The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (49 page)

45
Grants of arms: ibid., II, 506–12, 571. Fatter soil: ibid., I, 382. Grenville and Fernandes: Quinn,
England and the Discovery of America
, 258–9. White’s report: Quinn,
Roanoke Voyages
, II, 515–38. 

46
Oranges and plantains: ibid., II, 520–2. The case for Walsingham’s complicity in sabotage is made by Miller,
Lost Colony
, especially 166–71, 178–82, 187–9.

47
George Howe’s murder: Quinn,
Roanoke Voyages
, II, 530–1. White’s return: ibid., II, 532–5.

48
Stirrers abroad: Hakluyt,
Principall Navigations
, sig. *2v–*3r.

49
Ships prohibited from sailing:
APC
XV (1587–8), 254. White’s return to Roanoke: Quinn,
Roanoke Voyages
, II, 610–18. Manteo’s baptism: ibid., II, 531.

50
Lost colonists: Quinn,
Set Fair for Roanoke
, chapter 19. White to Hakluyt 4 Feb. 1593: Quinn,
Roanoke Voyages
, II, 716.

*
See
here

8 Eleventh Hour

The panel portrait of Francis Walsingham which hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery captures his features with unflinching precision. The face is long and rather narrow, coming to a point in a closely trimmed beard. Frown lines have etched themselves into his forehead. Walsingham was in his early fifties when he sat for the painting, and no effort has been made to conceal the encroaching signs of age. The eye sockets are sunken, the dark hair receding under his scholar’s cap. A few streaks of silver fleck through his moustache. The fur trim on his black gown hints at a man who had begun to feel the cold. The obligatory starched ruff and fancy cuffs seem oddly out of place on a man like Walsingham; a photographer’s gimmick, grudgingly put on and quickly discarded. The only other adornment is a cameo of Queen Elizabeth, a symbol of his power but also a reminder of its ultimate source. The globes and guns and coats of arms crammed into more conventional portraits of Elizabethan courtiers have been deliberately left out of the frame. Instead the viewer’s attention is drawn inexorably to Walsingham’s eyes, watchful and piercingly blue.

Although the panel isn’t signed, we can be pretty confident about the identity of the artist. John de Critz was first-generation English, the son of a Dutch Protestant family living in London since the reign of Edward VI. His parents had assimilated within the Church of England by the time that they arranged for John to be apprenticed to another Dutch exile, the painter Lucas de Heere in 1571. De Heere had carried out commissions for both Philip II and Catherine de’ Medici before the revolt in the
Netherlands forced him to take shelter in England in the 1560s. Young John must have watched him working on the group portrait of the Tudor royal family which the queen gave to Walsingham in celebration of the treaty of Blois. Maybe he took a hand in filling in some of the background detail, a common task for an artist’s apprentice.

It was probably through this connection that John de Critz came to Walsingham’s notice. An aspiring artist naturally wanted to see the court culture of Renaissance Europe for himself, and the principal secretary had the means to grant a passport under the privy seal. By April 1582 he was in Paris, ‘resting dutifully at your honour’s discretion in anything that I shall undertake’. His letters home refer to him buying art on Walsingham’s behalf: a study of St John, and a painting of the sea-god Neptune ravishing Coenis and transforming her into a man. A sexually charged story taken from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
seems a risky choice for de Critz to send to Walsingham; more suited to the Holy Roman Emperor’s ‘chamber of wonders’ at Prague, where visitors could see a similar work by the Flemish Mannerist Bartholomeus Spranger, than to the walls of Barn Elms. The likely solution seems even stranger, albeit more in keeping with what we know about Walsingham’s interests and friendships. Ovid’s entwined and androgynous couples were read by contemporaries in terms of alchemical philosophy: the union of the fixed male, represented by mercury, and the more volatile female, or sulphur. John Dee would certainly have picked up the reference when he came visiting from Mortlake. De Critz may also have been a source of the artefacts or ‘curiosities’ which Walsingham was known to collect, complementing the books in his library and the exotic flora in his garden.

Perhaps this is all that John de Critz was doing in France, touring ‘fair houses here about the country’ to marvel at their
workmanship and gather works of art for his patron. But the fact that his correspondence was filed in the state papers rather than in Walsingham’s lost personal archive implies that something else may have been going on. His occupation as a painter gave de Critz an unusual degree of freedom to travel between courts without arousing suspicion. His chosen destination of Paris was the focal point for the English Catholic community in exile. Its streets were awash with conspiracy stories which could be bought for money or the promise of a royal pardon. De Critz’s offer to send ‘some rare piece of work’ from the palace at Fontainebleau may have held some deeper meaning, confided to his courier to explain to Walsingham in person. A letter of October 1582 talks of moving on to Italy, but fees paid out by the treasury reveal that de Critz was in Paris on several further occasions between 1583 and 1588 on some sort of official business. Did he make contact with Richard Hakluyt, another English shadow at the French royal court? De Critz was certainly a political survivor, outlasting the Tudor dynasty to work on Queen Elizabeth’s tomb at Westminster and ending up as serjeant-painter to the Stuart kings.
¹

Walsingham probably commissioned his own portrait; Elizabeth preferred her courtiers to foot the bill for the cult of devotion surrounding her. The occasion may have been the signing of the 1585 treaty of Nonsuch committing England to the defence of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. It had been a long and wearying road to reach this point. Walsingham had been pressing for intervention in the Dutch revolt ever since he had joined the government in 1573. Taking the fight to the Habsburgs was not only the queen’s clear duty to God; it was the best guarantee of her own safety. The assassination of William of Orange in July 1584 had prompted Walsingham to draw up a list of leading questions to be debated by the privy council:

Whether Holland and Zealand, the Prince of Orange being now taken away, can with any possibility hold out unless they be protected by some potent prince.

