The Secretariat of Francis Walsingham, 1568–1590

Mid-Elizabethan rivalry over policy and patronage split the system of state information and espionage into the collaboration of individuals. To maintain the utmost privacy, Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, designed a comparatively enclosed information management and secretarial machinery that combined household space with clientage. This strategy facilitated the multiple infiltrations of clientage into the different levels of power politics, ranging from pan-European espionage to government administration and parliament. The political involvement of clientele hence constructed the late Tudor polity out of another amalgam of bureaucratic and household elements. Using the model of Walsingham's privatised, flexible and meritocratic secretariat, this essay will examine a new style of Tudor clientage and their capture of power within the mid-Elizabethan regime. In doing so, it explores the connection within and between clients, bureaucrats and the monarch, as well as a political controversy concerning the late Tudor polity.