Of the many Englishmen, who, by loyal service to the nation in the reign of the Virgin Queen, deserved well of the State, there is perhaps not one whose claim stands higher than that of Walsingham. For twenty years, or near it, Elizabeth trusted him more completely than any of her council, except Burghley, relied on his ability and his fidelity to carry out every task of exceptional difficulty, profited by his devotion, his penetration, and his resourcefulness, rejected his advice on the cardinal question of policy till she was compelled by circumstances in some measure to adopt it, suffered him to ruin his fortunes in her service, and finally permitted him to die the poorest of all her Ministers. It was said, in the study of Burghley, that she was loyal to him; she was so, in the sense that nothing would induce her to part from him. Unlike many other princes, when she found a good servant, she never let him go from personal pique, or on account of differences; her loyalty was the loyalty of a very acute woman, but one wholly devoid of generosity. His loyalty she left to be its own reward. Walsingham won his position by sheer force of ability and character; qualities in him which were probably discovered by the penetration of William Cecil, with whom he was always on the most cordial terms, although himself the advocate of a much bolder policy than was favoured by the cautious Lord Treasurer. None could say of Walsingham, as his enemies have said of Cecil, that he was in any degree a time-server; he was not only as incorruptible, but it could never be hinted that in affairs of State his line of action was deflected by a hair’s-breadth by any considerations of personal advantage or advancement. He indulged in none of those arts of courtiership which not only a Leicester, a Hatton, or an Essex, but even a Raleigh, took no shame in employing to extravagance. Not Knollys nor Hunsdon, her own outspoken kinsmen, could be more blunt and outspoken to their royal mistress than he. It would be difficult to find in the long roll of English statesmen one more resolutely disinterested, or one whose services, being admittedly so great, were rewarded so meagrely.

There are diversities of conscientiousness. Henry VIII. referred most questions to his conscience, after he had made up his mind about the answer; and his conscience always endorsed his judgment. Cromwell ignored conscience altogether; with More, it overruled every other consideration. Burghley’s was tolerably active, but perhaps somewhat obtuse. Walsingham, if we read him aright, was as rigidly conscientious as More himself; but his moral standard requires to be understood before it can be appreciated. It was derived, not from the New Testament, but from the Old. It assumed that the Protestants were in the position of the ancient Hebrews; that they were the Chosen People, and their enemies, the enemies of the Lord of Sabaoth. It justified the spoiling of the Egyptians. It was sufficiently tempered to disapprove the extermination of the Canaanite, but it hardly condemned Ehud and Jael. Broadly speaking it applied different moral codes in dealing with the foes of the Faith and in other relations. Identifying the foes of the Faith with the enemies of the State, it authorised the use, in self-defence, of every weapon and every artifice employed on the other side. It was not with him as with those to whom the law serves for conscience; who will do with a light heart anything that the law permits, and shrink in horror from anything that it condemns. Nor did he act on the principle that the right must give way to the expedient. With him, conscience positively approved in one group of relations the adoption of practices which in other relations it would have sternly denounced. That type of conscience is absolutely genuine and sincere; but it permits actions which are, to say the least, censurable from a more enlightened point of view.

II
WALSINGHAM’S RISE

The records of Walsingham’s early years are somewhat scanty. An uncle was Lieutenant of the Tower during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.; of whom it is reported that when Anne Askew was on the rack, he refused to strain the torture to the point desired by Wriothesly. His father was a considerable landed proprietor at Chiselhurst, and filled sundry minor legal offices. He died in 1533, leaving several daughters and one son, Francis, an infant, born not earlier than 1530, and so ten years younger than William Cecil. Young Walsingham was up at King’s College, Cambridge, from 1548 to 1550, and entered Gray’s Inn in 1552.

Being of the advanced Reformation party, young Walsingham quitted the country on Mary’s accession, remained abroad during the five years of her rule, and returned when Elizabeth succeeded, to take his place in the House of Commons. His sojourn abroad emphasised his Protestantism; he utilised it also to acquire a very extensive knowledge of foreign affairs, though he omitted to make himself a master of the Spanish tongue. He does not appear to have taken prominent part in the affairs of Parliament when he came back to England; but he attracted Cecil’s notice, and was employed by the Secretary in procuring secret intelligence, of which the earliest definite record is a report of August 1568, giving a “descriptive list of suspicious persons arriving in Italy during the space of three months,” obtained from “Franchiotto the Italian.” On November 20 of the same year, he writes to Cecil to say that, if the evidence of Mary’s complicity in Darnley’s murder is insufficient, “my friend is able to discover certain that should have been employed in the said murder, who are here to be produced.” Incidentally, it may be remarked that this, of course, means no more than that Walsingham knew where to lay his hand on some one who professed to have information; which Mr. Froude renders by a phrase implying that he actually had information, known to be valuable, ready to be brought forward. What it really shows is, that Walsingham was engaged in looking out for anything which offered a chance of being turned to account.

