Sir Francis Walsingham by Derek Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

doyen of English Protestants, and Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devon.
    Padua’s chief claim to fame was its ancient university, already more than 300 years old when Walsingham arrived. He enrolled in its great law school and increased his knowledge by studying with the finest European experts in the
corpus juris civilis.
It is now that we obtain our first glimpse of Walsingham’s character. He obviously impressed both his confrères and his seniors, for, in December 1555, he was elected to the office of Consularius of the English Nation in the law faculty. This meant that he represented and exercised authority over his fellow countrymen. The student body was divided into twelve ‘nations’ according to their place of origin. The chosen representative of each nation looked after his colleagues’ interests and even had a say in the running of the faculty. In return the authorities looked to him to ensure the good behaviour of his compatriots. It was an office requiring tact, firmness and diplomacy: students were no less boisterous in the sixteenth century than they are today. The twenty-three-year-old Walsingham must have possessed a gravitas which commended him to students and teachers alike.
    With French, Italian, German, Swiss, Spanish, English and other national contingents all living cheek by jowl in the narrow confines of the medieval city it cannot have been easy to keep the peace but to national rivalries were added religious differences. For the English exiles these were only intensified by news from home. As the Marian persecution grew in intensity Walsingham and all his colleagues had friends and family caught up in the Protestant witch-hunts. Those known to Walsingham included Nicholas Ridley, burned at Oxford, and John Cheke whose capture and forced recantation were a propaganda coup for the new regime. Cheke was kidnapped by government agents near Antwerp, bound and blindfolded and thrown into a ship. Within days he was in the Tower of London, where fear of the stake drove him to recant. Although freed, he went into a rapid decline and died overwhelmed with grief and shame for his betrayal of the truth. Lesser fry also suffered. Walsingham’s contemporary at King’s, John Hullier, was one of the few men to be burned in Cambridge. On a blustery Maundy Thursday he suffered long and terribly as the wind blew the flames away from his body, denying him a quick death. Almost more shocking were the finalindignities heaped upon the gentle Martin Bucer whose sermons and lectures had moved Walsingham and his friends. With great ceremony his remains were dug up after almost six years and burned in the market place.
    All the news which reached the exiles was not unwelcome. There were stories of frequent anti-government riots and demonstrations. Public reaction to the burnings was not what Mary and her bishops had hoped. In London, where most of the martyrdoms occurred, citizens resented religious zealots prying into their affairs and the arrest of neighbours. By now many held the queen in ridicule and contempt. The one event that could have saved the situation for Mary was the birth of a male heir. Ironically, it was the queen’s failure to conceive the desired prince which created for her the same dilemma that had faced her father and begun the whole Reformation and Counter-Reformation crisis. In the autumn of 1557 Mary had convinced herself that she was pregnant. Catholic hopes were raised only to be cruelly dashed when after eleven months, the humiliated queen admitted that she had been deceived.
    According to rumours emanating from sources close to the throne the queen was constantly on the alert for assassins and was afraid to show herself in public. Pious Protestants had no doubt that all this was God’s judgement on (in the words of John Knox) ‘the wicked Jezebel, who for our sins, contrary to nature and the manifest word of God, is suffered to reign over us in God’s fury’. 9 Many were the debates Walsingham