Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  The realm’s last duke was arraigned and condemned by a jury of his peers, and sent to the scaffold on the 2nd of June 1572. The Spanish Ambassador was expelled; in a parting shot, he tried to encourage two glory-dreaming English Catholics to assassinate Burghley, a plot that promptly unraveled when the men sent an anonymous letter to Burghley warning him of it themselves.

  Ridolfi dispatched one final letter to Mary from Paris, lamenting that circumstances, alas, did not permit him to return to England. Made a Senator of Rome by the Pope, he peacefully lived out the remainder of his eighty years, dying in his native Florence in 1612.

  Ross, and Baillie, were eventually released: All things come to those who wait.

  Mary was ordered to reduce the size of her entourage to sixteen servants. She wrote more pathetic pleas to Elizabeth and Burghley bemoaning her “feeble state” and that of her faithful, dismissed servants.

  To Walsingham, in Paris, the breaking of the Ridolfi plot merely confirmed his growing convictions that Mary was the enemy, pure and simple, the focus of all of that threatened Elizabeth and her realm; sooner or later she would have to be dealt with, as would the power of Catholic France and Spain. The French Protestants had already seen in Mary the same threat the English had; there were her Guisean connections, her fatal allure, her symbolism as a rallying point for resurgent Catholicism everywhere; if ever Scotland and England were brought back to the old religion, the Protestants of the Continent would be isolated and soon exterminated.

  In the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, which came just two months after Norfolk’s execution, all of those points took on a more sinister appearance. If they had not destroyed Mary, recent events now at least gave the Protestants some vivid material with which to tarnish the Scottish Queen’s reputation; and in the flood of pamphlets that they now began churning out to tell their side of Saint Bartholomew there was a propaganda opportunity to do some good work against Mary, too. Walsingham almost certainly had a part in the clandestine publication and distribution of a French version of a pamphlet that itemized in lurid but exacting detail all of the sordid charges against her and her lover Bothwell. An English version of the same work had been secretly published in London the year before, in an edition made to look as if it had been printed in Scotland; the French edition similarly bore an Edinburgh imprint, again almost surely a false trail. When the book began appearing in France, the French Ambassador in London was instructed to bring a protest to Elizabeth for allowing the printing of such a slanderous book; Elizabeth innocently replied that it must have been printed in Scotland or Germany, since she certainly would not have permitted it in England. It may actually have been printed in France; but there is no doubt that the English embassy in Paris had a hand in seeing it got to the right people.

  But this was a sideshow, as Walsingham well knew.

  “So long as that devilish woman lives,” he wrote Burghley, neither would her Majesty “continue in quiet possession of the crown, nor her faithful subjects assure themselves of safety of their lives.”

  1573-83: Mr. Secretary

  6

  INTELLIGENCERS AND SCOUNDRELS

  If ever there were a land in need of men adept in the black arts of espionage, betrayal, and subversion, it was England; faction-ridden, ungovernable, outnumbered, hand-tied, outspoken England. It was in London that all the jagged seams of English society and English polity came so jaggedly together, and where such men could surely be found, if one knew the right places to look for them.

  The London that Francis Walsingham returned to in May 1573 from his embassy to France was noticeably altered from the city he had left just two and a half years earlier, dramatically altered from the pockmarked urban wreck he had known as a student at Gray’s Inn two decades before. In the 1550s, the ruins of the dissolved and demolished religious houses still lay in heaps, an ugly embroidery of gashes and scars across the cramped face of the walled medieval town. Sir Philip Hoby, who was in a position to know since he had traveled far and wide as an ambassador on the Continent, called the London of 1557 “a stinking city, the filthiest in the world.”

