Elizabeth's Spymaster (4 page)

Edward VI died ‘thin and wasted’ in his sixteenth year on 6 July 1553,
from a suppurating pulmonary infection, septicaemia and renal failure. As planned, the leaders of his Protestant government immediately proclaimed the teenage Lady Jane Grey, grand-daughter of Mary, one of Henry VIII’s sisters, his lawful successor. Edward’s elder half-sister, Princess Mary, fled London for the safety of East Anglia. There she mustered forces loyal to her Catholic cause and, gathering more troops en route, marched on the capital where the chastened Privy Council hastily named her queen on 19 July. Catholicism had returned to England.

Around 1,000 Protestant reformers fled England for safety, particularly after the Kent-based rebellion launched by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554 in protest against Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain was finally defeated at the western gates of the City of London. It may be that some relatives of the Walsingham family were caught up in that abortive uprising and were closely involved in the attempt to maintain a Protestant royal line via that tragic and misused figure of English history, Lady Jane Grey.
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Certainly, by the time the fearsome torchings of heretics began in London’s Smithfield and the market squares of many English towns as Mary sought to cauterise the fervour of the new religion, Walsingham had departed the shores of England for Europe once again, youthful discretion overcoming his gamecock valour.

After some journeying in Europe, he reappears at the University of Padua in Italy on 29 December 1555, where he was elected
Consularius
or representative of the English students studying in the faculty of civil law, with an influential seat on the university’s governing senate. But his time at this liberal and tolerant seat of learning was strangely brief, as Walsingham left there in 1556 and travelled on to France, Switzerland and probably Frankfurt in Germany. He returned from exile sometime after Mary’s death in 1558 and the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth, the last of Henry’s turbulent brood to come to the throne of England.

Walsingham was probably in England when his mother died in 1560; she was buried next to her first husband in St Mary Aldermanbury Church.
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Despite Walsingham’s now fervent Protestant beliefs, a Mass was said during the funeral and communion was taken by at least some
of the mourners. Four of his sisters had married during his exile,
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the youngest, Mary, to Walter Mildmay, later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in Elizabeth’s government, the founder of Emmanuel College in Cambridge
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and a staunch friend. Walsingham was by this time aged twenty-eight, fluent in French, Italian and Latin – indeed, he was later reckoned to be ‘the best linguist’ of the period.
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He had his own complex coat of arms, recording the Walsingham family marriages, with the motto
Auspicante Deo –
‘With God being propitious’.
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It was high time he found himself a wife and made something of his life.

During this period he met Anne Carleill, or Carlyle, the widow of a London wine merchant and the daughter of the haberdasher Sir George Barnes, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1552. She already had a young son, Christopher, by her dead husband. Walsingham married her in 1562 and sold his property at Foots Cray in Kent to John Gillibrand in April that year. He leased the manor at Parkebury in Hertfordshire, where the family lived quietly as country gentle folk for several years, with members of the Denny family and Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Chief Minister, as near neighbours.

Walsingham was a good catch for the widow – he was well off and, having some influential relations and friends, looked to have excellent prospects. Utilising that patronage, he had already been elected to the second parliament of Elizabeth’s reign
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as the pluralist member for both the Dorset port of Lyme Regis and also the Oxfordshire market town of Banbury, although he appeared to play no active role in its legislative proceedings.

Sadly, Anne died in 1564, just two years after the wedding. There were no children of the marriage. Her will, dated 29 July of that year, leaves £100 (just over £20,000 in today’s money) to her husband. ‘By his consent’ she made a host of small legacies to her friends and family. These included £10 to her friend Christopher Robinson, the public notary living in Paternoster Row, near Old St Paul’s, who witnessed and subsequently proved her will, and a ‘purse of silk and gold’ to her brother-in-law William Dodington, an officer at the Mint. A bequest of £2 also went to the sister of her first husband, Cicely Hastenden, née Carleill.
Most importantly, for her, there remained the issue of the wellbeing and education of her son by her previous marriage:

My husband to have custody of my son Christopher Carleill, to be by him virtuously brought up and to pay him when twenty-one all money and goods remaining out and besides my said son’s exhibition.
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This Walsingham faithfully fulfilled, even after his second marriage, probably in August of 1566, to Ursula,
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the comfortably-off widow of Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe
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on the Isle of Wight, who had died a few months before. She was left with two young sons, John and George, as well as ample financial provision through the manor, the estates of the former Benedictine priory at Carisbrooke and the manors of Godshill and Freshwater on that garden isle. Appuldurcombe was a handsome property in the parish of Godshill, consisting of a large house with extensive grounds, including a bowling green, which had come into the Worsley family by marriage in 1511.

The following year, tragedy struck Walsingham’s new family. His two stepsons

being in the lodge or gatehouse at Appledurcombe, where they went to school, the servants were drying of [gun] powder there against [before] the general muster [of the local militia].

