Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  They were capable, efficient, professional, distinctly modern. Parliament, too, was now coming to be dominated by the gentry, and by university-educated men. For a couple of generations, it had been a tradition of sorts for the gentry, and ambitious families of the classes just below, to send their sons after university to the Inns of Court in London. Some became professional lawyers, which took six to nine years of study, but many more stayed for just a few years, to acquire social refinement and valuable contacts and the sort of knowledge that might help them look after their property or assume a county office such as Justice of the Peace. The Inns were said to be the “third university” of the land, with a place alongside Cambridge and Oxford.

  Under Elizabeth, they became something more, the place where men seeking a career as a politician or statesman could get their professional start. Being a grandee was fine if one wanted to play cards with the Queen or be invited to dance in her presence. Knowing law, and Latin, and business, and the ways of the world was a better recommendation if what one was after was the real power of government.

  William Cecil had shown the way, the exemplar of the new breed.

  His grandfather was a successful yeoman farmer and soldier; his father had made the jump to the ranks of the gentry, purchasing several royal manors and becoming a Justice of the Peace; William was duly sent to Cambridge and Gray’s Inn.

  Throughout his life, William Cecil remained a scholar through and through, steeped in Latin and Greek, eloquent, a brilliant debater, quick on his feet, ever seeking and storing away any scrap of knowledge that might be of use. At Cambridge he had imprudently concluded a secret marriage with the daughter of an innkeeper: a scandal, but not a simple one, for the girl’s brother was actually a great and famous man, already the greatest Greek scholar of his day, a poor man whose native genius had swept away all barriers of class and custom to attain for him a Cambridge education, and then the post of Regius Professor of Greek, and then tutor to no less a person than Prince Edward, the King’s heir. When Cecil’s young wife died not long thereafter, he remarried; his new wife was herself an accomplished Greek scholar.

  Cecil entered Parliament at the age of twenty-three, became Principal Secretary to Edward VI at thirty, survived Mary Tudor’s five-year reign by fulfilling a few tactful diplomatic missions abroad and conforming enough to keep his lands and his head, all the while maintaining a discreet contact with the young Princess Elizabeth. When Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, her first act was to name Cecil her Principal Secretary and a Privy Councilor.

  Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne brought the exiles back, and Cecil, always on the lookout for likely young men, apparently helped see to it that Francis Walsingham—one of the likeliest, who on his return had taken up the life of the country gentleman on the estate at Footscray, in Kent, which he had inherited by his father’s will—was elected to Parliament in 1562.

  Cecil was the perfect patron and the perfect mentor for a man of Walsingham’s inclinations and abilities. Sober, upright, self-controlled, a limitless capacity for work and an unflappable nerve, Cecil was friendly and cheerful to everyone and revealed nothing to anyone. He was no courtier, he said: he shunned the social life of the Court, dressed plainly, lived in his own house, admitting no friend to a footing of true intimacy. His only diversion was pleasant talk at meals; work consumed the rest of his waking hours.

  He was no courtier: but he was a master at leading and cajoling a Queen who, ever on guard against the imputation that she was a mere figurehead, a woman pretending to a man’s job, spurned cajolery. Elizabeth may not have been schooled to rule a kingdom as other princes were, but she had received a formidable classical education and had taken to hard mental work with enthusiasm; though she loved the pomp and ostentation that were hers to command, she equally prided herself on the mastery of the most complex affairs of state. From the start she made it clear that no decision, however trivial, would be made without her personal consent. Her famous temper was equal parts royal caprice and tactical shrewdness, all the shrewder and shocking for coming from a woman, and she knew it. “When I see her enraged against any person whatever,” the French Ambassador once confessed, “I wish myself in Calcutta.” As circumstances required, she could be a bully, a coquette, or a wit: whatever it took. But she was not beyond advice, and Cecil could get decisions and answers out of the Queen as no one else could: “he knoweth her mind,” she once said of her chief councilor. She might storm, but she was ultimately loyal to those upon whose efficiency, devotion, and capability her rule depended.

