Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  From other French contacts Franchiotto passed on reports of joint Spanish and French schemes to overthrow Elizabeth and Protestantism. Meanwhile, Walsingham had arranged for the Lord Mayor of London to send him weekly reports of all strangers taking lodgings in the city. Walsingham admitted that Franchiotto’s vague reports of “a practice in hand for the alteration of religion and the advancement of the Queen of Scots to the crown” were not much to go on; but “there is less danger in fearing too much than too little”—those words that Walsingham would repeat, again and again.

  Walsingham’s trail appeared again a few months later, crossing the tracks of rather more dangerous quarry. At the time of the commission at York, rumors had drifted about that some of the Scottish lords had approached the Duke of Norfolk with a startling proposition: that he should marry Mary himself. Rumor also had it that the Duke was extremely enthusiastic about the idea.

  Norfolk vehemently denied it, exclaiming to Elizabeth that he would not be able “to sleep upon a safe pillow” lying next to “so wicked a woman, such a notorious adulteress and murderer.” But there were safe pillows and there were the glories due a lord who was a direct descendant of Edward I, the only remaining duke in the land, a man widely regarded as the richest and most powerful man in Europe who was not a prince in his own right. Confident of his power, Norfolk began in the spring of 1569 to move openly toward forging so attractive an alliance; even Cecil did not dare oppose him when the Duke sought a Privy Council decision that Mary would be given her liberty if she was safely married to an English lord.

  Cecil did not actively oppose the Duke: he had other means at his disposal. Sometime in 1569, a pamphlet appeared, a brilliant, savage piece of propaganda that warned of the evils that would befall the realm and the Protestant cause should the Queen of Scots marry an Englishman. The author was almost surely Walsingham. It purported to be a dispassionate analysis of whether it was better for the Queen of Scots to marry an Englishman or a foreigner, though of course no one was talking about her marrying any foreigner. In fact, it was a wonderful piece of character assassination of both the Queen and the Duke, calculated to provoke the ire of England’s Puritans in particular.

  In enumerating the sins of the Queen of Scots, the pamphleteer was thorough in appealing to every English prejudice:

  In religion she is either a Papist which is evil, or else an Atheist which is worse… .

  Of nation she is a Scot, of which nation I forbear to say what may be said, in a reverend respect of a few godly of that nation.

  Of inclination, how she is given, let her own horrible acts publicly known to the whole world witness, though now of late certain seduced by practice seek to cloak and hide the same.

  Of alliance on the mother’s side how she is descended of a race that is both enemy to God and to the common quiet of Europe, every man knoweth, but alas too many have felt.

  In goodwill towards our sovereign she hath shewed herself sundry ways very evil affected, whose ambition hath drawn her by bearing the arms of England to decipher herself to be a competitor of this Crown, a thing publicly known. I leave to touch other particular practices that have discovered her aspiring mind.

  And as for the Duke, the pamphlet continued, though he was outwardly a Protestant, and though of course his religious belief was a matter to be left between God and his own conscience, there was the undeniable fact that he had once married a papist, had allowed his son to be educated by a papist, had chosen papists for all of the chief men of his house, and was on intimate terms with “the chief Papists of this realm.” In short, the “pretended match” between Norfolk and Mary was a threat to religion and to the safety of the Crown. Without coming right out and declaring it to be treasonous as well, the pamphleteer concluded ominously: “I leave to lawyers to define of what quality this presumption is for a subject to seek to match with a competitor of this crown, without making his sovereign privy thereto.”

  Walsingham had, with considerable accuracy, touched the heart of the case there, for it was Norfolk’s failure to inform the Queen of his intentions that would turn out to be the most effective weapon against him. Walsingham’s pamphlet was one of just many inspired leaks that Cecil orchestrated throughout the spring and summer; never outwardly confronting or opposing Norfolk, he repeatedly dropped just enough hints to Elizabeth to make it clear that the Duke was up to something.

  In early August, Elizabeth encountered Norfolk while walking the grounds at her palace at Richmond; Norfolk had come from London to join the rest of court, and Elizabeth archly asked him if he had any news of a marriage. Norfolk slipped off without giving a straight answer. A few weeks later, she pointedly told him to “take good heed of his pillow,” a barbed reference to his earlier denial of any interest in the Scottish Queen. Finally, in September, Elizabeth confronted Norfolk directly and the Duke was panicked into a confession. The Queen responded with “sharp speeches and dangerous looks,” and, a bit of a weakling and a bit of a fool, Norfolk fled from Court. Defying the Queen’s orders to return, he first pleaded he was too ill to travel, then made for his country estate, where his followers now fully expected him to lead a revolt. The Queen told Leicester that she knew perfectly well that were the planned marriage to take place, she would be in the Tower in four months. But at the moment of crisis, Norfolk gave himself up: it was he who was thrown in the Tower.

  Damp powder lit with a wet fuse, a group of Catholic northern earls who had been secretly preparing to join Norfolk’s cause once his position was secured through the planned marriage to Mary now went ahead with their revolt anyway, without him, or the marriage. At Durham Cathedral, Northumberland arrived in mid-November with three hundred horsemen, knocked over the communion table, threw Protestant Bibles and prayer books to the ground, and ordered celebration of the mass.

  But within a month, the pathetic revolt had fizzled; the leaders escaped to Scotland, the followers were hanged. Mary was moved yet again, farther south.

  A stronger guard was ordered placed about her.

  Among those swept up in the aftermath of Norfolk’s matrimonial plot was a well-known Florentine banker in London, Roberto Ridolfi. He had resided in London for a decade, handling the banking affairs of continental merchants and the Catholic embassies; he was known to receive a regular pension from both France and Spain for his work.

  But Ridolfi had also been observed of late delivering considerable sums of money to the Bishop of Ross, Mary’s agent in London, as well as to some of Norfolk’s servants. Again it was Walsingham whom Cecil now called upon to assist in the matter. On the 7th of October 1569, the Council issued an order authorizing Walsingham to hold the Florentine at his house “without conference until he may be examined of certain matters that touch her highness very nearly.”

  It would prove to be one of the few times anyone got the better of Walsingham. Ridolfi freely admitted to Walsingham that he had arranged banking matters for Norfolk and the Bishop of Ross and had transferred money for them from abroad; that, after all, was his job. He had even been “made privy to the matter of the marriage betwixt the Queen of Scots and the Duke.” But surely this was not a crime. Walsingham was ordered to search Ridolfi’s lodgings and did so: nothing incriminating among his papers. So Ridolfi was released on a £1,000 bond and his promise that he would not meddle “in any matters concerning her Majesty or the state of this realm.” In January 1570, the bond was returned in full.

  In part, Cecil’s reason for detaining Ridolfi had been simply to cut off his communication with the Spanish Ambassador, de Spes, while the Norfolk matter was being investigated; that had been accomplished. It was no doubt true, too, that nothing positively incriminating had been extracted from Ridolfi. But Walsingham ended up being beguiled, not just as to Ridolfi’s guilt but as to his character; a few months later, Walsingham wrote Cecil urging him to make use of Ridolfi for a sensitive diplomatic mission, praising him as a man who “would deal both discreetly and uprightly, as one both wise and who stan
deth on terms of honesty and reputation.”

  It was a mistake Walsingham would scarcely repeat. Ridolfi, for his part, would later boast to friends that the matters Walsingham had interrogated him about were serious enough to have had him beheaded twenty-five times over.

  Early in 1570, Cecil mentioned to the Queen that he thought Francis Walsingham might be a suitable candidate for her new ambassador to France. By August she had agreed, and Walsingham had already left England for the Continent when the final act took place in the Norfolk melodrama: it could never quite attain the level of tragedy.

  It had quickly became apparent that nothing Norfolk had done strictly fit the definition of treason, and his confinement in the Tower was eased. In August 1570, he was released, having given his word “never to deal in the cause of the marriage of the Queen of Scots.”

  The following April, of 1571, a passenger arriving at Dover from Flanders became so insistent that certain packages he was carrying be allowed through that the suspicions of the customs officers were, not unnaturally, aroused. The traveler was arrested and his baggage searched.

  The man was Charles Baillie, a Fleming of Scottish descent, a servant of the Bishop of Ross. In his possession was a book by Ross, secretly printed in Liège, defending the Queen of Scots. Also in his possession was a packet of letters in cipher. Secretary Cecil—Lord Burghley, as he had become in February—was informed.

  Before the letters were turned over to Burghley, however, Ross managed an extraordinarily bold feat: he approached the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and explained that, though the letters were perfectly innocent, they would greatly embarrass Norfolk, and surely the Lord Warden did not wish to do that to so great a nobleman. Ross convinced the Lord Warden to deliver the letters to him instead; after opening the packet in the Lord Warden’s presence, Ross gave him a packet of old letters to give to Burghley in their place, and so allay any suspicions.

  The shoe was on the other foot with regard to the custody of Baillie’s person, however: he was thrown into Marshalsea Prison, in Southwark, and practiced upon with every prison confidence trick from time immemorial. A man very convincingly playing the part of an abject fellow prisoner befriended him; Baillie, “fearful, full of words, and given to the cup,” let slip that there had been other letters than the ones Burghley had received. The fellow prisoner claimed he himself had found a way to pass cipher messages from Baillie to Ross, should he wish to communicate with his master; these were intercepted and read before being passed on.

  Transferred to the Tower, Baillie was then both racked and further practiced upon. In one elaborate ruse, a man appeared late one night in his cell identifying himself as Dr. John Story—a hero of English Catholics who had recently been kidnapped from Antwerp and brought back to England in one of Secretary Cecil’s most brilliant secret operations. Though Baillie had never met him before, Story’s presence in the Tower was the talk of the prisoners there; Baillie was even placed in the same cell in the Beauchamp Tower where Story had in truth been held, and where the Catholic hero had left an inscription carved on the wall. The “Story” who now slipped in to speak to Baillie, through “the kindness of a gaoler,” strongly advised the young man that it would be best, after all, to cooperate with the authorities.

  Eventually the miserable man did. He confessed that the two ciphered letters he had been carrying were from none other than Roberto Ridolfi, who had approached him in Flanders shortly before Baillie departed for England. What was more, Ridolfi had told him what was in the letters: they reported on Ridolfi’s recent audience with the Duke of Alva in Brussels, during which the Spaniard had agreed to an invasion of England to coincide with a Catholic rising that would free Mary and seize Elizabeth. The letters were addressed to two English noblemen, identified only as “30” and “40.” Baillie insisted, apparently truthfully, that he did not, however, know who they were.

  Having been wrung dry at last, Baillie was thrown back in his cell, where he was left to scratch his own rueful inscription on the wall, still there to be seen centuries later: “Be friend to no one. Be enemy to none. The most unhappy man in the world is he that is not patient with the adversities they have, for men are not killed with the adversities they have, but with the impatience which they suffer. All things come to he who waits.”

  Ross was detained and his premises searched. He admitted the charade about the letters but said he had already burned the real ones. But he still maintained they were perfectly innocent: Mary had been seeking Philip’s and Alva’s aid only against the rebels in her own Scotland, and that was where the Spanish invasion force was to land. Ross feared, however, that Elizabeth might misunderstand Mary’s motives, and that was why he felt it best to get rid of the papers. Asked who “30” and “40” were, Ross insisted they were merely the Spanish Ambassador and Mary herself: again all perfectly innocent.

  And so things lay. From her confinement in Sheffield, Mary penned letter after letter to Elizabeth tearfully lamenting her wretched state and protesting her loyalty to “her dear sister”; to Burghley, her “trusty cousin,” she insisted with wounded innocence that she could not “conjecture in what manner the Bishop of Ross our ambassador might have offended the Queen our good sister” and pleaded for his release. She would have written in her own hand, she added pathetically, but “the debility of our person would not permit us through sickness we have been vexed with.”

