Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  The Queen, for her part, hinted she might go along with Walsingham’s revocation as ambassador, but first she wished him to clarify what had been the French King’s role in the massacres: and, more important, ascertain what the significance of recent French naval movements were.

  But couriers bearing Walsingham’s reports and his instructions from the Queen and Council kept crossing paths. It was not until the 9th of September that reports providing the full details of the massacres, and the peril in which Walsingham’s own life had been, arrived in England; it was not until a week after that that the Queen’s and Burghley’s letters instructing the English Ambassador on what course to take with the French arrived in Paris. And so, when Walsingham was summoned on the 10th of September to return to the French Court for another audience with the King and Queen Mother, he was left in the most precarious position an ambassador who had once sworn to leave his “private passions behind” him could be in: he would have to rely completely on his own devices, instincts, and native wits.

  The Queen Mother was most disturbed and perplexed: or so she had insisted in summoning the English Ambassador to that second meeting between them since the massacres, now two weeks past. A nice feint. She had heard, she continued, that Monsieur Walsingham was not inclined to continue his friendly feelings toward the King her son. She had hoped the ambassador would continue to lend his support to her efforts to bring the match between his mistress and her youngest son to the long-hoped-for conclusion. Perhaps he would come to the palace and explain the reasons for his “scruple touching the King’s and her sincere meaning”?

  Walsingham came; this time he wasted no time showing his steel. There were three reasons, he told Catherine, that he entertained doubts whether the French were in earnest in their protestations of amity and desire to bring about the marriage. First was “the violating of the late Edict and the present severity used against those of the Religion.” Next was the “strange dealing” of the French in the negotiations over the first proposed match, between Elizabeth and Anjou. And, finally, there were the “certain discourses” now everywhere heard around Court of French dreams of “conquest of England and Ireland.”

  Queens were not generally spoken to this way, but Catherine was as cool and unfazed as the ambassador; she also was well aware that the real issue was the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, and so she ignored the last two points the ambassador had raised and went at once to the heart of the matter. France and England had signed a defensive alliance; that treaty, she said, was made not with the Admiral or any other faction but with the French Crown; differences of religion had not prevented its being signed, nor would they prevent its being respected.

  That was true, Walsingham acknowledged, but “the chiefest causes that moved the Queen my Mistress to make account of the Amity of this Crown was that the King suffered certain of his subjects to enjoy, by the virtue of this Edict, exercise of the same Religion her Majesty professed.” And he went on, “Surely, Madame, I fear that this late severity executed herein will make all the princes of the Religion to repute the same a general denunciation of war against them, which I fear will prove as bloody as ever war that happened, whereof the benefit would chiefly grow to the Turk.”

  Catherine suggested that the English had been misled to have thought of the Admiral as a friend to their cause in any case. She produced a discourse found with the Admiral’s will, a letter of advice to the King written a number of months before, in which the Admiral urged the Crown to pursue a policy of apportioning equal mistrust to the Queen of England and the King of Spain, the better to ensure the safety of the French Crown. Walsingham examined the document for a moment. It merely showed, he calmly riposted, that the Admiral was a faithful servant of his master the King; such loyalty and devotion were virtues his mistress always respected.

  Walsingham again pressed Catherine on the abandonment of the Edict’s toleration of freedom of worship for the Huguenots; and so the thrust and parry began in earnest.

  “They shall enjoy the liberty of their conscience,” Catherine insisted.

  “And the exercise of their religion, too?”

  “No, my son will have exercise of but one religion in his realm.”

  “Then how can it agree, that the observation of the Edict, whereof you willed me to advertise the Queen my mistress, should continue in its former strength?”

  Catherine replied that they had “discovered certain matters of late” that made it “necessary to abolish all exercise of the same.”

  “Why, Madame, will you then have them live without exercise of religion?”

  “Even as your mistress suffereth the Catholics of England.”

  “My mistress never did promise them anything by edict; if she had she would not fail to have performed it.”

  The bluntest language yet, summoning a blunt answer: “The Queen, your mistress is to direct the government of her own country, the King his.”

  “I do not move these questions out of curiosity,” Walsingham retorted, “but to render account to the Queen my Mistress of the proceedings.”

  And so it had ended; a draw perhaps.

  A week and a half later, on the 21st of September, the English Ambassador was back for yet another interview. At last the mail had caught up, and for the first time since the massacres he was armed with full instructions from London. Elizabeth had written demanding to know from the French King why, even if the accusations against the Admiral were true, it had been necessary to act outside of the law and kill him in cold blood; after all, he was confined to bed, wounded in his right hand and left arm, under the care of surgeons, surrounded even by the King’s own guard; the force that had slain him could just as easily have taken him prisoner and brought him to answer the charges. “The manner of the cruelty used,” Walsingham boldly stated, “cannot be allowable in any kingdom or government.” His mistress was prepared to order his recall, he informed Catherine: she had heard his very life was in danger.