In the autumn of the following year, just before the rising of the northern earls, when it was practically certain that some kind of Catholic plot was afoot and that the Spanish ambassador, Don Guerau de Espes was mixed up in it, circumstances brought the Florentine banker Ridolfi under suspicion. The position to which Walsingham was now attaining is shown by the Italian being assigned to his surveillance—with the result that Ridolfi’s house and papers were thoroughly searched without his knowledge, but also without the discovery of anything incriminating. Whether honestly or with the object of deceiving him, Ridolfi was thereupon treated as if no vestige of suspicion attached to him. In the modern phrase, it was an integral part of Walsingham’s system in dealing with persons on whom he expected to pounce when his own time came, to give them every inch of rope he could afford: but a year later Walsingham wrote about the man to Cecil in terms which imply that the belief in his honesty was genuine. When the whole of the Ridolfi plot was revealed in 1571, Walsingham was in France. The secret service was Cecil’s creation, not Walsingham’s, though doubtless the latter had a considerable share in organising it, and a little later became mainly responsible for controlling it. Valuable as he was already rendering himself, he only emerges definitely into the front rank on his appointment as a special envoy to the French Court in August 1570; followed immediately thereafter by his selection for the post of Ambassador Resident.

The situation at this time was exceedingly critical. At home, the northern insurrection had just been suppressed, Norfolk and others of the peers were very much subjects of suspicion, and the Papal Bull of deposition had increased the sense of nervousness. The Spanish representative in England was the hot-headed and intriguing Don Guerau de Espes; in the Netherlands, Alva had made the world in general believe—though he knew better himself—that the revolt was crushed. In France the Huguenots, despite defeat in the field, had just shown themselves strong enough to obtain, through the balancing party of the Politiques, terms which placed them fairly on a level with the Guise faction; but a marriage was being planned between Henry of Anjou, the king’s next brother and heir presumptive, and the imprisoned Queen of Scots. In Scotland itself, the assassination of Moray had revived the confusion which the sombre regent had been struggling to allay. Thus, there was danger to Elizabeth’s throne from her own Catholic subjects; danger from France, since Anjou was regarded as of the Guise party; and danger, imagined at least, from Spain, where that surprising charlatan, Stukely, had almost, if not quite, persuaded Philip that at his call—with some armed assistance—all Ireland would rise, fling off the English yoke, and offer itself to Spain. As a matter of fact, Philip was much too heavily hampered to take openly aggressive action against England at the time—but that was known to very few people besides himself and Alva.

These difficulties of Philip’s were the first redeeming feature in the situation. The second was that on which Cecil always relied, that the national interests of France and Spain were too antagonistic to permit of any cordial alliance between them. Mary Stewart on the English throne as Philip’s protÉgÉe would not suit France; as Anjou’s wife she would not suit Philip. France might at any time see her own interest in fostering the revolt in the Netherlands and intriguing for their Protectorate. The third point was that in France itself, the Politiques were at one with the Huguenots in wishing to avoid the union of Anjou with Mary, which would be a great victory for the Guises; so that the balance of forces in France would turn definitely in favour of England if she could offer anything in the way of a make-weight. Such were the conditions under which Walsingham was sent to France as a special envoy in August 1570—to congratulate the French Government on the pacification just concluded; to urge the necessity of maintaining it loyally; and to dissuade the Court from espousing the cause of the Scots Queen. Within a month, he received official intimation that the resident Ambassador, Sir Henry Norris, was about to be recalled, and he was himself to succeed to the post; which arrangement took effect in January.

III
AMBASSADOR AT PARIS

In the interval, an ingenious solution of several problems had suggested itself to the Huguenot leaders, and found favour with the Queen-Mother. This was that Anjou should drop the idea of marrying Mary and should instead marry Elizabeth herself. He was her junior by seventeen years, but that was a small matter. If he wedded the Protestant Queen, he would be definitely detached from the Guises, toleration for both religions would be assured both in England and France, and the two countries could join in the liberation of the Netherlands. The problem would be to arrange the marriage on terms which would give the parties who were favourably disposed to it security for the carrying out of those parts of the programme which were from their several points of view essential. Prima facie the plan was acceptable to the Huguenots, to the Politiques, to the English Council, and to Walsingham himself. To the Guises, it was very much the reverse, and they tried, with a degree of success, to frighten the Duke with the old scandals about the Virgin Queen and Leicester. The Spaniards were much perturbed. Their Ambassador first tried to draw the French into engagements with them against Orange; and, failing in that attempt, began making overtures to Walsingham which he appreciated at their true value. He knew all about the overtures to France—to which, as the Englishman wrote drily to Cecil, “the answers falling not out to his contentment, maketh him, as I suppose, to think that the friendship of England is worth the having.” The same letter notes information that the Pope has a “practice in hand for England, which would not be long before it brake forth”—no doubt in connexion with the Ridolfi plot, which was now maturing.

