by Derek Wilson
You know [Hunsdon’s] passion, whose propinquity in blood doth somewhat prevail here, especially being countenanced by [Burghley] who doth use [Hunsdon] as a counterpoise to [Leicester] though, God wot, he be but a weak one. [Burghley] hath always liked to entertain [circuitous] courses, which groweth from lack of resolution in him, which, I pray God, may not prove the destruction of England.15
The links between Walsingham and Leicester had recently become even stronger by the marriage of the secretary’s daughter, Frances, to Dudley’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney. The ceremony took place on 21 September, while Walsingham was still in Scotland. One cannot help wondering whether Elizabeth’s determination to send Walsingham out of London was to deprive him of the pleasure of attending the wedding of his only child. (His other daughter had died in 1580.) She had opposed the alliance ever since it had been mooted in 1581. There was no logical reason for disapproval of a match that most regarded as eminently suitable. The prospect of other people’s married happiness, especially those connected with the court, often aroused her jealous spite. Castelnau reported that the two councillors now united by their marriage had incurred the queen’s ‘grande jalousie’. Walsingham, naturally, was very distressed that Elizabeth, despite his long and faithful service, could not bring herself to offer her royal blessing to his daughter and son-in-law. This was yet one more burden piled upon the already overloaded wagon of his loyalty. Philip Sidney had no house of his own. Indeed, as a part of the nuptial agreement, Walsingham paid off his son-in-law’s debts. So, the newlyweds moved in with Sir Francis and Lady Ursula at Barn Elms and their town house, now located in Sydon or Seething Lane, at the eastern edge of the City, close by the Tower.
With matters as they were in the English and Scottish courts it is not surprising that Leicester sent word to his friend in September 1583 to return as soon as possible. It was still another month before Walsingham could get back to a desk, doubtless piled with urgent business. Unmasking what would become known as the Throck-morton plot was now his most urgent task but before that he was diverted by the need to examine a madman. A certain Warwickshire gentleman, John Somerville or Somerfield, had been received into the Roman church by Hugh Hall, a priest. He subsequently announced his intention of going to court to assassinate the queen where he hoped to see the head of this ‘serpent and viper’ set up on a pole. He was, naturally, brought to London where Walsingham examined him to see whether he had any connection with a wider Catholic conspiracy. He concluded that the poor man posed no threat and, had the times been different, Somerville might have been consigned to Bedlam and quietly forgotten. As it was he and Hall and Mr Arden, Somerville’s father-in-law (whose only crime was that he had known of Somerville’s insane ravings and concealed them from the authorities), were indicted for treason and condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
A few days later, Mendoza reported this and other items of gossip to Parma. His letter is worth quoting at some length because it indicates how jittery the whole court, from Elizabeth downwards, had become. Somerville, he reported, had been committed to Newgate, where he:
hanged himself with his own garters the day before he was to be executed with his father in law, who suffered accordingly . . . the Earl of Northumberland [is detained], his guard being Captain Laydon. The Earl of Arundel is to remain a prisoner in his own house, and the Countess his wife, who was in the castle of Arundel, being with child, is to come hither; who is a very brave lady, a great Catholic and a servant of [Elizabeth]. Mr. Shelley, a rich gentleman of Sussex, has been arrested on suspicion of having aided the lords who have gone to France in their embarkation. [Lord Paget and Charles Arundel] . . .
A Jesuit father embarking with great secrecy in an English ship, which sailed from Rye with a good wind, but six leagues out at sea, it veered so contrary that the sailors were forced to put into Queen-borough, some leagues away, where the inquisitors of the Queen, coming to inspect the ship, took him merely on suspicion and sent him to Lord Cobham, governor of the country, who had him brought before the Council. They, having examined him, ordered him into a prison not so strait of others of this kingdom, all of which are filled with Catholics; all those who had gone away being ordered to be brought back by troops and many others being taken, while the judges of the counties have orders to proceed against the goods of those who are not living in their own houses. This may show his Majesty with what fury [Elizabeth] permits the persecution of the good party daily to increase . . .
