by Susan Ronald
At this first public appearance, the obvious injuries to Campion’s shoulders and arms indicated he had been put to the rack. On August 10, Burghley wrote to Walsingham, who was in France on business: “We have gotten from Campion knowledge of all his peregrination in England, as in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Denbigh, Northampton, Warwick, Bedford, Buckingham … We have sent for all his hosts in all countries [counties].”2
On November 20, 1581, Campion’s trial was convened to a packed courtroom. The Jesuit priest showed further signs of torture. Though the statute of 1581 had already been passed into law, Campion was tried under the old treason law of Edward III, presumably to avoid making him a religious martyr, which trying him under the new law of 1581 might do since the Jesuit “conspiracy” had been the motivating factor in the law’s inception. The charges brought forward were “for conspiring to compass the death of the Queen and raise sedition within the realm.”3 Implicated, though not specifically named in the indictment, were Philip II and Gregory XIII. Campion was tried along with the other Catholic priests currently in custody—Ralph Sherwin, Edward Rishton, Robert Johnson, Thomas Ford, John Collington, and William Filby. The last two of these had been mere local priests who had come to hear Campion preach at Lyford. Robert Persons and William Allen were tried in absentia.
Those who had been instrumental in Campion’s undoing testified for the government. Charles Sledd, who had led the pursuivants to the Red Lion Inn hoping to capture Robert Persons, testified that while in Rome and Rheims, before he recanted Catholicism, he had learned about the invasion plans from William Allen. George Eliot, who had been instrumental in Campion’s capture, told the court that the Jesuit had preached of “a great day” soon to come and that it was general knowledge amongst the prisoners that there was an invasion planned. The real drama was reserved for the soon-to-be playwright Anthony Munday, who recited from his diary about the seminarians schooled in treason. The guilty verdict had been decided long before the testimonies were complete. No sound evidence was produced to show that Campion had been part of any plot to assassinate the queen. For Burghley and Walsingham, all that mattered was the security of the realm, the queen, and the Protestant faith. Campion had been a threat to all three.
Edmund Campion was led from the Tower through a driving rain to the scaffold at Tyburn. There he was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the time-honored tradition for traitors. Father Ralph Sherwin and Father Alexander Briant also met their traitors’ deaths that day. Seven other priests followed within the year.
As for Persons, he eluded capture, escaping to the Continent with a wave of Catholic refugees fleeing the new persecution. He would never see England again, but would devote his life to “the Enterprise” so dear to the pope’s and Philip’s hearts.
* * *
Elizabeth could not know that Campion’s execution had imperiled the Jesuit mission to England. On the contrary, fear of a coup d’état loomed large in the government’s mind, and further steps were deemed necessary for the security of the realm. Diplomacy and international trade had long formed a primary strand for England’s financial security; “adventuring” with the likes of Drake—newly returned from his voyage of circumnavigation with enough looted treasure to keep the government in funds for years—was another. “Planting,” or colonization, in North America by Sir Humphrey Gilbert represented a bold, if tentative, strike against Spain, declaring that England intended to be a world power. Elizabeth rebelled against Philip’s or the pope’s authority to rule the world as it had done for the previous one hundred years.
The political landscape was changing rapidly, however, and all England’s efforts to ensure its security were mere pinpricks in the sides of her enemies. Philip II had successfully invaded Portugal in 1580, after the death of King Sebastian at Alcazar in Morocco, and was now king of both countries, uniting their empires. Gregory XIII remained determined to demonstrate papal supremacy over England and pushed once more for Philip to consider his “Enterprise of England.”
Political Catholicism was growing daily. Mary Stuart’s cousin Henry of Guise was gaining strength once more against the increasingly unpopular Henry III. The French king was seen to be weak and effeminate, mocked by contemporaries for his fastidiousness and his young male favorites, called mignons. Henry viewed both the Duke of Guise and his heir Anjou as potential enemies of the crown.
