Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (18 page)

From his earliest years Walsingham seemed by disposition to be grave and industrious. Other young students, such as the notorious Robert Greene, had filled their time abroad with sport and debauchery. But Walsingham was a model student and a model traveller, using his laborious days for the pursuit of knowledge. He read law at Padua, the foremost European university for legal studies. He perfected his command of foreign languages, and he travelled to Switzerland and Germany to talk with other Protestant refugees from England. Italy, that subtle, intellectual land, seed-bed of the Renaissance, had the greatest effect on him, as it did on all European men of culture. Men of the North usually had a great suspicion for Italian ways. Roger Ascham condemned the Italianate Englishman who brought home ‘the religion, the learning, the policy, the experience, the manners of Italy’. In his
Scholemaster
he defined these as follows: ‘for religion papistry or worse:
for learning less commonly than they carried out with them: for policy a factious heart, a discoursing head, a mind to meddle in all men’s matters: for experience plenty of new mischiefs never known in England before: for manners variety of vanities, and changes of filthy living.’ But the effects of Italy were too profound to be anatomized so easily. The sober Walsingham certainly did not give way to papistry or atheism, nor was he notable for ‘filthy living’; the only marks of Italian vanity on him were the shape of his doublet, the cut of his beard, and the elegant polish of his manners. But he did learn from Italian policy and experience. In the land of Machiavelli he studied the statecraft of the Italian princes, and prepared himself for public service according to their cold, unscrupulous principles. Old-fashioned scholars like Ascham decried the new Italian policy, but the forward-looking Tudors knew that mercy and conscience had been banished from international affairs and were determined to take advantage of the new secular morality. ‘There is a Fate, that flies with towering spirits Home to the mark, and never checks it conscience’, wrote Ben Jonson in
Mortimer
, expressing the cruel faithlessness of Renaissance polity:

              But we

That draw the subtle, and more piercing air,

In that sublimed region of Court,

Know all is good, we make so, and go on,

Secured by the prosperity of our Crimes.

Some time in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign Walsingham returned to England. For the next decade or so little is seen of him. He married a prosperous widow, and when she died within a short time, he married another; he had one daughter. He entered Parliament and sat whenever the Commons met (which was not often for the Queen did not like the restraint of Parliament) for the rest of his life. And all the while his ambition was aiming at the court. His path to that promised land is not recorded, but the journey was well known in Tudor times to be a weary pilgrimage requiring patience, influence, skill, boldness and bribery. ‘My lord’, said a contemporary, ‘advancement in all worlds be obtained by mediation and remembrance of noble friends.’ But even with that help the course was difficult, as Spenser, who had suffered the pains of the attempt, wrote in
Mother Hubberd’s Tale
:

To have thy asking, yet wait many years;

To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;

To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;

To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to rise, to run,

To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

Through his family Walsingham had certain influential friends; he is known to have helped the government secret service on occasion, and this perhaps brought his name to the attention of Elizabeth’s ministers. But his best credentials for service were his own qualities. He was serious and hard working; he was well educated, cultured and a very proficient linguist; he had studied the art of statecraft; and his years on the continent had given him many useful connections abroad, especially among Protestants. In 1570 Elizabeth sent him to be her ambassador in France. It may be that the careful hand of Lord Burghley was behind the Queen’s choice, for it was said that Elizabeth never resolved ‘any private suit (or grant) from herself, that was not first referred to his consideration; and had his approbation before it passed’. In any case, the new ambassador was just the man that the Queen and her great minister required.

In former times the ambassador was often an insignificant figure. Much of the diplomacy between countries had been undertaken through the international organization of the Catholic Church, and the lay envoy, when he existed, had a rather low place. Merchants were sometimes delegated to represent their countries abroad; otherwise the envoy was a simple clerk. John Stile, the English ambassador to Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, had neither rank nor education. And Puebla, Stile’s counterpart at the court of Henry VII, lodged with a mason who kept a bawdy house and took his meals daily with the prostitutes. But the religious Reformation also brought in a new, complicated age of international relations, and the lay ambassador advanced in ability and prestige. Henry VIII, who needed to count the pulse of Europe for the good of his own plans, appointed such eminent men as Sir Thomas Elyot and the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt and had in return elegant reports and swift, reliable information. The French ambassador, Marillac, reported that the English were the first to hear any rumour from any quarter.

Walsingham’s embassy, which lasted three years, was up to
the standard set by his notable predecessors. He was sent to negotiate the marriage between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, the brother of the French King. But the Queen’s hand in marriage was, as always, merely a ploy in the diplomatic game: she made it clear to the French envoy La Mothe that she never intended to marry. ‘Her real aim’, a French observer reported, ‘is to bring the French gradually into the offensive and defensive league which many of the German princes and the Duke of Florence are said to have joined.’ Differences of religion, colonial and commercial rivalry had severely strained the alliance between Spain and England that had lasted since the reign of Henry VII. England’s prosperity was based very much on trade with the Netherlands, and the Protestant revolt in the Spanish Netherlands, which was disastrous for commerce, worried England. This issue divided England and Spain; England was driven to help the revolt in the Netherlands, and Spain encouraged rebellion in Ireland and plots in Scotland. By 1570 the alliance with Catholic Spain was at an end, and Walsingham’s task was to make a new Protestant coalition into which France might be drawn. He arrived at the end of the third French religious war when the Protestant Huguenots were gaining influence at the French court. His Puritan sympathies were naturally with the Huguenots and the negotiations with Catholic Anjou, a man who had successfully fought against the Huguenots at Jarnac, were no doubt a sore trial. But he subordinated his feelings to the wishes of his government and with great skill forged the new alliance.

The marriage negotiations with Anjou were, as Philip of Spain commented, ‘nothing but a trick’; they were soon decently forgotten and Walsingham, to his relief, was left to form the defensive alliance against Catholic Spain. He succeeded so well that the Huguenot leaders now began to dominate the French court, much to the distress of the Catholic party. In April 1572 the defensive treaty between England and France was concluded at Blois. On 24th August the fear and hatred for the Huguenots burst out in the Massacre of St Bartholomew. For eight days the Protestants were put to the sword. ‘While I write’, the Spanish ambassador reported on the 26th, ‘they are casting them out naked and dragging them through the streets, pillaging their houses and sparing not a babe.’ And he commended this as holy work: ‘Blessed be God who has converted the princes of France to his purpose!
May he inspire their hearts to go on as they have begun!’ At a low estimate some 10,000 Huguenots were killed in France. It is said that on hearing the news Philip of Spain laughed for the only time in his life.

To Walsingham the massacre was a terrible blow, first because his co-religionists were suffering, and then because his own diplomacy had helped to make the massacre certain. He became convinced that a Protestant country should fly from Catholics—that Christ, as he put it, should not lie down with Belial—and after St Bartholomew he longed to return to England. He thought that religion was still the main-spring of international policy, and his own Puritan faith was too strict to allow him to be at ease in the faithless realm of national intrigue. Elizabeth and Burghley knew better. They saw that national interest, not religion, was at the heart of European affairs and they patiently set about the reconstruction of the French alliance which the massacre had threatened to destroy. Catholic France had kept quiet when Elizabeth executed the two Catholic leaders, Norfolk and Northumberland, in 1572. Elizabeth had her testing moment after St Bartholomew. Since her people were outraged by the slaughter in France, Elizabeth had her court wear black to receive the ambassador, La Mothe. But she treated him kindly and pretended to believe his stammering explanations; to the Queen, national security overrode all religious arguments.

The callousness of Elizabeth’s policy may have puzzled Walsingham, and his conscience disqualified him for the immoralities of international intrigue, but while he was ambassador he followed his instructions exactly and was as successful as any man could have been. His reports were models of clarity; he was loyal, hard-working and efficient. The Queen was pleased with him and for the rest of his life used him for the most delicate diplomatic negotiations. In December 1573 she recalled him from Paris and appointed him to be one of her principal secretaries, a position he retained until his death in 1590.

‘I wish first God’s glory’, Walsingham once wrote, ‘and next the Queen’s safety.’ By these bright lights he advanced surely. The duties of his position were never exactly defined; his powers and his responsibilities were too large to be covered simply. ‘Among all particular offices and places of charge in this State’, one of his officials wrote about his master’s post, ‘there is none of more necessary
use, nor subject to more cumber and variableness than is the office of principal secretary, by reason of the variety and uncertainty of his employment, and therefore with more difficulty to be prescribed by special method and order.’ He was in fact responsible for the efficient working of the centralized Tudor government, and such was the nature of Tudor despotism that he was liable to be held to blame for any failure in government policy. ‘Only a secretary’, said his successor, ‘hath no warrant or commission in matters of his own greatest peril but the virtue and word of his sovereign.’ How frail that virtue was, Wolsey and Cromwell had found to their cost, though they had most assiduously done the King’s bidding. It is a measure of Walsingham’s careful and successful attention to ‘the Queen’s safety’ that he was never called to account for any act of his time in power.

By 1573, after fifteen years of trouble and worry, Elizabeth was in firm control of the country, and the nature of her rule had become clear. The old lords whose power, religion or ambition had threatened the early days of her reign were all gone, executed, imprisoned or dead. There were no political parties. She was England’s policy-maker and she ruled with the help of a Privy Council composed of new men recently ennobled by the Tudors, dependent on the monarchy for patronage and in general devoted to her interests. ‘All these Lords’, Burghley said in 1565, ‘are bent towards her Majesty’s service, and do not so much vary amongst themselves as lewd men do report.’ And for himself he declared that he had ‘no affection to be of a party, but for the Queen’s Majesty’. Among these supporters of the Queen there were naturally different factions who advocated different policies, and it was Elizabeth’s wise habit to play one faction off against the other. Leicester and Walsingham were usually bold spirits, clamouring for aggressive acts against Spain and Catholics, while Burghley and his son were the advocates of peace and restraint. The Queen valued men of both factions, yet insisted on deciding her own mind; she was careful not to allow either group to become dominant, and when she disposed of her patronage, shared official positions between the factions. ‘The principal note of her reign’, Sir Robert Naunton commented in his
Fragmenta Regalia
, ‘will be, that she ruled much by faction and parties, which herself both made, upheld, and weakened, as her own judgment advised.’

This policy maintained a balance in the government which
pleased Elizabeth’s cautious nature. From time to time a leader of a faction would have a deluded sense of his own power—Essex was the most notable example; but by a skilful use of opposites, the Queen soon curbed such ambition. The partisan
Leicester’s Commonwealth
, in a virulent attack on Leicester, claimed that the earl was paramount at court: ‘nothing can pass but by his admission, nothing can be said, done, or signified, whereof he is not particularly advised.’ But the reality of Leicester’s position came home to him while he was away in the Netherlands. Advised by Burghley (or so the French ambassador claimed), Elizabeth appointed Whitgift, Buckhurst and Cobham to the Privy Council, all men who worked against Leicester’s interests. ‘I pray you’, the worried earl wrote to Walsingham, ‘to stand fast for your poor absent friends against calumniators.’ This stroke showed where the true influence lay; for the one man who always had the ear of the Queen was William Cecil, Lord Burghley. He was the greatest statesman of the age; his advice was the most disinterested and the closest to the Queen’s own mind, and he himself was less corrupt than most others at court. Unlike Essex, he was not a man of brilliant parts, but the Queen trusted him the more for that; as he told his friends, ‘he had gotten more by his patience than ever he did by his wit’.