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.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
I
CHARACTER