Sir Francis Walsingham

by Derek Wilson

  We will return shortly to the subject of torture in the war on terror. First let us hear what Norton himself had to say about the appropriate way to handle Catholics:

  Touching toleration to papists, I have ever holden, and have published this opinion, that her subjects holding popish heresies upon persuasion of conscience were to be borne withal and relieved by the instruction and the leisure of God’s Spirit to be attended, so long as they did not disturb the church, and held them within allegiance and loyal affections to the queen.6

  Walsingham was of much the same opinion. Those whose religious convictions had not yet been reformed could not be coerced into faith. They needed to be educated. He favoured more biting recusancy fines as a means of encouraging offenders to attend their parish churches where they might be brought to truth, in Norton’s words, by ‘instruction and the leisure of God’s Spirit’. Underground sacerdotalism was a more urgent problem The priests who flitted about the shires from hiding place to hiding place were the subjects of a foreign ruler who had set himself to removing Elizabeth Tudor from her throne. However much they disavowed political motives, there was no escape from the logic that they were emissaries of a regime which was financing invasions in Ireland and fomenting plots in England and Scotland. Converts were, by the terms of Regnons in excelsis, expected to pray for and give support to military intervention by a Catholic invader. The remembered images of 1572 were still vivid to Walsingham. He had seen what frenzied mobs could do when stirred by their priests and had no reason to doubt that the same would happen in England if Catholics were to gain the upper hand.

  Thanks to the energy and efficiency of magistrates, informers and spies, several of these ecclesiastical ‘runagates’ were being arrested but that only solved one part of the problem. The government still had to decide how to proceed against them. An analysis Walsingham committed to writing in 1586 showed a pragmatic and essentially secular understanding of the problem. He dismissed a policy of wholesale execution. Not only was it morally indefensible, it was counter-productive. Creating martyrs had never been an effective way of halting a religious movement. Walsingham recommended that a few priests should suffer the penalty for treason, ‘for example’s sake’. The rest should be banished or held in secure detention centres (an old idea now resurrected). He even, briefly, advocated a scheme to allow priests and Catholic laymen to emigrate to America.

  In the early months of 1581 parliament struggled to come up with legislation which would give the government powers to deal effectively with the Catholic threat. The draconian first draft was considerably watered down in committee and, though we do not know whose guiding hands were the strongest, the statute that eventually emerged enshrined Walsingham’s principle of dealing with proselytization as a political offence. Recusancy fines were swingeingly increased. From one shilling a week they rose to £20 a month. The basis for prosecuting priests was defined as deflecting English people from their allegiance or converting them to Catholicism with the intention of undermining their loyalty. The Act made clear that religious belief and even the effort to spread that belief were not per se punishable by the state, unless it could be shown that political subversion was intended. The final wording of the ‘Act to retain the Queen’s Majesty’s subjects in their due obedience’ was a piece of masterly lawyerese; it avoided the opprobrium of being an instrument of religious persecution while enabling the courts, whenever they wished, to interpret religious zeal as treasonable intent.

  The Act fell a long way short of the measures the parliamentary draftsmen had initially proposed and it has customarily been assumed that the modifications were made on the queen’s insistence. Elizabeth was temperamentally disinclined to ‘make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’. She was also instinctively wary of measures initiated in her Puritan-dominated House of Commons. But the Council – and this certainly included Walsingham – were also involved in steering the bill to its final form. It was all very well for MPs to indulge in anti-papal oratory but the government had to come up with workable legislation. Any law depended for its effectiveness on the willingness of local courts and magistrates to implement it. Any attempt to impose widespread persecution would have been resented and thwarted in the shires, particularly in those farthest from London. If Walsingham ever needed to be reminded that politics is the art of the possible he had only to reflect on his long and tortuous relationship with the queen. As it was, the new Act allowed Walsingham the freedom to proceed against apprehended priests on an individual basis. No one knew more than he about the men his agents (and other vigilantes) tracked down and other members of the Council frequently deferred to his judgement on the best way to deal with them. Thus it was that Walsingham decided who might be ‘turned’ into government agents, who should remain under lock and key, who ought to be banished and who should suffer the dramatic and sanguinary penalty imposed on traitors.

