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

by John Cooper

  Elizabeth finally decided to sign Mary’s death warrant on 1 February 1587, more than three months since the commissioners had come to a verdict. Recalling for a moment her father’s cruel sense of humour, she quipped that the news would be a cordial to restore her principal secretary to health. Walsingham was back in London but still too weak to attend court. William Davison had to take responsibility for the warrant, and suffer the consequences of the queen’s fury when she discovered that it had been despatched without her express permission. What merit Elizabeth saw in further delay it is difficult to say; perhaps she simply changed her mind. But the councillors of the monarchical republic had been one step ahead of her. For a few extraordinary days Burghley, Walsingham, Davison and Hatton effectively seized the initiative in government. Burghley quietly secured the support of the rest of the council, guarding the warrant and preparing for the mass detention of Catholic recusants. Beale was woken in the night and ordered to report to Seething Lane, where Walsingham told him that he would be carrying the fatal document to Fotheringhay. Walsingham also took charge of the executioner, who travelled in the clothes of a serving man with his axe in a trunk.

  Elizabeth’s reluctance to agree to Mary’s execution is the stuff of legend. Towers of interpretation have been built upon it. For some it exposes the crippling indecisiveness of the queen. Others identify her behaviour as deliberate, consistent with her strategy of keeping her male ministers on the back foot, expressive of the kinship that one female ruler felt for another. To allow that the law had the power to discipline an anointed sovereign was a radical reversal in the theory of monarchy, and Elizabeth was justly nervous about where it might lead.

  But Walsingham’s correspondence reveals a darker facet of the queen’s character, the politician who spotted the advantage of a quiet backstairs killing over a public execution. On 1 February, the same day that she sent Mary’s death warrant to be sealed, Elizabeth directed her two principal secretaries to write to Sir Amyas Paulet expressing her disappointment that no one had acted under the bond of association to rid her of the Queen of Scots. In open court Elizabeth would weep for Mary, mourning the death of a sister monarch, but the raw truth was that she tried to arrange for her murder. Paulet was horrified and refused to make ‘so foul a shipwreck of my conscience’, although self-preservation must have also played its part: few would have been willing to leave themselves so politically exposed. He was saved by the arrival of Beale bearing the warrant, unknown to Elizabeth. The irony was that Walsingham, who had done so much behind the scenes to advance Mary Stuart towards her death, should guarantee her the relative dignity of a public execution.39

  Mary was beheaded in the great hall at Fotheringhay on 8 February 1587. The second of the pair of drawings in Beale’s papers traces the sequence of events. Mary appears three times: entering the chamber dressed as if for a festival, in gown and trailing linen veil and carrying a rosary; on a dais in the centre of the room, her missal and crucifix set down on a table and a man in breeches awkwardly holding her top dress; and kneeling at last for the half-naked axeman. Like all the great officers of state, Walsingham stayed away. The execution was left to the Sheriff of Northamptonshire and the Earls of Shrewsbury and Kent. A small crowd looks on from behind a line of soldiers armed with halberds. The Dean of Peterborough is speaking, although in reality Mary rejected the sermon that he had prepared and knelt with her servants to recite the Latin office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A fire burns in the grate, where a man with a sword rests on one leg. It is a familiar image, but an upsetting one – its violence implied, about to happen: an axe poised, cartoon faces watching and talking, a few looking the other way as if distracted or bored with what they were seeing. There is no triumphant depiction of Mary lying dead, but it captures the pose of the onlookers with a chilling intimacy.40

  Francis Walsingham had coaxed the brags and dreams of a group of friends into a plot against the Protestant state. He offered Mary Stuart an apparently secure route to those who wanted to see her on the English throne, and calibrated the moment that her letter to Anthony Babington would have the greatest impact. The ethics of the episode are hard to judge. Walsingham had tempted Mary into an act of rebellion, but in truth she had already shown herself willing to depose her cousin Elizabeth. The criminal justice system of today would attempt to balance the degree of entrapment against the scale of the offence that it revealed. The shape of the Babington plot owed a lot to Walsingham and his agents, but its origins lay in the exile communities in Paris and Rheims. Mary can hardly be blamed for desiring her own freedom: she had come to England seeking sanctuary and had found an endless imprisonment. But Elizabeth could never have recognised Mary as her heir, for fear of sparking a Protestant revolution of the sort that had deposed Mary from the throne of Scotland. The result was that Mary Stuart signed the bond of association with one hand, and gave her benediction to a company of assassins with the other.