  The Queen’s nickname for Cecil had none of her usual barbed wit. Her Spirit, she called him, and he was everywhere, the guiding force of her government. He was like a spirit in another way, Elizabeth once reassured him when the intrigues of courtiers began to get to him, in that he was insensible to the “kicks of asses.”

  Of Cecil’s absolute command of detail there could be no possible doubt. He filled hundreds of volumes with dossiers of intelligence scrounged from every corner of the land. He was known to stay up late into the night marshaling facts, writing memoranda to himself, weighing pros and cons: who the important families were, how they were connected, what they were up to, and facts about coinage, and imports, and the size of the fishing fleet, and the fortunes of the Protestant rebels in France and the Low Countries, and the price of French wine. In 1569, when the great lords on the Council, Norfolk and Leicester among them, decided the time had come to put this upstart in his place and hatched a plot to confront him with an accusation of malfeasance and misgovernment and have him thrown into the Tower, Cecil characteristically learned of it first and was ready with a lengthy, brilliant memorandum on the state of the realm and his management of it during his ten years in office. He was ready, too, with the Queen’s backing, and her wrath against the would-be conspirators; that was the end of that. The Queen called him her Spirit: others called him the Old Fox.

  Francis Walsingham was reelected to Parliament in 1566. In 1568, thirty-six years old, recently married to his second wife, he bought a house in London. A promising man, acquainted with the world and its tragedies. Walsingham’s first wife, Anne Carleill, had died after just two years of marriage, leaving him a young son by her previous marriage to bring up. His second wife was also a widow, Ursula St. Barbe Worseley; her inheritance added to his growing estates, but she had brought her own tragedy, too: shortly after their marriage, the two sons from her previous marriage were accidentally blown up by gunpowder while playing in the porter’s lodge at the Worseley estate on the Isle of Wight.

  It was around this time, in the year 1568, that Francis Walsingham’s mentor William Cecil, the man who knew everything and revealed nothing, began finding little jobs that his promising protégé might take on from time to time in the service of his government.

  4

  THE QUEEN’S PERILOUS COURSE

  They were strange jobs, but, then, England was a strange land; the wonder of Europe, in many ways ungoverned, in many ways ungovernable. The Queen’s caution, her famous love for the middle course, was policy and prudence, instinct and necessity, cause and effect: the middle course avoided the shoals, and cut its own narrow way deeper with each traverse.

  It was the English themselves who were at heart ungovernable; ungovernable not because they were lawless but because they were just the opposite, a people for whom law was national religion and national sport. The courts were choked with lawsuits over land and inheritances, over ancient rights encroached upon; juries pigheadedly stood on their power to acquit in criminal trials, and did so one time out of three; even armed rebels and rioters, rising up in one of their regular protests against authority, would invariably invoke the law to justify their resistance in the name of some customary privilege, some right to work the land or work their trade in accordance with some obscure, convoluted, but never forgotten grant.

  The monarchs of England tried to keep their Parliaments in check, and were not above committing to the To
wer members who occasionally spoke too freely; but their increasing dependence upon Parliament for the approval of special taxes, and to confer legitimacy upon such radical social reforms as the reordering of religion, gave voice and power to that same strident demand of the people to be heard and to stand upon their ancient rights and privileges. The Lords and Commons usually in the end gave the sovereign what he or she wanted, but not without some astonishing expressions of independence and will; the Commons especially, for it was the Commons where, by tradition, money bills originated. Though elected only by freeholders who possessed land worth £40, the Commons was universally understood to speak for all: “The consent of Parliament was taken to be every man’s consent,” wrote Sir Thomas Smith. “The regiment of England is not a mere monarchy, as some for lack of consideration think,” a pamphleteer defending Elizabeth in the first year of her reign wrote; “nor a mere oligarchy, nor democracy, but a rule mixed of all these.” The Queen ruled, to be sure, the pamphleteer acknowledged, yet “first it is not she that ruleth, but the laws.”

