Part 22

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

In his virtues and in his faults, in his brilliance and in his limitations, in his greatness and in his defects, Walter Raleigh is the very type of Elizabeth’s England. Like Robert Cecil, Spenser, and Sidney, he was a child when the great queen ascended the throne; like Shakespeare and Bacon, he had not passed the full vigour of manhood when she died. He was a year older than Henry of Navarre, whom he outlived by eight years. Walsingham was a grown man and William Cecil a Secretary of State before any one of this younger group was born. All of them were young men still when the crisis of Elizabeth’s reign was reached and the Armada was dispersed. The older generation raised England from weakness to strength; the younger saw her strength made patent to the world. The older generation maintained her on the defensive; it was the part of the younger to assert her primacy in every field of endeavour.

Of this younger generation, Raleigh stands out as the typical representative. In an age of men of action, he was one of the greatest of the men of action. In one of the two greatest ages of English poetry he was acclaimed as one of their peers by the poets. In the age which saw the creation of English prose, he was one of the masters of prose. The military world and the naval world were developing new theories of strategy and tactics; in both fields he was a first-rate authority and a brilliant performer. The expansion of Spain and Portugal had brought new political conceptions into being; we owe the conception of Greater Britain and all the first stubborn efforts to realise it to the genius of Sir Walter. In a day of brilliant courtiers, none was more brilliant than he; and in the day when Bacon was formulating anew the principles of scientific inquiry, Raleigh was incidentally an ardent experimentalist. In every field his versatility was exercised, and in every field his place was in the front rank.

And yet perhaps--save in one thing--never quite in the first rank. His literary achievement does not set him beside Shakespeare and Spenser. Drake was a greater commander and John Davis a greater seaman. By land he was never tested in a great command. His scientific pursuits were merely a parergon. As a statesman he never achieved the control of England’s destinies; wily Robert Cecil was the craftier politician. But two things he did: he taught Englishmen that the might of England lay in her fleets--not as the accident of a moment but as a permanent principle; and he created the idea of a Britain beyond the seas, struggled for it almost alone year after year with persistent tenacity, through good report and evil report and failure--finally died for it. He it was that sowed the seed; ours is the tree that sprang from it.

II

RALEIGH’S RISE