The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (27 page)

5 Security Services

There is something indistinct about Francis Throckmorton, the young Catholic gentleman executed in 1584 for plotting to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne. There are no independent witnesses to his character; few clues to his motives for rejecting the quiet loyalism of the Catholic mainstream. Throckmorton’s story has to be reconstructed from the records of his trial and the official propaganda campaign that followed it. We strain to hear his own voice above the babble. Historians write about the ‘Throckmorton plot’, and yet Francis himself had only a supporting role: the real directors of the drama were off-stage, in Paris and Madrid.

Throckmorton was an unlikely revolutionary. His forebears had clambered into royal service by cultivating the law and hunting out good marriages, not unlike Walsingham’s own family. His father John rose to be vice-president of the council governing the Welsh marches, earning him a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 1565. Sir John must have conformed to the established Church to have held such a sensitive position, but he showed his true colours when he schooled his sons Francis, Thomas and George as Catholics. Francis Throckmorton’s faith led him to Salisbury Court, the London house of the French ambassador Michel de Castelnau, where he dined and dreamed and went to mass. By Christmas 1581 Throckmorton had been recruited by an embassy official, Claude de Courcelles, to handle the secret correspondence between Mary Stuart and her English supporters. He was also spotted in the company of Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the ultra-Catholic ambassador of the King of Spain.

Salisbury Court was convenient for the River Thames, and Mary’s letters were probably smuggled from Throckmorton’s house at Paul’s Wharf by boat. Under cover of the French diplomatic bag, the Queen of Scots could finally reach her supporters in Paris. In May 1582 her envoy James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, met the Duke of Guise and the Scottish Jesuit William Crichton to discuss reclaiming Britain for Catholicism by force. Robert Persons, who had joined Edmund Campion on the first Jesuit mission to England, took responsibility for winning over Philip II of Spain. The plan was initially to send an army to Scotland, capitalising on the friendship between King James and his French-born cousin the Earl of Lennox, but the capture of the fifteen-year-old king in the August 1582 raid of Ruthven left Scottish government in the hands of the Protestant lords. When Cardinal Allen gained a seat at the table in June 1583, the target of the invasion shifted to England. Charles Paget, a leading figure among the Paris exiles and a member of Guise’s household, was despatched to London to negotiate with Mendoza and reconnoitre the south coast.

The story is taken up in a propaganda pamphlet published shortly after Throckmorton’s execution.
A Discoverie of the Treasons Practised by Francis Throckmorton
was written by someone close to Walsingham, possibly the diplomat Thomas Wilkes, to create the official record of the plot. When royal officials broke into Paul’s Wharf early in November 1583, they surprised Throckmorton in the act of writing a letter to the Queen of Scots. A search produced further incriminating papers copied out in his own hand: a list of safe harbours ‘for landing of foreign forces’, with the names of Catholic aristocrats who could be relied on to support an invasion. Pedigrees detailing Mary’s claim to the English crown left no doubt about his guilt. Taken to the Tower and ‘somewhat pinched’ on the rack, Throckmorton yielded further details of the conspiracy. An uprising of the
English Catholic nobility was to coincide with a naval assault led personally by the Duke of Guise and bankrolled by Philip II. Walsingham had feared a Catholic enterprise for years, but the Throckmorton plot was on a scale grander than even he had predicted.
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Contemporaries were mystified by Francis Throckmorton’s descent into treason. The
Discoverie of Treasons
drew attention to his ‘pleasant humour’ in the company of friends, and the antiquary William Camden presented him as ‘a gentleman well educated and of good wit’. How had this wealthy and popular young man become radicalised? His studies at Hart Hall in Oxford and the Inner Temple in London placed Throckmorton in the company of other idealistic young Catholics. By the later 1570s his family was dabbling in recusancy, attending the household masses celebrated by a missionary priest. But the turning-point seems to have been a meeting with the English exile and veteran plotter Sir Francis Englefield in the Low Countries, where Throckmorton was drawn into discussions about ‘altering of the state of the realm’. He returned to England speaking a much more heated political language. When his father was ejected from the chief justiceship of Chester shortly afterwards, ostensibly for corruption but probably on religious grounds, Francis added family honour to his litany of grievances against the establishment.

Royal propaganda slotted the events of 1583–4 into a pattern of Catholic plots against crown and state. The
Discoverie of Treasons
contrasted Throckmorton’s ‘pretention’ that he aimed at freedom of conscience for English Catholics with his ‘intention’ to depose Queen Elizabeth. It lingered over his confessions and retractions, defending the fairness of the trial and justifying torture as a necessary weapon against terror. Translations into Latin and Dutch targeted European support for any future uprising, while a printed ballad sang the same
story to the English public. The queen was compared to the three children of Israel who refused to bow down before idols, miraculously preserved from harm in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Throckmorton was pictured breaking down at his betrayal of the Queen of Scots, ‘who was the dearest thing to me in the world … sith I have failed of my faith towards her, I care not if I were hanged’.
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Uncovering the Throckmorton plot was a coup for the government, apparent proof of the deadly efficiency of Francis Walsingham’s network of agents and informers. According to the
Discoverie of Treasons
, ‘secret intelligence’ that Throckmorton had been acting as Mary’s courier was not initially acted upon ‘to the end there might some proof more apparent be had to charge him therewith’. Thanks to the detective work of John Bossy, we now know who supplied this information. Throckmorton was tracked from within the French embassy by Laurent Feron, a London-born clerk who kept Walsingham supplied with the contents of Ambassador Castelnau’s diplomatic bag. The operation was concluded with an extraordinary Watergate-style raid on the French ambassador’s files, in which Feron passed months of incriminating correspondence on to Walsingham’s agent Walter Williams, risking ‘not just dishonour but death’ by doing so.

Secret services like to propagate myths about their own competence. Fear is a powerful deterrent, often outweighing any objective danger of being detected. In fact Walsingham had tried without success to infiltrate the household of the French ambassador until a priest living there, writing under the alias Henri Fagot, offered to recruit Castelnau’s secretary on his behalf. This tremendous piece of luck allowed Walsingham to monitor the ciphered traffic between Mary, Castelnau and King Henry III of France. The principal danger, or so Walsingham had thought, was a pro-Catholic invasion from Scotland. When
Francis Throckmorton came into view, more or less by chance, Walsingham realised that his information was out of date. The real threat in 1583 was an army landing on the coasts of Sussex and Cumbria, paid by Spain and led by the Guise.
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To judge by the weight of the archival record, Francis Walsingham’s main influence was as a diplomat and foreign secretary. The Elizabethan state papers depict him as the broker of England’s foreign policy, struggling to reconcile his own Protestant internationalism with the isolationism of his sovereign. Archives, however, are selective in what they tell us. They can refract, as well as reflect a life. When those who had known him came to write about Walsingham after his death, they recalled a spymaster as well as a civil servant.

William Camden was the first historian to assess the character and achievements of Francis Walsingham. His
Annals
or ‘History of Elizabeth’ was printed in Latin between 1615 and 1625, the period of James I’s ‘personal rule’. The political context was gloomy. James’s autocratic language had soured the relationship between crown and political nation, and the late Queen Elizabeth’s reputation was enjoying a nostalgic revival. Walsingham had hounded James’s mother Mary to her execution, and Camden had to tread carefully. In praising Walsingham as a Protestant, ‘a most sharp maintainer of the purer religion’, he was on safe enough ground. But Camden also remembered ‘a most subtil searcher of hidden secrets’, a clear reference to Walsingham’s role in defeating the Catholic conspiracies which had promoted the cause of the Queen of Scots.

In 1634 Sir Robert Naunton included a portrait of Walsingham in
Fragmenta Regalia
, his celebration of the
personalities of the Elizabethan court. Naunton was disgruntled at losing his position as secretary of state, and like Camden he contrasted his own times with the golden age of Elizabeth. He described Walsingham as a faithful servant of the queen, watchful over her safety and possessed of ‘curiosities and secret ways of intelligence above the rest’. Naunton is a useful witness. He had met Walsingham in 1589 and knew what it was like to work undercover, having served the Earl of Essex in the 1590s as an ‘intelligencer’. The word was freshly coined, a linguistic response to the new world order of plots and counter-espionage. Walsingham’s success as a spymaster remained relevant to a generation which had witnessed the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Protestants like Camden and Naunton saw Guy Fawkes as the latest in a line of Catholic conspirators stretching back into Elizabeth’s reign. Their failure, time and again, was proof of divine providence: the English monarchy was under the special protection of God.
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Walsingham’s career as a spymaster was no less topical when scholarly interest revived in the late nineteenth century. Writing in the original
Dictionary of National Biography
, its editor Sidney Lee credited Walsingham with developing a secret service capable of thwarting the ‘furtive designs’ of England’s enemies. Biographers have a habit of seeing their own times reflected in their subject. Lee’s essay was published in 1899, a time of growing apprehension about German agents and covert naval expansion. Erskine Childers caught the mood in his thriller
The Riddle of the Sands
, which fantasised about an invasion of England from the Frisian Islands. The Secret Service Bureau was established in 1909, soon to be restructured as MI5 and MI6. With the coming of the Second World War, the American scholar and businessman Conyers Read was able to put his vast research on Walsingham to practical effect. An Anglophile and an opponent of Nazism, Read combined his
study of Elizabethan statecraft with employment on the British Empire desk of the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA.
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Scholars of Sidney Lee’s era were happy to search Tudor England for the origins of the modern state: the rule of law, government by council and the germ of parliamentary democracy. Modern historians tend to be more sceptical. Strictly speaking, Francis Walsingham was not the founding father of MI5 and 6. The Elizabethan secret service was less a formal structure than a web of relationships. Walsingham turned his household into a seat of government, just as Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell had done before him. His agents were his own servants and clients, operating as individuals rather than as cogs in a departmental machine. The gathering of intelligence was lubricated by patronage and profit. Yet it is this absence of bureaucracy which makes Walsingham’s achievement so remarkable. Success or failure depended on his ability to keep alert, to spot the connections in the avalanche of information and to keep his people loyal. Camden says that ‘he knew excellently well how to win men’s minds unto him, and to apply them to his own uses’. One word recurs in his depiction of Walsingham: ‘subtiltie’ – the quality of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Elizabethan translation of the Bible.
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