by Derek Wilson
To hold the queen to a firm stance Walsingham needed every scrap of reliable intelligence he could lay hands on. Fortunately the network he had painstakingly built up over the years was equal to the challenge. His best placed agent was another of those adventurous Catholic exiles for whom personal survival counted more than religious zeal. Anthony Standen had been a member of Mary Stuart’s household before 1568. After Mary’s escape from Scotland, Standen, who was currently in France, considered himself an agent for his former mistress, while also establishing contact with Walsingham. After sundry adventures he fetched up in the household of the Medici Duke of Tuscany. Standen cultivated many Spanish contacts but his most useful were the Tuscan ambassador to Spain who passed on information from Philip’s court and a certain Fleming who was a close attendant on the Marquis of Santa Cruz, the Spanish Grand Admiral. Thanks to Standen, Walsingham received intermittent reports of the extent and disposition of Philip’s ships and men and the evolution of the king’s plans. He was able to conclude that the Armada would not sail in 1587 but that all efforts were being directed towards an invasion in the following year. The political plan, as it emerged after the death of Mary Stuart, was that Philip’s daughter, Isabella, would be proclaimed queen after she had been suitably married off to one of her Habsburg cousins. The interim government would be placed in the hands of none other than Dr William Allen who would oversee the restoration of Catholicism and the confiscation of every acre of church land seized by Henry VIII half a century earlier. It is as well for the modern reader to be aware of the chaos and inevitable bloodshed which would have resulted from a successful invasion in 1588. Standen, who rapidly proved his value, was generously pensioned by Elizabeth in 1588, when he travelled to Madrid and reported directly from the enemy camp.
From various sources Walsingham learned of the impact of Francis Drake’s raid on Cadiz. This was an enterprise either conceived or encouraged by Walsingham and Leicester. As soon as Walsingham was back at court, and while Burghley remained under a cloud, Elizabeth was persuaded to authorize a strike which might inhibit Philip’s preparations. A purely private scheme originated by some London merchants to make a piratical attack on Spanish vessels to recoup losses they had sustained as a result of Philip’s trade embargo was taken over by the government. Seven naval vessels were added to the fleet and Drake was put in charge of the operation. This was in mid-March. Now preparations had to be completed at speed before the queen experienced one of her changes of mind. Drake and his ships got away from Plymouth on 2 April. A week later a fast pinnace was despatched severely restricting Drake’s orders. The queen demanded that he should only apprehend enemy vessels on the high seas and not enter any of Philip’s harbours. ‘Unfortunately’ the pursuing ship encountered contrary winds and was obliged to turn back, the message undelivered. The result was the celebrated ‘singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’, the devastation of Cadiz harbour, the destruction of some two dozen ships and the capture of four vessels which Drake loaded with loot, including supplies which had been intended for the Enterprise of England. In terms of military advantage the Cadiz raid achieved little. The loss of a few ships was unlikely to deter Philip from his grand project. But the audacious attack did further unhinge Philip’s plans. It deterred several captains, en route from the Mediterranean to rendezvous with the Armada, from venturing into the Atlantic and it demonstrated the vulnerability of galleys to English vessels with superior fire power. Santa Cruz’s plan had relied heavily on the use of galleys to move well inshore and take on board many of the troops Parma was to assemble on the Channel coast. This scheme was now drastically revised.
Another tactical coup which may, to some extent, be attributed to Walsingham, took place in France. There a vicious, three-cornered conflict was in progress. Henry, duc de Guise and the Catholic League were confronting, not only the Huguenot forces of Henry of Navarre but also Henry III, the ineffectual monarch who did not want to hand the Crown on to a Protestant successor but who also feared the power of the Guises. Walsingham, as ever, vigorously urged his queen to support the Huguenot cause, both to succour England’s religious allies and also to prevent the Guises and their Spanish paymasters gaining the upper hand in France at a time when control of the Channel ports might be a vital element in the coming conflict. By the late summer of 1587 the ‘War of the Three Henries’ was in full spate. Constant nagging from Elizabeth’s hawks had persuaded her to subsidize an incursion of German mercenaries, headed by John Casimir of the Palatinate. His intervention proved fairly ineffectual but it did have the effect of obliging Guise to lift the siege of Boulogne, a deep-water port Philip was relying on as a potential rendezvous point for his seaborne and land forces.