  It had since become a great city, the third largest in Europe, England’s unquestioned capital of politics, finance, trade, shipping, society, religion, a city whose fame was known, it was said, in Persia. It still stank: there was no helping that amid the torrent of slops dumped in streets and courtyards and the offal of slaughtered cattle in the marketplaces and the detritus of leatherworkers and the noisome creeks and inlets and the rotting heads of traitors stuck up on the pikes over London Bridge. And then there was the historical and geographical fact that the city walls still stood where the Romans had first placed them, a small circumscribed arc running from the Tower in the east to the River Fleet in the west, lines laid out a millennium earlier by a Roman general to defend a great empire’s minor provincial outpost, now the confining bounds to a hundred thousand souls who lived and labored and ate and sweated and defecated and gave birth and died practically atop one another all within 330 acres of meandering medieval lanes. Medieval; and crowded; and cast in perpetual shadows by the overhanging upper stories of their cheek-by-jowl houses.

  The plague of 1563 had wiped out a quarter of the city’s teeming masses; but England’s burgeoning prosperity, carried on a tide of coal and woolens and overseas ventures, and London’s unassailable claim to be England’s only city worth a fart, counteracted even that collapse with a boom that drew thousands of new dwellers to the capital each year, from across the land and from across the seas. And so the monasteries had at last been cleared, or their better halls kept and taken over for use by the city’s wealthy guilds; and to the west, toward Westminster and the royal palace of Whitehall, grand town houses of the nobility now stretched along the Strand, each with its private stairs down to the Thames, for boats were the fastest and least troublesome way to travel about the crowded city, or to get to Greenwich or Richmond when the Court removed to the Queen’s palaces there; and Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, with its great open piazza and arcaded colonnade and hundred shops for goldsmiths and armorers and financiers, had opened on the east end of Cheapside, heralding London’s arrival as the great center of European trade and finance it had become.

  And with the grandeur of prosperity came the squalor of prosperity, for each year the city burst a bit more to accommodate the destitute and the adventurers and the ambitious and the refugees drawn by hope or impelled by need. Within the city, hovels and tenements jostled with grand houses and merchants’ stalls; just beyond the gates, beyond the reach of the law of the good bourgeois aldermen, the filthy cottages of the poor crowded along the main roads to the north and the east, colonizing the fields where cattle had grazed but a few years before. Farther out, the brick kilns of Islington attracted the more desperate, the homeless unemployed looking for a warm place to sleep while they scrounged for work. And across the river, to the south, the suburb of Southwark teemed with shipwrights and sailors and semi-skilled craftsmen and foreigners and prostitutes, and with the crowds who frequented prostitutes and the bull-baitings and bear-baitings nearby.

  The watermen who jammed the Thames calling “Westward ho!” and “Eastward ho!” for fares, and the carriers who carted in water to all who could afford to save themselves from the sickness and death of drinking right from the foul river, and the speculators who divided up some of the old decaying palaces of the wealthy into rude tenements, and the prostitutes, and the bull-baiters, and the butchers, and the tavern keepers, and the prison wardens, all saw little to choose between grandeur and squalor: demand was demand, and prosperity was prosperity.

  It was not democracy; but London’s hugger-mugger jumbling together of rich and poor, merchants and seamen, aristocrats and tradesmen, cosmopolitans and vagabonds, foreigners and yokels, meant that all kinds of men crossed paths in London’s streets and alleys and churches. The parish register of Walsingham’s church in London lists them all in their succinct catalogue of baptisms
, marriages, and burials: knight, parson, stranger; baker, cobbler, carpenter; gentleman, silkweaver, scrivener; merchant, blackamoor, vintner, broker, sugarmaker, porter. And so they all lived upon and walked upon the same streets, and rubbed elbows in the same taverns, and occasionally even the same prisons; and they heard things, and knew things, well outside the conventional stations that Elizabethan society assigned men to.

  The house that Walsingham returned to in London was—suitable irony—known to all as the Papey; it had been a hospital for poor priests before being dissolved by Edward VI. Though the name was actually archaic and had nothing to do with popes, papists, or papistry, everyone believed it did. The house, which had a large courtyard and garden, faced the London wall in the Aldgate Ward at the end of the Saint Mary Axe Street. Walsingham’s old friend Thomas Heneage lived across the lane in a great house that had belonged to the Abbots of Bury; Thomas Gresham lived nearby.

