Elizabeth's Spymaster (2 page)

That finely chiselled face with its prominent aquiline nose and receding hairline appears to us cold, cruel and calculating – suggesting
a man not to be trifled with. The heavily starched white ruff beneath his neatly trimmed beard is the single gesture from this brooding, fanatical Protestant towards the glamorous chic of the Elizabethan court’s opulent and extravagant costume. The background of the picture, which hangs now in London’s National Portrait Gallery, is dark and mysterious, providing few clues or hints about the man or his life. Many visitors idly pass by, eager to get to the familiar portraits of Tudor royalty half-remembered from their school lessons or, more likely, from a recent history programme on television.

In doing so, they miss the chance of confronting, face to face, the enigmatic image of one of the great, powerful engines of state who drove, shaped and, above all, safeguarded the late-sixteenth-century English fledgling Protestant nation.

Walsingham was far more than a mere pen-pushing bureaucrat, a ministerial apparatchik of Elizabeth’s autocratic government. True, he was heavily involved in forging and implementing England’s foreign policy during the two turbulent and bloody decades from 1570 onwards – acting as the equivalent, perhaps, of a modern Foreign Secretary or the US Secretary of State. But his other, more sinister responsibilities profoundly touched the lives of almost every one of his queen’s 3.5 million subjects. For Walsingham was also Elizabeth’s spy master, secret policeman and de facto propaganda chief.

During his single-minded mission both to protect Elizabeth’s sacred person from the continual threat of assassination and to defeat the many Catholic enemies of
Gloriana’s
government domestically and overseas, he constantly deployed all those devious and underhand techniques now known by the intelligence community’s disarming sobriquet of ‘trade-craft’. His dire, black methods would be familiar to any aficionado of today’s espionage thrillers: the perfidious paraphernalia of dead letter boxes, complex ciphers, secret writing, bribery, extortion, blackmail, forgery, double – sometimes triple – agents, and yes, even torture to brutally extract timely and incriminating information from his helpless prisoners.

Walsingham’s clandestine activities combined the roles fulfilled in
modern British society by the Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6), the Security Service (or MI5) and the Special Branch of the Police. He was concerned not only with gathering and analysing vital military and diplomatic intelligence, but also with entrapping and ruthlessly destroying those subversives plotting the downfall of Elizabeth’s government. At its peak, his extensive espionage network is said to have numbered fifty-three spies and eighteen agents in foreign courts, as well as a host of informers within the English realm itself, some of them turncoats, others from the detritus of Tudor society. One of his spies was probably the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who almost certainly worked for him in return for escaping state prosecution for the blasphemy contained in his drama
Tamburlaine,
first produced in 1587.
³
Walsingham also employed a range of technical experts, from his code-breakers, who swiftly deciphered the secret messages sent by Elizabeth’s enemies, to one Arthur Gregory, who was skilled in opening letters and then resealing them – without trace, as far as the addressee was concerned.

Walsingham’s methods brought many from the highest born to the most lowly to the executioner’s scaffold, including an anointed monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, in February 1587. His intelligence network and international financial machinations were major factors in the defeat of the Spanish Armada just over a year later in 1588. But his most chilling duty was masterminding the government’s intensive campaign, at home and abroad, against the Catholic missions sent to England – viewed by those in power as rebellious, seditious and traitorous – and those who harboured them.

A disturbing flavour of life as a fugitive priest in Elizabeth’s police state is provided in a letter to Alfonso Agazzari, Rector of the English College in Rome, from the Jesuit Robert Persons, then living undercover in England. The missionary wrote in August 1581 of the dreadful, numbing fear of that sudden Gestapo-like knock on the door from Walsingham’s questing pursuivants:

It is the custom of the Catholics themselves to take to the woods and thickets, to ditches and holes even, for concealment, when their houses are broken into [at] night.

Sometimes when we are sitting at table quite cheerfully, conversing familiarly about matters of faith or piety … it happens that someone rings at the front door a little more insistently than usual, so he can be put down as an official.

Immediately, like deer that have heard the voice of hunters and prick their ears and become alert, all stand to attention, stop eating and commend themselves to God in the briefest of prayers; no word or sound of any sort is heard until the servants report what is the matter …

It can be truly said of them that they carry their lives always in their hands.
⁴

Walsingham sat spider-like at the centre of his carefully constructed web of deceit and deception, gathering information about the Catholic seminaries and their recusant
⁵
supporters in England from battalions of spies and informers. One, the young Charles Sledd, was employed as a servant at that same English College in Rome in 1579-80. He provided many physical descriptions of those priests and Jesuits who had secretly departed for England, to facilitate their arrests. For example:

John Neale,
sometime rector of Exeter College in Oxford. Was made priest in Rome and sang his first Mass [on] 8 September 1579. About fifty years of age, tall and slender in body, a brownish grey beard, lean and slender faced [with] little eyes and fast of speech.

Thomas Hide,
priest, about thirty years of age. The hair of his head and beard milk white and to look at, a simple man and of a mean stature. A Berkshire man born.

Thomas Worthington,
priest, [ordained] at Rheims or Douai, about thirty-four years of age. Of a reasonable stature, the hair of his beard of a brown colour cut short and rather thick, the tip of his nose somewhat red. A simple man to look at, slender of body. A Lancashire man.
⁶

On arrival in England, if they eluded the government’s watchful customs ‘searchers’ based at the ports, the priests were ruthlessly hunted, always having to be ready to move at a moment’s notice from safe house to safe house, constantly trying to keep one step ahead of Walsingham’s hunters. The prisons in London and elsewhere were soon full. The terrifying fate for many was execution for treason: hanging by the neck until half-dead, their genitals cut off and organs ripped out, these then burnt before the victim’s eyes and then the final beheading and quartering of the corpse. The mangled body parts were then displayed in public places as a warning and deterrent to any who dared conspire against the English crown. Such gruesome deaths became regular grim spectacles on scaffolds throughout the land. The tragic list of Catholic martyrs, dying horribly for their faith, grew inexorably year on year.

