Books
(these are Amazon affiliate links – you pay the same price, but the podcast gets part of the profits. Hooray!)
The Queen’s Agent by John Cooper
The Watchers by Stephen Alford
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford
Her Majesty’s Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage by Stephen Budiansky
Other Englandcast Episodes you might enjoy:
Episode 085: Tudor Times on Mary Queen of Scots
Throwback Episode 027: Francis Walsingham, Spymaster
The Spanish Armada Part I: A 30 Year Road to Battle
The Tudor Times Resources on Francis Walsingham
http://tudortimes.co.uk/people/francis-walsingham-life-story
The Allegory of Tudor Succession, which was potentially a gift for Walsingham
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Episode Transcript:
Heather:
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a member of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and our connection to our own humanity.
This is Episode 103, another joint episode with Melita Thomas of Tudor Times, this time on Francis Walsingham. First though, I want to thank my lovely patrons, the patrons of this show who keep it independent. Thank you to Elizabeth, Cathy, Cynthia, Juergen, Sarah, Megan, Melissa, Lady Anne aka Jessica, Olivia Al, Ashley, Kendra, Cynthia, Judith, Renee, Katie, Mara, Emily, Celayne, Lara, Ian, Barbara, Sharkiva, Amy, Alison, Joanna, Kathy, Christine Anetta, Susan, Andrea, Katherine, Rebecca from Tudors Dynasty, Shandur, Philip and John. To learn more about how you can become a part of this intelligent and discerning group for as little as $1 an episode, go to patreon.com/Englandcast. Also remember you can support the show in two other ways. First and free, you can leave a rating on iTunes, makes a huge difference. And second, if you’re looking for gifts for your Tudorholic friends, and that actually might be you, you can go shopping at tudorfair.com which is the place for Tudor swag and fun products like the gorgeous Anne Boleyn leggings with the portrait and the iconic B necklace woven throughout. It’s really beautiful. There’s lots of other fun stuff there. So tudorfair.com for that.
So now let me introduce you to Melita. Melita Thomas is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history from the period of 1485 to 1625. You can find it at tudortimes.co.uk. Melita who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970’s series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
He’s an interesting character.
Melita:
He is! I’ve been thinking this morning about the whole religious divide and how some people, it was more and still is if you look at similar things in the world today, how much was it love of God and how much was it hatred of the other guy? And what’s the balance? And some people seem far more concerned about what the other guy they don’t agree with is up to, than actually following their religion themselves, and it’s interesting, too. But to be fair to Walsingham, I think he was genuinely religious in his own life. Although he was very keen to capture rebels and traitors and those who supported Mary, Queen of Scots, I don’t get the impression that he particularly liked religious persecution. I mean, he accepted it as a necessity as everybody did in those days but I don’t think he was a zealot for persecution. He just wanted everybody to conform to the law.
Heather:
Right. So then I guess we can just jump in. What can you tell me about his early life and the kind of family, was he born into a Protestant family?
Melita:
Well, he was born in about 1532. So there were no Catholics and Protestants in the sort of hardline sense. Everybody was Catholic, but there were Evangelicals. This is in England. He certainly was born into an Evangelical family. His mother, a woman called Joyce Denny. She was the sister of Sir Anthony Denny, who was a member of Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber. And the Denny family were very early adapters of Evangelical modes of thought and then later Protestants and the Walsinghams as well seem to have had a leaning in that direction. Francis’s father, he was a lawyer, and they had lots of court connections. But Walsingham senior died when Francis was just a child, probably about 18 months old. And his mother’s second husband was so John Carey, whose brother William Carey was the husband of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s sister. And also the Careys seem to have been Evangelicals as well. So from a very early age, Francis would have been brought up to be as Protestant as the law allowed at the time.
Heather:
What was his early education like? You said his father was a lawyer. Did he go into that?
