Francis Walsingham

“ He was much employed in political affairs by Sir Francis Walsingham, after whose death he retired into private life. He died on 29 March 1608, and was buried in the chancel of the church at Chertsey, Surrey, where a black marble was erected to his memory with a curious Latin inscription which is printed by Wood. ”

“ Of thy immortal Wit will never die.
He wrote also besides his Arcadia, several other Works; namely, A Defence of Poesie, a Book entituled Astrophel and Stella, with divers Songs and Sonnets in praise of his Lady, whom he celebrated under that bright Name; whom afterwards he married, that Paragon of Nature, Sir Francis Walsingham's Daughter, who impoverished himself to enrich the State; from whom he expected no more than what was above all Portions, a beautiful Wife, and a virtuous Daughter. ”

“ She was dining in the tent of Lord Leicester, the lieutenant general of the land forces, herself being 322 the generalissimo, when they arrived. There were present, beside the queen and the earl, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had come down from London for conference with the queen; Hatton, the vice chamberlain, the young Earl of Essex who, despite his inexperience, had been made the captain-general of the cavalry, and Lord Shrope, who had hastened to return to England upon hearing of his country’s peril. ”

“ CLEEVE, BOURCHIER (d. 1760) , writer on finance, a prosperous pewterer in. London, was probably the son of Alexander Cleeve, pewterer in Cornhill, who died on 11 April 1738 (Gent. Mag. April 1738, p. 221) . Cleeve's name is mentioned in 1755 as paying a fine to be excused serving the office of sheriff. About this date he acquired an estate in Foots Cray, Kent, once the property of Sir Francis Walsingham. ”

“ Thou knowest well all evidence that can be obtained anent every one implicated with that ‘bosom serpent, Mary,’ should be gotten wil or nil.”
“My Lord of Burleigh is seeking you,” said Lord Shrope. “He reporteth that Babington hath made full confession, and hath thrown himself upon the mercy of the queen.”
“Say you so?” Walsingham started for the door, and then paused. “Thy services will not be needed to-day,” he said to the tormentor. “As for thee,” turning to Francis, “thy sex protects thee from torture, but in 258 sooth I wonder that one so young should be so staunch.” ”

“ He is getting old. All the world was growing old, and all his contemporaries, in the phrase of the day, were “a little thing sickish.” The intrepid and laborious Walsingham is described as being “troubled with his old diseases: the tympany and carnosity,” and so is absent from Court. Letters still flowed in to the Earl, news of the Netherlands campaign, from the now depressed Lord Leicester, the Governor, news of the Queen’s movements, of Spain, of the legal strife of his contemporaries and friends. ”

“ WALSINGHAM, Sir EDMUND (1490?–1550) , lieutenant of the Tower of London, was elder son of James Walsingham (1462–1540) . The pedigree of the family, which is supposed to have originally come from Walsingham in Norfolk, has been conjecturally carried back to the thirteenth century. ”

“ Such an experience made Walsingham reluctant to undertake other diplomatic missions. The queen's indecision had allowed the king of Scotland to fall under the influence of the catholic party among his councillors; but when Elizabeth realised the danger in which a breach with Scotland would involve her, she bade Walsingham go to Edinburgh and judge at close quarters the position of affairs. James was to be dissuaded at all hazards from negotiating with Spain in behalf of his mother. Walsingham did not complacently face a repetition of the humiliation that he had suffered in France. ”

“ Walsingham, in his history of the reign, describes with unction the King’s childish behaviour during his fits of ungovernable anger,31 his violent words on more than one occasion to his Parliaments, and his absurd extravagance in dress. With righteous indignation he relates how Richard, on his way to London, borrowed from the monastery a palfrey, which he never returned. ”

“ A pious Norfolk lady caused a little wooden house to be built in imitation of the Holy House at Nazareth and invited her neighbours to join with her there in meditation on the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. With time and a great concourse of pilgrims came an elaboration of legend and a variety of foreign accessories, maybe exaggerated in the half satirical description given by Erasmus. But when the true unvarnished story of Walsingham comes to be written it will show that to the very end a degree of sober good sense controlled the authorities there. ”

