Elizabeth's Spymaster (39 page)

His arch-enemy Spain was also quick to learn of his decease. On 18 April, a Spanish spy in London provided details of an English fleet then being fitted out ‘with much activity’ and possibly destined for the Azores, sailing under the Portuguese flag. He added finally: ‘Secretary Walsingham has just expired – at which there is much sorrow.’

More than a thousand miles away in the Escorial Palace in Madrid, King Philip II of Spain later read the spy’s report. After musing for a few moments, he picked up his pen and scribbled in the margin alongside his personal reaction to the spy master’s death: ‘There … yes. But it is good news here.’
⁸³

Walsingham would have smiled wryly at this unexpected tribute to his life’s work.

CHAPTER NINE

Epilogue

‘Madam, I beseech you, be content not to fear. The Spaniard has a great appetite and an excellent digestion but I have fitted him with a bone for this twenty years
…
Your majesty have no cause to doubt him, provided that if the fire chanced to slack which I have kindled, you will be ruled by me, and now and then cast in some English fuel which will revive the flame.’

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM TO QUEEN ELIZABETH REGARDING SPANISH PLANS AGAINST FRANCE.
¹

Walsingham was clearly a famous Protestant hero in his time. William Camden, writing only a little while after his death, said that in subtlety and official services

he surpassed the queen’s expectation and the Papists accused him as a cunning workman in complotting his business and alluring men into dangers, whilst he diligently searched out their hidden practices against religion, his prince and country.
²

Sir Robert Naunton had read many of Walsingham’s ‘letters … and
secrets, yet if I might have been beholding to his ciphers (whereof they are full) they would have told pretty tales of the times’.
³

Men of letters also paid their tributes. The poet Edmund Spenser acknowledged his virtues and accomplishments in a sonnet prefixed to his
Faerie Queene,
published in 1596:

This lowly Muse that learns like steps to trace,

Flies for like aid unto your patronage;

That as the great Mecænas of this age,

As well to all that civil arts profess

As those that are inspired with martial rage

And craves protection of her feebleness

Which if ye yield, perhaps ye may her raise

In bigger times to sound your living praise.

Another poet, Thomas Watson,
⁴
who befriended the spy master in Paris in 1581, wrote a Latin and English
Eglogue upon the death of the Right Honourable Sir Francis Walsingham
in 1590, in which he appears under the pastoral name of Melibœus and his daughter as Hyane. The English version was dedicated to Frances and talks of Walsingham as ‘a sound pillar of our commonwealth and chief patron of virtue, learning and chivalry’.

For all these fine, elegant words, however, Walsingham in truth was a ruthless instrument of the state.

With the benefit of our twenty-first-century liberal values, we could easily share the oppressed English Catholics’ view of his character and actions. It would be all too simple for us to glibly equate Elizabeth’s ubiquitous Minister with the most notorious and cruellest enforcers of any modern-day totalitarian nation, such as Lavrenty Beria of the Soviet NKVD, or Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who controlled Nazi Germany’s
Schutzstaffel
(SS) and Gestapo. But such a hasty judgement would be wholly wrong, as it conveniently discounts the callous reality of the times in which Walsingham lived and the challenges he confronted almost daily.

Religious belief is a powerful, unforgiving emotion and, down the
ages, countless barbarities have been piously committed in its sanctimonious name against many good and innocent men, women and children. Sadly, such outrages continue today under the same justification and there remains a widespread failure to fully comprehend the compelling imperative of religious motivation behind so many of the horrific acts that stun us when we turn on our televisions or read our newspapers. The only change, over the years, is our increased capacity to be shocked by them. But more than four centuries ago, the conflict arising from differences in religious belief was more starkly defined and fiercely fought over upon a less sophisticated and more violent stage. In sixteenth-century England, lacking much of the painfully acquired veneer of the civilised behaviour norms we enjoy today, life was not only far cheaper but contained fewer complexities, certainly no niceties. Pain and death were never far away in everyday life.

