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

by John Cooper

  26 Privy seal payments: CSP Dom. 1581–90, 636; Read, Walsingham, II, 370–1 and III, 418 n. 2. Crown income: Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), 71.

  27 Bewray: to reveal or betray. Beale’s advice: Read, Walsingham, I, 436. Entrapment: Camden, Annals, 394.

  28 Rogers alias Berden: TNA SP 12/167, fol. 5; TNA SP 12/176, fol. 117–18, 119–20; TNA SP 12/178, fol. 36–7, 83–4, 163; TNA SP 12/187, fol. 181–2; TNA SP 12/189, fol. 56–8; TNA SP 12/209, fol. 36, 215; Read, Walsingham, II, 316–17, 330–5, 415–19.

  29 Gifford: Francis Edwards, Plots and Plotters in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Dublin, 2002), 137; Peter Holmes, ‘Gilbert Gifford’ in Oxford DNB; Read, Walsingham, II, 337. Stafford: J. H. Pollen, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot (Edinburgh, 1922), 126.

  30 Tyrell: TNA SP 53/19, fol. 69; Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), 44–5, 160–1, 175–6; Peter Holmes, ‘Anthony Tyrell’ in Oxford DNB.

  31 Machiavellian precision: Sidney Lee, ‘Francis Walsingham’ in Oxford DNB. Militants and pacifists: Edwards, Plots and Plotters, 87.

  6 Bonds and Ciphers

  Early one morning in October 1583, a lone gunman set out from Warwickshire on a mission to kill the queen. For a man intent on assassination, John Somerville cut a conspicuous figure. He was obviously well born, yet he travelled without any servants to attend him. Then there was the heavy pistol slung at his side, a curious choice of weapon for a gentleman. Anyone meeting him along the way would have been struck by the ferment in his head. Stopped at an inn for the night, Somerville scattered feverish threats to shoot the queen and ‘see her head set on a pole, for that she was a serpent and a viper’. His imprisonment in the Tower was swiftly followed by the arrest of his wife, sister and household.

  Somerville was questioned on a charge of high treason. Secretary to the council Thomas Wilkes reported to Walsingham on 7 November that ‘nothing could be learned except from the confessions’ of Somerville and his family, a phrase that implies the threat of torture. English law had traditionally shunned torture, but the rulebook had been rewritten as society had fissured in the wake of the Reformation. Investigating reports in 1575 that Mary, Queen of Scots had been getting messages to the outside world, Walsingham admitted to Burghley that ‘without torture I know we shall not prevail’. Queen Elizabeth remained squeamish about it, but the use of torture to extort information had become increasingly common. When the Jesuit William Holt was arrested at Leith in 1583 on suspicion (correctly, as it turned out) of gathering a Catholic alliance to make a holy war on England, Walsingham urged the English envoy in Scotland that he ‘should be put to the boots and forced by torture to deliver what he knoweth’: in other words, his feet would be crushed until he confessed or fainted. Within days of Somerville’s ordeal in the Tower, Walsingham would be writing to Wilkes to authorise the racking of Francis Throckmorton.

  Somerville’s interrogators hoped that his detention could be used to force other traitors to break cover. Who were his accomplices, they demanded? Who had sown sedition in his mind? What was his connection to Hugh Hall, a Catholic priest who lived at the house of his father-in-law Edward Arden, disguised as a gardener? Given the oppressive political atmosphere, Somerville’s conviction was never in much doubt. He was found guilty by a commission of oyer and terminer, a fast-track legal process which avoided the need for a conventional trial. He was dead within two hours of being moved from the Tower to Newgate prison to await the queen’s mercy: strangled, it was explained, by his own hand. Arden suffered a traitor’s execution at Smithfield the following day. Their severed heads were spiked on London Bridge.

  To the historian with hindsight, John Somerville resembles a gnat biting an elephant. He was already under surveillance as a Catholic and known sympathiser with the Queen of Scots. Propagandists on both sides of the religious divide, Lord Burghley and Cardinal Allen, agreed that Somerville was ‘furious’ or mentally ill. His attempt at regicide was on a wholly different scale from Francis Throckmorton’s, with its menacing coalition of Spanish money, French troops and English fifth-columnists.

