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Review
| Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage, by Stephen Budiansky. New York: Viking, 2005. 229 pages. $24.95, cloth.
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| When someone without formal historical training writes history for a popular audience, as Stephen Budiansky has done here, the author has a double burden: accuracy and liveliness. Historical popularizers who devote themselves to one area of history can become quite expert. Unquestionably Stephen Budiansky has the stylistic talents to write for a popular audience and just as unquestionably he has no formal training in Elizabethan England. What he ends up doing, more often than not, is staying on the very narrow path between academic correctness and making it interesting. Occasionally he gets it completely wrong. He gives a very funny line that he attributes to the French ambassador in Elizabeth I's court in which he wishes himself in Calcutta. There was no city named Calcutta in the sixteenth century. A couple of pages further on Budiansky claims that the voting qualification in England involved owning land that brought in profits of ,40 per year. That is the amount of landed income qualifying someone for knighthood. Qualifications for voting varied from place to place, but generally required a good deal less income than ,40 a year. Fortunately, however much these mistakes make the professional wince, they are not frequent enough to spoil the book. |
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On other occasions Budiansky is just off the mark. Because the author is writing for an audience that he presumes has little or no background in Elizabethan England, he sets about sketching a picture of the society that takes him just under half the book to complete. Unfortunately he relies upon secondary works that, with just a couple of exceptions, are a decade or more old. Whatever the source of the problem, he writes like someone who does not quite grasp the nature of the country he is describing. At one point, when discussing mobility in Elizabethan England, Budiansky remarks that no one lost when a yeoman became a gentleman. That is a very American view of English society, especially sixteenth century English society. The weaknesses are not quite so evident when he focuses on the international scene. Without going into great depth in a short book, he lays out the conflicts England had with the major Roman Catholic powers of Spain and France. He also shows what a delicate matter it was to keep the two of them from forming an alliance with each other to depose Elizabeth I. Both powers had that end in mind at one time or another, but fortunately for the queen, never at the same time. Budiansky is a little less sure of his touch when it comes to the revolt in the Protestant Netherlands. He never quite seems to grasp that for the English, French control was as big a danger as Spanish control. England did not want a major power with a tight grip located there; strategically and economically the area was too important. As a result, he does not realize that Elizabeth's marriage negotiations with the heir to the French throne had a lot to do with keeping him and the French out of the Low Countries. |
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So what does the book get right? It gives a sound, convincing analysis of its leading characters, especially of Walsingham. Sir Francis comes through as a very subtle, extremely clever man who devoted his life to protecting England and its queen and to keeping Protestantism safe. Budiansky shows that Walsingham performed this feat in large measure by means of an intelligence network that covered most of the countries in Europe. Sir Francis particularly targeted people attempting to put the Roman Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne. This meant infiltrating their network and finding out their plans before they could put them into operation. It also meant plotting Mary's trial and execution, which Walsingham managed, as Budiansky indicates, at no small cost to his standing with the queen. Not surprisingly, given the other books Budiansky has written about intelligence networks, this is the section of this work in which he is at his best. When it comes to constructing codes and breaking them, he gives a layman a friendly analysis that in many ways is the strongest section in the book. The main value of this work is that it is written in a lively manner that could help to interest undergraduates in sixteenth century English history. If complete historical accuracy and up to date interpretation are the principal concerns, then try another book. |
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| Indiana University South Bend |
Roy Schreiber |
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