The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I
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Beale’s ‘Treatise of the Office of a Councillor and Principal Secretary to Her Majesty’ was one of two advice manuals written in 1592 by men who had served under Walsingham. The second, a ‘Discourse Touching the Office of Principal Secretary of Estate’, was the work of Walsingham’s confidential secretary and agent Nicholas Faunt. The coincidence in date suggests that the secretaryship was being re-thought following Walsingham’s death in 1590. Beale’s treatise examined the relationship between secretary, queen and council while Faunt’s focused on the staff in his household, but on two key matters they spoke with a single voice. The first was the remarkable range of business handled by the principal secretary, from foreign affairs to the maintenance of the common peace: ‘staying the ill affected from evil courses, encouraging the well affected, making arbitraments and good agreements betwixt subjects’, as Faunt put it. Burghley and Walsingham are sometimes cast in modern terms as prime minister and foreign secretary, but this distinction simply doesn’t work. Walsingham’s role as royal secretary, and his growing responsibility for the queen’s safety, meant that he was deeply absorbed in domestic affairs.
The second point of agreement is more surprising. Both authors were openly critical of Walsingham’s lax attitude towards security. ‘Burthen not yourself with too many clerks or servants as Sir Francis Walsingham did’, cautioned Beale. ‘Let your secret services be known to a few’, copying the good example of Lord Burghley. Faunt’s critique of his former master was even sharper:
by experience I can say that the multitude of servants in this kind is hurtful and of late years has bred much confusion with want of secrecy and despatch in that place. For if in a principal servant to the secretary, secrecy and faithfulness be chiefly required, what trust can there be reposed in many? And if many be employed in matters of secrecy, who shall think himself principal in trust?
Walsingham’s modern reputation depends more than anything on his work as a spymaster, his ability to infiltrate and expose the Catholic plots which were attempting to dethrone Elizabeth. As we shall see, this image is based on a good deal of hard evidence. But in the judgement of his own staff, the men who acted on his orders and deputised for him when he was sick, Walsingham also made some serious mistakes. His operatives wrestled with each other for position, offering rival opinions and weakening his ability to react quickly and decisively. Far better, counselled Faunt, for a principal secretary to select one man to be ‘his own pen, his mouth, his eye, his ear, and keeper of his most secret cabinet’.8
Queen Elizabeth was determined that the royal supremacy claimed by her father would not be eroded while she was on the throne. Policy flowed from the sovereign rather than her ministers, at least in theory. But Elizabethan England was far from being an absolute monarchy. All the queen’s majesty and rhetoric, her delaying tactics and her tears, could not alter the fact that her dominions were ungovernable without the co-operation of the council. Elizabeth rarely attended meetings of the full council, preferring to summon her advisers one by one to avoid a united front. But the queen’s absence also allowed an esprit de corps to grow among her councillors, which began the reign as a shared sense of frustration and ended it approaching a theory of mixed government. A council had ruled the realm once before, in Edward VI’s reign. If Elizabeth would not or could not take the decisions necessary to ensure national security, then there were those in authority who judged it their duty to act without her.
Having tackled the technicalities of being principal secretary, Robert Beale turned to a far more sensitive question: how to manage the queen. His advice was startlingly frank. A great deal depended on her emotional state. If she was well disposed, a secretary had a good chance of getting her signature. If she was not – and Elizabeth was notorious for her explosive temper and bouts of depression – then government could simply grind to a halt. A wise man established her state of mind before seeking the royal presence. Hence the political significance of the privy chamber, the gentlewomen who acted as Elizabeth’s companions and personal servants. ‘Learn before your access her majesty’s disposition’, cautioned Beale, ‘by some in the privy chamber with whom you must keep credit’. An entertaining anecdote while she signed any documents would make the process run more smoothly. Every chance should be taken to favour her family on the Boleyn side. When she was angry, the queen should not be approached ‘unless extreme necessity urge it’.
