Sir Francis Walsingham

by Derek Wilson

  Davison was with Leicester in the Low Countries in 1585–6 and it was he whom the earl despatched to Elizabeth to explain why he had disobeyed orders in assuming the governorship of the rebel state. Stoically the emissary bore the brunt of the queen’s fury, though at one point he, like others before him, contemplated resignation. What he found harder to stomach was Leicester’s reaction. The disgraced favourite tried to put the blame for his actions on Davison’s shoulders. ‘You did chiefly persuade me to take this charge upon me,’ without waiting for the queen’s approval, he asserted.2 It was probably quite true that Davison, in his enthusiasm for the Protestant cause had urged Leicester to be bold but that does not excuse Leicester’s cowardly behaviour in trying to shelter behind an underling. Walsingham obviously thought the same, though he expressed himself more tactfully in a letter to Dudley: ‘The gentleman is very much grieved with the dislike he understandeth your lordship hath of him. For my own part, I do not find but that he hath dealt well, both for the cause and towards your lordship, whose good opinion and favour he doth greatly desire.’3

  In the following September Davison was appointed to assist Walsingham, in view of the secretary’s fluctuating health. He was thus thrust into the centre of government at a time of great crisis. While other councillors, including Walsingham, were busy at Fotheringhay and Westminster, he was attendant on the queen at Windsor, then Richmond, taking every opportunity to urge on her the necessity for Mary’s execution. Then, in December, when the Council came together again, Walsingham absented himself from court and Davison was once more left exposed. Everyone at this stage was walking on eggshells. They knew how difficult it was going to be to obtain Elizabeth’s irreversible decision and they also had a sense that it was now or never. Davison was very aware of his situation and refused to present the warrant for Elizabeth’s signature until she requested it via a senior Council member (in this case Charles Howard, Lord Admiral).

  Once the warrant was signed there followed a succession of hurried secret meetings. No one wanted to be held personally responsible. Davison reported to Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester, Bromley, Hatton and Robert Beale. He told them of his anxiety that the queen would change her mind. When the next day (2 February), she instructed him to delay having the great seal attached, the councillors’ worst fears were confirmed. The sealing had already been done but the warrant’s despatch could still be halted. Walsingham was not present at the Council meeting on the 3rd when eleven of his colleagues decided to arrange for the execution. Both queen and Council made sure that Walsingham was kept fully informed of developments. The letter authorizing the warrant’s despatch to Fotheringhay was rushed from Greenwich to Seething Lane for his signature and, as we have seen, Burghley and Walsingham communicated over the choreography of the execution. Davison and Robert Beale also maintained contact with their chief. When Beale was selected as the courier to ride post haste into Northamptonshire with the Council’s covert instructions, it was in his interests as well as his colleague’s to ensure that Walsingham knew what they were doing. They had no intention of being ground between the upper and nether millstones of queen and Council. They knew perfectly well that there would be unpleasantness ahead.

  The storm burst on 10 February. Elizabeth ordered Council members to her private chambers for a dressing down. Walsingham was not present. Nor was Burghley, who was, apparently, suffering from a riding accident. Absence did not save the Lord Treasurer from the royal fury. He was banned the court for more than a month and even then he had not heard the end of the matter. On 15 March he complained to Hatton of ‘the late sharp and most heavy speech of her Majesty to myself in the hearing of my Lord of Leicester and Mr Secretary Walsingham.’4 We know, therefore, that Walsingham was by then back at court. He had, in fact, returned on the 14th of the previous month – ie as soon as the immediate furore was over. Of all the major players in the events of February, he seems to have been the one who came through relatively unscathed. Elizabeth had already decided to throw the book at Davison. She even enquired of her lawyers whether she might use her prerogative powers to send the unfortunate man to the block. Walsingham did his best for his friend. As soon as he heard of Davison’s incarceration he wrote to Burghley expressing his genuine shock and urging the treasurer to intervene. He wasted no time in doing so, pointing out to the queen that to despatch a councillor to the Tower, except on a charge of treason, was quite unprecedented and would raise eyebrows in foreign courts. Walsingham had the prisoner set down his own version of events and, on 11 March, he sent a mutual friend, Thomas Randolph, to discuss the situation with him. As well as being a wise senior diplomat, well versed in Scottish affairs, Randolph was Walsingham’s brother-in-law (husband of his sister, Anne). Randolph discovered a depressed but unrepentant Davison who rejected the charge that he had disobeyed the queen by failing to keep the signed warrant a secret (and thus enabling the Council to go behind her back in authorizing the execution). His perfectly reasonable defence was that he had only shared the information with leading members of the Council who were in the queen’s confidence. Over the next few days Davison was visited by other councillors. By the time the poor man’s in camera trial took place in the Star Chamber on 28 March, his story had changed. He now accepted full responsibility on the basis that he must have misunderstood the queen’s intentions. He meekly received his sentence – an open-ended prison term and an enormous fine he could not possibly pay. He doubtless knew that there was never any intention that the fine should be paid. After nineteen months of probably not very onerous confinement he was quietly released, on the authority of Burghley and Walsingham. Although he never returned to his job he continued to draw his pay and, in 1594, Elizabeth made him a generous grant of lands.

  A distinct odour of fish hangs over the whole of these proceedings. A deal had been struck. Davison allowed himself to be used to protect the reputations of his seniors and particularly the queen. The only way the Council majority’s determination to get rid of Mary could be squared with Elizabeth’s determination to keep her hands clean was to put the blame on someone else. The obvious candidate was the intermediary between queen and Council, the secretary. In normal circumstances that would have been Walsingham. It is inconceivable that Elizabeth would have put him on trial, shut him up in the Tower and, in effect, sacked him from his job. Walsingham was an internationally known and respected figure. Even foreign diplomats and courtiers who loathed his religion acknowledged his honesty and intellectual stature. His disgrace would have been a huge scandal which would have reflected on the queen. Another reason for keeping Walsingham out of the firing line was that Elizabeth needed him – now more than ever. She had to have help in disseminating through diplomatic channels the official account of Mary’s execution. She had to know how that account was being received in foreign courts. More important still, it became daily more vital to have intelligence about Philip II’s invasion plans. If someone had to be thrown to the wolves it could not be Francis Walsingham.

  The only question which remains is, how complicit was Walsingham, himself, in these shabby dealings? Robert Beale, who was highly indignant at the treatment meted out to himself and his colleague, exonerated his brother-in-law from blame. Describing the events of February 1587 years later he claimed, ‘Mr Secretary Walsingham was thought too stout, and would utter all. Therefore, Mr Davison must bear the burden.’ The word ‘stout’ carried, at that time, a range of meanings, viz: ‘proud’, ‘stubborn’, ‘unyielding’, ‘defiant’, ‘uncompromising’, ‘honest’. What Beale was saying was that Walsingham was too straightforward to be a party to the underhand dealings of either the Council or the queen. We may recall the advice Beale gave in 1592 regarding the conduct of the principal secretary and which had Walsingham’s example very much in mind:

  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 advi
ce is that you answer more roundly, lest your silence cause standers-by to think ill of you and to retain it in memory and thereupon to work your farther indignation and discredit.5

  Walsingham was too honest to condone by his silence Elizabeth’s subterfuge and too canny to shoulder the blame for her actions.

  What I believe happened was something like this: the previous December there had been a falling-out between the queen and her secretary which had resulted in the latter leaving the court. He had subsequently been taken ill and was completely incapacitated throughout most of January. By the end of the month he was sufficiently recovered to return to his house in the City and to conduct business from his sickbed. It now suited Elizabeth to keep him away from the centre of the action, even though vitally important matters of state were cropping up thick and fast. The business of the warrant would never have worked if Walsingham had been the courier. Therefore, she deliberately delayed his recall until mid-February. If anyone contrived Walsingham’s absence during the crucial days covering the end of the Mary Stuart affair it was the queen.

