Elizabeth's Spymaster (7 page)

Walsingham by now had other preoccupations that realised his worst fears: an acute shortage of money. His ambassadorial duties had incurred considerable expense and he had been forced reluctantly into debt. He reported to Burghley on 3 March 1572 that he had spent £1,600 more than his income and had been forced to sell his own land, which yielded
£60 a year, as his debts now totalled more than £730. Perhaps unwisely, later in July he borrowed money in anticipation of his salary from Guido Cavalcanti, an agent of Catherine de Medici, and now owed him many thousands of pounds.
⁸⁶

But Walsingham’s duties as royal matchmaker had not ended. Astonishingly, attention turned to Anjou’s younger brother, the seventeen-year-old Francis, Duke of Alençon, as a possible substitute candidate for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. He was no great catch: he had a callow, pock-marked face – the result of a bad attack of smallpox – and a puny, undersized body. Walsingham had grave doubts about how his vain royal mistress would view the lad’s physical suitability. He told Cecil, now created Lord Burghley for services rendered in one of his queen’s rare gestures of generosity, of his frank concerns over the possible match:

The great impediment I find … is the contentment of the eye. The gentleman is void of a good humour, besides the blemish of the smallpox. When I weigh the same with the delicacy of her majesty’s eye, I hardly think there will grow any liking.
⁸⁷

Even Elizabeth ignored the diplomatic blandishments about Alençon’s age and appearance and became worried over ‘the absurdity that in general opinion of the world might grow’ if she entered into matrimony with an immature youth with only a stubble of beard first appearing on his chin.

Worse was to come for the chances of any meaningful political alliance between England and France against Spain. The French Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny had been urging war against Philip II’s Spanish forces in the Low Countries. This augured ill for Elizabeth’s government, anxious over what French control of Flanders would mean for English maritime power and trade. Burghley wrote to Walsingham in June 1572 warning that French control of the Low Countries’ ports would restrict shipping movements and regulate their merchants, and ‘our sovereignty upon the narrow seas will be abridged with danger and dishonour’.
⁸⁸
The following month, Elizabeth, concerned over French
territorial ambitions, sent Sir Humphrey Gilbert
⁸⁹
(who had savagely repressed the Fitzmaurice Rebellion in Southern Ireland in 1569) with more than 1,000 volunteer soldiers to occupy the Zeeland coastal towns of Flushing and Sluys against the Spanish, to prevent their occupation by French troops. The expedition was strictly unofficial and Gilbert knew the queen would quickly disown him if disaster struck and his force was defeated.

In Paris, Catherine de Medici became alarmed that Coligny’s policy would suck France into a dangerous and potentially disastrous war with Spain, possibly on two fronts. Something dramatic had to be done to dilute or dissipate the Huguenot influence on French foreign policy.

At around eleven o’clock on the morning of 22 August 1572, four days after the marriage of the French king’s daughter Marguerite of Valois to the Protestant Prince Henry of Navarre, Coligny was walking along the rue de Béthisy after meeting the Duke of Anjou at the Louvre. He bent down to adjust his overshoe, which he wore as protection from the filthy, muddy roadways, and this sudden action saved his life, for a shot fired by Maurevel, alias Maurevert, an assassin hired by the Guises, injured rather than killed him. The shot was fired from an arquebus
⁹⁰
through an iron grille in the window of a house owned by Canon Pierre de Pille, former preceptor to the Duke of Guise. The would-be assassin fled through the cloister of a nearby church to a horse, waiting already saddled on the banks of the River Seine, and made his escape.

Coligny was carried home, bleeding from a shattered left elbow and hand. The king, playing a game of tennis in the Louvre, heard the shot, and when told of the attempt on Coligny’s life seemed beside himself with anger. He immediately sent his own physician, Ambrose Pare, to tend the wounded man. The admiral’s right index finger had to be amputated.

