Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  The ardent English Catholic who had nailed up the order of excommunication was soon found, and tortured, and executed. The effects of the Pope’s words were less easily dealt with. In the wake of the 1569 northern rising, Elizabeth had taken pains to reiterate that, in demanding conformity to the practices of the Church of England, she was not in any way instituting an “inquisition” into “men’s consciences in matters of religion.” Now the Pope’s actions had leapt that gulf: whether this was his actual intention or not, he had equated the religious conscience of England’s Catholics with treason against the state.

  Elizabeth once hoped, and not altogether unrealistically, that Catholicism would simply fade away in England, that its remnants were no more than a sort of administrative problem that could be dealt with by properly regulating the machinery of the church. Pius’s bull, with its savage indictment of the Queen herself, made the problem of recusancy rather more personal, and menacing.

  The Puritan faction in Parliament now clamored for sterner measures against Catholicism, beyond the existing statutes that simply required weekly attendance by all at Church of England services. In 1571, the first of a series of ever more repressive anti-recusancy laws appeared. One statute made it treason for anyone to declare that the Queen was not the lawful queen, or to name her a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper. A second made it treason to bring into the realm any papal bulls, and also banned the importation of “any tokens, crosses, pictures, beads or suchlike vain and superstitious things from the bishop or see of Rome.” And a third, aimed at neutralizing the Catholic fugitives overseas, declared that any Englishman who went abroad without license and failed to return within six months would forfeit all his possessions and profits from all his lands: if, however, he returned to “fully reconcile himself with the true religion,” he might be permitted to recover his lands after a year had passed.

  Meanwhile, more alarming reports of Catholic resurgency soon began to filter in to the government. A seminary for training English priests had been founded at Douai, in the Spanish Netherlands, in 1568, by Dr. William Allen, an English Catholic scholar who had resigned his post at Oxford and fled abroad early in Elizabeth’s reign. Now the first of these Douai priests began smuggling their way back into England, sheltering in the houses of secret Catholics, holding stealthy masses and preaching a return to the old religion. The first few arrived in 1575 and achieved a success that immediately sent a chill down Puritan spines. Within a few years, more than a hundred missionary priests had reached English soil.

  A seamy fraternity of priest-takers soon had a fine career for themselves, tearing apart houses in search of hidden priests. But these were not Walsingham’s men: Mr. Secretary took a longer and cooler view of the matter. For one thing, the capture, torture, and sadistic execution of priests cut two ways, as Walsingham saw sooner than many of his equally zealous colleagues. It was actually a source of common pride in England—so different from those filthy foreigners—that torture was not the law of the land; it took a warrant from the Council to authorize it, and generally the rack was reserved for rare cases of state security. Only fifty-three warrants were issued in all of Elizabeth’s reign, but even these caused unease when some of the seamy details leaked out, particularly when it came to the torture of priests, and particularly when it came to the tortures inflicted by one Richard Topcliffe, who was always begging the Queen for permission to practice his artistry. Besides the rack, Topcliffe especially enjoyed suspending prisoners in manacles with their feet just barely touching the floor. He also apparently engaged in embarrassing sexual fantasies while he was at it; one priest who was his victim took the opportunity of his public trial to provide a verbatim account in open court of the monologue Topcliffe had delivered while racking him: Topcliffe had said that “he was so great and familiar with her Majesty that he may putteth his hands between her breasts and paps … that he hath not only seen her legs and knees, but feeleth them with his hands above her knees; that he hath felt her belly and said unto her Majesty that she hath the softest belly of any womankind.”

  Topcliffe was also fond of attending the executions of condemned priests and seeing to it that they were cut down from the rope at once: otherwise, they would not still be alive when they were boweled and quartered by the executioner.