Side by side with the business of the Anjou marriage, Walsingham was much engaged in gathering information as to the suspected Spanish expedition to Ireland; in respect of which he held much diplomatic conversation with the ex-Archbishop of Cashel and heard many tales of Stukely’s doings and sayings. Walsingham suspected his good faith, and remarked significantly to Cecil—who had just been “ordered to write William Burleigh” instead of William Cecil, but had still some difficulty in remembering the new signature—“I have placed some especially about him, to whom he repaireth, as also who repairs unto him.” The suspicions were not dissipated as time went on.

The Ambassador’s situation was one of singular difficulty. For a dozen years past, Elizabeth had played fast and loose with so many suitors that any lack of straightforwardness on her part was certain to be construed as meaning that she intended to play with Anjou in the same way; while she was absolutely incapable of being straightforward. As a matter of fact, she was probably merely playing her usual game. So long as the match was on the tapis, but only on the tapis, Philip would be afraid to move lest he should precipitate it. Meantime, Orange was making ready to renew the struggle in the Netherlands, and she might presently find that she could afford to manoeuvre herself out of the marriage, and would have skill enough to make the rupture of negotiations come from the other side. Burghley and Leicester both wanted the match—the former being satisfied that it would result in the Burgundian dominions being separated from Spain without being absorbed by France, while Protestantism would be generally much strengthened. But in his private correspondence with Walsingham, he warned the Ambassador very plainly that neither he nor Leicester knew what the Queen meant to do—it was as likely as not that she wished in the long run to get the match broken off by Anjou on the score of the English stipulations for his conforming to the English law in matters of religion. Walsingham, who was a Protestant with his heart and soul as well as his head, and believed that the Protestant cause was the national cause much more uncompromisingly than Burghley, was more zealous on behalf of the marriage than the Secretary himself, being convinced that it would bring about the victory of Protestantism, in alliance with England, both in France and the Netherlands.

It was not Burghley nor Walsingham, but Elizabeth, who controlled the situation; and however strongly the ministers might express their private feelings to each other, they had to do as she told them. Her trickery met with its usual success. In due course, Henry of Anjou found that he could not accede to the demand for conformity, and in spite of his mother’s entreaties withdrew his suit; yet the business was so successfully managed that the French court, instead of being offended, very soon began to hint that the French king had yet another brother, the Duke of AlenÇon, whose hand and heart were not yet disposed of. So the play began again.

Meantime the complete revelation of the Ridolfi conspiracy brought conclusive proofs of the real hostility of Spain to Elizabeth. In the following spring (1572) the Netherlands were set ablaze once more by La Marck’s capture of Brille, and Alva found his hands full; a timely occurrence, since the crushing defeat of the Turks at Lepanto by Don John in October had greatly strengthened the hands of Philip. In the summer of 1572 Walsingham was more than ever convinced that a French marriage, and support on the most liberal scale to Orange, composed the policy which it was imperative for England to adopt. Everything was pointing to a Huguenot ascendency in France; Marguerite of Valois was on the point of marrying young Henry of Navarre, head of the Bourbons, and next in succession to the throne after the reigning king’s brothers. To play fast and loose with the AlenÇon marriage would alienate France; to play fast and loose with Orange would be to throw him into the arms of France alienated from England. That Philip, seeing England thus isolated, would cheerfully forgive and forget all that he had suffered, for the sake of an unstable union with her, was almost unthinkable. Yet the months went by, and the Ambassador could get no guidance even from the sympathetic Burghley, who was as much in the dark as ever as to Elizabeth’s real intentions.

But there was a factor in the situation of which on one had taken full account; not Walsingham, nor Burghley, nor Elizabeth; not the Huguenots; not Philip nor Alva. This was Catherine de Medici’s overwhelming lust of personal power, and the passion of jealousy accompanying it. She saw her ascendency over her son Charles IX. slipping away and passing into the hands of Coligny and his associates. For victory and vengeance, she prepared to commit, perhaps, the most appalling crime in the annals of Christian Europe. Paris was crowded with Huguenots gathered to celebrate the pact of amity, to be sealed by the wedding of the BÉarnais and the sister of the king. Stealthily and swiftly the plans were laid, the plot organised, the preparations completed. The wedding took place on August 18: three days later, an unsuccessful attempt was made to murder Coligny. It may be that if the assassin had killed the Admiral, the huge tragedy which followed would have been averted; as it was, hours before the sun of St. Bartholomew’s day (August 24) had risen, the floodgates had been opened, and the streets of Paris were running red with rivers of Huguenot blood. During the following days, like scenes were being enacted through the provinces.

