Elizabeth's Spymaster (6 page)

After speedily producing this propaganda, Walsingham was asked to take on a new role – that of secret policeman, for a conspiracy against the crown had been discovered.

A curious and sinister figure now steps into the ring of intrigue – the Italian banker Roberto Ridolphi. He was born in November 1531 into a family connected with the nobility of Florence – the Ridolphi di Piazza. His parents were amongst the directors of prominent banking and commercial concerns in that city
⁶⁴
and he too entered the business. He came to London in 1561 and within five years had been tasked to channel the secret funds provided by Pope Pius V to the English Catholics to help overthrow Elizabeth and her government in a conspiracy that came to be called ‘the Enterprise of England’. The French and Spanish ambassadors were both involved in the plot, as were some of Elizabeth’s Catholic nobles (with whom Ridolphi had business dealings) and Mary’s special envoy in London, John Leslie, Bishop of Ross.
⁶⁵
Ridolphi’s visits to the home of the Spanish ambassador and to Norfolk’s London base, Howard House, had been closely monitored by Cecil’s agents. On 7 October, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, wrote to the Chief Minister and Walsingham informing them that orders had been issued to the Lord Mayor of London Alexander Auenon to immediately arrest Ridolphi. He was to be confined in Walsingham’s home at The Papey and there questioned by him in several sessions.
⁶⁶

It was Walsingham’s first experience of the interrogation of a suspect.
Under close questioning in fluent Italian over many days, Ridolphi admitted dealing with the Bishop of Ross and giving both him and Norfolk cash from overseas. Elizabeth was puzzled by some of the Florentine’s answers, which seemed ‘very different from the truth’. She asked for copies of Walsingham’s questions about issues on which Ridolphi was to be further examined. Four days later, there were more instructions on the interrogation, specifically on the banker’s dealings with Mary Queen of Scots.
⁶⁷
Walsingham also searched Ridolphi’s home for incriminating papers and submitted all the evidence to Cecil. Suddenly, on 11 November, Leicester and Cecil wrote to Walsingham ordering Ridolphi’s release from his custody and into house arrest at his own lodgings. Their letter said that the queen, now ‘disposed to act with clemency’, was pleased

to give Ridolphi his liberty on certain conditions. Say to him that he has misused his privileges, seeing he is but [allowed] to live here as a merchant and has interfered in affairs of state. These he has confessed in part. Her majesty, if she were disposed to be severe, might force him to confess more. Nevertheless, she will grant him liberty if that he shall be bound by writing by you to the sum of
£
1,000, with securities besides, not to deal directly or indirectly in any matters concerning her majesty or the state of this realm, except by her consent.
⁶⁸

The following January, his bond for good behaviour was returned. He was completely free.
⁶⁹
What on earth had happened? In modern espionage parlance, Walsingham had probably ‘turned’ Ridolphi – persuaded him to become a double agent in the pay of the crown. The herald and antiquary William Camden, who probably knew Walsingham well, said he was ‘a most subtle searcher of hidden secrets, who knew excellently well how to win men’s minds unto him and apply them to his own use’.
⁷⁰
Here, then, were these talents brought to play, and their full value was to be demonstrated later, in bringing down the house of Howard. Cecil may also have hoped that Ridolphi, now at liberty, might flush out other traitorous members of the conspiracy.

The government’s concerns about the security of queen and state
were amply justified. Ridolphi’s plot may have been nipped in the bud and the Pope’s agent in London removed from circulation at a crucial time; and the Duke of Norfolk may have been safely incarcerated in the Tower. But overarching all were continuing fears about a potential Catholic insurgency coupled with possible attempts to free Mary Queen of Scots.

Their worst-case predictions became true.

In November 1569, the Catholic magnates in the North – Thomas Percy, Seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, Sixth Earl of Westmorland – gathered together, armed their tenantry and marched on Durham. Then they headed south, planning to free Mary Queen of Scots from her confinement at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire.
⁷¹
Although poorly equipped and possessing little military training, the rebels managed to eject the royalist forces from Barnard’s Castle before suddenly withdrawing back in the direction of Durham, fearing the advance of troops hastily levied by the government, 265 miles (425 km) away in London. Elizabeth’s retribution was terrible: as well as the executions, the destruction wreaked by her forces on the homes and properties of the insurgents meant that the economy of the North of England would not fully recover for almost two centuries.