  Babington’s letter to Mary described the impending execution of Elizabeth as a tragedy, and it was in similar terms that the conspirators’ own downfall was perceived. Sir Christopher Hatton made a memorable interjection during the arraignment of the principal plotters: ‘O Ballard, Ballard, what has thou done? A sort of brave youths otherwise endued with good gifts, by thy inducement hast thou brought to their utter destruction and confusion’. Contemporary accounts of the Babington plot take on the tone of an Elizabethan morality play, a tale of talent tragically brought low by pride. The prosecution took care to remind the trial how Ballard was dressed when he came on his mission to England, not in the humble clothes of a man of God but the gorgeous apparel of a gentleman soldier: ‘a grey cloak laid on with gold lace, in velvet hose, a cut satin doublet, a fair hat of the newest fashion, the band being set with silver buttons; a man and a boy after him, and his name Captain Fortescue’. Hatton ended by denouncing Ballard and other such Catholic priests who preyed on young Englishmen of ‘high hearts and ambitious minds’, carrying them ‘headlong to all wickedness’.41

  It served the interests of the crown to sensationalise stories of treason and plot. And yet the perpetrators seem to have shared the sense of theatre. Chidiock Tichborne delivered a remarkable oration about his friendship with Babington before he was given over to the executioners. ‘Of whom went report in the Strand, Fleet-street, and elsewhere about London, but of Babington and Tichborne? Thus we lived, and wanted nothing we could wish for: and God knows, what less in my head than matters of State?’ Tichborne framed his address as a warning to other young gentlemen, asking forgiveness of the queen and for some provision for his wife, sisters and servants. But his final prayer was for himself, ‘that he hoped steadfastly, now at this last hour, his faith would not fail’. By acting out a role, he and his companions steeled themselves for the torment to come. Tichborne also sought solace in poetry, penning a wrenching elegy in his last days in the Tower:

  I sought my death and found it in my womb,

  I looked for life and saw it was a shade;

  I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

  And now I die, and now I was but made.

  My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.42

  Anthony Babington died for his vision of an English nation that was still viscerally Catholic. The north he assumed would rally to his cause, because Catholicism was still the religion of the common people, but also to revenge the harm that the region had suffered in the wake of the 1569 rebellion. Wales he judged to have the same complexion, and the West Country might also be sympathetic. Working inwards from ‘the very extremities of the kingdom’, supported by foreign troops and placing Catholic magistrates to govern the counties that he had already taken, Babington reckoned to squeeze the south parts of the realm into submission.

  In much of this he was plainly deluded. The majority of Elizabethan Catholics wanted nothing more than to be recognised as loyal to the queen. Babington’s plan for invasion was not welcome
d by Abington, who told him ‘I had rather be drawn to Tyburn by the heels for my religion than to have it reformed by strangers’. The papacy was less concerned for the plight of England than Babington believed it to be. As for the extremities of the kingdom, Walsingham had received assurances from the Earl of Huntingdon, president of the council of the north, that ‘in no part of England is Queen Elizabeth more reverenced than she is here’. Two of Babington’s predictions, however, were more alarming to his interrogators. The first was that the English people, labouring under a weight of unjust rents and taxes and the enclosure of the commons, would one day be ready to cut the throats of their landlords. The second was that, although his own conspiracy had failed, it would be followed by others; and next time, the plotters would know how to keep their secrets.43

  NOTES

  1 Somerville and his plot: TNA SP 12/163, fol. 17, 54, 56–7; CSP Dom. 1581–90, 128–30, 182; BL Harley 6035, fol. 32–5; VCH Warwickshire 4 (London, 1947), 45, 62; William Wizeman, ‘John Somerville’ and ‘Edward Arden’ in Oxford DNB. Torture: Robert Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London, 2006), 72–8; Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925), II, 378–9.

  2 To avoid a greater evil: CSP Dom. 1581–90, 161. Breathing nothing but blood: William Camden, Annals, or the Historie of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth, trans. Robert Norton (London, 1635), 257.

  3 Cult of Elizabeth: J. P. D. Cooper, ‘O Lorde Save the Kyng: Tudor Royal Propaganda and the Power of Prayer’, in G. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (eds), Authority and Consent in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2002), 190–3; Henry Foulis, The History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations (London, 1681).