  Walsingham was still Burghley’s protégé, but he was also Leicester’s now: Leicester the Queen’s favorite, the dashing courtier, expert jouster and equestrian, exactly the sort of man the Queen loved, the man rumored to be her lover indeed; cultured, magnificent physique, master of courtly banter and witty repartee; a man whose recent sudden eruption of Protestant zeal would have been a pathetic disguise for patent political ambition if anyone had dared to point out its craven, neck-saving expediency, coming as it did so hard on the heels of his dabbling in the Catholic intrigue that had landed Norfolk’s neck in the noose, but no one did dare. Still, everyone knew. Leicester was the perfect courtier, civil and well mannered to all, self-controlled, never giving sway to his passions, but even that only reinforced the impression of self-serving calculation and guile. He so outrageously, so unscrupulously seized on whatever expedient argument or alliance would advance his own interests that it was a marvel even to his friends. Leicester had thrown in his lot with Norfolk’s fumbling attempts to unseat Burghley back in 1569, and had suffered the withering coldness of royal disfavor for it. But he had kept far enough out of it to avoid anything worse than coldness; and now he saw in the Puritans and Walsingham an alliance that might achieve the same end, Burghley’s ouster and his own advancement, yet ever more safely.

  And so, even while Walsingham was still in France, Leicester had showered him with flattering letters about his influence and achievements. “You know what opinion is here of you, and to what place all men would have you unto,” Leicester assured him in January 1573. “The place you already hold is a Councilor’s place, and more than a Councilor’s place for a time, for ofttimes Councilors are not made partakers of such matters as you are acquainted withal.”

  On the 20th of December 1573, Elizabeth formally named Walsingham to the post of Principal Secretary, succeeding Burghley, who had become Lord Treasurer; the next day, Walsingham was sworn in as a Privy Councilor.

  Neither office, Councilor or Secretary, had powers or duties well defined by law, or even by tradition. Everything in the half-medieval-half-modern, half-amateur-half-professional government of Elizabeth depended upon the personality and influence of the men who held the posts. There were seventeen Privy Councilors, but only thirteen of those had ever shown up for a meeting, and usually only five or six attended. Before long, as the Spanish Ambassador observed, there were only three who really mattered: Burghley, Leicester, and Walsingham. The Queen’s trust, and favor, and—at least in Burghley’s and Walsingham’s cases—their boundless capacity for work, were what determined their true power.

  The Council had once been huge, ceremonial, and perfunctory; under Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, it had become much smaller and more a genuine body of advisers; now, because of both the crush of business and Elizabeth’s faith in those three, the Council wielded vast and real executive and judicial powers, meeting every day, Sundays not excepted, often both mornings and afternoons. The Queen never sat at the Council herself, but it was through the Council that royal power was now unquestionably exercised: enforcing the laws; supervising the Councils of the North and the West and Wales, which administered royal authority in the hinterlands; regulating trade and the church; censoring the press; organizing and supplying the army and navy, making war and peace—behaving, as the Venetian Ambassador commented, like “so many kings” themselves.

  The office of Principal Secretary depended even more on the man who held it. “All officers and councilors of State have a prescribed authority by patent, by custom, or by oath,” wrote a later holder of the post, “the Secretary only excepted.” Lord Treasurer, Lord Keeper, Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Attorney-General, and so on down to Master of the Horse, Receiver of the Ships, Cofferer of the Household, Foreign Apposer—whose sole job it was to appose a green wax seal upon sheriffs’ financial accounts—they all had their duties that no man could challenge. But the Secretary had no power and every power; he could take almost any authority of the government into his own hands, and with it the risk, for his neck was completely exposed: “Only a Secretary hath no warrant or commission in matters of his own greatest peril, but the virtue and word of his sovereign.”

  Burghley had taken the power and the risk that Elizabeth offered him, greatly expanding the office from that of factotum or clerk in the royal household to the chief office of state, the most all-encompassing, the most flexible, and the most dangerous to its occupant. Now Walsingham was prepared to do the same; as his secretary Nicholas Faunt would later describe the post as Walsingham had filled it, “Amongst all particular offices and places of charge in this state there is none of more necessary use, nor subject to more cumber and variableness than is the office of the Principal Secretary.”

