by Derek Wilson
By the time Walsingham received a knighthood in December 1577 the quadrumvirate which would guide English affairs for the next, crucial, decade had come into being. Elizabeth ruled with the guidance of her closest confidant, Robert Dudley, her most trusted political adviser, William Cecil, and Francis Walsingham, whom she valued because of his unique grasp of international affairs. Professor Collinson has suggested that we might think of Walsingham as foreign secretary to Burghley’s prime minister. However, the mid-seventies to mid-eighties were to be a period of constant anxiety and frustration and more than once Walsingham came close to resigning.
In works of period fiction and also in some popular non-fiction accounts Francis Walsingham has become ‘her majesty’s spymaster’; a sinister figure who created an intelligence web for trapping those he regarded as enemies of the state. It is not difficult to see why this Machiavellian image finds such ready appeal. Puritans are never popular and critical commentators always enjoy pointing out flaws in religiously earnest ‘hypocrites’. Sympathy for the hapless Queen of Scots inevitably spawns animosity for the man who was her nemesis. Walsingham lacked star quality. He was a dour workaholic, not a court exotic like Dudley or Hunsdon, or a political genius like Cecil. It is easy, therefore, to force him into the mould of a dark master of intrigue. Such an oversimplification obscures his real contribution to the middle years of Elizabeth’s reign.
Francis Walsingham certainly did head up an official intelligence and counter-intelligence service. But we must be careful in using such terms. England in the 1570s and 1580s bore some comparison with England in the 1970s and 1980s. The country was in a state of cold war in a world where powerful ideological rivals were counterpoised. Suspicion, anxiety and fear coursed like stimulants through the bloodstream of international relations, keeping diplomats and statesmen on the alert. This is the climate in which espionage most luxuriantly flourishes. Governments desperately need to know what their potential enemies (and, indeed, their allies) are planning. Accurate intelligence has to be gathered as rapidly as possible. If communication is unreliable or too slow the results may be disastrous. But we must not allow our conception of Walsingham’s activities to be coloured by the cloak-and-daggery of twentieth-century espionage. Elizabethan intelligence-gathering was unsophisticated, haphazard and non-specialized. Today’s MI5 and MI6 agents are subordinate to their political masters. They are charged with gathering information by employing informants, moles and high-tech surveillance technology. They make reports to their political masters. It is the latter who decide what action if any should be taken. Billions are lavished by the major powers on the gathering and analysing of intelligence (and they can still make the most appalling mistakes).
Sixteenth-century methods were different, not only in being, inevitably, more crude, but also more diffuse. There was no specialist body at the service of the queen and her councillors. The queen and her councillors were the ones who gathered and assessed intelligence and acted on it. Elizabeth, Dudley, Burghley, Walsingham, the leaders in church and state – all had their own networks. Nor should we assume that news about the activities of foreigners and potential native troublemakers was always pooled for the good of the state. Individual Council members were not above carrying on their own negotiations without the knowledge of their colleagues and Elizabeth certainly went behind the backs of her advisers. For example, in 1581 the queen and Leicester spent several months in secret correspondence with d’Aubigny, James VI’s favourite, at the very time that official policy was bent on undermining the Frenchman’s influence. And there were certainly occasions on which Walsingham withheld from the queen information which, be believed, would provoke an unhelpful response.