  4 Bond of association: examples include TNA SP 12/174/1, BL Additional 48027, fol. 248, and BL Cotton Caligula C. IX art. 41, fol. 122, the latter reproduced in Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose (eds), Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago and London, 2000), 183–5; David Cressy, ‘Binding the Nation: the Bonds of Association, 1584 and 1696’, in D. J. Guth and J. W. McKenna (eds), Tudor Rule and Revolution (Cambridge, 1982). Spontaneity: Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, in John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997), 124; Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven and London, 2008), 256–7.

  5 Surety of the queen’s person: statute 27 Eliz. I, c. 1, Statutes of the Realm, IV, 704–5. Links of your goodwills: Marcus et al. (eds), Elizabeth I: Collected Works, speech 16, March 1585, 181–2. Plowden and the king’s two bodies: E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), 7.

  6 Parry: BL Additional 48027, fol. 244–5; John Bossy, Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story (New Haven and London, 2001), 96–9; Julian Lock, ‘William Parry’ in Oxford DNB; Penry Williams, The Later Tudors (Oxford, 1998), 303.

  7 Throckmorton’s cipher: A Discoverie of the Treasons Practised and Attempted against the Queene’s Majestie and the Realme by Francis Throckmorton, reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany (London, 1808–13), III, 197. Morgan: Leo Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem: Some Aspects of the Careers of Two Exile-Adventurers (London, 1964); John Bossy, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair (New Haven and London, 1991), 66–8; Alison Plowden, The Elizabethan Secret Service (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 56–7.

  8 Alum is aluminium sulphate. Mary’s recipe for secret ink: John Guy, My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004), 474. Gregorye: BL Harley 286, fol. 78–9; Camden, Annals, 305. Gregorye served Burghley’s son Robert Cecil after Walsingham’s death, and petitioned James I for a grant of confiscated Catholic land ‘for recompense for my services’: Hutchinson, Elizabeth’s Spy Master, 98–9.

  9 Orange juice: TNA SP 12/156, fol. 35–6. Lopez and Walsingham: Dominic Green, The Double Life of Doctor Lopez (London, 2003), 39–44, 51–6.

  10 Codes and ciphers: David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (New York, 1996); Simon Singh, The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-Breaking (London, 1999), chapter 1. Strictly speaking codes involve the replacement of words or whole phrases, while ciphers substitute letters of the alphabet with an encrypted equivalent.

  11 St Aldegonde and Don John’s plans: Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, Relations Politiques des Pays-Bas et de L’Angleterre sous le Reigne de Philippe II (Brussels, 1882–1900), IX, 405–14; Read, Walsingham, I, 315, 323–4 and II, 355–8; Kahn, Codebreakers, 119–21.

  12 Phelippes: CSP For. 1578–9, 37; CSP Dom. addenda 1580–1625, 68–9, 86; History of Parliament, The House of Commons 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler (London, 1981), III, 219–20; William Richardson, ‘Thomas Phelippes’ in Oxford DNB; Edward Fenton (ed.), The Diaries of John Dee (Charlbury, 1998), 46.

  13 Frequency analysis: Singh, Code Book, 17–29. Walsingham ordering new and old ciphers: BL Harley 6035, fol. 7r, 45v.

  14 Shorthand and cryptography: Page Life, ‘Timothy Bright’ in Oxford DNB.

  15 Trithemius and Dee: Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr Dee (London, 2001), 72–81; Kahn, Codebreakers, 130–6.

  16 Mary’s cipher: J. H. Pollen, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot (Edinburgh, 1922), lv; Guy, My Heart is My Own, 480; Singh, Code Book, 37–8.

  17 Move to Chartley: Pollen, Babington Plot, lii.

  18 Mary at Buxton: Guy, My Heart is My Own, 447–8.

  19 Gifford’s appearance: Pollen, Babington Plot, liii, quoting a memoir by Châteauneuf. William Gifford and Walsingham: Read, Walsingham, II, 428–33.

  20 Mary’s shoes: Guy, My Heart is My Own, 480. Phelippes at Chartley: Read, Walsingham, III, 10.

  21 Rich, pleasant witted, and learned: Camden, Annals, 302. Babington’s first confession: Pollen, Babington Plot, 49–66, transcribing BL Additional 48027, fol. 296–301.