For a moment Europe stood breathless, aghast. Whatever this appalling thing meant, it seemed at least an assured portent of developments undreamed of; probably a vast, all-embracing, Catholic conspiracy. England sprang to arms, ready to stand at bay against the united forces of France and Spain. If there was to be a life-and-death struggle between the religions, she would fight to the last gasp. The Englishmen in the French capital had been safeguarded on the night of the massacre, but it was some little time before they could be sure that their turn was not still to come. Yet Walsingham in Paris bore himself with the same lofty sternness that the English Queen and her Council displayed to the French Ambassador in London. It soon became evident that Catherine was frightened at what she had done; that her one desire was to minimise it, to declare that matters had never been intended to go so far, to shelter behind the plea that the victims had been on the verge of effecting a bloody coup d’État and the counter-stroke had only been dealt in self-defence. Walsingham’s reply was in terms of courteous but scathing incredulity. The Queen-Mother tried to win him over by declaring that Coligny had warned Anjou against the machinations of England; he answered that the Admiral had acted therein as a loyal Frenchman.

The diplomatic fabric had collapsed, but at least there was no question of France holding Elizabeth to blame for the rupture; nor was there any question of Catherine turning to a junction with Spain. The Huguenots now were at bay; there would be work enough before they were either crushed or pacified; while the slaughter of their leaders had made the Guises more dangerous than ever. On the other hand, there could be no joint action on behalf of Orange. France had ruled herself out. Walsingham would still have stood boldly for “the Religion,” but the Queen and Burghley were not equally ready to fling themselves single-handed into the struggle on behalf of the Netherlands. The Spaniards deemed the opportunity a good one for seeking reconciliation with England. A more politic and less bloodthirsty Governor was dispatched to the Low Countries to take the place of Alva, who by his own desire was recalled. Walsingham went back to England, and for some time to come Philip and Elizabeth were engaged in an elaborate if insincere ostentation of amicable intentions.

IV
ENTANGLEMENTS

Burghley as Secretary had been so heavily worked that he was in danger of breaking down; to prevent such a catastrophe, he was made Lord Treasurer, Walsingham on his return to England being appointed joint Secretary of State with Sir Thomas Smith. Leicester continued to be Burghley’s chief rival with Elizabeth on the Council, owing to his personal favour with her; and his political line was the same as Walsingham’s, though the Secretary supplied the brains. Walsingham was neither the rival nor the follower of either; it was never in his mind to supplant Burghley either himself or by Leicester; but his counsels and those of the Lord Treasurer were often in disagreement in so far as his Protestantism was more energetic, and as he had no sympathy with the idea of amity with Spain, being thoroughly convinced of Philip’s fundamental hostility to England as a Protestant Power.

For some years the Protestant policy was out of court so far as Spain and the Netherlands were concerned; the comparative moderation of the new Governor, Requesens, giving plausibility to the hope that a modus vivendi might be arrived at—that Philip’s maximum of concession and Orange’s minimum of demand might prove capable of adjustment. In Scotland, however, Walsingham and Burghley both recognised the necessity of maintaining friendly relations with the capable but sinister Regent, the Earl of Morton. It was impossible to ignore the danger of a reconstruction of parties there, which might again result in French intervention being invited; a consummation equally abhorrent to the Treasurer and the Secretary. Elizabeth’s parsimony here proved too strong for her policy. Burghley and Walsingham both believed that liberal but judicious expenditure would prove economical in the long run. But the Queen would not relax the purse-strings; the unrest of Scotland continued to be a thorn in her side, and to be also a perpetual strain on the anxiety of her ministers and a drain on her Exchequer.

Requesens died in 1576; before his successor, Don John, arrived, the Spanish soldiery—whose pay was in arrear—got completely out of hand; and the autumn saw the hideous butchery in Antwerp known as the “Spanish Fury.” The whole of the provinces—Catholic as well as Protestant—were united thereby in a solid demand for the restoration of their old constitutional privileges, and the withdrawal of Spanish troops; and in a flat refusal to admit the new Governor or recognise his government, until their main demands were conceded. Don John made provisional terms and was admitted in the spring following; but he was known to be harbouring audacious designs against England, the Hollanders suspected his good faith, and the old state of serious tension was renewed. Drake was planning his great voyage, to the entire satisfaction of the anti-Spanish party—but with an obvious certainty of giving extreme offence to Philip, which caused them to make a vain attempt to keep the thing secret from Burghley; while Elizabeth—who liked playing with fire and was also greedy for money—made her own bargain with the adventurer. Thus, in 1578 a curious state of affairs arose. Philip, jealous of his half-brother, and still extremely anxious to avoid a rupture with England, once more accredited an ambassador to the English Court, Bernardino de Mendoza, whose business was to be conciliation; Elizabeth’s Council swayed to the views of Walsingham and Leicester, while Burghley seemed to be outweighted. The Queen started on one of her most exasperating pieces of political jugglery, snubbing Orange on the one hand, and on the other reviving the AlenÇon marriage project; while AlenÇon himself was now posing as a would-be figure-head for the Huguenots, and at odds with his brother Henry III., who had succeeded Charles IX. two years after St. Bartholomew.

