Walsingham E-Book

Alan Haynes

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 579

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster had established the most extensive spy network the world had ever seen, placing secret agents throughout Europe, especially in the Catholic courts of Spain, Italy, and France, to ferret out Catholic plots against Elizabeth. He took an active part in the persecution of Catholics and, with the backing of William Cecil, entered Parliament in 1563. Joining the Privy Council in 1573, he was knighted in 1577. The ousted Catholics championed Mary Queen Scots. Fearful of an uprising, Elizabeth offered Mary sanctuary against the Scottish reformers and then betrayed and imprisoned her. She then plotted with Walsingham to compromise Mary. Through his talented spies Walsingham built a case against Mary through her letters - which are suspected now to have been forged by Walsingham himself - and which eventually brought about a death warrant for Mary from Elizabeth. He later discovered information about the attack of the Spanish Armada - which was sent by an outraged King Philip of Spain who accused Elizabeth of regicide. Yet in later years, Elizabeth all but ignored her spymaster. Walsingham, distrusted for being too powerful and having information that might ruin her reputation and regime. This is his story.

Leseprobe

Walsingham

Walsingham

ElizabethanSpymaster &Statesman

ALANHAYNES

First published in 2004

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Alan Haynes, 2004, 2007, 2013

The right of Alan Haynes to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9622 1

Original typesetting by The History Press

For N L KMy eyes on the Internet

‘A court is a conspiracy.’

M. Bradbury, To the Hermitage, p. 139

‘His thoroughness was compulsive and regenerative, a pathological condition.’

Don DeLillo, The Names, p. 46

‘Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?’

Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor III, i

‘I know of no disease of the soul but ignorance.’

Ben Jonson

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1The Student Strategist

2Handle with Care

3Diplomatic Scars

4Imago Mundi

5Future Foes

6Fighting Talk

7The Men of Butter

8The Pains and Pleasures of Patronage

9Beating Boundaries

10‘Murders most Horrible’

11Reeling in Scotland

12The Ins and Outs of Confinement

13The Prayerful Puritan

14Tide and Time

15Ruining Roanoke

16All around the Houses

17The Pope’s White Sons

18Cradled in their Graves

19Off with her Head

20The Agent of the Canals

21Damnable Losses

22Defying the Don

23The Last Effort

24Last Orders

25Dignity, Duty, Deliverance

Appendix AThe Ice-Breakers

Appendix BThe Land of Ire

Notes

Selected Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For indispensable help with the preparation of this book I am beholden forever to my exceptional research assistant Nicolas Keen who provided a blizzard of new material. Over several years he saved me vast amounts of time, and much money.

Living in a Somerset village, far from research libraries, I deluged my local branch library with requests for difficult-to-obtain books. The ladies of the library were very helpful. They would have had an easier professional life if I had researched this book while abroad – as I had hoped – but that did not happen. Nor did I get to spend long periods enjoying the hospitality and polite interest of the owners of any Elizabethan houses. No one was generous with provision of the family archives. Just my luck!

Writing outside the academy can be lonely and somewhat daunting. I have been very fortunate in my chosen general reader, Emeritus Professor Park Honan, a distinguished biographer in his own writings.

I am also grateful to Dr Simon Adams (Strathclyde University), a specialist in the period, for reading, commenting and correcting. If, from time to time, he recoiled ‘as at a bad smell’ I hope he thinks still that it was a task worth doing. Dr M. Leimon must be thanked since he kindly allowed me to use material from his Cambridge PhD thesis.

Funding from the Oppenheim–John Downes Memorial Trust greatly relieved the cost of preparing a handwritten manuscript for publication.

Since a crushing conjunction of events in 1998 I have had wonderful support from the Royal Literary Fund and its administrators – help that has been critical to my well-being and so to the writing of this book.

Finally, the Hélène Heroys Foundation (Switzerland) helped immeasurably by funding the last stages of writing, before becoming defunct.

INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth-century fashion for two-or three-volume biographies was sliding exhausted towards a temporary oblivion, when early in the twentieth century a graduate student at Yale – Conyers Read – began studying the life and work of Sir Francis Walsingham (1530–90). After completing his doctorate Read went on to achieve a rare mastery of the political and diplomatic history of Elizabethan England. His appetite for the manuscript sources available then, and subsequent printed material, was almost unlimited, and at length he produced Mr Secretary Walsingham and the policy of Queen Elizabeth, published in 1925. These acclaimed three volumes, with copious references and often lengthy quotations from documents, are rightly still recommended for student reading, and gratefully pillaged by them for essays. But even Read ignored or scampered over elements of Walsingham’s career, and the possible fourth volume was not written.

After publication the behemoth biography broke down, collapsing under the weight of its research effort and the light, voluptuous kicking delivered by an entirely different kind of writer – the lean and not very learned Lytton Strachey. Few now bother to read him, while in marked contrast the academy has constantly and rightly cited Read on Walsingham. Even so, I suspect that the text has been as much dozed over in airless university libraries as pored over with gratitude. And Read had another effect; three volumes effectively smothered any later historian’s inclination to take on the same subject. Now, after eighty years, the first single-volume biography of the redoubtable statesman and spymaster is here available for students and the general reader, placing the life it sets out within the rich historical and social context. For Read, the diplomacy of the Elizabethan Secretary of State was more significant, and dignified by detail, than espionage, but recently historians have been less fastidious, and Walsingham’s activities and direction of the clandestine world have once again been scrutinised to greatly rewarding effect.

Those who served under him as intelligencers and spies were just as he was – men of the age. His subtle authority over the greedy, the feckless and the nervily patriotic stemmed from his candid purpose – to protect Elizabeth I and advance the Protestant cause when she fumbled the politics. Although desperate for employment spies could be scathing about their place of work; so Henry Wotton considered Florence ‘a paradise inhabited by devils’. Yet he seems to have relished the challenge of posing for years as a German Catholic, and was ‘able to penetrate areas of religious controversy undreamt of by other spies’. Walsingham put together and consolidated with gold a spy service that mesmerised European rulers, especially as like a great swordsman he developed a startling instinct for when to pause, when to catch brief breath, and when to lunge for the heart. No wonder his enemies feared him, and the unknowable number of his agents.