  And yet there were aspects of the ‘Somerville plot’ which explain why the crown, sensitive to the charge of tyranny, still chose to show him no quarter. The portrait that we can paint of John Somerville is a familiar one. He was young and privileged, due to inherit estates scattered across three counties on his twenty-fourth birthday. He entered Hart Hall, Oxford in 1576; Francis Throckmorton departed the same hall in the same year. Somerville’s marriage to Margaret, the daughter of Edward Arden, consolidated the landholdings of their two Catholic families in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Arden was a respected figure in his community, serving as Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575. He was a distant cousin of Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden. More to the point – and this may have given Walsingham pause for thought – Edward Arden had married a daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton.

  It may be no more than coincidence that the Somervilles, Ardens and Throckmortons all had estates in Warwickshire and Worcestershire; that Margaret Somerville’s mother was a Throckmorton; that John Somerville made his suicidal bid at the very moment that Walsingham was closing in on the Throckmorton plot. Perhaps Somerville and Francis Throckmorton did not cross paths at Hart Hall. But at a frenetic time at Seething Lane, when every day seemed to be turning up new conspiracies and connections, Walsingham and his aides could not afford to take chances. The state papers reveal that the Throckmorton and Somerville plots cohabited on Walsingham’s desk. On 5 November the privy council pored over the interrogations of Somerville’s family and household, and sent out its commission for his trial; Walsingham ordered the arrest of Throckmorton at Paul’s Wharf the same evening. In Walsingham’s ‘ledger book’ or diary, his notes on the Somervilles and Ardens are followed by the memo ‘to appoint a new examination of Throckmorton’: new, because the queen had now agreed to the use of the rack.1

  Somerville made a less convincing martyr for the Catholic cause than did Francis Throckmorton, and he was much more quickly forgotten. Even by the standards of Tudor jails, his sudden death was suspicious. A report on Catholic activity dating from February 1584 refers to Somerville as having been hanged in prison ‘to avoid a greater evil’. William Camden, whose Annals have Somerville ‘breathing nothing but blood against the Protestants’ and brandishing a sword, had heard some gossip that linked his strangling to the Earl of Leicester. Edward Arden had always made a virtue of his independence from Leicester, refusing to sell him property and dropping hints about his chequered marital history. By the early 1580s it was widely rumoured in Catholic circles that Leicester had murdered his wife Amy Robsart in order to get closer to the queen, concealing the crime as a fatal fall on the stairs. Arden’s card was already marked; and when Somerville made his frantic gesture against the Elizabethan regime, both were left naked to their enemies.2

  Having disposed of the Throckmorton and Somerville plots, Walsingham set about capitalising on them to promote a sense of national unity. The life and death of Francis Throckmorton was taken up by government propaganda and broadcast to the kingdom as a lesson in loyalty. The Renaissance mind searched for patterns in history which could cast light on contemporary events. The litany of conspirators who had failed to harm the queen – Ridolfi, Throckmorton, Somerville – endorsed the official rhetoric that Elizabeth and her loyal subjects were the chosen of God. As new traitors arose and were cut down by divine justice, so their names were absorbed by the books of prayers that carried the cult of Elizabeth into the shires: William Parry, the impenetrable MP who was hanged in 1585 for plotting the queen’s murder; Anthony Babington in 1586; and Edward Squire, executed in 1598, a royal stable-hand who allegedly devised a potion to poison the queen’s saddle. As late as the 1680s, Henry Foulis’s History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations was preaching the same stories to a fresh generation of English Protestants.3

  The plots against Elizabeth prompted an
other initiative to hold her people in obedience, far more audacious in scale and scope. In October 1584 the privy council bound the kingdom of England together in an association to protect the queen’s life. News from the Netherlands was closely monitored by English Protestants, and it had been taking an ugly turn. In July 1584 William of Orange was murdered by a Catholic zealot, the victim of a political culture which increasingly regarded the assassination of rulers as a legitimate tactic. With Orange out of the way, Philip II’s military commander the Duke of Parma lost little time in conquering Ghent and Flanders. The cause of true religion seemed to be faltering. What was needed was a new national covenant, to remind her people of the blessings of Queen Elizabeth’s rule – and the painful fate of opposing her.

