England is ruled by a beleaguered woman trying to hold together a fractured country while looking over her shoulder for conspirators waiting to stab her in the back. She lives in fear of a younger, Scottish female rival who might prove more popular with the populace. People are suspected of plotting against the state on account of their religion, and the government uses the climate of fear as an excuse to spy on its citizens. New laws are passed to make the reading or possession of suspect material a criminal offence. Ministers of state even attempt to whip up cheap patriotism by murmuring about the prospect of war with Spain.
It’s no wonder there’s been a resurgence of interest among dramatists and novelists in the turbulent world of the late 16th century and the way it gave rise to the origins of the modern surveillance state. Commentators have found parallels to our troubled times in a number of historical periods – most obviously the 1930s – but to me there’s a unique richness in the way the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age reflects our current anxieties about national identity, religious allegiance and individual freedom.
Anders Lustgarten’s new play, The Secret Theatre, is currently making superb use of the evocative shadows and candlelight of the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London to illuminate the character and motivation of one of the most intriguing figures of the age – Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham – the original C.
I’ve been writing about Walsingham as the mastermind of a global spy network – the precursor to our present-day Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – for almost 10 years in the series of historical thrillers I write as SJ Parris. In that time I’ve become increasingly fascinated by the inner life of this obsessive man who rose from relatively humble origins and almost bankrupted himself in the desire to keep England safe from Catholic plots, ultimately working himself to death for Elizabeth.
I’ve always thought that Malcolm Tucker’s rant about the toll of his work in the final season of The Thick of It (“This is a fucking husk. I am a fucking host for this fucking job”) could have been spoken by Walsingham towards the end of his life, possibly with slightly less swearing. He was a devoted family man who was willing to turn the handle of the rack himself while interrogating Catholic suspects, if he thought the information they spilled might be too sensitive even for the ears of professional torturers.
Lustgarten brings all this out vividly, bending historical record the better to illustrate his interpretation of the man in a graphic torture scene with the Jesuit poet and priest Robert Southwell. Walsingham’s ruthlessness in this regard had a deeply personal foundation. He had been Elizabeth’s ambassador in Paris in 1572, when Catholic troops massacred thousands of innocent Protestants in their homes; Walsingham and his family, including his four-year-old daughter, were barricaded inside the embassy and only survived because the king dispatched an armed guard to protect them. The morality of using torture to prevent more deaths is not a question that seems likely to go away any time soon.
Perhaps it’s the nature of the job, but Walsingham has remained somewhat in the shadows, the significance of his role understated. The recent BBC documentary Elizabeth I’s Secret Agents gave most of the credit to Sir William Cecil, the queen’s other trusted adviser, and Lustgarten also portrays Cecil as the victor in an ongoing struggle for supremacy between the two men. But it’s Walsingham whose portrait now hangs in C’s private dining room at MI6 HQ. There couldn’t be a more apt time for him to take centre stage.
- The Secret Theatre is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 16 December. Box office: 020-7401 9919. Conspiracy by SJ Parris is published by HarperCollins.