Was that a snort of derision from his Queen? She was never comfortable with the tireless intellectual, and creative dissonance centred their dealings. No doubt beside the man in black she felt gaudily frivolous, and his unremitting loyalty could seem like pressure or a challenge. However so – in their frequent meetings, argued exchanges and letters galore, the one could test the other almost to breaking point. Yet the possible even probable rupture never came, and though the haughty arch Tudor could rail against him, once deflated even she had to admit that his breadth and vigour of mind were irreplaceable; a proven fact when he died exhausted in 1590. For his part, as the years passed he grew in confidence, and he found ways to achieve an essential elasticity in government policy. Also pressed into service was the element of the apocalyptic in his imagination, as a result of his time as ambassador to France. Elizabeth must have been unaware of it when she appointed him, and although reluctant to go to such an expensive, corrupt place, he became the resident ambassador to the Valois court. So it was he who had the shocking misfortune to be in Paris during the Massacre of St Bartholomew in August 1572.

Thousands of French Protestants (Huguenots) were murdered in Paris and in towns across France by French Catholics. Among the mutilated dead were friends and acquaintances of Walsingham, whose own life was at risk. The depravity of what happened left the little cluster of Englishmen and foreign nationals in the locked and guarded embassy, aghast. The horror was psychologically overwhelming, yet when Walsingham emerged early in September for meetings with King Charles IX and the Queen-mother, Catherine de Medici, he seems not to have faltered – the diplomat in him prevailed. What had prepared him to show such strength under pressure? The answer must surely be his reading and his education abroad. Exiled from Marian England, Walsingham had furthered his intellectual expansion by time spent at the University of Padua. He had become a stoic – a crucial psychological prop for survival and sanity. Moreover, in the time of exile he became a cultivated homme du monde; humanistic learning in a multi-national centre made him less brittle. Not, by his own admission, less choleric – but then, as he also averred, choleric men make the best husbands.

Little chance to prove this to his first wife, except through his kind treatment of her son after her premature death. When he was vetted for a second marriage to a wealthy widow, somehow Walsingham’s constant bouts of ill-health escaped them, as he escaped later sickness through the loving attention of Dame Ursula, who bore him two daughters. Mary Walsingham, second born, died in childhood; Frances, their first born, survived and made eventually three remarkable marriages: first to Philip Sidney, then to the Earl of Essex, and finally to the Irishman who looked strikingly like Essex – the Earl of Clanrickarde. Since the first two marriages aroused the extreme exasperation of Elizabeth, it was fortunate for the young wife that her father could not be alienated by Elizabeth, who could lash out at those who thought to flout her objections to a marriage. Walsingham was the second most important man in the kingdom, a shade behind Lord Burghley, and surely the equal of Leicester, whose position was eroded by Tudor hatred of his countess, Lettice Knollys, the piling up of debts, and the mid-1580s debâcle in the Low Countries when he took an army to assist the Dutch rebels. All this happened as Walsingham’s career reached its peak with the destruction of the Babington Plot.

The reader will get a deliberate steer from me that is contextual and detailed because coherence in a biographical life often emerges by allowing the life to slide off-centre, placing the subject back in the crowd as well as picking him out from it. There are times when like Polonius in Hamlet Walsingham seems to disappear behind an arras. But while the sententious statesman in the play falls to the stabbing sword of Hamlet, Walsingham moves in and out of the court, driving himself to work harder, constantly reading and writing letters, and the pulse of the work strongly suggests a controlling hand and a brilliant authority. Hence my defence of the contextual strategy I have adopted; it seems to me the only secure way of following the complexities of the late career. Reflect too on his powerful, unnerving presence, dressed in black with the gleaming white starched neck ruff setting off the trim black beard. An interview with a man not above average height could still make the most confident sweat, forced to meet the serious, dark-eyed gaze; and consider being Babington when in their private meetings he sought to hide treachery.

In midlife Walsingham moved out of the retired anonymity of a country-living gentleman. First he became an MP, returned in 1562 for two places, Banbury and Lyme Regis, and choosing to sit for the Dorset constituency in the former seat of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. His brothers-in-law Robert Beale and Peter Wentworth later entered the House of Commons nominated by Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, and it seems very likely that Walsingham did the same. With dizzying speed (as it seems now) he became a diplomat and then a key minister of Elizabeth. It put him beside the throne of England to guide, correct and even defy one Queen, bring another to execution, and eventually help to defeat the might of an overbearing global empire. These career triumphs came late in life and were in every respect hard won. But the effort involved does not diminish, in my view, his strong challenge for the accolade, ‘man of the century’. And if the reader of this biography allows Walsingham to nudge aside contemporaries – Burghley, Drake or perhaps even Ralegh – what will happen to the myth of the personal greatness of Elizabeth I? I say let that rickety notion be dumped forever into the dustbin of history.

Chapter1

THE STUDENT STRATEGIST

In the decade after the death of the adipose and sinister King Henry VIII, his realm, especially the court and Westminster, was a tense, nerve-jangling place. His child successor, Edward VI, was surrounded by self-seeking senior noblemen tenaciously engaged in power struggles for wealth and advancement, and when the boy died the apparently nerveless John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had the temerity to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, a young woman married to one of his sons. This coup speedily collapsed under the weight of public disfavour. Mary Tudor, Catholic half-sister to the late King and herself half-Spanish, took her throne. Though generally welcomed to her royal inheritance as a relief after greedy, disruptive factionalism, she was the embodiment of the old faith so ruthlessly plundered by her father and his loyal cohorts. Mary purposed the full restoration of Catholic rites, and by February 1555 her thrust was a choking fact with the first public burnings, the terrible consequence of resisting the ultra-zealous Marian government and church. Her marriage to the Spanish Philip II was resisted by Sir Thomas Wyatt who during his rebellion appealed for patriotic support. He failed and was executed; other Protestants fled abroad from what they felt was an increasingly alien court. Philip arrived with courtiers galore and even his own confectioner, Balthazar Sanchez, who settled in Tottenham. Yet her husband and Cardinal Pole could not persuade Mary to proceed with more caution and moderation.