Beale had another lesson to teach Walsingham’s successor: court faction could leave a secretary vulnerable and exposed. ‘When there shall be any unpleasant matter to be imparted to her majesty from the council,’ he warned, ‘let not the burden be laid on you alone, but let the rest join with you’. That way no one could subsequently say it was all the secretary’s doing. Walsingham’s correspondence with the people he trusted the most contains similar references to the queen, his letters to Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, being particularly revealing. Huntingdon governed huge swathes of England as president of the council of the north. He was also a convinced Protestant, using his influence to deploy evangelical clergy in strategic parishes and to organise preaching tours of the north. Huntingdon’s interests were represented at court by his wife Katherine, whom Walsingham described as ‘a most diligent solicitor’ on his behalf. The northern counties were regarded by the government as a crucial buffer zone against potential attack from Scotland. The problem, as so often in Elizabeth’s reign, was one of money: the queen was reluctant to fund a costly military establishment on a permanent footing. Walsingham’s solution was to advise Huntingdon to send his requests for resources directly to the privy council, promising that when they were received ‘I will devise some way that your lordship shall have entertainment without troubling of her majesty’.
Knowing full well what Elizabeth’s reaction was likely to be, Walsingham was attempting to outflank her. Whereas Huntingdon took a generally positive view of the region under his command, Walsingham was more pessimistic. He doubted the loyalties of those who currently made a show of allegiance to the queen, predicting that many of them ‘would be found very dangerous and doubtful in obedience’ if a second northern rising began to muster. This was why he wanted ‘her majesty still to doubt the worst, and the worst accordingly to be provided for’. Regulating the flow of information received by the queen placed real power in the principal secretary’s hands. But Elizabeth was not so easily outmanoeuvred: despite Walsingham’s best efforts, Lord Hunsdon was ordered to disband all but five hundred of the soldiers mustered in the north. ‘By which account’, wrote Walsingham bitterly, ‘I see that Scotland is clean lost, and a great gate opened thereby for the loss of Ireland’. The council had faithfully discharged its duty to protect the kingdom from harm, ‘but God hath thought good to dispose otherwise of things, in whose hands the hearts of all princes are’. There were times in Elizabeth’s service when the only option left was to pray.9
Among all the offices of state, observed Nicholas Faunt in 1592, ‘there is none of more necessary use, nor subject to more cumber and variableness, than is the office of principal secretary’. ‘Cumber’ has fallen out of modern English, but Faunt used it to mean the relentless pressure of government. Walsingham’s day started when he was still in bed, making notes in a memoranda book on problems to be addressed, scoring out any which had been despatched and carrying over the many that had not. He would still be at work late at night, writing the reams of letters on which the authority of the Tudor crown depended. The only way to cope was to ‘divide and measure the day’ according to the urgency of business. Faunt’s treatise paints a picture of Walsingham’s servants clustering around him, ordering the bundles of papers on his table, fetching cipher alphabets to decode reports from agents abroad, and digesting the most valuable intelligence into ledgers to ensure that it wouldn’t be lost.
It was a punishing routine, and Walsingham was soon paying a high price. In March 1574 he fell ill and had to withdraw from the court for several days. A more serious bout of sickne
ss in December kept him away for nearly four months, although he continued to write letters from his bed. By September 1576, after two more summers on progress, Walsingham had almost reached the end of his endurance. He had only one request to bring before the queen, he told Burghley, namely ‘to be quit of the place I serve in, which is subject unto so many thwarts and hard speeches’.
