The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (32 page)

8
1571 legislation: statutes 13 Eliz. I, c. 1 and 2,
Statutes of the Realm
(London, 1810–28), IV, 526–31. Mildmay: Patrick McGrath,
Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I
(London, 1967), 174–5.

9
1581 legislation: statute 23 Eliz. I, c. 1,
Statutes of the Realm
, IV, 657–8. The mark, an obsolete monetary unit, was worth two-thirds of a pound sterling.

10
Jesuits in disguise:
John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan
, ed. Philip Caraman (London, 1951), 15–18.

11
Persons: John Bossy, ‘The Heart of Robert Persons’, in Thomas M. McCoog (ed.),
The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits
(Woodbridge, 1996), 141–56. Greenstreet House Press: McGrath,
Papists and Puritans
, 169–71. 1585 legislation: statute 27 Eliz. I, c. 2,
Statutes of the Realm
, IV, 706–8.

12
Seething Lane: John Stow,
A Survey of London
, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1908), under ‘Sydon lane’ or ‘Sything lane’. Walsingham’s table book: BL Stowe 162. Secret cabinet: PRO, PROB 11/75, fol. 262v. Maps: BL Harley 6035, fol. 35v; BL Harley 286, fol. 78r.

13
Puritan household: Read,
Walsingham
, II, 261. Herle: Robyn Adams, ‘The Service I am Here For: William Herle in the Marshalsea Prison, 1571’,
HLQ
72 (2009), 217–38; ‘The Letters of William Herle’, ed. Robyn Adams, (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, 2006, http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/herle/index.html). Williams: BL Harley 6035, fol. 33v; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham from Dec. 1570 to April 1583’, ed. C. T. Martin,
Camden Miscellany
6 (London, 1870–1), 13, 41; TNA SP 12/155, fol. 56–7, 58–9, 71, 112; TNA SP 12/156, fol. 35–6; Bossy,
Under the Molehill
, 44–6, 48, 55–6, which improves on Read,
Walsingham
, II, 325–7.

14
Sores of this diseased state:
CSP Scot.
V (1574–81), 99; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 345–54. Poison of this estate: transcribed in ibid., II, 305–8.

15
Gentlemen exiles: estimated at four hundred by Catherine Gibbons, ‘The Experience of Exile and English Catholics: Paris in the 1580s’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2006), 148–9; Cobham to Walsingham 3 Mar. 1582,
CSP For.
1581–2, 511; Stafford to Walsingham 27 Dec. 1583,
CSP For.
1583–4, 281–2.

16
News from Rouen: Becknor to Walsingham 31 Aug./10 Sep. 1584,
CSP For.
1584–5, 39. Banking: Stafford to Walsingham 15 Dec. 1583,
CSP For.
1583–4, 269; Gibbons, ‘Experience of Exile’, 95 n. 28. By statute 13 Eliz. I, c. 3, ‘against fugitives over the sea’, profits from the lands of unlicensed exiles were forfeit to the crown, although there is some doubt whether the law was strictly applied; see
Statutes of the Realm
, IV, 531–2.

17
Progresses: Mary Hill Cole,
The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony
(Amherst, Mass., 1999), 38–9.

18
Stafford:
CSP For.
1583–4, 435, 457;
CSP For.
1586–8, 34–5; Mitchell Leimon and Geoffrey Parker, ‘Treason and Plot in Elizabethan Diplomacy: The Fame of Sir Edward Stafford Reconsidered’,
EHR
111 (1996); James McDermott, ‘Sir Edward Stafford’ in
Oxford DNB
.

19
Needham: Read,
Walsingham
, III, 246–7.

20
Foreign espials: Robert Beale, ‘A Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary’, BL Additional 48161, reproduced in Read,
Walsingham
, I, 435–6. Sundry foreign places: TNA SP 12/232, fol. 25.

21
Hoddesdon:
CSP For.
1577–8, supplementary letters 4, 15, 18; ‘Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham’, 28; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 360–1; James Hodson, ‘Sir Christopher Hoddesdon’ in
Oxford DNB
.

22
Harborne’s carpet:
CSP For.
1583–4, 329. Elizabeth’s orator: Christine Woodhead, ‘William Harborne’ in
Oxford DNB.
Turkish alliance: Walsingham to Harborne 8 Oct. 1585, deciphered and reproduced in Read,
Walsingham
, III, 226–8. 

23
Corpus buttery books: Park Honan,
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy
(Oxford, 2005), 84–8. Privy council meeting:
APC
XV (1587–8), 141. Marlowe and Burghley: David Riggs,
The World of Christopher Marlowe
(London, 2004), 181. Marlowe and Thomas Walsingham: Honan,
Marlowe
, 128–32, 324; Reavley Gair, ‘Sir Thomas Walsingham’ in
Oxford DNB
, which mistakenly refers to Sir Francis Walsingham as Thomas’s uncle.

24
Baines: Charles Nicholl,
The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
(London, 1993), 122–32; Roy Kendall, ‘Richard Baines and Christopher Marlowe’s Milieu’,
ELH
24 (1994).

