W Is For...Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's Spymaster! A To Z Challenge 2017

                                                  

She drove him crazy, constantly changing her mind. At one point, she banished him from court for several months. But Sir Francis Walsingham  was a good and loyal civil servant and without him, Elizabeth I stood a much greater chance of being assassinated or losing her throne.

Let's face it, Elizabeth had plenty of enemies, as did the rest of her family, ever since her grandfather Henry VII grabbed the throne off Richard III. There were all those young men in Henry's reign popping up claiming to be his wife's brothers and therefore the rightful heirs to the throne. There were real relatives of the York family who might be a threat(his son Henry VIII got rid of the last of those).

And then the Tudors started marrying off daughters. And THEY had children with Tudor blood who were, maybe, entitled to inherit, and why bother waiting to inherit, especially when That Woman currently on the throne wasn't even a Catholic? It didn't help, in this respect, that she hadn't married and produced her own heir.

And the biggest of her enemies, apart from her brother-in-law, Phillip of Spain, was Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was Elizabeth's cousin, through her grandmother, Margaret Tudor(who remarried after her first husband's death and produced another potential heir...), and not only that, but she had married and produced an heir. Who, by the way, did end up becoming King of England, but that was later. Mary hadn't been capable of running her own country, let alone Elizabeth's, which was why she ended up in England, with plots going on all around her. Elizabeth didn't know what to do with her. Well, she did, but she didn't think it was a good idea, for quite some years. And then she hated doing it. 

Elizabeth needed her faithful spymaster to find out who was plotting what and deal with it. And boy, was there a lot of plotting going on! Elizabethan England was a golden age of spying. Francis Walsingham was the right man to be running it. 

Francis was born in 1532, the son of a lawyer, and became one himself. When Elizabeth's sister Mary came to the throne, he fled the country; it was not a good time to be a staunch Protestant in England. He didn't waste his time overseas, studying local law in Italy. 

Returning in 1558 after Elizabeth became Queen, when it was safe, he was elected to Parliament. By 1568, he had started working for her Principal Secretary William Cecil, doing a little spying among French and Italians living in London, gathering information about plots by Spain and France to kick Elizabeth off the throne and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. 

Later, he became Ambassador to France, where he was during the Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants. That happened in 1572, and he had a lot of sorting out to do. 

Returning to England the next year, he got a job on the Privy Council. His career as a spymaster took off. 

Francis organised a huge intelligence network. He used double agents. In fact, when Mary Queen of Scots was under house arrest in England, he didn't just unearth the plots around her, he had his double agents fool her agents into using communications methods they had supplied! "Here's a nice beer barrel we can use to smuggle messages in..." 

He had his own experts who developed and used codes. Through other experts, he had ways of opening sealed documents without the people they were sent to suspecting they had ever been opened. I can't help wondering if he, like Eugene Francois Vidocq, might not have employed criminals... He certainly used them in prisons. He had spies in countries outside England, even in North Africa! And he used statistics, economics, methods of government, to help him in his work. It makes sense. If you hear a country you don't trust is having economic difficulties, for example, it's worth keeping an eye on them. 

Thanks to Francis and his work, an invasion of England by Spanish and French troops in favour of Mary was avoided in 1583. He had a spy in the French Embassy, who warned him in time to arrest the head conspirator and seize maps and plans that told their own story. 

And then there was the (Anthony) Babington plot, only three years later, when Francis's double agents managed finally to get proof that Mary was a part of those plots against her cousin, through those beer barrels, and she was executed. Francis could breathe again.

But his work wasn't done. In 1587 he made sure the Spanish didn't catch on that Francis Drake was about to raid their harbour at Cadiz - and when he knew through his network that the Spanish had their own plans for invading England, he made sure they were fed fake information through the English Ambassador in Paris, whom he was pretty sure was in their pay. (Clifford Stoll would like that!). This reduced the Spanish Armada's chances when they set off to invade England. There were other factors, of course, but even Francis Walsingham couldn't control the weather. He just gave the English a fighting chance.

When he died in 1590, Elizabeth had lost a major asset. I hope she realised it. 

My main source for this post was Britannica On Line. Both illustrations are public domain.