If Walsingham had acted on his threat he would be remembered in similar terms to Sir Thomas Smith, a modestly successful diplomat defeated by the sheer weight of Elizabethan government. The difference between the two men was that Walsingham could always find fortification in his faith. As he later wrote to the Earl of Huntingdon, ‘a Christian man armed with innocence never taketh harm by the knowledge of suchlike thwarts, for that they minister rather cause of comfort than grief; when they be argument of God’s love towards us, who doth correct those that he loveth’. Walsingham’s drive to serve the state can be explained in different ways: his brooding fear of invasion, and the civil war which would follow it; his loyalty and patriotism; the desire for power and personal advancement, to which even he was not immune. But his obligation to queen and country was tightly bound with his duty to God. If the two ever came into conflict, Walsingham would unhesitatingly follow his conscience. The comparison may seem eccentric, but there are times when his priorities echo those of Henry VIII’s secretary Thomas More, ‘the king’s good servant, but God’s first’.10
For a ruler who cast herself in the image of her father, Elizabeth I was notably reluctant to go to war. The Tudor family portrait which she presented to Walsingham in 1572 praised her for banishing conflict from her kingdom, allowing peace and plenty to flourish. A seam of pacifism ran through the Christian humanism in which the young Elizabeth had been schooled, and it is possible that she had taken this to heart. Then again, her brother and sister had been educated in much the same way, and both of them pursued an aggressive foreign policy. Other explanations for Elizabeth’s caution seem more likely. The consequences of earlier military campaigns were clear for all to see: the treasury emptied and the coinage debased, Calais lost and nothing gained in exchange. The Earl of Warwick’s Newhaven expedition of 1562–3 ended in humiliating surrender at Dieppe and Le Havre. True, Queen Elizabeth’s navy was comparatively strong. But she was shrewd enough to recognise that land armies ate resources on a scale which the crown could not sustain. There was another, more nakedly political, reason for keeping England out of the European theatre. Defending Le Havre had cost Elizabeth more than a year’s regular income, forcing her to call on Parliament for a subsidy; remaining neutral might protect the royal prerogative from interference from the Commons.
Francis Walsingham did not see things Elizabeth’s way. For him, national security and the survival of Protestant Christendom depended on a pre-emptive strike against Spain. With its small population and limited taxation base, England was in no position to launch an assault into Iberia; military ambition on that kind of scale had died with Henry VIII. But there was a battleground closer to home in which the English could land a blow against Spain and Catholicism. Since 1566 the Calvinist towns of the Low Countries had been gathering in revolt against the rule of Philip II and his regent in the Netherlands, his half-sister Margaret of Parma. Elizabeth’s stance had so far been guardedly neutral. The prosperity of her crown and nation depended on trade, and English merchants were heavily committed in Antwerp. Rebellion of any sort was anathema to the queen. On the other hand the emerging leader of the Protestant opposition, William of Orange-Nassau, was a prince in his own right. A sovereign ruler could hardly be a rebel. And if liberty and true religion were ground underfoot in the Low Countries, then England might be the next target of the Catholic league.
With its urban mercantile culture and intellectual traditions of humanism and anticlericalism, the Netherlands was natural terrain for Protestantism to take root. Printing presses had been disseminating radical ideas amongst Flemings and Walloons since the early 1520s. Forty years on, the persecution of the Huguenots was pushing French migrants over the border into Artois and Flanders. Protestants gathered in open-air rallies to sing psalms and hear the gospels read by ‘hedge-preachers’ recruited from the crowd rather than the clerical elite. Sympathetic Calvinist ministers travelled on mission from Geneva. An outbreak of iconoclasm blazed through Dutch towns and monasteries, fanned by sermons and an economic downturn which had left many without employment. It was against this backdrop that three hundred noblemen, dressed as beggars but armed with guns, served a petition on Margaret of Parma demanding toleration for non-Catholics. Children in Ghent staged a sympathetic protest of their own, challenging devotional images to say ‘long live the beggars’ before decapitating them in the streets. When William of Orange resigned from Margaret’s council of state and fled to Germany, the various strands of the Dutch revolt had a leader around whom they could rally.
