The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (20 page)

There is no doubting Walsingham’s closeness to a more eminent commentator on the Alençon match. Philip Sidney’s ‘Letter to Queen Elizabeth touching her marriage to Monsieur’ was probably written in the weeks before Stubbs produced his
Gaping Gulf
. Sidney had watched the St Bartholomew’s massacres from the uncertain safety of Walsingham’s house in Saint Marceau, and the two men had become friends. By the time he was appointed royal cup-bearer in 1575, Sidney had soaked up much of what the literary and artistic Renaissance had to offer. In Paris, he met the Huguenot political thinker Philippe Duplessis-Mornay; in Venice he was painted by Veronese. At the English court, by contrast, his career signally failed to launch. For the son of a viceroy of Ireland, this lack of employment was achingly frustrating. Poetry became both a personal release and a means to influence the Elizabethan regime. This was the context in which
Arcadia
was begun; to entertain his sister, claimed Sidney, though it sought to do a good deal more than that. Before the allegory of
Arcadia
, however, came a more direct attempt to dissuade Elizabeth from marrying Alençon.

Sidney’s travels had schooled him in the gallantry required of a Renaissance courtier, and he knew how to craft an appeal to
Elizabeth. His words came from ‘the deep wellspring of loyal affection’, and they were addressed to an absolute princess. His supplication was intended solely for the ‘merciful eyes’ of the queen. Sidney spoke rhetorically; the ‘Letter to Queen Elizabeth’ circulated in manuscript, as he intended that it should. But there was a world of difference between Sidney’s mannered prose and the public marketing of Stubbs’s
Gaping Gulf
. The ‘Letter’ called on age-old metaphors of the state: as a ship sailing through calm waters, or as a healthy human body. Alençon threatened this equilibrium because of his religion. According to Sidney, the Catholic faction in England was looking for a figurehead. No monarch had ever been held in higher esteem than Elizabeth, but the history of Tudor rebellions offered sobering lessons in how the people’s allegiance could be squandered. Sidney’s oratory was polished, but his assessment of the situation was no less damning than that offered by his uncle the Earl of Leicester: ‘there can almost happen no worldly thing of more evident danger to your State Royal’.
³⁵

For five solid days in October 1579, the privy council met at Greenwich to find a way around the impasse. Burghley repeatedly spoke in favour of the marriage; whether out of altered conviction, or a sense of duty to the queen herself, is unknowable. Walsingham did not attend the debates, and indeed removed himself from court for the following three months. The gossip at Paris was that Elizabeth had dismissed him as a ‘protector of heretics’. The queen was certainly angry with him, although his chronic medical condition seems to have flared up at the same time, so perhaps this was more than a tactical withdrawal. At any rate, Walsingham wasn’t there to witness Elizabeth’s tears of rage at the majority council decision against the marriage. When she rejected their advice and ordered a group of loyal advisers to draw up a treaty which Simier could carry back to France, her principal secretary was not included. 

Elizabeth condemned her councillors as so many sieves, their courage draining away when forced to face their sovereign. Perhaps this was no more than coincidence, but the year of Alençon’s visit also saw the first in a series of portraits of Elizabeth carrying a sieve in the style of the Vestal Virgin Tuccia: so chaste, the legend had it, that she could carry a sieve of water from the Tiber to her temple without a drop leaking away. One was commissioned by Sir Christopher Wray, the judge who had passed sentence on John Stubbs; another by Sir Christopher Hatton. A cameo brooch with the same sieve motif was presumably made to be worn by a supporter of the campaign against the marriage. During her final years, Elizabeth embraced the identity of the Virgin Queen as a way of sustaining her hold on power. But in the context of the Alençon match, an icon of maidenhood functioned as exhortation as much as praise. The queen regularly made use of art to communicate with her political nation; the sieve portraits prove that the traffic was two-way.
³⁶

The privy council was the monarchy’s voice in Parliament. Without its wholehearted support, the queen had little hope of persuading a truculently Protestant House of Commons to accept a Catholic as their co-ruler. The bishops in the Lords, many of whom had chosen exile in Queen Mary’s reign, were also likely to offer spirited resistance. The recent incursion of missionary priests onto English soil was another factor, stoking anti-Catholic feeling in both Parliament and the pulpit. By the time that Walsingham returned to court, the marriage of Elizabeth and Alençon had been provisionally agreed on paper. But the treaty was a phantom; a clause allowing the duke the free exercise of his religion in private effectively guaranteed that it could never be ratified. Nor is there reason to suppose that Elizabeth had wavered in her own convictions since she denied the mass to the Duke of Anjou. 

The parody of love-making dragged on for another eighteen months. In the spring of 1581 Elizabeth welcomed a huge French delegation to the English court to settle the marriage once and for all. Statesmen and the officers of Alençon’s household were presented with all the pageantry of the cult of Elizabeth at its zenith. A fantasy wedding ceremony was drawn up by the French, to be concelebrated by Catholic and Protestant bishops in a temporary theatre planned for Westminster. In a remarkably insensitive twist, the wedding service would be modelled on the one worked out for Margaret de Valois and Henry of Navarre.

The English commissioners, Walsingham included, solemnly agreed to all these demands. But a ‘triumph’ staged at Whitehall for the benefit of the visiting ambassadors told a different story. Surveyor of the queen’s works Thomas Grave spent weeks constructing a banqueting house at one end of Henry VIII’s tiltyard, assisted by a small army of artists and craftsmen. The result recalled the prefabricated palaces built by Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Its canvas ceiling was painted with clouds and sunbeams, while oranges and pomegranates seemed to grow from the walls. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed counted 292 panes of glass in its windows. Elizabeth’s presence transformed the structure into a Castle of Perfect Beauty, where tiers of spectators watched a mock battle unfold over the course of two days. Four knights and their retainers set scaling ladders against the fortress before bombarding it with poetry and roses. But the Children of Desire were forced to withdraw, defeated by the Virtue which would not allow them entry. The castle which they had assaulted belonged to ‘the eye of the whole world’. For Philip Sidney, who took the role of one of the knights caparisoned in blue and gilt armour, the allegory must have been especially satisfying.

The French delegation sailed home soon afterwards, carrying 
a treaty that was signed but impotent. When Walsingham followed them to France a month later, it was to angle for an alliance detached from the marriage. Elizabeth sent him with a kind of blessing: ‘as she doth know her Moor cannot change his colour, no more shall it be found that she shall alter her old wont, which is always to hold both ears and eyes open for her good servants’. Walsingham had been readmitted to royal favour with a nickname, perhaps a pun on his habitually black clothes. It was an honour reserved for those closest to the queen.
³⁷

NOTES

1
St Bartholomew’s service:
A Fourme of Common Prayer Necessarie for the Present Tyme and State
(1572), STC 16511. Public fasts: Alexandra Walsham,
Providence in Early Modern England
(Oxford, 1999), 146.

2
Allegory of the Tudor Succession: Karen Hearn (ed.),
Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630
(London, 1995), 81–2; Roy Strong,
Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I
(London, 1987), 71–7. John N. King in
Tudor Royal Iconography
(Princeton, 1989), 223–4 argues for a date of
c
.1570 for this painting, interpreting it as an admonition to Walsingham to adopt the queen’s own cautious Protestantism instead of a more active foreign policy. This seems too early: Walsingham did not formally take up the post of resident English ambassador until 1571, and did not join the council until 1573.

3
Appointment as principal secretary: TNA PC 2/10, 178; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin,
Camden Miscellany
6 (London, 1870–1), 13. Daily attending: Smith to Burghley, 6 Mar. 1575, BL Harley 6991/61. Smith as secretary: Mary Dewar,
Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office
(London, 1964), chapter 15. Ulster: Christopher Maginn, ‘Thomas Smith (1547–73)’ in
Oxford DNB
.

4
Signet and seals: Penry Williams,
The Tudor Regime
(Oxford, 1979), 39–45; G. R. Elton,
The Tudor Constitution
(Cambridge, 1960), 116–17.

5
Progresses: ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 19–22; John Nichols,
The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth
(New York, 1973), I, 396; Dewar,
Sir Thomas Smith
, 176; Mark Girouard,
Elizabethan Architecture
(New Haven and London, 2009), 149–50, 181–4; Mary Hill Cole,
The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony
(Amherst, Mass., 1999), 37.

6
Privy council: Conyers Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth
(Oxford, 1925), I, 424; Williams,
Tudor Regime
, 27–33; Elton,
Tudor Constitution
, 101–4; Christopher Haigh,
Elizabeth I
(Harlow, 1988), chapter 4. Star Chamber: John Guy,
The Court of Star Chamber and its Records to the Reign of Elizabeth I
(London, 1985), 1; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 17 (5 Feb. 1574), ‘I sat in the Star Chamber’.

7
State of the whole realm: TNA PC 2/10, 232–4; Read,
Walsingham
, I, 428. 

8
Advice manuals: Robert Beale, ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary’, BL Additional 48161, reproduced in Read,
Walsingham
, I, 423–43; Charles Hughes, ‘Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate, 1592’,
EHR
20 (1905), 499–508.

9
Managing the queen: Read,
Walsingham
, I, 437–8; Pam Wright, ‘A Change in Direction: The Ramifications of a Female Household, 1558–1603’, in David Starkey (ed.),
The English Court
(Harlow, 1987), 147–72. Walsingham and Huntingdon: Huntington Library Hastings correspondence, box 2, HA 5356, 13064, 13065, 13067; Claire Cross, ‘Katherine Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon’ in
Oxford DNB
.

10
Cumber and variableness: Hughes, ‘Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse’, 499–500, 503. Falling sick: ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 17– 18. Thwarts and hard speeches: TNA SP 12/109, fol. 11r. A Christian man: Huntington Library Hastings correspondence, box 2, HA 13053.

11
Protestantism in the Netherlands: Geoffrey Parker,
The Dutch Revolt
(London, 1985), 36–7, 57–63, 75–80. Turning-point: ibid., 84.

12
Exiles and Sea Beggars: ibid., 109–10, 118–21; Penry Williams,
The Later Tudors
(Oxford, 1998), 264.

13
Pope’s champion: Dudley Digges,
The Compleat Ambassador, or, Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth
(London, 1655), 120–1. War: ibid., 127–8; BL Harley 168, fol. 54r–57v.

14
Meanest sums of money: Digges,
Compleat Ambassador
, 57. Opportunity of revenge: Read,
Walsingham
, I, 150.

15
Without licence or knowledge:
CSP For
. 1583, addenda, 496–8. For Gilbert see also below, chapter 7.