  The result was the ‘instrument of an association for the preservation of the queen’s majesty’s royal person’, drawn up by Walsingham and Burghley and referred to as the bond of association. It required all subjects ‘to the uttermost of their power, at all times, to withstand, pursue and suppress all manner of persons that shall by any means intend and attempt any thing dangerous or hurtful to the honours, estates or person of their sovereign’. Withstand, pursue, suppress: one of those Tudor trinities intended to sear themselves into the memory, as when congregations were instructed to ‘read, mark and inwardly digest’ the lessons of holy scripture. Those with long memories thought back to 1534, when Henry VIII’s subjects had pledged themselves to the king as supreme head of the English Church. The Elizabethan oath imposed sacred duties, publicly sworn on a copy of the gospels: constant vigilance, being prepared to inform on others without regard to friendship or community, and a personal commitment to take up arms to defend the sovereign.

  The bond of 1584 was a master-stroke of propaganda. The majority of English men and women, especially those beyond the circuit of the royal summer progresses, can have had only the dimmest notion of the monarch as flesh and blood. Contact with their queen was limited to a scuffed image on a coin, or the engraving of Elizabeth on the title-page of a Bible. The bond aimed to span this gulf between ruler and ruled, fostering a cult of allegiance to the regime and demanding ‘uttermost revenge’ on anyone who threatened it. The bond is a fascinating counterpoint to the artistic magnificence of the royal court, where portraits and poetry emphasised the queen’s godlike omniscience rather than her human frailty. It was signed in an atmosphere of solemn theatre. In Wigan the backdrop was a church, and volunteers came forward in order of social precedence, hatless and on their knees as if they were taking holy communion. Although the bond was aimed initially at the gentry, thousands of citizens also queued to add their names. In Yorkshire the Earl of Huntingdon collected enough signatures to ‘fill a good big trunk’. Those who couldn’t sign were allowed to make their mark: illiteracy was no bar to loyalty.

  The spontaneity, however, was not quite what it seemed. Walsingham oversaw the operation as it spread out through the English shires, and he knew the bond had more value if it appeared to be a voluntary act of national fealty. In a letter drafted by Burghley, probably for circulation among the lords lieutenant who were the queen’s principal representatives in the counties, Walsingham inserted some instructions of his own. ‘Your lordship shall not need to take knowledge that you received the copy from me, but rather from some other friend in these parts’, he wrote. It was important that the bond was seen to stem from ‘the particular care of her well-affected subjects’. It was a sophisticated response to the climacteric of 1584, and it reveals just how skilled Burghley and Walsingham had become in the art of manipulating public opinion. At a spiritual level the bond represented the covenant between Christ and the reformed Church on earth, central to Calvinist theology. For its two drafters, it had the grimmer attraction of fixing its sights on the Queen of Scots. Mary met politics with politics, signing the bond in order to prove that she plotted no secret treasons against the English crown. It suited the persona that she created for herself, loyal to Elizabeth in spite of her wrongful imprisonment. For Walsingham, however, this was a document beyond price: a pledge of allegiance in Mary’s own hand which could be quoted against her if she ever broke her oath. He kept it close, waiting and watching.4

  In 1585 the bond was endorsed by an Act of Parliament ‘for the surety of the queen’s most royal person’. This sweeping new law justified itself in terms of the ‘sundry wicked plots of late devised and laid, as well in foreign parts beyond the seas as also within this realm’. It made a blanket grant to the queen’s subjects of the right to pursue to the death anyone engaged in an act of invasion or rebellion against her. In effect it legalised a type of vigilante justice that would have been inconceivable before the early 1580s. Addressing the parliament that passed the Act, Queen Elizabeth took comfort in this expression of her nation’s devotion: ‘No prince herein, I confess, can be surer tied or faster bound with links of your goodwills’.

