Elizabeth's Spymaster (5 page)

Two days after delivery of his letter concerning the Huguenot messenger Stewart, Walsingham wrote again to warn Cecil of a plot to poison the queen by contaminating her bedding and furniture with some toxic substance. This startling intelligence was based on a tip-off passed to Walsingham by ‘Franchiotto, the Italian’ – alias Captain Tomaso Franchiotto of the ancient walled city of Lucca in Tuscany, a Protestant who had spied for the French crown for forty years.
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Franchiotto was well known to Cecil: another of his pseudonyms was ‘Captain François’, a codename under which the Chief Minister had employed him to uncover French agents in England.
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With Mary Queen of Scots now the focal point of burgeoning Catholic plots, both at home and overseas, to put her on the throne in place of Elizabeth, the need to monitor subversion and espionage in England became ever more pressing. On 7 September, Walsingham supplied information about ‘a Frenchman and an Italian secretly lodged in London’ and asked for the assistance of the city authorities to immediately search their houses. He also suggested that taverns and inns should report on foreigners staying with them – an early version of today’s familiar hotel register.
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A week later, Walsingham told Cecil that he had arranged with Sir Thomas Row, then Lord Mayor of London, to draw up weekly lists of all strangers who took up lodgings within the square mile of the city. He also reported information, imparted ‘from a friend’, about two suspects ‘with a loathsome disease’ who had just left Southwark, across on the South Bank of the River Thames. In addition, he helpfully enclosed physical descriptions of the secret agents employed in London by Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine and uncle of Mary Queen of Scots.
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The following month, Walsingham passed on intelligence about preparations in Marseilles to transport soldiers to the North of England, using twelve galleys then in readiness, ‘for the better execution of some conspiracy’.
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This report proved to be unfounded. The subsequent embarrassment may have taught Walsingham a hard lesson in the world of espionage – both the importance of evaluating or analysing raw
information and knowing the reliability of one’s sources. Perhaps as a result of this, in late December he was sceptical about more reports from Paris he had submitted, warning that France and Spain were working closely together ‘for the alteration of religion and the advancement of Mary Queen of Scots’ in England. He explained his doubts to Cecil:

For that this advertisement [news] is so general and descends to no particulars, I thought to have [not] troubled your honour with [it] at present.

But, weighing [the] earnest protestations of the credibility of the party it came from, the nature of the matter as of the greatest importance, the malice of this present time, the allegiance and particular goodwill I owe her majesty and the danger that might come to me by the concealing thereof, if any such thing (which God defend) thereafter should happen, I saw it in duty [that] I could not forbear to write.
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Here lies the eternal dilemma in espionage – can you afford
not
to pass on intelligence of possibly vital importance because of any doubts, however small, you may harbour about its veracity or credibility? Nothing changes: no doubt today’s MI6 and CIA officers frequently suffer the same testing quandary, as emerged over the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. Back in 1568, Walsingham sought to explain his perplexity:

I beseech your honour that I may without offence conclude that in this division that reigns among us [the Catholic plots] there is less danger in fearing too much than too little and there is nothing more dangerous than security.
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Guard against complacency! This was to become one of his key beliefs when he later took over Elizabeth’s secret service from Cecil and completely reorganised England’s spy network at home and overseas. For Walsingham, this letter and this intelligence also marked the genesis of the major
bête noire
of his career – the striking, sensuous figure of Mary Queen of Scots and the constant plotting that surrounded her.

The acrid stench of conspiracy was in the very air of England that autumn. The premier peer of the realm Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England and a Privy Councillor, had tragically lost his third wife Elizabeth
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and their child during her confinement the previous year. The son of the wild and arrogant Earl of Surrey – the ‘poet earl’ executed for treason in the dying hours of Henry VIII’s reign – Norfolk had been a loyal Protestant all his life. However, he lacked foresight,
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was politically naïve and, fatally, remained ever ambitious for greater power and influence, despite already being the richest man in England. Now he was one of the commissioners
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appointed to head north to investigate allegations of Mary Queen of Scots’ complicity in the murder, in December 1567, of her husband, the distinctly unattractive, hard-drinking and syphilitic Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley.
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Whilst taking a break from the deliberations, Norfolk went hawking on 16 October with the Scottish Secretary of State William Maitland, on the banks of the River Ouse near Cawood, eight miles south-west of York. During a pleasant day’s sport, the Scot suddenly suggested to the duke that he should marry the Scottish queen as a convenient way of bringing the two nations into a powerful alliance, as well as securing Mary’s claim as heir to the throne of England. After much pondering, Norfolk found himself sorely tempted by the marriage plan.

The murder investigation was inevitably adjourned without result and Elizabeth called a full Privy Council meeting in London to continue the inquiries away from the machinations of the Scottish delegation.
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The queen was now becoming suspicious about her cousin Norfolk
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and she suddenly asked him point-blank whether he intended to marry Mary Queen of Scots, a match that in her eyes threatened both her person and her crown. Disingenuously, the duke replied that

no reason could move him to like of her that has been a competitor to the crown and if her majesty would move him thereto, he will rather be committed to the Tower, for he meant never to marry with such a person, where he could not be sure of his pillow.
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He would come to bitterly regret those rash words. Foolishly, he
became more set on the enterprise of marriage with Mary. The Scottish queen, seeing a chance both of freedom from virtual imprisonment at the hands of Elizabeth and leapfrogging all the objections to her claim to the English throne, enthusiastically pledged her love for the duke.
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At the same time, Mary did not hesitate to hedge her bets and secretly contacted the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland to seek their help in releasing her, by force of arms if necessary.