  From France, Walsingham picked up one thread of the mystery. In May 1571, he wrote Burghley that he had heard of Ridolfi’s meeting with Alva and the fact that he was carrying with him letters of credence from the Spanish Ambassador in London; after a long conference with Alva, the Florentine had continued on to see both the Pope and the King of Spain. But what Ridolfi’s secret business was, Walsingham had been completely unable to determine.

  The break in the case came obliquely, explosively, in August. A merchant reported to Burghley a strange business that he thought his Lordship should know of. The merchant had been asked by the Duke of Norfolk to carry a shipment north. The load seemed unusually heavy; upon investigation, it turned out to be £600 in gold, plus several letters in cipher.

  Burghley quickly arrested the Duke’s secretary and ordered a search of the Duke’s great London house. He was hoping to find the cipher key, but his searchers instead found yet another cipher letter, hidden, with a subtlety well befitting the Duke’s skills as a conspirator, under a mat at the entrance to his bedroom.

  The Duke’s sweating secretary at this point, under further interrogation, suddenly remembered that the Duke had received letters in cipher from the Queen of Scots; it was a point that had slipped his mind until then.

  The Bishop of Ross, who had passed a not unpleasant summer in the custody of the Bishop of Ely at his country house, hunting and amiably debating theology, was now brought to the Tower and threatened with more rigorous interrogation himself. He pleaded diplomatic immunity; Burghley countered with a written opinion from the Doctors of Law that “an ambassador procuring an insurrection or rebellion in the Prince’s country toward whom he is an ambassador” has forfeited this privilege; whereupon Ross spilled his guts.

  Norfolk, he confessed, had been in on the plot from the start. The Duke was in fact the mysterious “40” to whom Ridolfi’s progress report had been addressed; “30” was Lord Lumley, a leading Catholic nobleman. Ridolfi had carried letters and money from the Pope to advance the effort. Norfolk had refused to put his name directly to the letters Ridolfi had carried abroad from de Spes, letters that Ross now admitted laid out the whole invasion plan to Alva and the Pope; but Ross and Ridolfi had personally assured de Spes that Norfolk had given his word that he subscribed to the plan, and on that basis the Spanish Ambassador had agreed to lend his support. The plan that Norfolk had endorsed envisioned the Catholic lords assembling 20,000 infantry and 3,000 horse; Alva would supply 6,000 arquebusiers, 3,000 horse, and 25 pieces of field artillery. Harwich was the port most suitable for the invasion force. The plan al
so called for two diversionary forces, 2,000 men each, to be sent to Scotland and Ireland. Included in Ridolfi’s letters were a list of 40 English noblemen likely to stand with the rebellion.

  Ross was so terrified of the rack that once he began confessing he could scarcely stop. He dashed off a letter to Mary commending her henceforth to trust only to God; it was obviously His providence that so misguided a plot as this had been uncovered. In a rush of anguish, Ross blurted out to his interrogator, Dr. Thomas Wilson, that Mary had practically murdered all three of her husbands, was unfit to be any man’s wife.

  “Lord, what a people are these!” Thomas remarked to Burghley afterward. “What a Queen, and what an ambassador.”

  The plot was ludicrous in many ways; it would much later be known that, although Alva approved of its purpose, he thought Ridolfi a fool and that an invasion made sense only if Elizabeth was first killed or deposed. “A man like this,” Alva wrote to Philip of Ridolfi, “who is no soldier, who has never witnessed a campaign in his life, thinks that armies can be poured out of the air, or kept up one’s sleeve, and he will do with them whatever fancy suggests.”

  Realistic or not, it was indubitably treasonous. Norfolk was rearrested and, “falling on his knees, confessed his undutiful and foolish doings,” reported the gentlemen who had been sent to bring him to the Tower. The Duke was carried through the streets of London “without any trouble,” his escorts added, “save a number of idle, rascal people, women, men, boys, girls, running about him, as the manner is, gaffing at him.”