25
Catlyn: BL Harley 286, fol. 102, 266–7;
CSP Dom.
addenda 1580–1625, 172–4;
CSP Dom.
1581–90, 35, 336–7; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 327–30 and III, 181. The Latin tag
hic et ubique
, which is also used by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was Catlyn’s attempt to flourish a little learning.

26
Privy seal payments:
CSP Dom.
1581–90, 636; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 370–1 and III, 418 n. 2. Crown income: Penry Williams,
The Tudor Regime
(Oxford, 1979), 71.

27
Bewray: to reveal or betray. Beale’s advice: Read,
Walsingham
, I, 436. Entrapment: Camden,
Annals
, 394.

28
Rogers alias Berden: TNA SP 12/167, fol. 5; TNA SP 12/176, fol. 117–18, 119–20; TNA SP 12/178, fol. 36–7, 83–4, 163; TNA SP 12/187, fol. 181–2; TNA SP 12/189, fol. 56–8; TNA SP 12/209, fol. 36, 215; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 316–17, 330–5, 415–19.

29
Gifford: Francis Edwards,
Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I
(Dublin, 2002), 137; Peter Holmes, ‘Gilbert Gifford’ in
Oxford DNB
; Read,
Walsingham
, II, 337. Stafford: J. H. Pollen,
Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot
(Edinburgh, 1922), 126.

30
Tyrell: TNA SP 53/19, fol. 69; Michael Questier,
Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625
(Cambridge, 1996), 44–5, 160–1, 175–6; Peter Holmes, ‘Anthony Tyrell’ in
Oxford DNB
.

31
Machiavellian precision: Sidney Lee, ‘Francis Walsingham’ in
Oxford DNB
. Militants and pacifists: Edwards,
Plots and Plotters
, 87.

6 Bonds and Ciphers

Early one morning in October 1583, a lone gunman set out from Warwickshire on a mission to kill the queen. For a man intent on assassination, John Somerville cut a conspicuous figure. He was obviously well born, yet he travelled without any servants to attend him. Then there was the heavy pistol slung at his side, a curious choice of weapon for a gentleman. Anyone meeting him along the way would have been struck by the ferment in his head. Stopped at an inn for the night, Somerville scattered feverish threats to shoot the queen and ‘see her head set on a pole, for that she was a serpent and a viper’. His imprisonment in the Tower was swiftly followed by the arrest of his wife, sister and household.

Somerville was questioned on a charge of high treason. Secretary to the council Thomas Wilkes reported to Walsingham on 7 November that ‘nothing could be learned except from the confessions’ of Somerville and his family, a phrase that implies the threat of torture. English law had traditionally shunned torture, but the rulebook had been rewritten as society had fissured in the wake of the Reformation. Investigating reports in 1575 that Mary, Queen of Scots had been getting messages to the outside world, Walsingham admitted to Burghley that ‘without torture I know we shall not prevail’. Queen Elizabeth remained squeamish about it, but the use of torture to extort information had become increasingly common. When the Jesuit William Holt was arrested at Leith in 1583 on suspicion (correctly, as it turned out) of gathering a Catholic alliance to make a holy war on England, Walsingham urged the English
envoy in Scotland that he ‘should be put to the boots and forced by torture to deliver what he knoweth’: in other words, his feet would be crushed until he confessed or fainted. Within days of Somerville’s ordeal in the Tower, Walsingham would be writing to Wilkes to authorise the racking of Francis Throckmorton.

Somerville’s interrogators hoped that his detention could be used to force other traitors to break cover. Who were his accomplices, they demanded? Who had sown sedition in his mind? What was his connection to Hugh Hall, a Catholic priest who lived at the house of his father-in-law Edward Arden, disguised as a gardener? Given the oppressive political atmosphere, Somerville’s conviction was never in much doubt. He was found guilty by a commission of oyer and terminer, a fast-track legal process which avoided the need for a conventional trial. He was dead within two hours of being moved from the Tower to Newgate prison to await the queen’s mercy: strangled, it was explained, by his own hand. Arden suffered a traitor’s execution at Smithfield the following day. Their severed heads were spiked on London Bridge.

To the historian with hindsight, John Somerville resembles a gnat biting an elephant. He was already under surveillance as a Catholic and known sympathiser with the Queen of Scots. Propagandists on both sides of the religious divide, Lord Burghley and Cardinal Allen, agreed that Somerville was ‘furious’ or mentally ill. His attempt at regicide was on a wholly different scale from Francis Throckmorton’s, with its menacing coalition of Spanish money, French troops and English fifth-columnists.

And yet there were aspects of the ‘Somerville plot’ which explain why the crown, sensitive to the charge of tyranny, still chose to show him no quarter. The portrait that we can paint of John Somerville is a familiar one. He was young and privileged, due to inherit estates scattered across three counties on his
twenty-fourth birthday. He entered Hart Hall, Oxford in 1576; Francis Throckmorton departed the same hall in the same year. Somerville’s marriage to Margaret, the daughter of Edward Arden, consolidated the landholdings of their two Catholic families in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Arden was a respected figure in his community, serving as Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575. He was a distant cousin of Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden. More to the point – and this may have given Walsingham pause for thought – Edward Arden had married a daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton.