The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (30 page)

Ambassadors and semi-official envoys like William Harborne inhabited a courtly world, defined – at least on the surface – by codes of chivalry and amity, and displayed in exaggerated etiquette. The queen’s image abroad was one aspect of her government that Elizabeth treated with deadly gravity, since it was by her own reputation that the strength of her regime was assessed. England was underpopulated and militarily under-resourced by continental standards, and this made it all the more vital that the queen should visibly appear to emanate power and dignity. Where diplomacy shaded into espionage, it could not be allowed to compromise the public face of the English monarchy. This set a limit to the intelligence operations of the official channels of state.

Look underneath that patina of royal magnificence, however, and there was another layer to the Elizabethan security services: the semi-professional intelligencers who existed to collect, decrypt and interpret information regarding the enemies of the established regime. One of the remarkable features of Walsingham’s secret service was its social inclusiveness, from young members of the gentry down to the jailbirds and petty criminals of the Elizabethan underworld. It is tempting to draw a comparison with modern agencies like Bletchley Park in the early 1940s, a melting-pot of grammar-school boys, dons and debutantes. At a time when even modes of dress were prescribed by Parliament according to hierarchy, Walsingham was willing to recruit talent wherever it lay.

At the social summit of the Elizabethan secret service lay men who were educated at university or the Inns of Court, fluent in classical languages and English common law. Robert Beale was one of these. Another, almost certainly, was the poet Christopher Marlowe. Speculation about his work for Walsingham in the mid-1580s adds just the required dash of spice to Marlowe’s biography, which is otherwise scant in crucial details. It seems to provide a context for the subversiveness of such plays as
Dr Faustus
and
Edward II
. It might also explain his sordid death with a knife in the eye at a Deptford rooming-house. Marlowe’s outrageous atheism, and his uncertain but passionate sexuality, contrast dramatically with the steely Puritanism of Walsingham’s other administrators and agents in the field.

Unfortunately, this portrait of Marlowe rests on evidence that is both limited and tainted: an absence from his Cambridge college in the mid-1580s, and a slew of slanders after his death. Rumour clung to Marlowe in his own lifetime, courted by the poet himself, and his myth has only grown in the telling. But one place-name recurs in the sources, implying that Marlowe was somehow involved there: the French city of Rheims, home to 
Cardinal Allen’s college for missionary priests and the target of a sustained operation by Francis Walsingham.

We know that Marlowe’s time as a spy was brief: a few months while reading for his MA at Corpus Christi in 1584–5, and a reprise in the Dutch port of Flushing in 1592. According to the ledgers of the college buttery (from
bouteillerie
, where the bottles are kept, hence an account of food and drink consumed) he disappeared from Corpus for the duration of Michaelmas term 1584. He was absent again between April and June 1585, and was noticeably more lavish in his spending on his return. Then silence until June 1587, when the privy council directed the University of Cambridge to award him his MA. It also wanted the rumour suppressed that Marlowe was intending to defect to Rheims. These unusual orders were justified on grounds that Marlowe had been employed ‘in matters touching the benefit of his country’.

Who was Marlowe working for? Although he reported to Lord Burghley on occasion, there is circumstantial evidence that Francis Walsingham was his principal paymaster. Marlowe’s life as a playwright was entwined with that of Thomas Walsingham, a young second cousin of Sir Francis who fashioned himself as a literary patron while couriering government letters between England and Paris in the early 1580s. If Thomas recruited Marlowe, then he may also have been his handler at Seething Lane. When the authorities came to arrest Marlowe in May 1593, they looked for him at Thomas Walsingham’s manor of Scadbury in Kent. Within the month, Thomas was one of the mourners at Marlowe’s funeral. The 1598 edition of Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander
was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham by its editor. As for the nature of his secret service, Marlowe would have been too easily recognised to be a plausible plant in Cardinal Allen’s seminary. Then again, he hardly needed to leave England to serve the state: he was already in a position to
trail Cambridge men who were contemplating the road to Rheims.
²³

