With the tremendous issues at stake, both national and religious, with the forces engaged in setting conspiracy in motion or in encouraging it, with the untrammelled character of its operations, the nature of the fight was obviously very different from anything with which modern statesmen have to deal. Yet where active secret societies are in existence, the police methods of modern Governments are the police methods of Walsingham. The spy, the paid informer, the _agent provocateur_, play the same part now as in the sixteenth century. It was in the risks for a Spanish ambassador or agent that his secretary, or some other person standing to him in a confidential relation, might be in the pay of the English Secretary of State. Any influential person suspected of Catholic leanings might wake up one morning to find that a tolerably complete copy of his correspondence was in Walsingham’s hands. A plot, big or small, might progress merrily while the plotters hugged themselves on their skill and secrecy--till the psychological moment arrived for dropping the mask, and they found that they had merely been drawn into a carefully prepared trap.
Walsingham had no qualms about employing liars, perjurers, the basest kind of scoundrels in this business. When he had caught his culprits he quite deliberately applied the rack and other forms of torture to extract evidence. He would have argued that the Queen’s enemies had chosen their own method of fighting, and it was legitimate to meet them with their own weapons--as Clive argued in the case of Omichund; that, in fact, it was only by the use of their own weapons that he could make sure of defeating them. Also he did not originate the system--espionage and the rack were in full play when his foot was only on the lowest rung of the ladder. Also, these methods were not employed vindictively, but with the single object of obtaining true information by which treasonous designs might be frustrated. Also, in acting as he did, he did not violate the public conscience--or his own, with its rigid Old Testament limitations.
But there is one case in which he is charged with having gone farther.
It would be difficult to find any even approximate parallel to the position of Mary Stewart in England. Whatever her own attitude might be, she was the inevitable centre of Catholic plots of the most far-reaching order. While she lived, the throne of Elizabeth and the triumph of the Reformation in England could never be secure. She was held captive on no legitimate ground, but solely because her title to the English throne was so strong that the Queen could not afford to set her at liberty. In plain terms, the national security required her death, but unless she could be convicted of plotting against the life of Elizabeth, there was no legitimate ground for putting her to death. The eighth Henry would have made short work with her; there was no European sovereign who would not have made short work with any dangerous pretender to his crown who lay completely in his power. Yet even the Throgmorton conspiracy was not turned to her destruction; Elizabeth had her own reasons for preferring to keep her captive alive. But the Throgmorton revelations, with the assassination of Orange, the death of Alençon, the approach of the Spanish crisis, and the growing certainty that Mary’s son would not take her place as the figure-head for Catholic conspiracies, went far to cancel Elizabeth’s reasons. To Walsingham, alike as patriot and protestant, the death of Mary had long been about the most desirable event that could occur; and now he saw his way to compass it--to inveigle her within reach of the law.