  The Queen Mother replied that there had been no time for the normal machinery of justice to deal with a conspiracy about to be sprung only hours hence; it was a known fact that the Huguenot commander Count Montgomery had amassed in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain a great troop ready to seize power. Walsingham said that surely Montgomery’s forty horsemen, only four of whom even had pistols, were no danger to the Crown. The King asserted that if he were to consent to Walsingham’s recall he would have to recall his own ambassador in London; such an action would be tantamount to a declaration of war. He the King would ensure that the English Ambassador was adequately protected, but could not grant him his passports to leave.

  In parting, the King and the Queen Mother both assured the ambassador of their devotion and friendship to his mistress the Queen of England.

  Another draw; but a draw that had reinforced Walsingham’s conviction that to continue England’s traditional diplomatic course as if nothing had happened was madness. The massacres showed that there could be no true peace with Catholic countries, now or ever, and it was time for a revolution in policy: not for moral reasons, not even for the cause of the Protestant religion, but for pure political practicality.

  Elizabeth still hoped to thread a course of temporizing and half-measures: safety in ambiguity, an ambiguity that kept friends and enemies alike uncertain where they stood amid all of the competing ties of religion, courtship, and family. As a token of friendship the French King sent an envoy to ask Elizabeth if she would stand godmother to his newborn daughter. Elizabeth feigned astonishment at the suggestion: why would the King, who had just persecuted those of her religion, now ask her to be godmother to his child? Many of her advisers were urging her to break relations altogether. After berating the French Ambassador in this vein for some time, she majestically declared that she would nonetheless rise above all of these wrongs and all of this hard counsel and show her love to her brother king by agreeing to his request. She would send an English nobleman to represent her: the Earl of Worcester, an En
glish Catholic nobleman at that.

  Meanwhile, both sides had resumed the seemingly endless series of proposals and counter-proposals of the marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and Alençon. Yet Walsingham saw that the time for such games was over. Though not making so bold as to oppose the marriage outright, he grew increasingly suspicious of French sincerity; their intention appeared nothing more than to “lull us asleep in security.” He wrote a trusted colleague, Sir Thomas Smith, one of her Majesty’s principal secretaries, “The more I observe of their doings here, the more I increase my jealousy of their evil meaning.”

  “The best way not to be deceived by them,” he added with harsh simplicity, “is not to trust them.” The protestations of friendship from Catherine and Charles were themselves suspicious, Walsingham insisted. The Admiral had been fawned over and petted by the King and Queen Mother just two days before he died; likewise, the French Court now never used “fairer speech” or “greater protestations of amity” toward England, such a torrent of kind words at a time when their actions spoke just the opposite. Politics had aligned with religion, and the Queen was playing with her very life and crown to ignore that truth:

  If her Majesty stick now to spend or put in execution all those things that tend to her safety, she must not look long to live in repose, nay she must not long look to keep the crown upon her head. The cause of her former quietness proceeded of her neighbors’ unquietness, which being removed, she must now make another account.

  With the Admiral dead, not only was a distracting “unquietness” removed from the French King’s attentions, but the influence of the ultra-Catholic Guises was inevitably increased. The Papal Nuncio and the Spanish Ambassador were every day seen closeted with the King or members of the court.

  “Can we think that the fire kindled here in France will extend itself no further?” Walsingham wrote in another letter that autumn. “Let us not deceive ourselves but assuredly think that the two great monarchs of Europe together with the rest of the Papists do mean shortly to put in execution” their aim of exterminating Protestantism altogether.

  And amid the outpouring of prose that Walsingham penned in a rush of growing certainty, he pronounced what would become his watchwords for the next two decades: “It may be said that I fear too much. Surely, considering the state we stand in, I think it less danger to fear too much than too little.”

  In late September, he went so far as to offer his advice to the Privy Council itself, the inner circle of power and administration of the English government; his manner was deferential, his conviction unbending. “Your Honors, by the King and his mother’s answers, may see great protestations of amity. I am sorry that I cannot yield that assurance thereof that heretofore I have done.” He himself had believed such French expressions of goodwill in the past, but he hoped he might be excused for that mistake; “my error in that belief was common with a great many wiser than myself.” But the King’s assurances were now inescapably belied by his actions: in persecuting the Protestants, in violating the terms of the Edict, and in giving his ear to the sworn enemies of England. “I leave it to your Honors now to judge what account you may make of the amity of this crown. If I may without presumption or offense say my opinion, considering how things presently stand, I think less peril to live with them as enemies than as friends.”

  Personally, Walsingham was heartily ready to leave. Elizabeth had quickly backed off from her threat to the French King that Walsingham might be withdrawn, leaving a mere secretary in his place; now she was willing to consider Walsingham’s departure on personal grounds, but only if it carried no diplomatic significance, and that meant not until a replacement was found and dispatched.

  The months dragged by heavily; Walsingham suffered another bout of his illness; his household continued to hemorrhage money. His wife, back home, was pregnant with their second child. Thomas Smith reported in December that he was working on the Queen as best he could in London: “All your friends have not only been diligent but more than importunate to bring you home, and your wife with tears and lamentations. And the Queen’s Majesty seemeth to incline and grant our requests. But when a pin is set fast in a hole, till we have another to thrust that out and tarry there itself, it is hard to get out.”