Whether it be likely that the King of Spain, being possessed of these countries, will attempt somewhat against her majesty …

What way there may be devised to annoy the King of Spain.

By the time that Burghley tabled a similar set of proposals in October, Walsingham had acquired proof positive that Philip II intended to strike against Elizabeth. Papers found on the Scottish Jesuit William Crichton revealed that the invasion plans touted by Francis Throckmorton hadn’t died with him. They had merely been postponed pending a time when the Spanish king ‘shall be rid of his Low Countries troubles’. Crichton had previously been maddeningly out of reach, shuttling between Rome and Paris in an attempt to draw the pope, the Duke of Guise and Philip II behind a plan to invade England and free the Queen of Scots. A tip-off that he was sailing for Scotland had given Walsingham his chance, and his boat was intercepted by a Dutch naval patrol. Crichton tore up his plans and tried to throw them overboard, but enough fragments were blown back on deck to enable an outline of his story to be pieced together. He was taken for interrogation at Seething Lane, where Walsingham was able to fill in the rest.

Two further revelations reached the court within days of each other in the spring of 1585, both of them a consequence of the wars of religion in France. On 6 March the council learned that Henry III had rejected the sovereignty which the States-General had offered him in the wake of Orange’s death. The fate of the Protestant Netherlanders now lay in Elizabeth’s hands. Still more alarming was the news which Walsingham confided in a letter to the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford, on 22 March. A secret agreement had been reached at Joinville between the pope and the King of Spain, ‘whereof they have
chosen the Duke of Guise to be the executioner’. The treaty promised Spanish money and soldiers for the Catholic League, in return for military assistance in the Netherlands and the eradication of Protestant heresy in France. Although nothing specific had been said about England, the threat of invasion had suddenly come a lot closer.

This reading of events seemed to be confirmed when Philip II placed an embargo on foreign shipping in May, impounding the ninety-one English ships in harbour. London learned about the outrage from the 150-ton
Primrose
, which fought her way out with four Spanish officials still on board. According to a pamphlet published by Humphrey Mote, her crew were resolved ‘to die and be buried in the midst of the sea rather than suffer themselves to come into the tormentor’s hands’. The same mood of patriotic defiance is captured in a letter which Walsingham received in June from Sir George Carey, governor of the royal garrison in the Isle of Wight. Carey had heard about the aggressive stance of the Spanish king, and he wanted Walsingham’s opinion on what the queen meant to do about it. If open war was coming, then he was ideally placed to intercept the Spanish freighters which he suspected of carrying money to the army in Flanders concealed in boxes of oranges. If her majesty preferred her subjects to recover their own losses, then Carey asked for leave to join the band of adventurers ‘as either will lose part of what they have, or gain more from the King of Spain’. Philip II had thrown down a challenge to English honour, and that demanded ‘amends and satisfaction’ – whether by public war or private revenge.
²

The treaty of Nonsuch committed Elizabeth to supply five thousand foot-soldiers and a thousand cavalry to the Dutch revolt, in return for naval support from the States if an enemy fleet got as far as the Narrow Seas. The ‘cautionary towns’ of Brill and Flushing would be taken as collateral until the campaign
was won and her loans repaid. Elizabeth wasn’t interested in becoming queen of the Netherlands and Walsingham seems to have agreed with her, feeding a list of ‘reasons why her majesty should rather accept the title of protector than of a sovereign’ into the treaty negotiations. Elizabeth’s reluctance might appear odd in light of her obsession with recovering Calais, but in fact her decision was consistent with her broader understanding of monarchy. Calais was part of the hereditary estate of the English crown, while Burgundy was an ancient territory in its own right. To absorb the Low Countries into her dominions, even at the express request of the States-General, was dangerously similar to what the tyrannical Habsburgs were attempting to do. As Walsingham put it, the queen’s conscience had previously been ‘free from all note of ambition and avarice’. Besides, the drain on the treasury could be open-ended. Taking on the rule of the Netherlands would prompt a ‘perpetual quarrel’ between the crowns of England and Spain ‘which may be the root of long bloody wars’. A decisive campaign to shore up Protestantism and pre-empt a Spanish attack was one thing; a permanent war of religion quite another. Walsingham knew that in the long term, England’s resources couldn’t hope to match those of the most powerful monarchy in the known world.
³

For once, the queen and her principal secretary were in agreement on an issue of foreign policy. The problem was her commander on the ground, who took a very different line on the sovereignty question. If Elizabeth had dealt him a different hand, the Earl of Leicester might have been a king of England; now the position of governor-general of the Low Countries proved just too tempting to resist. When she heard that Leicester had accepted the offer from the States, Elizabeth was incandescent that she hadn’t been consulted. Worse, he had made a mockery of her claim to stand for the ancient liberties of the Netherlanders rather than her own best interests. Walsingham
had a hard fight to save Leicester from being forced to renounce his new title, weakening his own credit with the queen in the process. Elizabeth relented in the end, but the episode left her even less willing to authorise the payments to the army for which Leicester was appealing with increasing desperation. Relations with Walsingham reached a new low when the queen threw a slipper in his face, furious that she hadn’t been told about a hostile navy allegedly assembling at Lisbon. Smarting from the humiliation, Walsingham recalled happier times spent in the Protestant city of Basel: ‘The opinion of my partiality continueth, nourished by faction, which maketh me weary of the place I serve in and to wish myself amongst the true-hearted Swiss’. By the time that Leicester was recalled in November 1586, £115,000 had been spent in trying to stall the advance of the Duke of Parma – getting on for half the ordinary annual revenue of the crown. The battle of Zutphen had claimed the life of Sir Philip Sidney, leaving Walsingham’s daughter Frances a widow at nineteen.
⁴