  If Elizabeth had any doubts whatsoever about the priceless value of Walsingham’s service she had only to peruse the letter he wrote to John Maitland, his opposite number in Scotland, within days of his return to court. Reactions to Elizabeth’s execution of a foreign royal personage had been predictably harsh. Her brother monarchs in France and Spain were genuinely shocked and outraged by the deed, as were many of their Catholic subjects. Reports poured into Walsingham’s office of formal diplomatic protests and popular demands for revenge. On the quayside at Rouen mobs attacked English ships and their crews. From Paris Stafford sent so many accounts of French outrage that Walsingham abruptly told him to stop providing information that was upsetting their mistress. But the country most closely affected by Mary’s death was, of course, Scotland. On 14 February, Elizabeth had sent Sir Robert Carey to Edinburgh with instructions to give James the official version of his mother’s death. In a personal note she wrote of ‘the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident’ (my emphasis). She proclaimed her innocence and assured the king: ‘I am not so base-minded that fear of any living creature or prince should make me afraid to do that were just or, done, to deny the same . . . as I know this [the execution] was deserved, yet if I had meant it I would never lay it on other’s shoulders.’6 Well might we conclude, ‘The lady doth protest too much!’ The letter was not delivered. Carey arrived at the border to find it closed and all communication between the two nations at a standstill.

  The execution of Mary had been a severe affront to Scottish national pride and popular demonstrations demanded reprisals. At court James’ nobles were urging him not to submit, in cowardly fashion, to this blow against his dignity. One courtier appeared before the king in fall armour, claiming that this was the only suitable mourning to wear for the ex-queen mother. More seriously, the French ambassador pounced upon the death at Fotheringhay as a means of turning James’ affections away from England and back to the ‘auld alliance’. It was to stiffen the young king’s resistance to any such blandishments that Walsingham wrote his long letter, fully intending it to be brought to James’ attention. Could he succeed where the queen had failed?

  Walsingham wasted no ink justifying what had been done. His letter was couched purely in terms of realpolitik, with a large element of bluff. He advised the king not to allow himself to be drawn into a warlike alliance against England, a nation which was ‘so prepared . . . to defend itself, both otherwise and by the conjunction of Holland and Zeeland’s forces by sea’ that it ‘need not fear what all the potentates of Europe, being banded together against us can do’. Walsingham preyed upon James’ known dislike of violence by suggesting that any war might result in the king being taken prisoner or slain. France, he warned, was only interested in restoring Catholicism in Scotland. And let not James, Walsingham lectured, delude himself into thinking that he could ride the tiger of Spanish militarism and avoid the inevitable consequences. Philip would be no more disposed than Henry III to permit the union of England and Scotland, nor would he allow James to exercise his own religion.

  Should he seek to placate the powerful continental monarchs by voluntarily converting to Catholicism, this would not save him. He should contemplate the fate of Dom Antonio, a devout Catholic prince despoiled of his inheritance by his voracious neighbour. Finally, Walsingham pointed out that espousing the Roman faith would not win him support south of the border. English Catholics, he averred (presumably with tongue in cheek) were all united in their loyalty to the Crown. English people would not welcome him: ‘the Protestants because he had renounced the religion wherein he was with great care brought up, the papists because they could not be assured in short space he was truly turned to their faith. Yea, all men should have reason to forsake him who had thus dissembled and forsaken his God.’7

  This letter certainly struck the right note insofar as James VI was very carefully weighing his options. If he bided his time and meekly took his pension then the chances were that the ripe fruit of the English Crown would eventually fall into his lap. On the other hand, with foreign help he might harvest that Crown much sooner. Walsingham tried to persuade Elizabeth formally to acknowledge James as her heir but she was as immovable as ever on that subject. However, James was, very slowly, brought to regard discretion as the better part of valour and to resist the sabre-rattling of his more belligerent nobles.

