The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I

by John Cooper

  10 Edward’s illness: W. K. Jordan (ed.), The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (Ithaca, 1966), 117. Mary’s accession and Wyatt’s rebellion: D. M. Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies (Cambridge, 1965), map; Anna Whitelock and Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Princess Mary’s Household and the Succession Crisis, July 1553’, HJ 50 (2007), 265–87; Brigden, London and the Reformation, chapter 13; J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry (Oxford, 2003), 163–70. Walsingham relatives: Read, Walsingham, I, 22.

  11 Nicodemism and conventicles: Brigden, London and the Reformation, 559–60, 600–4. Cecil and the mass: Alford, Burghley, 74.

  12 Basel: C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938), 55–7, 143–4, 319–20, 357–8; H. G. Wackernagel (ed.), Die Matrikel der Universität Basel (Basel, 1951), II, 91; Read, Walsingham, I, 25; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (London, 2003), 194, 261. Padua: Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Toronto, 1998), 221–2, 231, 280–1.

  13 Walsingham to his nephew: printed in Read, Walsingham, I, 18–20. Sidney to Denny: printed in James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney 1572–1577 (New Haven and London, 1972), 537–40.

  14 Activism in the Veneto: Kenneth R. Bartlett, ‘The English Exile Community in Italy and the Political Opposition to Queen Mary I’, Albion 13 (1981), 223–41; ‘The Misfortune that is Wished for Him: The Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon’, Canadian Journal of History 14 (1979), 1–28.

  15 Cecil in Mary’s reign: Alford, Burghley, 65–82. Thomas Walsingham and Pole: APC V (1554–6), 83.

  16 Restoration and persecution: Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London, 2009), reference to ‘microscopic’ scrutiny at 131; Eamon Duffy and David Loades (ed.), The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot, 2006); Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (London, 2008), chapter 10; Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian Persecutions’, History 60 (1975), 374–91. Stratford-le-Bow: John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London, 1570), 2,097.

  17 Radical political thought: Robert M. Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory, 1550–1580’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge, 1991), 193–218.

  2 Massacre at Paris

  On 6 November 1558 Queen Mary, childless and ravaged by fever, yielded to the inevitable and named Elizabeth as her successor. Her husband Philip of Spain had not been seen in England for more than a year. Hopes that the queen would give birth to a child had turned to ashes. Any chance of sustaining the Catholic faith to which Mary had devoted her life now depended on her half-sister, the offspring of Anne Boleyn and their father’s break from Rome. By recognising Elizabeth as her heir, maybe Mary hoped to coax her into maintaining the rites and rituals which she had tenderly restored over the previous five years. If so, then she was deluding herself. Although Elizabeth had outwardly conformed to Catholicism during the reign of her sister, Protestants knew that she was a true reformer at heart. The deaths of Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole on the same day, 17 November, were taken as proof that the providential course of history had been restored. In later years Elizabeth’s accession day would become an annual festival marked by bonfires and patriotic sermons.

  The bells ringing across the nation to announce the peaceful transfer of power sounded a reveille to the English Protestant diaspora. Several hundred clergy, merchants and gentlemen were soon streaming home to pick up the threads of their lives. They might not have had a master plan for the future shape of the Church of England, but collectively the Marian exiles would make a deep impression on the age of Elizabeth. All but one of Queen Mary’s bishops resigned in 1559, compelling Elizabeth to look to the émigrés to recruit the next generation of Church leaders. Fourteen of the twenty-five bishops who sat in the 1563 Convocation or synod had taken refuge in Germany and Switzerland. Protestantism in England had previously been moulded mainly by Luther and Bucer. Now it was infused with Calvinist ideas: the predestination of the elect to salvation and the structuring of the Church along presbyterian lines, with authority invested in congregations rather than bishops. This second wave of religious reform came with its own Geneva translation of the Bible, cheaper and easier to carry than the Great Bible of Henry VIII’s reign.1

  Political thought had also moved on during the time of exodus. Queen Mary and her ministers had regarded Protestantism as a disease which could be cut out of the body politic, driving John Knox and John Ponet to pioneer theories of resistance to royal power. Now that Elizabeth was on the throne, the threat that had sparked such radical thinking had faded. But the principle of absolute monarchy had been questioned, and the genie could not be put back in the bottle. It was no longer enough to preach the gospel of obedience: the crown would have to engage with those who saw the power of any earthly monarchy as limited by God. The sovereignty of a woman threw up even greater challenges. Mary’s reign had been a time of persecution, popular rebellion and a disastrous foreign war; Elizabeth could hardly call upon her sister as a precedent.