  A ruler who sought to impose his will by force alone on such an ungovernable, pigheaded, legalistic, outspoken people did so at his peril: not that there was much force to be had. The kings of France had forty thousand officials serving them, an army, a horde of professional bureaucrats and local enforcers. Elizabeth had twelve hundred paid officials in the whole of her realm, and half of those were administrators of her personal estates. It was a tenth the number of government officials per subject that any self-respecting tyrant required: a “government by persuasion,” as one later historian would call it.

  Most of the burden of local rule in Elizabeth’s England fell to unpaid Justices of the Peace, local gentry charged with everything from ensuring church attendance to having vagrants whipped and enforcing the laws against football-playing, swearing, and abducting heiresses. The justices were magnificently amateurish, ridiculously overburdened. London printers, sensing a lucrative market, came out with a whole series of quick-study guides that promised to turn a not always too-bright country gentleman into something that could at least pass for a judge. For other help the J.P. could turn to that other magnificently amateurish and unpaid local official, the constable, whose major contribution to Elizabethan society was to provide the butt of rough humor on the stage for Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights.

  Of an army there was almost none because of taxes there was almost none. Many realms of Europe teetered on bankruptcy through profligacy but England managed to do it through sheer penury. A distinction of sorts: the most undertaxed country of the age. Elizabeth inherited a debt of £300,000 and a debased currency, and like her predecessors was expected to foot the entire cost of government out of her own income from Crown lands and customs duties, about £200,000 a year in all. In the first decade and a half of her rule, she borrowed £1 million from abroad. Small military adventures in Scotland and France in the early years of her reign absorbed £750,000; special taxes grudgingly voted by Parliament to cover these extraordinary costs in fact covered but a third. These parliamentary taxes were the only thing England had that ever resembled real taxes, based on a fixed percentage of property or income. But they were viewed, at least by Parliament and ordinary men, as exceptional measures that would be granted only to meet special emergencies. And in practice they never worked as they were supposed to; tradition had reduced the percentages of property and income to a fixed sum to be apportioned among the counties, and even those sums were not met. The local gentry parceled out the actual assessments: they went easy on themselves.

  And so the Queen’s entire standing army consisted of two hundred royal bodyguards and a garrison of a few hundred men manning the south-coast forces against invasion. In theory, all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty could be called up for militia duty; in practice, they were exempt from foreign service and too poorly trained and ill-equipped to be of much use anyway.

  The dearth of government offices and their meager pay bred inefficiency and corruption, a very English sort of inefficiency and corruption, sanctioned by custom, nothing too egregious but impossible to alter. Officers of the Crown supplemented their official earnings with bribes and fees and skimmings and kickbacks and the petty graft needed to oil so creaky a piece of machinery; monopolies were granted on everything from the manufacture of playing cards to the licensing of taverns to the transportation of leather, all a way for the Queen to grant favors without costing herself a penny, only further disabling the machinery of governance. Offices were always for sale, a minor one for £200, a particularly lucrative one for £4,000. A great man like Cecil was above straight bribery, was incorruptible in that sense; but he, like everyone else, accepted the perquisites that more subtly subverted the efficiency and power of government. There were “arrangement fees” from those seeking a profitable wardship, the gift of the Court of Wards over which he presided; there were the presents of plate expected of anyone with private business before the Privy Council. Cecil died with £15,000 worth stashed in his house.

  The amateurism and casualness of Elizabethan administration clung to all levels of government, a strange mixing of public and private. Officers hired and paid for clerks out of their own pockets if they wanted them; those who were charged with receiving and spending funds mixed their private and public obligations and freely borrowed or speculated with the government’s money; experiments were made in farming out customs collection entirely to private hands. The truly appalling and precarious practices Cecil managed to root out. A bold devaluation of the debased coinage, followed by its immediate recall and reissuance in new coins with full silver value, two-thirds of a million pounds’ worth, stabilized the currency and actually returned a small profit to the Treasury; rigid controls on spending erased the government’s debt by the 1570s. A long neglect of domestic arms manufacture was rectified: brass and gunpowder industries were hastened into being.

