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a diligent researcher out of hidden secrets, and one
who knew excellently well how to win men's affections
to him, and to make use of them for his own purposes.
ON 8 FEBRUARY 1587 a tall, powerfully built woman of early middle age calmly entered the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire. Imprisonment and severe illness - both of which had lasted for most of her adult life - had left her corpulent and slightly stooped, with no remaining trace of the elusive, animated beauty that portrait painters once vied to capture and that poets once hymned. (Pierre de Ronsard, France's leading sixteenth-century poet, had called her belle et plus que belle.) Yet her pride and dignity remained untarnished. Beholding her from behind a rail was a crowd of nobles, gentry and clergy, around three hundred in number. At first they were silent. Then the Dean of Peterborough, standing on a dais in the centre of the hall, led them in prayer, hoping to drown out any 'papist' utterances the woman made. In this hope they failed; with a firm clear voice, she recited penitential psalms in Latin, then asked God's blessing on Pope Sixtus V, on her only son, and on Elizabeth I.
As was the custom, the headsman asked her forgiveness. 'I forgive you with all my heart,' she answered,' for now I hope you shall make an end of all my troubles.' Her two ladies-in-waiting removed her black robe and her veil, disclosing thick auburn-gold locks and a blood-red velvet dress. Laying her chin upon the block, she called out three or four times the words In manus tuas, Domine! - 'Into Thy hands, Lord!' - and the executioner's assistant laid a hand upon her to keep her still. The executioner swung his axe, but merely gashed the back of her neck; her ladies thought they heard her whisper 'Sweet Jesus'. He struck again, this time bringing forth a great fountain of blood. According to several accounts, only at a third stroke did he decapitate his victim; and even then, 'her lippes stirred up and downe almost a quarter of an hour'.
The crowd remained mute with horror. No one dared speak till the headsman shouted: 'God save the Queen!' To which the Dean of Peterborough replied, 'Amen! Amen! So perish all the Queen's enemies.' As the executioner picked up the severed head and exhibited it to the spectators, the auburn-gold wig came away, to reveal closely cropped hair 'as grey as if she had been three-score and ten years old'.
When it was time to take away the corpse, there was found a small dog,
which was crept under her clothes which could not be gotten forth but with force and afterwards could not depart ... but came and laye betweene her head and shoulders a thing dilligently noted.
Thus died Mary, Queen of Scots; thus Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary of state and spymaster to Elizabeth I, achieved his greatest triumph. For months, he had feared he would be deprived of it. Elizabeth, though admitting that Mary's intrigues against the English government deserved death, reacted with loathing to the very idea of an anointed sovereign being judged by commoners. She would far rather have had Mary quietly assassinated, than given the aura of martyrdom in a law court.
Alas, her underlings refused to kill Mary without legal sanction. Mary's gaoler, Sir Amyas Paulet, responded to the very idea of secretly murdering Mary with righteous rage: 'God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience.' Thus a formal trial of Mary became inevitable; yet even after she had been convicted and condemned to death, it took three months to prevail on Elizabeth to ratify the sentence. In January 1587, the Queen's secretary, William Davison, placed the death warrant for Mary in the middle of a pile of otherwise ordinary documents requiring her signature, trusting (correctly as it happened) that she would sign the warrant without even realising the nature of what she was signing.
However concerned Davison and Walsingham were with having Mary done away with, others regarded the topic in a spirit of near-total indifference. One such largely passive spectator was Mary's son and successor in Scotland, James VI. With noticeable weariness, the Protestant James - then aged twenty - disclaimed all sentiment towards the Catholic mother whom he had not even seen since he was ten months old. On 15 December 1586 James wrote to Elizabeth's sometime favourite, the Earl of Leicester:
How fond and inconstant I were if I should prefer my mother to the tide [of Scottish monarch], let all men judge. My religion ever moved me to hate her course, although my honour constrains me to insist for her life.