  Elizabeth’s government was full of men who had tailored their religion to suit the fashion dictated by Queen Mary’s regime. William Cecil had acted like an evangelical in King Edward’s day, yet he allowed the Catholic mass back into his household and courted the friendship of Cardinal Pole. Robert Dudley jousted at Mary’s court and fought in her army in France to atone for his family’s role in the Jane Grey conspiracy. The Earl of Sussex defended London against Wyatt’s rebels in 1554 and was appointed a gentleman of King Philip’s privy chamber. Sir Thomas Smith advised Mary on the economy and was paid a handsome royal pension. Sir Nicholas Bacon quietly carried on his work for the Court of Wards while his wife served as a gentlewoman of Queen Mary’s privy chamber. None of this is to deny the Protestantism of Elizabeth’s principal councillors, but it does mark Walsingham out among his peers: a man who could not be lured from his faith by the promise of patronage.

  Walsingham was back in England by the spring of 1559, when he was elected to Parliament for the seat of Bossiney in Cornwall. A hamlet skirting the ruins of Tintagel Castle seems an unlikely start for one of the great political careers of the sixteenth century. Bossiney was condemned as a rotten borough by the Reform Act of 1832, and barely even registers on a modern map. Walsingham probably never saw the place, but he did understand its significance. As part of the estate of the duchy of Cornwall, Bossiney was effectively under the control of the crown. Elections were managed by the lord warden of the stannaries; in this case Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford and Walsingham’s fellow exile in the Veneto. There was a natural affinity of faith between the two men. Bedford had studied with Heinrich Bullinger at Zurich and corresponded with Calvin following his return to England, using his position in the Lords to denounce the papacy as ‘a sink of crime and a cess-pool of iniquity’.

  Elizabeth’s first parliament opened in January 1559 with a service at Westminster Abbey. Its dissolved Benedictine community had been re-founded by Mary, but the new queen had no time for monasteries. When Abbot Feckenham led his monks to meet Elizabeth at the abbey door, she objected to their processional candles: ‘Away with these torches, for we see very well’. It was a signal that the devotional world of saints and altars, lights before images and the elevation of the consecrated Host, would soon be gone for good. After three months of debate, the constitution and liturgy of the Church were settled by statute. The Act of Supremacy restored the sovereignty of the crown which had been asserted in 1534, though with one important difference: Elizabeth was styled as ‘supreme governor’ rather than ‘supreme head’ of the Church of England. This was an astute piece of politics, the queen outmanoeuvring objectors on both sides of the religious divide. The mystical union between monarchy and priesthood asserted by her father and her brother did not easily translate into the rule of a woman. But the altered title also reflects the humility before God detectab
le in the prayers which Elizabeth composed throughout her life.

  The second pillar of the Elizabethan Church was the Act of Uniformity. Services would be conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer; anyone absent without good cause would be fined a shilling a week. The liturgy was based on the more thoroughly Protestant prayer book of 1552, but again there was an attempt to soften the impact of change. Ministers were required to wear a surplice, not quite the sumptuous vestments of the Catholic past but still a visible mark of their ordained priesthood. The order for holy communion manoeuvred the conservative formula of the 1549 Prayer Book, ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul into everlasting life’, into the more commemorative rite of 1552, ‘Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving’. By combining the two, it was hoped the Eucharist would revert to what it once had been, a celebration of communal peace in which all could take part.2

