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 actually did from Elizabeth’s more Fabian tactics. War, declared before England had gained the naval experience and wealth of the next fifteen years, and before Spain had been weakened by the struggle in the Netherlands and the depredations of the sea-rovers, would have been a desperate expedient; and the ideas that any action on Elizabeth’s part could have made France Huguenot, or prevented the disruption of the Netherlands, may be dismissed as the idle dreams of Protestant enthusiasts.

Walsingham, however, was an accomplished diplomatist, and he reserved these truculent opinions for the ears of his own government, incurring frequent rebukes from Elizabeth. In his professional capacity, his attitude was correct enough; and, indeed, his anxiety for the French alliance and for the marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou led him to suggest concessions to Anjou’s Catholic susceptibilities which came strangely from so staunch a Puritan. Elizabeth did not mean to marry, and although a defensive alliance was concluded between England and France in April 1572, the French government perceived that public opinion in France would not tolerate an open breach with Spain in Protestant interests. Coligny’s success in captivating the mind of Charles IX. infuriated Catherine de Médicis, and the prospect of France being dragged at the heels of the Huguenots infuriated the Catholics. The result was Catherine’s attempt on Coligny’s life and then the massacre of St Bartholomew, which placed Walsingham’s person in Jeopardy and ruined for the time all hopes of the realization of his policy of active French and English co-operation.

He was recalled in April 1573, but the queen recognized that the failure had been due to no fault of his, and eight months later he was admitted to the privy council and made joint secretary of state with Sir Thomas Smith. He held this office jointly or solely until his death; in 1577 when Smith died, Dr Thomas Wilson was associated with Walsingham; after Wilson’s death in 1581 Walsingham was sole secretary until July 1586, when Davison began his brief and ill-fated seven months’ tenure of the office. After Davison’s disgrace in February 1587 Walsingham remained sole secretary, though Wolley assisted him as Latin secretary from 1588 to 1590. He was also returned to parliament at a by-election in 1576 as knight of the shire for Surrey in succession to Charles Howard, who had become Lord Howard of Effingham, and he was re-elected for Surrey in 1584, 1586 and 1588. He was knighted on December 1, 1577, and made chancellor of the order of the Garter on April 22, 1578.

As secretary, Walsingham could pursue no independent policy; he was rather in the position of permanent under-secretary of the combined home and foreign departments, and he had to work under the direction of the council, and particularly of Burghley and the queen. He continued to urge the necessity of more vigorous intervention on behalf of the Protestants abroad, though now his clients were the Dutch rather than the Huguenots. In June 1578 he was sent with Lord Cobham to the Netherlands, mainly to glean reliable information on the complicated situation. He had interviews with the prince of Orange, with Casimir who was there in the interests of Protestant Germany, with Anjou who came in his own interests or in those of France, and with Don John, who nominally governed the country in Philip’s name; the story that he instigated a plot to kidnap or murder Don John is without foundation. Flis letters betray discontent with Elizabeth’s reluctance to assist the States; he could not understand her antipathy to rebellious subjects, and he returned in October, having accomplished little.

In August 1581 he was sent on a second and briefer mission to Paris. Its object was to secure a solid Anglo-French alliance against Spain without the condition upon which Henry III. insisted, namely a marriage between Elizabeth and Anjou. The French government would not yield, and Walsingham came back, to be followed by Anjou who sought in personal interviews to overcome Elizabeth’s objections to matrimony. He, too, was unsuccessful; and a few months later he was dismissed with some English money and ostensible assurances of support. But secretly Elizabeth countermined his plans; unlike Walsingham, she would sooner have seen Philip remain master of the Netherlands than see them fall into the hands of France. His final embassy was to the court of James VI. in 1583, and here his vehement and suspicious Protestantism led him astray and provoked him into counterworking the designs of his own government. He was convinced that James was as hostile to Elizabeth as Mary herself, and failed to perceive that he was as inimical to popery as he was to Presbyterianism. Elizabeth and Burghley were inclined to try an alliance with the Scottish king, and the event justified their policy, which Walsingham did his best to frustrate, although deserted on this occasion by his chief regular supporter, Leicester.

For the rest of his life Walsingham was mainly occupied in detecting and frustrating the various plots formed against Elizabeth’s life; and herein he achieved a success denied him in his foreign policy. He raised the English system of secret intelligence to a high degree of efficiency At one time he is said to have had in his pay fifty-three agents at foreign courts, besides eighteen persons whose functions were even more obscure. Some of them were double spies, sold to both parties, whose real sentiments are still conjectural, but Walsingham was more successful in seducing Catholic spies than his antagonists were in seducing Protestant spies, and most of his information came from Catholics who betrayed one another In his office in London men were trained in the arts of deciphering correspondence, feigning handwriting, and of breaking and repairing seals in such a way as to avoid detection. His spies were naturally doubtful characters, because the profession does not attract honest men; morality of methods can no more be expected from counter plotters than from plotters; and the prevalence of political or religious assassination made counter plot a necessity in the interests of the state.

The most famous of the plots frustrated by Walsingham was Anthony Babington’s, which he detected in 1586. Of the guilt of the main conspirators there is no doubt, but the complicity of Mary Stuart has been hotly disputed. Walsingham had long been convinced, like parliament and the majority of Englishmen, of the necessity of removing Mary; but it was only the discovery of Babington’s plot that enabled him to bring pressure enough to bear upon Elizabeth to ensure Mary’s execution. This circumstance has naturally led to the theory that he concocted, if not the plot, at least the proofs of Mary’s connivance. Undoubtedly he facilitated her self-incrimination, but of her active encouragement of the plot there can be little doubt after the publication of her letters to Mendoza, in which she excuses her complicity on the plea that no other means were left to secure her liberation. Considering the part he played in this transaction, Walsingham was fortunate to escape the fate which the queen with calculated indignation inflicted upon Davison.

Walsingham died deeply in debt on April 6, 1590. Since 1579 he had lived mainly at Barn Elms, Barnes, maintaining an adequate establishment; but his salary did not cover his expenses, he was burdened with his son-in-law Sir Philip Sidney’s debts, and he obtained few of those perquisites which Elizabeth lavished on her favourites. He had little of the courtier about him; his sombre temperament and directness of speech irritated the queen, and it says something for both of them that he retained her confidence and his office until the end of his life.

Dr Karl Stählin’s elaborate and scholarly Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit (Heidelberg, vol. i., 1908) supersedes all previous accounts of Walsingham so far as it goes (1573); Dr Stählin has also dealt with the early history of the family in his ''Die Walsingham bis zür Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts'' (Heidelberg, 1905). Vast masses of Walsingham’s correspondence are preserved in the Record Office and the British Museum; some have been epitomized in the Foreign Calendar (as far as 1582); and his correspondence during his two embassies to France was published in extenso by Sir Dudley Digges in 1655 under the title The Compleat Ambassador, possibly, as has been suggested by Dr Stählin, to give a fillip to the similar policy then being pursued by Oliver Cromwell. The ascription to Sir Francis of Arcana Aulica: or Walsingham’s Manual of Prudential Maxims for the Statesman and the Courtier is erroneous; the book is really the translation of a French treatise by one Edward Walsingham who flourished c. 1643–1659. See also Webb, Miller and Beckwith’s History of Chislehurst (1899) and  lix. 231-240.