  In the parliament of 1572–83 Walsingham sat as a member for Surrey but there is very little evidence of his involvement in its proceedings. However, he remained in close contact with Thomas Norton who was very active in the 1581 session. He was a principal draftsman of the Recusancy Act and when a new sedition bill came before parliament he tried to turn it into a second specifically anti-Catholic measure. The bill, as proposed, toughened the law on slandering the sovereign and also made it an offence to cast horoscopes or ‘by prophesying, calculation or other unlawful act’ try to determine how long the queen would live or who would succeed her. As the years passed, Elizabeth’s subjects became increasingly anxious about the future and this provided opportunity for necromancers and preachers to impress the gullible with claims of hidden knowledge on the sensitive subject. The proposed Act was not directed against Catholics. Indeed, it was more likely to catch Puritan pamphleteers and preachers. (The memory of Stubbe’s fate was still vivid in people’s minds.) Norton now proposed an amendment which would make it an offence to proclaim that the doctrine of the English church was heretical or schismatic.

  Norton had, by this time, interrogated several captured priests. He had been involved in the examination of Cuthbert Mayne and knew at first hand how tricky it had been to secure a safe conviction. The priest had been offered a way of escape: all he had to do was swear allegiance to Elizabeth as supreme governor of the church. This he could not, in conscience, do. Was it then that Norton had the idea of applying a doctrinal litmus test to all suspected Catholics? By whatever route Norton arrived at his amendment, it amounted to bringing religious belief firmly under the umbrella of civil law. So much for Norton’s insistence on toleration! In the event his ploy failed and, within months, this most loyal of the queen’s subjects found himself in the Tower for incurring the queen’s displeasure.

  These complex parliamentary manoeuvrings indicate how tense and divisive the Catholic problem was. Faced with the mounting likelihood of invasion and the present fact of infiltration, Walsingham and his colleagues might have responded by creating draconian laws which would have filled the prisons and kept the executioners busy for years. This was, in reality, not an option. Firstly because of the size of the problem. The arrest of thousands of Englishmen on suspicion of treason – even if the courts could be induced to prosecute – would have been intolerably divisive and would have played into the hands of England’s enemies. But pragmatism was not the only, or the main, reason for pursuing a more cautious policy. Massive state persecution was morally indefensible. The proof of that lay ready to hand. Spain had gone down that route and ended up as a police state. France had gone down that route and ended up in ungovernable chaos. So Walsingham, who shared Norton’s abhorrence of popery and his longing to cleanse England of Romish defilement, refused to accept his friend’s apparently simple solution.

  The Commons – or, at least, its Puritan majority – could not allow the session to end without continuing to press the need for further church reform. Even those who were prepared to accept episcopal government were scandalized by the abuses whi
ch remained to be addressed, such as non-residence, the poor educational quality of many clergy, and heavy-handed discipline of radicals. After much earnest debate the house deputed four councillors – Walsingham, his co-secretary Thomas Wilson, Hatton and Mildmay – to present their grievances to a committee of bishops. Reporting back to the house, Mildmay acknowledged, on behalf of the queen, that earlier parliamentary complaints had been ignored by the clergy. He assured members: ‘her Majesty would eftsoons commit the same unto such others of them as with all convenient speed, without remissness and slackness, should see the same accomplished accordingly, in such sort as the same shall neither be delayed or undone.’7

  Elizabeth did, indeed, take the matter up with the bishops and exhorted them to redress such grievances as they should decide needed to be dealt with. The result was, of course, that nothing happened. Inevitably, several members felt that, once again, they had been fobbed off by the queen with empty answers. Norton was reported to the Council as one of the malcontents. In his defence he insisted that, while being highly critical of the bishops, he had not spoken ill of the queen.