A soldier, returned from Terceira . . . [came] to the Court to give a letter to the Earl of Bedford and to see the Queen. [He proceeded with] such boldness that he found his way to the place where the Queen was with two other ladies. She . . . cried out angrily for him to be seized and carried to the chamber of the Earl of Leicester, where he was asked whether I had sent him to kill the Queen and if he bore arms, though he having nothing but a blunt knife. After giving him something to eat, they detained him in the Council Chamber, and questioned him anew, with caresses and promises, whether I had sent him thither, and how many times he had spoken with me about the [Queen], who replied that he had never seen me, nor knew any other person in the Indies or England whom they named. Afterwards examining him about the Pope, and seeing him to be a Protestant, they encouraged him, and the said manner gave out his entrance to be in order to irritate the people against me, and make them cry out that it was by my intervention that the lunatic desired to kill the Queen; who has said publicly to the ambassador of France that there are three hundred Catholics who have sworn to kill her.16
By the time this was written, in mid-December, Mendoza knew that Throckmorton had been arrested and tortured in the Tower. He must have realized that his own complicity in plots against the queen was about to come out, if it had not already. Walsingham pounced on 4 November. The operation was minutely planned. After dark two armed men called discreetly at Throckmorton’s house. Within the hour he was locked up in the Tower and Walsingham’s men were going through his lodgings with a fine tooth comb. Yet, for all that they had the element of surprise, the raiders failed to discover a casket of letters newly arrived from France, which one of Throckmorton’s men smuggled out of the house and took to Mendoza. The next day Mr Secretary had on his desk a bundle of incriminating evidence. There were names – the Earls of Arundel and Northumberland, Lord Howard, Charles Arundel and Thomas, Baron Paget. As we have seen the last two escaped to France but the others were detained. There were plans of south coast harbours which would make good landing places for invading troops. There was a cache of polemical pamphlets directed against Elizabeth and supporting Mary’s claim to the Crown. It was useful but it was not enough. Throckmorton knew a great deal more. It was just a matter of inducing him to divulge it and Walsingham knew the best man for the job – Thomas Norton.
Norton was understandably upset by the epithet ‘Rackmaster’ attached to him by Catholic propagandists. He protested to Walsingham in 1582: ‘I was never the Rackmaster but the meanest of all that were in commission and as it were clerk unto them, and the doing was by the hands only of the queen’s servants, and by Mr Lieutenant [of the Tower] only direction for much or little.’17 However, the fact that he was frequently called upon by Walsingham to examine prisoners indicates that he was something of an expert in interrogation techniques. He may not have personally turned the screw but he advised others when the application (or non-application) of physical torture might be most effective. His expertise proved invaluable in the examination of Throckmorton. The prisoner was first interviewed by members of the Council and there is no evidence that Walsingham was among their number. Throckmorton denied everything, claiming in words that have a modern ring that the incriminating papers had been planted on him. After that the councillors withdrew and left Throckmorton to the experts. One reason for Norton’s frequent employment in such work must surely be his close relationship with Walsingham. The secretary could be certain of receiving at first hand accurate accounts of all interrogations before o
ther members of the Council got wind of any significant revelations. On 18 November Walsingham ordered a second racking of the prisoner and, to make sure that he was kept instantly informed, he detailed Council clerk Thomas Wilkes also to be present. Throckmorton’s first session of torture had produced little of interest. Walsingham told Wilkes that, in his experience, a second racking usually brought victims to their breaking point. There is something chilling about his insouciant observation, ‘I suppose the grief of the last torture will suffice without any extremity of racking to make him more comformable than he hath hitherto shown himself.’18
He was quite right. When the prisoner was taken from his cell and marched across the courtyard to the White Tower where the rack was housed (the Tower of London never had a ‘torture chamber’ of the type beloved of novelists) every terrifying step must have raised the level of fear. From his earlier acquaintance with ‘the Earl of Exeter’s daughter’ (the rack) he knew exactly what lay in wait. The psychological pressure was every whit as bad as the physical. It took little turning of the screw to make Throckmorton gasp out everything he knew and another examinee, William Shelley, a Sussex gentleman, added more details to the plot whose lurid details now emerged. Philip II and Pope Gregory were to finance an invasion led in person by the Duke of Guise which would land at Arundel (and not in Scotland or the north of England, as earlier intelligence had suggested). The way was to be prepared for them by the Earl of Arundel, Lord Paget and the Earl of Northumberland who had extensive estates close to the port. Mary had been apprised of the plan and the principal intermediary between her and the conspirators had been Mendoza (not Castelnau as Walsingham had assumed). Nothing seems to have been said about what would happen to Elizabeth but she would obviously have lost her crown to Mary and, possibly, the head on which it rested.