Norfolk was eventually released from the Tower after ten months, in early August 1570, but kept under close surveillance and house arrest at his London home under the charge of Sir Henry Neville.

Walsingham meanwhile had risen steadily in the estimation of both Cecil and the queen. In the same month as Norfolk’s release, he was instructed to go on a diplomatic mission to the French court, charged with winning justice and security for the Huguenot Protestants in France after the bloody civil wars in that country. However, Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, the French envoy in London, believed Walsingham’s task was more about discovering his master King Charles IX’s attitude towards Mary Queen of Scots and his policy on Scotland than merely reassuring the Huguenot party.

The presentation of diplomatic credentials is normally a staid, formal occasion, clothed in grandeur. When Walsingham and the English ambassador Sir Henry Norris arrived at the French court on 28 August, the
French king’s mother, Catherine de Médici, threw aside any subtle niceties and went straight for the jugular. She asked Walsingham outright if the harsh treatment accorded to Mary Queen of Scots in England was caused by Elizabeth’s Ministers’ hatred of her. The envoy was equally direct in his reply. His royal mistress, he said, would not be diverted from an honourable course by any Minister and, moreover, she could and would justify her actions to anyone in the world.

A forthright reply – but the English delegation apparently made another kind of impression on the French royal family. Francés de Alava, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, reported that the

English nobleman at his audience was clothed entirely in black. He entered haughtily and spoke with the king and queen in a blunt and uncourtly fashion. At his dismissal, both he and Norris were so ill-mannered that I hear that both of them did not escape censure as they passed out [of] the doors. They did not bestow upon [Henry] Duke of Anjou [one of the king’s brothers] so much as a salutation or even a glance, nor for that matter, upon any other of the great personages present.
⁷²

Walsingham’s version of the meeting was different – he reported the discussions as cordial. His diplomatic work in Paris, moreover, led to his appointment as Norris’s successor as English ambassador there. He did not want the job. Back temporarily in London, he wrote to a lady – probably his wife – of his hopes that Elizabeth would find

so small taste in this my present service that she will forbear to employ me any further by making choice of some other of more sufficiency. Thus madam, you see in what doubtful terms [I] stand whereby I cannot dispose of myself.

His Puritanism shines through his comment that he would rather stay in England ‘with a piece of bread and cheese’ than be based in France with all ‘their best [delicacies] and entertainments’. Haplessly, he realistically conceded that ‘seeing I am born a subject and not a prince, I am tied to the condition of obedience and commandment’.
⁷³

At the heart of his objections to taking up the job was probably the notorious personal cost of being a resident ambassador overseas, serving a queen known to loathe parting with any cash to repay expenses outlaid on her behalf. He was therefore unwilling to bankrupt himself to further her interests in France. Walsingham told Cecil that if Elizabeth decided to appoint

any of my mean calling and ability, she must also resolve to enable them some way whereby they may bear the [financial] burden. Sir Henry Norris, whose living is known to be great, has found the charge very heavy and therefore unfit for the shoulders of any other of my mean calling …
⁷⁴

Eventually, doubtless after much debate, the queen agreed on a daily allowance of £3 6s 8d (£657 in today’s monetary values). Parsimoniously, it was the same amount she had allowed her ambassador in Paris in the 1560s – but at least the sum was payable three months in advance. In addition, he was allowed his costs of travel and for transporting ten horses and his belongings to France, amounting to £84 9s 11d.
⁷⁵
On 23 December 1570, he received his instructions from Elizabeth for his embassy: to obey her commands and pass on her messages; to keep her informed about political events in France; and to promote and protect the interests of English merchants in that country.

The Spanish ambassador in London, de Spes, told Philip II of Spain: “The queen is shortly sending Walsingham as her new ambassador … as she thinks he is more likely to raise dissensions there than any other man.’
⁷⁶
Walsingham left England five days later, with his brother-in-law Robert Beale as his secretary.

