The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (38 page)

Ill and exhausted, Walsingham retreated from the court to his house at Barn Elms. The signet and great seal, tools and symbols of his power, were left in the custody of the new junior secretary, William Davison. Walsingham’s spirit had been sapped by news of the death of his son-in-law Philip Sidney in the Netherlands in October. His passing left Walsingham honouring £6,000 of Sidney family debts, and yet his request to the queen for assistance was rebuffed. As a spymaster this was the summit of his career, but it had brought him no material benefit and had actually distanced him from the queen’s favour. Walsingham slid into weeks of sickness that were part physical and part psychological, a ‘dangerous disease’ brought on by what he called ‘the grief of my mind’. Echoing Elizabeth’s own metaphor of monarchy as theatre, he observed to Burghley that the happiest men in government were ‘rather lookers-on than actors’. But life in the country offered little comfort. Walsingham could not rid himself of the dread that his mistress was in greater danger than ever.

His fears for the future are detailed in a document that Walsingham wrote before leaving London, a lengthy memorandum on the ‘dangerous alteration likely to ensue both in England and Scotland’ if Mary’s execution should be delayed any longer. Her survival would increase both the numbers of English Catholics and their resolve to rebel: ‘her friends will rather attempt some desperate remedy than to suffer her to perish without attempting anything’. Scotland presented the awful possibility that the impressionable James VI might be persuaded to renounce his Protestantism and strike against England, to liberate his mother and to pursue his own title to the English throne. As so often with Walsingham, the pan-British dimension of his thinking is striking.
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Elizabeth finally decided to sign Mary’s death warrant on
1 February 1587, more than three months since the commissioners had come to a verdict. Recalling for a moment her father’s cruel sense of humour, she quipped that the news would be a cordial to restore her principal secretary to health. Walsingham was back in London but still too weak to attend court. William Davison had to take responsibility for the warrant, and suffer the consequences of the queen’s fury when she discovered that it had been despatched without her express permission. What merit Elizabeth saw in further delay it is difficult to say; perhaps she simply changed her mind. But the councillors of the monarchical republic had been one step ahead of her. For a few extraordinary days Burghley, Walsingham, Davison and Hatton effectively seized the initiative in government. Burghley quietly secured the support of the rest of the council, guarding the warrant and preparing for the mass detention of Catholic recusants. Beale was woken in the night and ordered to report to Seething Lane, where Walsingham told him that he would be carrying the fatal document to Fotheringhay. Walsingham also took charge of the executioner, who travelled in the clothes of a serving man with his axe in a trunk.

Elizabeth’s reluctance to agree to Mary’s execution is the stuff of legend. Towers of interpretation have been built upon it. For some it exposes the crippling indecisiveness of the queen. Others identify her behaviour as deliberate, consistent with her strategy of keeping her male ministers on the back foot, expressive of the kinship that one female ruler felt for another. To allow that the law had the power to discipline an anointed sovereign was a radical reversal in the theory of monarchy, and Elizabeth was justly nervous about where it might lead.

But Walsingham’s correspondence reveals a darker facet of the queen’s character, the politician who spotted the advantage of a quiet backstairs killing over a public execution. On 1 February, the same day that she sent Mary’s death warrant to
be sealed, Elizabeth directed her two principal secretaries to write to Sir Amyas Paulet expressing her disappointment that no one had acted under the bond of association to rid her of the Queen of Scots. In open court Elizabeth would weep for Mary, mourning the death of a sister monarch, but the raw truth was that she tried to arrange for her murder. Paulet was horrified and refused to make ‘so foul a shipwreck of my conscience’, although self-preservation must have also played its part: few would have been willing to leave themselves so politically exposed. He was saved by the arrival of Beale bearing the warrant, unknown to Elizabeth. The irony was that Walsingham, who had done so much behind the scenes to advance Mary Stuart towards her death, should guarantee her the relative dignity of a public execution.
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Mary was beheaded in the great hall at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587. The second of the pair of drawings in Beale’s papers traces the sequence of events. Mary appears three times: entering the chamber dressed as if for a festival, in gown and trailing linen veil and carrying a rosary; on a dais in the centre of the room, her missal and crucifix set down on a table and a man in breeches awkwardly holding her top dress; and kneeling at last for the half-naked axeman. Like all the great officers of state, Walsingham stayed away. The execution was left to the Sheriff of Northamptonshire and the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent. A small crowd looks on from behind a line of soldiers armed with halberds. The Dean of Peterborough is speaking, although in reality Mary rejected the sermon that he had prepared and knelt with her servants to recite the Latin office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A fire burns in the grate, where a man with a sword rests on one leg. It is a familiar image, but an upsetting one – its violence implied, about to happen: an axe poised, cartoon faces watching and talking, a few looking the other way as if distracted or bored with what they were seeing. 
There is no triumphant depiction of Mary lying dead, but it captures the pose of the onlookers with a chilling intimacy.
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Francis Walsingham had coaxed the brags and dreams of a group of friends into a plot against the Protestant state. He offered Mary Stuart an apparently secure route to those who wanted to see her on the English throne, and calibrated the moment that her letter to Anthony Babington would have the greatest impact. The ethics of the episode are hard to judge. Walsingham had tempted Mary into an act of rebellion, but in truth she had already shown herself willing to depose her cousin Elizabeth. The criminal justice system of today would attempt to balance the degree of entrapment against the scale of the offence that it revealed. The shape of the Babington plot owed a lot to Walsingham and his agents, but its origins lay in the exile communities in Paris and Rheims. Mary can hardly be blamed for desiring her own freedom: she had come to England seeking sanctuary and had found an endless imprisonment. But Elizabeth could never have recognised Mary as her heir, for fear of sparking a Protestant revolution of the sort that had deposed Mary from the throne of Scotland. The result was that Mary Stuart signed the bond of association with one hand, and gave her benediction to a company of assassins with the other.

Babington’s letter to Mary described the impending execution of Elizabeth as a tragedy, and it was in similar terms that the conspirators’ own downfall was perceived. Sir Christopher Hatton made a memorable interjection during the arraignment of the principal plotters: ‘O Ballard, Ballard, what has thou done? A sort of brave youths otherwise endued with good gifts, by thy inducement hast thou brought to their utter destruction and confusion’. Contemporary accounts of the Babington plot
take on the tone of an Elizabethan morality play, a tale of talent tragically brought low by pride. The prosecution took care to remind the trial how Ballard was dressed when he came on his mission to England, not in the humble clothes of a man of God but the gorgeous apparel of a gentleman soldier: ‘a grey cloak laid on with gold lace, in velvet hose, a cut satin doublet, a fair hat of the newest fashion, the band being set with silver buttons; a man and a boy after him, and his name Captain Fortescue’. Hatton ended by denouncing Ballard and other such Catholic priests who preyed on young Englishmen of ‘high hearts and ambitious minds’, carrying them ‘headlong to all wickedness’.
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It served the interests of the crown to sensationalise stories of treason and plot. And yet the perpetrators seem to have shared the sense of theatre. Chidiock Tichborne delivered a remarkable oration about his friendship with Babington before he was given over to the executioners. ‘Of whom went report in the Strand, Fleet-street, and elsewhere about London, but of Babington and Tichborne? Thus we lived, and wanted nothing we could wish for: and God knows, what less in my head than matters of State?’ Tichborne framed his address as a warning to other young gentlemen, asking forgiveness of the queen and for some provision for his wife, sisters and servants. But his final prayer was for himself, ‘that he hoped steadfastly, now at this last hour, his faith would not fail’. By acting out a role, he and his companions steeled themselves for the torment to come. Tichborne also sought solace in poetry, penning a wrenching elegy in his last days in the Tower:

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade;

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I was but made.

My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.
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Anthony Babington died for his vision of an English nation that was still viscerally Catholic. The north he assumed would rally to his cause, because Catholicism was still the religion of the common people, but also to revenge the harm that the region had suffered in the wake of the 1569 rebellion. Wales he judged to have the same complexion, and the West Country might also be sympathetic. Working inwards from ‘the very extremities of the kingdom’, supported by foreign troops and placing Catholic magistrates to govern the counties that he had already taken, Babington reckoned to squeeze the south parts of the realm into submission.

In much of this he was plainly deluded. The majority of Elizabethan Catholics wanted nothing more than to be recognised as loyal to the queen. Babington’s plan for invasion was not welcomed by Abington, who told him ‘I had rather be drawn to Tyburn by the heels for my religion than to have it reformed by strangers’. The papacy was less concerned for the plight of England than Babington believed it to be. As for the extremities of the kingdom, Walsingham had received assurances from the Earl of Huntingdon, president of the council of the north, that ‘in no part of England is Queen Elizabeth more reverenced than she is here’. Two of Babington’s predictions, however, were more alarming to his interrogators. The first was that the English people, labouring under a weight of unjust rents and taxes and the enclosure of the commons, would one day be ready to cut the throats of their landlords. The second was that, although his own conspiracy had failed, it would be followed by others; and next time, the plotters would know how to keep their secrets.
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NOTES

1
Somerville and his plot: TNA SP 12/163, fol. 17, 54, 56–7;
CSP Dom.
1581–90, 128–30, 182; BL Harley 6035, fol. 32–5;
VCH Warwickshire
4 (London, 1947), 45, 62; William Wizeman, ‘John Somerville’ and ‘Edward Arden’ in
Oxford DNB
. Torture: Robert Hutchinson,
Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England
(London, 2006), 72–8; Conyers Read,
Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth
(Oxford, 1925), II, 378–9.

2
To avoid a greater evil:
CSP Dom
. 1581–90, 161. Breathing nothing but blood: William Camden,
Annals, or the Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth
, trans. Robert Norton (London, 1635), 257.

3
Cult of Elizabeth: J. P. D. Cooper, ‘O Lorde Save the Kyng: Tudor Royal Propaganda and the Power of Prayer’, in G. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (eds),
Authority and Consent in Tudor England
(Aldershot, 2002), 190–3; Henry Foulis,
The History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations
(London, 1681).