Melita:
Well, we don’t know what his first education was like, but he went to King’s College, Cambridge. And whilst he was there, Sir John Cheke was the Provost of the university and John Cheke was the tutor to Edward VI and a Protestant, and also Martin Bucer (I never know whether to pronounce it Booser or Boosa, because it’s one of those words you only ever read in there. But actually say he was very prominent reformer who was keen to bring together different branches of reform – the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the Anglicans and all the various other branches. So Walsingham would have known both men and probably been influenced by them.
Heather:
Cambridge was really a hotbed of reform with the White Horse Tavern or whatever it was, right? Was he involved with that scene? Do we know?
Melita:
Not that we know of. That was probably a little in the generation before him, Cranmer and his friends. King’s was not quite the hotbed that St. John’s was, which I would think is ironic, given that St. John’s was founded by Margaret Beaufort. Although Margaret Beaufort like many of the religious women in France could have become Evangelical in a different generation. You just wonder what she would have been like a generation later. So that’s a side thought.
After he left Cambridge, he didn’t take his degree because he didn’t have any intention of going into the church it would seem. He did go to Gray’s Inn and started legal training. But it’s not clear that he ever completed legal training. But he did have five older sisters who were married into the city’s great and the good and also into court circles. So he had a very wide network of people from all strata of the middle classes and up.
Heather:
So then he would have come of age during the reign of Edward. Can you talk to me a little bit about what that was like for him? And then we can get into what happened to him under–
Melita:
Yeah, again, we don’t know exactly because, of course, he wasn’t famous then. But given his upbringing, that his stepfather was John Carey, who was the steward of the royal household at Hunsdon. So although there’s no proof that he knew Elizabeth and Leicester, Robert Dudley at that time, it’s likely that he did because Dudley lived in the household as one of the companions of Edward VI and Elizabeth was often there. So it’s likely that’s how he began to mix in those circles. He certainly had a close personal friendship with Dudley later in life and William Cecil was again in the same group, the Dennys and the Cecils were friends. So there’s a whole sort of network the Dudleys, the Cecils, the Dennys, the Walsinghams of Protestant families. And he was at the heart of that. So although in Edwards reign, so he would have been 15 when Henry VIII died, so he was still too young to be taking up government positions. But it’s likely he was sort of on the outer fringes and knew people who were in power and was influenced by the religious reformation of the time. He was certainly by the end of Edward’s reign, a committed Protestant.
Heather:
What happened to him under Mary?
Melita:
So when Mary became queen, the initial government policy was to try to persuade everybody to return to Catholicism, because most people still were Catholics. There was a strong and powerful group at the center of government, the Dudleys, the Cecils who were Evangelical Protestants, but most of the country was that bothered. As always, there was some strong views on either side. So quite a lot of people who had taken up Protestantism, either genuinely or for reasons of policy reverted to being Catholics and evade the law. Amongst whom was William Cecil who obeyed the law and became very close to Cardinal Pole. There were a group who didn’t, who couldn’t accept Mary as Queen or Philip of Spain as, as her husband, and they got involved in the Wyatt’s Rebellion. There’s no evidence that Francis did, but it’s probable that one of his cousin’s was involved in it. So by 1555, Walsingham had joined those Protestants who were unable to live under Mary and who went into exile. It’s not clear exactly when he went. He may have gone after Wyatt’s Rebellion, or it might have been a bit later. But certainly by 1555, he didn’t feel he’d be able to conform to the law, which you can admire, he wasn’t prepared to be a hypocrite. So he went to Basel and spent a good deal of time there, along with his several cousins he took with him. He also went to Padua which despite being in Italy was quite a hotbed of English Protestant exiles. And he had quite a leading position amongst them in Padua.
Heather:
What did he do there? Like, was he connected to the– Did he write? Did he teach? Like, what was his life like when he was there?
Melita:
What he did do, he represented the students, just couldn’t find the exact role that he held in Padua. He certainly improved his languages, he was noted as having a very, very fine facility with languages. He spoke French and Italian extremely well and also his Latin was excellent. So that gave him many options later. So I guess he studied and became very friendly with the Earl of Bedford, who was another Protestant exile. So it’s certainly possible that he could have worked for Bedford, he may have been supported by him or had some sort of financial assistance from Bedford. He would have had a small income from his lands at home probably, I mean, during Mary’s late reign, there was a move by the government to confiscate the lands of exiles, but it was defeated in the Commons. So if he had had good friends, they would have sent him his money.