“ On the plains all waited for letters. Walsingham was no exception to the rule. Few came. He was too far away. Younger sons of impoverished noblemen are sent to far-off places purposely to be forgotten. He employed the intervals between such stray notes as he received in studying Cyclona. ”

“ If the good man had any cause of dissatisfaction, it was with the Calvinistic tendencies of the Ambassador’s household. Walsingham was always on the Puritanical side of Elizabeth’s court, and such an atmosphere as that of Paris, where the Roman Catholic system was at that time showing more corruption than it has ever done before or since in any other place, naturally threw him into sympathy with the Reformed. ”

“ Weary suppliants, on the way to, or returning from, the road of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here, and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would, as already hinted, be the gravest [Pg 91] mistake to assume pilgrims to have been, quâ pilgrims, necessarily decorous; and, indeed, modern Bank Holiday folks, compared with them, would shine as true examples of monkish austerity.
HOUSE FORMERLY A PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, COMPTON.
The shrine at Walsingham, very highly esteemed in East Anglia, drew crowds from every class, from king to beggar. ”

“ In truth, Elizabeth and James were personally the great support of the high church interest; it had few real friends among their counsellors.
[368] Burnet, ii. 418; Cabala, part ii. 38 (4to edition) . Walsingham grounds the queen's proceedings upon two principles: the one, that "consciences are not to be forced, but to be won and reduced by force of truth, with the aid of time, and use of all good means of instruction and persuasion;" the other, that "cases of conscience, when they exceed their bounds, and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature ”

“ Walsingham also relates that the King proceeded to York, and summoned the whole county of Northumberland to appear before him. The Earl, who had started with a strong body a few days after the battle, either in ignorance of his son's failure, or to meet the King for the purpose of treating with him for peace, had been resisted by the Earl of Westmoreland, and compelled to retire to Warkworth. On receiving the King's summons, leaving the commonalty behind, he approached the royal presence with a small retinue, and, in the humble guise of a suppliant, besought forgiveness. ”

“ Therefore the country swarmed with spies and informers; and Walsingham, as a man of a detective genius, was kept hard at work to trace, by his secret emissaries, every concealed movement of sedition. Both at home and abroad he had a host of agents under a multitude of disguises. The society of Jesuits never had a more expert and fearless general, nor a more varied army of informers. They presented themselves in the shape of travelling noblemen, of physicians, of students in Popish seminaries. They swarmed in seaports lying betwixt England and the different chief Continental routes. ”

“ His tongue for prating like a moon-struck boy's.
"I am mad," he cried, "I am mad to babble so!"
Then Walsingham drew near him with strange eyes
And muttered slowly, "Write that madness down;
Ay, write it down, that madman's plan of thine;
Sign it, and let me take it to the Queen."
But the weather-wiser seaman warily
Answered him, "If it please Almighty God
To take away our Queen Elizabeth,
Seeing that she is mortal as ourselves,
England might then be leagued with Spain, and I
Should here have sealed my doom. I will not put
My pen to paper." ”

“ Who, outside Norfolk, knows that “worsted” gets its name from Worstead in East Norfolk, a village with a noble church that might hold from 800 to 1,000 people? I see in the “Clergy List” that the population is now 781, of whom 54 per cent. might be expected to go to church, if they valued statistics—and our incomparable Liturgy.
Take another case. There was a time when Our Lady of Walsingham had an extraordinary reputation, not only in England but in the Low Countries. ”

“ With all this machinery in his hands, Walsingham patiently awaited the progress of the correspondence, till it should have ripened into sufficient flagrancy to become fatal to his dupes. That it might speed the faster, he seems to have applied a strong stimulus through his agent Pooley. About Midsummer he had obtained a letter from Babington to Mary, proposing in plain terms the murder of Elizabeth, and the liberation of herself, on receiving her unequivocal sanction to those two measures. ”