  The rhetoric of protecting the queen’s person concealed some even more radical thinking. Who would govern if Elizabeth met a violent death? Parliament came close to authorising an interim executive formed of the privy council, selected peers and the legal officers of the crown, and recognising its own power to choose a successor. This was not an attempt at a Glorious Revolution a century early – the transfer of sovereignty would only have been temporary – but it still went further than anything that Parliament had attempted to do before. In imagining an emergency republic, Walsingham recalled the classical history he had learned in Cambridge and Padua, while Burghley looked to the more recent experience of Edward VI’s reign. Both were familiar with the medieval doctrine of the ‘king’s two bodies’ recently restated by the law reporter Edmund Plowden. His Reports of 1571 contrasted the body politic, ‘consisting of policy and government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public weal’, with the body natural, the flesh-and-blood body of the prince that would wither and die like any mortal’s. The theory had been developed to explain the royal succession, but it could also have been used to justify the exercise of the crown’s authority in the absence of a king. In the event, Elizabeth detected a threat to her prerogative and would not waver from the principle of hereditary monarchy, a personal victory which kept her counsellors guessing until the very moment of her death.5

  As the waters of the 1584–5 parliamentary session boiled around him, so William Parry, spy and MP for Queenborough in Kent, was forced up for air. Parry’s biography is bewildering even by the standards of the shape-changers and quislings who populated the Elizabethan secret service. He began life among the large group of Welsh gentry whose landed income was barely sufficient to maintain their social status. Mounting debts, a commuted death sentence for burglary, and rumours that he was abusing the daughter of the wealthy London widow whom he had married, propelled him to Paris in hope of government service. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church and sank himself into the exile community in France, where he took a doctorate of law and debated the theology of tyrannicide with the Jesuit William Crichton. He was back in England by the summer of 1584, and somehow got himself returned to the House of Commons in November. Within the month he was apologising on his knees for denouncing legislation against seminary priests and Jesuits as full of ‘blood, danger, terror, despair’. In February 1585 Parry was accused of discussing Elizabeth’s assassination by an accomplice named Edmund Neville, and was tried for treason in Westminster Hall. He confessed, then recanted on grounds that he had been threatened with torture.

  Parry posed as a government agent, working to ‘prevent and discover all Roman and Spanish practices against our state’. At this distance we simply cannot tell where his true identity lay, whether an agent provocateur in the English seminary in Rheims, or a Catholic traitor engaged in a breathtaking double bluff. Perhaps he no longer knew himself; the multiple personalities that he assumed may have left his loyalties irredeemably confused and compromised. His contemporaries were equally uncertain, although Robert Persons co
ncluded that Parry did plot with his friends to kill the queen. Raphael Holinshed has Walsingham pressing Parry to reveal anything which he might have said, even with the intention of trapping his Catholic targets, which could have brought him under suspicion of treason. Parry seems to have expected a royal pardon. But the advice he scribbled to Elizabeth in his last days in the Tower to ‘cherish’ the Queen of Scots as her ‘undoubted heir in succession’ was a bad miscalculation, and shows how out of touch with reality he was.

  Like Francis Throckmorton, Parry died a traitor’s death. The British Library contains a hand-written ‘Report of Parry’s Execution’, dramatising his dying speech and loading it with advice for his fellow Catholics:

  I am not come hither to preach nor to make you any oration, I am come hither to die. And here I protest unto you all, I am clean of that I am condemned to die for: I did never intend to lay violent hands on her most sacred majesty: whom I beseech God long to preserve from all her enemies, and here I will take it on my death and seal it with my blood.

  And you that be of my profession in religion, beware that you never offer to lay violent hands upon her, she is God’s anointed: and before I die receive this comfort at my hands.

  Those who watched Parry on the scaffold saw him taken down alive and heard him groan as his bowels were cut out. The ‘Parry plot’ ensured that the Act for the surety of the queen’s person passed into law without further objection: a biting irony – or, perhaps, the government’s intention all along.6

  ‘The cipher I had from Thomas Morgan in France.’ Thus Francis Throckmorton described to his interrogators how he had been communicating with Mary Stuart and her English supporters in Paris. William Parry had also consorted with Morgan during his time in France. According to Holinshed’s Chronicles, Parry confessed to having bragged to Morgan of his resolve to do the Catholic Church some great service, even to kill the greatest subject in England. Morgan’s reply was blunt: why not the queen herself? We have glimpsed Morgan before, trailed by rival Walsingham and Stafford surveillance operations in Paris, and we shall soon meet him again as a cog in Anthony Babington’s treason of 1586. Morgan it was who recruited the Douai student and double agent Gilbert Gifford to be a courier for the Queen of Scots. Remarkably, he played his part in the Babington plot from within the walls of the Bastille, where he had been shut up at Queen Elizabeth’s request following the Parry plot. In France as in England, a prison could be an effective headquarters for an aspiring revolutionary.