The situation in the Netherlands was not dissimilar. In June, Elizabeth, again after being harangued by Walsingham and Leicester, allowed Dudley to return. This time he was there less than five months – five militarily disastrous months. Largely as a result of squabbles with his allies, Leicester failed to prevent the loss of Sluys, the important foreport of Bruges. In November the English commander washed his hands of the United Provinces and returned home, having had a medal struck for his supporters, bearing the legend, ‘I reluctantly leave, not the flock, but the ungrateful ones.’
But what English intervention had achieved was tying up Parma’s forces and slowing his advance. By the time the Armada arrived in the Narrows, the barges needed to carry his soldiers were pinned down by Dutch blockades in Nieuport and Dunkirk. He had not gained control of the ports of Holland and Zeeland and he had not neutralized the United Provinces’ navy. In order for Philip II’s complex battle plan to succeed all the pieces had to lock securely into place. The Spanish fleet had to arrive in good order off the Flanders coast and maintain naval supremacy long enough for a smooth junction with Parma’s contingent. It was always going to be a tall order. Philip’s noble Enterprise of England really fell apart in February 1588 when Santa Cruz, his extremely able and experienced admiral, died of a fever. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia who replaced him was an administrator who had never led men in battle. He lacked the flair and flexibility so vital at times of military crisis. A skilled commander just might have found answers to the unseasonable weather, the harrying tactics of Lord Howard’s navy, the unavailability of a safe haven on the Channel coast and Parma’s unwillingness to risk running the blockade. Beset by all these difficulties, the Spanish Armada failed in its purpose and the defeat which was, in fact, only one episode in a European war that continued to the end of Elizabeth’s reign and beyond, took its place among the heroic national legends of England.
Intelligence-gathering and foreign affairs were not the only matters that Walsingham had to oversee at this time of mounting crisis. The whole of England had to be mobilized in case any enemy forces did manage to come ashore. Putting the country on a war footing was an unprecedented task and one for which there was no existing organization. For a dozen years or so a system of ‘trained bands’ had been developed which provided basic instruction in arms and drill but such periodic assemblies took place on a very ad hoc basis and depended on the enthusiasm of local authorities. Now, as a real threat loomed, the government took steps to put this home guard on a more regular footing. A special commission organized recruitment and training and established a chain of muster points around the southern coasts from Yarmouth to Anglesea. It was all very last minute and there were complaints from several localities about the costs involved. Elizabeth, too, was, as ever, concerned about the drain on her treasury and her councillors had to argue the case for almost every defence need. Walsingham was, of course, impatient. His grumbles to Leicester had become, by now, almost routine: ‘The manner of our cold and careless proceeding here in this time of peril and danger maketh me to take no comfort of my recovery of health, for that I see apparently, unless it shall please God in mercy and miraculously to preserve us, we cannot long stand.’10 So he wrote on 12 November on returning to his desk after another six weeks of illness.
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In addition to the local militias, a ‘guard’ of between 30,000 and 45,000 foot and mounted troops was assembled in the summer of 1588 for the protection of London and the queen. Of these the bulk was stationed near the capital with a reserve force of some 16,500 under Leicester’s command at Tilbury. For all Walsingham’s espionage endeavours the government did not know exactly where Parma proposed to make his landfall. It might have been anywhere on the coast of Kent or Essex. The defence strategy adopted allowed for the initial attack to be countered by forces either side of the estuary and slowed down until the bulk of the English army could converge to meet it.