Whilst he was in Basel, he also met John Foxe, famous for the Book of Martyrs, and John Knox as well who was in exile from Scotland. And both of those were obviously were very radical in their views. In particular, Knox’s political views seem to have rubbed off on Walsingham. The idea that tyrants, as they perceived them, ought to be overthrown. So Walsingham was always one of those who thought that monarchs who overstepped the mark should be overthrown. And this is where he often came into conflict with Queen Elizabeth who was very, very keen to uphold the authority of the monarch. Whereas Walsingham felt that it ought to be limited, to say the least of it.
I’m still looking for what he got up to in Padua. Oh, yes, he was a spokesman for the English students at Padua University, and he must have had plenty of money because while he was there, he’s recorded as buying rather a lot of wine. And he also bought himself a clavichord. instrument. Yes, he was quite musical, actually. There’s other evidence that yes, we think of Puritans as being very dour and narrow but at this period, they weren’t. It was more about purifying the church of Catholic… rather than puritanical in their approach to life generally.
Heather:
What happened once Elizabeth became queen and he came back? What was his early life, his early career like? And he became a member of Parliament, was it?
Melita:
He did. He became a member of Parliament in Elizabeth’s first parliament of 1559, which he was sponsored for the seat of Bossiney in Cornwall, by the Earl of Bedford, who, as I say, had been a fellow exile. I don’t suppose he ever went anywhere near Bossiney. He wasn’t required because there was democracy in the sense that the freeholders with lands above the value of 40 shillings per annum could select their MP. But basically, they selected whoever the local landowner told them to select, more or less. I mean, it wasn’t always quite as black and white as that. But there was certainly no need to go campaigning or anything. And the city is deep into Cornwall, so probably quite a tricky place to get there. So he sat in that Parliament 1559, which approved the Act of Uniformity, the Book of Common Prayer of 1552, with a few minor modifications to make it more acceptable to Catholics.
But then he didn’t have any government position at that time. He got married in the early 1560’s came a… and lived on his estates in Parkbury in Hertfordshire. Then he also sat in the 1563 Parliament again for one of the Earl of Bedford seats, but this time at Lyme Regis. So it wasn’t until 1568 that he actually got involved in government in any way. He’d been widowed by then and remarried a lady called Ursula St Barbe.
Heather:
He was a diplomat, right? So how did he make that move? And how did he kind of get into government? Because I’m thinking about, he was in Paris–
Melita:
He was.
Heather:
So that was a couple of years then from his first government job. Can you talk to me, like leading up to Paris?
Melita:
In 1568 his old friend, William Cecil thinks, “Haha, I know just the man for a job.” The issue was this one of the most curious incidents in the whole of the Elizabethan sort of spies and traitors stories. It was a chap called Roberto di Ridolfi, who was a Florentine. No, actually, I go back. In 1568, Mary Queen of Scots had escaped, unfortunately for her, to England in the hope that Elizabeth would help her back onto her throne in Scotland. And Cecil wanted to put spies in Mary’s household as was pretty much the norm. And he wanted an Italian chap called Franciotti to take this role and Franciotti was fine with that. But Walsingham was used as the translator and the demand to actually liaise with Franciotti because his Italian was so good. So that was his first role.
And then the second element was, slightly later, Roberto di Ridolfi, another Italian, I mean, it’s very unclear whether he was a double agent or whether he was on nobody’s side or being paid by both but as another Italian, Walsingham questioned him and elicited information about what was going on in Mary’s household, and letters that were going between Queen Mary and the Pope who Ridolfi was apparently representing. So that’s how he first got involved.