The royal outrage and concern were all a sham, however. In the early hours of St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, a hastily but well-constructed plan to murder all the Huguenot leaders was put into action. The wounded Coligny was amongst the first to die, stabbed in the chest in his bedroom even though his house was guarded by royal troops. His murderer was
Besme, a Bohemian also known as Vanovitch, who was a Guise follower. Coligny’s body was hurled out of the window and down into the street, where the Duke of Guise himself and the Duke of Angoulême, the bastard brother of the king, were waiting. Coligny’s head was hacked off and his gore-soaked body dragged away to be hung in chains from the public gibbet at Montfaucon. Another dozen Huguenot leaders were killed soon afterwards: La Rochefoucauld, who had been joking with Charles IX only hours earlier, was stabbed by a masked servant; the Seigneur de la Force and one of his sons had their throats slashed.

In their home on the quai des Bernardins in Faubourg St Germain,
⁹¹
Walsingham, his wife and their four-year-old daughter Frances heard the bells of the Church of St Germain l’Auxerrois, up the River Seine, ring out at midnight. Unknown to them and their house guest Philip Sidney, who was visiting France, it was a pious signal for bloody genocide. The homes of known Protestants in Paris had been quickly identified and their doors daubed with a white cross, indicating them as targets for the coming bloodbath.

As the sun rose that morning, a Sunday, there were more bells ringing and gunfire could be heard from the direction of the Louvre, across the water. By mid-afternoon, some of the terrified English in the city had sought shelter in Walsingham’s house and told the stark, terrible story: a concerted massacre of Huguenots had been carried out by a Catholic mob and disciplined troops of soldiers. Three Englishmen had already been killed. No doubt Walsingham led their prayers for survival within the locked and barred embassy. The Spanish ambassador in Paris maintained that the mob attacked Walsingham’s home and he was forced to cravenly conceal himself, but this claim is likely to be disinformation. Charles IX certainly sent a guard, under the command of the Duke de Nevers, to protect Walsingham and his family and their growing band of refugees from the continuing bloodshed.
⁹²
The Huguenot General François de Beauvais, Sieur de Briquemault, also hid in the ambassador’s house, but was dragged out by royal troops and later hanged.
⁹³

Over the next few days, more than 3,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris, and the massacre spread like a red stain of terror across
the rest of France. An estimated 70,000 Protestants died horribly in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyons,
⁹⁴
Rouen and Orleans as the carnage carried on into October, despite belated royal orders to cease and desist.
⁹⁵

Walsingham managed to smuggle his wife and daughter out of the city and back to England. He was granted royal protection for his coach as he moved around Paris but was subjected to abuse and insults hurled by the still rampaging mob.
⁹⁶
Fearing that his letters to London were being intercepted, his frank account of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre was committed to his diplomatic messenger’s memory,
⁹⁷
probably the trusty Welshman Walter Williams who was to be employed by Walsingham in this role and others over the next fifteen years.
⁹⁸

On 1 September, Walsingham had an audience with Catherine de Medici. She told him that her son King Charles IX would now only allow one religion to be practised in France: Catholicism.

Five days later, John Facchinetti, Bishop of Nicastro and Papal Legate in Venice, wrote to Ptolemy Galli, Cardinal of Como, congratulating him on the

good news from France of the death of the admiral and the great slaughter of the Huguenots and their chiefs … The king [Charles IX] speaking of the [Protestant] princes of Navarre and Condé said: ‘Let these poltroons be forthwith shut up.’ And … he caused all the gentlemen and servants of the count of Navarre to be killed.
⁹⁹

In Rome, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a
Te Deum
to be sung to celebrate the signal victory over Protestantism and for a medal to be struck to mark the event, with an image on its reverse of an angel with a cross and drawn sword, killing the Huguenots. Irrevocably, perhaps unintentionally, the international battle lines against England were being drawn up.

The horrors of the St Bartholomew’s Day slaughter scarred Walsingham for the remainder of his life. A numbed and terrified eyewitness to the bloody, state-sponsored repression of his fellow Protestants, he had seen the pools of congealing blood on the streets and smelt the smoke of the raging fires lit by blind hatred and prejudice across Paris. His memory was seared by the sight of the naked fear in the faces of his
fellow Englishmen as, day after day, the Catholic mob clamoured and bayed for their deaths outside the walls of his ambassadorial home, a tiny, frail bastion of Protestant safety amid the noisy carnage around them.

