Elizabeth's Spymaster (41 page)

The funeral service was held on Tuesday 1 August. Although a cloth of estate of purple velvet had been hung over a regal chair in the black-draped presence chamber of the bishop’s palace, Elizabeth, as at Mary’s trial, had no desire to suffer the embarrassment of attendance. The role of chief mourner therefore fell to Bridget, Countess of Bedford, who wore the insignia of the sovereign she represented. She was attended by a number of court functionaries and thirty-one lords and ladies, together with eight Scottish gentlemen. Despite the ceremonial trappings of royalty, it was deemed indiscreet to invite foreign ambassadors. Outside the palace, one hundred poor men waited patiently to fulfil their symbolic role as mourners in the Scottish queen’s obsequies, wearing specially made black gowns.

In lieu of the body or a coffin, a life-size wax effigy of Mary had been carved,
³⁷
which now lay in the great hall of the episcopal palace. Promptly at ten in the morning it was carried in great state into the cathedral and placed in the choir within a hearse measuring twenty feet square, twenty-
seven feet in height and richly covered with black velvet.
³⁸
A ‘close crown of gold with precious stones’ was set on the effigy’s head, which rested upon a purple velvet cushion.

An anthem was sung, and the Scottish contingent then all hurriedly departed, save Andrew Melville, Mary’s steward, and one of her attendants, Barbara Mowbray, the Scots saying they would ‘not tarry [for the Protestant] sermon or ceremonies’.
³⁹
William Wickham, the Bishop of Lincoln, then preached from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days, that I may be certified how long I have to live.’ Today, we would perhaps feel this was a singularly inappropriate choice of text for such a sermon. After being told of her impending execution, Mary at least knew when and in what violent manner her life would be ended. He concluded his discourse with these comforting words for all those who had come
not
to mourn the Scottish queen:

Let us give God thanks for the happy dissolution of the high and mighty Princess Mary, late Queen of Scotland and Dowager of France, of whose life and death at this time I have not much to say because I was not acquainted with the one, neither was I present at the other.

I will not enter into judgement further but because it has been signified to me that she trusted to be saved by the Blood of Christ, we must hope well of her salvation.

For, as father Luther was wont to say, many a one that lived a Papist died a Protestant.
⁴⁰

There is sometimes something insufferably smug about Protestant divines in the late sixteenth century, but his sentiments reflected the perceived threat that Mary Stuart had represented to the continued existence of the English Protestant nation.

Her heraldic accoutrements – the tabard bearing her arms, the sword, shield and helmet – were solemnly laid before the altar
⁴¹
and the funeral service was read over the vault containing her body by the Bishops of Lincoln and Peterborough. The officers of Elizabeth’s household then ceremoniously and symbolically broke their white wands of office over their heads and hurled the pieces into the void below.

Everyone then departed to consume ‘a most royal feast’ at the bishop’s palace, while alms were distributed to the patient poor gathered outside.
⁴²
The remnants of Mary’s household were invited to attend this banquet, their hosts ‘praying them to eat well and to ask for anything they wished, so that nothing should be wanting to them, such being the orders of their mistress, [Elizabeth]’.
⁴³
But they sat apart from the official mourners, in a separate room, ‘mingling many tears with their food and drink’.
⁴⁴

Mary’s body remained in the vault at Peterborough for twenty-seven years. After her son, James VI of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth as King James I of England in 1603, he built a new vault in the south aisle of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey to receive his mother’s body.
⁴⁵
A magnificent tomb was commissioned from the carver Cornelius Cure of Southwark and was completed by his son William in 1613.
⁴⁶
Its iconography significantly includes the figure of Victory.

Across on the north side of Henry VII’s chapel lies Elizabeth’s sumptuous tomb, also commissioned by King James I in 1606 from the Protestant refugee sculptor Maximilian Colt. Elizabeth had died in her sleep at Richmond Palace, on the banks of the River Thames in Surrey, in the early hours of Thursday 24 March 1603, probably from septicaemia caused by the poisonous infection of her rotten teeth and bronchopneumonia.
⁴⁷
She was aged sixty-nine.

The two queens may have been divided by politics and religion in life, but they are now united in the same church in death. Walsingham had been the prime mover in the cruel slaughter of one, and the protection and survival of the other, one of the greatest of England’s monarchs, despite her parsimony and procrastination. He was truly the guardian of the gates of this fledgling Protestant nation, soon to spread its creed and values like a creeping tide across the globe.

APPENDIX

Walsingham’s Spy Network

This is the first attempt to produce a consolidated list of the many spies and informants employed by Walsingham. Names, locations and details are inevitably sparse because of the spy master’s famed obsession with secrecy.

Aldred, Solomon.
Double agent. Set up a tailor’s shop in the French city of Lyons. Later moved to Rome with his wife, became tailor to the English College there and was granted a pension by Pope Gregory XIII. Recorded as a visitor to the English Hospice in Rome 10–20 March 1581 and 11–19 March 1583.
¹

Dr Owen Lewis, a leading Catholic in Rome, told the Pope’s secretary in March 1582 that Aldred was able to supply copies of letters intercepted from English ambassadors in Europe.

In 1583, the Inquisition in Milan imprisoned Edward, brother of Henry Unton (or Umpton). At Walsingham’s suggestion, Henry Unton negotiated for his release. A cash payment was demanded, the money destined to support English Jesuit priests in Rome.
²
Lewis sent Aldred to Lyons to represent the Catholics’ interests in the negotiations. Henry Unton told Walsingham on 2 June 1583:

I have won over Aldred, the player of my brother’s tragedy to come into England upon your … assurance of his safety. He is one [who seems] simple, but better acquainted with Romish practices against England than any He has delivered much to me and promised me upon my writing to him out of England and performance of certain conditions, he will become a right Englishman. Whereas now he is unnatural and of little honesty, yet he is one very worth the winning.
³

William Parry, one of Burghley’s spies in Lyons, told the Chief Minister on 18 August that Aldred departed for Milan the 10th of this month in hopes of bringing Mr Umpton away’ and later reported that on ‘the 20th of this month Mr Edward Unton was in good health but not yet delivered. Aldred was within two or three days after to depart from Milan to Rome, in very good hope to procure his dispatch.’
⁴

The following year, Aldred went to England and met Walsingham. On 15 November 1584, Aldred wrote to him from Lyons, pledging his services as a spy: ‘I assure you of my faithful and true service both to her majesty and to your honour. If you ever have cause to doubt me, cause one of your servants to write to me and I shall show myself an honest man.’
⁵

News of his unexpected visit to London reached Rome via Paris and the belief that he had turned traitor was prevalent in the Holy City by February 1585. The Pope stopped his pension and some Catholic exiles warned Aldred that if he set foot in Rome ‘he would be evil entreated even to the death’. William Lewknor, Walsingham’s agent in Lyons, told his master that

poor snack, not having other means to live than his pension was constrained to hazard himself and to strain his conscience, God knows how, for the obtaining of his stipend, the which he has obtained and has brought himself into more credit than ever he was, insomuch as he is one of the Inquisitors.
⁶

At this time, Walsingham planned to create dissension between the Jesuits and the exiled Catholic seculars abroad, and to that end employed
Aldred to sow the seeds of discord in Paris. Aldred brought Batson, a friar (and later a member of the Jesuit order) to London in 1585 for discussions with Hatton, Burghley and Walsingham ‘about moderation in religions’ but ‘all fell out to be subtle dealing from the first’, according to the leading Jesuit priest, Father Robert Persons.

Intelligence received by Walsingham from the French capital in September 1585 warned that ‘here is a great looking into Aldred [and] his doings and they are very diligent upon him. They intend to do him mischief, except he looks warily to his business’.
⁷
Stafford, the English ambassador there, warned Walsingham that Aldred was ‘somewhat long-tongued’ and that the spy should be ‘more circumspect, if only for his own safety for there are here eyes enough that neither sleep nor wink’.
⁸
The spy was still on Walsingham’s payroll in Paris in July 1589, sums having been paid to him for travelling expenses for the previous three years.

Persons commented in 1592 that Aldred was

a Catholic layman … [who] seemed to be honest [but] falling into the factious was first employed into England diverse times and often he returned to Paris to have conference with Thomas Morgan, Gilbert Gifford and others of the crew, by which he so profited in spirit, as he soon after became Walsingham’s man openly, and professed heresy and atheism, and died most miserably in Rome, showing no faith at all, in the year 1592.
⁹

Almond or Amon, Roger
, alias
William Vavasour.
A renegade Catholic and betrayer of the Jesuit priest William Holt at Leith, near Edinburgh, in March 1583. Almond was later constantly in and out of prison. He was tortured in jail in Arras in France in September 1583 and Walsingham eventually won his release. He returned to England and was almost immediately imprisoned at Winchester. In October 1584, Roger Manners, Fourth Earl of Rutland, detained Almond at Newark, Nottinghamshire.
¹⁰
The agent ‘called himself Walsingham’s servant, showed a warrant surreptitiously obtained and pretended to have been robbed of his horse’. The warrant, dated 26 September 1584, was addressed to High Sheriff
Sir John Spencer, directing him to assist William Vavasour in arresting the Jesuit Robert Persons and any other Papists. He was imprisoned yet again for having an unauthorised warrant.

He last appears in 1612, incarcerated in Newgate Prison, London, after being convicted of praemunire, and offering a composition of £100 to James I for his freedom.
¹¹

Barnard, Robert,
alias
Robert Woodward.
Also signed himself ‘P. H.’ Tracked down priests and recusants in England. When he first worked for Walsingham in January 1581, he was living in London. He seems to have been frequently impecunious, at one stage begging Walsingham: ‘I must humbly beseech you to consider of me I owe my host above
£4
who threatens to have me in prison for the same. I have not received anything from you in three months past.’

He became a kind of roving spy, rooting out recusants and hidden priests during a tour of Middlesex and Nottinghamshire and later Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Northumberland and Yorkshire in December 1584.

Barnes, Thomas,
later used the alias
‘Robinson’.
Cousin of the agent provocateur Gilbert Gifford and stayed with him in London. Implicated in the Babington conspiracy as a messenger for Mary Queen of Scots, carrying letters to and from the French ambassador. Secured his pardon from the government by agreeing to spy on Catholic exiles in Paris.
¹²
Barnes travelled there in March 1588 and became a confidant of Thomas Morgan, Charles Paget and their Catholic exile circle. Barnes returned to London in April 1589 and maintained his contacts with English Catholics in France after Walsingham’s lifetime.
¹³

Baynebridge, Patrick,
alias
Tompson.
Worked as a spy for Sir Robert Bowes, English ambassador in Edinburgh, but sent intelligence to Walsingham on Scottish Catholics in France via the English ambassador in Paris.
¹⁴
He disguised himself to accompany the French envoy in Scotland, François de Roncherolles, Seigneur de Mainville, when he was forced out of Scotland in May 1583.
¹⁵

‘
B. C
’ Alias of
Anthony Standen.

Beckner, Thomas.
An English cloth merchant in Rouen, France, who provided regular information about Catholics and general intelligence about events in France from 1584 in return for Walsingham’s help in settling a local lawsuit against him.

Berden, Nicholas,
alias
Thomas Rogers.
Able to disguise his handwriting and used a variety of names. He was the servant of a prominent Catholic layman, George Gilbert, and accompanied him to Rome.