To his own intense disgust, Walsingham was despatched to the Netherlands on the most thoroughly uncongenial task that could be conceived: one, moreover, which it would have been quite impossible for him to accomplish even if his heart had been in it. He was to urge the Protestant States to accept the Spanish terms, which would have deprived them of the exercise of their religion; he was to refuse the promised issue of the bonds on which they were relying for the sinews of war; in effect, he was to represent England in what he himself looked upon as an act of betrayal. Of course, the mission was a failure. Betrayed or not, Orange and his party would never accept the Spanish terms; they would rather take the risk of a French Protectorate, or die fighting. Walsingham loathed the job, and wrote home in very bitter terms of the shame the whole of the proceedings were bringing on the name of England. The only glimmer of satisfaction he extracted from it was in the retraction of the monstrous breach of faith about the bonds. It was bad enough that Elizabeth’s name should be made a by-word for falsehood; it was only less bad that France, instead of England, should become for her own ends the friend and protector of the Low Countries; it was sickening that he, of all men, should be made the agent of such perfidy, held personally responsible for it abroad, and rewarded by his mistress with abuse because it failed. “It is given out,” he wrote, “that we shall be hanged on our return, so ill have we behaved ourselves here: I hope we shall enjoy our ordinary trial—my Lord Cobham [his colleague] to be tried by his peers, and myself by a jury of Middlesex.... If I may conveniently, I mean, with the leave of God, to convey myself off from the stage and to become a looker-on.”

Elizabeth, however, was far too keenly alive to his value to allow him to become a looker-on; nor could Burghley have spared him, however their views might differ on some points. The Queen might ignore his advice, but she relied on his penetration and his loyalty, and was more afraid of his righteous indignation than of the Lord Treasurer’s sober disapprobation. Neither minister would countenance what they accounted perfidy, and in act she never in the long run degraded her honour as much as she repeatedly threatened to do. Both of them spoke their minds. She knew they were in the right; she resisted, abused, flouted, defied them; but she always yielded enough, and in time, to save some shreds of credit.

The death of Don John about the end of September was followed by the appointment of Alexander of Parma, a statesman and soldier of the first rank, as his successor; who at the outset skilfully severed the union between the northern or Protestant and the southern or Catholic provinces. If Burghley could have had his own way untrammelled, he would have dealt straightforwardly with Orange, giving him support enough to keep him from calling in France, and still hoping to bring about an accommodation with Parma possible of acceptance by both parties. Neither he nor Walsingham now had any belief in joint action with France, in which their confidence had been permanently blotted out by the Paris massacre. Neither of them, therefore, saw good in the AlenÇon marriage as a genuine project, while both saw infinite danger in merely playing with it. They differed, as it would seem, only as to the length they were prepared to go in helping Orange, Burghley drawing the line at the point where he thought Philip might be driven into a declaration of open war, while the Secretary would have taken bigger risks, accepting open war if Philip chose. The Queen’s object was the same as Burghley’s, but she elected, according to her habit, to seek it not by straightforward, but by crooked, courses. She would give Orange the minimum of help, but she would, by playing with AlenÇon, either keep France out of it, or else embroil France and Spain, keeping herself out of it till she could strike in as arbiter. To do which, she had to induce every one to believe that she probably meant marrying, while trusting to her own ingenuity and the chapter of accidents to effect, if the worst came to the worst, an escape not too ruinously ignominious. If she really did know what she wanted, it was more than any of her Council did, and she drove them almost to despair.

So the juggling went on; the Queen blew hot and cold with AlenÇon, and tried to inveigle France into a league without a marriage; the French tried to get the marriage secured as preliminary to a league. Drake came home, his ship loaded with spoils; but the remonstrances of Mendoza were met by complaints of the assistance given by Spain to the Desmond rebellion in Ireland. Walsingham was flatly opposing the marriage, and the Puritan element in the country at least was with him to a man. Parsons and Campion, and the Jesuit propaganda, had set Puritans and Catholics alike in a ferment. In the summer of 1581 AlenÇon was still dangling, France was still waiting to have the marriage question settled, Philip had just annexed Portugal, and Burghley himself was despairing of a peaceful outcome.