Meanwhile, the French people were literally starving by the interruption to farming and hyperinflation from decades of war. Shipping had been interrupted by English, Dutch, and Huguenot corsairs. Anarchy was prevalent, with local nobles acting like regional warlords. Guise and his brand of ultraorthodox Catholicism offered a downtrodden people hope.
In Scotland, Walsingham remained exercised by the sudden appearance of the French claimant to the defunct title of the Earl of Lennox. The handsome, dashing, and violently Catholic Esmé Stuart, Count or Seigneur d’Aubigny, was escorted personally by Henry of Guise to Dieppe to see him off on his adventure to Scotland and the court of his cousin James VI. On May 3, 1580, Walsingham wrote to the English representative in Scotland, Robert Bowes, that he feared “some great and hidden treason not yet discovered.”4 Naturally, d’Aubigny had been sent by Guise at Mary Stuart’s behest to reconvert her sixteen-year-old son, James, to Catholicism and send intelligence back to Guise for a planned invasion. Their scheme was only uncovered and foiled by Walsingham’s newly set up network of informants in 1582–83 as part of the unraveling of what became known as the Throckmorton Plot.
As for Spain, Philip remained deeply committed to his recovery of the Netherlands. Worse for Elizabeth, he made no secret of his desire to turn his eye to England once his rebellious Dutch provinces had been brought to heel. Something, Walsingham and Burghley agreed with the queen, needed to be done. So once again, Elizabeth pulled out her ancient, dog-eared marriage card and dealt it to Anjou in the autumn of 1578. Henry III and Catherine de’ Medici were delighted as it helped them maintain a balance of power against Spain that a weakened France desperately needed. What they hadn’t realized was that Elizabeth’s true motive was to assist Anjou—newly acclaimed by the Dutch rebels as their “Duke of Brabant”—to rule the rebellious Dutch provinces for himself. No wonder Henry III had branded his brother a “common criminal.”5 Anjou’s leadership of the Dutch rebels only served to anger Philip, who retaliated against France by supporting the designs of Henry of Guise.
* * *
For England, it was an explosive situation. Jesuit missionaries, the enmity of the pope, Philip II, and now the Guise faction once more in France, meant that the realm was in grave jeopardy. Since Walsingham had proved so effective in the past and had acted as a foreign minister to the queen, the task of masterminding resistance to the powers seeking to destroy England fell to him. Walsingham would not only look to diplomacy as his standard tool but would also use his proven skills covertly. In effect, Francis Walsingham had become head of the English secret services and the foreign ministry, and it was these final nine years of his life that would determine his legacy, for good or ill.
Despite this, Walsingham was not in charge of ferreting out English priests, though both Sledd and Munday had been in his pay to destroy Campion.6 That duty fell to the local authorities. The bishops, lords, and even the county lord lieutenants all had their own network of spies and pursuivants. Nevertheless, it was hardly a well-oiled machine. Often, strangers were picked up on the high roads by chancers in the hope that they would prove to be someone worth something to the authorities.
At home, detection of priests, whether Jesuit or not, was seen to be the primary danger. Their capture usually depended on the boring job of keeping watch on houses of known recusants, since the change in legislation in 1581 imposed a fine of twenty pounds on Catholics not attending Anglican services. Over the next three years, a large number of recusants were imprisoned, and the courts were overwhelmed with cases relating to their failures to pay fines. Instead of the fines contributing positively to the ex
chequer, they were becoming a liability to the state. By 1585, the recusancy fines would be farmed out by the crown in much the way customs duties were for sweet wines or spices.
Of course, on a human level, the situation had become intolerable. Letters from recusants—though undoubtedly written to stress their hardships—remain poignant today. Richard Tremayne told the Privy Council that he was willing to pay twenty-five pounds in additional fines but begged “for pity’s sake to be absolved from paying since all his lands had been seized” as he had defaulted on his original recusancy fines. Tremayne’s ready cash had been eaten away by his long journeys back to Cornwall to answer the indictments against him.