Having thereby 'insisted' in tones of almost complete inaudibility, James let the matter rest. In a letter to James (written six days after the execution), Elizabeth tried to justify killing his mother, with breathtakingly sanctimonious language:
My Dear Brother: I would you know (though not felt) the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident, which, far contrary to my meaning, hath befallen ... I beseech you that - as God and many more know - how innocent I am in this case, so you will believe me, that if I had bid aught, I would have abided by it. I am not so base-minded, that the fear of any living creature, of prince, should make me afraid to do that [which] were just, or, when done, to deny the same. I am not of so base a lineage, nor carry so vile a mind ... if I had meant it, I would never lay it on others' shoulders; no more will I not damnify myself that thought it not.
For all her piled-on double negatives, she need not have worried: James expressed no further public disapproval. But even James might have started seriously defending his mother, had he perceived the sheer trickery and forging of evidence which Walsingham, to ensure Mary's execution, had carried out.
Francis Walsingham's emergence as a political giant proved steady and gradual rather than dramatic. In early youth he had little to distinguish him from many clever, middlingly successful lawyers, save the fact of being more honest and intellectually inclined than most. His father, also a lawyer, had done well enough from his profession to buy the manor of Foot's Cray, in Kent, where Francis himself was probably born. No one bothered to record with any exactitude his date of birth, but it definitely occurred in or around 1532. Thus, Walsingham belonged to the first generation of Englishmen too young to recall life in a wholly Catholic England, before Henry VIII's breach with the Pope. His father had accepted the new religious dispensation with every appearance of loyal enthusiasm, and with Francis himself Protestantism became the guiding force of his life.
Educated in law at Cambridge, Walsingham was called to the Bar in 1552; but the following year he fled to the Continent, after Mary Tudor had wrested the throne from the Protestant Jane Grey. This departure indicated much in itself about the moral character of the Walsingham whom all Europe's governments eventually came to know and to fear. Most young Englishmen who shared Walsingham's Protestant beliefs placed them discreetly in storage once Jane Grey had been deposed and the unflinching Catholic Mary had been installed. Not Walsingham: who, rather than violate his convictions by swearing allegiance to a Catholic sovereign, would willingly have perished. During his European sojourn he eagerly studied the history and differing legal systems of Continental states. (In after years he commanded a nephew of his to do likewise when on the Continent, to acquire a firm grasp of languages, and to let no day pass 'without translating somewhat'.) Above all, he waited: waited for Mary to expire, although as she was only in her late thirties when crowned, and still young enough to produce an entire dynasty of Catholics, he looked doomed to a lengthy, frustrating exile.
His banishment turned out to be shorter than he had dared hope: little more than five years. In November 1558 Mary died, her dreams of motherhood cruelly disappointed by a sequence of false pregnancies that were probably symptoms of ovarian cancer. Back in London within weeks of Elizabeth succeeding her sister as queen, Walsingham allied himself with William Cecil: a fellow Protestant of a much more obviously ambitious sort than Walsingham, who had become one of England's leading civil servants while still in his twenties. (Despite his firm opposition to Catholicism, Cecil had spent Mary's reign in England unmolested.) Thanks to Cecil's approval, Walsingham became a Member of Parliament in January 1559: first for the constituency of Banbury in Oxfordshire, then (1562-67) for that of Lyme Regis in Dorset.
While the connection between the experienced Cecil and the comparative novice Walsingham necessarily had much more of a master-servant relationship about it in the late 1550s and early 1560s than it possessed later, their subsequent political combination's essential elements emerged quickly. Each man had qualities the other lacked. Already Walsingham was the savant, the Puritan, preoccupied with theological questions, subordinating Realpolitik issues to his lifelong dream of a sweeping Protestant victory across Europe; and Cecil was the voice of caution. Both Cecil and Walsingham regretted Elizabeth's cultivation, in her reign's early years, of her own bet-hedging world view that combined Protestant scriptures with predominantly Catholic ritual. Yet Cecil understood this compromise, and showed tact towards the Queen about it, whereas for Walsingham it constituted a reprehensible display of theological cowardice. As Walsingham himself bluntly put it in later years: 'Christ and Belial can hardly agree.' To Elizabeth herself, when she characteristically vacillated on an important question of foreign policy, he complained in the most brusque terms:
For the love of God, madam, let not the cure of your diseased state hang any longer on deliberation. Diseased states are no more cured by consultation ... than unsound and diseased bodies by only conference with physicians, without receiving the remedies by them prescribed.