Ghent had been the birthplace of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and protector to the Catholic Church. Charles did everything he could to eradicate Protestantism from the Netherlands, but at least his regime had been recognisably Burgundian. His son Philip II was born in Valladolid, and never attempted to speak either Flemish or French. Philip’s solution to the crisis was to garrison the Netherlands with Spanish troops. Their commander was Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, a career soldier who had previously fought the Ottomans in North Africa and the French in Italy. His arrival in the Low Countries in 1567 has aptly been called ‘a turning-point in European history’. Alva’s army, which regarded all the Netherlanders as ‘Lutherans’, was billeted on loyal and rebel towns alike. Amidst a thousand executions for heresy and the mass burning of Protestant books, William of Orange was condemned as a traitor.11
Given its centuries-old trade links with the Netherlands, England could hardly remain aloof from the Dutch revolt. The Orangist resistance was kept supplied by the ‘Sea Beggars’, a fleet of irregulars under the nominal command of William’s brother Count Louis of Nassau. Some of these ships were paid for by Dutch refugee congregations under the protection of the English crown. By 1570 there were close on ten thousand exiles living in London and Norwich and Sandwich, enough to merit a separate province of the Dutch Reformed Church. When Alva overran the Protestant ports of the Dutch coast, Dover offered the Sea Beggars a safe harbour. As funds dried up and the Beggars turned to piracy to keep themselves afloat, the exile community ashore helped to sell the prizes which were being seized.12
Remembering his own time in exile, Francis Walsingham was a strong advocate for the Dutch Calvinists and their revolt. His first meeting with Louis of Nassau was in 1571, when the count was in France seeking support for his campaign against the Duke of Alva. To Walsingham he was the answer to a prayer, an agent sent by God to defeat the tyranny of Spain. The Habsburg dynasty, he explained in a letter to Leicester, ‘is become the pope’s champion, and professed enemy unto the gospel, and daily practiseth the rooting out of the same’. They should be thankful that God had given them the opportunity to advance His glory and to secure the queen’s safety. It was time for England to commit to the war on false religion.
Walsingham was a hawk, but he was also a realist. Advising a prince to go to war was fraught with danger, because war was unpredictable. And yet sometimes not going to war was the more perilous course. It was characteristic of Walsingham that he thought this problem through on paper. An essay on what he called ‘the enterprise of Burgundy’ helped him marshal his thoughts before making a case to the privy council. ‘As colours by their contraries are best discerned’, he proposed, so ‘the best and soundest resolutions are taken by comparing commodities with inconveniences’. Objections were first anticipated, then answered one by one as if in a court of law. Walsingham had no illusions about the resort to military action, ‘wherefore the success is doubtful, the benefits that ensue thereof small or none, the harms most manifest’. By sea as well as land, England lacked the capability of Spain. The queen herself was ‘irresolute’, uneas
y about backing the rebellion of the Netherlanders against their sovereign prince. War for ‘ambition of ground’ was unlawful. But defensive war was another category altogether.
Striking against Habsburg power in the Netherlands could be justified on grounds that Spain had already proved herself England’s enemy. The northern rebellion had been kindled by the Spanish ambassador, and rebels against Elizabeth were still being fostered in Flanders. Philip of Spain was a protector to the Queen of Scots, ‘her majesty’s capital enemy’, while Alva had been given ‘the donation of England’ by the pope. The soldier and privateer Thomas Stucley, a defector from Tudor service who dreamed of being created Duke of Ireland, had been warmly received at Philip’s court. Queen Elizabeth was being openly derided on the streets of Spain. Intervention in the Netherlands was not only legally defensible and strategically necessary; it was also the will of God. Supporting the Protestant uprising would ‘advance the cause of religion throughout all Christendom, an act worthy of a Christian prince’. The King of Spain and the Guise between them aspired to rule the Christian world; only England stood in their way. Should all these reasons still not prove sufficient, Walsingham slyly played on the queen’s vanity. The Netherlands enterprise could add ‘increase of domination unto her crown’ – as much to Elizabeth’s honour as the loss of Calais had been a disgrace to her sister.13