Tiptoeing away from the brutality was a princess. She was Elizabeth, stepsister of a queen wedded to government by faith, but who in a benign gesture allowed her out of the Tower. The arch-pragmatist Elizabeth said jittery prayers on knees perhaps still knocking at All Hallows, Barking, and then it was on to nearby Fenchurch Street for a celebration lunch of pork and peas at the King’s Head. Mary had little to celebrate, as it became clear that to consolidate Catholicism she had to provide hope of a Catholic succession, and when her reproductive system failed her the survival of Elizabeth ‘created an automatic and Protestant reversionary interest’. Even so, Elizabeth’s peaceful accession was not a foregone conclusion, but when it happened late in 1558 there was at large a feeling that Protestantism had retrieved the high ground and Catholicism was again in retreat, with ‘Sweet Sister Temperance’ as Edward VI had called her, in charge of the realm.

The lingering, sour reek of the burnings went away, and even the once papabile Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, involuntarily aided Elizabeth I by dying within hours of the now unlamented Mary, generously buried with full Catholic ceremony. The new queen was young, in her prime, not beautiful but certainly eye-catching; a woman who would frequently ignore or deliberately fumble conventional royal preoccupations such as the dynastic; who looked balefully on war and ideological passions, and who gave space to active men in her court and government to master political concerns, but not her in her privilege. Pole’s legacy to her was an ecclesiastical vacuum; alienate Rome by harshness and she might be excommunicated, leading to a possible civil war with a host of enemies. But her title to the throne being essentially Protestant, doing nothing was not an option for Queen Anne Boleyn’s daughter, and by the time of her mid-January 1559 Coronation, she had actually made religious changes that, as she was advised, almost brought her beyond what was possible without Parliament’s agreement, and this did not open until 25 January. The Elizabethan church settlement included statutory recognition that the Bible, the works of the early fathers and the decrees of the first four councils provided the basis for Anglican belief.

The revamped Privy Council was emphatically Protestant and dominated by university-trained laymen, not clerics. A Marian privy councillor like Sir William Cordell was shunted off, but retained the office of Master of the Rolls until his death in 1581. Elizabeth had a key trusted adviser and Principal Secretary – Sir William Cecil – the second most influential person in the realm during most of a long reign. During 1558–9 the political landscape was given its specificity by the return to government and high influence of the group of Cambridge University men who had been taught by, or felt the gale of influence of, the late humanist Protestant scholar of lowly birth and brilliant reputation, Sir John Cheke, one of whose sisters was briefly married to Cecil. Their mother, wife of a beadle who died and left her with little to raise a family, kept a wine shop in Cambridge where as a student Cecil took a glass. Cheke was a scholar in Greek and a Marian exile, first in Italy and then in Antwerp. Like his great predecessor, William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English, Cheke overestimated his personal safety from the agents of Catholicism. Tyndale had been arrested and burned; Cheke was a little more fortunate, being seized and shipped to the Tower of London. Fear drove him to recant – and then he seems to have resolved to die, an end probably aided by the unhealthy environment. His widow Lady Mary also had a vinous connection, being the daughter of the sergeant of the wine cellar to Henry VIII, and wealth from the wine trade laid too the foundations of the Walsingham family fortune which allowed Francis Walsingham to go to King’s College, Cambridge, for years Cheke’s domain.

Vineyards were part of England’s ancient history, but the red wine for the mass of converted Christian England was too rosé for Christ’s blood. Hence imports (French), and from the time that King Edward (the Confessor) gave the monopoly of its carriage to the ship masters of Rouen, it was brought to England by French vessels which sailed en masse during the more settled Channel weather of April to early October. Winchelsea has still surviving medieval wine vaults built for storage on a vast scale to match the huge number of hogsheads being imported. The wealth of vintners like generations of Walsinghams is well illustrated by a story of the famous Henry Picard, who as Master of the Guild of Vintners had five Kings dine at his table: Edward III, David of Scotland, John of France and the rulers of Denmark and Cyprus. In after-dinner cards Cyprus lost heavily and Picard, in a sweeping gesture, handed back to him the gold he had forfeited in play.

James Walsingham (d. 1540) had seven daughters and four sons; the eldest, Edmund, became Lieutenant of the Tower, was knighted, and when he died in 1549 Scadbury Manor in Kent, long in the family through a mid-fourteenth-century marriage, passed to his son, Sir Thomas Walsingham. One of the uncles of Sir Thomas, William Walsingham, had a career in law and probably resided at Footscray in Kent with his wife Joyce (née Denny), the daughter of Sir Edmund Denny of Cheshunt, Herts, a Baron of the Exchequer, an advantageous position wherein lay opportunities to increase the family fortune. In his will the pious Denny asked for twenty-eight trentals of masses to be said for his soul, and the souls of his father, mother and three wives. The brother of Joyce Denny was Sir Anthony Denny who married Joan Champernowne, the aunt of Walter Ralegh, whose mother was a Champernowne. Along with Sir William Herbert, Sir Anthony was chief gentleman of Henry VIII’s privy chamber, and then its head following the dismissal of Sir Thomas Heneage. Denny did less well in land grants than his colleague Herbert, and after Waltham the most valuable property in his portfolio was Sibton, Suffolk, once the property of the Duke of Norfolk. Denny helped to put in motion the sweeping religious changes of the later part of Henry’s reign which were to deprive his own father of his devout wishes.

When William Walsingham, a former under-sheriff of London, died soon after the birth of his son Francis in the early 1530s, Joyce Walsingham sought to protect her five daughters and her son by a prompt remarriage, and she selected Sir John Carey of Pleshey as her new spouse. He was an uncle of the Henry Carey who became Lord Hunsdon, and was widely assumed to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII from the adulterous relationship with Mary Boleyn. The younger sister of Anne, Mary had married Sir John Carey’s brother, William, a gentleman of the bedchamber. William Carey died in 1528, and Anne Boleyn had the wardship of young Henry granted to her by the King. This Carey–Boleyn connection was always a restraint later on Elizabeth I when she and her kinsman Francis Walsingham disagreed profoundly about foreign policy. Family mattered. Sir John moved his to Hunsdon (Herts) after his appointment as royal bailiff of the manor.

