Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  The autumn of 1585 brought a final bit of political theater from Mr. Secretary. In October, the government published a propaganda pamphlet, Declaration of the Causes Moving the Queen of England to give aid to the Defence of the People afflicted and oppressed in the Low Countries. Though ostensibly the word of the Queen herself, it had Walsingham written all over it: the combination of simple logic and appeal to prejudice.

  The Queen, it began, was of course a sovereign answerable only to God; yet the suffering of the “natural people of the Low Countries” was so great, and England’s motives were so pure, that the Queen was “specially moved” to explain her intentions to her people and her neighbors. England and the Low Countries were tied by ancient connections of trade and commerce, “by which mutual bonds there hath continued perpetual unions of the peoples’ hearts together.” Far from seeking to remove the Low Countries’ allegiance to Spain, England was seeking only the restoration of their ancient rights and liberties. Indeed, had England not come to their aid, the native people of the Low Countries would have been prepared to give their allegiance to some “foreign prince.” England, however, had no ambitions of sovereignty or territorial aggrandizement. But the King of Spain—misled by his counselors—had appointed “Spaniards, foreigners and strangers of strange blood, men more exercised in wars than in peaceable government,” as the governors of the Low Countries: “These Spaniards being exalted to absolute government, by ambition, and for private lucre have violently broken the ancient laws and liberties of all the countries, and in a tyrannous sort have banished, killed, and destroyed, without order of law, within the space of a few months, many of the most ancient and principal persons of the natural nobility that were most worthy of government.” Even Catholics suffered. The Queen of England had sent the King of Spain “many friendly messages and ambassadors” warning him how he was being misled; in return, Spain had sent ambassadors who had conspired to overthrow the Queen’s realm with the help of the Spanish forces that it sought to plant “so near to us” in the Low Countries themselves. Thus “no reasonable person can blame us if we have disposed ourselves to change this our former course, and more carefully to look to the safety of our self and our people.”

  The pamphlet was translated and published in all of the major European tongues: the back door wedged open a bit more.

  There had been little doubt that Leicester would be the nobleman chosen to lead the English expedition. He was well known in the Low Countries, hailed there as nothing less than the Prince of Orange come back to life. Now, between his vanity and Elizabeth’s meddling and temporizing, they managed to undo almost everything. For months Elizabeth hesitated even to give Leicester his commission; she alternately instructed him to proceed and reversed herself. She regularly went into rages and then bouts of self-pity, at one turn indignant that Leicester was setting himself up as a viceroy, with a court to rival her own, she claimed; at another weeping that she was in poor health and needed her favorite courtier to remain by her side, but that he preferred to abandon her in her time of need. “This is one of the strangest dealings in the world,” Leicester complained to Walsingham.

  Walsingham had been pressing hard to have his son-in-law, Sir Philip Sidney, appointed to the governorship of Flushing, but here, too, the Queen hesitated; Walsingham’s opponents feared having so tight a circle, tied by family and faction, in control of so many key posts. “These changes here may work some change in the Low Countries as may prove irreparable,” Walsingham wrote Leicester. “God give her Majesty another mind and resolution in proceeding. Otherwise it will work both honest and best affected subjects’ ruin.”

  It was not until the 8th of December 1585 that Leicester finally took ship. Sidney had left a few weeks earlier, having finally secured his appointment and bidden farewell to his wife and newborn daughter.

  When Leicester arrived, he at once found himself in an endless battle for the money Elizabeth had promised. Leicester was said to be spending £1,000 a month out of his own pocket; he had raised a personal loan of £25,000 from the City, but it was disappearing faster than even he could account for it. In January 1586, he wrote Walsingham, “Our money goeth very low”; by February, “All our treasure is gone.” Every dispatch from Leicester to Walsingham now mentioned money. Though, as Leicester at one point admitted, “Methinks I hear your answer already, that no man knoweth better than I the difficulty to get money from her Majesty.”

  Walsingham was rapidly exhausting his favor with the Queen in pressing for the dispatch of the funds now desperately needed to pay the troops. It had left him wide open politically; those who still hoped to abandon the war were muttering that Mr. Secretary was merely working to advance Leicester’s personal interests, his policy blinded by factional allegiance. In March, Walsingham confided to Leicester, “The opinion of my partiality continueth, nourished by faction, which maketh me weary of the place I serve in and to wish myself amongst the true-hearted Swiss.”