  But the merely routine and precarious remained, as always, unchangeable in ungoverned and ungovernable England. If trying to retain power and the security and unity of the nation through so limited a means and so precarious a middle course seemed a dubious formula for success, it at least had the virtue of being a less dubious policy than attempting to impose power and security and unity by force where no force was to be had.

  No shoals tested the cautious navigator of the middle course like the shoals of religion.

  Religion had cast Elizabeth’s very right to the throne in doubt, for as far as Rome was concerned the marriage of her parents, Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, had never happened. Elizabeth had outwardly professed Catholicism during her half-sister’s reign, but enough was known, or thought to be known, about her inner convictions to elate Protestants and grieve defenders of the old faith in the uncertain weeks that stretched between Mary’s death, on the 17th of November 1558, and Elizabeth’s coronation, on the 15th of January 1559.

  At Mary’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, John White, Bishop of Winchester, had stood before her coffin to deliver the sermon and a shot across the bow. Mary’s coffin was draped in gold cloth and, somewhat grotesquely, surmounted with a lifelike, full-sized image of the late Queen, clothed, robed, sceptered, crowned, bejeweled. The Bishop’s text was a verse from Ecclesiastes: “I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.” White did not directly question Elizabeth’s legitimacy, and he was cleverly elliptical in explicating those words of the Old Testament decrier of human folly. But he seemed to leave little doubt about what he was getting at when he said, “If ye ask whether it is better for me to be born in this world, and be a rebeller, a murderer, a heretic, a blasphemer, or not to be born at all? In this case I must answer, better is never to be born.” The Bishop closed his sermon with a perfunctory expression of hope for a prosperous and peaceful reign for the new Queen—adding portentously, “If it be God’s will,” implication distinctly not.

  Most Englishmen would probably follow sullenly wherever their new Q
ueen led on religion, as they had through the reverses of her sister and brother and father before; so, too, would most of the rank-and-file clergy, good Vicars of Bray almost to a man.

  Those who would not were girding for trouble, and were in a position to make it. The hierarchy of the church and most of the nobility were strongly Catholic, or at least conservative. Elizabeth tipped her hand but once: on Christmas Day, in the royal chapel, she walked out of mass when the priest, defying her instructions, elevated the host. It was enough to make every leading bishop of the land refuse to preside at the coronation.

  On the other side, the hopes of the hotter Puritans were almost sure to be dashed, so great had they risen and so swiftly; and the reformers’ capacity for anger and trouble was almost unlimited. Elizabeth’s accession had already unleashed a paroxysm of iconoclasm; mobs set upon churches and made bonfires of relics, roods, banners, vestments, altar cloths, saints’ images, “as if it had been the sacking of some hostile city,” noted one chronicler. The staunchly Protestant burghers of London greeted the Queen on her coronation procession with five elaborate pageants. None were subtle. In one, a figure representing Pure Religion trampled Ignorance and Superstition underfoot; in another, a child clad as Truth presented Elizabeth with an English Bible; and in the last, the new Queen was portrayed as an English Deborah, rescuing her people from the yoke of oppression.

  Elizabeth’s middle course had been charted in a secret plan prepared by an adviser to William Cecil before Christmas: “A Device for the Alteration of Religion.” It was a profoundly conservative strategy for the reinstatement of Protestantism, a Protestantism of the most circumspect kind, orderly, decorous, uniform, governed by bishops, preserving most of the forms and rituals of the old church, strictly forbidding unlicensed worship and unlicensed preaching. The result, the author admitted, would be dismissed by many Protestants as “a cloaked papistry or a mingle-mangle”; but to acquiesce in the full Puritan vision, every church governed by itself, every man in direct contact with God, free to determine the truth from his own study of the Bible, was to invite chaos.