  The very absence of a traditional office of state to handle foreign affairs made the burgeoning of such matters in Elizabeth’s reign fall naturally upon the ill-defined, ever-protean secretaryship, and here Walsingham’s mark was at once everywhere seen and felt, too. Practically every letter abroad was signed by him and many were written by his own hand. The letters from England’s ambassadors abroad all came into his hands as well. No particular law or custom decreed that an ambassador worked for the Secretary; indeed, an ambassador was by custom a representative of the sovereign himself. But Walsingham steadily gathered these reins into his hands, and if he could not always control the appointment of ambassadors, he had a way of having his men in the secondary positions; and if he could not always control what instructions the Queen gave her ambassadors, he had a way of shaping the information that came in from them and seeing to it that some of their letters came to the notice of the Queen and Council, and others somehow never quite did.

  Like Burghley before him, Mr. Secretary Walsingham filled book upon book with records of every diplomatic matter, every fact or bit of data that might prove useful in England’s dealings abroad. His office was piled high with such books: books of copies of treaties, and records of negotiations, and papers on the necessity of moving England’s trading operations from Antwerp to Emden; instructions to ambassadors and to “sundry persons sent into France,” and “a memorial for Flanders, with the names of all martial men dispersed through the realm and other gentlemen fit to take charge”; and “sundry discourses” on Flanders, and Germany, and Poland, and France, and Italy, and Spain, and Barbary; and an extract of an ordinance by the King of France concerning the suppression of piracy; and “a small book concerning the values of foreign coins and rates to reduce any foreign coin to sterling, and so & contra”; and so on and on.

  And then, on top of all of these foreign papers, there was an even greater heap, an avalanche, of books and papers devoted to all of the domestic affairs that also fell within the Secretary’s endless purview. Walsingham’s office ledger went on page after page, cataloguing them all: a book of castles and fortifications, and another of the Queen’s houses and parks and forests, and a book of expenses and regulations of the army, and plans for which forces should be dispatched to which ports in case of invasion, and a table of all of the costs ent
ailed in putting a navy vessel to sea for one month, and of the provisions needed to feed six thousand men at sea for two months, and treatises on training militiamen, and lists of known Catholics in every county, and reports of the ecclesiastical commissioners on the examinations of priests, and legal opinions from the Attorney-General, and the names of “ill-affected noblemen,” and a schedule of expenses for fortifying the town of Berwick.

  And then there were still other things that a Secretary had to know: Walsingham’s longtime clerk and brother-in-law, Robert Beale, set it all down in a memorandum he wrote years later, shortly after Walsingham’s death. A Secretary, Beale stated, had to “understand the state of the whole realm”; he had to know who was who in every shire and city and town, and the affairs of the English trading companies, and the actions of the Justices of the Peace, and the government’s sources of revenue and its expenditures, and the operations of the mint; and while he was at it he had better make sure that the post worked as it was supposed to, and take a look each year at the books of the undersheriffs and the coroners of every shire. It was a good idea if he had a complete set of maps while he was at it. And, of course, he had better log every letter that came in or out, and every expenditure he incurred. And, of course, he would be the first to be blamed when anything went wrong. And, of course as bad as it might be to displease his prince, there were even worse fates that a Secretary might incur in shouldering so vast and so grave a set of responsibilities: “Remember there is a higher Lord that will exact an account and is able to lay a more grievous punishment of soul and body than any prince can do.”

  Like Burghley, Walsingham had so mastered everything, so unquestionably made the duties and responsibilities of the office his, that the man quickly became one with the office. Everyone called him “Mr. Secretary,” referred to him in the third person even as Mr. Secretary. Even after he was knighted he was not Sir Francis but Mr. Secretary: it was hard to think of him any other way. He was, in short, a phenomenon, a given, as real and as inevitable a fact of London and life as the stones of the city walls, or the rope of the hang-man’s noose.