  And then there were rumors of secret peace negotiations Elizabeth was already pursuing with Parma, before the first battle had been fought. In the spring of 1586, the Queen had heard reports that Spain was preparing a huge invasion force to send against England; it was obviously folly, she now insisted, to send more troops abroad and risk provoking Philip further at a time like this. Walsingham vainly insisted the reports were untrue: his agents in Spain saw no signs of such preparation in Spanish harbors; one well-informed spy reported that only eighteen ships in the entire Spanish fleet were ready for sea.

  Elizabeth chose the moment to act as her own spymaster, never a good idea. A ship sailed past the royal palace at Greenwich and fired a salute; the Queen inquired what ship it was and learned it was a Scottish merchantman come from Spain; she summoned the ship’s master and interrogated him. Yes, he had seen with his own eyes a fleet of twenty-seven galleons in Lisbon Harbor making ready; yes, he had heard their intended destination was England.

  The Queen summoned Walsingham, berated him, and threw a slipper in his face. Walsingham privately observed that the Queen was “daily more and more unapt to embrace any matter of weight.”

  Leicester was again left out to dry, pleading as ever for money. Hundreds of men deserted. Thousands lacked supplies. Not that it helped that the great commander of the English forces was engaged in a furious and public feud with his infantry commander, Sir John Norris, a man who, unlike Leicester, actually knew something about fighting a war; or that Leicester’s command better resembled a feudal lord’s retinue than a field army’s headquarters. The Earl had brought with him seventy-five servants to attend to his personal needs: steward, secretary, treasurer, four gentlemen of the chamber, two chaplains, physician, surgeon, apothecary, among the many others. With the other noblemen and knights who had volunteered to accompany the Earl, and their servants, his whole personal entourage totaled some two hundred. Night after night, Leicester lavished hospitality on the ladies and noblemen of the Low Countries: great suppers, music, dancing, fireworks. The military campaign went nowhere; the Earl’s grand attempts to meddle in the intricacies of Dutch politics went less than nowhere, breeding resentment and worsening rifts among the factions.

  In late June, Lady Sidney had sailed to join her husband: a small bit of cheer amid the increasingly bleak situation that Sidney accurately perceived. By August, Sidney was despairing at the course of the aimless and ill-favored campaign; he wrote to his father-in-law telling of the brink that things had been brought to by lack of money to pay the troops:

  I assure you, Sir, this night we were at a fair plunge to have lost all for want of it. We are now four months behind, a thing un-supportable in this place. To complain of my Lord of Leicester you know I may not, but this is the case, if once the soldiers fall to a thorough mutiny this town is lost in all likelihood. I did never think our nation had been so apt to go to the enemy as I find them.

  Leicester meanwhile began to look for scapegoats; he turned even on Walsingham, who had more than any man fough
t for him, and at greater personal cost. “I think you all mean me a forlorn man as you set me in the forlorn hope,” Leicester wrote to Walsingham on the 10th of August, full of mawkish self-pity. “I see all men have friends but myself. I see most false suggestions help other men, and my upright, true dealing cannot protect me. Nay, my worldly protector faileth me.”

  The morning of the 22nd of September 1586 found Sir Philip Sidney on horseback, in a heavy mist, near the Spanish-held fortress of Zutphen. He was part of a small and hastily assembled force that had been ordered to intercept a convoy bringing provisions to the Spanish garrison; the English numbered no more than 200 horse and 400 foot. Suddenly the fog broke and the mounted men found themselves, ahead of their infantry, facing an enemy force of some 2,200 musketeers and arquebusiers and 800 pikemen that had been thrown across the highway. The first volley of Spanish fire fell square on the horsemen. Sidney’s horse was shot out from under him; he remounted and joined the charge. It was then that a musket ball pierced his left thigh, an inch above the knee.

  At first the wound did not seem serious. Leicester wrote to Walsingham on the 2nd of October:

  Good Mr. Secretary, I trust now you shall have longer enjoying of your son, for all the worst days are passed, as both surgeons and physicians have informed me, and he amends as well as possible in this time; and himself finds it, for he sleeps and rests well, and hath a good stomach to eat, without fear, or any distemper at all. I thank God for it.

