Davison, in his enthusiasm for the Protestant cause had urged Leicester to be bold but that does not excuse Leicester’s cowardly behaviour in trying to shelter behind an underling. Walsingham obviously thought the same, though he expressed himself more tactfully in a letter to Dudley: ‘The gentleman is very much grieved with the dislike he understandeth your lordship hath of him. For my own part, I do not find but that he hath dealt well, both for the cause and towards your lordship, whose good opinion and favour he doth greatly desire.’
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In the following September Davison was appointed to assist Walsingham, in view of the secretary’s fluctuating health. He was thus thrust into the centre of government at a time of great crisis. While other councillors, including Walsingham, were busy at Fotheringhay and Westminster, he was attendant on the queen at Windsor, then Richmond, taking every opportunity to urge on her the necessity for Mary’s execution. Then, in December, when the Council came together again, Walsingham absented himself from
court and Davison was once more left exposed. Everyone at this stage was walking on eggshells. They knew how difficult it was going to be to obtain Elizabeth’s irreversible decision and they also had a sense that it was now or never. Davison was very aware of his situation and refused to present the warrant for Elizabeth’s signature until she requested it via a senior Council member (in this case Charles Howard, Lord Admiral).

Once the warrant was signed there followed a succession of hurried secret meetings. No one wanted to be held personally responsible. Davison reported to Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester, Bromley, Hatton and Robert Beale. He told them of his anxiety that the queen would change her mind. When the next day (2 February), she instructed him to delay having the great seal attached, the councillors’ worst fears were confirmed. The sealing had already been done but the warrant’s despatch could still be halted. Walsingham was not present at the Council meeting on the 3rd when eleven of his colleagues decided to arrange for the execution. Both queen and Council made sure that Walsingham was kept fully informed of developments. The letter authorizing the warrant’s despatch to Fotheringhay was rushed from Greenwich to Seething Lane for his signature and, as we have seen, Burghley and Walsingham communicated over the choreography of the execution. Davison and Robert Beale also maintained contact with their chief. When Beale was selected as the courier to ride post haste into Northamptonshire with the Council’s covert instructions, it was in his interests as well as his colleague’s to ensure that Walsingham knew what they were doing. They had no intention of being ground between the upper and nether millstones of queen and Council. They knew perfectly well that there would be unpleasantness ahead.

The storm burst on 10 February. Elizabeth ordered Council members to her private chambers for a dressing down. Walsingham was not present. Nor was Burghley, who was, apparently, suffering from a riding accident. Absence did not save the Lord Treasurer from the royal fury. He was banned the court for more than a month and even then he had not heard the end of the matter. On 15 March he complained to Hatton of ‘the late sharp and most heavy speech of her
Majesty to myself in the hearing of my Lord of Leicester and Mr Secretary Walsingham.’
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We know, therefore, that Walsingham was by then back at court. He had, in fact, returned on the 14th of the previous month – ie as soon as the immediate furore was over. Of all the major players in the events of February, he seems to have been the one who came through relatively unscathed. Elizabeth had already decided to throw the book at Davison. She even enquired of her lawyers whether she might use her prerogative powers to send the unfortunate man to the block. Walsingham did his best for his friend. As soon as he heard of Davison’s incarceration he wrote to Burghley expressing his genuine shock and urging the treasurer to intervene. He wasted no time in doing so, pointing out to the queen that to despatch a councillor to the Tower, except on a charge of treason, was quite unprecedented and would raise eyebrows in foreign courts. Walsingham had the prisoner set down his own version of events and, on 11 March, he sent a mutual friend, Thomas Randolph, to discuss the situation with him. As well as being a wise senior diplomat, well versed in Scottish affairs, Randolph was Walsingham’s brother-in-law (husband of his sister, Anne). Randolph discovered a depressed but unrepentant Davison who rejected the charge that he had disobeyed the queen by failing to keep the signed warrant a secret (and thus enabling the Council to go behind her back in authorizing the execution). His perfectly reasonable defence was that he had only shared the information with leading members of the Council who were in the queen’s confidence. Over the next few days Davison was visited by other councillors. By the time the poor man’s
in camera
trial took place in the Star Chamber on 28 March, his story had changed. He now accepted full responsibility on the basis that he must have misunderstood the queen’s intentions. He meekly received his sentence – an open-ended prison term and an enormous fine he could not possibly pay. He doubtless knew that there was never any intention that the fine should be paid. After nineteen months of probably not very onerous confinement he was quietly released, on the authority of Burghley and Walsingham. Although he never returned to his job he continued to draw his pay and, in 1594, Elizabeth made him a generous grant of lands.

A distinct odour of fish hangs over the whole of these proceedings. A deal had been struck. Davison allowed himself to be used to protect the reputations of his seniors and particularly the queen. The only way the Council majority’s determination to get rid of Mary could be squared with Elizabeth’s determination to keep her hands clean was to put the blame on someone else. The obvious candidate was the intermediary between queen and Council, the secretary. In normal circumstances that would have been Walsingham. It is inconceivable that Elizabeth would have put him on trial, shut him up in the Tower and, in effect, sacked him from his job. Walsingham was an internationally known and respected figure. Even foreign diplomats and courtiers who loathed his religion acknowledged his honesty and intellectual stature. His disgrace would have been a huge scandal which would have reflected on the queen. Another reason for keeping Walsingham out of the firing line was that Elizabeth needed him – now more than ever. She had to have help in disseminating through diplomatic channels the official account of Mary’s execution. She had to know how that account was being received in foreign courts. More important still, it became daily more vital to have intelligence about Philip II’s invasion plans. If someone had to be thrown to the wolves it could not be Francis Walsingham.

The only question which remains is, how complicit was Walsingham, himself, in these shabby dealings? Robert Beale, who was highly indignant at the treatment meted out to himself and his colleague, exonerated his brother-in-law from blame. Describing the events of February 1587 years later he claimed, ‘Mr Secretary Walsingham was thought too stout, and would utter all. Therefore, Mr Davison must bear the burden.’ The word ‘stout’ carried, at that time, a range of meanings, viz: ‘proud’, ‘stubborn’, ‘unyielding’, ‘defiant’, ‘uncompromising’, ‘honest’. What Beale was saying was that Walsingham was too straightforward to be a party to the underhand dealings of either the Council or the queen. We may recall the advice Beale gave in 1592 regarding the conduct of the principal secretary and which had Walsingham’s example very much in mind:

Bear reproofs, false reports and such like crosses, if they be private and touch you not deeply, with silence or a modest answer. But if it be in company or touch your allegiance, honour or honesty, mine advice is that you answer more roundly, lest your silence cause standers-by to think ill of you and to retain it in memory and thereupon to work your farther indignation and discredit.
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