  Walsingham was one of nineteen Marian exiles elected to Parliament in 1559. The Commons had swollen to a total of four hundred MPs by the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and the queen would enfranchise another thirty-one boroughs of her own. Putting this in perspective, the House of Commons was two-thirds its modern size at a time when the total population of England and Wales was about one-twentieth of today’s. Henry VIII and Cromwell had created a new role for Parliament, extending its jurisdiction over spiritual affairs and using it to justify the break from Rome. What Parliament had created only Parliament could modify, hence Elizabeth’s use of Lords and Commons to revive the royal supremacy over the Church in 1559. Once this framework had been rebuilt, however, she wanted to see no more wrangling over religion. The ambiguities in Elizabeth’s Church settlement may have offended the hotter Protestants on her council, but they also appealed to the conservative majority of her people. In her opinion, the question of religion was now a matter for the queen alone.

  Elizabeth’s interpretation of her royal prerogative provoked a series of skirmishes in the parliaments that followed, with controversy focusing on the Book of Common Prayer. William Strickland introduced a bill in 1571 aimed at Protestantising the Prayer Book, while Peter Turner tried to replace it with the Genevan order of service in 1584. If a Puritan ideology of opposition did exist in the Elizabethan House of Commons, as some historians have claimed, then there is no evidence that Walsingham shared it. His attitude to royal power was shaped by the writings of resistance theorists as well as his deep Protestant faith, but Parliament was not the place to pursue reform. Walsingham never made a major speech in the Commons, unlike his firebrand brother-in-law Peter Wentworth, who described Parliament without freedom of speech as ‘a very school of flattery and dissimulation and so a fit place to serve the devil’ – a challenge to the crown which carried him to the Tower. Walsingham’s strategy was distinctly different. In 1578 he urged the English community of Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp not to abandon the Prayer Book for a more Protestant service:

  I would have all reformations done by public authority … If you knew with what difficulty we retain that we have, and that the 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.3

  Whatever his private doubts, he could appreciate the political value in having one form of public prayer.

  In 1563 Walsingham was returned to the Commons for Lyme Regis, another borough under the Earl of Bedford’s influence; he would subsequently sit as a knight of the shire for Surrey. Cecil took an interest in his election, noting in a memorandum ‘Mr Walsingham to be of the House’. Sir Walter Mildmay, who had married Walsingham’s elder sister Mary in 1546, may have played a role in bringing him to Cecil’s notice. Mildmay was another Gray’s Inn lawyer, an administrator rather than a politician who had worked with Cecil as a commissioner and councillor in Edward VI’s reign. His presence on the privy council from 1566 adds Mildmay to the list of crown servants, courtiers and parliamentarians who were related to Walsingham. Peter Wentworth was married to Francis’s sister Elizabeth. Another sister, Christiana, married firstly John Tamworth, keeper of the privy purse – a position once occupied by Sir Anthony Denny – and then William Dodington, an official in the royal mint. Katherine Astley, Queen Elizabeth’s first chief gentlewoman of the privy chamber, was Denny’s sister-in-law and thus related to Walsingham by marriage.

  The closest of these family connections threading through government was also the longest-lived. Robert Beale was the senior clerk of the privy council, a Marian exile who had studied in Strasbourg and Zurich. He worked for Walsingham as a secretary during the Paris embassy of 1571–3, and later deputised for him as secretary of state during Walsingham’s frequent absences from the council table. Friendship became kinship when Beale married Edith St Barbe, sister of Walsingham’s second wife Ursula. Beale was a strong reformer, favouring the Protestant 1552 Prayer Book over the compromise settlement of 1559 and arguing that the power of bishops should be reduced. To Walsingham he was ‘my brother Beale’, a political ally and a friend.4

  Apart from his election to Parliament, much of Walsingham’s life during the 1560s is a frustrating blank. Robert Beale helps to explain why the documentary trail goes cold. A lengthy essay dating from 1592 describes the office of principal secretary which his brother-in-law had filled for so long. Aware of his own advancing years, Beale was worried about the continuity of government. He was particularly keen that paperwork should be maintained and passed on intact to the next generation of crown servants. In Henry VIII’s reign there had been a chamber in the Palace of Westminster where the records of state were kept separate from the private papers of the principal secretary. But the practice had fallen into neglect, ‘whereby no means are left to see what was done before or to give any light of service to young beginners’. The result was that, following Walsingham’s death, ‘all his papers and books both public and private were seized on and carried away’.