In this harsh environment, we find Walsingham to be a deeply spiritual man, driven always by the overarching need to protect and preserve his precious Protestant state, beset, like a small ship in a fierce, threatening storm, by enemies all around – indeed, even within.

Never far from the forefront of his mind was the brutal suppression of Protestantism by Mary, Elizabeth’s Catholic half-sister, in the mid-15 50s, a persecution he had wisely fled from as a youth. He would have returned from exile certain that those burnings and that bloodshed would inevitably be repeated in England if Catholicism were ever restored as the state religion.

Subsequent events just across the English Channel bore out his worst fears and hardened his resolve to prevent that happening, at whatever cost. Like the rest of the English government, he had heard with horror the graphic accounts of the mass atrocities inflicted on ‘infidel’ Dutch Protestants by the crusading Spanish army of occupation in the Low Countries. He must also have been traumatised and scarred by witnessing the bloody and genocidal St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in August 1572. Later, as Secretary of State, reports endlessly crossed his desk from his spies and informers regarding plot after plot to assassinate his queen and the planned invasions, by battle-hardened Catholic
forces, of his ill-defended nation. Couple the impact of these events with his own religious fervency, and we might begin to understand his personal determination that Spanish troops would never forcibly return the Mass to English parish churches on the needle-sharp points of their pikes.

Such fears could rarely have deserted him in either his waking or sleeping hours. They can have left no room for any doubts or scruples to prevent him from deploying all the dark instruments of the Tudor state to destroy any threat he perceived as emanating from the repressed Catholic majority or from England’s enemies overseas. To him, bribery, treachery, blackmail, coercion, internment, torture and state-sponsored murder were merely handy tools to be employed unhesitatingly to stamp out the contagion of Popish treason and conspiracy. In addition, let us also remember that these tools were the customary penal methods of the period, used similarly by oppressive Catholic governments and administrations in the Low Countries, in Spain, France and Italy.

Walsingham’s writings demonstrate the extent to which his simple but dour version of Protestantism shaped his thoughts and actions. Walsingham perhaps held a brutally logical, Old Testament view of the world. ‘Right’ – represented by decency, humility, obedience and even patriotism – was clearly God’s work, and ‘wrong’ was often equated with the wicked actions and sinful will of a Popish Anti-Christ. The continuance of his religion in England, as an island haven from or bastion against what he saw as the florid evils of Catholicism in Europe, was to him the complete and absolute personal mission in life. Its importance to him perhaps exceeded his concern for and loyalty to his queen, as she sometimes testily but shrewdly pointed out. Indeed, sixty years on, he might have felt comfortable in the humourless Puritan Republican Commonwealth of Protector Cromwell. He was therefore something of a fanatic, a religious fundamentalist in modern terms, who saw issues purely in black and white, always measured against what he and his God stood for. You were either on Walsingham’s side or judged to be against his aims and objectives, and therefore treated accordingly. There was no room for grey areas of indecision: right had to be defended by might and, in his terms, might was right.

So much for his motivations. To secure the state religion and the sacred person of Elizabeth, we have seen how he employed a substantial network of overseas spies and domestic informers – the direct forerunners of today’s secret intelligence and security services in Britain. In the face of always inadequate funding from the state, his belief that the ‘acquisition of knowledge is never too dear’ often had to be supported by contributions from his own private finances. His methodology, his total obsession with secrecy, would be familiar tools of the trade to any desk officer in a modern spy agency, as would the systematic way in which he collected evidence against individuals, although some of his tactics – such as forging incriminating material – would be shunned in Western societies.

If he had one fault, it may have been an unwillingness to pounce on a suspect until he had collected every available piece of information. Perhaps such caution or occasional hesitancy is understandable in any secret policeman who operates amongst the shifting sands of rapidly changing political allegiances at court, or has to rely on a corps of unreliable informers, motivated only by cash handouts.

