Contributions
Francis Walsingham is the father of English state intelligence. A convinced Protestant, exiled on the Continent under the Catholic Mary I, a linguist trained in law and diplomacy, he returned to serve Elizabeth I and became in 1573 one of her principal secretaries. In that office he methodically built a network of informers, agents and decipherers spread across Europe, from Paris to Madrid, from Rome to Constantinople. He refined the techniques of modern espionage: the interception and opening of letters, cryptanalysis, double agents, surveillance of Catholic networks. His masterpiece was the unravelling, in 1586, of the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth and set Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne: his decipherers read the conspirators' secret correspondence and gathered the proof that brought Mary to the block. A fervent champion of the Protestant cause, he also weighed on diplomacy toward Spain and helped prepare the realm for the confrontation with the Armada.
Significance
Walsingham marks a break in the art of government: he made intelligence a permanent, organised part of the state, where before it had been a matter of chance. His network - among the first secret services worthy of the name in Europe - protected the queen's life and, with it, the survival of the English Protestant regime on a continent dominated by Catholic powers. His success in the Babington affair sealed the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, and showed the formidable efficiency of his methods. But his is also the most ambivalent figure of Elizabeth's circle. To protect the state he resorted without scruple to entrapment, provocation and manipulation: in the Babington Plot he let - even encouraged - the conspiracy to grow so as to gather damning proof, a practice that raises the question of the limits of state intelligence. Austere to the point of rigidity, nicknamed by the queen her "Moor" for his dark complexion and black dress, at times at odds with Elizabeth's caution which he thought too lenient, he died in 1590 deep in debt, having largely financed the Crown's service from his own purse. His shadow was that of his very trade; his light, a total devotion to his country's survival.
Influence
He invented in England the model of a state intelligence service and bequeathed to his successors - beginning with Robert Cecil - lasting methods of cryptanalysis and surveillance. His practice shaped the modern idea that the security of sovereign and state rests on organised information, and his part in preparing for the Armada contributed to the rise of English power.
Anecdote
As ambassador in Paris in August 1572, Walsingham sheltered in his residence English and French Protestants fleeing the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre; the horror of those days fixed in him the conviction that no vigilance was too much against the Catholic threat. Years later, to trap the Babington conspirators, his service had the plotters' ciphered letters pass through a hiding place fashioned in the bung of a beer barrel, reading and copying them before letting them go on their way.