  Scotland was only one of Walsingham’s worries. He was still busy keeping the Low Countries war going and trying to persuade Elizabeth to succour the Huguenot cause. He was even trying to persuade the Ottoman sultan to renew anti-Spanish hostilities in the Mediterranean. As he confessed to a friend: ‘I had never more business lying on my hands sithence I entered this charge, than at present.’8

  But the great challenge was preparation for Philip’s Armada. Walsingham forced his ailing body to keep going long enough to cope with that crisis he had always known as inevitable. The coming together of Catholic forces against England which he had feared was now a reality. Everyone knew that Spain’s long-mooted invasion was imminent. But there was no agreement as to what Philip’s strategy was, how large his fleet would be, when or at what precise target it would be launched. Never was intelligence work more important than in these nail-biting months and Walsingham’s expenditure on his network increased dramatically. Accurate figures are impossible to achieve but we shall not be far out if we reckon that in 1587–8 Walsingham spent half as much again as in the previous year. He reorganized the system. A ‘Plot for intelligence out of Spain’, drawn up in spring 1587, made provision for the setting up of a clearing house in Rouen to handle information gathered by agents in France’s Atlantic ports and for staff in other agencies to be increased. One reason for this reconstruction was that in 1585 Philip had closed all Spanish ports to English merchants. Intriguingly, Italy was the most vital intelligence nerve centre for keeping up to date on Spanish activities. All the independent states in the peninsula maintained their own embassies in Spain and were often the first to discern significant movements of ships and men. They were usually quite obliging about selling on information to England. Walsingham’s couriers were constantly toing and froing along the roads between Italy and the Channel coast.

  A glut of information can be just as dangerous as a dearth. The true art lies in properly evaluating it. Throughout the summer his staff tried to decipher and co-ordinate reports that simply could not be squared. In July, fifty-seven ships and 10,000 troops were supposedly assembled in Lisbon and only waiting to link up with the convoy vessels from the silver fleet. But another report gave the numbers as a hundred ships and 15,000 soldiers. By mid-September the Armada had, reputedly, set sail – en route for a landing in Scotland. These alarmist messages were all false. Any estimate of Spain’s preparedness for the Enterprise of England was complicated by many factors. Philip kept changing his plans. He received conflicting advice from Parma and from his chief na
val adviser, the Marquis of Santa Cruz. Negotiations with Sixtus V went unsatisfactorily because the pope was reluctant to make the degree of financial commitment the king looked for. When Philip did begin to assemble his fleet annoying attacks by Francis Drake obliged him to modify his plans. Another problem Walsingham had to contend with was the deliberate misinformation coming from Stafford in Paris. The ambassador fed the English government with stories provided by Mendoza: Philip’s intentions were entirely pacific; Elizabeth had more to fear from France than from Spain. He even tried to make the queen believe, in January 1588, that Philip had disbanded his fleet. This was a particularly reckless ploy to try, flying as it did in the face of all the evidence Walsingham had to the contrary. It also created family tensions. The brother of Stafford’s wife was Lord Admiral Howard, the man whose secrets Stafford was betraying. Howard’s embarrassment was acute, as he told Walsingham: ‘I cannot tell what to think of my brother [-in-law] Stafford’s advertisement; for if it be true that the King of Spain’s forces be dissolved, I would not wish the Queen’s Majesty to be at this charge that she is at; but if it be a device, knowing that a little thing makes us too careless, then I know not what may come of it.’9

  There was a certain subtlety to Stafford’s ‘device’ because it told the queen what she wanted to hear. Keeping ships and men in readiness to face invasion was an expensive business. Throughout 1587 Howard, backed by Walsingham and the other hawks, had to fight for every penny the navy needed. At the same time the doves, headed by Sir James Croft, were in communication with Parma about the possibility of English withdrawal from the Low Countries. Philip’s governor was only stringing England’s envoys along but Elizabeth persisted in believing that all-out war with Spain could be avoided.