Intelligence-gathering was only one of Walsingham’s many activities. We can learn a great deal about the scope of his responsibilities and his handling of them from a treatise written by Robert Beale, someone who knew Walsingham and his methods better than most. Beale was ten years younger than the man who became his patron. Like Walsingham he had a legal and bureaucratic background but, more importantly, he shared Francis’ Puritan faith. If anything, he was even more extreme in his views. In Mary’s reign, though he was only a teenager, he went into exile in Strasbourg and Zurich. By the time of his return Beale was well versed in law and theology. In 1564 he went to Paris where he later found employment with the English ambassador, Sir Henry Norris. Walsingham inherited Beale when he took over the embassy in 1570 but was certainly acquainted with him before then for it must have been sometime in the 1560s that Beale married Walsingham’s sister-in-law, Edith St Barbe (Ursula Walsingham’s sister). Beale acted as his brother-in-law’s secretary in Paris and shared with him the harrowing events of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre. Shortly afterwards, doubtless on Walsingham’s recommendation, Beale was advanced to the position of clerk to the Council. When Walsingham was secretary Beale was his right-hand man. Theirs was more than just a professional relationship. When Walsingham moved to a more commodious London residence in Aldgate Ward, called the Papey, Beale built himself ‘a fair house’ in nearby St Mary Street. When in 1579, Walsingham was granted by the queen the lands of what he modestly called a ‘cottage’ at Barn Elms on the Surrey bank of the Thames near Richmond Palace as his principal country dwelling, Beale also relocated there. The two families were obviously very close. Professionally, Beale enjoyed his superior’s complete trust. He deputized for Sir Francis when the latter was absent from the Council board and was often employed as Walsingham’s emissary in sensitive situations.
In 1592, the seasoned diplomat, Sir Edward Wotton, was angling for the post of principal secretary (vainly, as it transpired) and Robert Beale wrote for him an account of what was involved. As well as providing a list of the senior bureaucrat’s duties, it also provided an insight into Walsingham’s methods, not all of which Beale approved.
The secretary’s usefulness – and his power if he chose to wield it – lay in his omniscience. As the framer of the Council’s agenda he knew (theoretically, at least) all its business and could manipulate discussion. He received diplomatic despatches, correspondence from foreign courts and the hundreds of letters which arrived weekly from all sorts and conditions of men and women, most of them suing for royal favours. The secretary had to use his judgement to sift the wheat of important affairs from the chaff of matters to be delegated to other government officers. Items for Council debate had to be skilfully arranged so that pressing affairs could be dealt with promptly. The secretary had to make digests of complex documents ‘lest the rest of the Lords will not have them all read, or shall not have leisure’.8 Meticulous records of Council business had to be kept by the clerks – as much for the secretary’s own security as for general efficiency. If resolutions were not signed as having been approved by the members present, the secretary could find himself stranded; his colleagues denying knowledge of any decision which might prove unpopular with the queen.
The first and easily overlooked characteristic of Walsingham’s tenure of office is that the Council emerged as a government parallel with the monarch. Technically its role was advisory and administrative but in that it gave long and detailed consideration to all important issues and in that the queen was never present at its deliberations there was an inevitable separation between Crown and Council and the authority of the latter grew. Before Walsingham’s time it was normal for the group to converse three or four times a week. By the Armada year Council meetings were almost a daily phenomenon and lasted several hours. This, doubtless, reflects the growing complexity of international affairs but also indicates Walsingham’s diligence. Inevitably, councillors, who were busy men with household and other responsibilities, could not maintain 100 per cent attendance and the secretary was, at times, hard pressed to ensure a quorum. In these years there were about twenty Council members but normally between six and nine turned up for meetings, the most regular being Leicester, Burghley, Walsingham, Sir Francis Knollys (Treasurer of the Household), Sussex (Lord C
hamberlain), Lord Howard of Effingham (Lord Privy Seal) and Sir James Croft (Controller of the Household). These men constituted a kind of executive cabinet. As Professor Collinson has observed ‘at times there were two governments uneasily co-existing in Elizabethan England: the queen and her council’.9
Elizabeth was determined to maintain her supremacy and she never allowed her advisers to forget that that was exactly what they were – advisers. She could and did on occasion countermand their decisions. This could be incredibly frustrating for Walsingham and his colleagues, who believed, usually correctly, that having debated a subject at length and taken account of all the relevant facts, they knew better than their mistress what was needed. ‘My Lords here have carefully and faithfully discharged their duties in seeking to stay this dangerous course, but God hath thought good to dispose otherwise of things, in whose hands the hearts of all princes are.’10 So the long-suffering Walsingham wrote to the President of the Council of the North in April 1581. The colleagues had authorized a force of 1,000 men to cross the border. Subsequently Elizabeth had sent instructions that this force be reduced by half. Only hours later she had decided that there was to be no military action at all.