His partial journal for this period of his life survives,
⁷⁷
but is sadly short on detail, merely recounting whom he met or dined with. On 14 February 1571, he had an audience with the French king to discuss complaints made by English cloth merchants about their treatment in trade matters, an issue constantly to be raised with the French authorities. A few weeks later, on 2 March, he records the removal of a copy of the papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth, issued thirteen months before, from
a Parisian gate,
⁷⁸
clearly pasted up by a mischievous Catholic. He also tackled the Spanish ambassador de Alava about reports that Irish rebels had been received at Philip II’s court in Madrid. De Alava refused to converse in any language but Spanish (which Walsingham did not speak) and afterwards Walshingham told Cecil that ‘he seems to be no better affected towards me than I am towards him … Never spake I with a prouder man or with one more disdainful in countenance or speech. I mean to have little else to do with him’.
⁷⁹
Just over a fortnight later, Walsingham travelled to Clermont to meet his wife Ursula, who had been in the Auvergne region. She arrived in Paris ‘about two of the clock in the afternoon’ of Sunday 19 March.
⁸⁰

The remainder of the diary entries reflect very much the daily round, the common task of an ambassador hard at work protecting his nation’s interests. He was already receiving secret intelligence – part and parcel of any diplomatic work: his journal records the arrival of ‘Jacomo, [who] came out of England with letters’ on 8 June 1571. This was almost certainly Jacomo Manucci, a Florentine, who was later to control a number of agents inside Walsingham’s spy network and was a trusted confidant, capable of handling very sensitive matters. Walsingham’s old Italian contact ‘Captain Tomaso’ Franchiotto also sent him letters on 26 June and visited him twice in Paris in November and December.

Walsingham’s major diplomatic mission in Paris was handling the protracted discussions over plans for Elizabeth, now aged thirty-seven, to wed Henry, Duke of Anjou, the French king’s younger brother, and seventeen years her junior. Elizabeth’s suitor, Walsingham told Leicester, was

three fingers taller than myself, in complexion somewhat sallow, his body of very good shape, his leg long and small but reasonably well proportioned. Touching the health of his person, I find the opinion [so] diverse, as I know not what to credit.
⁸¹

As a devout Protestant, he could not have approved of any marriage between Elizabeth and a Catholic, but he was careful to hide his personal
feelings in the snake pit of diplomatic life in Paris. He emphasised to Leicester that he had left his ‘private passions behind me and do here submit myself to the passions of my prince, to execute whatsoever she shall command me as precisely as I may’.
⁸²

His professed attitude seemed to satisfy the supporters of the marriage, even though he had been ‘adjudged to be a very passionate enemy’ of the project by some within Elizabeth’s government. England’s adversaries naturally sought to block the Anjou marriage plan, fearing the strength of the Anglo-French political alliance that it would bring. The Papal Nuncio in Paris told Anjou dismissively that Elizabeth was old, probably barren and, moreover, a heretic. The powerful Guise faction at the French court did all they could to derail the marriage plans. They mounted a whispering campaign against Elizabeth and her government to sour attitudes in the Valois court, and Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, even bribed one of Anjou’s favourites to persuade the duke to drop Elizabeth as a prospective bride and marry Mary Queen of Scots instead. As ever, the issue of religion was the stumbling block in the Anglo-French marriage negotiations. When the special English envoys Henry Killigrew
⁸³
and Sir Thomas Smith
⁸⁴
eventually met the French queen mother in her private chamber in early January 1572, she told them that her son had become so devout a Catholic that he began to be ‘lean and evil coloured’ from his constant vigils and fasts. Secret, closet worship in England would not satisfy the duke, said his mother, and nothing less than the celebration of very public high Masses would be required. Smith replied sarcastically: ‘Why, madam, then he may require also the four orders of friars, monks, canons, pilgrimages, pardons, oils, creams, relics and all such trumperies. That in no way can be agreed.’
⁸⁵
It was obvious that, to all intents and purposes, the marriage plans were dead and buried.