The two sides of Kit Marlowe, atheist and spy, come together in his relationship with Richard Baines, another Cambridge MA with a connection to Rheims. Baines was already working for Walsingham when he was ordained a Catholic priest there in 1581. He was a valuable mole within the seminary until he was identified as an
explorator
, a ‘lurking spy’ in William Allen’s Latin. Marlowe knew Baines as a man whose career was virtually finished, scarred by the torture he had endured in the town jail in Rheims following his discovery. Walsingham’s intelligencers varied in their response to the close quarters in which they were required to work. In some, it fostered an
esprit de corps
founded on patriotism or faith. Others found it stifling. Baines detested Marlowe, and made a record of his provocative conversation. His account of Marlowe’s atheistical table-talk, his ‘scorn of God’s word’, created an atmosphere around the poet that prompted others to think they could profit from his murder.
²⁴

Investing in Marlowe may have paid Walsingham a dividend of a different kind. A London playhouse was one of very few venues where politics could be publicly discussed, and consequently the crown took an interest in what was put on. For Walsingham Marlowe may have represented a man on the inside, a literary equivalent of Richard Baines in the seminary at Rheims. A parallel strategy was to offer protection to the actors themselves. In 1583 Walsingham instructed Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney to form the company of Queen’s Men. Whatever his motives, Walsingham’s patronage of plays and players forces us to refine the received image of a relentlessly dour Puritan.

Dogged by rumours of homosexuality and crypto-Catholicism, Marlowe lay at one end of the spectrum of agents employed by Walsingham. At the other was Maliverny Catlyn, who wrote
from Rouen in April 1586 promising ‘such service as might witness my duty to religion, her majesty’s person, and my country’s preservation’. By his own account, Catlyn had served as a soldier in the Low Countries before successfully penetrating the English Catholic exile community in France. He revealed the true tone of his faith in a sermonic address to Walsingham on what he called ‘the daily abuse of stage plays’: ‘such an offence to the godly,’ wrote Catlyn, ‘and so great a hindrance to the gospel, as the papists do exceedingly rejoice at the blemish thereof’. While two hundred proud players paraded in silks, five hundred people starved on the streets of London. Every theatre, declared Catlyn, should pay a weekly pension to the poor.

Notwithstanding his contempt for the Elizabethan stage, Catlyn must have been a convincing actor. Walsingham embedded him as a prison spy in Portsmouth and then the Marshalsea, where he was assured by one of the prisoners that a Franco-imperial invasion and a popular Catholic uprising would free them before the harvest was in. Catlyn forwarded the news to Walsingham ‘with all speed, with all expedition’. As Walter Williams had found before him, the life of a stool-pigeon was never easy. Catlyn struggled to get hold of paper and ink and to allay the suspicions of his jailer, ‘who in truth useth me like a prisoner committed for high treason, so that I was forced to charge him in her majesty’s name to deliver this to your honour’. When Walsingham had discovered all he could, Catlyn was transferred to survey the strength of Catholicism in the north.

His diatribe against stage plays implies that religious zeal motivated Catlyn to volunteer for Walsingham’s secret service. He identified the English nation with God’s people in the Old Testament, numbering himself among the elect: ‘the Lord of Hosts will surely forsake to dwell amongst the tents of Israel if the sins of the people do still provoke him’. Elsewhere, however, we find Catlyn attempting to serve both God and Mammon. His
letter from Rouen called Walsingham’s attention to ‘my poor living, the defect whereof drives me sometimes to a non-plus; for being the youngest son of a younger brother, my position was only seven feet of inheritance, which has constrained me to seek my living
hic et ubique
[here and everywhere]’. A few months later he wrote again asking for money, or else ‘I and mine are like to keep the coldest Christmastide that hitherto we ever tasted’. Walsingham sent him £5, hardly generous if Catlyn’s household aspired to any sort of gentility.
²⁵

This seems to have been how Elizabethan spies were rewarded, ad hoc and for operations carried out. Again, it looks so different from the established security agencies of the modern state. But Walsingham’s system had the advantage of keeping his operatives hungry to serve, and personally loyal to him. It also acted as a check on costs, a vital consideration given the queen’s notorious reluctance to part with money. The financing of the Elizabethan security services is difficult to trace in the archives. Funds were authorised by warrants issued under the privy seal rather than voted by Parliament or paid through the formal crown machinery of exchequer and treasury. This made things easier for Walsingham, who had physical custody of the privy seal by the mid-1570s, but also problematic for the investigating historian, since a fire in 1619 consumed many of the privy seal warrants. The records which do survive, augmented by a list of payments ‘for secret service’ compiled by signet clerk Thomas Lake (nicknamed ‘Swiftsure’ for his efficient despatch of business), reveal an annual grant to Walsingham of £750 in 1582. This rose to about £2,000 in the mid-1580s and dropped to some £1,200 when the crisis of the Spanish Armada had passed. Ordinary crown revenue was about £300,000 per annum, implying that Elizabeth’s security services accounted for two-thirds of one per cent of her government’s spending. But this would be misleading, for two reasons. Intelligencers were often
rewarded not in cash but in kind, for instance with the stewardship of a profitable royal estate. Secondly, Walsingham’s substantial debts at his death suggest that he had been paying his agents out of his own resources when state subventions did not suffice.
²⁶

Walsingham’s willingness to buy information greatly increased the reach of his secret service, but it also created unease among his peers. In Robert Beale’s words, ‘with money he corrupted priests, Jesuits and traitors to bewray the practices against this realm’. Beale was his colleague and brother-in-law, a fellow pilgrim in the journey towards the Protestant promised land. His advice to a future principal secretary included a warning not to copy Walsingham too closely: ‘seeing how much his liberality was misliked, I do not think that you can follow the like example’. William Camden also hinted that Walsingham had crossed the line into entrapment: ‘the Papists accused him as a cunning workman in complotting his businesses, and alluring men into dangers’. Camden’s tone is defensive, but his epitaph and Beale’s treatise provide some evidence from the Protestant side that Walsingham put his Protestant conviction before his respect for the law; just as Catholics have always claimed.
²⁷

Whatever its ethics, Walsingham’s strategy of suborning the enemies of the English state to his own service produced some spectacular results. Through bribery, threats and a handful of genuine conversions to the Protestant cause, Walsingham was able to infiltrate English Catholicism at home and abroad. Defectors came from among both the laity and the clergy. In 1581 a wealthy Suffolk gentleman named George Gilbert, who had converted to Catholicism while touring the continent two years before, went into exile in Rheims and Rome. Travelling with him was his servant Thomas Rogers, who more often appears in the state papers under his alias of Nicholas Berden. For whatever reason, Berden had chosen to lead a double life. In 1583 he reported to Walsingham from Rome ‘concerning the
proceedings there touching the Queen of Scotland’. Somebody came to suspect Berden and he was imprisoned for a while, but was permitted to return to England on his release.

Berden’s value to Walsingham lay in his credibility within Catholic circles, which evidently survived the Roman episode. By the spring of 1585 he was filing despatches every few days: dining with a Catholic priest here, talking to Cardinal Allen’s agent there. It was a rich harvest of intelligence from deep within the Catholic underground. Berden reported on the safe-houses and prisons of London; on the priests and books stowed away on French coasters bound for Newcastle, where the queen’s officer ‘is a papist in heart’; on the networks that supported seminary priests and Jesuits in England. Walsingham learned that William Allen supplied his priests with £6 or £7 in money ‘and a new suit of apparel to wear’ when they embarked on their mission. In the summer Berden was moved to France, where he successfully re-established himself among the exile community and provided Walsingham with a valuable alternative to the Paris embassy compromised by Sir Edward Stafford.