  Topcliffe was not Walsingham’s man, either. And though Catholic pamphleteers would later seek to vilify Walsingham as being cut from the same cloth—“not content with mocking and bullying and insulting the confessors of the faith of Jesus Christ, but who even went so far as to beat them and kick them,” claimed one—he in fact consistently counseled against persecution for persecution’s sake. Walsingham’s secretary Robert Beale made so bold as to publish a pamphlet strongly denouncing torture of any kind, and under any circumstance, as cruel and barbaric and contrary to English law and liberties. And Walsingham himself argued that it was generally a mistake even to execute priests, “saving in a few for example’s sake”: the “constancy, or rather obstinancy,” shown by the condemned priests, Walsingham warned, who often went bravely to their very public and very gruesome ends, “moveth men to compassion and draweth some to affect their religion upon conceipt that such an extraordinary contempt of death cannot but proceed from above.” It was more prudent policy just to imprison the “learned and politic” among the missionary priests, Walsingham concluded, and as for the rest, those with “more zeal than wit or learning,” simply to ship them back to France or Rome, where they could do no more harm.

  Mr. Secretary Walsingham also had a rather different reaction from most to the fact that idealistic young English Catholics were flocking to Douai to attend Dr. Allen’s college (or, later, to a second such seminary for English priests established in Rome in 1579). The influx of these foreign-trained Englishmen was an escalation in the religious warfare; it was also an opportunity. It was not hard for Mr. Secretary to learn from his well-connected spies in English Catholic circles how the priests were smuggled into the country (most came in on French boats that put into Newcastle for coals, each supplied by Dr. Allen with a new suit of clothes and six or seven pounds in cash). Nor was it hard to learn of the internal enmities that were threatening to split the seminaries into rival factions along theological and nationalistic lines (the English and Welsh were at each other’s throats). It would likewise not be hard to inflame those feelings and sabotage the missionaries at their source, a more appealing proposition than tracking them all over England. And it would not be hard to infiltrate a more daring man or two into one of these hotbeds of Catholic zeal to penetrate any more nefarious plans they might have afoot beyond simply sending priests to England to say mass in some recusant’s attic. (One who would sow dissension and feed information with particular aplomb was Solomon Aldred, the tailor at the English College at Rome, who enjoyed a pension from the Pope and the secret patronage of Mr. Secretary.)

  No, the priests were at worst a distraction, a sideshow; at best a means, not an end. It was what the English Catholics might do rather than what they believed that had ever been the real worry to Walsingham, Puritan though he was, political realist that he was. And what they might do in England came down, as always, to what they might do for the imprisoned Queen of Scots.

  Secretary Walsingham more than once proposed that the real solution to that problem was to arrange to have the lords of Scotland request Mary’s transfer to their custody, followed by her prompt execution; but the lords balked at shouldering all the blame themselves for so drastic a step, while Elizabeth was insistent that her hands must be kept at least superficially clean in any such transaction. And so the dangerous limbo had continued.

  Mary, for her part, had no doubt where the English Secretary stood: in a letter she wrote in August 1574 to the Archbishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in Paris, she called Walsingham “my mortal enemy.”

  The knowledge and the feeling, in other words, were now complete, and mutual.

  A few months earlier, in May 1574, Mr. S
ecretary had received a less personal but rather more interesting report regarding the Scottish Queen’s correspondence. An eighteen-year-old Scot named Steward had been arrested in Scotland and confessed that he had been employed as a secret courier for Mary. He would meet a man in Don-caster, in northern England, who would hand him packets of letters to be delivered to Mary’s friends in Scotland. This man’s name was Alexander Hamilton: he was the tutor to the children of the Earl of Shrewsbury, keeper of Mary Queen of Scots.

  Walsingham had Hamilton sent to London to be questioned; the man denied everything. Lacking any evidence but the uncorroborated word of a Scottish lad who prudently declined to be interviewed in England, Walsingham was forced to let Hamilton go. The man returned to his position in Shrewsbury’s household. But Mr. Secretary was hardly about to let the rest of the matter go so easily.

  The Ridolfi plot had made plain the dangers of allowing Mary to communicate freely with her supporters; all of her correspondence was now supposed to be handed to Shrewsbury. That Mary had contrived a clandestine channel of communication presented an ongoing danger; it was also an acute warning in itself that a new scheme for her liberation might be afoot at that very moment. And so Mr. Secretary quietly continued his watch.

  In January 1575, another thread appeared: a letter from the Bishop of Ross to one of his servants was intercepted by the Regent of Scotland and forwarded to Mr. Secretary, and it pointed to a far larger network of secret communications. A London bookseller named Henry Cockyn was the hub, and the spokes connected him not only to Mary and Ross but also to a number of prominent men of the country, most notably Lord Henry Howard—the brother of the recently executed Duke of Norfolk.

  Cockyn was promptly arrested. He admitted knowing Howard and the other men, but insisted they were just customers of his. Mr. Secretary was named to a committee of three to investigate Cockyn further.

  Once again Walsingham preferred subtlety and patience to the cruder methods customarily employed. “I think the show of torture will little prevail, but rather make him more obstinate,” Walsingham cautioned. And keeping Cockyn locked up was paying dividends in any event: “The best is that certain Scottishmen lately come over, and having letters to convey, do find great miss of him.”

  A few weeks of waiting was all it took. On the 22nd of February 1575, Mr. Secretary reported to Elizabeth that Cockyn had made a complete confession:

  Neither by examination nor threatening of torture we could get the party to discover anything… . In the end, having great cause to suspect he received some secret pension at the Queen of Scots, which he was loathe to lose, I thought good therefore to run another course with him, assuring him by my letters if that he would discover what he knew (accusing no man wrongfully), I would not only procure your Majesty’s pardon, but also send such further consideration as both he and his should be the better for it, and besides that the matter should be handled with such secrecy as he should not be discovered to be an accuser of others.

  Cockyn admitted that Ross had approached him in December 1573 to act as a conduit for Mary’s letters. He passed and received packets of letters to and from Hamilton; moreover, a number of other servants of Shrewsbury were also involved in the smuggling of Mary’s mail.

  Four of them were arrested and brought to the Tower, along with two London doctors who had had a part in the matter. But Elizabeth, to Mr. Secretary’s distraction, seemed serenely disinclined to take the matter seriously; in particular she refused to pursue the case against Howard (whose letters to Mary, admittedly, seemed innocuous enough). And so the case unraveled.

  Warned by the arrests of the others, one Thomas Morgan, who had once been a servant of Shrewsbury’s and who was long suspected of having had a key part in many of Mary’s conspiratorial doings, made good use of the Queen’s repeated delays in deciding how to proceed, and fled to Paris. There he immediately entered the service of the Archbishop of Glasgow and quickly began to assume control of Mary’s affairs, her finances, and the more ardent efforts of her growing contingent of powerful friends abroad, English and foreign alike. The others who been taken prisoner were all eventually released.

  Walsingham could not conceal his frustration over the way so important a matter had been bungled. As in other moments of crisis, he did not hesitate to tell the Queen exactly what he thought; the steel of inner conviction this time was not even tempered with a self-deprecating joke or a courtly compliment. “Your Majesty’s delay used in resolving doth not only make me void of all good hope to do any good therein, the opportunity being lost,” he wrote Elizabeth, “but also doth quite discourage me to deal in like causes, seeing mine and other your poor faithful servants’ care for your safety fruitless.”

  To a fellow Councilor he explained that he was not interested in pursuing any vendetta against those who had been named in the matter: “I protest before God I malice none of the parties detected, but rather lament them as one that taketh no delight in another’s trouble.” Yet: “When I consider that the trouble of a few may avoid a general trouble, I prefer general respects before particular.” And, to his colleague Leicester: “Her Majesty’s strange dealings in this case will discourage honest ministers that are careful for her safety to deal in the discovery of the sores of this diseased state, seeing her Majesty bent rather to cover them than to cure them.”

  Walsingham had succeeded in breaking up Mary’s secret network of communication but had gotten no further. It was an interesting practical lesson in a dilemma that would vex intelligence chiefs for five centuries thereafter: whether known enemy agents are sometimes better left at large, and watched, and lulled into a false sense of security—rather than exposed and arrested, only to be replaced by others who must then be found afresh.

