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Walsingham' Sir Francis
WALSINGHAM, SIR FRANCIS (c. 1530—1590), English statesman, was the only son of William Walsingham, common. sergeant of London (d. March 1534), by his wife Joyce, daughter of Sir Edmund Denny of Cheshunt. The family is assumed to have sprung from Walsingham in Norfolk, but the earliest authentic traces of it are found in London in the first half of the 15th century; and it was one of the numerous families which, having accumulated wealth in the city, planted themselves out as landed gentry and provided the Tudor monarchy with its justices of the peace and main support. To this connexion may also be attributed much of the influence which London exerted over English policy in the 16th century. Sir Francis’s great-great-great-grandfather, Alan, was a cordcsacsawainer of Gracechurch Street; Alan’s son Thomas, a vintner, purchased Scadbury in Chislehurst, and Thomas’s great-grandson William bought Foot’s Cray, where Francis may have been born. His uncle Sir Edmund was lieutenant of the Tower, and his mother was related to Sir Anthony Denny, a member of Henry VIII.’s privy council who attended him on his death-bed.
Francis matriculated as a fellow-commoner of King’s College, Cambridge, of which Sir John Cheke was provost, in November 1548; and he continued studying there amid strongly Protestant influences until Michaelmas 155o, when he appears, after the fashion of the time, to have gone abroad to complete his education (Stghlin, p. 79). Returning in 1552 he was admitted at Gray’s Inn on January 28, 1553, but Edward Vi’s death six months later induced him to resume his foreign travels. In 1555—I 556 he was at Padua, where he was admitted a “consiiarius” in the faculty of laws. Returning to England after
Elizabeth’s accession he was elected M.P. for Banbury to her first parliament, which sat from January to May 1559. He married in January 1562 Anne, daughter of George Barnes, Lord Mayor of London and widow of Alexander Carleill, whose son-in-law Christopher Hoddesdon was closely associated with maritime and commercial enterprise. He was elected to represent Lyme Regis in Elizabeth’s second parliament of 1563 as well as for Banbury, and preferred to sit for the former borough. lie may have owed his election to Cecil’s influence, for to Cecil he subsequently attributed his rise to power; but his brotherin-law Sir Walter Mildmay was well known at court and in 1566 became chancellor of the exchequer. In that year Walsingham married a second time, his first wife having died in 1564; his second was also a widow, Ursula, daughter of Henry St Barbe and widow of Sir Richard Vorsley of Appuldurcombe, captain of the Isle of Wight. Her sister Edith married Robert Beale, afterwards the chief of Walsingham’s henchmen. By his second wife Walsingham had a daughter who married firstly Sir Philip Sidney, secondly Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and thirdly Richard de Burgh, earl of Clanricarde.
Walsingham’s earliest extant communications with the government date from 1567; and in that and the following two years he was supplying Cecil with information [next page]