It is hardly surprising that Beale’s advice included stratagems for handling the equivocating queen. He should keep a list of important things that needed to be done in order to be able to advance them whenever his mistress was in a good mood. Forewarning of that mood was vital: ‘Learn before you access her Majesty’s disposition by some in the privy chamber with whom you must keep credit . . . When her highness is angry or not well disposed trouble her not with any matter which you desire to have done, unless extreme necessity urge it.’ Since Elizabeth had an almost pathological aversion to committing herself to any course of action, her secretary should be ready with diversionary tactics: ‘When her highness signeth, it shall be good to entertain her with some relation [i.e. anecdote] or speech whereat she may take some pleasure.’ As Beale knew, such subtleties did not come easily to Walsingham. Though cunning in his dealings with adversaries, he preferred plain speaking in court and Council. Because he was a man of strong convictions he tended to feel personally affronted when the queen rejected his advice. Beale doubtless had his old friend’s difficulties in mind when he counselled:
Be not dismayed with the controlments and amendments of such things which you shall have done, for you shall have to do with a princess of great wisdom, learning and experience . . . Princes themselves know best their own meaning and there must be time and experience to [become acquainted with] their humours before a man can do any acceptable service.
Walsingham may have paid lip service to that principle but he never really believed it. He frequently grumbled at Elizabeth’s indecisiveness, spoke about resigning and absented himself from court with pleas of ill-health. He suffered from a variety of ailments, foremost among which was a longstanding urinary disorder, but there were times when it was only weariness of spirit that kept him from court. So far from accepting that the queen always knew best, Walsingham did not flinch from protesting to her in person. In September 1581, driven to distraction by Elizabeth’s dithering over marriage with Anjou and her declining, for financial reasons, to enter a Protestant league, Walsingham delivered himself of a long more-in-sorrow-than-anger homily:
I cannot deny but I have been infinitely grieved to see the desire I have had to do your Majesty some acceptable service . . . so greatly crossed . . . I will leave to touch my particular [circumstances] though I have as great cause as any man that ever served in the place I now unworthily supply, being at home subject to sundry strange jealousies and in foreign service to displeasure . . . If either ambition or riches were the end of my strife my grief would be the less. But now to the public [matters] wherein if any thing shall escape my pen that may breed offence, I most heartily beseech your Majesty to ascribe it to love, which can never bring forth evil effects, though sometimes it may be subject to sharp censures. And first, for your Majesty’s marriage. If your Majesty mean it, remember that by the delay your Highness useth therein, you lose the benefit of time . . . If you mean it not, then assure yourself it is one of the worst remedies you can use. And as for the league we were in hand withal . . . Common experience teacheth that it is as hard in a politic body to prevent any mischief without [expense] as in a natural body diseased, to cure the same without pain. Remember, I humbly beseech your Majesty, the respect of [expense] hath lost Scotland and I would to God I had no cause to think that it might put your Highness in peril of the loss of England . . . It is strange, considering in what state your Majesty standeth, that in all the directions that we have now received, we have special [instruction] not to yield to anything that may be accompanied with [expense] . . . Heretofore your Majesty’s predecessors, in matters of peril, did never look into the [expenses], when their treasure was neither so great as your Majesty’s is, nor subjects so wealthy nor so willing to contribute . . . If this sparing and unprovident course be held still, the mischiefs approaching being so apparent as they are, I conclude therefore, having spoken in heart of duty, without offence to your Majesty, that no one that serveth in place of a Councillor, that either weigheth his own credit, or carrieth that sound affection to your Majesty as he ought to do, that would not wish himself in the farthest part of Ethiopia rather than enjoy the fairest palace in England.11
Elizabeth found it hard to stomach outspoken criticism, especially when it came from the likes of Walsingham, Archbishop Grindal or Paul Wentworth, Puritans who claimed that their high allegiance to God justified their ‘froward’ attitude towards their sovereign. When the queen was in a bad mood Walsingham was often the first to feel the rough edge of her tongue. Beale’s advice in such circumstances was: ‘Bear reproofs, false reports and such like crosses, if they be private and touch you not deeply, with silence or a modest answer. But if it be in company or touch your allegiance, honour or honesty mine advice is that you answer more roundly lest your silence cause standers-by to think ill of you.’