Unless sent away for a self-improving period in a great household, Francis probably lived with his mother in the Carey home, while Scadbury remained the home of his first cousin, Sir Thomas, who married Sir John Guldeford’s daughter, Dorothy. Of the early life and education of Francis we know nothing other than it would have given particular attention to Latin history and the liberal arts – grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music and astronomy; then, in his late teens, he went to King’s College, Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree after being a Fellow Commoner for some two years. Quite soon this could signal an inclination to Catholic recusancy, but Walsingham was always a sincere Protestant, and he made no hurried decision about his future. Like rather few before him but many since, he chose to travel from September 1550 (heading who knows where), before returning to London in 1552 to study law at Gray’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court where increasing numbers of commoners studied law, not necessarily to follow the example of his long-dead father. Still, it was a litigious age and any gentleman could reasonably expect that at several points in his life he would indeed be in court as a plaintiff or defendant. Certainly his prospects for advancement were not diminished by such studies, although many students found them acutely boring. It was Nicholas Bacon, also of Gray’s Inn – which then stood by itself, north of cottage-lined Holborn, in Gray’s Inn Lane – who urged Henry VIII to employ his common lawyers in diplomacy, replacing the hitherto indispensable churchmen. If the intellectually gifted Francis did find the law boring, at least the country-dweller in him should have been satisfied, and when he wanted to quit his books he had only to walk a few yards from the Inn buildings to be in the countryside.

Nor was he any great distance from the booksellers around St Paul’s. There were books appearing at this time – the mid-century – to fire his imagination, among them a History of Italy and Italian Grammar – the last dedicated to John Tamworth, who married Christian, Walsingham’s sister. Both were the work of William Thomas who years before had fled to Italy with a large sum of money stolen from his noble employer. Having made belated restitution and been forgiven, Thomas still remained in Italy, a place of civilised delight. Back in England, he was at length favoured by Edward VI and became Clerk of the Council of the Duke of Northumberland, which was also joined by John Cheke.*

Under Queen Mary both these salvationist Protestants lost favour, and after a period in the Tower Cheke went into exile in Italy; Thomas was executed. The scholar administrator travelled south in company with Sir Richard Morison, a civil lawyer trained in Padua, who had adapted Machiavelli’s writings for the use of Henry VIII in the 1530s and 1540s.1 Italians had become diplomatic mercenaries in service to Henry; travel by Englishmen to Italy seeking advancement acquired a cachet. Cheke and Morison lodged with Sir Thomas Wrothe and Thomas Hoby, translator of Castiglione’s The Courtier, after 2 November 1554, and when the following year Walsingham arrived in Padua, it may be he fell in with this little academy. Before enrolling at the university of Basle, Walsingham’s Denny kinsmen Anthony, Charles and Henry were in Padua in August 1554, and it was there that he met Pietro Bizari, advocate of the Reformation, who the following year met Francis Russell, earl of Bedford in Venice, later becoming tutor to the Russell children. By December 1555 Walsingham was the chosen consularius, the official representative of the students comprising the English ‘nation’ in the faculty of Civil Law at the ancient university of Padua. However, this was an oddly abbreviated honour, because some four to six months later he abruptly quit Padua with other Englishmen following the exposure of the Dudley plot in the spring of 1556; at the same time Cheke himself had become thoroughly disenchanted with foreigners and their manner of conducting themselves in daily exchanges.2 The constant irritations occasioned by exile did not readily evaporate; threats, shortages of money and an almost fatal illness cast a pall over Italy for Cheke, and in turn Walsingham may have drifted into the same frame of mind. Or, and perhaps more importantly, he was becoming seriously uneasy at the decay of Venetian-Papal relations, which threw up the problem of where to go for safe exile. Southern Italy and Spain were too dangerous, so a more obvious path of retreat would be to Strasbourg, where Thomas Sampson fetched up, or Switzerland, where in Basle, Zurich or Geneva many more exiles were secure. (Robert Beale went to Strasbourg, where he lived in the house of Sir Richard Morison (d.1557), before moving to Zurich. Morison’s widow would marry the 2nd Earl of Bedford.) Walsingham may even have been inspired by the peregrinatio academica – visits to the most famous Reformed seats of learning. He was reading deeply in theology, and the impulse to embrace it elsewhere may have been hard to resist. At length he reached Basle and seems to have spent time there with William Temple, a King’s College Fellow. Does this help to explain why the library of King’s would later give Walsingham one of its Bibles for presentation to Philip II of Spain?

Walsingham had quit England to defend his life and beliefs. Along with the other 800 or so who fled the Marian terror, he had never, in the words of John Knox, ‘bowed to idolatry’, so on his return he was untainted (in some eyes) by collaboration, unlike Sir William Cecil, against whom the accusation was boldly made as late as 1579 by a parish priest of Barton upon Dunsmore – Mr Prowde. The unspoken sub-text to this may have been the more dangerously held notion that Elizabeth had also ‘bowed to idolatry’ in the time of her half-sister, but then she might have done this anyway without any pressure – it was anyone’s guess. Walsingham had not prospered in exile, but he had gained a rare level of maturity for a young intellectual. He returned to his father’s Footscray estate; his stepfather had died in 1552 and his influence had gone. The Walsingham sisters were married (save for one at this time) and their mother Lady Joyce would herself die in 1560. Once re-established in Kent, the dark and eligible bachelor landowner needed a wife, preferably comely and rich. Within two years he had met and married just such a woman, Anne Carleill, formerly married to the late wine merchant Alexander Carleill (Carlyle?). The daughter of Sir George Barne (Snr), the former Lord Mayor of London and Alice Brooke, Anne had a son already, and money. The young couple settled at Parkebury Manor in Hertfordshire, leased by Francis, and shortly before her death he had disposed of Footscray. He was her executor and in her will she left him £100 (c. £50,000 today). Even though she died within two years of their marriage, Walsingham stayed put until in 1565 he remarried, having proved his honest intentions. This second marriage was to another widow, Ursula (née St Barbe), whose father was a Somerset landowner, and one of her uncles, William St Barbe, was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, where access to the queen was strictly controlled and most appointments conferred courtier status. Ursula St Barbe had made her first marriage to Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe (IoW), and when he died in 1565 Walsingham became a candidate second husband to a lady with property in Lincolnshire at Boston and Skirbeck. To prove his honest intentions the widower had to promise to settle lands to the yearly value of 100 marks on Ursula, for which he was bound for 2,000 marks. To Ursula’s brother-in-law he had to convey Parkebury, and in July 1566 was bound to 1,000 marks for this transaction (the cause of litigation). If he predeceased Ursula she was promised plate worth £500, and by a still later deed she would also get a manor valued at £100 per annum.

Neither Walsingham nor his second wife had strayed out of social demarcations. He got a housekeeper of good standing for him, little Christopher and his older sister Alice Carleill, who would later marry Christopher Hoddesdon of the Muscovy Company; a mother already of two sons John and George, who would both die soon, accidentally blown up by gunpowder held in the porter’s lodge at Appuldurcombe where the newly-weds lived, a boat and lengthy horse ride from London, Windsor, Nonsuch, Richmond or Greenwich. (With the death of the two boys, Ursula’s first brother-in-law took possession of Appledurcombe, and Walsingham and his shockingly reduced conjoined family had to console themselves with Carisbrook Priory and the manors of Godshill and Freshwater. The restored priory evidently served as their residence, and what remains today is incorporated into a farmhouse.) She got a dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender and good-looking bearded man in his mid-thirties, spiritual, intellectual, a man of substance and temperate habits, albeit, as he noted of himself, ‘choleric’ – when, as he also said, choleric men made the best husbands – and a protective, loving future father of two daughters, Frances and Mary, who died very young in 1577.

When Elizabeth became queen it was Sir William Cecil who became her chief adviser and minister. If like Walsingham he had been a Marian exile, or plotted more extreme resistance, she would not have picked him. He was married to the sister of his Cambridge tutor, Sir John Cheke, and on her death married Mildred, the eldest of the highly educated Cooke sisters, three of whom married men who had strong careers at Elizabeth’s court – Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Thomas Hoby and Sir Henry Killigrew, who was to become a strong follower of Lord Robert Dudley, the accomplished, preening royal favourite who got him an Exchequer office. Any government office remained outside possibility at the moment because Walsingham, like the Earl of Bedford,3 had been a Marian exile – this choice was like an invisible badge of former hostility to the Crown, worn by Bedford since his implication too in the Wyatt plot. His flight abroad had been first to Geneva, then Venice, where the fork-bearded nobleman listened to continental church reformers. Some people attached much hope to this, but apart from minor diplomatic assignments the young privy councillor did not get a specific office until 1564, when he became governor of faraway Berwick and Warden of the East Marches. He never ceased to work towards a Calvinistic solution of England’s problems, and echoing his views was the Earl of Huntingdon, whose own claim to the throne remained and effectively kept him out of high office. All his Plantagenet blood ancestry made Elizabeth wary of this loyal servant who on his father’s side was a descendant of Edward III. I believe it was the intimate links to Bedford – one of those who with Sir Henry Sidney had linked Lord Robert Dudley to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton – that got Walsingham, kinsman to Elizabeth, sidelined for so long. In the case of Throckmorton, a former Wyatt ally and Protestant firebrand, he had narrowly avoided a treason indictment through a technical loophole. When Mary had died he was soon panting for a post, but when the ambassadorship to France happened he urged aid for the Huguenots and got himself captured in the fighting that was supposed to lead to the re-annexation of Calais, so recently lost to France. To attain power Throckmorton needed an energetic supporter, otherwise his career – beyond being the ablest intelligencer of his day – would be inconsequential – no wonder he attached himself to Dudley’s cohort. That he did so in the mid-1560s indicates the strength of the favourite at court. A favourite who dared to look to Mary, Queen of Scots, nine years younger than Elizabeth, mother of the recently born Prince James, and a prime candidate for the English throne in the event of Elizabeth’s early demise. To Cecil the notion of an accommodation with Mary, a Catholic and a Guise, was impossible, and this turn of events may well have suggested to him the utility of having Walsingham within his affinity, this at a time when Henry Killigrew became Cecil’s brother-in-law, and the Earl of Leicester’s older brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, married Anne Russell, daughter of Bedford.

Was it marriage to Ursula Worsley that made Walsingham more ambitious? Was he actually keen to advance or did it just occur as a result of increased contacts with Cecil? Pietro Bizari in Venice by 1565 was writing to Cecil and Walsingham with information. Hostility to Cecil in council was led by the Duke of Norfolk with other nobles following, antagonistic to an upstart commoner; nominally Protestant when Cecil was strongly so, ‘they naturally leaned for support towards the Roman Catholics’. Cecil would need a quiet, staunchly Protestant aide, a man of intellect and integrity, and he found him in Walsingham who ‘was already at the very outset of his official career an earnest co-worker in the cause of militant Protestantism’. By August 1568 (if not before) the long pause in his career was over.

*Principal Secretary in 1553.

Chapter 2

HANDLEWITH CARE

The years 1568–9 were vastly important ones for Elizabeth and her government. The challenge came from the coiled support for the cause of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant to the throne of England, who had been ousted by her Scottish enemies for exile in May 1568. Instead of passing through England to her former home in France, Mary was placed under house arrest in the very country whose throne she coveted. Despite her lamentable (even murderous) record as a wife, the premier Duke of England, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, himself a Catholic-leaning Protestant, was soon ruminating on the possibility of marrying her, despite a warning from Elizabeth in October 1568 that the notion of nuptials must be dropped. Mary’s Scottish subjects charged her with many errors and crimes, so that after weighing the matter Elizabeth decided to establish a commission of enquiry, nominating Norfolk, the Earl of Sussex and Sir Ralph Sadler to meet in York with representatives of Mary and her half-brother, the Regent of Scotland, the Earl of Murray. Mary recoiled from such a procedure as beneath her regal dignity, especially since her complicity in the murder of Lord Darnley, her former husband, was bound to be raised. The Casket Letters, documents incriminating Mary, when shown to Norfolk at York, for a time made Mary seem utterly repugnant, but Murray denied the Casket letters open circulation without Elizabeth committing herself to give judgement against the accused. Not likely – so the York Conference petered out, and to end the stalemate Elizabeth decided to appoint a much larger London-based commission that would sit in Westminster where she could get at it.

When this conference also folded after the revelation of the Casket letters by a bumbling Murray, who caught wind of a rumour that his throat might be cut as he made his way north, he decided it was politic to make a grovelling apology to Norfolk before departing. They met in Hampton Court Park, with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton supervising the renewal of amity and Norfolk maintaining that he was resolved to marry Mary, and even hinting that his own daughter might one day wed the boy king James VI. Sworn to secrecy, Murray revealed all to Elizabeth before he left London and she agreed to support him as Regent; a £5,000 dole would help.

With the Casket letters available to sway domestic and European opinion, Elizabeth’s position had been strengthened. She had ample evidence to justify her treatment of Mary to Philip II, a self-preening expert, as he thought, on English affairs. But contacts between the King of Spain and his former sister-in-law were not helped when he loftily refused further audiences to the English ambassador to Spain, John Man. It may be this mattered less than his appointment of an opinionated bigot as his own ambassador in London, Don Guerau de Spes, who arrived in September 1568. De Spes was under orders by Philip to carry out the directions of the Spanish governor-general of the Netherlands, the Duke of Alba. Yet within a very few weeks in a foreign country, where he lacked for the moment informed contacts, de Spes was behaving with an arrogant freedom that marked him down as dangerous. He told Alba in December 1568 that Elizabeth had confiscated the five shiploads of silver sent from Spain to Alba’s bankers in the Netherlands, when the ships carrying this cargo of bullion had taken refuge in Dover before landing it in Portsmouth and Plymouth. Actually, she had not, and virtually single-handed de Spes managed to spark a trade war. Alba ordered the prompt seizure of all English goods in the territory he ruled for Philip. Trade as such was to cease, and this disaster forced Elizabeth to counter with her own responses in January 1569. Blame for the embargo fell on Secretary Cecil, whose dominant position in the court government seemed sinister to some, and his unpopularity among city merchants was matched by a loss of confidence in him by the Privy Council. Elizabeth’s reaction to Alba was to mimic his policy thrust and to have de Spes placed under house arrest, a restriction lasting until July 1569, while the captains and some of the ships’ crews were imprisoned.

So Philip had no diplomatic representatives to resolve the problem other than Alba, a grandee who had lived in England during Mary’s marriage to his prince, and had his own intelligence cluster in situ, and who even before receiving royal instructions was sending envoys to England. Although Elizabeth was unaware of it Alba was not her principal enemy; he saw no point of advantage in seeking her overthrow to be replaced by a French catspaw, and he opposed any policy that jeopardised Anglo-Dutch trading. Alba, by his resistance to royal inclination and his frankly expressed realism, started to repair the damage done and Chiappino Vitelli (Marquis of Certona) was sent to England to establish how the restoration could be effected. Vitelli found a positively friendly Privy Councillor in Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who spoke Italian and was chief among Cecil’s opponents at this time. Elizabeth’s handsome favourite was sure that Cecil had thwarted the wooing and winning of the Queen. Others taxed the minister for the severity of treatment of recusant Catholics since the arrival of Mary. Criticism of an anti-Spanish drift in English foreign policy came from still others who feared a dirty little rapprochement with France, the enemy of historical choice. Cecil was faced by enemies on all fronts save one – he had the confidence of the Queen. Finding that they could not heave him out of power, a number of malcontents rallied round the fainéant Norfolk to promote his marriage to Mary. The Duke and the Earl of Arundel took the complicated issues of matrimonial and foreign policy to the house where de Spes was currently in quarters under guard, using as their emissary the Florentine money-dealer Roberto Ridolfi, who delivered what was considered to be a ‘safe cipher’ for key correspondence.

Ridolfi had settled into business in London in 1562, and within five years he was handling the secret funds sent by Pope Pius V to English Catholics. In January 1569 the French ambassador to London, La Mothe Fénélon reported to Paris that Ridolfi was now offering himself as a bridge between rattled London and angry Brussels, and when he got to meet de Spes late in February of the same year he gave the assurance that the snatched treasure would be returned to Spain. In his isolation, de Spes had time to ruminate on a plan that went beyond anything Ridolfi had secretly communicated in March to La Mothe Fénélon – the papal commission to overthrow Protestantism, the restoration of Catholicism, with Elizabeth worked by the puppet masters Norfolk, Arundel and Lumley. By late May the brooding de Spes had even come to the view that Elizabeth had to be removed, and Philip II should either claim the throne or support Mary. Details, together with Ridolfi’s plan, were smuggled to Alba, who despite his deep unease did forward them to Philip for consideration. This was ‘the Enterprise of England’.

In the summer of 1569 the jitteriness that had once assailed Elizabeth as she looked to her future returned like an avalanche. Norfolk had quit the court – to do what? Raise the standard of rebellion, rescue Mary and advance on London? As yet Cecil knew nothing about possible aid to Mary’s cause from Philip II or Alba, but he too feared the worst. In fact when the rebellion came it was relatively localised, and led by the northern religious malcontents the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, proclaimed traitors by the Lord President of the Council in the North, the Earl of Sussex, on 28 November 1569. The military response of the government was sharp; the rebel earls fled to Scotland as a preliminary to European exile. Alba’s scepticism about the ‘Enterprise’ was enhanced and he sent rude letters to de Spes, and a detailed letter to Philip on the latter’s invasion plans which is saturated in sarcasm. Startled by the withering tone and content Philip stalled any policy he might have had in mind to allow Alba to make decisions. His error (as we will see) was to allow – even require – de Spes to maintain contact with Ridolfi. Not lacking in confidence he offered his services again to the Privy Council as an intermediary with Alba, but paid out c. £3,000 from de Spes to John Leslie, Bishop of Ross and spokesman for Mary in Elizabeth’s court. Ridolfi’s disinclination to remain obscure in the shadows led to his arrest with a clutch of Englishmen, Italians and Spaniards. Twenty-five charges were made against him and he was interrogated by the Italian-speaking aide to Cecil, Francis Walsingham, who was mastering the craft of counter-espionage. Being questioned in his own language just before the Northern Rebellion seems to have smothered any resolve he might have had to lie and resist. At some point Walsingham achieved the psychological mastery he required to ‘turn’ Ridolfi into a double agent.1 In November the new recruit to the government side was released on bail of £1,000 (rough equivalent today to £500,000) and by the beginning of 1570 Ridolfi had been discharged unconditionally because Walsingham and whoever assisted him could find nothing of substance against the immigrant while his freedom might well lead to an indiscretion.

The rebellion of the Northern earls had repercussions too for Mary and Norfolk, who both experienced close custody. Elizabeth had hoped to deal with him with a charge of high treason, but found to her chagrin that he had not infringed the Treasons Statute. In due course, as the estates of the defeated earls were settled on her men, Elizabeth allowed his release from the Tower to his own property at the Charterhouse in August 1570. Norfolk set about improvements to his house (for a time renamed Howard House), and even while he had the builders in, renewed his dealings with the ebullient Ridolfi, who was edging into plotting again. Presumably he felt immune to any mauvais interpretation by the surveillance of the great building, and seems to have thought Englishmen too untutored in revolution to make their own plans. He prepared the Bishop of Ross and de Spes for his notion of a general rising, given its ideological thrust by the Papal Bull Regnans in excelsis, which attacked in vivid language Elizabeth’s authority. Ridolfi grandly exaggerated figures for those Englishmen who were willing to resist Elizabeth through contacts with Norfolk’s secretary, William Barker, the elderly lawyer George Ferrers, and Edmund Plowden, a famously distinguished common lawyer whose Catholicism barred him from being a judge. When Mary’s bishop was questioned in October 1571 he disclosed that Ferrers had long favoured the Scottish claim to the throne, and it was perhaps miraculous that Ferrers and Plowden emerged unscathed from the implosion of the Ridolfi plot.

In Europe Ridolfi had the support of Philip II, whose willingness to marry his sister-in-law of years before had long abated. He was actually alarmed, and not a little displeased, with the papal bombshell, fearing reprisals by Elizabeth on the Catholic community – still a substantial element in the population. Instead he looked approvingly on the more devious schemes of Ridolfi, skilfully concealed hitherto, who slid out of England in late March 1571. It has been averred that Cecil (now Lord Burghley, to signal Elizabeth’s esteem) had no suspicions about the wily Florentine who remained on excellent terms with Walsingham (in whose house he had been confined). It is possible to be both wary and willing to employ a man with such a stack of contacts, and Burghley may actually have been more cautious about Ridolfi than his junior aide. After an audience with Elizabeth on 25 March the banker left for Europe, taking with him a commission to open talks aimed at ending the damaging trade war. Were Walsingham and Burghley aware of Ridolfi’s authorization from Norfolk and Mary to get plot assistance from Spain? Not immediately perhaps – though they may have had suspicions – but Ridolfi’s deciphered letters to Mary, the capture of the code used by Ridolfi, and the testimony of his English contacts and de Spes revealed everything. Such bungling may (or may not) have been deliberate; certainly in the autumn of 1571 when Philip sent him to see Alba, he was briskly cross-questioned. It emerged that de Spes was the overseer of business and according to Alba, Ridolfi was ‘a man of limited understanding’.2

The principal components of the plot were fourfold: Alba was to send between 6,000 and 10,000 men to Harwich or Portsmouth as an invasion force, but not before Norfolk and his sympathisers took Elizabeth captive or even murdered her while she was making her annual progress through the south of England. This piece of brigandry would be followed by a general rising in the country against the remnants of her government, presumed to be disorganised or paralysed, and then it was a free Mary who would marry Norfolk. She would be queen and he would take the crown matrimonial. Consider this now and the flaws betray themselves. Despite Philip’s passion that the enterprise should go forward too few troops were allocated, and given the totally unrealistic time of six weeks for preparation. Nor was Philip beyond making organizational changes that Alba would regard with incredulity; the King wanted men scheduled to reinforce the army of Flanders to take part in the invasion, and the force itself was to be commanded by a recalled Vitelli. Moreover, Ridolfi’s geographical knowledge of England was ignorantly casual – he did not even know the whereabouts of Harwich – and his reliance on the temperamentally limp Norfolk was also misplaced. The Duke and Mary had never met, and she was still married to the renegade Earl of Bothwell, then rotting in a Danish gaol. Even so, a papal annulment might remove that impediment, and if three marriages each could betoken anything it might mean both making an effort to achieve a harmonious relationship.

Harmony was not high on Alba’s list of ends desirable. As far as he was concerned the chronology of the Enterprise was wrong; Norfolk should lead the rising and prompt the invasion. Nor was he greatly impressed by the chatty Ridolfi who to him seemed a volatile mixture of subtlety and childish indiscretion. The man talked too much, but this was a personal habit that did not seem to bother Guerau de Spes excessively. On 25 March 1571 he wrote to the King’s Secretary of the Council of State, Gabriel de Zayas, reporting the departure of Ridolfi and requesting that the secretary should arrange an audience between the Italian and Philip. De Spes used his official cipher for the conspirator’s correspondence. If he wanted to contact Mary, then like Ridolfi and Norfolk he had to do it through her representative in Whitehall, the Bishop of Ross, who passed items to her in Sheffield Castle, where she was quite comfortably close-watched by the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury. Not closely enough, however, to prevent her written commission to Ridolfi passing to him via the Bishop.

Just before Ridolfi made passage, de Spes received a visit from the representative of the boldly unscrupulous sailor, pirate and larcenist, John Hawkins of Plymouth, son of one of Henry VIII’s most esteemed West Country sea captains. The agent for Hawkins was George Fitzwilliam, a distant relation of Lady Burghley, whose brother Hugh Fitzwilliam served as chargé d’affaires in the Paris embassy from mid-1566 to January 1567. Speaking for Hawkins, Fitzwilliam, a former Spanish captive held in prison in Mexico, gave a stirring diatribe on the anger Hawkins (supposedly) felt about the failure of Elizabeth to support him in his efforts to get released men captured, in September 1568 at San Juan de Ulua. The battle there ended a voyage of almost unredeemed disaster for Hawkins; 400 men had sailed with him and in all about seventy returned. In August 1570 he had told de Spes of his alienation, and early in 1571 he scattered further bait when he spoke openly of defecting to Philip II with all his ships if the King would release the captive twenty who had fetched up in a Seville gaol. It is now impossible to ferret out whether Walsingham was the artful source of these alluring gestures. Certainly Hawkins was a senior member of a cluster making periodic snatches against Spanish trade in the Channel, and they were hand-in-glove with the increasingly powerful French Protestants – the Huguenots. As Hawkins made his move on de Spes in August 1570, Walsingham had royal instructions on 15 August to go to France to act in conjunction with the resident ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, in the negotiations between the Huguenots and Charles IX of France. But La Mothe Fénélon informed the Queen before Walsingham went over that the treaty of St Germain had royal and Huguenot assent, so in appearance at least Walsingham’s mission had ebbed in importance to one of formal congratulations. But the French ambassador himself took the view that Walsingham was sent to discover the effect of the peace on the attitude of Charles towards Elizabeth, and especially how he would view Mary and the Scottish problem. As for the Huguenots – if Walsingham did have any dealings with them he was immensely guarded about them; by the end of September he was back in England to report, and by October he was dealing once again with Ridolfi.

Hawkins, as far as we know, never did meet Ridolfi, although it is just possible they had a chance meeting at the Spanish embassy in Winchester House, Southwark. In February 1571 Hawkins was in London as a Plymouth MP, shortly after Walsingham had gone reluctantly to France as Elizabeth’s new permanent ambassador, the private cost of the appointment making him clearly unhappy. Walsingham had seen how the embassy drained the pockets of even someone like Norris, ‘whose living is known to be great’ and who was allowed £280 a quarter for living expenses. Walsingham got £3 6s 8d a day ‘for his diet’, payable two weeks before his arrival at his point of embarkation. This was Dover, and on 1 January 1571 he landed at Boulogne after a little campaign in wining and dining La Mothe Fénélon in London, thereby hoping to make his own Paris reception more cordial. De Spes, ever dour, wrote to Philip II that the English ambassador was sent to France because Elizabeth calculated he would cause dissent there. This was perhaps a little unkind to the Queen and her diplomat, who only reached Paris on 16 January; certainly she wanted him in close contact with the Huguenots, and he had too a role as cupid, for Elizabeth was once again marriage-minded (or so pretended) and Henri, Duke of Anjou, was her sighted prey.

So, by the spring of 1571 Walsingham was in Paris; Ridolfi was in the Low Countries and George Fitzwilliam was in Spain where he met with his relative, the English-born wife of the Duke of Feria, Lady Jane Dormer, and piecemeal presented the Hawkins proposal of disengagement from Elizabeth and re-engagement to the Catholic cause there. With the interest of the Duke snared, Fitzwilliam was to return to England to secure credentials from Hawkins and Mary, Queen of Scots. Feria sent rings to them both and the Duchess and Philip also prepared gifts for her.3 When Fitzwilliam got back to England he went to de Spes to explain his travels and ask for a meeting with Mary, which was not within the ambassador’s remit. So Hawkins asked Burghley, who arranged it for early June, and out of that meeting Fitzwilliam got a missal dedicated by Mary to the Duchess, as well as letters to Feria and Philip asking for the release of Hawkins’s twenty English sailors. He and Burghley were shown these items, and the latter (who now knew what Ridolfi was orchestrating) was also told of the offer of service to Spain, with the rider that this might be used to uncover all the clandestine effort being made by England’s enemies. In his baiting of de Spes Hawkins concealed the fact that Burghley was now fully appraised of what was going on, and the ambassador and his royal master, although suspicious, found Hawkins and Fitzwilliam convincing enough that hope triumphed over intelligent reflection. If the Ridolfi plot and Hawkins’s transfer of allegiance and ships chimed together it would be a royal flush. The English would be severely deflated, a significant part of their marine power lost to Spain, and this in turn would cripple Dutch resistance to the colonial power by removing English support for the Sea Beggars in the Channel.

The resistance fighters of Prince William of Orange, at sea under their designated admiral, Adrien de Berghes, seigneur de Dolhain, formed a fleet. It got limited recognition in England – although Walsingham would surely have urged more, since their militant Calvinism so neatly matched his – and shelter by the Huguenots at La Rochelle. Dolhain was not a success in William’s eyes, unwilling or unable to control the violent excesses of his men and reluctant to share the spoils of war. Eventually Dolhain was imprisoned in England with the connivance of the Dutch prince. Perhaps it was the absence of Walsingham as their advocate that led to a much tougher attitude among Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors towards the Sea Beggars under an eccentric Liègois, William de la Marck, Lord of Lumey. By mid-1571 they were becoming exasperated with these wilful belligerents, who had found shelter in English ports such as Dover and attacked any vulnerable shipping. Louis of Nassau came to realise how dangerous to the Orangeist cause it would be if Elizabeth became too exasperated, as indeed some of her subjects were – most notably Sir John Hawkins. Very likely it was the strong presence in Dover of the Sea Beggars that set him off, because the port was about to become pivotal in his own dealings with Spain. Even more important was the return of Fitzwilliam to Spain to meet with Feria. Their agreement for the use of Hawkins’s ships (sixteen) for six weeks, at Spanish royal expense, was the key item signed up for on 10 August 1571. In return, those English prisoners still held in prison in Seville were to be freed, and when a few subordinate matters had been settled Feria expounded the Enterprise to Fitzwilliam, who was sent back to England carrying explanatory letters for Hawkins, Mary, Queen of Scots and de Spes. From Philip, Fitzwilliam received 500 gold ducats, a ring and, for Mary, a ruby.4

Back in April a servant of the Bishop of Ross, the active spokesman for Mary at Whitehall, one Charles Bailly, was arrested at Dover and a packet of letters taken from him. Given his position in Paris, then the hub of espionage, it seems realistic to suggest that Walsingham had been given his name and in turn had contacted Burghley. He was probably waiting for the packet, but the Warden of the Cinque Ports, Lord Cobham, was sympathetic to Norfolk, and he allowed the Bailly packet to be seen by Ross, who went by night to de Spes. The ambassador removed two letters from Ridolfi, substituted two others in cipher, and then enjoyed reports that the Lord Treasurer had a clerk working for weeks on breaking the cipher. Ridolfi’s attitude to Hawkins was recorded in a brief memorandum now lodged in the Simancas archives; he was blithely optimistic that there was nothing the mariner could (or would) do to endanger the plot. But as has recently been pointed out by Geoffrey Parker, adding another fleet to the ‘Enterprise of England’ made it bottom-heavy, and it was these foreign vessels that Philip II intended should transport the battalions of Alba across the Channel; and a trio of forces in Plymouth, Santander and Zealand had to be sandwiched together before the invasion could become a reality.5 Seepage of the grand plan was evident in Paris (of course) but also Florence and Rome. When the Florentine Vitelli heard that he was the intended commander of the invading force he was both gratified and aghast, since by the summer of 1571 he was utterly negative about the whole operation. So was Alba, who thought the King’s intention a muddle, de Spes inexperienced in public affairs, and Ridolfi a soft-handed banker without the required military experience. He reiterated in a letter to Philip that he had made no preparations, and Philip responded with an ardent declaration of intent. The safety of English Catholics was at stake.