Such remarks as these understandably prompted a modern historian to call Walsingham 'the one wholehearted ideologue' of Elizabeth's régime. At one stage Elizabeth, goaded to wrath by Walsingham's incivility, threw a slipper at him. The differences between him and Cecil extended even to portraiture. Cecil's best known surviving likeness, now in London's National Portrait Gallery, reveals him in his gorgeous robes of state; it combines a self-satisfied look (noticeable above all in the small, deep-set eyes) with the limited but sincere geniality of a man who can make himself obeyed without needing to cajole or browbeat. The same gallery's depiction of Walsingham, by contrast, shows him clad all in black: his long melancholy face more like that of a priest as depicted by El Greco than like that of any politician. For all his activity in sponsoring poets like Spenser (who hailed him as an exceptionally generous patron), Walsingham seems to have been born harried and liverish: yet another respect in which he was the antipode to Cecil, who took so detached a view of his responsibilities that when doffing his cloak of an evening after work, he would say to the cloak 'Lie there, Lord Treasurer.'
The bureaucracy of which Walsingham had become a part would scarcely have been recognised by a Spaniard, Frenchman or Swede of the time as a bureaucracy at all: so few members did it contain, and so much did it depend on support from volunteers at the municipal level. True, it was somewhat larger than historians concluded until recently; it consisted of around 2,500 individuals, most of whom retained their jobs only at the monarch's pleasure. But compared to France only a generation later, governed by about 40,000 bureaucrats, this 2,500 remained an extraordinarily small total. That Elizabethan administration worked as efficiently as it did resulted from three factors: the contemporary example of strife-torn France, whose religious wars provided most Englishmen with a cautionary tale of what to avoid; the calibre of individual bureaucrats such as Walsingham and Cecil, who for all their faults had loftier principles than mere take-the-money-and-run greed; and the almost obsessive Elizabethan preoccupation - faithfully echoed by Shakespeare, who in turn perpetuated it - with the Wars of the Roses. Having ended less than fifty years before the Queen's birth, these conflicts remained an ever-present Elizabethan nightmare (out of all proportion, it must be said, to the impact they had actually left on day-to-day fifteenth-century English life); and they confirmed Elizabethans' widespread belief that even the most odious despotism was better than anarchy. Hence the 1553 failure of Jane Grey to survive on the throne for more than nine days: since even the average Protestant preferred to see orderly dynastic succession by a Catholic candidate, rather than usurpation by a Protestant one.
It followed from this happy combination of dutiful administrators and distorted folk memory that the first decade of Elizabeth's reign (1558-68) was in every respect her most peaceful. The Queen justified her initial reluctance to hound Catholics by boasting that she had no wish to 'make windows into men's hearts'; at this stage she might even have meant what she said, however absurd such remarks afterwards became, when she not only made windows into men's hearts but demanded that men's hearts be publicly removed with a butcher's knife from men's bodies. Moreover, there still existed a good chance that Elizabeth would marry.
Continues...
Excerpted from THE UNSLEEPING EYE by Robert J. Stove Copyright © 2003 by Robert J. Stove. Excerpted by permission.
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| Foreword | 1 | |
| Most dangerous and desperate treason: Elizabethan and Jacobean surveillance | 9 | |
| The birth of the Modern: French surveillance from Richelieu to Fouche | 67 | |
| The engineers of human souls: tsarism and communism | 113 | |
| Show me a no-man not six feet under: German National Socialism | 189 | |
| You don't fire God: J. Edgar Hoover's eye on America | 237 | |
| Afterword | 315 | |
| Acknowledgments | 321 | |
| Notes | 323 | |
| Bibliography | 343 | |
| Index | 355 |
Overview