  Beale’s plea for a permanent archive is remarkable for its day. It would ultimately be answered by the creation of the Public Record Office in 1838, when piles of mouldering manuscripts were moved out of the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey into purpose-built accommodation in Chancery Lane. Victorian editors created order out of chaos, sifting out the principal records of government and sewing the individual manuscripts into volumes. Much of the Walsingham archive came to rest here, in the domestic and foreign series of the state papers. Other material descended to the British Museum, originally belonging to the records of state but extracted by antiquaries and collectors like Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose portrait greets visitors to the manuscript reading room of the British Library at King’s Cross.

  Walsingham’s public career can be reconstructed in forensic detail. But the letters and account books which might have recreated the texture of his domestic life – the hospitality and patronage which he dispensed, the furnishing of his houses, his private thoughts and devotions – are nearly all lost. Of no use to later secretaries, they were simply thrown away. If Walsingham had founded a political dynasty in the manner of William Cecil, his personal archive might have been preserved as Cecil’s was at Hatfield House. As it is, only hints and fragments remain. We know that Walsingham enjoyed falconry because Sir John Forster, warden of the middle march with Scotland, presented him with a prized gyrfalcon. Other gifts included plants collected from the new worlds overseas which the English were beginning to explore. Walsingham noted that he went to see a garden while ambassador in Paris in 1571. His journal for 1583–4 couples the planting of elms and hawthorn in his own garden with urgent issues of state: the making of ciphers, the interrogation of Catholic priests and traitors, and the fortification of Dover harbour. Distinctions between public and private had little meaning for Walsingham. A garden was simultaneously a place of retreat and display, its triumph of order over nature a recognised metaphor of statecraft during the Rena
issance. The portrait of Prince Edward at Hunsdon had made the same claim, the garden beyond the window symbolic of the royal estate which he would all too soon inherit.5

  At least something of Walsingham’s family life can be recovered. In 1560 his mother Joyce died and was buried beside her husband in the church of St Mary Aldermanbury. When Francis chose to marry two years later, it was within the same London merchant community that he looked for a bride. Anne Carleill was recently widowed, a woman of means with a young son and an older daughter. Her late father, Sir George Barnes, was Lord Mayor of London in 1552–3 and had helped to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. They had no children of their own, although Walsingham supported his stepson Christopher Carleill during a military career spent mainly in the Netherlands and Ireland. Anne’s father and first husband were founder members of the Muscovy Company, incorporated in 1555 to spearhead England’s trade into Russia, while her daughter Alice Carleill married the Baltic trader Christopher Hoddesdon; his reports kept Walsingham informed about shipping movements and dissident Catholics during the 1570s and early 1580s.

  By marrying Anne Carleill, Walsingham strengthened his family ties with the city of London and gained admission to a circle of speculators in the new frontiers of English trade. In 1569 he became an ‘assistant’ or director of the Muscovy Company. For her part Anne acquired a guardian for her son during his minority, and the social cachet of a husband with connections to the royal court. Foot’s Cray was sold, and the couple leased the manor of Parkbury in Hertfordshire. Walsingham had his first taste of crown service as a justice of the peace. But their marriage of mutual convenience was short-lived. Anne made her will, ‘sick of body’, in July 1564. Within four months she was dead, bequeathing Francis £100 and the custody of her son Christopher, with an earnest entreaty to see him ‘virtuously brought up in learning and knowledge’. The contents of her wardrobe were distributed among Walsingham’s sisters, suggesting the women had become friends: a damask gown with a kirtle of satin for Christiana, a pair of sables for Elizabeth, and a purse of purple silk and gold for Mary. Other bequests included a diamond, a ‘book of gold’ with a chain, and several sums to purchase remembrance rings – a Protestant alternative to the masses and obits of the past. A feather bed with bolster and blankets, its valance of needlework and curtains of sarsenet in red and green, offers a glimpse of the costly fittings at Parkbury.6