Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage

Backstage Hero

Once upon a time -- a time not without parallels to our own, although with far more hangings and far fewer professional politicians -- there was a man named Francis Walsingham. Walsingham, as he emerges from Stephen Budianksy's lively and fascinating account of one man's contributions to the cause of British empire, was an educated and cool thinker, unhindered by vanity or showiness, born around the same time as Queen Elizabeth I, who he would come to serve. He was a Protestant true believer in a time when the passion for religious persecution ran high and gruesome, and when the official religion of England was still a mash of old and new. Government odd jobs led Walsingham to the post of English Ambassador to France (a post which, in those quaint days, was self-financed), and on to being named the Queen's Principal Secretary. In the "half-medieval-half-modern, half-amateur-half-professional-government of Elizabeth," Walsingham was forced to define the duties of his new title, and so he set about behaving like a proto-intelligence czar. This involved, at first, a network of lowlife paid informants, invisible inks, and cipher decipherers, although soon the network grew more sophisticated, with double agents infiltrating the circles of the Queen's enemies, and Walsingham instigating military adventures abroad. In these many plots and counter-plots, Walsingham's primary target (as anyone who saw the movie version of Elizabeth's life knows) was Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic and man-eater extraordinaire. Walsingham's paper-shuffling eventually beats out Mary's hot-blooded plot for a violent uprising, although in a somewhat less dramatic way than the movie version would have you believe. Walsingham was a hero for his native England, although he was, portentously, and for better or worse, a backstage, bureaucratic sort of hero.

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