But despite all the obstacles, he succeeded in staunchly and successfully protecting both England and Elizabeth.

His intelligence-gathering played a major role in defeating the Spanish Armada – a role acknowledged by that ultimate man of action, the swashbuckling corsair Francis Drake – as well as foiling conspiracy after conspiracy, including the continual machinations of Mary Queen of Scots. His attempts to counter her constant plotting against queen and state must count as one of the greatest and most dramatic personal confrontations of English history. Elsewhere in this undeclared and covert religious war, Walsingham’s mind encompassed a remarkable grand strategic vision focused on containing the Spanish and papal threats and recognising that his front-line defences lay not along the English coast, but on the continent of Europe. He fully understood the necessity of using naval power to exert political and diplomatic pressure; he utilised economic warfare to hinder the Armada preparations; he employed black propaganda to lower morale amongst the forces of England’s enemies.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth did not always embrace the wisdom of his strategies, and the audacity of some of his proposals, together with their potential cost, was often too much for her to swallow, or for her exchequer to bear. And who can blame her? After all, she had far more to lose from an unlucky throw of the dice in Walsingham’s ‘great game’ against the Spanish.

For Walsingham, his onerous duties as spy master came on top of the workload of the routine bureaucratic grind of government and a series of difficult diplomatic missions. His career as a Minister is a breathtaking intellectual achievement, made more impressive by his frequent and debilitating bouts of ill-health. His capacity for paperwork must have been awesome, even aided by a bevy of secretaries. Walsingham was not a man cursed with tunnel vision: he had an unquenchable thirst for detail, as befits any spy master. While Burghley’s papers often consist of only a tautly disciplined half-page of handwriting, Walsingham’s correspondence goes on for page after page – confirming details, seeking information, giving instructions, offering advice. Despite his pressure of work, no issue went unresolved. He must rank as one of England’s greatest administrators.

His sure, safe hands manipulated many of the levers of power in the Elizabethan state. No wonder he burnt himself out.

Today, Walsingham still remains a man of the shadows, like a play’s leading actor speaking his lines off-stage, unseen by the audience. We know something of him by reputation, but few of us have seen his performances to admire his consummate skills. Those quizzical eyes are rarely caught by the bright glare of the footlights of history, but the drama of the past is incomplete without his physical presence. It is now time for him to come out of the darkened wings to receive the audience’s applause for his unique role in creating the England, the Britain, we know today.

Walsingham’s wife Ursula lived on for twelve years after the death of her husband. She continued to play a role in the life of Elizabeth’s court, exchanging New Year gifts with the queen, although their relationship was sometimes stormy. At one point, Elizabeth refused to ask a
favour of her, saying imperiously that she would see Ursula hanged first. She died suddenly at Barn Elms on 18 June 1602, probably in her late sixties, and was buried quietly near Francis in Old St Paul’s the following night.
⁵
In her will, dated 30 January 1599, she left bequests of £20 each to eight servants, if they remained in her service at her death;
£3
each to her cooks Henry Calthorpe and John Cordell, and £50 to her ‘waiting woman’ Alice Poole, who must have given faithful service. Amongst those of higher station, her brother-in-law Robert Beale and Thomas Fleming, the queen’s Solicitor-General, each received a piece of plate worth twenty marks. Aside from bequests to the poor in Barnes and to the ministers of the parish churches she attended, her ‘plate and jewels’ and her property at Boston and Skirbeck in Lincolnshire went to her surviving daughter Frances, who was appointed sole executor.
⁶

Barn Elms – ‘my poor cottage’, as Walsingham referred to it
⁷
– was granted by James I on his accession to the throne to Peter Vanlore, afterwards made a baronet.
⁸
The house was rebuilt by Thomas Cartwright in 1694 and remodelled in 1771 by the banker Richard Hoare. The site later became famous as the Ranelagh Polo Club, but the buildings were demolished in 1954. Nothing remains except an ornamental pond, an icehouse from the later house and an artificial mound.
⁹