Sir Francis Walsingham Read Free

the poor and were not averse to taking bribes. At the same time, anyone seeking justice had to employ the experts and by 1500 more than 3,000 new suits per annum were being presented in the courts of the capital alone. The law was a hard trade to master but a lucrative one to follow. More importantly, it was becoming a stepping-stone to that place where
real
fortunes were to be made – the royal court. For half a century the fate of rival royal dynasties had been decided by baronial armies. The new king decided that the weight of his regime would be borne not by steel blades but by paper statutes. He would employ the nation’s best legal brains to strengthen his position and secure the succession for his heirs. Over the ensuing decades the balance of the royal Council changed; the barons and senior ecclesiastics who had assumed that they were indispensable to the government of the country had to make room for new men, versed in the law and loyal only to the Crown.
    James Walsingham, Francis’ grandfather, never made it to the very top of the tree – membership of the royal Council – but he was one of the leaders of royal society: a justice of the peace, member of various royal commissions and Sheriff of Kent in 1486–7. He consolidated his position in the county and acquired a grant of arms from the College of Heralds. And he ensured that his two sons would be drawn to the attention of the king. When he died, full of years, in 1540 he had cause for satisfaction that his family had received significent marks of royal favour. He could not, however, have foreseen that his youngest grandson, Francis, was destined to become one of the nation’s leaders. His greater expectations were focused on the career of his son and heir, Edmund.
    The young extrovert prince who came to the throne in 1509 as Henry VIII sought his companions among macho, athletic, patriotic Englishmen like himself. It was no coincidence, therefore, that Edmund received a martial training. In 1513 he gathered some retainers about him and joined the 20,000-strong force being hurriedly assembled on the northern border by the Earl of Surrey to ward off a Scottish invasion. The ensuing victory at Flodden was one of the most bloody and decisive ever achieved in the long history of Anglo-Scottish warfare. Several captains were afterwards knighted by Surrey – among them Edmund Walsingham. The young man’s exploits were brought to the attention of the king and Edmund’s place among the young blades of the court was secured. He appeared frequently in the tiltyard as an accomplished horseman and exponent of sixteenth-century martial arts. In 1520 he was chosen as one of the knights to accompany the king to France for the sumptuous diplomatic display which has gone down in history as the Field of Cloth of Gold. It was a signal sign of Henry’s confidence in Edmund that, in 1521, he gave him charge of England’s major fortress-prison, the Tower of London. The man responsible for the Tower was the Constable and, for most of this period, that was Sir William Kingston, but it was the Lieutenant who actually resided there and was responsible for day-to-day administration.
    Sir Edmund Walsingham was destined to be Lieutenant of the Tower during its most bloody and controversial years. Henry VIIIruthlessly used the grim stronghold for cowing opposition to his policies, disposing of possible Yorkist rivals and for applying the ‘final solution’ to some of his marital entanglements. Among the notable prisoners incarcerated there and executed within the walls or on the adjacent hillside were Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Marquess of Exeter, the Countess of Salisbury, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. There were many more smaller fry who faced torture, deprivation and the axe in Henry’s police state.
    Edmund Walsingham proved himself to be the ideal jailer and guardian of the Tower’s