A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

riverside. The more eagerly Christopher spoke, the slower he walked. Expounding heresies excited him. But it also lightened his mood and by the end he was smiling at his own exuberance. I was in something of a daze, not only because such heresies were shocking but because they were disturbing. I had never suspected him of harbouring such thoughts. I perceive they still have power to shock, sir? Dare you relay them to the King? Is it this that His Majesty wishes to know about?

Christopher’s own deepest beliefs? I fear I cannot plumb him deep enough to know what he truly believed. If anything. He loved playing with ideas, you see, especially ideas with power to shock, and it was hard to know how he stood behind them, whether far or near. As I said when we began today, he was a cat that walked alone.

At the time I comforted myself by reflecting that he was at least partly in jest, a comfort reinforced when he placed his hand on my shoulder again and smiled his soft smile, ‘Forgive me, Thomas, I did not mean to burden you with troublesome fantasies. There is enough to complicate life without idle speculations. It is time we broke our fast.’

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Cambridge? Did Cambridge change him? A shrewd question, sir, one I cannot comfortably answer. He once told me that study of the ancients taught him to question everything. But of course he had studied them at school in Canterbury so where the change began I cannot say. It may have been Cambridge, though he did not speak in this manner when I first met him some six years before the events I have just related. He was new to Cambridge when we met.

In those days I did my secret work for Sir Francis in a private study in Whitehall Palace called the New Library, although it held more maps than books. Sir Francis and Lord Burghley were keen geographers and spent much time studying maps, Lord Burghley especially when he feared the Queen apt to be persuaded by some handsome sea-captain to pay for voyages in distant seas. He was parsimonious with the Queen’s money, as I now know to my cost, and his broad, hunched figure would stand as if turned to salt before a map. Sometimes he wrote on the maps or altered them according to what returning sea-captains – those who did return – reported. Sir Francis too would study them for hours on end until he knew all foreign countries and regions. But his chief study was a map of English counties on which were marked the houses of recusant Catholic families suspected of harbouring priests and other seditious men. This was the map he later removed to his house in Seething Lane, along with the large globe.

None apart from those two men and the Earl of Leicester, and those working closely with them, were allowed in the New Library. The Earl of Essex gained entry as a result of the Queen’s favour but he did not come often. As one of the few granted regular access I worked on my decipherings at a small table in the corner, locking my papers away when not engaged on them so that as few as possible should know whose letters we read.

That little room gave me the privacy and quiet I needed. And my need was great during the busy early summer of 1581. I was recently returned from Paris, whither Sir Francis had sent me to help our ambassador there, Sir Henry Cobham, with some papers that had come into his hands. They were not, it turned out, so very important, being copies of Spanish correspondence about the fate of 500 Spanish soldiers who had landed in County Kerry the year before in order to raise an Irish insurrection. They had surrendered in September and our forces had massacred all but 23 of them. It was not clear how or why they were massacred but what was clear from these papers was that the Spanish Court still did not know the fate of their expedition. That was important because it meant we could reasonably assume there was no Spanish spy in our midst.

Sir Francis was also recently returned from Paris where he had been sent by the Queen on a mission of great delicacy – negotiating Her Majesty’s possible marriage to the Duc d’Anjou. I daresay, sir, that few even now know that such a possibility was ever on the table? Or under it. Mr Secretary’s task was made even more delicate by the fact that he found it impossible to establish whether Her Majesty was serious. A further complication was that he himself was deeply opposed to it, believing that the throne of England should not be shared with any foreigner, especially a Catholic foreigner. But there was a point beyond which no one, not even Sir Francis, durst argue with Her Majesty. She knew his opinion and he privately hoped that she chose him as her negotiator because she wanted to show willing but did not really want the negotiation to succeed. Sir Francis appointed his young cousin, Thomas Walsingham – who later became Christopher’s patron, as you shall hear – to be his confidential courier. I was involved because correspondence carried by Thomas had to be encoded. Also, I knew more than I was supposed to because my intimate role in Sir Francis’s affairs meant that other men assumed I knew everything – which I did not – and so would discuss matters freely with or before me.

As well as all this we were dealing with serious threats on our own soil. The Pope had recently issued dispensation to Catholics to swear false loyalty to the Queen without endangering their souls. His predecessors, of course, had already granted dispensation to murder her and her advisers in order to restore England to the old faith.

Do you know whether these dispensations still stand, sir, or