“ But the popular feeling ran so strongly against him that it was felt impossible for him to remain at Waterford, and having obtained letters of recommendation to Walsingham from Lord Grey and Archbishop Loftus, he repaired to England, apparently in September 1581. ”

“ Lady Walsingham died in 1844, and his lordship married, secondly, on October 25th, 1847, the Horn Emily Elizabeth Julia Thellusson, eldest daughter of John, second Lord Rendlesham, by whom he left issue three sons and three daughters. His lordship was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1824, was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1827, and in 1842 was made LL.D. of his University. Although educated for the law, he devoted himself to agriculture, the improvement of his estate, and of his cattle and sheep. ”

“ Sir Thomas Walsingham (1568–1630) , Sir Edmund's grandson, was third son of Sir Thomas Walsingham (1526–1584) , Sir Edmund's only surviving son, who was sheriff of Kent in 1563, and was knighted ten years later. His mother was Dorothy, fourth daughter of Sir John Guldeford of Hempstead in Benenden, Kent. He succeeded to the family estates at Chislehurst in 1589 on the death of his elder brother, Edmund, and rapidly acquired a high position as a country gentleman, a courtier, and a patron of literature. ”

“ No documentary evidence exists before the fifteenth century, when the city of London archives show that Sir Edmund's great-great-grandfather, Alan Walsingham, was in 1415 a citizen and cordwainer, owning property in Gracechurch Street. Alan's son, Thomas Walsingham, a London citizen and vintner, was the earliest of the family to settle in Kent; in 1424 he purchased the estate of Scadbury at Chislehurst, and he added to the property much neighbouring land in 1433. ”

“ He's so beastly intelligent. Besides, the famous reading is still to come off, and it has been postponed a day, to allow Guy Walsingham to arrive. It appears that this eminent lady is staying at a house a few miles off, which means of course that Mrs. Wimbush has forcibly annexed her. She's to come over in a day or two—Mrs. Wimbush wants her to hear Mr. Paraday.
"To-day's wet and cold, and several of the company, at the invitation of the Duke, have driven over to luncheon at Bigwood. ”

“ By way of avenging himself on him for his interposition, Arran substituted ‘a stone of crystal’ for the rich diamond in the ring which James assigned to the English envoy on his departure (State Papers, Scotl., ed. Thorpe, i. 452–9; Cal. Hatfield MSS. iii. 124–7; Melvill, Memoirs, 1683, pp. 147–8; Hume, The Great Lord Burghley, pp. 381–2) .
Walsingham's purpose was unchanged. The queen must still be driven at all costs into effective intervention in behalf of the protestants in the Low Countries. The chances of the queen's surrender on the point seemed small. ”

“ In her answer to this letter, she does not advert to this hint, but mentions Babington as in correspondence with her. At her trial she denied all communication with him.
[251] It may probably be answered to this, that if the letter signed by Walsingham as well as Davison to Sir Amias Paulet, urging him "to find out some way to shorten the life of the Scots queen," be genuine, which cannot perhaps be justly questioned (though it is so in the Biog. Brit. art. Walsingham, note O) , it will be difficult to give him credit for any scrupulousness with respect to Mary. ”

“ And as I have heard lately at Walsingham, the people had risen if one person had not been. And as I hear say, some of them now be in Norwich Castle, and others be sent to London.’ And further, the said Richard said, p. 297‘If two men were gathered together, one might say to another what he would as long as the third man was not there; and if three men were together, if two of them were absent, the third might say what he would in surety enough.’ And he said he knew there was a certain prophecy, which if the said Robert would come to Bungay, he should hear it read ”

“ For three hours the struggle and carnage went on, every one fighting. Soot against Scot, Englishman against Englishman, with the fury of demons; the archers all the while pouring in their showers of arrows on their opponents, so that, as Walsingham says, "the dead lay thick as leaves in autumn;" and so encumbered were the ranks, that there was scarcely any advancing over them. Still, everywhere the forces of Percy and Douglas were carrying the day; yet, at length, Henry's fortune once more prevailed. He had fought everywhere with a gallantry not surpassed by any man in the field. ”