  Norton, like Walsingham, now belonged to the older generation of Puritans. If some of his opinions and actions seem to be mutually contradictory it is probably because he was sensitive to the challenge of younger Puritans who were more extreme and more demonstrative. They viewed their elders as compromisers and yesterday’s men. Norton was anxious to show that he yielded nothing to the young Turks in zeal but, in fact, he had inevitably mellowed and had learned that confrontation was not the most effective way of securing change – certainly with a queen like Elizabeth. Walsingham found himself in much the same position. His attitude towards impatient reformers was still: ‘If you knew with what difficulty we retain what we have and that seeking of more might hazard . . . that which we already have, you would then deal warily in this time when policy carrieth more sway than zeal.’8

  As we have seen, part of Walsingham’s strategy in dealing with the Jesuit menace was to make examples of the more notorious offenders. In July 1581 his agents achieved a major coup. Acting on information received, a local magistrate arrived at Leyford Grange, near Wantage, the home of a known recusant, with an armed posse. They subjected the house and outbuildings to an inch-by-inch search but it was only after many hours that they discovered three priests cowering in a secret room. One of them was Edmund Campion, a star of the English mission, a man of considerable intellect who, before his defection to Rome, had been marked out by the queen for special favour. Walsingham was just about to embark for France and it was from beyond the Channel that he wrote urging Campion’s prosecutors to throw the book at him.

  The captives were conveyed to London and, because the Council ordered that their arrival should be made into a public spectacle, they were paraded through the streets of the capital, tied securely to their horses. Campion bore a placard bearing the words ‘Edmund Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. After a few days in the Tower Campion was brought to the house of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Bromley, to be examined on behalf of the Council by Leicester and Hatton. They were doubtless anxious about the impression he would make at his forthcoming trial, as was the queen. Campion was recognized by all who knew him as sweet-natured, clear-headed and a gifted orator. He was careful not to condemn himself by any unguarded word and his examiners ordered that he be returned to prison and, if necessary, put to the rack. Walsingham, still in France, played no part in the subsequent interrogation which went on for almost three months but Beale deputized for him and Thomas Norton took care of the application of torture.

  One remarkable – and probably ill-advised – aspect of Campion’s ordeal was public disputation. On four separate occasions he was obliged to debate with Protestant theologians several points of doctrine. If this exercise was devised to draw attention to the pernicious opinions of the accused and the fair-mindedness of his accusers (and we should bear in mind that in no Catholic country were Protestant prisoners permitted to air and defend their beliefs in public), it backfired badly. Norton, one of Campion’s adversaries, complained that the prisoner used the events to deliver prepared speeches and that the open invitation to the public enabled the priest’s friends and sympathizers to attend. London was soon awash with pro-and anti-Campion tracts.

  The Council, therefore, had to consider carefully how they were going to proceed judicially against the Jesuits. They decided not to use the recent Act, which could have seen the trial bogged down in religious issues. Instead they fell back on Edward III’s Treason Act of 1351. The prosecution had witnesses, predominantly Charles Sledd, ready to swear that Campion and his colleagues were parties to a plot, hatched in the Rome seminary, to assassinate the queen and stir up rebellion in preparation for an invasion. The trial took place on 20 November in a packed Westminster Hall. The presiding judge was Sir Christopher Wray, Chief Justice of Queen’s Bench who had been in charge of Stubbe’s trial. The prosecutor was Edmund Anderson, the Attorney-General who arrived fresh from the trials of nonconformists in East Anglia. Both were sound establishment men, pledged to defending the status quo against attack from extremists – of whatever colour. Campion handled the defence well and he enjoyed a wide measure of sympathy, particularly when the audience noted that torture had left him unable to raise his right hand in order to enter his plea of not guilty. Onlookers were divided in their opinions. Not so the jury. Eleven days later Campion and two companions were drawn on hurdles to Tyburn to face death by hanging, drawing and quartering.

  Then, while the Campion affair was still a cause célèbre being argued about in alehouses and market places, something remarkable happened. Within four days of the Jesuit’s death, Thomas Norton, his chief tormentor, was arrested and locked up in the Bloody Tower. His offence was, apparently, having spoken against the Anjou match. If he had offended the queen in this way no evidence survives and Norton was clearly astonished by his sudden arrest. There were certainly sterner critics of Elizabeth’s matrimonial proceedings – some in the Council – who were allowed free speech. The timing cannot have been a coincidence. ‘Rackmaster’ Norton was an unpopular figure and public sympathy for Campion swelled the numbers of those who would have loved to see him behind bars, if not stretched on his own instrument of torture. Norton’s arrest looks very much like a sop to the populace, a move ordered by Elizabeth to demonstrate her even-handedness and also to placate the French.

  Norton’s captivity was far from arduous. He remained in the Tower until March 1582, but was allowed many comforts and privileges. He was furnished with writing materials and fired off several letters to prominent persons proclaiming his innocence. He also received visitors. Among them was Sir Francis Walsingham. The secretary stood by his old friend as far as he could. He interceded with the queen for the prisoner’s release. He promised to take care of Norton’s wife, who was in the early stages of a complete mental collapse. And he gave Norton a new literary commission. He proposed that the fifty-year-old author, poet, lawyer and parliamentarian should draw on his long experience to analyse the English church and set forth ‘such things as are meet to be considered of for the stay of the present corruption in religion’. The result, known as Norton’s Devices, was not printed but both Walsingham and Burghley owned manuscript copies and his ideas on reforming, not just the church, but the legal, judicial and educational systems were, we must assume, useful to them in the framing of policy. Norton’s conciliar friends secured his complete return to freedom in April 1582, whereupon he resumed his various activities in close association with Walsingham. He had only two more years of life left but they were hectic. He continued to publish his observations on religious matters and to examine Catholic prisoners. He rebutted the attacks of Catholic pamphleteers. In addition, Walsingham set him to write a massive historical review of important events and personalities since the Norman conquest. Whatever the queen might think of Thomas Norton and however he might be perceived by the people, he enjoyed the friendship, support and
confidence of Francis Walsingham to the very end. And he had one last significant service to perform for his patron.

  The duc d’Anjou left England on 7 February. Elizabeth played her love games adroitly to the last, accompanying her departing guest as far as Canterbury and there making a major production of their tearful adieus. The Frenchman left with a noble escort led by none other than the Earl of Leicester. In fact, during the marriage negotiations over the preceding months, the queen had increasingly upped the ante, even to the point of demanding that Henry III should close down the Catholic seminary at Rheims. She thus made it impossible for the French to agree to her terms. Instead of marrying Anjou she supplied him with more funds for his Netherlands campaigns. Unfortunately, the faction-riven Dutch Protestants were quite ungovernable. Also Anjou was no match for Parma, nor could the money the duke was able to raise in France and England outweigh the Indies gold Philip now had at his command. In June 1583 a humiliated Anjou crossed the border back into France. Elizabeth had nothing to show for her investment.

  She certainly had not secured a firm alliance with France. Despite Walsingham’s arduous and thankless efforts to manufacture some kind of entente, the Guises and their allies had been working behind the scenes against England. The focus of their attention was Scotland and their aim was to work on the young king and revive the auld alliance. Esmé Stuart, Sieur d’Aubigny, had made an excellent start. The Frenchification of James VI’s court and the fall of Morton were severe blows to English policy. They put new heart into Mary Stuart. In 1582 the Queen of Scots was forty and had spent more than a third of her life being shunted around various strongholds in the English Midlands. She knew full well that Walsingham kept a close watch on all her servants and visitors and intercepted her letters whenever he could. One of her few distractions was dreaming up new ways of maintaining contact with her supporters in Scotland and France and the London embassies of Henry III and Philip II. Mary’s guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was certainly kept on his toes: