Elizabeth's Spymaster (9 page)

In 1582, Richard Hopkins, a former ambassador in Paris, wrote to Walsingham of the

fervency of zeal which your honour has against our ancient Catholic religion and the professors thereof. So should you be noted among the chiefest of our religion to be one of the most severe persecutors we have in our realm.
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An example of his determination that Protestantism should ultimately prevail and of the interrogatory techniques he may have employed is provided by an admittedly subjective source: Bernardino de Mendoza, the new Spanish ambassador in London. The envoy reported in June 1578 that he had been told some months earlier that Walsingham had questioned a Catholic prisoner and asked him if he believed that Elizabeth was excommunicated. The prisoner claimed he did not know, but the Secretary

put down that [the prisoner] held her to be excommunicated. He then asked him if, the queen being excommunicated … she ought to be obeyed as sovereign or not and the prisoner answered the same way as before. Walsingham put down that he said that being excommunicated, she could not be queen.

He then went to the queen with the so-called confession and told her that this was proof of what Catholics in general thought, for which she could see what was desirable to do with them.
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Later, on 30 January 1584, Walsingham wrote to Sir Christopher Hatton about the interrogation of a priest:

I doubt not that you will have care, both that he may be forthcoming [and] also that he may be kept from intelligence [any contact with the outside world].

They that have given [information] that he is a priest do take upon them to be most assured of it … Therefore I find it strange that his answers should be so pre-emptive. It may be when pressed with [swearing an] oath, he will yield another answer.

If he proves to be a priest (as is reported) then will he not greatly weigh his allegiance, having, as the rest of his associates have, a very irreverent opinion of her majesty’s authority.
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In 1592, the Jesuit Robert Persons published a pamphlet,
Response to the Unjust and Bloody Edict of Elizabeth against the Catholics,
in which he attacked Walsingham for maintaining the reputation of an honest man

if such can be called who was cruel and inhumane, who was not content with mocking and bullying and insulting the confessors of the faith of Jesus Christ, but even went so far as to beat them and kick them, so violently was he moved to the defence of his sect against the truth of our religion.
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Given his position within the government, it is inevitable that Catholics and their sympathisers alike have vilified Walsingham. One later writer castigated him for his

unmistakable marks of brutality and fanaticism. Blinded by religious passion, he honestly believed every Roman priest was deceitful and dangerous to the state and he presided in person at their examination.
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Walsingham probably would not have disagreed with that viewpoint.

Yet this was not one man fulfilling a personal vendetta or crusade. Indeed, he was probably opposed to the wholesale slaughter of captured missionary priests – although he called them the ‘poison of the estate’ – save for ‘a few, for example’s sake’. A paper written by him in December 1586 distinguishes between two types of seminary priest: some were learned and politic’, the others ‘simple, having more zeal than wit or learning’. The first group, he urged, should be held ‘under honest keepers and be restrained from access and intelligence, for that, being banished, might do a great deal of harm’. As for the second, they ‘may be banished as others before, upon penalty to be executed if they return, and for the more terror, such as were banished and are returned, to be presently executed’.
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Four years earlier, there was even a plan, probably conceived by Walsingham, to exile some of the English Catholics to North America, where the problems of mere survival in an alien hostile environment could well subsume the importance of treasonable conspiracies. Transporting undesirables to the colonies is an older idea than we perhaps imagined.

No, for all his Protestant fervency, all his diligence in hunting down Catholic fugitives, Walsingham was merely prosecuting government policy to the best of his ability. After his death in 1590, the state campaign
against Catholic recusancy and the Jesuit missionaries continued just as fiercely as it had under his supervision.

There is little doubt that Elizabeth’s life was frequently in real danger from Catholic fanatics, particularly after Pope Pius V denounced her as a heretic and absolved her subjects from any allegiance to her and her government by publication of the bull
Regnans in Excelsis
in 1570. Plot after plot followed, all aimed at violently removing her from the throne and restoring England to Catholicism. In October 1583, a number of prisoners in the Tower of London were interrogated about ‘certain speeches against the queen’s majesty supposed to have been spoken by John Somerfield’, alias John Holland, a gentleman from Edneston, Warwickshire, when he protested against the persecution of English Catholics. He said he ‘meant to shoot her through with his dagg [pistol] and hoped to see her head set on a pole [because] she was a serpent and a viper’.
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Somerfield was later found hanged ‘with his own garters’ in his cell in Newgate Prison the day before his execution, and one of Walsingham’s agents, operating undercover in Exeter Jail, claimed Somerfield was ‘hanged to avoid a greater evil’ by supporters of the Catholic cause.
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Somerfield was clearly mentally unstable – even the Spanish ambassador Mendoza described him as ‘the lunatic’. At Somerfield’s trial, to judge whether he was insane, ‘they brought into court a letter signed by five [privy] councillors, certifying that he was not – but there are proofs to the contrary’.
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The ambassador also reported that only days after Somerfield’s arrest, an English sailor went to court

with such boldness that he found his way to the place where the queen was with two other ladies. She … cried out angrily for him to be seized and carried to the chamber of the earl of Leicester, where he was asked whether I sent him to kill the queen and if he bore arms, though he had nothing but a blunt knife.

The sailor said his visit was aimed at irritating the people against Mendoza and to ‘make them cry out that it was by my intervention that the lunatic desired to kill the Queen’. Mendoza said the interloper had told the French ambassador that there were 300 Catholics who had sworn to
kill Elizabeth.
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The episode has all the hallmarks of a state-inspired propaganda exercise.

The threats of invasion and rebellion were also ever present. In July 1572, the adventurer Sir Thomas Stucley
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suggested to King Philip II of Spain his hare-brained plan to overthrow Elizabeth. He wrote that

My lord [Sir Leonard] Dacres offers for the hire of 6,000 soldiers, 1,000 being foreign arquebusiers, in six months to wrest the kingdom [of England] from the pretended [queen], or at least to wrest from her … Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and make of them a safe refuge and, as it were, a realm free and independent, whither all the Catholics of England may repair.
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Alternatively, he suggested, Philip’s forces could occupy the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton ‘because these places are in that part of England where there are many Catholics’. Recklessly optimistic, he offered to capture all three objectives ‘at a stroke, in a single night and in less than twelve hours and from thence to London is not a two days’ journey and one can march straight upon the city’.

Three months later, Stucley, then in Louvain in present-day Belgium, jotted down the broad headings of an oudine agreement on papal policy towards England for the new Pope Gregory XIII, again urging the invasion of England, when, he promised, a ‘vast number [of Catholics] will join the invader and very few will oppose him’. Furthermore ‘His Holiness should not desert the cause of the Queen of Scots, who after suffering much and sorely for so many years for the Catholic faith ought not now [to] be deprived of her realm’.
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It was the cause, the ‘Good Old Cause’, all over again.

The following year, 1573, the new Papal Nuncio in Madrid, Bishop Nicholas Ormanetto, was almost beside himself at the slowness of events to destroy the Protestant government in London.

Secretary Cecil, who may be called king of England in order to maintain his greatness and authority, seeks by all manner of ways
and means to extirpate the Catholic faith in that realm and to foster heresies in the neighbouring realms …

And then there is our queen [Mary Queen of Scots], who for all the persuasions of the pretended queen, and all the wiles of that secretary, has refused to follow the Huguenot sect; nay, rather woman though she be, and alone amid so many enemies, oppressed and defamed in the eyes of the world … remains constant and steadfast in the Catholic faith and deserted and disparaged though she be, in defiance of all the dictates of humanity by Christian princes …

What were the praise, how great were the merits of his Catholic majesty [Philip II] if by his aid, the holy faith were restored in the realms of England and Scotland! Especially since, as the Saviour say, a single soul is worth more than all the world, and so many would be gained thereby.
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Amid all this sound and fury, doubts must have existed in the Vatican about the practicality, never mind legality, of removing Elizabeth from the throne of England. The papal archives contain a curious memorandum, drawn up around 1573-4, that raised various unpleasant questions stemming from Pope Pius V’s bull excommunicating the English queen. It acknowledges, frankly, arguments that the bull was ‘no longer binding upon Catholics because it has failed of its purpose, since instead of helping the Catholic cause, it has damaged it’. The document added:

Catholics may, with a clear conscience, obey [Elizabeth] in civil matters.

They may even, with a mental reservation, acknowledge her as head of the Anglican church.

They may defend her against those who attack her unlawfully.

Then the author, perhaps remembering the opinions of his readership, makes a sudden swerve back to orthodoxy:

They may not, however, defend her against those who attack her
vi hullæ
[in pursuance of the bull] or
studio religionis
[in religious zeal]
and with reasonable hope of victory, but in such a case, are bound to co-operate against her.

The queen, though the bull had not been published [in England] might lawfully be dethroned as a perturber of the peace of the universal church.

In 1575–6, yet another scheme for the invasion of England was proposed by an odd assembly of English exiles in Rome, amongst them Stucley, Sir Richard Shelley – Prior of the Order of Jerusalem in England – and Sir Francis Englefield, and submitted to Pope Gregory XIII for his blessing and support. The Pope gave them special crucifixes for the enterprise, and after a request by Stucley granted ten separate indulgences to those who ‘regarded [the conspirators] with reverence or devotion’. These graces included:

For each time that prayer is made before any one of them for the prosperity of Holy Mother Church and the exaltation of the Holy Catholic Faith and the preservation and liberation of Mary Queen of Scotland, and the reduction of the realms of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the extirpation of the heretics, another fifty days, and on feast [days] 100 days’ indulgence.
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There was another theological weapon in the papal arsenal aimed at England: the missionary priests now being trained in the new English seminaries founded in Europe. Three were dispatched in 1574, and four years later there were more than fifty in the realm, mainly English-born, administering to a Catholic community feeling oppressed and threatened, as well as energetically converting new adherents to the faith.

The Privy Council in London seemed unaware of the growing danger to their Protestant policies until the capture and execution of a priest named Cuthbert Mayne in June 1577 in Cornwall. Mayne, ‘a reverend and learned bachelor of divinity’, had been trained in Douai and, disguised as a steward, had become chaplain to a member of the local gentry, Francis Tregian,
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in whose house he was arrested.
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He was eventually executed by hanging, drawing and quartering in Launceston marketplace on 30 November 1577. In being cut down from the
gallows, still alive, he fell against the upright beam and horrifically knocked one of his eyes out of its socket. His head was placed above the town’s castle gate and his body quarters were sent to Barnstaple, Bodmin, Wadebridge and Tregony, near Tregian’s house, as a deterrent to further Catholic recusancy.

Mayne’s arrest was closely followed by a dire official warning of the spread of Catholicism. On 21 June, the new Bishop of London John Aylmer wrote to Walsingham, thoroughly alarmed at the activities of the Catholic missions and their secret congregations:

I have had conference with the archbishop of Canterbury and we have received from diverse of our brethren, bishops of this realm, news that the papists marvellously increase both in numbers and in obstinate withdrawing of themselves from the church and the service of God.
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