Another victim of the Draconian law, Nicholas Tichborne, wrote that he was the younger son of a younger son and only possessed a small farm holding to support his wife and children; that is, until it had been seized by royal officers for his inability to pay his recusancy fines. He wrote to the council from prison, pleading to be set free so that he could beg or borrow enough money to pay all that he owed and keep his family from starving.
Others, like James Welsh, a scholar of Magdalen College Cambridge, earned his living as a spy against Catholics in the pay of the bishop of London. His reason for spying against his friends was simple. As a Catholic, he could not find work as a schoolmaster.7
Yet there were those, more entrepreneurially minded, who found a more original way of dealing with the heavy burden of being a Catholic in England. Sir George Peckham had been imprisoned in the roundup of “hosts” to Jesuit priests in 1581. Once released, Peckham and the Catholic merchant Sir Thomas Gerard became actively involved in financing the second voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert to colonize North America. The plan to resettle the Catholic population in the American colonies met with favor from Walsingham; so much so that his stepson, Christopher Carleill, was one of the investors in the scheme. They raised the money, but Sir Humphrey sank with his ship during the voyage. Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half brother, took up the gauntlet and enticed the gentlemen to invest in his “plantation” in Roanoke.8
* * *
Recusancy on the local level was simply not Walsingham’s focus. He saw his duties as discovering fifth columnists from the Continent—be they English or foreign—and bringing them to justice. Some would be left in place for several months or years in order to discern if they could lead Walsingham to bigger fish. For these covert operations, he had several levels of sources available to him. Aside from the local authorities, Walsingham also learned a great deal about the movement of priests from England’s ambassadors overseas. Sir Henry Cobham, ambassador at Paris from 1579 to 1583, was a mine of information about English priests living in France. The official reports from ambassadors like Cobham were often supplemented with informal accounts from merchants or even itinerant actors and semiofficial secret agents scattered throughout Europe.
Among these agents was the secretary of the French ambassador in London, Jean Arnault. In 1582, Arnault went to Rome to plead the case of Fabrizio Pallavicino, brother to Elizabeth’s financier, Horatio, who had converted to Protestantism and hired Protestant armies for Elizabeth on the Continent. Fabrizio, who had remained resident in the Papal States, had crossed swords with the Inquisition—not for any religious breach but because he was involved with a financial syndicate competing with the pope’s for the export of alum to northern Europe. Arnault stayed with the French ambassador to Rome, Paul de Foix, whose systematic policy had been to alert Walsingham of planned attacks against Elizabeth.9
These informants, whether official or casual, were the tip of the army of small-time yet infamous “spies” in Walsingham’s employ. Many were used occasionally for a specific purpose. Fewer would be trusted with long-term projects. At the port towns in England, Walsingham had his own searchers stationed to scrutinize every traveler coming into the country. Often, the searchers would make random requests to examine letters and their baggage. The only problem with his searchers was that they were notoriously corrupt and could be bought cheaply. In addition, a determined priest or infiltrator could readily pay a foreign ship’s captain to set him ashore on one of England’s lonely beaches to avoid detection.
* * *
Still, Walsingham wasn’t the only privy councillor with a network of spies. Lord Burghley had used the services of servants in embassies, couriers, courtiers, actors, and linguists in his employ since the outset of Elizabeth’s reign. Nor were all of these spies used to detect subversives. Privy councillors like Leicester and Burghley were not above spying on one another, too, and those who did the spying often found lucrative employment with the adversaries of their former employers.
Swimming in these murky waters, Walsingham focused at first on apprehending priests or others entering England illegally for the purpose of overthrowing the queen. Four names of men who assisted the secretary throughout stand above the rest. In the order in which they entered Walsingham’s service, these men were Robert Barnard, Walter Williams, Thomas Rogers, also called Nicholas Berden, and Maliverny Catlyn.10 Walter Williams, though not officially in Walsingham’s pay at the time, would prove pivotal in uncovering the greatest prize of all in the witch hunt for England’s enemy: proof of Mary Stuart’s complicity to overthrow Elizabeth.
Williams had been one of Walsingham’s agents placed in Rye jail in 1582 to extract treasonable intelligence from a Catholic prisoner. On his release in February 1583, he was sent on a similar errand to Paris, where Ambassador Edward Stafford described him as devoted only to the “holy bottle”: drink. Whether this was part of an elaborate subterfuge is difficult to say. Whatever the truth, Williams soon found himself at the hub of operations forwarding Mary’s secret correspondence to France from within the French embassy in London.11
The thirteen-month intelligence operation at Ambassador Michel de Castelnau’s residence was launched by Walter Williams and the “mole” Henri Fagot, whom some experts believe to have been Castelnau’s clerk, Laurent Feron.12 Fagot sent a report to Walsingham that Francis Throckmorton had dined with the ambassador and that he had recently sent Mary Stuart the sum of 1,500 crowns, “which is on the ambassador’s account.”13 A month later Fagot informed Walsingham that the queen of Scots was directly involved in some sort of a conspiracy and that the chief agents were Throckmorton and Henry Howard, both enemies of Leicester. Walsingham set his watchers onto Throckmorton and on November 5, 1583, arrested him for the Throckmorton Plot. Among his seized papers was a list of names of “certain Catholic noblemen and gentlemen” and details of harbors “suitable for landing foreign forces.”14
Mary’s involvement in clandestine correspondence with Castelnau was pretty convincing. What made it so galling for Elizabeth was that she had recently opened discussions to release the Scots queen from her captivity in June 1583 in return for assurances about Mary’s future conduct. In all, Fagot passed along forty-odd letters from Mary to Castelnau. Throckmorton was named as one of Mary’s postmen; George More was the other. Henry Howard, brother of the disgraced Duke of Norfolk, was later confirmed as also receiving letters from Mary.15
In the first letter, dated July 3, from Castelnau to Mary, the French ambassador reported his discussions with Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador. Castelnau believed that Anjou could be induced to change sides and sketched out how Mary might help. The next letter leaked was Mary’s reply, written on July 14. She made it clear that she had always detested the “pox ridden” Anjou and that she doubted his prowess. In the third letter that July, Mary asked Castelnau to try to push Henry III to send troops to Scotland in support of her son, who had recently escaped to St. Andrews from the Protestant Lords who had been holding him captive. She let Castelnau know, in no uncertain terms, that if Henry III would not intervene, plans were well advanced for her cousin Guise to intervene on her behalf—with or without the French king’s authority. Castelnau’s personal dream of reconciliation between the two queens lay in tatters.
As Mary’s scheme unfolded, the go
vernment discovered that Henry of Guise planned to personally lead a small invasion force of five thousand men to land near Arundel in Sussex. Simultaneously, Philip II would send twenty thousand Spanish troops to Lancashire to raise the Catholic north of England. The purpose of the invasion was to liberate Mary, defeat Elizabeth’s forces, then overthrow her to put Mary on England’s throne.16 Yet in his confession, poor Throckmorton had only revealed the details of the southern invasion.
Walsingham soon had the verification he needed. Spies across Europe warned that Guise’s army was at the ready, and Philip II would pay for half the invasion. Francis Throckmorton and his brother Thomas, along with Ambassador Mendoza, were to organize a welcoming committee of Catholic gentlemen to greet the French when they landed. Walsingham made further arrests, although most of those in the plot, including Thomas Throckmorton, had had time to make good their escape. In the end it was only Francis who was executed as a traitor at Tyburn in July 1584, dying “very stubbornly,” refusing to ask Elizabeth’s forgiveness.
Mendoza had been expelled earlier that year for “conduct incompatible with his diplomatic status.”17 He immediately took up his next posting as Spain’s ambassador in Paris. Meanwhile, Mary’s clerk and keeper of her secret correspondence there, Thomas Morgan, remained undeterred in preparing another “notable Service for God and the Catholic Church”—the assassination of Elizabeth.
TWENTY
Frustrating the Designs of Our Enemies
The worst is that the Queen now knows what we had planned and feels the same indignation as if the enterprise had taken place.
