The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (31 page)

Soon after he started working for Walsingham, Berden set down his motives for betraying the Catholic culture that had nurtured him. He wrote with a swagger which is rare in the archives of espionage, and it is worth letting him speak in his own words.

When so ever any occasion shall be offered wherein I may adventure some rare and desperate exploit such as may be for the honour of my country and my own credit, you shall always find me most resolute and ready to perform the same … This only I crave, that though I profess myself a spy (which is a profession odious though necessary) that I prosecute the same not for gain, but for the safety of my native country.

Reading this letter in context, it almost rings true. The Elizabethan age praised those willing to face peril in the pursuit
of fame. Berden’s work was undoubtedly dangerous, and by Protestant standards counted as heroic. His political vocabulary is a plausible reaction to the nationalistic rhetoric that had become deeply rooted in English culture by the 1580s.

Almost rings true – but not quite; because Berden, like Maliverny Catlyn, also worked for money. Within Catholic circles, he cloaked his treachery by posing as someone who could influence Walsingham to be lenient through his own contacts at court – so long as the price was right. In accepting the bribes of Catholic gentlemen, he enriched himself while rising ever higher in their estimation. Berden literally held the power of life and death in his hands, annotating Walsingham’s lists of captured priests as to who should be banished, who imprisoned and who hanged. He contrived to be convincing to all sides. His last letter to his master, written in April 1588 when his cover had finally been blown in Paris, thanked Walsingham for securing him the contract to supply poultry to the royal kitchens. He has no entry in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, but he surely deserves one.
²⁸

Perhaps it is not so surprising that the crucible of Tudor religion and politics distilled men like Nicholas Berden, who defended his own bloody advancement with the language of glory and patriotism. What remains astonishing is Walsingham’s ability to recruit double agents from within the very brotherhood of Catholic priests that he was hunting down. The most notorious of these turncoats was Gilbert Gifford, who would play a central role in the Babington plot. Gifford was an unquiet soul, the son of a Staffordshire recusant and barely seventeen when he entered Allen’s college at Douai in 1577. Having apparently challenged another student to a duel, he left for the English College at Rome but was soon expelled from there too. In 1583 Allen took Gifford back and he was finally ordained deacon. He then journeyed to Paris to meet the two leading
figures of the expatriate Catholic resistance, Thomas Morgan and Charles Paget. Morgan wanted to open a channel of communication to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was at that point under house arrest at Chartley in Gifford’s home county. But Gifford was too visible, too quick to temper, to make an effective courier. When he crossed the Channel to Rye in December 1585 he was swiftly arrested and brought to Walsingham to be interrogated.

Was Gifford already working for the English security services when he was picked up at Rye? One Jesuit writer alleges that Walsingham had turned him two years earlier, although Gifford’s most recent biographer hedges his bets. If the accusation against him is just, then his dealings with Morgan and Paget in Paris look like a prime example of what Camden called Walsingham’s ‘complotting’: a Machiavellian manoeuvre to tempt the English exiles into treason. From here it is an easy step to a conspiracy led by Walsingham and Burghley against the life of Mary Stuart. Certainly Gifford became a crucial link in the chain that led to Mary’s traitorous last correspondence with Anthony Babington. A triumphant Walsingham granted him a pension of £100, an enormous sum in comparison to his payments to other agents. Gifford’s behaviour, always difficult to interpret, then became very odd indeed. Rather than living out a comfortable life in England, he opted to return to Paris. Somehow he was ordained priest in March 1587, barely a month after Mary’s death, and he spoke of travelling back to Rome. The depth of his vocation may be doubted, since he was arrested in a Paris bordello and died in the Archbishop’s prison. Sir Edward Stafford condemned him as ‘the most notable double treble villain that ever lived, for he hath played upon all the hands in the world’.
²⁹

Other Catholic priests were turned, or perhaps converted. An exile since childhood, Anthony Tyrell was ordained at the English College in Rome and sent into England in 1581. His
work as a missionary was interleaved with political agitation, in Rheims with William Allen, in Paris with Charles Paget, and in Rome with both the pope and the father general of the Jesuits, or so he claimed. But when he was finally arrested in England in 1586, Tyrell was prepared to offer up a hoard of information on the whereabouts and contacts of his fellow priests. He was spirited into London’s Clink prison to see what he could find out from the Catholics detained there. Tyrell was encouraged to hear confession and say mass before reporting on what he had learned. When he had exhausted his usefulness to the government, including preaching a Protestant sermon at Paul’s Cross, he was re-employed as a Church of England clergyman on the Essex marshes. Trips to a London brothel, however, meant a further spell in prison. He ended his life in Naples, apparently a Catholic once again.
³⁰

It is difficult to know what to make of chameleons like Gifford and Tyrell. Marlowe’s nemesis Richard Baines was a fraud from the start, seeking ordination as a priest only to infiltrate the seminary at Rheims. Tyrell and Gifford occupy a separate category, defying historians who want to divide Elizabethan Catholicism into neat groups of believers and apostates. The full picture is more complex, but also more psychologically plausible: hidden allegiances, partial conversions, and overlapping loyalties to Church and state. The febrile Anthony Tyrell, who changed religion six times within twenty years, was tormented by the fear that he had been possessed by devils during an exorcism. Gilbert Gifford’s return to the Catholic Church following his destruction of the Queen of Scots is every bit as extraordinary. However they were turned, these double agents enabled Walsingham to create a perpetual anxiety within the English Catholic community. Congregations sheltering in barns and attics had good reason to fear discovery at the hands of an investigating magistrate or a royal pursuivant on the prowl. But betrayal
might also come from a Judas within; and against this sort of threat, a watcher from a high window was no defence.

Studying the security services built up by Francis Walsingham allows us to piece together competing narratives of the Elizabethan state. One tells the story of a legitimate Tudor queen, served by able ministers and loved by her people, who was faced with assassination by Catholic zealots and the invasion of her kingdom by the great powers of Europe. To defeat this threat, Walsingham devised a secret service which worked, in the words of Sidney Lee, ‘with a Machiavellian precision at home and abroad’. Espionage might be a murky business, but Walsingham managed to preserve his own integrity as well as the state which he served: ‘in no instance is there conclusive proof that he strained law or justice against those whom his agents brought under his observation’. For Lee’s generation, Walsingham seemed to embody values of loyalty, patriotism and fair play; a characterisation endorsed in its essentials by Conyers Read, whose account was based on years of painstaking research in the archives.

The Walsingham of the original
Dictionary of National Biography
has a doppelgänger, discovered by the Victorian Catholic priests who constructed an alternative narrative of the English Reformation. For them the Virgin Queen was a bastard and a heretic, and Mary Stuart the rightful successor to a kingdom which still yearned to be Catholic. Walsingham’s web of informers and turncoats features large in this story too, but as the enforcement agency of a state power intent on utterly extinguishing the flame of English Catholicism. More recently, the Jesuit historian Francis Edwards has presented the Throckmorton plot as an attempt ‘to bracket militants and
pacifists and destroy them all’ – in other words, to use one foolhardy dreamer to condemn the entire Catholic community. Throckmorton himself was a victim rather than a perpetrator, shy of committing treason but tortured on Walsingham’s orders into ‘false and feigned’ confessions. For reasons which will be obvious, this is the image of Francis Walsingham which has appealed to modern film-makers.
³¹

On balance, the Throckmorton plot represents an impressive victory for Walsingham’s intelligence service courtesy of Laurent Feron, the embassy clerk who offered his services as a mole. It had been a close-run thing in November 1583. The Duke of Guise had successfully persuaded Philip II to fund an invasion of Cumbria and Sussex, where Throckmorton was to join him. Forces had already started to muster in Normandy. If we accept that Elizabeth was the rightful ruler of England, then we could justifiably cast Walsingham as a hero. A credible threat to overthrow the state had been averted, and Mary Stuart’s supporters had been thrown into confusion. Deep down, however, Walsingham knew that the execution of one religious radical would not prevent others from stepping forward to take his place. Plotters against Elizabeth need be lucky only once; Walsingham had to be lucky every time.

NOTES

1
Throckmorton and his plot:
A Discoverie of the Treasons Practised and Attempted against the Queene’s Majestie and the Realme by Francis Throckmorton
, reprinted in
The Harleian Miscellany
(London, 1808–13), III, 190–200; John Bossy,
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story
(New Haven and London, 2001), 31–3, 84–6, 120 n. 40; Stuart Carroll,
Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe
(Oxford, 2009), chapter 10. Salisbury Court: John Bossy,
Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair
(New Haven and London, 1991), 203.

2
Englefield:
Discoverie of Treasons
, 191 bis. Pretention, intention and torture: ibid., 191–2 bis, 200. The dearest thing to me: ibid., 195. Ballad: Alexandra Walsham, ‘A Very Deborah? The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds),
The Myth of Elizabeth
(Basingstoke, 2003), 152.

3
Feron: Bossy,
Under the Molehill
, 46–61, 105–6. Fagot: ibid., 35–6; Bossy,
Giordano Bruno
, 15, 18–21.

4
Camden: William Camden,
Annals, or the Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth
, trans. Robert Norton (London, 1635), 394; Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s first historian: William Camden’, in his
Renaissance Essays
(London, 1986), 133. Naunton: Robert Naunton,
Fragmenta Regalia
, ed. John S. Cerovski (Washington, 1985), 59.

5
Secret service: Sidney Lee, ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’ in
Oxford DNB
. Office of Strategic Services: Benjamin R. Foster, ‘Conyers Read’ in
American National Biography
.

6
Walsingham’s web: Conyers Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth
(Oxford, 1925), II, 335–6; Bossy,
Under the Molehill
, 144; Alison Plowden,
The Elizabethan Secret Service
(Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 52–5. Subtiltie: Geneva Bible, Genesis 3:1: ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’.

7
Local society: Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds),
The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England
(Basingstoke, 1996). Cucking-stools: David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold’, in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds),
Order and Disorder in Early Modern England
(Cambridge, 1985), 123–5. Treason: J. P. D. Cooper,
Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry
(Oxford, 2003), 87–93. Oaths: S. J. Gunn,
Early Tudor Government 1485–1558
(Basingstoke, 1995), 181; C. S. L. Davies, ‘The Cromwellian Decade: Authority and Consent’,
TRHS
6th series, 7 (1997), 185. Cromwell: R. B. Merriman,
Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell
(Oxford, 1902), I, 99; Geoffrey Elton,
Policy and Police
(Cambridge, 1972), 327–33.