The root causes of Elizabeth’s draconian penal policy were not only religious, but also dynastic. The virulent persecution of the Catholics in England by Elizabeth’s government was a direct legacy of her father Henry VIII’s turbulent reign. He had assumed the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England after his break with Rome over the messy divorce from his Spanish first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Henry’s last Act of Succession in 1544
⁷
and his controversial will
⁸
firmly laid down the Tudor line of succession: firstly to Edward, his son and heir by Jane Seymour; secondly to Mary, his daughter by Catherine of Aragon; and thirdly to Elizabeth, his daughter by Anne Boleyn. If none of this was applicable or went unfulfilled, the succession would be settled on the heirs of Lady Frances (eldest daughter of the king’s late younger sister, Mary) or her sister, Lady Eleanor.

Henry VIII died, to all intents and purposes, a good, devout Catholic, although still defiantly denying the Pope’s supremacy over religion in England. Edward VI, who came to the throne as a precocious nine-year-old in January 1547, presided wanly over a militant Protestant government that callously cleansed England’s churches and cathedrals of their pious riches in a quest for cash to fill his painfully bare exchequer, as well as dramatically sweeping away the last familiar and much-loved rites of the Catholic liturgy. Edward’s successor, his half-sister Mary,
swiftly returned the realm to the religious jurisdiction of Rome after 1553, amid a ferocious repression of the new beliefs: 280 Protestant heretics died piteously at the stake during her five-year reign.

Thus, when Henry’s last daughter, the Protestant Elizabeth, finally ascended the throne in 1558, the vast majority of her subjects still remained Catholic. The veteran Privy Councillor Sir Ralph Sadler wrote tellingly in 1569 that in his area, there was

not in all this country ten gentlemen that do favour and allow of her majesty’s proceedings in the cause of religion and the common people are ignorant, full of superstition and altogether blinded with the old popish doctrine.
⁹

He warned that adherence to the Protestant creed was only skin deep, and added graphically, ‘The ancient faith still lay like lees
¹⁰
at the bottoms of men’s hearts and if the vessel was ever so little stirred, [it] comes to the top.’

Moreover, for Elizabeth’s government and England’s Protestant minority, the continuing, dreadful sufferings of the Netherlands were never far from the forefront of their minds. In 1559, Philip of Spain had re-enacted a draconian edict against Protestant thought, word and deed within his possessions in the Low Countries. Those found guilty of such heresy must always die: the men by the sword and the women by being buried alive. Unrepentant heretics were burnt at the stake and those who failed to inform on their neighbours were adjudged heretics themselves and faced the same fate of torture and execution. Philip took great pride in the horrific activities of the Inquisition against his Dutch Protestant subjects: ‘Why introduce the Spanish inquisition,’ he wrote in 1562, ‘[when] the inquisition of the Netherlands is much more pitiless than that of Spain?’
¹¹

When the Low Countries rose in revolt against this violent religious repression, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, was dispatched with a hand-picked army of veterans to put it down ruthlessly with fire and sword. Alva set about his task with a burning conviction that he was engaged in a personal crusade against infidel forces and planned to plant
his banner of the Holy Cross on the blackened and bloody battlements of three hundred Protestant towns. In September 1567, Alva set up his Council of Troubles to administer harsh justice on the insurgents. It soon became known as the ‘Blood Council’ for the thousands upon thousands who died at its merciless hands.

Across the southern North Sea in London, the lessons were written starkly in Protestant blood in the decades that followed for Walsingham and his fellow Ministers. They believed that a new Catholic regime in England would wreak genocidal vengeance in the same terrible way, almost certainly supported by Spanish pikes and artillery called in to help suppress the inevitable civil war. Would such trappings of terror as the grim, gaudy spectacle of the Inquisition’s auto-da-fe – the march to the scaffold – become a regular occurrence in the streets and squares of England’s towns and cities?

The worst fears of Elizabeth’s government were quickly realised.

In November 1569, the always restive and conservative North of England was electrified by open rebellion breaking out with the twin aims of overthrowing Elizabeth’s rule and re-establishing the Catholic religion. On 14 November, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, escorted by 300 armed horsemen, broke into Durham Cathedral, destroyed the English Bibles and prayer books within and banned further Protestant services there. They then marched south, and as with any marauding army, looting and destruction went unchecked. Sir George Bowes, later Provost Marshal of Elizabeth’s avenging army, complained bitterly that the rebels had

… spoiled and taken all my goods and cattle … with all my household stuff and all manner of provision for maintenance of a house and have threshed and carried away all my corn from all places to the value of £3,000.
¹²

They have utterly defaced my principal house, pulling down and carrying away the glass and iron of the windows and … doors and some of the [roof] covering, being lead.

They have carried away from my house all my evidence,
charters, leases and writings that concerned all my lands, to the extreme prejudice of me and my heirs for ever.
¹³

Unfortunately for the rebel leaders, however, their 7,500-strong insurrection, drawn from their tenantry who were mostly poor and unschooled in war, became a military farce. Even the strongest faith may falter for want of money and grievous shortages of food, as well as constant exhaustion and cold. The Northern Rebellion swiftly turned into a hopeless cause in the teeth of the growing numbers of well-armed royal troops being mobilised to destroy it. After inconclusive military manoeuvrings, the rebel army hesitated, retreated and then quietly melted away as government forces marched to defeat them. Tudor mercilessness now flowing strongly through her veins, Elizabeth wrote crisply to her field commanders in January 1570: