Elizabeth's Spymaster (8 page)

Over in Paris, Walsingham, still Elizabeth’s ambassador to the Valois court, quickly received wind of the plot. He wrote to Burghley on 14 May:

I am given secretly to understand that Ridolfi has letters of credit given him by the Spanish ambassador unto the duke of Alva; where upon he had [a] long conference with the duke and was dispatched to Rome with letters of credit to the King of Spain promising to be in Madrid the 20th of this month.

Touching the matter of secrecy committed unto him, I can learn nothing as yet, notwithstanding, I thought it my part to advertise [tell] your Lordship of this much which perhaps by other advertisements can give some guess what the same imports.
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But the Florentine banker failed to make a good impression upon the Spanish general. During their meeting, he enthusiastically described how Spain could generously supply 6,000 harquebusiers for the invasion along with military equipment, including twenty-five artillery pieces, to augment a popularist English Catholic army, led by Norfolk, which would
free Mary and seize Elizabeth. The reliability of his information was somewhat damaged by urging a landing at the port of Harwich, which he claimed was in Norfolk rather than in Essex. His credibility quickly sank and the canny Alva was hardly convinced of the wisdom of the plan. He later told Philip II that Ridolphi was a ‘great babbler’ and had learned his lessons parrot fashion’. Instead, the general urged the king that Spain should provide military assistance only after the English Catholics had risen up in rebellion and Elizabeth was already ‘dead … or else a prisoner’. Then there would be an opportunity ‘which we must not allow to escape’. Alva added: ‘We may tell [Norfolk] that these conditions being fulfilled, he shall have what he wants.’
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Such requirements were virtually impossible to achieve, given the brutal suppression of the Northern Rebellion in 1569, and the Spanish general must have known that. Ridolphi, unaware of Alva’s cynical dismissal of his plans, hastened on to the Vatican and Madrid, but by then Philip already knew that the conspiracy had been uncovered through the arrest of Bailly and had received Alva’s adverse military advice.

Back in London, Bailly was moved to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, where Burghley inserted one of his stool pigeons, the linguist William Herle, disguised as an Irish priest, to extract more information from him.
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Slowly, piece by piece, the details of the conspiracy were teased out by the queen’s investigators and fitted together like a giant, sinister jigsaw. Then the moment came for action.

Betrayed by his servants under interrogation, Norfolk was arrested again on 7 September 1571 and taken to the Tower as a close prisoner. Three days later, he wrote a pathetic letter of submission to Elizabeth, seeking her pardon ‘with an overwhelmed heart and watery cheek’. He rued the day when he had first considered marrying Mary Queen of Scots – as he always ‘coveted nothing but a quiet life’.
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So do we all, even those of us not regularly accused of treason. He stumbled and excused his way through several painful examinations by members of the Privy Council,
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but in his heart, he now knew it was his own stupidity, his own vanity, that had caused his ruin.

Ridolphi, safely in Paris, wrote to Mary Queen of Scots on 30
September reporting the results of his negotiations with the Pope and the king of Spain, adding that he would now judiciously ‘retire into privacy that he may not give umbrage to Queen Elizabeth’.
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Mary’s reaction to his letter is not recorded, but may be imagined.

The Spanish ambassador de Spes was expelled from England after Elizabeth told him bluntly that he would ‘secretly seek to inflame our realm with firebrands’.

Excited rumours reverberated throughout Europe. A newsletter received in Rome in early January 1572 reported wrongly that Mary had been convicted of complicity in the plot and was now ‘so straitly confined that no one may speak with her and [her] food is conveyed to her through a window’.
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Archbishop John Baptista Castagna, the Papal Nuncio in Madrid, observed that the Ridolphi affair was ‘a matter of importance and substance, had it not been discovered, which causes the king [Philip II] infinite mortification’. If Norfolk and the other conspirators should be put to death, as was expected, there was no more to be done but to be patient, because to make war

and attack those realms deliberately without a rising of the [Catholic] magnates of the said kingdom is no enterprise for these times, nor would the king so much as think of it at present and this is the answer to the two ciphered [letters] received touching this matter.
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Norfolk was tried for his life in Westminster Hall on 16 January 1572. None of the witnesses against him were allowed to appear, to prevent them from facing questions posed by the prisoner. The duke cut a figure that was haughty at times, redolent of that old Howard dynastic arrogance, but pathetic at others, claiming that his memory was ‘too weak to answer a heap of matters huddled up’. It came as no surprise that his peers unanimously found him guilty and the Tower axe was ominously turned towards him as sentence of death was pronounced by the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Lord High Steward.
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Norfolk was an unlikely traitor. He was more guilty of foolishly concealing information than of planning the downfall of Elizabeth and her
government. He complained that he was ‘betrayed and undone by my own, while I knew not how to mistrust’.
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The duke climbed the Tower Hill scaffold at eight o’clock on the morning of 2 June. He told the crowd that he only talked with Ridolphi – a ‘stranger, a naughty man’ – but once and

not to the prejudice of the queen, for many men know I had dealings with him for money matters, upon bills and bonds. I found him to be a man that enjoyed the tranquillity of England and of a prompt and ready wit for any wicked design.
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Norfolk also stressed that he remained a good Protestant to the end: ‘I take God to witness, I am not, nor never was, a Papist, since I knew what religion meant.’ His head was then cut off with a single blow of the executioner’s axe. He was aged thirty-four. His body was buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower’s walls.