Walsingham also had to be conscious of his relationships with other Council members. He was their social inferior and, therefore, vulnerable. Beale pointed out the danger of the secretary becoming embroiled in personal and group rivalries. ‘Take heed you do not addict yourself to any faction that you may find among the councillors. You shall find they will only use you for their own turns and, that done, set little by you afterwards.’
Walsingham was fortunate in that the majority of leading councillors were united on most issues. He naturally gravitated towards Dudley, the leader of the Puritans and the champion of a more aggressive foreign policy. Burghley’s voice was more often heard urging caution but the differences between the two noblemen were differences of degree rather than kind. However, in the claustrophobic atmosphere of court and Council chamber, it was impossible that personal rivalries and clashes over policy would not occur.
Between Leicester and Sussex there was a long-established and deep-seated animosity. They quarrelled over most major policy issues – religion, Ireland, the Anjou marriage, relations with Spain and the Netherlands. Early in the reign the two nobles had openly headed court factions and their supporters had worn coloured favours. By the 1580s they confined themselves to heated exchanges across the Council table but even these could turn nasty. In July 1581 Elizabeth had to order them to their rooms like squabbling adolescents and six months later Burghley had to separate them when they came to blows. It should be the secretary’s concern, Beale suggested, to smoothe over disagreements rather than take sides.
Unity in the face of political crisis and a termagant queen was vital. Walsingham made sure that he never found himself stranded between Elizabeth and her Council. His caution was endorsed by Beale. ‘When there shall be any unpleasant matters to be imparted to her Majesty from the Council . . . let not the burden be laid on you alone but let the rest join with you.’
It is in his reference to Walsingham’s intelligence-gathering responsibiliti
es that Beale reveals to us his brother-in-law’s fundamental dilemma. His restless diligence and ingrained sense of duty, combined with his conviction that England stood with its back to the wall, facing packs of baying Catholic hounds, drove him to extend his energies and his purse beyond their limits. He lost no opportunity to acquire sources of information. These included ‘honest gentlemen in all the shires cities and principal towns’; diplomats; merchants, mariners and others whose work took them abroad; Huguenots and other Protestant friends; foreign courtiers who could be bribed to be Walsingham’s eyes and ears; as well as a handful of trained agents placed strategically in over forty centres throughout Europe. Maintaining this network, as well as paying self-appointed informants who thronged Walsingham’s office hoping to profit from items of gossip they had for sale, was enormously expensive. As well as the agents, Walsingham had to pay a large staff of clerks and scribes, some of whom were linguists or codifiers. Accurate figures for espionage work are notoriously difficult to come by. Privy Seal warrants suggest a steady increase in payments from £750 in 1582 to more than £2,000 in 1588. But Beale intimates that Walsingham received other payments from the Privy Seal of which he kept no adequate record. An estimate of 1610 makes the figures leap from £5,753 to £13,260 over the same period which suggests that Walsingham received royal funds via other channels. In addition he did not shrink from making payments from his own pocket. Beale commented that the queen was far from pleased with the scale of secret service expenditure and he added his own observation that Walsingham employed too many office staff. He seems to suggest that an unnecessary number of clerks were privy to confidential information and there can be little doubt that foreign spymasters were as adept as he at planting moles. It would be safe to say that, during Walsingham’s tenure of office, expenditure on the intelligence services trebled or quadrupled. Beale writes approvingly:
