Elizabethan England was defined by its Protestant faith. It stood resolutely – to many offensively – apart from most of the kingdoms and states of Europe. Between the years 1559 and 1603 the Queen’s subjects worshipped with an English book of common prayer and an English Bible. Elizabeth, whose royal arms could often be seen displayed in England’s churches, had the care of the souls as well as the bodies of her people. She was God’s lieutenant on earth, his deputy and vicegerent, his handmaiden, the giver of his justice. Anyone who professed to be a loyal subject obeyed Elizabeth’s proclamations and the laws made by her parliaments, but they also believed in their conscience that she possessed the spiritual authority that for Catholics could be exercised only by a pope. The laws of England allowed for no other interpretation of the powers of heaven and earth.
Elizabethan Protestants commonly called their faith the ‘true’ religion. Reinterpreting centuries of Christian history, English theologians believed that the English polity, which fused together the authority of a spiritual and a temporal ruler, was the best possible form of Christian monarchy. No other kingdom in Christendom, they believed, was so well established in law and justice. In the early months of the new reign Elizabeth’s government proceeded very carefully, keeping to the letter of Mary’s laws. England remained for the time being a Catholic country. But within six months of the queen’s accession, after difficult and fractious debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons, parliament in Westminster passed an Act of Supremacy and an Act of Uniformity.
The first of these laws stated that the queen was unequivocally ‘the only supreme governor of this realm … as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal’, setting out the words of an oath of supremacy to be sworn by any man holding office in Church and State. The Uniformity statute established in law the Elizabethan book of common prayer and protected it from any kind of public criticism or ridicule. Parliament recognized and defended Elizabeth’s historical right as an English monarch to govern her Church solely and without question, and anyone who dissented from this position publicly could be prosecuted. The parliamentary settlement of 1559 was a revolution in Church and State. Elizabeth’s supremacy was also a powerful international statement of the independence of Tudor England and Ireland. As her father had done in the 1530s, Elizabeth Tudor dismissed the Pope’s authority. To English Protestants, Elizabeth had once again freed their country from the shackles of papal tyranny. But in the eyes of Catholic Europe, struggling to know what to do about Elizabeth, England was a dangerous and infectious pariah of Christendom.
The new settlement of Protestant religion in England was profoundly shocking to a generation of Elizabethans. Nor was it for Elizabeth’s Church and government an easy settlement to enforce: a popularly Protestant England was never inevitable. For English Catholics the royal supremacy was at best a conscientious difficulty, but to many it was a monstrous heresy that turned the authority of the Pope and centuries of Church tradition upside down. After the years of division in the reigns of Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, Catholics found in Mary’s rule the reconciliation of painful schism, the English Church once again returned to the universal Catholic Church. Defined by the burnings of Protestants, Mary’s Catholic reformation offered to Europe a model for the suppression of pernicious Protestant heresy. But Mary’s Catholic reformation was torn to pieces by Elizabeth’s government. Catholic churchmen in parliament in 1559 fought the new religious settlement as best they could. They hated the new doctrine, preached from the pulpits by Protestant theologians recently returned home from foreign exile. The Abbot of Westminster called these hated exiles the ‘preachers and scaffold players of this new religion’. The Archbishop of York, who was soon enough replaced, was staggered by the bizarre notion that a woman could be head of Christ’s Church.
When the new laws came into force, in the early summer of 1559, English Catholics faced the choice either to reconcile themselves to Elizabeth’s Church in ways that were not yet clear to them or to go into exile. Most remained loyal subjects who balanced their consciences and civil obligations as well as they could. Some resisted. Many young students and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge chose exile, leaving England to study in the Catholic universities of continental Europe; Louvain was a popular choice and later Rheims. As one spy wrote in 1571, ‘divers fugitives are thought to lurk in Louvain as students and scholars there’. Some of these committed and clever young men began to fight the heresy of their homeland with their pens. Heavy works of Latin theology showed what they believed to be the nonsense of Protestant belief. Shorter works of polemic, combative pamphlets written in sharp vernacular English, attacked the government of Elizabeth’s ministers. Many of these works were smuggled into England in great numbers, annoying and harrying the English authorities and keeping government spies and informants very busy indeed.
Later émigrés, forced into foreign exile in the Low Countries of modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands by an uprising against Elizabeth in the north of England in 1569, threw their energies into the rescue of their country by war and invasion. Their numbers were somewhere between fifty and seventy; but given that these fugitives and outlaws were of the English nobility and gentry they carried immense weight in a society acutely conscious of the importance of rank and social hierarchy. By 1579 one spy’s catalogue of the English Catholic émigré community in France and Italy – priests, students, merchants and other travellers, some paid modest pensions by the Pope – put their number at just short of three hundred. How many Catholics there were in England the government could only guess at, but Elizabeth’s bishops and advisers knew that few of the justices of the peace charged with enforcing the statutes on religion were enthusiastic supporters of those laws. The government perceived many potential enemies of the queen both within and without the kingdom.
Most Catholics decided to live in England as peaceably as they could in good conscience; others decided publicly and politically to fight for their country’s recovery. But whatever an individual chose to do, one fact was plain. Elizabethan England was a confessional state in which religious beliefs and political loyalties were impossible to separate from each another in any straightforward way. The government held that a truly loyal subject worshipped as the law expected him or her to do in the Church of England. Anyone who resisted the English prayer book risked severe punishment. In the later years of Elizabeth’s reign Catholic ‘recusants’ – a word derived from the Latin recusans, a refuser – were fined huge amounts of money and regularly imprisoned for refusing to attend church services. Members of the grandest gentry and noble families in England were held under suspicion by the authorities and were sometimes under active surveillance. The power of the state was turned upon the private and now illegal activities of some of Elizabeth’s most important subjects. Some men and women were prosecuted for sheltering Catholic priests who came secretly into England from the 1570s. In these conditions, spies and informants thrived. Throwing everything into very sharp relief was the severity and extent of Tudor treason law. Like Henry VIII and his ministers, Elizabeth and her government believed that determined resisters of royal authority were most probably traitors. The suspicion and even the scope of treason deepened and broadened in the Elizabethan years as the battleground of religion and politics became for many a more dangerous and desperate place.
So what were the Catholic powers of Europe to do about Elizabeth? In quieter times, kingdoms like France and especially Spain may have wanted to leave her alone, balancing the realities of diplomacy and politics against the imperatives of religion. But that was never likely after 1558 because of a complicated interplay of three forces at work in Europe in the later sixteenth century. The first was the religious division caused by the Reformation and the regular outbreaks of violence between Protestants and Catholics. The second was Spanish military power and the global ambitions of King Philip of Spain. The third was Mary Queen of Scots and her claim to the Tudor crown. What is more, Elizabeth’s government quickly began to pursue a surprisingly active policy of military support for fellow Protestants abroad, and to do so in a way that seemed calculated to annoy the great powers of Catholic Europe. Though in fact against the queen’s instincts, her advisers pressed hard to support Protestant opponents of French regency government in Scotland in 1560. Two years later English troops crossed the English Channel to support Protestant Huguenots in the first of the unrelenting religious wars and disturbances that consumed France in the later sixteenth century. The first intervention was a great success, securing an Anglophile Protestant government for Scotland that could help to protect England’s vulnerable northern border. It was possible because the Queen of Scots was in France. But the death in 1560 of Mary’s husband, by then Francis II of France, meant that she returned to her homeland in 1561, so causing enormous complications for Elizabeth’s government: the Queen of Scots, a blood kinswoman of Elizabeth, was once again in Scotland, with an eye to the Tudor royal succession. Whether she was an active conspirator herself – and on this point historians have disagreed profoundly over the centuries – Mary Stuart was at the very least a focus of what for Elizabeth was plainly treason against the Tudor crown.
When the Count of Feria spoke to Elizabeth a few days before her accession as queen, he feared for the future of Catholic England and told King Philip so plainly. With Elizabeth Philip played a careful diplomatic hand. As the most powerful Catholic king in Europe, he found the heresy of Elizabeth and her government deeply offensive. As the ruler of a global power whose resources were stretched to their limits by years of war in western Europe against France and in the eastern Mediterranean against the Ottoman empire he could not, however, afford financially and militarily to fight England. As late as 1568, Philip hoped that Elizabeth might be brought to her senses. It was a hope against experience. Very early on cracks began to show in Anglo-Spanish relations. Elizabeth’s ambassador in Spain was an outspoken Protestant who made offensive remarks about the Catholic faith and called the Pope ‘a canting little monk’; not surprisingly, he found himself expelled from Philip’s court. In 1568 Elizabeth’s government detained Spanish treasure ships that had been forced by pirates into the safety of an English port. The bullion was taken ashore, causing the Spanish ambassador in England to protest that the queen had confiscated it. The treasure ships were helping to fund Philip’s tough military campaign led by the Duke of Alba in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands. This campaign alone, conducted against Dutch Protestants, caused Elizabeth’s government profound disquiet. Quite apart from the persecution of men and women of the same faith, what if Alba were directed to take his troops across the English Channel? Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s secretary, wrote in a policy paper in 1569 that England was ‘most offensive both to the King of Spain and the French King for sundry considerations and specially for succouring of the persecuted’: by this time, many Protestant refugees fleeing from war in France and the Low Countries were settling in towns and cities in southern England. Elizabeth’s kingdoms seemed to stand alone against its enemies. Considering the international politics of the moment, Cecil employed a surgical metaphor: the queen was a patient being operated upon by the King of Spain and the Pope, who used Mary Queen of Scots as their scalpel.
Over the years of the 1560s Philip of Spain’s patience wore thin. But for all of the problems that existed between England and Spain by 1570 – diplomatic spats, English support for those Spain called rebels and an increasingly frosty trade war between the two kingdoms – Philip held back from isolating Elizabeth completely. Pope Pius V was, however, less forgiving of Elizabeth Tudor’s errors and not as patient as Philip was in playing a long international political game. In February 1570, by publishing a bull called Regnans in excelsis (‘He that rules in the heavens above’, the opening words of the bull), Pius excommunicated Elizabeth from the Catholic Church and faith. She was, he said, merely the pretended Queen of England who had usurped ‘monster-like’ the spiritual authority of the Pope. With her kingdom in miserable ruin, Elizabeth was a heretic and a favourer of heretics, now cut off from the unity of the body of Christ. More significantly for Catholics, in an action that made their obedience to the queen very difficult to prove beyond doubt, Pius freed Elizabeth’s subjects from loyalty, duty, fidelity and obedience to the Tudor crown.
When Pius V’s bull was nailed to the gates of the Bishop of London’s palace near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, in one of the most public precincts of the city, Elizabeth’s government responded robustly. In 1571 parliament passed a Treasons Act and a law to prohibit and punish the bringing into England of bulls and other instruments from Rome. To deny Elizabeth’s right to the throne, to claim that anyone else should be king or queen, to call Elizabeth a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper: all, whether expressed on paper or spoken out loud, were, if proved by a court of law, offences of treason. So, too, was the reconciliation of any English subject to the Church of Rome by means of a papal bull or document. Loyalty to the English Church and the English state became impossible to disentangle one from the other. Both sides – the Pope in Regnans in excelsis, Elizabeth’s government in treason law – had marked out the lines of the long battle ahead.
To Elizabeth’s advisers Pius V’s bull was hardly unexpected: they were used to what they called the malice of Rome. But what made it especially sinister was the fact that Regnans in excelsis was published within weeks of the suppression of the Northern Rising, the first major rebellion of Elizabeth’s reign. Late in 1569 two English Catholic noblemen of the border country with Scotland, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Nevill, sixth Earl of Westmorland, raised their tenants against the government. Militarily it was an insubstantial rising that was soon put down by a royal army. But its significance lay in the rebels’ aims. After only a few years of disintegrating personal rule in Scotland, in 1568 Mary had sought sanctuary in England and found herself an unwanted guest put under restraint. One of the rebels’ objects was to free Mary Queen of Scots from this English captivity. The rebellion in the north was also a Catholic rising, marked by the symbolism of a mass celebrated in Durham Cathedral.
The earls of Northumberland and Westmorland failed. Both men forfeited their titles and lands. Westmorland and his wife, the sister of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, escaped to the Netherlands from Scotland. Northumberland, also an escapee to Scotland, was eventually handed over to the English government, which executed him in 1572. To Elizabeth’s advisers the message of the Northern Rising was as clear as the government’s judicial response was savage. Responding to a military assault against the queen’s rule, it determined that those rebels who had been captured should be hanged by martial law, their bodies left to rot on the gibbets as a warning to the men and women of the north. Church bells that had rung to raise rebellion would be pulled down. Those fifty or so rebels who were able to escape abroad with their families were fugitives and outlaws, marked for the rest of their lives.
To Elizabeth’s government there were obvious connections between the military ambitions of Philip of Spain, Pope Pius V’s excommunication of the queen, the objectives of Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters, the fact of open rebellion in England and the known plottings of English Catholic nobility. They were shown in exact detail by the discovery in 1571 of a conspiracy against Elizabeth in favour of the Queen of Scots funded by the Pope and encouraged by the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth’s court. The principal conspirator was Roberto di Ridolfi, a merchant of Florence who had lived in London for a number of years.
The story of the plot begins in 1569, the year Ridolfi, on the face of it a respectable businessman, was caught bringing money into England from the Pope. For a time, in December of that year, he was held under house arrest by the Elizabethan authorities. They discovered that Ridolfi’s bills of foreign exchange were for the Bishop of Ross, Mary’s ambassador at Elizabeth’s court, and for Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. This was clearly suspicious, but nothing certain was proved either way. Only in 1571 did all the elements of Ridolfi’s plot come properly to light. Because of the arrest at Dover of a courier working for the Bishop of Ross, Elizabeth’s government discovered that Ridolfi had been working as a contact between the Spanish government and English Catholic noblemen sympathetic to the cause of the Queen of Scots. Chief among them was the Duke of Norfolk, who had plotted to free and then marry Mary and to encourage a Spanish invasion of England. In unmasking Norfolk as a traitor to Elizabeth, the Ridolfi Plot struck a blow to the heart of the Elizabethan state. The duke’s beheading in 1572 was the price Elizabeth had to pay for resisting pressure from her Privy Council and a very angry parliament to execute the Queen of Scots herself.
One of the profoundest problems facing Elizabeth’s advisers was that of Mary’s asylum in England. For nearly nineteen years, between 1568 and her execution in 1587, she was Elizabeth’s guest both uninvited and unwanted. She was believed by the English government to be complicit in the murder of her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, in 1567. She was obviously hostile to Elizabeth and wanted her kinswoman’s crown; she plotted with foreign powers in Europe on behalf of her own royal claim to England. Elizabeth, nervous of killing a fellow monarch even by justice, refused to put Mary on trial for her life. Equally, it would have been madness for Elizabeth to send her back to Scotland: the consequences for England’s security, and for a friendly Protestant government in Scotland, were unthinkable. To return her to France was much too dangerous a prospect. At least in England she could be held at Elizabeth’s pleasure. So Mary was isolated, moved between houses and castles in the midland counties of Warwickshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire, her movements and household controlled as much as possible by the English government. But Elizabeth’s ministers could not cut her off from Europe completely, much as they tried – from Spain and King Philip’s ambassadors in London, from her Guise kinsmen in France or from Rome. It was known that secret letters passed between Mary, her secretaries and her friends at home and abroad. Eager English Catholic gentlemen volunteered to act as her couriers.
To English eyes it was clear as daylight (though of course concealed in shadow and secrecy) that the Queen of Scots was determined by hook or by crook to get for herself the Tudor crown. They believed that she sat at the centre of a web of European Catholic conspiracy. This toxic fear of Mary provoked in 1585 the Act for the Queen’s Surety, one of the most extraordinary and menacing laws ever passed by an English parliament. This statute set out how any action against Elizabeth ‘by or for’ a pretender to the English crown would be tried by a special commission of privy councillors and lords of parliament. Anyone found guilty of such a conspiracy against the queen – and also the pretender with whose knowledge or assent the conspiracy was planned – could on being found guilty by the commission be hunted down and ‘pursued to death’. The statute, in other words, sanctioned vengeance against Mary by private subjects authorized to do so by an act of parliament. True, her name did not appear in the act, but nevertheless the statute was clearly and obviously aimed squarely at the Queen of Scots. Indeed it was the very law that took her to the executioner’s block at Fotheringhay Castle two years later.
The Act for the Queen’s Surety spoke of ‘sundry wicked plots and means … devised and laid … to the great endangering of her highness’ most royal person’. This was the greatest anxiety of the Elizabethan political establishment. The preamble of the act spoke with painful eloquence to their fears, which were real. This is not to deny that Elizabeth’s advisers could be ruthless and cynical; often they were. But from the beginning they saw how precarious England’s position was, and they believed the dangers. To discover a plot like Ridolfi’s confirmed a suspicion or exposed a danger previously unforeseen. Evidence became tangled up with suspicions, suspicions in turn influenced the reading of future evidence: it was a familiar pattern of thinking for Elizabethan politicians. Treason was cumulative, a self-sustaining and self-nurturing fear, incident building upon incident over many years, a great pattern of conspiracy. And the queen’s advisers were absolutely right to believe the truth of plots and conspiracies and plans for invasion and assassination, for those conspiracies and plans certainly existed. What Elizabeth’s councillors tended to do, however, was to overestimate their enemies’ intelligence, cunning and organization. But the fear was there, and it was painted in the vivid colours of divine providence. Elizabethans believed they were engaged in a great war for truth against lies, light against darkness, Christ against Antichrist, Protestant against Catholic. The ravaged countries of sixteenth-century Europe bore the scars of that terrible struggle.
It was, however, too easy in this Reformation world of absolutes, of the high politics of monarchs and states, to lose the human scale of things. Some men and women in Elizabeth’s reign were born to play the martyr. Many others were not, like Charles Bailly, the young courier and servant of the Bishop of Ross whose capture led to the unravelling of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571. Bailly was interrogated and threatened with torture by Elizabeth’s government. After two years in the Tower of London he was released and banished from England, leaving a record of his imprisonment in the Beauchamp Tower. The inscriptions of others were all around him, for one of the few unofficial privileges of a state prisoner was to make a mark on the walls, to carve a name, a symbol, a statement of faith, of hope and expectation, even a declaration of innocence. Bailly carved his inscription in the recess of the northernmost window in his cell, from which he had a view of the executioner’s scaffold on Tower Hill:
Wise men ought circumspectly to see what they do; to examine before they speak; to prove before they take in hand; to beware whose company they use; and above all things, to [consider] whom they trust.
He added a line in Italian, ‘Gli sospiri ne sono testimoni veri dell’angoscia mia’: ‘My sighs are true witnesses to my sorrow.’ Poor Charles Bailly reminds us of the human cost of the long secret war fought by Elizabeth’s servants for peace, security and religion.
In late October 1572 Elizabethans earnestly prayed for their deliverance from the queen’s enemies and the work of the Devil. Elizabeth instructed parsons and curates to encourage as many people as they could exhort to come to church on Sundays, on holy days, on Wednesdays and on Fridays to say special prayers. From the pulpits ministers told the people to behave themselves reverently and to go down on their knees to pray to a merciful God for his protection from the plagues and punishments racking Christendom. In return for repentance they asked for defence against their enemies. And they did so seeking to make sense of the most shocking act of religious violence in sixteenth-century Europe. The people of England knew all too well what had happened in Paris and other towns and cities in France a few months earlier, on the feast of Saint Bartholomew and in the weeks following, when thousands of Protestant men and women were murdered by their Catholic neighbours. There was, in the view of Elizabeth’s advisers, no more atrocious practical demonstration of Catholic evil.
Even Elizabethans used to a life that was harsh and often violent were horrified by the massacre in Paris. It was provoked in late August 1572 by the assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, one of the leaders of France’s Protestant, or Huguenot, community. The French religious civil wars of the 1560s had come to an uneasy peace, but bitter resentments continued to fester, with short nasty bursts of violence breaking out on the streets of Paris. Coligny was first of all shot and only wounded; but taking advantage of the moment, the leading Catholic noblemen in Paris met their king, Charles IX, the son of Catherine de’ Medici, to plan with great care the killing of leading Protestants in the city. On Saturday, 23 August, they drew up a list of names of those who would be murdered. Just before dawn on the following day Admiral Coligny was killed in his bed. Henry, Duke of Guise, who led the killing party, was present when Coligny’s corpse was thrown from the window of his house into the street below. Duke Henry was a first cousin of Mary Queen of Scots, and the eldest of the three Guise brothers; they were members of one of the most powerful political dynasties in Europe; and they were uncompromisingly Catholic.
A Protestant commemoration of the massacre in Paris in August 1572, by François Dubois.
Coligny’s corpse was mutilated by a mob. Quickly the violence spread throughout Paris. At least two thousand men, women and children were killed, though the number may have been nearer to six thousand; nearly six hundred houses were pillaged. Hundreds of Protestants were marched to the Pont aux Meuniers, executed, and thrown into the River Seine. One heavily pregnant woman was stabbed in the stomach by a business rival of her husband’s. The murderer and his accomplices then ransacked their victims’ house. At three o’clock on Sunday, 24 August the aldermen of Paris went to the king at the Louvre Palace to tell him that the city was beyond their control. Charles IX, who had sanctioned the killing of Coligny and other Protestants supposedly to prevent another civil war between Catholics and Huguenots in France, appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. The violence was copied in other towns in France. But the horror of what had happened in the houses and on the streets of Paris between 22 and 24 August 1572 was felt far beyond the borders of Charles IX’s kingdom.
Queen Elizabeth’s advisers heard of the massacre in early September. Even men used to, as they saw it, the duplicity and cruelty of Catholic princes were revolted by the killings. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s lord treasurer, wrote: ‘I see the Devil is suffered by Almighty God for our sins to be strong in following the persecution of Christ’s members.’ Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, another councillor and courtier very close to the queen, called the massacre a ‘lamentable tragedy’. All true Christians, he said, looked for revenge at God’s hands. God had punished them with the ‘just scourge of correction, by the sufferance of his people thus to be martyred, but our sins do deserve this and more’. Only Protestants’ vigilance and repentance would deprive the Devil of final victory. This was a war imagined in cosmic terms, Antichrist and Devil on one side, Christ and God on the other. The queen’s ministers sought to understand the ways of providence. But they also looked to practicalities. As soon as the massacre was known at court the Privy Council met in emergency session, the coasts of England were prepared for an invasion and Elizabeth’s navy was ordered to put to sea.
The man upon whom Burghley and his fellow councillors relied for information from France was Elizabeth’s ambassador at the court of Charles IX. He was a gentleman of Kent and London, about forty years old, whose name was Francis Walsingham. Walsingham left no account of what he saw in Paris that August weekend; like many other eyewitnesses he may have found it too painful to recall the massacre. His house as ambassador was in the Faubourg-Saint-Germain, on the right bank of the Seine near the great Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. With Walsingham were his wife and young daughter as well as Philip Sidney, an eighteen-year-old English gentleman who would one day be Walsingham’s son-in-law as well as a distinguished poet. Walsingham surely recognized the danger of the first failed effort at assassinating Admiral Coligny. He may even have heard, coming from the direction of the Louvre, a signal for the killings: in the small hours of the morning of Sunday, 24 August, shortly before the murder of Coligny, the bells of the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois rang out.
Walsingham offered sanctuary for foreigners in peril of their lives. The mob knew this, for it even attacked Walsingham’s house. Elizabeth’s ambassador was unlikely to have been reassured by the guard King Charles sent to protect him. For weeks after the violence Walsingham always left his residence in the company of bodyguards, and he was taunted and insulted as he went through the streets of Paris. He sent reports to Elizabeth and her advisers within days of the massacre. He met King Charles and his mother Catherine de’ Medici on 1 September. Francis Walsingham, the ambassador of a supposedly heretic queen, negotiated the audience with extraordinary coolness and composure. Charles IX spoke of a plot by Coligny and other Huguenot leaders to kill the royal family. Walsingham, we can be sure, would have taken his own view.
Sir Francis Walsingham went on after his Paris embassy to have a distinguished political career and to build a powerful reputation for his gifts as an organizer of spies and informants. His face is probably one of the most familiar of the Elizabethan court. His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London has been attributed to John de Critz the Elder, the son of Dutch Protestant immigrants settled in London, and an artist who received the benefits of Walsingham’s patronage. The portrait shows Sir Francis in about 1585, more than a decade after the massacre in Paris. The ambassador of forty was by now the queen’s secretary in his early fifties. We see a half-length picture, Walsingham standing just a little to the left, though he looks directly at us with grey eyes. His brown hair is cropped short, his clipped beard streaked with grey, his moustache fashionably brushed up. He wears a black skullcap and a large white ruff around his neck. Over a black doublet, slashed to show its lining, he wears a black surcoat trimmed with fur. Hanging from a black ribbon is a cameo of Queen Elizabeth set in gold. The impression John de Critz leaves us with is of power and control, a man of authority modestly but richly dressed, the austere loyal servant of Elizabeth.
De Critz’s Walsingham of the middle 1580s was no longer a young ambassador. But in Paris he had seen for himself the murders of thousands of his fellow Protestants. Walsingham’s embassy in Paris was formative. He had encountered at first hand the work of the Devil; he knew how to make his way through the perilous labyrinth of the Valois court; he understood something of Mary Stuart’s kinsmen the Guise. Sixteen months after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, Elizabeth appointed Walsingham as her secretary, the man who sat at the heart of the machine of the Elizabethan state. One of the secretary’s tasks was to secure information for Elizabeth and her Privy Council. To do this he sent out spies. Sir Francis Walsingham, always conscious of the enemy at the gates of both Elizabeth’s kingdom and God’s, was a practised hand in clandestine affairs. Like other men of authority in her government, he would always do what he saw was necessary to defend the queen and the true religion. As a passionately committed Protestant, Walsingham knew the dangers as well as the attitude of mind needed to face them. As a young man, even before his embassy in Paris, he coined an aphorism: ‘there is less danger in fearing too much than too little’. For Walsingham, a life in politics confirmed the principle he so neatly expressed.
As they went about their daily lives, ordinary Elizabethans knew something of the dangers threatening their queen and faith. They heard for themselves the words of royal proclamations and of the laws passed by parliament. They talked in the market squares of towns and cities and in shops and taverns, went to church to pray for aid and protection, read or had read to them books and pamphlets and ballads that tried to comprehend a world in which God made the force of his will clearly felt, scourging and punishing his people with the victories of their enemies. They saw public executions for sedition and treason and heard from the pulpits the sermons of Elizabethan clergy and the recantations of Catholic priests who asked for forgiveness. Loyal subjects behaved themselves. Others read controversial books and pamphlets smuggled into England from abroad, causing them perhaps to question the authority of Elizabeth and her government. More dangerous still, some families even sheltered Catholic priests working secretly and illegally in English towns and cities and in the houses of the wealthy gentry and nobility. Many of Elizabeth’s subjects knew of the spies and informants who thrived in these shadowy corners of religious faith and political loyalty.
Countries across the ‘Narrow Sea’ of the English Channel were at war. The Catholics and Huguenots of France killed one another often, as in Paris in 1572, acting out the rituals of worship, cleansing and purifying the stench of Protestant heresy or smashing the Catholic idols of false religion. The formidable war machine of King Philip of Spain rumbled through the Spanish Netherlands, crushing Protestant resistance in a long and hard campaign to which English troops would be sent in 1585. English Catholic exiles and émigrés who were either banished from England or found it impossible in conscience to stay at home lived, taught and plotted in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. Some returned secretly to England, successful in evading the watchful eyes and ears of the authorities. From the later 1570s priests taught and trained in Rome and France entered Elizabeth’s kingdoms to minister to English Catholics. Many were captured and sent to prison and the gallows. Both sides fought for the truth as they understood and believed it.
These were not years of peace and stability, a golden age of Elizabeth: they were instead some of the most difficult and troubling in the history of Europe. Any Elizabethan who knew something of the world understood very well the significance and meaning of the prayers of public repentance published by the queen’s printer in October 1572. In the safety of the parish church he or she prayed to God that the horror of what had happened in Paris would not be repeated in the crowded alleyways of London or on the streets of other towns and cities in the kingdom: neighbour against neighbour, private hatreds turning to murder, corpses thrown into the River Thames. In the rich Elizabethan English of this specially printed book of common prayer, priest and people said:
Hearken to the voice of our prayers, our king and our God: for unto thee do we make our complaint.
O Lord, the counsel of the wicked conspireth against us: and our enemies are daily in hand to swallow us up.
They gape upon us with their mouths: as it were ramping and roaring lions.
But thou O Lord art our defender: thou art our health and our salvation.
We do put our trust in thee O God: save us from all them that persecute us, and deliver us.
O take the matter into thy hand, thy people commit themselves unto thee: for thou art their helper in their distress.
Save us from the lions’ mouths, and from the horns of the unicorns: lest they devour us, and tear us in pieces, while there is none to help.