And then he obviously impressed Cecil and Elizabeth, and he was appointed as Ambassador to Paris, probably again because of his facility with French. His role there was to build an alliance between France and England, probably to be cemented by a marriage between Elizabeth and Henry, the Duke of Anjou. And Francis thought this was a good idea despite Anjou’s Catholic religion, because he feared Spain more than he feared France, which wasn’t necessarily Elizabeth’s position. She previously had concerns about both of them. She certainly felt that France could be pretty threatening, but Walsingham always seems to have felt that France was the lesser of two evils.
He went off to France as ambassador, his wife, and they had two little girls, one born in France, I think, and one before they’d gone, Frances and Mary, their names. So he went off to France with …by the French court as the representative of Elizabeth, met King Charles IX and Catherine de ‘Medici, the queen mother who had a very powerful position in the French court, and he tried to negotiate this marriage. But the Duke of Anjou was really not terribly interested. He was very Catholic, perhaps more so than his brother and his mother. And he was a lot younger than Elizabeth and he was probably homosexual. Not that that mattered in the sense that he did later marry, although he had no children and was actually really very attached to his wife. And of course, they didn’t think of sexuality quite as we do. The marriage didn’t come of, but Francis was still keen to create an alliance between the two countries but then he got caught up in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
There’d been a treaty called the Treaty of…which was between the French Catholics and the French Huguenots or Protestants and the main thrust of this was that to bring the two factions together. The king’s sister, Marguerite would marry the king of Navarre who was a Huguenot and that could have been agreed and this was the ceremony that was to take place in Paris in August of 1572. And this became the catalyst the hardline Catholic League, who were mostly led by Mary, Queen of Scots’ uncles and cousins – the Guise family, supported by the Spanish with money and moral support at this stage, didn’t like the increasing level of influence the Huguenots had. They objected to King Charles and Queen Catherine trying to find an …with the Huguenots. And they particularly dislike the fact that one of Charles’s personal friends and favorites, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was a Huguenot. And the Guises arranged his assassination basically. All the various complications, and there was a sharp stabbing and shooting and goodness knows what, but this then exploded into a, well genocide effectively. The Catholics across France slaughtered the Protestants. And, again, there are all sorts of views of how serious it was. Has it been blown out of proportion? There’d been guesstimates of anywhere between 7000 killed and 70,000 killed across France, so could be anywhere between those numbers. But you can imagine that Francis Walsingham and his family were completely terrified. They were hiding in their house, there wasn’t an official embassy in those days, the embassy was wherever the ambassador lived, tried to protect Huguenots, English Protestants who were in France, and they also took in a couple of French refugees effectively. They were in a very dangerous situation. Fortunately for Walsingham, he wasn’t personally attacked, but he was traumatized by the whole affair as one would be.
Heather:
I’ve heard things about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and how that changed the perception in England of Catholics, because you’d have these refugees coming back. And these people, giving these horror stories and everything. And it seems like people were really, really changed by that. And the opinion of people and the fear that people had of Catholics kind of shifted at that point. Would you agree to that? Or can you talk about–
Melita:
Yes, I would say so, because, I mean by now it has been 15 years since Elizabeth had become queen. And during that 15 years, the older people who had been born and brought up as Catholics were dying off. Catholic priests were no longer being ordained in England. There were fines for non-attendance at the regular services. So gradually, the population was becoming fundamentally Protestant, as opposed to fundamentally Catholic. And this site of appalling persecution, certainly gave weight to the more radically Protestant government views and fears about Catholicism. Yes. So I would say it certainly did make people far more nervous about what the Catholic powers might be planning for England, and it made it perhaps more politically acceptable to fines for not going to church from being a shilling went up to 20 pounds, which was a year’s income for a quite comfortable family, so to not go to church anymore, it was almost impossible not to do that. I mean, it was a very good policy that Elizabeth was cleverer to think that open persecution would ever work. The policy of education, and bringing up a new generation as Protestants were actually very effective. And this massacre certainly created a bogeyman of Catholic persecution and they very, very heavy-handed actions of Spain in the Netherlands, again, supported this idea that they would try to reimpose Catholicism with their sword and their fire.
Heather:
So then he comes back and I kind of want to talk about his transition from him being a diplomat and an ambassador to then becoming how we kind of remember him as this “Spy Master”, and the founder of the first kind of major modern spy network.
Melita:
He never actually stopped being a diplomat. And then he went on various diplomatic missions throughout Elizabeth’s reign. But he came back and he was appointed as one of Elizabeth’s two principal secretaries. So she usually had two secretaries, sometimes one. He started off as a junior one then became the senior one. And it was the secretary’s job to do pretty much everything. So Cecil had started off as a secretary and become Lord Treasurer. He was now Lord Burghley. So the secretary handled nearly all of the day-to-day business of the monarch, so he liaises between the monarch and the council. He was the monarch’s right-hand man, so to speak. So he had an enormous workload. The foreign affairs and domestic affairs weren’t split out into different departments, so the secretary had a finger in every pie. So one of Washington’s major concerns was the threat he perceived from Mary, Queen of Scots, and the threat he perceived from Spain. He needed information. Just like today, the more data he had, the more information he had, the more he felt he could manage the situation and control it. And he was a man who was very, very conscious of detail, very, very hard-working, and absolutely ideal man to set up a sort of network of informers. There’d been informers for years. I mean, Cromwell had a very nice spy ring. But it became much more bureaucratized, institutionalized under Walsingham. I mean, there were the codes that they built, the ciphers. I mean, there’s some extraordinary, the complexity of the ciphers that they used and the mathematical code cracking and the when you think they did it without computers, quite extraordinary intellectual challenge that some of this pose. So he had informants and I mentioned before his five sisters had been married in all sorts of useful places. So he had a large network of informers in the city who talked to the merchants who gathered information from elsewhere. Lots of informers. It wasn’t necessarily their full-time job. They might be a merchant or a student abroad, but they would send reports back to Walsingham and his circle. And so he gathered more and more information. I don’t think you can doubt that he puts what you might call an agent provocateur into situations where he thought plots might develop. And now of course, people are free to ignore temptation, even at the time, people thought there was a level of entrapment potentially in some of the plots that were discovered relating to Mary, Queen of Scots. But as Walsingham put it to Cecil, “There’s more danger in fearing too little than fearing too much.”
Heather:
So can you talk to me, when we did do the Mary, Queen of Scots stuff, he’s all wrapped up in all of them, so I don’t want to necessarily go that deep into what happened with Mary, Queen of Scots. But can you talk to me a little bit from his perspective of how he was involved in catching her and then pressing for her execution, I suppose?
Melita:
He and Cecil saw Mary as a threat. Well from the day she became Queen of Scots, Queen of France, had a claim to the throne of England, neither Walsingham nor Cecil seemed to think it was possible that Mary could rule England as a Catholic monarch and not interfere with the Protestant settlement. Even though that is what she had done in Scotland, they just couldn’t conceive that she would be anything but determined to bring England back to Catholicism. And with Elizabeth having no other direct heir, I mean, there were the Grey sisters, but by 1578, even the youngest of those, Mary was dead. There was only really only Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James. And so they would want to do anything to keep Mary off the throne. And of course, the more they did to keep her off the throne, the more they had to do to keep her off the throne, because if she hadn’t become queen, they’d would have…from her, or at least so they would have assumed, probably not unreasonably. So that was their whole policy. And particularly, I think you can think that well the massacre at St. Bartholomew, the Guise family, Mary’s cousins were the primary movers behind it. So you can see that he might well assume that she’s going to be influenced by them, because she had been previously Queen of France. So he didn’t make the whole idea up, but he perhaps took it to more extreme than it might otherwise have been, had he followed a different line of thinking. He was certain that this was that Mary was determined to get rid of Elizabeth, determined to become queen, and determined to make England Catholic again. So encouraging her and her followers into treasonable acts was fair game as far as he was concerned, because if they fell into treason then they could be legitimately executed.
So he had a whole sort of infiltration into her household and from time to time, her papers were read, and so forth. Hence the need for the codes on both sides and the code-cracking on both sides, infiltrated her household. Well, the Babington Plot was set up on the basis that letters were going to pass to and fro. And what Queen Mary didn’t know was that her letters were being read as they went in and out. Now Queen Elizabeth was very reluctant to act against Mary, to overthrow a monarch was a very dangerous precedent. That’s why she was reluctant to get involved in the Netherlands to overthrow Philip of Spain, you know, but where does it all end? Once you start overthrowing kings and queens, it’s a slippery slope in Elizabeth’s view. So Walsingham knew that he needed really hard evidence against Mary. It was no good to say, “Oh well, she approved the plot.” He had to get evidence in her own handwriting, which he did, in that a letter was sent to Mary outlining a plot of assassination against Elizabeth. And Mary, although she didn’t specifically say, “Yes, go ahead and kill the queen.” What she did say is something along the lines of “When the gentlemen have done what you suggest, blah, blah, blah.” So she didn’t say, “Don’t do it.” And this came into the hands of Walsingham, and in one of his office, he read it and he drew a little sign of the gallows next to Mary’s handwriting thing. So she hanged herself, but he put her in a position to do that. But she was free not to. She had previously warned the English government. She had said “I’m being held against my will. It’s my duty as a queen to try to escape and I will do anything that I need to do that.” So you can argue it both ways, I suppose. But Walsingham was obviously jubilant and Mary was tried and convicted. Elizabeth still hesitated partly for the reasons I mentioned before and also because she feared if she actually went ahead and executed Mary, the French would take umbrage because she had been Queen of France and also because of the power of the Guise family, and the Spanish as Mary’s sort of the Catholic heir to the English throne. So Elizabeth had felt that going too far against Mary would be provocative, whereas Walsingham continually argued with Elizabeth that France and Spain were threatening anyway, so you might as well get it over with and let’s preempt their attack. And yes, when Elizabeth eventually signed the death warrant, she said to her secretary, the other secretary, Davison that she thought Walsingham would probably die of grief when he saw her signature on the warrant, she was rather sarcastic.
Heather:
And then she pretended like, plausible deniability, that she hadn’t meant it.
Melita:
Yeah. “Oh, I only signed it. I didn’t mean anybody to have it. I was going to recall it. Oh, it went out, damn.”
Heather:
Clever. So then what did Walsingham do in his later years?
Melita:
He was still working like a Trojan. He had a couple of side interests, which are quite interesting. He invested in the Muscovy Company, which was one of the early trading companies. This is perhaps where the legacy of some of the ideas of the time still resonate today. He was a strong promoter of plantations in the Americas. He was a supporter of some of the various schemes to set up colonies there, but also tragically, in Ireland. There was a very strong feeling in amongst English bureaucratic circles that Ireland was ignorant and backward and didn’t follow the rule of law, and they were a nest of Catholics and full of Spanish spies. And what they really needed was some good, robust Englishman to go and teach them how to behave. So there were the early Protestant plantations. They’d ship good Protestants over to try to change the culture of Ireland. Now, we know how that worked out. So I mean, reading some of the descriptions of the perceptions of the Irish and Gallic culture, I mean, it really was terribly offensive stuff but they genuinely believed. And of course, there was money to be made as well. They would invest in these, so they’d pay for people to go there effectively. And it was an investment in setting up new towns, new farming methods, perhaps more profitable ways of commerce rather than the traditional feudal system. But Walsingham in the end, had to sell his shares in a plantation to pay off his son-in-law’s debts. Yeah, his private life, he seems very happily married to Ursula. Their daughter Mary died young. Frances was married to Sir Philip Sidney, and Francis as a father, love loved him dearly. He’d been with him in Paris. He was part of the Dudley-Sidney connection. Philip Sidney is obviously famous as a poet, as a gentleman. He famously gave his water to a man, a soldier who needed it more when he was wounded. So he was sort of a hero to a Protestant Englishmen, and he married Walsingham’s daughter but he died of wounds after the Battle of Zutphen. And Walsingham paid off his debts and paid for one of the most elaborate funerals ever given to a commoner in England in his burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He did ask the queen to contribute, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that Elizabeth was terribly keen on doing. And not even Leicester contributed, even though Sidney was his nephew. So it seems a bit mean of them really. Well, Sidney wasn’t always in Elizabeth good books because he had written a pamphlet protesting against one of her marriage proposals. So he’d been banished from court. So that happened around about the time of trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, so Walsingham was not as happy as he might have been that year.
Then after Mary, Queen of Scots’ death, when it became obvious that Spain would invade, Walsingham was responsible for preparing the defenses of England. So he spent a lot of time and effort organizing the coasts, getting the musters ready, the beacons, the provisions, everything that would be needed to fight off the invader. So that kept him busy. He was in poor health, he had some sort of kidney disease. In early 1589, he was very, very poorly, Elizabeth on occasion, she had to give him time off when he was actually sick but she didn’t. She didn’t really coddle him, shall we say? So by April 1590, he was really very poorly, he had a fit. But Elizabeth said, “Well, I’m sorry about that. But you can’t retire until you find somebody to take your place. So just get on with the work.” Elizabeth can be very kind of sympathetic to people she was fond of. But she wasn’t always that sympathetic. And although she respected Walsingham and appreciated what he did, I don’t think, she didn’t have the same affection for him that she had for Burghley or for Leicester.
He died on the 6th of April, and was buried in the same tomb as his son-in-law, Philip Sidney. Elizabeth, she very, very kindly forgave his various debts to the crown. But since most of them had been run up in running spy ring, because he didn’t get paid for that. He had fork for it out of his own pocket, that wasn’t that magnanimous. His wife lived on for another 10 or 12 years. Frances, Walsingham’s daughter, she then married the Earl of Essex, and lost that husband as well because of obviously the rebellion, and she married a third time to another earl, the Earl of Clanricarde and had more children whose descendants are still around today.
Heather:
So where can people go to learn more about Francis Walsingham?
Melita:
Well, there’s a number of books. There’s a couple. There’s The Queen’s Agent by John Cooper, that’s a biography of him. God’s Secret Agents by Alice Hogge, it’s similar in its subject matter to Jessie Childs’ God’s Traitors. They both talk about spying and the sort of networks and that aspect of it. Yeah, there are two or three books about him. He pops up of course in biographies of Elizabeth, Anne Somerset’s Elizabeth I, Stephen Alford’s book on Burghley, he plays a part in it. So yeah, there’s a fair bit about him. I mean, there’s obviously his life story on our Tudor Times website. Actually, one of the nice interesting things in there is in the article about this on our website, you may be familiar with the painting The Allegory of the Tudor Succession, where Henry VIII is sitting in the middle, under his cloth of state, with Edward VI next to him, Mary to the right, holding hands with her husband Philip, and Elizabeth to the left. And Mary and Philip leading Mars, the god of war, and Elizabeth is leading the signs of Plenty and Peace. And it is said, I’m not 100% convinced about it, it is the accepted view that this was a gift from Elizabeth to Walsingham. This painting. Yeah, it’s interesting.
Heather:
Oh, wow. Cool. Well is there anything you want to add about him?
Melita:
No, I think I’ve probably gone on long enough about Francis who I have mixed feelings about. I can admire the man’s dedication and the work and his utter, utter commitment. But yes, we only know his about his business persona. We don’t really know what he was like in his private life. I mean, he’s clear attachment to Sidney and his daughter and his wife suggests that he was probably quite a nice chap in his personal life.
Heather:
Yeah, he seems like you can admire the integrity of the man, without necessarily agreeing with him.
Melita:
Yes. At the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, she accused him of trying to entrap her and sort of interpolating things into her letters. And he said, “I as a private man have done nothing not beseeming an upright and honest man, neither for the public person which I bear have I done anything not belonging to my place. I confess that I have been careful of the safety of the queen and the realm and have curiously sought to find the plots against her.” So he made a distinction between his private morality and what he did as a as a public servant.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
