Elizabeth's Spymaster (3 page)

We marvel that we have heard of no execution by martial law, as was appointed, of the meaner sort of rebels in the north. If the same be not already done, you are to proceed thereunto, for the terror of others, with expedition.
¹⁴

Around 750 insurgents were executed to satisfy her increasingly strident calls for vengeance. The queen’s General, Thomas Radcliffe, Third Earl of Sussex, ordered that in Richmondshire, part of Yorkshire, a total of 231 were to be hanged out of the 1,241 in the neighbourhood who had joined the rebellion.
¹⁵
One commander, Sir Thomas Gargrave, wrote to Bowes on 4 February objecting to the scale of reprisals, which would leave many villages bare of male inhabitants, and recommended that

some select number may be chosen of the least and meanest sorts and chiefly the papists and these to be attainted as well here [York] as at Durham, and all the rest would I wish to be pardoned, except certain chosen persons that be abroad, for in my opinion, the poor husband man and mean subject (if he be not a great papist) will become good subjects.
¹⁶

Those tardy unfortunates who did not quickly rally to Elizabeth’s flag against the rebels were also not allowed to escape her ruthless retribution. She ordered: ‘Spare no offenders in that case – but let them come to trial and receive due punishment.’
¹⁷

Of the rebellion leaders, Sir Thomas Percy, Seventh Earl of Northumberland, took refuge in Scotland but was handed over to the English authorities by the Scottish Regent James Stewart, Earl of Moray, and beheaded in August 1572 at York.
¹⁸
His severed head was stuck on top of the city’s Micklegate Bar (or gate) to pointedly exemplify the inevitable grim fate of traitors. Percy’s partner in rebellion Charles Neville, Sixth Earl of Westmorland, fled for his life to Flanders.
¹⁹
On 13 March 1570, Elizabeth’s government issued a proclamation demanding that the rebels must swear an oath of allegiance, confess to their crimes and hear sermons on the evil of rebellion.
²⁰
Religious homilies written later by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, firmly stressed that obedience to the queen was a duty to God for all within the realm of England.

But other, still powerful voices had very different ideas.

On 25 February 1570, Pope Pius V
²¹
published the bull
Regnans in Excelsis
which excommunicated Elizabeth and deprived this ‘pretended’ English queen of her throne – as well as absolving her subjects of any allegiance or loyalty to her. It claimed she had usurped the place of Supreme Head of the Church and returned the English nation to ‘miserable destruction’ after Mary I had brought it back ‘to the Catholic faith and good fruits’.
²²
A few months later, the bull was cheekily nailed to the garden gate of the Bishop of London’s home in St Paul’s churchyard for all to see and wonder at.
²³

It was a grave tactical mistake by the Vatican in its campaign against Protestant England, for it instantly transformed each of Elizabeth’s Catholic subjects into an individual and palpable threat to her life. Pius V had given his blessing – his permission – for their treason against both state and monarch. As far as Elizabeth and her ministers were concerned, so soon after the scare of the Northern Rebellion, all English Catholics were now potential enemies within.

In addition, there were numerous Catholic missions being dispatched
to England to support the covert celebration of the Mass and to institute large-scale conversions. Always present, always threatening, were the wild and impractical conspiracies hatched by English Catholic exiles to invade England, topple Elizabeth off the throne and throw her Ministers and advisers into prison. In the Pope, the Catholic states in Europe and the Catholic population at home, her government and the state religion now faced what they saw as a clear and present danger to their survival. The campaign against Elizabeth was personal, motivated by a very real hatred. Many Catholics regarded her as an illegitimate heretic, the bastard daughter of Anne Boleyn, who had secretly married Henry before the death of his wife Catherine of Aragon. A dark, embittered memorandum, the frustration virulently scorching off the pages, written in September 1570 probably by an English Catholic exile in Brussels, discusses the ‘condition of England’. It says of Elizabeth:

Verily she is the whore depicted in the Apocalypse with the wine of whose prostitution the kings of the earth are drunk.