  It was a lesson that Mr. Secretary Walsingham would take to heart the next time he discovered his enemy in secret communication with her friends. On that occasion, he would be the one to bide his time.

  Though it was wrong to speak of “parties” within the Privy Council, Walsingham and Leicester and the younger and more ardent Protestants were increasingly at odds with Burghley and the mostly older, more conservative, and less zealous men who stuck to him. It was becoming personal, too, inevitably: Burghley resentful of the credit that Walsingham, his onetime protégé, now enjoyed on his own.

  Politically, the outlines of their differences were becoming ever sharper over policy toward France and Spain. Burghley clung to the venerable English game of balance-of-power diplomacy; playing off France and Spain; drifting to whichever seemed more favorable at the moment. Walsingham wanted to be done with both: a revolution in strategy. He sought to “advance God’s glory,” he avowed, but there was also a purely pragmatic reason to seek the friendship of Protestant allies: religious ties could be trusted, political ties could not. And in any case, with the Catholic powers drawing together in religious common cause, the Protestant nations had no choice. It was defense of God’s will, but it was also self-defense; to fight under these circumstances was to wage a war not of ambition but of necessity, not for aggrandizement but for safety, “not to enlarge but retain,” he argued:

  What juster cause can a Prince that maketh profession of the Gospel have to enter into wars than when he seeth confederacies made for the rooting out of the Gospel and the religion he professeth. All creatures are created to advance God’s glory; therefore, when His glory is called into question, no league nor policy can excuse if by all means he seek not the defence of the same, yea, with the loss of life.

  Above all, Mr. Secretary wanted Elizabeth to greatly increase support to the rebels in France and the Low Countries, and so vex both of the Catholic powers at once. If “the fire chance to slack,” as he once put it, all that would be required would be to “now and then cast in some English fuel which may revive the flame.”

  Walsingham wanted moral and political clarity; he was an astute enough politician to know what arguments not to try on his own Queen, however. He saved the religious arguments
for others. With Elizabeth he concentrated on pragmatism and law. The occasional professions of goodwill that still emanated from Spain, Walsingham warned, were mere ruses to “lull us asleep for a time, until their secret practices be grown to their due and full ripeness.” And the Dutch were not “rebels” against their sovereign, he assured Elizabeth, but were in fact loyal countrymen doing nothing more than asserting their ancient and traditional rights that had been unjustly usurped by foreign Spanish governors.

  But Elizabeth preferred the temporizing middle course as always; that placed her with Burghley, and a majority of the Council agreed. Walsingham’s convictions and desperation for action made an explosion inevitable. He had often tried the Queen’s patience with his lectures and his insistent earnestness, but Elizabeth, in recognition of his intelligence and disinterested zeal, tolerated him as she tolerated almost no other councilor who dared speak so plainly. And Walsingham, for all that he confessed he was no expert in handling the Queen the way Burghley was, had known enough to back off prudently at times when he saw he had pressed the Queen too far; when she furiously told him that he cared more about the Puritans than about her own cause, he knew he had to forbear awhile lest he “rather hurt than help” his case.

  But now both pressed to the breaking point; and the break came over the ever-volatile matter of the Queen’s marriage. In October 1578, Walsingham returned from a mission to the Low Countries that had ended with the usual inconclusive result, the Queen balking at sending her bond for £100,000, which she had earlier promised the rebels. What was worse, Walsingham immediately discovered, was the reason: she was hoping to achieve the same end at less cost and with less chance of directly antagonizing Spain by entertaining the recently renewed marriage suit of Francis, the former Duke of Alençon, who was proposing to lead his own expedition to the Low Countries. Burghley favored the marriage with Francis (who had since succeeded to the title of Anjou, after Monsieur became King of France in 1574): it was marry the Duke or make peace with Spain, he argued. Walsingham opposed it on every possible ground. And, unlike the last time when the Queen’s marriage negotiations had so tried his patience, he was now so bold as to make known his views on so personal and sensitive a matter to the Queen.