  22 Ballard and Babington: Pollen, Babington Plot, 53.

  23 Savage’s oath: William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1809–23), I, 1,129–31.

  24 Babington’s dilemma: Pollen, Babington Plot, 54. Friends and conspirators: Penry Williams, ‘Anthony Babington’ and Enid Roberts, ‘Thomas Salisbury [Salesbury]’ in Oxford DNB. Tilney’s conversion: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,149. Portraits: Camden, Annals, 304; Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,138.

  25 Abington’s kidnap plan: Pollen, Babington Plot, 57. Sabotage and assassination: ibid., 60. Poley: Read, Walsingham, III, 8, 21–2, 25–6. Babington’s offer of service to Walsingham: Pollen, Babington Plot, 56.

  26 Mary’s delayed letter: ibid., 15–16; Read, Walsingham, III, 31. Betwixt two states: Pollen, Babington Plot, 58.

  27 Babington to Mary ?6 July 1586: ibid., 18–22.

  28 Mary to Babington 17 July 1586: ibid., 26–46.

  29 Killing Elizabeth: ibid., 66, 74, 80; Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,131. Babington on the run: Camden, Annals, 306.

  30 Trials, 13–15 Sep. 1586: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,127–40.

  31 Executions: BL Additional 48027, fol. 263–71; Camden, Annals, 308. Tichborne, ciphers and Star Chamber: Pollen, Babington Plot, 75, 94–5. Parce mihi domine: Job 7:16. Pamphlet: William Kemp[e], A Dutiful Invective Against the Moste Haynous Treasons of Ballard and Babington (1586–7), STC 14925; see also George Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercie (fourth edition, 1630), STC 4643, chapter 9.

  32 Gifford’s flight: Read, Walsingham, III, 45. Nau: ibid., III, 37; Alford, Burghley, 267.

  33 Morgan’s loyalty: William Murdin, A Collection of State Papers left by William Cecill Lord Burghley (London, 1759), 513–14; Bossy, Giordano Bruno, 246; Pollen, Babington Plot, xxxiii–xxxv; Hicks, An Elizabethan Problem, 113–15.

  34 Animate, comfort and provoke: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,134. Mary as an absolute prince: Alford, Burghley, 272, quoting BL Harley 290, fol. 191r; Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,169.

  35 Mary’s trial: BL Additional 48027, fol. 569*r; Cobbett, St
ate Trials, I, 1,169. Phelippes’s facsimile: Guy, My Heart is My Own, 491.

  36 Walsingham’s creed: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,182; Alford, Burghley, 275; Guy, My Heart is My Own, 491–2. Walsingham to Leicester 15 Oct. 1586: Read, Walsingham, III, 54, quoting BL Cotton Caligula C. IX, fol. 502.

  37 Walsingham to Burghley 6 Oct. 1586: TNA SP 12/194, fol. 34r. Speedy execution: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,189–95. London proclamation: BL Additional 48027, fol. 569*v.

  38 Grief of my mind: TNA SP 12/197, fol. 6v. Rather lookers-on: TNA SP 12/195, fol. 111r. Dangerous alteration: printed in full in Read, Walsingham, III, 58–9.

  39 A cordial for Walsingham: Alford, Burghley, 287.

  40 Mary’s execution: BL Additional 48027, fol. 650*; Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,207–12.

  41 Hatton’s speech: ibid., I, 1,138, 1,140. Captain Fortescue: ibid., I, 1,150.

  42 Tichborne’s speech: ibid., I, 1,157–8.

  43 Extremities of the kingdom: Pollen, Babington Plot, 81. Drawn by the heels: Cobbett, State Trials, I, 1,147. Huntingdon to Walsingham 16 Mar. 1581: Huntington Library Hastings correspondence, box 2, HA 5356. Babington’s predictions: Pollen, Babington Plot, 82, 86–7.

  7 Western Planting

  In 1577 the scholar and astrologer Dr John Dee published a book announcing that it was time for the British to take command of the oceans. General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation was dedicated to Sir Christopher Hatton, a fast-rising royal favourite who enjoyed privileged access to the queen as vice-chamberlain of her household. Dee described the Memorials as a ‘plat’: literally a design for a building, but by implication also a plan of action, to construct or to reform. In this instance, it was the architecture of empire which the author had in mind.