The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (2 page)

Walsingham often wielded power over the lives of others. The destruction of Mary Stuart has been attributed to him by both critics and admirers, though Walsingham exonerated himself of any blame: she had conspired to destroy his mistress, and consequently she deserved to die. The execution of Catholic missionary priests is harder to justify. Walsingham was responsible for protecting the queen from assassination, and he saw it as his duty to use every weapon in his arsenal. Imprisonment, torture and a state-sponsored campaign of intimidation were all employed to drive Catholics into conformity with the established Church of England. Walsingham’s agents infiltrated the English Catholic community at home and in exile, tempting the radicals in their midst to break cover by standing up for what they believed.

Modern lawyers would condemn this as entrapment, but again Walsingham’s conscience was clear. Hidden treason would always reveal itself in the end, just as a witch could never fully conceal the pact which she had made with the devil. England was engaged in a war; literally so in the Netherlands and on the oceans from the mid-1580s, but also in spiritual combat against the forces of the Antichrist, whether in the form of the pope or the Guise family or Philip II of Spain. The need to convince
Elizabeth of this fact was Walsingham’s most urgent priority during the two decades which he spent as her adviser and principal secretary. He presented himself to the world as the queen’s agent, carrying out her policies and protecting her from harm. The full picture may surprise anyone who thinks that Tudor England was governed solely by personal monarchy. Walsingham was loyal and true to Elizabeth, devoted his life to her service; but he also cajoled her, clashed with her, and ultimately authorised the beheading of Mary Stuart without her knowledge. Queen Elizabeth I believed that she was in command of the ship of state, but Francis Walsingham was often at the tiller.

NOTES

1
Briquemault and Sassetti: John Tedeschi, ‘Tomasso Sassetti’s Account of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’, in A. Soman (ed.),
The Massacre of St Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents
(The Hague, 1974), 143, where Briquemault is called Bricamore; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin,
Camden Miscellany
6 (London, 1870–1), 4–5, 10, 13; Dudley Digges,
The Compleat Ambassador, or, Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth
(London, 1655), 270–1, 345. The Briquemault incident is not mentioned in Conyers Read’s account of St Bartholomew:
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth
(Oxford, 1925), I, 219–22.

1 Exodus

In 1529 a London lawyer named William Walsingham used the proceeds of his thriving practice to buy the manor of Foot’s Cray, a dozen miles out of town on the road to the Kentish coast. As he and many like him were discovering, it was a good time to be a barrister. The name of Walsingham was well known in London, and William was able to trade on his contacts in city government and the royal household. King Henry VIII chose him to report on the possessions of the disgraced minister Cardinal Wolsey, and he was elected to a prestigious readership at Gray’s Inn. In 1532 he was appointed under-sheriff of London, the highest position which a city lawyer could hope to achieve. His wife Joyce had already given him daughters who could be married into prominent families; all that he now lacked was a son.

Regular registers of baptisms weren’t introduced until the later 1530s, so the year of Francis Walsingham’s birth is uncertain. But if we count back from his admission to King’s College, Cambridge then it was probably 1531 or 1532, the twenty-second year of King Henry’s reign. Nor is the place known for sure, although Foot’s Cray seems more likely than the family’s London home near Aldermanbury in Cripplegate ward; mothers of means usually chose to have their babies away from the filth and pestilence of the city. Francis would have been christened as soon as he could safely be carried to the parish church, in a rite that was rich in sacramental ceremony. The devil was exorcised with salt and holy oil before the baby was immersed in the font and wrapped in a chrisom cloth. Children
who died before they could be cleansed of original sin were believed to go into limbo rather than heaven, hence the urgency of getting them to baptism.

Some pedigrees trace the ancestry of the family back to the village of Little Walsingham in Norfolk. It would be ironic if Francis Walsingham, who grew to loathe Catholicism, could be connected to one of the greatest sites of pilgrimage in medieval England. Henry VIII prayed at Walsingham in thanks for the birth of his short-lived son Henry in 1511, before the Reformation swept away its shrine to the Virgin Mary. But the link with Norfolk is probably apocryphal. The earliest reliable evidence dates from fifteenth-century London, where the Walsinghams emerged as property-owners and members of the prestigious Vintners’ Company. In 1424 the merchant Thomas Walsingham bought a country manor at Scadbury near Chislehurst, so staking his claim to be a member of the gentry. It was a pattern that would define the English upper class for centuries to come: owning land was a social passport out of the world of commerce. Thomas’s grandson James had a long career, serving Henry VII as sheriff of Kent in 1486–7 and travelling to France with Henry VIII in 1520. He witnessed the fantastical Field of Cloth of Gold as one of the king’s honour guard. James Walsingham had two sons, Edmund – who inherited the estate at Scadbury – and William, who was Francis’s father.

Edmund Walsingham scrambled a rung or so higher up the social hierarchy. He earned a knighthood fighting the Scots at Flodden, and accompanied his father to France in 1520. Two years later he attended King Henry during the visit of the emperor Charles V to England. The sword and helmet that once hung above his tomb are now preserved at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. His wife Anne owned a jewel depicting Henry VIII within a golden heart, a visible statement
of her family’s standing at court. In 1521 Sir Edmund was appointed lieutenant of the Tower of London, giving him day-to-day responsibility for the prisoners held there. He found himself guarding both the Protestant translator John Frith, burned for heresy in 1533, and Frith’s great enemy Thomas More, beheaded in 1535 for his refusal to accept Henry VIII’s supremacy over the Church of England. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and another Catholic martyr, complained of harsh treatment at Walsingham’s hands. The duties of lieutenant included supervising the torture of suspected traitors on the rack. Forty years hence, his nephew Francis would be authorising the same methods of interrogation.

