Sir Francis Walsingham, as we have said, had the honour to be Sir Philip Sidney's father-in-law; he was a gentleman at first, of a good house, and of a better education, and from the University travelled for the rest of his learning. Doubtless he was the only linguist of his times, how to use his own tongue, whereby he came to be employed in the chiefest affairs of State.
He was sent Ambassador to France, and stayed there LEGAR long in the heat of the civil wars, and at the same time that Monsieur was here a suitor to the Queen; and, if I be not mistaken, he played the very same part there as since Gondomar did here. {59} At his return he was taken principal Secretary, and for one of the great engines of State, and of the times, high in his mistress's (the Queen's) favour, and a watchful servant over the safety of his mistress.
They note him to have certain courtesies and secret ways of intelligence above the rest; but I must confess I am to seek wherefore he suffered Parry {60} to play so long as he did, hang on the hook, before he hoisted him up; and I have been a little curious in the search thereof, though I have not to do with the ARCANA REGALIA IMPERII, for to know it is sometimes a burden; and I remember it was Ovid's criminant error that he saw too much, but I hope these are collaterals, and of no danger.
But that Parry, having an intent to kill the Queen, made the way of his access by betraying of others, and in impeaching of the priests of his own correspondency, and thereby had access to confer with the Queen, as oftentimes private and familiar discourse with Walsingham, will not be the query of the mystery, for the Secretary might have had an end of a further discovery and maturity of the treason; but that, after the Queen knew Parry's intent, why she would then admit him to private discourse, and Walsingham to suffer him, considering the conditions of all the designs, and to permit him to go where and whither he listed, and only under the secrecy of a dark sentinel set over him, was a piece of reach and hazard beyond my apprehension. I must again profess that I have read many of his letters, for they are commonly sent to my Lord of Leicester and of Burleigh out of France, containing many fine passages and secrets, yet, if I might have been beholding to his cyphers, they would have told pretty tales of the times; but I must now close him up, and rank him amongst the TOGATI, yet chief of those that laid the foundations of the French and Dutch wars, which was another piece of his fineness of the times, with one observation more, that he was one of the greatest always of the Austrian embracements, for both himself and Stafford that preceded him might well have been compared to him in the Gospel that sowed his tares in the night; so did they their seeds in division in the dark; and as it is a likely report that they father on him at his return, the Queen speaking to him with some sensibility of the Spanish designs on France: "Madam," he answered, "I beseech you be content, and fear not; the Spaniard hath a great appetite and an excellent digestion, but I have fitted him with a bone for these twenty years that your Majesty should have no cause to doubt him, provided that, if the fire chance to slake which I have kindled, you will be ruled by me, and cast in some of your fuel, which will revive the flame."
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