Ridolphi had heard that the conspiracy had been discovered when he visited Paris the previous October. He eventually returned to Rome where Pope Pius V gratefully made him a papal senator, and he lived on for another four decades in Florence, fat and prosperous from his lucrative financial transactions. He died there peacefully in his bed on 18 February 1612. What his precise role in the affair amounted to is difficult to discern, more than four centuries later. After his season as an unwilling guest in Walsingham’s London home during the winter of 1569, he almost certainly had become a double agent for the English government. It is tempting to imagine that Ridolphi was also an agent provocateur, part of an elaborate and cunning plot by Burghley to finally neutralise any remaining threat posed by Norfolk and the disaffected Catholic nobility after the Northern Rebellion a few years earlier. In this shadowy world of intrigue and double-dealing, the conspiracy theorist is in his element: the crafty Chief Minister was surely capable of such Byzantine trickery. It is perhaps significant that years later, in 1600, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote to Burghley’s son, Sir Robert Cecil, pointing out a belief prevalent at the time that ‘your own father … was esteemed to be the contriver of Norfolk’s ruin’.
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Elizabeth’s government may have chopped off one head of the hydra of conspiracy, but in the months and years to come, there were many others to combat.

Walsingham was named a Privy Councillor and one of Elizabeth’s two Principal Secretaries of State on 20 December 1573. The following day, he swore to be a ‘true and faithful councillor to the queen’s majesty’ as one of the notionally seventeen-strong Privy Council. In many ways, all this merely formalised his duties, as he had already been acting as a trusted unofficial adviser to the queen since before his return from France the previous April. Leicester told him just before his departure for London:

You know what opinion is here of you and to what place all men would have you unto, even for her majesty’s sake. Besides that, the place you already hold is a councillor’s place and more than [that]… for oft-times, councillors are not made [privy to] such matters as you are acquainted withal.
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Between his arrival back in England and his appointment as Secretary of State, Walsingham had probably been convalescing from bouts of ill health suffered in France. He was still, however, receiving intelligence from abroad. In August, he forwarded on to Burghley a letter from an Italian agent about the activities of the Dutch Protestant leader, the Prince of Orange, and the attempt on his life.
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A brief insight into Walsingham’s domestic life during this period is provided by the plea from Richard Arnold of Churcham in Gloucestershire that ‘his extreme sickness’ had prevented him from sending ‘the brace of greyhounds’, which he now begged Walsingham to accept.

Aside from the joys of hunting hares with his dogs, it was time to return to the service of Elizabeth. The post of Secretary of State involved handling practically every paper concerned with international affairs, embarking on various foreign embassies and tackling the humdrum administration of the realm such as construction projects, cleansing the coasts of rampant piracy, royal patronage appointments and the regulation of trade.

In addition, Walsingham became Elizabeth’s secret policeman,
utilising a host of informers to root out treason, using torture to extract incriminating information and hunting down fugitive priests from house to house, county to county, after their missions to England began in 1574. His workload must have been an immense and heavy burden to carry for a man frequently afflicted by bad health.

A description of the duties of a Principal Secretary of State under Elizabeth survives, written in 1592 probably by Robert Beale, Walsingham’s brother-in-law and one-time secretary, for Sir Edward Wotton.
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The thirteen-page document contains some sound, sensible advice for any official dealing with the feisty queen, as well as providing a flavour of Walsingham’s working practices. For example, when there was some unpleasant matter to be discussed with Elizabeth ‘or other matters to be done of great importance, let not the burden be laid on you alone, but let the rest join with you’. Safety in numbers, then, was a good idea. When ‘her highness is angry, or not well disposed, trouble her not with any matter which you desire to have done, unless extreme necessity urges it’. When the queen was finally persuaded to sign some state papers, the Secretary should ‘entertain her with some relation in speech, whereat she may take some pleasure’. Unfortunately, there is no advice regarding her sense of humour or, just as pertinently, what precisely pleased her. (Walsingham did his best, always joining in the custom of giving New Year’s presents to the sovereign. One gift, in January 1578, of a quantity of French satin appears to have particularly delighted Elizabeth.)
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The guidance document also pointed out that too many clerks or servants could become a burden to administration. Most importantly, ‘Let your secret services be known [only] to a few. The Lord Treasurer [Burghley] had not above two or three [having this knowledge].’ Security, then as now, was everything:

The secretary must have a special cabinet whereof he is himself to keep the key for his signets, ciphers and secret intelligence, distinguishing the boxes or tills rather by letters than by the names of countries or places, keeping that only unto himself.

And as for spies:

Mr Secretary Walsingham with her majesty’s allowance and his own purse entertained [employed spies in more than] forty places. In the time of Mr la Mott and Mr Mauvesier
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he had some of his secretaries that betrayed the secrets of both the French and Scottish dealings. In Scotland he was well beloved of many of the nobility, ministers and others whom he relieved when they were banished into England. With money, he corrupted priests, Jesuits and traitors to betray the practices against this realm.

But, seeing how much his liberality was misliked
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I do not think that you can follow the like example.
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For Walsingham, stamping down on Catholic subversion and conspiracy was a very personal mission, verging on religious devotion. He was, at heart, a radical Protestant. Indeed, Elizabeth regarded him as a ‘rank Puritan’ and sometimes unjustly castigated him for caring more for his fellow believers than he did for England, but she may have been overly harsh in her assessment of his religious beliefs. Walsingham did provide Thomas Cartwright, then leader of the Puritans, with £100 as financial assistance to counter the Catholic version of the New Testament produced at Rheims, but this could be said to fall within his propaganda remit. Later, he funded a lectureship at Oxford for the Puritan John Reynolds. With his deep strategic vision of the European political scene, Walsingham saw a desperate need for Protestants to unite internationally against the potent threat posed by the Catholic powers and was prepared to deploy devious methods to protect England’s tender young religion against allcomers. It was probably in 1583 that King James VI of Scotland commented that he was ‘very Machiavel[lian]’ in his religious fervour.
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