A spark flew into the dish, that set fire to a barrel which stood by, blew up a side of the gatehouse, killed the two children and some others [and] hurt one James Worsley, a youth, their kinsman, that went to school there with them.
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This heartbreak was not the only calamity that came with Ursula’s hand in wedlock to Walsingham, for the violent death of the two boys spawned a bitter legal dispute over the terms and intentions of her first husband’s will.
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Her brother-in-law John Worsley, the executor, amongst other contentious issues, maintained that various moveable goods and chattels left to her sons when they came of age now belonged to him, as they had both been killed. The lengthy suit was finally decided in favour of Walsingham and his wife in June 1571.
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Despite this annoying distraction, the added wealth brought by his second marriage enabled Walsingham to quit the leased manor at Parkebury. He purchased a house in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate in London on 5 March 1568, as well as maintaining a fine, if somewhat remote, country home at Appuldurcombe. He later bought a new town residence, ‘The Papey’,
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a substantial building across the street from the church of St Mary Axe,
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next door to the Fletchers’ Hall and hard up against the north-eastern section of the city walls. Next door was the newly built house of Walsingham’s brother-in-law Robert Beale, then one of the clerks of the Privy Council, who had married Ursula’s sister Edith.
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Little is known of Ursula, but her formidable likeness, painted in 1583 by an unknown artist, probably when she was in her early forties, is still preserved in London’s National Portrait Gallery.
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The painting shows an elegant red-haired lady wearing a tight-fitting black ‘Paris’ cap, a starched white ruff and a long, heavy and obviously expensive gold chain hanging around her neck. Her face is oval with a pointed chin, pursed lips and an angular, almost beak-like nose. There is something about her expression and that thin, disapproving mouth that strongly suggests this was not a wife whose feelings or views could be taken for granted, and it is easy to imagine that Ursula would not have tolerated any kind of nonsense from her husband. Some clues to Walsingham’s relationship with Ursula emerge from his surviving correspondence, containing broad hints that Walsingham’s second marriage suffered not a few tempestuous moments. Writing from Paris to Thomas Heneage, Treasurer of the queen’s Privy Chamber, in June 1571 regarding the marriage then being brokered between Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou, Walsingham described the French suitor as:

choleric, yet he lacks not reason to govern and bridle [the queen]. And you know that these natures are the best … and commonly prove the best husbands. Or else should not you and I be in the highest degree in such perfection as we are. Yet in this matter, we shall well not to be judged, neither by Mrs Heneage nor Mrs Walsingham, because they are parties.
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And in January 1574, he told his friend William More:

Bear, sir, with my earnestness, in recommending my wife’s causes. You are yourself a married man. You know, therefore, what force Mrs More’s commandments are to you.
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Despite these tell-tale suggestions of marital tension or discord, Walsingham warmly describes Ursula as ‘my well-beloved wife’ in his will, written in December 1589, in which she was appointed sole executor.
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Throughout the twenty-four years of their marriage, perhaps Walsingham was a generous husband, attempting to compensate her for his constant overwork and distraction, at all hours, with the complexities and secrecy of state business. In contrast to her husband’s rather dour, puritanical outlook on life, it seems likely that Ursula had a penchant for expensive and pretty things, having an account with a goldsmith.
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She bore him two daughters: the first, called Frances, was probably born in October 1567, and the second, Mary, in early January 1573,
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but she died seven years later.
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We come now to the defining moment in Walsingham’s career, and like much of his early life, it is shrouded in tantalising mystery. He first appears in the State Papers in a cryptic comment scribbled hastily in September 1566 by Elizabeth’s Chief Minister Cecil. The brief note is contained in a memorandum concerning issues to be discussed by Parliament: Mr Walsingham, he instructed, ‘to be of the House.’
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His attendance at Westminster was therefore required. What role he was to play there remains obscure, like an actor caught dimly in the footlights. There is no doubt that his presence in the Parliament House was important to the political objectives of Elizabeth’s government at the time, possibly with him acting as a lobbyist, or perhaps whipping the members into voting for a specific piece of legislation. The issue and its outcome remain unknown. Two years later, he makes another brief but significant appearance. Walsingham was now aged thirty-six and a letter from him to Cecil on 18 August 1568 may well signal the beginning of his distinguished, arduous and generally thankless career in the queen’s service.

Walsingham wrote on behalf of Sir Nicholas Throgmorton,
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whom
he had replaced as MP for Lyme Regis a few years before and who was now a close friend. Throgmorton, a former ambassador in Paris and subsequently a supporter of the French Huguenots, had fallen ill, and therefore asked Walsingham to contact Cecil about one Robert Stewart, an emissary who had come to England to seek the queen’s support for their cause in the French civil wars. Walsingham urged the Chief Minister to arrange an audience with Elizabeth for Stewart, as he had much important information to impart only ‘by mouth’ on this sensitive matter, and asked that Cecil should organise lodgings for him and see him ‘properly attended’. Walsingham added as a postscript:

Touching these matters wherein you appointed me to deal, I will tomorrow, in the morning, attend upon your lordship to advertise [tell] you what I have done therein.
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These last few words are telling. They indicate that Walsingham was now engaged in secret work for Cecil, who already operated an active intelligence service for Elizabeth.

Amongst those on the state payroll was one Rooksby, at that time living undercover in Edinburgh to spy on the intrigues of the court of Mary Queen of Scots,
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who had fled to England and Elizabeth’s unwilling protection in the middle of May 1568. In September of that year, King Philip II of Spain replaced his ambassador to London, Diego de Guzman de Silva, with the aggressive and conspiring Don Guerau de Spes, who described Cecil as ‘that astute and false liar and old heretic’. Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva and the Spanish commander in the Netherlands, was forced to admonish de Spes to end his conspiracies ‘for a meddling fool!’ Alvarez had heard from reports in France how Mary ‘was being utterly ruined by the plotting of her servants with you, for they never enter your house without being watched’.
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Allington, one of Cecil’s private secretaries, was also arrested after receiving bribes from de Spes to murder the Chief Minister. The Spanish envoy’s correspondence was quickly intercepted and deciphered by a government cryptographer called Somers.
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This was the dark, dangerous world into which Walsingham – armed only with his linguistic skills and the
‘knowledge how best to use his tongue’
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– patriotically stepped that summer of 1568.