The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (53 page)

Even as the queen delivered her speech, the crisis of the Armada was passing. The Spanish fleet began its desperate journey home around the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, while the English levies were released to the urgent task of gathering in the harvest. Prayers for deliverance were replaced by services of thanksgiving. Captured Spanish flags were displayed in St Paul’s and on London Bridge. The queen’s accession day in November was chosen to mark a double celebration, of victory over her enemies and thirty years of unbroken rule. It should have been a time of personal triumph for Walsingham, whose agents had supplied crucial intelligence about the scale and the strategy of the Armada. As the squadron commander Lord Henry Seymour put it in a letter of 18 August, ‘I will not flatter you, but you have fought more with your pen than many have in our English navy’.

And yet Walsingham could take little joy in the apotheosis of Elizabeth. Writing to Burghley during the queen’s progress to Tilbury, he had aired his sense of shame that ‘our half doings breed dishonour, and leave the disease uncured’. The Armada had been dispersed but not defeated, and that by the weather as much as the English navy. Like the East Anglian Puritan Oliver Pigge, Walsingham feared that the hatred of the Spaniards ‘is not yet quenched, but rather we may be assured, much more increased, so as they will but wait opportunity to set upon us again’. The Lord must have had some purpose in allowing the Armada to sail, yet there was little sign of the national repentance which it should have summoned into being. The privy council and shire lieutenants had risen effectively to the challenge of the invasion. But worrying cracks had also appeared in the structure of the English state, its ability to sustain a defensive campaign for any length of time and the unwillingness of some commanders to co-operate across county boundaries. Troubled by these unsolvable problems and exhausted by the strain of constant 
service, Walsingham succumbed to his old illness. He would never be fully well again.
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Stoked up by the victory over Spain and the papacy, the cult of Elizabeth reached an unprecedented intensity of praise and devotion. George Gower’s Armada portraits depicted the queen with a globe and an empress’s crown, her serenity contrasting with the chaos being inflicted on the Spanish fleet behind her. Walsingham’s gifts to Elizabeth to mark the new year of 1589 included a velvet cloak lined with cloth of silver, and a white satin doublet embellished with Venice gold. Dame Ursula gave presents too, a pair of perfumed gloves laced with symbolic pearls of chastity, and a ‘skimskin’ embroidered with golden birds, beasts and trees. Walsingham’s relationship with his royal mistress had warmed a little since the crisis of Mary Stuart’s execution. The queen asked after his health in the wake of the Armada, though her ‘many gracious and comfortable words’ had to be coaxed out of her by Clerk of the Signet Sir Thomas Windebank. But Barn Elms was honoured with a two-day royal visit in May 1589, while Windebank was allowed to share some of the burden of attending on Elizabeth.
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Although Walsingham often wished himself free from the shackles of royal service, the idea of actually retiring seems never to have occurred to him. The situation at court was in a state of flux. The death of Philip Sidney in 1586 had dealt a heavy blow to those who believed that England had an international Protestant mission to fulfil. Now Leicester had followed his nephew to the grave, carried off by a malarial infection less than a month after he had hosted the queen at Tilbury. Mortality probably held few terrors for Francis Walsingham. Calvinists usually included themselves among the 
elect, while the torment of purgatory was just so much monks’ cant. But Leicester’s passing deprived him of a powerful ally as well as a friend. It was also a sharp reminder that the queen, who was Leicester’s exact contemporary, would not be around for ever. Age would inevitably accomplish what foreign invasion and an assassin’s bullet had so far failed to achieve, yet the royal succession remained unresolved. A war by proxy in the Netherlands had escalated into a full-scale conflict with Spain, compounding the tension in court politics. One observer commented that he had never seen ‘such emulation, such envy, such back-biting as is now at this time’.

The impending extinction of the Tudor line left several possible contenders for the English throne. As the son of Catherine Grey and the Earl of Hertford, Lord Beauchamp enjoyed the strongest claim according to the provisions of Henry VIII’s will, but his parents’ secret marriage had been declared invalid by the queen, and Beauchamp never seriously entered the running. James VI of Scots was descended on both his father’s and his mother’s side from King Henry VII, whose daughter Margaret had married into the house of Stuart. James’s cousin Arabella Stuart had the same pedigree with the added advantage of being English by birth, but the support she received from Catholic circles effectively ruled her out (after decades of female rule, her gender may have been another factor). The King of Scots was a committed Calvinist, though this had not prevented him from engaging in brinkmanship with the English at the time of the Armada. Catholicism remained a real presence among the Scottish nobility, and James was able to play on English fears of a war on two fronts to extract a promised pension from Elizabeth. It was a game of high stakes, as Walsingham observed to Sir Robert Sidney. ‘If he should lose the possibility that he pretendeth to have to this crown after her majesty’s decease by growing to a pike with us’,
then neither Spain nor France would be quick to help him regain it.

Judging James to have been ‘ill counselled’, Walsingham offered him some advice of his own. A letter of December 1588 praised the good intentions of the young monarch while warning of the perils when ‘every great personage in that realm pretendeth to be a king’. What was necessary for sound government, along with an impartial council of advisers, was a parliament and Star Chamber to check the nobility and enforce the rule of law. Offering English solutions to Scottish problems was Walsingham’s way of bringing the two nations closer together, smoothing the path towards an increasingly inexorable union. To achieve anything more would have required a clear statement about the succession from the queen, and for that she kept her councillors guessing until the hour of her death.
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Regarding the hostilities with Spain, Elizabeth took a much clearer line. A reprisal raid must be launched to ‘distress the ships of war’ which had limped back to take refuge in the ports of Santander and San Sebastián. Walsingham was all in favour of a counter-attack against Philip II, questioning Howard as early as August 1588 about the feasibility of harrying the Azores and capturing the treasure fleet, but the navy was in urgent need of being careened and re-rigged. When the expedition finally departed in April 1589, its commanders had a markedly different set of priorities from the queen’s. Drake was at the helm once more, leading a huge counter-armada of seven royal vessels and seventy merchantmen plus a further sixty Dutch troop transports. Elizabeth forbade her favourite the Earl of Essex to join Drake at Plymouth, but he ignored her and boarded the
Swiftsure
further down the coast at Falmouth. When she demanded that the captain be arrested and Essex returned to court, Walsingham saw to it that the order wasn’t sent.

Events proceeded in the same vein. Drake led a wholly
ineffective assault on Corunna before landing his forces on the Portuguese coast in a bizarre attempt to restore the pretender Don Antonio as king. A forty-five-mile march ended in an unsustainable siege of Lisbon and personal frustration for Essex, who drove his lance into the city gates in disgust that no one would accept his challenge to a duel. Ralph Lane, the former governor of Roanoke who served as muster-master of the army, wrote a report for Walsingham commending Essex’s bravery but criticising the behaviour of Drake and Sir John Norris. They were characterised as ‘two overweening spirits, contemning to be advised and disdaining to ask advice’. Spanish galleys succeeded in capturing several English ships and would have taken more, claimed Lane, had it not been for the intervention of God. Elizabeth was incensed at the loss of men and materiel, and with good cause. Her temper was hardly improved when the privy council decreed that eighty ships belonging to German merchants, taken by Drake as prizes on the pretext that they were trading in contraband, should be restored to their rightful owners. Walsingham urged the queen to listen to her councillors debating the issue, but nothing he could say would persuade her to attend.
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Walsingham had only recently returned to the council table, having suffered repeated bouts of illness between February and June 1589. In August he was bedridden but still working, instructing his secretaries to read Burghley’s letters out loud and dictating his replies. On 12 December he signed his will, with Robert Beale standing as one of the witnesses. Sensing that the end must be approaching, Walsingham’s thoughts turned at last to his family. There was no son to inherit his influence at court; any lasting political legacy would depend on his brother-in-law Beale. But he and Ursula did have their daughter Frances, ‘wonderfully overthrown’ by the death of Philip Sidney and their stillborn child, and still only nineteen years old. Sidney and
Essex had forged a powerful bond during the campaign in the Netherlands, where the young earl served as colonel-general of cavalry. The dying Sidney had bequeathed Essex his sword, symbolically conferring on him the role of a Protestant knight which Sidney had crafted for himself. Given this close connection, it is not so surprising that Essex should choose to marry Sidney’s widow. And Frances could not have hoped for a higher-ranking husband: master of the horse and a knight of the Garter, an intimate favourite of the queen and also arrestingly handsome, if Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature ‘Young Man among Roses’ is indeed the Earl of Essex.

The date of Frances’s marriage to Essex has never been known for sure, but it must have taken place after December 1589, when Walsingham’s will referred to his daughter by her widow’s title of Lady Frances Sidney. Their first child was born in January 1591: a boy, named Robert after his father, and destined to command the parliamentary army against King Charles I during the civil war. The timing implies that Frances and Essex were married shortly before Walsingham’s death in March 1590; perhaps at his request, although it may also have been for love. The couple went on to have five further children, and Essex also assumed responsibility for his stepdaughter Elizabeth Sidney. Another boy and two girls would result from Frances’s third marriage, to the Irish peer the Earl of Clanricarde, following Essex’s execution for treason in 1601. Clanricarde drew on his Galway estates to build a fine house for Frances in Kent.
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Walsingham continued to attend meetings of the privy council until late March 1590. On the night of 1 April he suffered a fit, at which point Thomas Windebank stepped in to petition the queen ‘for speedy easing of your honour’. Elizabeth’s response was typically lofty. She would shortly ‘call another to the place’, but until then Walsingham should be reminded to make ‘speedy
despatch’ of Irish business. The letter informing him of the queen’s decision was probably the last that he read. On 3 April he sold some land to a consortium including his secretary Francis Mylles, perhaps to reward him for his role in rounding up the Babington plotters. Three days later, Walsingham’s lifelong struggle against illness was over. Lurid stories were soon trading hands in Catholic circles – that ‘his urine came forth at his mouth and nose with so odious a stench that none could come near him’, or that his body had become so corrupted that he poisoned one of the pall-bearers at his funeral. John Dee’s diary for 6 April 1590 states simply that ‘good Sir Francis Walsingham died at night
hora undecim
’, at the eleventh hour. Updates from Richard Bingham detailing the seizure of Irish cattle and corn reached Seething Lane too late for Walsingham to read them. The problem of Ireland was still there, just as it had been when he first joined the privy council.
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Walsingham’s will was found ‘in a secret cabinet’ the day after his death. As was conventional, his first bequest was his own soul: ‘to God the father my creator, to God the son my only redeemer, and God the holy ghost the true comforter’, affirming him to be an orthodox believer in the Trinity. Less formulaic was the section which followed it,

assuring myself that Jesus Christ my true and only Saviour of his great and infinite mercy and goodness will vouchsafe not only to protect and defend me during the time of my abode here in this transitory earth with his most merciful protection (especially in this time wherein sin and iniquity doth so much abound), but also in mercy to grant unto me, by increase of faith, strength and power to make a good and Christian end.