William Walsingham had no prospects of a landed inheritance, so he turned to London and the law. Like Thomas More, he prospered on the legal business of the city. John Stow’s
Survey of London
describes Aldermanbury as a street with many fair houses ‘meet for merchants or men of worship’, with a conduit of fresh water running down the middle. St Mary Aldermanbury had a churchyard and a cloister where the curious could see a shank bone reputedly belonging to a giant. William Walsingham asked to be buried in the church, and left its high altar a symbolic shilling in his will. Any monument to him would have been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, while the Wren church that replaced it was reduced to rubble during the Blitz and removed to Fulton, Missouri as a tribute to Winston Churchill. But a memorial to Sir Edmund survives in Chislehurst parish church next to a tablet to his grandson Thomas, who probably did some intelligence work for Sir Francis Walsingham and was a close friend of Christopher Marlowe.
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If William Walsingham enjoyed a degree of contact with the royal household, then his wife was even better connected. Joyce Walsingham was the younger sister of the Protestant courtier Sir Anthony Denny. As one of the principal gentlemen of Henry
VIII’s privy chamber, Denny was the closest thing that the king had to a friend during the 1540s. His position as keeper of the privy purse made him responsible for Henry’s huge personal expenditure on buildings, artwork and gambling. As groom of the stool, the gentleman in charge of the king’s close-stool or portable toilet, Denny regulated access to the royal apartments during the last two years of Henry’s reign. He also took charge of the dry stamp, a facsimile of the king’s signature which empowered him to authorise documents as if they had been signed by Henry in person.

This was a remarkable concentration of power, based on closeness to the king rather than bureaucratic office. When the royal doctors decided that the time had come for Henry VIII to prepare for death in January 1547, it was Denny who had the unenviable task of telling the king. Denny kept his faith in reform even when Henry grew suspicious of Protestant radicalism, and he was among those who ensured that the young Edward VI was advised by councillors of the right religious persuasion. Protector Somerset appointed him as Edward’s guardian during his own absences from London fighting the Scots, and he was still close to the throne when he died in 1549. One uncle entrusted with the Tower of London, another at the core of the king’s court: these were powerful connections for a London lawyer’s son. The tradition of royal service ran in Francis Walsingham’s blood.

‘Kent is the key of all England’, wrote the traveller and antiquary John Leland in the 1530s. Henry VIII had spent much of his childhood at Eltham Palace, four miles from Foot’s Cray. The Walsingham lands lay in a belt of arable farms and small estates that sent their wheat to the ever-expanding city of London. Livestock was raised on the salt marshes of the nearby Thames estuary. Timber and cloth travelled from the forests of the Weald, where an embryonic iron industry met the demand for cannon to arm Henry VIII’s navy. To the east the road ran
towards the River Medway at Rochester and onward to Canterbury, the ecclesiastical capital of England.

Kent was a landscape of ancient settlement, closely governed and prosperous. But its society was also experiencing some unsettling changes under the Tudors. Wealth was becoming concentrated in the hands of relatively few gentlemen and yeomen farmers, causing friction within a social order which was supposed to be fixed and harmonious. Population was rising fast, while people were increasingly on the move in search of work. As a justice of the peace for Kent and under-sheriff of London, Francis Walsingham’s father was faced with the consequences of this demographic revolution in the form of growing problems of vagabondage and crime. At its most acute, economic discontent began to shade into politics. Kentish cloth-workers refused to pay a forced loan to fund the king’s wars in France, following a tradition of resistance to unjust taxation which stretched back past Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450 to memories of Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt.

The Church was traditionally a force for stability in turbulent times. Sermons and prayerbooks taught that people should submit to adversity and focus on the life of the world to come. But this bedrock was also shifting in response to events in Lutheran Germany, and its trade links with Europe meant that Kent was one of the first English counties to feel the tremors. In 1530 a joiner named Thomas Hitton was caught importing heretical books at Gravesend and burned at the stake on the orders of Bishop Fisher. Two priests and a carpenter who criticised devotional images and praised the works of Martin Luther were faced with a stark choice, to recant or to die for heresy. Kent had a history of religious radicalism to match its tradition of rebellion. The secretive community of the Lollards, who had been reading an English Bible and criticising the doctrine of purgatory for a hundred years, was strong in
Maidstone and the Weald. But figures like Hitton represented the advance guard of a new movement, inspired by Lutheran ideas about the priesthood of all believers and justification by faith; and unlike the Lollards, its converts were determined to evangelise.

Disturbed by the spread of heresy in their midst, Catholics received comfort from an unlikely source. Elizabeth Barton was working as a serving maid when her graphic visions of heaven and the deadly sins first brought her to the notice of the authorities. An investigation into the ‘holy maid of Kent’ pronounced her to be orthodox, and she subsequently took her vows as a Benedictine nun in Canterbury. But as the movement to break from Rome gathered pace, Barton’s revelations acquired a sharply political edge. Having spoken in the pope’s defence and called for the burning of Protestant books, she told the king that he would not survive a month on the throne if he divorced Katherine of Aragon. Henry was outraged, and put her under Sir Edmund Walsingham’s guard in the Tower. She was hanged and beheaded for treason at Tyburn in 1534, alongside the Canterbury monks who had promoted her as a prophetess.
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