The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by Cooper John

Author:Cooper, John [Cooper, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571283170
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2011-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Reading this letter in context, it almost rings true. The Elizabethan age praised those willing to face peril in the pursuit of fame. Berden’s work was undoubtedly dangerous, and by Protestant standards counted as heroic. His political vocabulary is a plausible reaction to the nationalistic rhetoric that had become deeply rooted in English culture by the 1580s.

Almost rings true – but not quite; because Berden, like Maliverny Catlyn, also worked for money. Within Catholic circles, he cloaked his treachery by posing as someone who could influence Walsingham to be lenient through his own contacts at court – so long as the price was right. In accepting the bribes of Catholic gentlemen, he enriched himself while rising ever higher in their estimation. Berden literally held the power of life and death in his hands, annotating Walsingham’s lists of captured priests as to who should be banished, who imprisoned and who hanged. He contrived to be convincing to all sides. His last letter to his master, written in April 1588 when his cover had finally been blown in Paris, thanked Walsingham for securing him the contract to supply poultry to the royal kitchens. He has no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but he surely deserves one.28

Perhaps it is not so surprising that the crucible of Tudor religion and politics distilled men like Nicholas Berden, who defended his own bloody advancement with the language of glory and patriotism. What remains astonishing is Walsingham’s ability to recruit double agents from within the very brotherhood of Catholic priests that he was hunting down. The most notorious of these turncoats was Gilbert Gifford, who would play a central role in the Babington plot. Gifford was an unquiet soul, the son of a Staffordshire recusant and barely seventeen when he entered Allen’s college at Douai in 1577. Having apparently challenged another student to a duel, he left for the English College at Rome but was soon expelled from there too. In 1583 Allen took Gifford back and he was finally ordained deacon. He then journeyed to Paris to meet the two leading figures of the expatriate Catholic resistance, Thomas Morgan and Charles Paget. Morgan wanted to open a channel of communication to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was at that point under house arrest at Chartley in Gifford’s home county. But Gifford was too visible, too quick to temper, to make an effective courier. When he crossed the Channel to Rye in December 1585 he was swiftly arrested and brought to Walsingham to be interrogated.

Was Gifford already working for the English security services when he was picked up at Rye? One Jesuit writer alleges that Walsingham had turned him two years earlier, although Gifford’s most recent biographer hedges his bets. If the accusation against him is just, then his dealings with Morgan and Paget in Paris look like a prime example of what Camden called Walsingham’s ‘complotting’: a Machiavellian manoeuvre to tempt the English exiles into treason. From here it is an easy step to a conspiracy led by Walsingham and Burghley against the life of Mary Stuart.

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