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.