Was this ever a feasible invasion plan or just another of the extravagant schemes conceived in the fervid imagination of the fanatical duc de Guise? It has to be seen in the context of the long-term, on-and-off Enterprise of England. Philip had for years been committed to the invasion of England – in theory. He had commissioned detailed maps of the south coast and chronicles of the nine seaborne invasions that had taken place since 1066. He had discussed strategic options with Parma and, in the summer of 1583, he had certainly met with Guise, the papal nuncio and various English exiles. It is significant that the Guise faction bypassed Henry III, presumably to prevent serious consequences for France if the operation miscarried. But in October Philip had once more decided that the time was not right. He did not discourage the conspirators but he did make it clear that they could not count on Spanish men and ships. It seems unlikely, in these circumstances, that the Catholic invasion of 1584 was anything more than a scheme which would not have got off the drawing board.
But, of course, Elizabeth’s councillors could not know that. They had to decide what action to take based on the information they had. They debated this crucial matter at great length. The serious issues at stake were: the evident casus belli which now existed vis-à-vis Spain, the involvement of prominent Catholic nobles who had sizeable followings, the fate of Mary Stuart, and the need not to compromise valuable intelligence sources. It is the complexity of the situation which explains the government’s slow, one might almost say leisurely, proceedings. It was important for the ongoing intelligence operation not to alarm potential contacts by precipitate action. Quietly, patiently, Walsingham continued his work of unearthing suspects and fitting more and more pieces into the jigsaw. His most important source continued to be Bruno and, for that reason, no action was taken against Castelnau. The Council drew up a list of charges but the aged diplomat was not molested.
Mendoza was a different matter. He was too astute to leave many chinks in his armour and he was too committed a Catholic for remonstration to have any effect. It was on 19 January that the Spanish ambassador was invited to meet with the Council in the Fleet Street house of Sir Thomas Bromley, the Lord Chancellor. When all were assembled, it was Walsingham, with his command of Italian, who confronted Mendoza with his crimes and conveyed the queen’s decision that he quit her realm within fifteen days. The arrogant grandee blustered but had no alternative but to comply. The dismissing of his ambassador (the second in succession to have his residency abruptly terminated) infuriated Philip and when Elizabeth sent an envoy to Spain to explain her conduct he declined to receive him. Mendoza was not replaced and this severance of diplomatic relations was, in effect, the prelude to war. Throckmorton was not put on trial until May 1584 and, even when indicted, it was a further seven weeks before he suffered a traitor’s death.
It was not quite so easy to deal with the two members of England’s ancient noble houses languishing in prison. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was placed under house arrest in December and only transferred to the Tower on 9 January. Percy was the brother of the earl executed for leading the Northern Rebellion in 1569 and had been arrested in 1571 for being in communication with Mary Stuart. The Council had no doubt about his involvement in the Throck-morton plot but brought no charges against him. Howard, younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk executed in the wake of the Ridolfi plot, had been in and out of prison several times in the intervening years. He, like Percy, had secretly made contact with the Queen of Scots and was handsomely pensioned by Mendoza. His place of confinement was the cramped and insalubrious Fleet prison. Both men were detained for eighteen months without charge. The government were well aware that two high-profile treason trials would provoke widespread discussion of the religious issue and the real risk of civil disorder. Executions often proved counterproductive and there was also the possibility that juries of the noblemen’s peers might not bring in the desired verdicts. All this indecision led up to a tragic conclusion in the summer of 1585. On the night of 20–21 June, Northumberland was found dead in his cell, shot through the head with a pistol and the weapon lying by his side. A jury brought in a verdict of suicide but that, of course, did not satisfy conspiracy theorists. Suspicion fell on Sir Christopher Hatton who, it was alleged, had ordered the Lieutenant of the Tower to change the guard on Percy’s cell on the night of his death. It can scarcely be a coincidence that, within days of the earl’s death, Howard was released into the custody of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the first stage in his rehabilitation.
On the diplomatic front the forging of a closer relationship with the United Provinces now assumed paramount importance. If Spain and its Catholic allies were seriously considering invasion it was vital that the Protestant states banded together to defend themselves and to guard the Narrow Sea between them. This was energetically urged by Leicester, Walsingham and their allies. Thus it was that Mr Secretary, although confined to his bed for several weeks in early 1584, painstakingly drafted a naval treaty between the two states. The pattern of international rivalries was beginning to emerge clearly. It was a pattern Walsingham had always recognized. So the news that reached him in mid-July from George Galpin, representative of the Merchant Venturers in the Low Countries, was particularly alarming.
A heavy and lamentable [disaster] is fallen out by the sudden loss of the Prince of Orange who on Tuesday in the afternoon, as he was risen from dinner and went from the eating place to his chamber, even entering out of a door to go up the stairs, the Burgundian that had brought him news of Monsieur his death, making show as if he had some letter to impart and to talk with his Excellency with a pistol shot him under the breast, whereof he fell down dead in the place and never spake word, to the wonderful grief of all there present.19
Chapter 8
‘BE YOU ALL STOUT AND RESOLUTE’
1584–8
Like the successive eruptions of a long-rumbling volcano, the years we must now consider exploded with shattering events – Leicester’s Netherlands campaign, the Babington plot, the execution of Mary Stuart and the coming of the Armada. We know, of course, that Elizabeth’s England came safely through these crisis years and our understanding of them tends to be coloured by t
he nation’s fortuitous deliverance in 1588 and the queen’s famous ‘heart and stomach of a king’ speech. For those who lived through this tumultuous period, however, the outcome was very far from certain. For Walsingham it was the Armageddon he had long prophesied and sought to avert. Mounting anxiety drove him and his colleagues to extreme and even desperate measures.
In the dismal summer of 1584 bad news arrived by almost every post. As more details of Orange’s assassination came in two worrying facts, though not hitherto unknown, were freshly reinforced. The first was that Philip II had put a price on Orange’s head and was ready to reward any denizen of the criminal underworld who would dispose of his enemies for him. The second was that there were Catholic fanatics who needed no such financial incentive. This became clear from the macabre description of the torture of Balthazar Gerard, Orange’s killer.
The same evening he was beaten with ropes and his flesh cut with split quills, after which he was put into a vessel of salt and water, and his throat was soaked in vinegar and brandy; and notwithstanding these torments, there was no sign whatever of distress or repentance, but, on the contrary, he said he had done an act acceptable to God, by killing a man who had been the cause of the death of more than five hundred thousand persons and that for so doing, he was confident that he should be sanctified and received into the heavens into the first place, near to God.1
Three days later Sir Edward Stafford passed on information he had received in Paris from a ‘reliable source’ close to the Spanish ambassador. Other similar atrocities, he reported, were in preparation, including attacks on Elizabeth. ‘There is no doubt that she is a chief mark they shoot at and, seeing there were men cunning enough to enchant a man, and to encourage one to kill the Prince of Orange in the midst of Holland, and a knave found desperate enough to do it, we must think that hereafter anything may be done.’2 This merely confirmed intelligence Walsingham and other councillors were receiving via their various continental networks.