For Walsingham, and indeed for Elizabeth’s government, the French massacre was a stunning, horrific reminder of the brutal, genocidal anti-Protestant Spanish campaign in the Low Countries and a warning of what might follow in England if the realm was ever returned to Catholicism.

The grim-faced ambassador must have sworn to move heaven and earth to ensure the survival of his precious Protestant state, clearly now dangerously beset on every side by powerful, determined and devout enemies.

CHAPTER TWO

‘The Poison Against This Estate’

‘… If they should show themselves obstinate and perverse, as they have done before, they should carry them to the Tower, there to be kept close prisoners and to be put to the Rack and torture, to compel them to utter their innermost knowledge in all matters they dealt in or are privy to.’

PRIVY COUNCIL INSTRUCTIONS ON THE FATE OF CATHOLIC PRISONERS, JANUARY 1587.
¹

Out of the windblown embers of the fires that brutally destroyed 280 heretics during Queen Mary I’s reign was born the fervency of England’s new state religion under her half-sister Elizabeth, after she came to the throne in November 1558. The problem the queen and her government faced was that while the law of the land may have firmly established the Protestant Anglican church, a majority of her subjects, particularly in North and North-West England, remained staunchly Catholic. At various times during her reign, they were seen as representing grave threats to her crown and state and Francis Walsingham, a few months after his return from France in April 1573,
²
was tasked to bring to bear
the repressive measures of the police state to neutralise them. Around 125 Catholic priests and sixty recusants, including three women, were to be hunted down and cruelly executed as traitors during Elizabeth’s reign, mainly during the 1580s when Walsingham directed the security of the realm.
³

A plot to overthrow the queen had already galvanised England in 1571–2, centred yet again on that arch-conspirator Roberto Ridolphi. Within days of the Duke of Norfolk’s release from the Tower in August 1570 and into confinement at Howard House in London, the audacious Florentine had visited him secretly. A visitor with such a poor sense of timing could hardly have been less welcome. Ridolphi asked the apprehensive Norfolk to write to the Duke of Alva, the Spanish captain-general in the Netherlands, seeking funds for the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots. Wisely, Norfolk shunned him – ‘I began to mislike him,’ he said much later, and ‘sought ways to shift me from him.’

It was a rare moment of perception, for this double agent was eventually the deceitful means used to bring Norfolk to the scaffold. Despite all that he had suffered, Norfolk’s other nemesis, Mary Queen of Scots, was still keen to marry him and to embroil him in a new, dangerous conspiracy. She wrote to him on 31 January 1571, encouraging his escape from house arrest – ‘as she would do [herself], notwithstanding any danger’ – in order that they could be married.
⁴
One can imagine Norfolk’s incredulous expression when he read her wholly unrealistic letter, its contents, if not the stuff of daydreams, certainly of rampant self-deception.

The Scottish queen’s fantasies aside, the duke’s final downfall was triggered by the arrest of Charles Bailly, a young Fleming who had entered Mary’s service in 1564 and later worked for John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, her agent in London. Burghley’s agents in Dover had detained him in early April 1571 after discovering he was carrying books and letters from English exiles and had no valid passport. Two of the communications, ‘hid behind his back secretly’, were addressed to the bishop and had been dictated to Bailly by the ubiquitous Ridolphi in Brussels.
⁵
The prisoner was brought to London and held in the Beauchamp Tower in
the Tower of London, where grim inscriptions on the walls of a second-floor room, carved by him in the utter despair of imprisonment, survive to this day.
⁶
They include some painfully true words, and Bailly’s woeful sentiments are justified by the treatment he received at the hands of his torturers in the Tower. A brief session on the rack – a fiendish machine that stretched the body and agonisingly dislocated the joints
⁷
– plus the threat of further such treatment to come compelled the prisoner to make some startling admissions. He admitted that Ridolphi had left England on 25 March with personal appeals from Mary to the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, his master – King Philip II – and the Pope to organise and fund an invasion of England. The aim was to overthrow Elizabeth, crown the Scottish queen and re-establish Catholicism as the state religion. Earlier that month, Ridolphi had revisited Norfolk at Howard House in Charterhouse Square, leaving a document with him that outlined the invasion plans and listed some forty luminaries in England who secretly supported Mary, each name identified by a number for use in ciphered correspondence.
⁸