Sir Francis Walsingham Read Free Page A

grisly secrets. He carried out his duties without flinching and was ever determined to demonstrate his unreserved loyalty. In reality, he could do no other. The men and women entrusted to his care had incurred the royal displeasure. To show sympathy for them would be to run the risk of arousing Henry’s mercurial ire. He might – and did – lament to Sir Thomas More that he was unable to make his quarters more comfortable but, as he explained, ‘Orders is orders’. We can gauge something of Sir Edmund’s temperament from the case of John Bawde. Bawde was one of the lieutenant’s own servants. He fell under the spell of Alice Tankerville, a prisoner in Coldharbour within the Tower of London. So besotted was he that he tried to help her to escape. The bid failed and his complicity was revealed. Sir Edmund’s rage (doubtless fuelled by fear for his own position) was boundless. He had Bawde thrown into Little Ease, the Tower’s most notoriously vile cell. The prisoner was subsequently racked, condemned in a speedy trial and hanged in chains.
    While Sir Edmund was leading an eventful life at the centre of power, his younger brother, William, was being groomed to take over the family responsibilities in Kent. He followed his father’s profession, held senior positions in London’s legal establishment and was prominent in the affairs of his shire. He steadily added other lands to the family’s holdings and, by 1530, was well established as a substantial gentleman with court connections. But William’s fortunes were mixed and his aspirations far from being smoothly accomplished. He married, sometime in the early 1520s, Joyce Denny, daughter ofSir Edmund Denny, a minor courtier on the staff of the Exchequer. Perhaps the introduction to a court colleague was effected by William’s brother. The union, moderately important at the time, was to prove extremely influential in the later years of Henry’s reign. Joyce’s brother, Anthony, was another of that small army of hopefuls seeking preferment at court. He was fortunate in finding a short cut to royal favour. There were scores of men who held posts in the innermost chambers of the court but few of them could count themselves as the king’s friends. One of the privileged band of intimates was Sir Francis Bryan, soldier, diplomat and tiltyard companion of the king. Bryan was a gentleman of the privy chamber and trusted by Henry with delicate diplomatic missions, including an embassy to Rome in connection with his intended divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Anthony Denny, William Walsingham’s brother-in-law, was a member of Bryan’s entourage and his patron ensured his steady, but unspectacular, promotion. By the mid-1530s Denny was a groom of the chamber, one of those who attended the king most intimately. He was an educated, cultured man of pleasing disposition and Henry increasingly warmed to him.
    William, therefore, built up a corps of valuable contacts in the Tudor establishment but fate sometimes clouded her face from him. His well-connected wife had a succession of five successful pregnancies but they all resulted in girls. Not until 1532 did she present her husband with an heir, who was christened Francis. Two years later, just when everything was going well for him, William Walsingham died. His widow was still in her twenties and had been left well provided for. Despite having five daughters to dower, she was quite a good catch and it was probably not difficult for her family to find another suitable husband for her. Unsurprisingly, the chosen groom was a Hertfordshire neighbour of the Dennys who was also well established at court. John Carey was connected to Anne Boleyn, his brother, William (now deceased), having married Anne’s sister, Mary.
    We can now begin to see a picture of the circle in which the young Francis grew up. The social focus of the royal court from the mid–1520s was the Boleyn family. Sir Thomas Boleyn had long been a courtier and diplomat