  On the 6th, Leicester wrote again: “Your son and mine is well amending as ever man hath done for so short a time. He feeleth no grief now but the long lying, which he must suffer. His wife is with him.”

  But within a week the wound was infected and gangrenous. On the 17th Sidney was dead.

  Leicester sent an affectionate note to Walsingham that seemed to mend the recent rifts between them:

  Your sorrowful daughter and mine is here with me at Utrecht till she may recover some strength, for she is wonderfully thrown through her long care since the beginning of her husband’s hurt, and I am the more careful that she should be in some strength ere she take her journey into England, for that she is with child, which I pray God send to be a son if it be His will; but whether son or daughter they shall be my children too. She is most earnest to be gone out of this country and so I could wish her, seeing it so against her mind, but for her weakness yet, her case considered.

  Not long after that, Frances did return to England. Walsingham wrote Leicester on the 24th of December 1586: “I thank God for it I am now in good hope of the recovery of both my daughter and her child.” Frances recovered, but miscarried.

  The grief of Sidney’s loss lay heavy upon Mr. Secretary. Walsingham had lost one of the few men he loved and admired as a true friend. Sidney had written dozens of letters to Walsingham in the time they were acquainted; he had brought Walsingham into the orbit of many of his fellow young writers; Walsingham, an acquaintance recalled, had often paid an openhearted tribute to how Sidney’s star as a poet had risen far above his own as a man of affairs: “Those friends which at first were Sir Philip’s for his [Walsingham’s] sake within a short while became so fully owned and possessed by Sir Philip as now he held them at the second hand by his son-in-law’s courtesy.”

  There was also the prosaic but nonetheless extremely painful fact that Sidney’s death now threatened to ruin his father-in-law financially. Sidney had given Walsingham a power of attorney to sell some lands to satisfy his creditors, but nothing had been done before his death. Walsingham now informed Leicester, “I have paid and must pay for him above £6,000, which I do assure your lordship hath brought me into a most hard and desperate state, which I weigh nothing in respect to the loss of the gentleman, who was my chief worldly comfort.”

  The next day he had worse news: “I have caused Sir Philip Sidney’s will to be considered by certain learned in the laws and I find the same imperfect touching the sale of his land for the satisfying of his poor creditors… . His goods will not suffice to answer a third part of his debts already known.” It appeared that Sidney was in debt to the extent of some £17,000 to the Flushingers.

  Sidney’s will gave Walsingham and his wife only a token £100 each, “to bestow in jewels or other things as pleaseth them to wear for my remembrance.” In the absence of a male heir, Frances was left with a life interest in half his estate; their daughter received £4,000. But all of the lands were bequeathed to Sidney’s brother Robert. Leicester now refused to pay a penny of Sidney’s debts, or even allow any of the land to be sold to cover the costs. The temporary healing of the breach that Sidney’s death had brought the two former allies Leicester and Walsingham now hardened into an irrevocable chasm. It grew only deeper the following spring, when Frances secretly remarried, wedding the Earl of Essex: Leicester’s stepson from his first marriage, a man he openly disliked.

  The Queen had given Walsingham an export license for another hundred thousand cloths in 1582, and in August 1585 he had secured the customs farm for the ports in northern and western England, but Sidney’s debt was a charge that none of this would bear. The Queen appeared reluctant to do any more.

  And now it was Walsingham’s old and long-estranged friend Burghley who came forth to press the suit in his behalf. Burghley told Elizabeth that she should consider Walsingham “as one to whom under God she ought to acknowledge the preservation of her life” and reward him accordingly: Babington’s estates were forfeit to the Crown, and she could make a gift of some of them to the man who, by exposing the plot, had saved her life. The Queen, however, chose to give Babington’s lands to Sir Walter Raleigh instead.

  In the end, Walsingham asked Burghley to leave off, for it seemed pointless to try further: “My hope is, howsoever I am dealt withal by an earthly Prince, I shall never lack the comfort of the Prince of Princes.” He expressed himself “infinitely bound” to Burghley for his efforts, “which I will never forget.”

  Walsingham’s reconciliation with his old friend Burghley was the one spot of personal comfort that lonely winter. Though Leicester’s personal mistreatment of Walsingham had been part of what had brought Walsingham and Burghley back together, it was also made easier by the changing political circumstances. Even Leicester’s utter failure to accomplish anything of tactical value against Spain in the Netherlands could not undo the larger strategic fact that Spain and England were now openly at war; with England committed to a war policy, the decade-long struggle between Walsingham and Burghley over how to deal with Spain was decided, done with. Several months later, Walsingham sent Burghley a handsome gift of a “very rare coach for ease, strength, and lightness, whereof I made this day a trial upon London stones.”

  12

  A TRAITOR IN PARIS

  Walsingham’s reconciliation with his old friend Burghley at the end of 1586 was in most ways a blessing, but it complicated one old problem. Sir Edward Stafford, the ambassador in Paris, was still Burghley’s man, and he had become considerably more annoying.

  For one thing, he had not given up on his hopes of giving one in the eye to his rival and tormentor Mr. Secretary: he was still trying to bring off his own extremely amateurish intelligence coups. Stafford declared to the Queen his intention to infiltrate the Catholic exile community in France himself, or have his wife feign Catholicism to do so; the Queen forbade it. Stafford sulkily interpreted this as more Walsingham harassment. “I never heard of any ambassador being blamed for seeking intelligence any way he could,” Stafford wrote back. “Perchance,” he added, Mr. Secretary objected because he “can send nobody secretly hither without my being advertised of it.” The ambassador then proposed a ridiculous scheme to send false information to the Queen in letters that he would dispatch in such a way that they would be certain to be intercepted and read by the Spanish Ambassador. He would mark the false passages with a special symbol so the Queen would know they were “written for a purpose and not for a truth.” He desperately wanted to play spy.

  Bad enough that i
t threatened to undermine Mr. Secretary’s painstaking efforts to plant false men on Morgan and Paget and the others in Paris, and bad enough that such an erratic, and meddling, and insubordinate man in the post made it extremely difficult to continue using the Paris embassy as Mr. Secretary had been accustomed to, as a hub for the coming and going of his messengers and a transit point for intelligence from so crucial a diplomatic crossroads; worse was that Stafford, desperate for funds, jealous, miffed, was dabbling in more treacherous shoals. There were reports from Paris that Stafford was up to his eyes in debt, gambling huge stakes “that it passes all reason,” heading for certain shipwreck if he were not stopped. Back in October 1584, Walsingham had picked up one of Stafford’s servants who had arrived at Court to convey letters; there were hints he had also been secretly conveying letters for the Catholic exiles. (Stafford only learned of the man’s arrest four months later, and protested furiously.)

  And there were more hints that things were not quite as they should be. A letter, intercepted and deciphered by Phelippes, that had gone from the Archbishop of Glasgow to the Queen of Scots in March 1586 had mentioned that the ambassador was very devoted to her service. Stafford, confronted with this, explained that it was all part of the clever double game he was playing; yes, he had been ordered by Mr. Secretary not to continue with his efforts to befriend the Catholic exiles, but if he had drawn back suddenly from his earlier attempts it would have been obvious that he had merely been practicing against them all along, so he had had to withdraw slowly, continuing to offer vague assurances of his desire to help Mary, and so allay suspicion.

  It was about this time that Mr. Secretary decided it might be a good idea to have some of his spies in France turn their eyes on the ambassador. Nicholas Berden had played the part of the former prisoner and Catholic exile in France to perfection: so much so that, upon his return to London in the spring of 1586, he had been tracked and nearly arrested by one of the many English priest-takers. Berden had come back to England as the fully trusted agent of the exiles, supplied with a cipher with which to communicate with Paget and the others, and in particular to send “intelligence from England.” Berden wrote Walsingham: “If it be your Honor’s pleasure that I shall give them intelligence, then I hope your Honor will procure to be set down unto me such matters as I shall certify.” At times Paget complained that the news Berden sent back was “stale,” but he never suspected that Berden was in fact Walsingham’s man, or that the news he supplied was deliberate chickenfeed.