  The crux was finding the next willing victim for such a thankless office. “Your successor cannot yet be found; yea, find enough, but we cannot get one that will stick fast,” Smith wrote. The first nominee had succeeded in wriggling out of the job: “slipped his head out of the collar,” Walsingham sardonically put it. The next pleaded sickness. A third had manfully accepted the commission, bought his horses, engaged his servants; then the Queen had changed her mind. Given the delicacy of the marriage negotiations, she explained, she had decided she could not after all spare a man of Walsingham’s experience and discretion.

  “You are a wise man,” Smith wrote by way of apology, “and can comfort yourself with wisdom and patience.”

  By February 1573, Walsingham’s financial ruin was near total. When the Court removed to Fontainebleau, fifty miles up the Seine from the capital, he reported, “I shall be driven to remain here … having neither furniture, money, nor credit.”

  Finally, on the 19th of March, the Queen signed Walsingham’s revocation; two weeks later, his designated replacement was on his way from London. On the 19th of April, Walsingham presented his successor to the King at Court. The King thanked him for his services and presented him a gold chain worth a thousand crowns. Catherine gave him presents for his wife and daughter and a letter in her own hand to Elizabeth, praising his behavior and service while in France.

  After a final farcical episode—the King, suddenly fearing that Walsingham’s departure presaged a declaration of war by England, had sent a rider flying after the departing ambassador to carry him back to Fontainebleau, and by the time the King was reassured another week had passed—Walsingham arrived in London on the 10th of May.

  For his two years and four months in her Majesty’s service, he had been richly compensated with broken health, financial ruin, and an unequaled lesson in political reality.

  1532-72: Making of a Spymaster

  3

  A PARTICULAR KIND OF GENTLEMAN

  The characteristic that everyone would always later remark upon about Francis Walsingham was, to put it simply, that he knew how to shut up.

  Video et taceo, see and keep silent: It was said to be Queen Elizabeth’s motto, but it was Walsingham’s first, and the truth was that the Queen, for all her diplomatic shrewdness, came out with the most extraordinary things on occasion. No one ever heard Walsingham let a stray word slip. In the perpetual intrigue of the Court, boasts of influence and intimate knowledge of goings-on were the common currency of power. That, or shrill complaints of ill-use, and wounded protests of vanity and merit slighted. In an age of braggarts and swagger and public lamentations, a man with the self-assurance to keep his own counsel stood out.

  Not just stood out: was distinctly unnerving. “A man exceeding wise and industrious,” William Camden, the great chronicler of the age, called Walsingham, “a most sharp maintainer of the purer Religion, a most subtle searcher of hidden secrets, who knew excellently well how to win men’s minds unto him, and to apply them to his own uses.”

  “As the close room sucketh in most air,” wrote a later chronicler, so Walsingham, “this wary man, got most intelligence”:

  Dexterous he was in finding a secret, close in keeping it. His converse was insinuating and reserved: he saw every man, and none saw him. It was his first maxim, Knowledge is never too dear… .

  He was no less dexterous to work on humors than to convince by reason. He would say, he must observe the joints and flexures of affairs; and so could do more with a story than others could with a harangue… .

  He said what another writ, That an habit of secrecy is policy and virtue. To him faces spake as much as tongues, and their countenances were indexes of their hearts. He would so beset men with questions,
and draw them on, and pick it out of them by piecemeals, that they discovered themselves whether they answered or were silent… . He waited on men’s souls with his eye, discerning their secret hearts through their transparent faces.

  He saw every man, and none saw him. Certainly none knew his enemies better. He had early on learned to study them, to know them, to like them even. “He was a gentleman, at first of a good house and of better education,” noted a contemporary, “and from university traveled for the rest of his learning.” His father had been a London lawyer; he died in 1534, when Francis was but two. But the family was left well enough off that as a young man Francis was enrolled at Cambridge as a “fellow commoner,” the higher stratum of fee-paying students, distinguishing the sons of gentlemen from the lesser sorts who paid their fees but lacked social cachet, and the even lesser sorts, those with more brains than money or family, who paid their way through university waiting on tables.

  The usual regimen at Cambridge was Latin leavened with Greek, Hebrew, and not infrequent beatings for infractions of the college rules. Students were expected to speak to one another in Latin; in general they were not expected to apply their brains to much other than memorization. But King’s College, where Walsingham went, was the most ardently Protestant college in a university that was becoming a bastion of reformist thought, and Walsingham’s own tutor was a leading light among the young reformers: an early exercise in stretching one’s mind amid an otherwise conventional course.

  Like many a gentleman’s son, Walsingham then went conventionally on to study law at Gray’s Inn in London. And then he fled abroad, along with the rest of the zealous Protestants that Cambridge and King’s had nurtured in the flowering of reform that ended abruptly with the very unexpected accession of the very Catholic Mary Tudor to the throne in 1553.