Seeing that meanwhile she is drunk with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus, significant indeed is the figure of that whore and yet more confirmed in that belief would they be who knew that in the time of Queen Mary
²⁴
of happy memory, she would have lost her life for complicity of treason, but that one of the chief nobles of the land intervened to save it.
²⁵

Therefore, seeing that Elizabeth is now of evil odour not only with God but also with men, we demand … that Catholic Princes cease to accord her regal honour.
²⁶

What many English Catholics fervently desired was the replacement of Elizabeth by Mary Queen of Scots, widow of first Francis II of France and then of Henry, Lord Darnley and latterly the wife of the dashing James Hepburn, Fourth Earl of Bothwell. For her personal heraldry, she had unwisely quartered the arms of England with those of Scotland and France, in what was tantamount to a none-too-subtle claim to the throne of England. She steadfastly maintained that she was the strongest heir presumptive to the English crown because of her direct descent from
Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret.
²⁷
Such claims, regularly and loudly professed, do not endear one to the sitting occupant of the throne, nor to those whose continued status and prosperity depend on that incumbent remaining in power.

Mary had fled to England from Scotland after her defeat in a brief civil war in Scotland in 1568 and spent the remainder of her life to all intents and purposes a prisoner of Elizabeth I, closely watched over in a variety of five-star jails in the Midlands and the North in an attempt to quarantine her from the pestilence of English politics.

To Walsingham, she was always a grave threat – to his queen and her crown, to his state and to his beloved religion. He called her ‘that devilish woman’ as early as 1572, when he maintained that as long as she lived, Elizabeth would not enjoy a quiet reign ‘nor could her faithful servants assure themselves of the safety of their lives’.
²⁸
Always calculating, always cautious, eventually, by deciphering her letters and indulging in a little light forgery to produce incriminating evidence, he entrapped the Scottish queen.

Today, the spy master’s role in Elizabethan England is little appreciated, almost completely overshadowed by the authority and presence of that giant of the Tudor world, Sir William Cecil, Baron Burghley, the Chief Minister of the realm.

But Walsingham’s name still pops up in unexpected places. The surreal ‘Kids’ Page’ of the website of the National Security Agency – the US Government agency that eavesdrops on your international telephone calls, faxes and e-mails – features Walsingham, together with a game involving a cipher that substitutes letters of the standard alphabet for others to form a simple code. ‘The word “hello”,’ says the website, cheerfully providing the solution, ‘could be encrypted ITSSG.’ Good fun for those crowded around a computer screen on a long, dark winter evening. Educational, perhaps, certainly an innocent enough pastime.

But in Walsingham’s day, the game would have been far more deadly, and participants would have been playing for the highest stakes. In those days, torture and the scaffold were the grim penalty for getting the answer wrong.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Serviceable to Our Age’

‘Especially have regard
…
chiefly of the nobility [and] gentry …
that you see the inclination of each man, which way he is bent, whether it be a marshal or counsellor, a plain open nature, [or] dissembling or counterfeit and what pension
¹
he has from abroad

ADVICE FROM SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM TO ONE OF HIS NEPHEWS, PROBABLY WRITTEN IN THE LATE 1570s.
²

Francis Walsingham was born around 1532,
³
the only son of William, a London lawyer with extensive estates in Kent, and his wife Joyce, the daughter of Sir Edmund Denny of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. She was sister to Sir Anthony Denny, Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Henry VIII and the real unseen power behind the throne during the ailing monarch’s last months.
⁴
Politics, particularly Protestant politics, therefore ran vigorously through Walsingham’s veins. Francis’ uncle was Sir Edmund Walsingham, a gallant soldier who fought against the Scots in the crushing English victory at Flodden Field in 1513 and who later became the Lieutenant of the Tower of London,
⁵
being rewarded with grants of property by Henry VIII for his ‘good, true and faithful service’.
⁶

Some confusion surrounds the Walsingham family’s ancestry. Several pedigrees exist that seek to prove their gentle blood – a direct lineage from the lords of the manor of Walsingham in north Norfolk. One of these – drawn up by a fawning Robert Glover, the
Somerset Herald,
sometime during 1570–88 – lists a host of Walsinghams, some knighted, beginning with a Thomas who died in 1337.
⁷
This genealogy is largely fictitious, indeed is an Elizabethan fake, and is wholly unsupported by history. The harsh truth is that the Walsinghams came from trade.

The family was hardly ‘in every way splendidly conspicuous’, as Walsingham’s epitaph later gushingly claimed. Their lowly origins lie in Alan Walsingham, a humble cordwainer – in other words, a shoemaker – who purchased tenements in the parish of St Benet’s, Gracechurch Street, in London in 1403. His prosperity grew and he bought up a number of valuable properties elsewhere in the city, including a ‘mansion house’ in Eastcheap and a brewery and alehouse, called the Cock and Hoop, in Cripplegate. By 1412, his property holdings were incurring sizeable taxes totalling
£
17 11s a year, or just over
£
7,000 in today’s money. His son Thomas became a wine merchant and also dabbled in other profitable trades, such as the export of fish and cloth from London. In terms of city hierarchy, Thomas married well – to Margaret Bamme, daughter of the goldsmith Henry Bamme, whose influential family included two former Lord Mayors of London in 1390 and 1396. In 1424, he purchased, as his country house, the manor of Scadbury in Chislehurst, Kent, which was to become a seat of the Walsinghams in succeeding generations. His descendants remained in the lucrative vintner trade until James, Francis Walsingham’s grandfather, made the final triumphant transition from merchant to gentleman, signing himself ‘esquire’ and being granted the socially all-important coat of arms. It was a saga typical of many in England during the fifteenth century, of a family successfully clambering their way up the ladder of society.

Francis’ father William was the younger of James’s two sons, and trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn. In 1524, he was appointed a Commissioner of the Peace in Kent, and again in 1526 and 1532, and was recommended by both Henry VIII and his queen, Catherine of Aragon, to
fill the post of Common Serjeant for London in 1526.
⁸
Three years later, he may be the William Walsingham who appears on a long list of debtors, owing a total of £330 in sealed bonds to the rapacious Thomas Cromwell, who became Henry’s Chief Minister. In 1530, William was one of three commissioners appointed to investigate the possessions of the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey and two years later became one of the two Under-Sheriffs of London. He prospered as a lawyer, purchasing considerable new property including the manors of Foots Cray, Rokesly and Chelsfield in Kent and in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, where he maintained his London home. He died in 1534, seeking in his will to reserve Chelsfield to fund the marriage of his five daughters, and ‘if Joyce, my wife [dies] before Francis my son be twenty-one, my said manors of Foots Cray to be used as payment of my debts and for the advancement of my daughters’.
⁹
His twenty-seven-year-old widow was left with Francis, now a two-year-old infant, and all those daughters to marry off into good families. She remarried herself in 1538 to the courtier Sir John Carey of Plashy
¹⁰
in Hertfordshire, a match probably mooted and arranged by her own family, the Dennys, who held property in that county.

Walsingham’s early life is frustratingly short on detail, as perhaps befits the man of the shadows he was later to become as head of Queen Elizabeth’s secret service.

At the age of sixteen he went to the then notoriously Protestant King’s College, Cambridge,
¹¹
where John Cheke, Edward VI’s reformist tutor, was then provost. Walsingham’s tutor was Thomas Gardiner, another keen adherent of the new religion. He matriculated as a fellow commoner on 12 November 1548 and probably went down, seemingly without taking a degree, sometime before 1551. Walsingham then travelled in Europe, visiting ‘many foreign countries whose manners, laws, languages and policies he accurately studied and critically understood’,
¹²
before returning to London a year later, a confirmed and devout Protestant. He enrolled as a student at Gray’s Inn, clearly intending to follow his father into the legal profession. But his ambitions and dreams in the staid and stuffy world of the law were not to be fulfilled.