By the middle of the following year, 1569, the proposed match between Mary and Norfolk was taking on its own momentum, and Elizabeth, still harbouring dark suspicions fuelled by the whispering in the corridors of her court, was becoming exasperated. She gave Norfolk three separate opportunities that summer to confirm that he sought to marry the Scottish queen. Three times, he could not find the courage in his heart to reveal his plans to Elizabeth and on 6 September, when he finally did tell the queen of his intentions on his sickbed while visiting Titchfield in Hampshire, he was treated to a vintage Tudor tantrum. She angrily forbade any notion of such a marriage and solemnly charged him, on his allegiance to her, ‘to deal no further with the Scottish cause’. He hastily assured Elizabeth that he had ‘a very slight regard’ for Mary and that her rank and fortunes meant little to him. Norfolk, with the fatal, foolish pride that afflicted the house of Howard in the Tudor period, boasted that his own revenues ‘were not much less than those of the kingdom of Scotland … and that when he was in his tennis court at Norwich, he thought himself in a manner equal with some kings’.
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It was not a statement to calm the proud, prickly queen.

On 26 September, the duke arrived, still unwell with an ague (an attack of malaria), at Kenninghall, his opulent country estate in Norfolk, hoping that his departure might help to cool tempers at court. Even he had noticed his social ostracism and he wrote to the queen that his enemies found ‘such comfort of your majesty’s heavy displeasure that they began to make of me a common table talk [and] my friends were afraid of my company’.

In this case, Norfolk’s absence did not make Elizabeth’s heart grow fonder. She feared that his sudden, unexplained disappearance could be
the prelude to a rebellion by her Catholic subjects, with him in the vanguard, marching as their figurehead. The painful memories of the 1549 ‘Prayer Book’ insurrections against her half-brother Edward VI in the West, the Midlands and in East Anglia must have loomed large in her thoughts. She closed the main English ports as a security measure and put the militia on full alert. She had issued a peremptory summons on 25 September to Norfolk to attend upon her, now safely ensconced within the protective walls of Windsor Castle, but as ill-luck for the house of Howard would have it, the duke somehow failed to receive the royal charge.

A second, more pressing royal command eventually reached him and Norfolk set off for Windsor on 1 October with a thirty-strong escort. He was arrested on suspicion of treason and taken by Sir Francis Knollys to the Tower of London. He was confined in the Constable’s Lodgings, ironically in the very same rooms that had been occupied by his grandfather Thomas, Third Duke of Norfolk, for six years after his own arrest for treason in December 1546 on the orders of Henry VIII.

A pamphlet virulently attacking Norfolk’s marriage plans was swiftly published in London. There seems little doubt that Walsingham wrote the polemic
Discourse Touching the Pretended Match between the Duke of Norfolk and the Queen of Scots,
probably at Cecil’s prompting,
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and it demonstrates an early talent for producing the rawest of propaganda, aimed principally at the enthusiastic and willing audience of England’s Protestants.
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The author minces few words, nor wastes any opportunity to blacken the character of his targets, and like all effective disinformation or today’s ‘spin’, utilises a number of truths and half-truths to provide veracity. Centuries later, little limping Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s
Reichsminister
for National Enlightenment, would have glowed with pride if he had produced it himself.

The Queen of Scots, claimed the document, was ‘either a Papist, which is evil, or else an atheist which is worse’. She was in league

with the confederate enemies of the Gospel by the name of the holy league, to root out all such princes and magistrates as are professors of the same. A thing well known, though not generally.
Of nation, she is a Scot, of which nation I forebear to say what may be said, in a reverend respect of a few godly of that nation. Of inclination … let her own horrible acts
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publicly known to the whole world witness, though now of late seduced by practice [to] seek to cloak and hide the same.

Of alliance on her mother’s side, how she is descended of a race that is both enemy to God and the common quiet of Europe,
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[as] every man knows, but, alas, too many have felt.

In goodwill towards our sovereign, she has showed herself [in] sundry ways very evil affected, whose ambition has drawn her by bearing the arms of England, to decipher herself a competitor of the crown, a thing publicly known.

Norfolk is then rolled out to be roundly abused. His religious beliefs are left to ‘God and his own conscience’. But, says this poisonous pamphlet, he is clearly inconstant in his supposedly Protestant beliefs, for five reasons:

First, his education of his son under the government of a Papist [shows] it.

Secondly, the corruption of his house, his chief men of trust being Papists.

Thirdly, the reposed trust and confidence he has in the chief Papists in this realm.

Fourthly, his last marriage with a Papist and lastly, this pretended match.

Was it likely, asks Walsingham, raising the spectre of the murdered Darnley, that any man who professes some religious belief, or respects worldly honour, ‘or regards his own safety, would match with one detected of so horrible crimes in respect of love?’ Mary could solemnly swear by oath that she posed no threat to Elizabeth, or ‘confirm anything that may tend to the queen’s safety’, but, adds the pamphlet bleakly, ‘If she [falsifies] her faith, no pleading will serve. The sword must be the remedy.’

Regarding the alliance between England and Scotland that such a marriage could bring, Walsingham is scathing:

If we look well upon the uniters with a single eye that loves the continuance of God’s glory and the safety of our sovereign and the quietness of this state, we shall see more profit in division than in union.

Mary’s son by Darnley, the three-year-old James VI, had a Protestant ‘governor’ and was being brought up ‘faithfully inclining’ to England and Elizabeth

whereby during his government she may assure herself of most perfect union. Thus, you see the queen in safety, the two realms united and this remedy [the marriage] needless.
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