Under these circumstances, Elizabeth again chose to despatch Walsingham on an embassy to Paris. He was to get the Queen out of the marriage without upsetting the French. He was to get France to espouse the cause of Orange, while England was only to render secret pecuniary aid. Whether, in the last resort, the Queen would accede to the marriage for the sake of a secret league, or would accede to an open league to escape the marriage, or would positively on no condition have either marriage or open league, or would still keep the marriage unaccomplished but unrejected if she could, Walsingham did not know; for whatever instructions he received were liable to be contradicted in twenty-four hours. He was to extract his mistress from the tangle in which she had involved herself, and might understand that whatever means he found for doing so would be angrily condemned.

Naturally, he found the situation almost impossible. The King and the Queen-Mother would make an open league and let the marriage go; of that, he felt satisfied. But they would not have an undeclared league, nor commit themselves at any price to any war in the Low Countries, if there were any possible loophole for Elizabeth to back out of supporting them. She must be so committed that she could not back out. The suspicion that she was only dallying both with the marriage and the league could only be got rid of by the most straightforward dealing, and if she would not listen to advice there was the gravest danger that she would find France, Spain, and Scotland all united against her. He wrote in very plain terms that if she would not make up her mind to a liberal expenditure, and convince her neighbours that she had done so, ruin threatened. The instructions from England continued to be evasive, non-committal. The personal correspondence between Burghley and Walsingham is particularly interesting, as showing the complete confidence between them, the loyalty with which the Treasurer fought the Secretary’s battles with the Queen, though in vain, and Walsingham’s entire frankness to him.

“Sorry I am,” he writes, “to see her Majesty so apt to take offence against me, which falleth not out contrary to my expectation, and therefore I did protest unto her, after it had pleased her to make choice of me to employ me this way, that I should repute it a greater favour to be committed to the Tower, unless her Majesty may grow more certain in her resolutions there.” Twelve days later he fairly exploded in a letter to the Queen herself. He told her point-blank that she had already lost Scotland, and was like enough to lose England too, by her parsimony, and finished up—“If this sparing and improvident course be held still, the mischiefs approaching being so apparent as they are, I conclude therefore ... that no one that serveth in place of a Counciller, that either weigheth his own credit, or carrieth that sound affection to your Majestie as he ought to do, that would not wish himself in the farthest part of Ethiopia, rather than enjoy the fairest palace in England. The Lord God therefore direct your Majestie’s heart to take that way of councel that may be most for your honour and safety.” Nothing came of the embassy; not even the ruin foretold by Walsingham. The wonderful Queen managed somehow to keep AlenÇon dangling; and while he dangled there would be no decisive breach with France. In November he was in England again. She promised to marry him, kissed him, and a few weeks later told Burghley that she would not marry the man on any terms. The ministers, of course, could see nothing possible but an irreconcilable quarrel with France over the affair sooner or later; and again Burghley’s efforts were directed to pacifying Mendoza, and Walsingham’s to forcing Elizabeth into openly supporting Orange. In the Council Burghley was practically alone; yet Walsingham could not effect his object. The impending avalanche did not fall—and then AlenÇon in effect committed suicide by trying to play the traitor and failing ignominiously to carry out his plot; thereby making himself obviously and hopelessly impossible. The rupture with France on that score was averted. His death a year later, in 1584, made Henry of Navarre actual heir presumptive to the crown of France; and then the question of the succession became, and remained, so critical that all parties in France were too hotly engaged in their own contests to take effective part in quarrels beyond their borders. Orange was assassinated; the Throgmorton plot had convinced Burghley himself that the duel with Spain was inevitable; and in 1585 Parma’s skill brought affairs in the Netherlands to a point at which nothing but the armed intervention of England could apparently save the revolted provinces from utter destruction. Before the end of the year Elizabeth was in open league with them. At last, circumstances had compelled her officially to commit herself to Walsingham’s policy, though even now she could not bring herself to resign either her systematic penuriousness or her systematic vacillation.

V
DETECTIVE METHODS

Walsingham has hitherto appeared in the character of a foreign minister or ambassador with two main functions—to gauge the intentions of foreign courts, and to carry out a policy with which he was dissatisfied by methods which he abominated: the ally of Leicester in the policy he advocated, the ally of Burghley in his moral attitude towards the Queen. She and Burghley were at one in the knowledge that she must preserve Continental Protestantism from sheer destruction, and in the determination to limit their help, so long as it was possible to do so, in such wise as to avoid war with Spain. Since 1577 Walsingham had been opposed to that limitation; in 1584 Burghley himself was relinquishing it with reluctance, and with the persistent hope that a reconciliation might again become possible.

As a diplomatist, Sir Francis appears to have possessed in a high degree the quality of impenetrability, the precision of veracity which has the effect of suppressio veri or of suggestio falsi, misleading of set purpose but without deviation from formal truth. The ethics of the twentieth century have not yet learnt to condemn skilful deception in this kind, at any rate where it is not directed to personal ends. But the means which, in other capacities than that of an ambassador, Walsingham employed for obtaining information, were not always such as would be ventured on to-day by a politician who was unwilling to be called unscrupulous. Yet they were means which—so far as they can with certainty be attributed to him—would have been unhesitatingly sanctioned by almost every contemporary.

It has to be borne in mind, in the first place, that throughout the Elizabethan period every country in Europe was thick with plots, with the political intention of a violent coup d’État, or the religious intention of removing an obnoxious personality. While Elizabeth was on the throne the list of successful assassinations included those of two Dukes of Guise, a King of France, the Prince of Orange, Darnley, Moray, and the victims of St. Bartholomew. Attempts which only just failed were made on Orange and Coligny. There were at least three plots—those known by the names of Ridolfi, Throgmorton, and Babington—in favour of Mary Stewart, and involving the assassination of Elizabeth, in which Philip, or some of his ministers, or the Guises, or the Pope, or Cardinal Allen, were implicated, besides minor ones. Rizzio’s murder was political; and Burghley’s life was the object of a conspiracy. These are merely a few conspicuous instances out of a very long roll. The ingenuity of zealots, on either side, who honestly believed that in slaying a leader of heretics or of persecutors they were rendering acceptable service to the Almighty, was backed by the unscrupulousness of politicians, who might not, indeed, themselves be prepared to stab or poison, but were quite ready to make use of those who would do so. In England especially there were vast interests involved in the removal of Elizabeth, whose legitimate heir was, beyond all question, the Catholic Queen of Scots. Plots merely directed against the Queen’s person were serious enough; but they might be combined with schemes for invasion or concerted insurrection, like the revolt of the northern Earls. The plotters were perfectly unscrupulous. Nothing could be more certain than that, so long as the Queen of Scots was alive and in captivity, there would be a series of conspiracies, with or without her connivance, having it as their object to place her on the throne of England. And we must remember, further, that, to intensify the situation, a Papal Bull had declared that while it was not incumbent upon Catholics in England actively to hatch treason against the Queen of England, it was incumbent on them to countenance, and meritorious to take part in it.

With the tremendous issues at stake, both national and religious, with the forces engaged in setting conspiracy in motion or in encouraging it, with the untrammelled character of its operations, the nature of the fight was obviously very different from anything with which modern statesmen have to deal. Yet where active secret societies are in existence, the police methods of modern Governments are the police methods of Walsingham. The spy, the paid informer, the agent provocateur, play the same part now as in the sixteenth century. It was in the risks for a Spanish ambassador or agent that his secretary, or some other person standing to him in a confidential relation, might be in the pay of the English Secretary of State. Any influential person suspected of Catholic leanings might wake up one morning to find that a tolerably complete copy of his correspondence was in Walsingham’s hands. A plot, big or small, might progress merrily while the plotters hugged themselves on their skill and secrecy—till the psychological moment arrived for dropping the mask, and they found that they had merely been drawn into a carefully prepared trap.

Walsingham had no qualms about employing liars, perjurers, the basest kind of scoundrels in this business. When he had caught his culprits he quite deliberately applied the rack and other forms of torture to extract evidence. He would have argued that the Queen’s enemies had chosen their own method of fighting, and it was legitimate to meet them with their own weapons—as Clive argued in the case of Omichund; that, in fact, it was only by the use of their own weapons that he could make sure of defeating them. Also he did not originate the system—espionage and the rack were in full play when his foot was only on the lowest rung of the ladder. Also, these methods were not employed vindictively, but with the single object of obtaining true information by which treasonous designs might be frustrated. Also, in acting as he did, he did not violate the public conscience—or his own, with its rigid Old Testament limitations.

But there is one case in which he is charged with having gone farther.

It would be difficult to find any even approximate parallel to the position of Mary Stewart in England. Whatever her own attitude might be, she was the inevitable centre of Catholic plots of the most far-reaching order. While she lived, the throne of Elizabeth and the triumph of the Reformation in England could never be secure. She was held captive on no legitimate ground, but solely because her title to the English throne was so strong that the Queen could not afford to set her at liberty. In plain terms, the national security required her death, but unless she could be convicted of plotting against the life of Elizabeth, there was no legitimate ground for putting her to death. The eighth Henry would have made short work with her; there was no European sovereign who would not have made short work with any dangerous pretender to his crown who lay completely in his power. Yet even the Throgmorton conspiracy was not turned to her destruction; Elizabeth had her own reasons for preferring to keep her captive alive. But the Throgmorton revelations, with the assassination of Orange, the death of AlenÇon, the approach of the Spanish crisis, and the growing certainty that Mary’s son would not take her place as the figure-head for Catholic conspiracies, went far to cancel Elizabeth’s reasons. To Walsingham, alike as patriot and protestant, the death of Mary had long been about the most desirable event that could occur; and now he saw his way to compass it—to inveigle her within reach of the law.

He reckoned it as a certainty that if she found herself able to communicate with her partisans undetected, she would soon enough get involved in some plot of a character which would justify her doom in the eyes of the world. A supposed adherent of hers, a Jesuit, devised means of communicating with her and of passing her secret correspondence in and out of Chartley Manor. She fell into the trap: the supposed adherent was Walsingham’s agent. Every letter was opened and copied. A plot was soon on foot for her liberation, an invasion, and the deposition of Elizabeth, whose assassination by Anthony Babington was part of the scheme. From Walsingham’s point of view, the vital point was to get her definitely implicated in Babington’s part of the conspiracy. At last, Philips, the decipherer of the correspondence, produced a letter which was decisive. Then Walsingham struck. The bubble burst; Mary was tried and condemned.

Now an issue appears between Walsingham and Mary. The Scots Queen admitted participation in the plot up to a certain point: she denied in toto knowledge of the intended assassination. Apart from certain phrases in one letter, it cannot be conclusively shown that she was lying. The conditions made it possible that she never wrote those incriminating phrases; that they were forged. Did Walsingham fabricate that evidence in order that Mary might be prevented from escaping what he regarded as her just and necessary doom, on a technical plea? Did Philips forge it and persuade him that it was genuine? Or was it in fact genuine? Mendoza believed that Mary was in the secret, but Mendoza may have been under a misapprehension. No one will ever be able to answer that riddle decisively. But the form of Walsingham’s denial, when the imputation of forgery was made in court, is worth noting. “As a private person, I have done nothing unbecoming an honest man, nor, as I bear the place of a public person have I done anything unworthy my place.” If Walsingham did fabricate the evidence, he did it with a clear conscience; that is, with an honest conviction that he was discharging a duty; that he was “doing nothing unworthy his place.” The thing is perfectly conceivable. No one will deny that John Knox was a conscientious man; but John Knox justified assassination. Walsingham himself thought it permissible in certain circumstances. But the case is not proved one way or the other. The twist in his rigid conscience may not have been crooked enough for that. Yet the whole business of deliberately making arrangements to facilitate plotting on his victim’s part is hardly on a different plane. The point of interest lies in the fact that under sixteenth-century conditions such acts were committed and were sanctioned without compunction not only by men without conscience, or of careless conscience, or of conventional or adaptable conscience, but by the very men who held hardest to moral ideals: men whose serious purpose was to do all to the glory of God.

VI
THE END

For all her confidence in and dependence on Walsingham, the Secretary was never persona grata with Elizabeth. She abused him more roundly and more frequently than any other member of her Council. If an opportunity offered of setting him a task which was utterly against the grain, she would not let it go; and she liked him none the better for his share in making her responsible for the death of Queen Mary. In that, as in passing from covert to overt war with Spain, she was compelled to follow his policy; but she did not increase her favour to him and his allies, and she followed the policy with marked ill-will. Nothing could avert a desperate conflict, yet she continued to the last to drive the war-party half-frantic by parsimony, by issuing impracticable orders, by imposing paralysing restrictions, by temporising with Parma and threatening to betray her allies. And when the great Armada was triumphantly shattered by English seamen, and thereafter overwhelmed by the winds and the waves, and Drake would have delivered a still more fatal blow by rending Portugal from Philip, she carefully tied the Admiral up with instructions which doomed the Lisbon expedition to fruitlessness and its great organiser to discredit and practical retirement.

If Walsingham lived to see England freed from the nightmare of Mary Stewart, and on a palpable equality with Spain, the accession of the leader of “the Religion” in France to the throne, if not as yet to the rulership, of that country, and the rise of a worthy successor to William the Silent in the person of Maurice of Nassau, yet his last years were full enough of bitterness. He had striven devotedly with a single eye to the welfare of his country, so loyally and with such absence of self-seeking that he had beggared himself in the process. His services—invaluable yet unwelcome—were requited by chill disfavour; the assistance to which gratitude and justice should have entitled him was denied, since lavish bounty to Walter Raleigh suited the Queen’s humour better at the time; and the statesman who with Burghley had done most, for twenty years, for the honour and the safety of England, died so poor that he was buried quietly and privately—at his own desire—that his heirs might be spared the charges of a costly funeral. Whether he was in alliance with Burghley, or in occasional antagonism to the policy of his great colleague, the personal friendship and fidelity of the two to each other remained unbroken to the end. That is almost the only pleasing reflection to which his closing years give rise. For the rest, he passed from the world, one more example of the ingratitude of princes.