Walsingham himself contributed readily to the English land force. He raised a troop of sixty mounted men and 200 infantry to form part of the royal bodyguard. He even, in some haste, ordered a suit of armour from Amsterdam. The thought of the semi-invalid, fifty-eight-year-old councillor in breastplate and helmet riding out in the queen’s train to Tilbury on 9 August 1588 to be present at the most famous PR exercise of the reign borders on the bizarre. And yet, if he was so accoutred for that semi-theatrical event, there would have been an appropriateness about his appearance. As Elizabeth expressed her ‘foul scorn’ for Parma and his master she was figureheading that defiance Walsingham had always expressed of the massive Catholic conspiracy he had seen over the years gathering its powers to strike at Protestant England. Vice-Admiral Henry Seymour spoke no more than the truth when he told Walsingham, ‘you have fought more with your pen than many have in our English navy fought with their enemies’. By then the Spanish fleet was retreating into the grey North Sea and towards the perilous coasts of Scotland and Ireland. The war was far from over but the immediate crisis was. And the long-term crisis also. For the failure of the Catholic invasion and the legends which were built up around it formed the coping stone of the English Reformation. There could be no doubt that, after this event, England would identify itself, once and for all, as an independent, Protestant nation which had earned its right to stand alone and which was emerging as a maritime power pursuing its own colonial ambitions.
It is a cliché but, nevertheless, true to say that the Armada year was the turning point of Elizabeth’s reign. In the 1590s members of her court and government had two new preoccupations: creating a myth and preparing for the next reign. It was by now evident that Elizabeth was the last of her line. Her chastity, therefore, had to be made into her highest virtue. So was born the cult of the Virgin Queen. Her people hoped that they would not have long to wait before ‘normal hereditary service’ would be resumed and they would have a ‘proper’ king and royal heirs in perpetuity. Courtiers and ministers with an eye to the future developed their contacts with the monarch-in-waiting over the border. But Elizabeth lived on . . . and on. Inevitably, the era of the aged, childless queen became something of a twilight zone. Her very longevity dulled the edge of old controversies, notably the religious one. People got used to the church by law established. There were still Catholics and there were still Puritans but more and more of them compromised and conformed. New phenomena gave the last years of the reign a different character. London pulpits had fresh rivals – the playhouses – the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Hope, the Fortune, all located in the nearer suburbs. In 1590 Shakespeare’s first play was performed. Popular imagination was also widened by tales of strange places to be seen and fresh opportunities for commerce and even settlement in the New World. Horizons were widening.
But in the narrow confines of the court it was the change of personnel which made the real difference. Infirmity and death removed many of the queen’s old friends and servants. She found herself increasingly surrounded by younger men – a matriarchal figure rather than a woman to be wooed. In the immediate aftermath of Philip’s failed invasion Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, died. This was a profound shock. The queen went into purdah and was for several days inconsolable. Within months she also lost Francis Walsingham. His bouts of illness had become longer and more debilitating. Every winter laid him by the heels. He was confined to bed in January and February 1587, from November 1587 to March 1588 and from February to June 1589. When his health permitted he tried to work with his habitual industry and devotion but he was aware of his failing powers and his need to rely increasingly on members of his staff.
Though he made his will in December 1589, he apparently did not even contemplate resigning until the end of March 1590, and by then death was only days away. As well as state business he had his own affairs to attend to. He worked assiduously to clear his personal debts and those of Philip Sidney’s that he had shouldered. He did not die in poverty, as has sometimes been claimed, but he was keenly aware that he left his wife in a ‘mean state’. According to Robert Beale, there was on his book account with the queen a deficit of £42,000 arising from official expenditure for which he had not obtained privy seal warrants. In material terms this civil servant-cum-statesman-cum-courtier cannot be said to have been fairly compensated for his services to queen and country. At a time when conspicuous consumption marked the lives of most great Elizabethans; when Leicester created his fairytale castle at Kenilworth and William Cecil built impressive mansions at Burghley House and Theobalds, Walsingham lived modestly.
Sir Francis Walsingham died in his house in Seething Lane on 6 April, 1590. In accordance with his will he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral ‘without any such extraordinary ceremonies as usually appertain to a man serving in my place’. As if to underline his humility, even in death Walsingham was shouldered aside by another Elizabethan celebrity. His coffin was interred beside that of Sir Philip Sidney on the north side of the choir. The following year Sir Christopher Hatton was laid to rest nearby. A sumptuous monument erected to his memory took up so much space that a contemporary versifier observed:
Philip and Francis have no Tomb
For great Christopher takes all the room.
Death may not always be the great leveller but time is. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed alike the memorials of pompous churchmen, self-important aristocrats and hard-working, self-effacing royal servants. Walsingham’s last resting place was consigned to obscurity.
But not his reputation. Burghley’s testimony to one of Walsingham’s friends was no mere formal eulogy: ‘the Queen’s Majesty and her realm and I and others his particular friends have had a great loss, both for the public use of his good and painful long services and for the private comfort I had by his mutual friendship’.11 And there was much more than that to Sir Francis Walsingham. The very nature of the surviving evidence and his obvious importance in affairs of state mean that the historical focus tends to be on his political and diplomatic activities. It is scarcely surprising that Elizabeth found him irreplaceable. For six years she appointed no successor, preferring to load yet more work on to Burghley’s shoulders until it became obvious that that venerable servant could no longer bear the burden. But Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queen, called Walsingham
The great Maecenas of this age
As well to all that civil arts profess
As those that are inspired with martial rage.
The label ‘Puritan’ should not impose on us a false interpretation of the man as a narrow philistine. His deep religious conviction caused him to avoid ostentation and to attend to his duties with sober industry but his years abroad had made him a cosmopolitan who well understood the rich culture of Renaissance Europe. He was a fluent linguist, a scholar as well versed in the classics as he was in the Bible and the theology of Calvin. His wide international network of friends and acquaintances embraced scholars and poets as well as diplomats and the denizens of the espionage underworld. He even had an interest in the new study of horticulture. The list of men who gained or confidently sought his patronage extended to poets, classicists, architects, writers on navigation and foreign travel, poor students at university and even the queen’s fool, Richard Tarlton.
Walsingham was one of the foremost backers of maritime enterprise. As well as inv
esting in Francis Drake’s more adventurous voyages, he put his capital and influence to use in the Muscovy Company, the Levant Company and the Merchant Adventurers. Walsingham was passionately interested in overseas trade and exploration. The most enduring legacy to this was his patronage of Richard Hakluyt, the greatest geographer of the age. One of the last projects Sir Francis supported was Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation made by sea or land to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth (1589). This seminal work, dedicated to Walsingham, was symbolic of an expansionist vision which the author shared with his patron and the boldest spirits of the age. It is in the context of this group of advanced thinkers that we really need to see Francis Walsingham. His Protestantism, his advocacy of overseas expansion, his reading of contemporary events (particularly the cosmic clash between evangelicalism and the Roman Antichrist) and his turbulent relationship with Queen Elizabeth stemmed from a world vision to which he was intensely committed. This was why he served a monarch for over twenty years with whom he was often at loggerheads and endeavoured to steer her into courses which were to him both obvious and holy.
A vigorous state censorship operated in Elizabethan England. As early as May 1559 a royal proclamation had prohibited the performance of plays dealing with religion and governments and affirmed that such subjects were ‘no meet matters to be written or treated upon but by men of authority, learning and wisdom’. Preachers and parliament men claimed higher authority in defying such a ban but they did so at their peril. We have only to remind ourselves of the fate of Edmund Grindal, Peter Wentworth, John Stubbe and Thomas Norton to see how Elizabeth frequently moved to silence critics of the regime. Her passionate dislike of Puritans sprang from their insistence on airing their views on the succession, on the treatment of Catholics and, especially, on the need to deal drastically with Mary Stuart. Venturing on matters which were none of their business, in her opinion, smacked of disrespect and even of incipient republicanism.
