a voluminous History of the Remonstrance (1674); Hibernica (1682), a worthless history of Ireland; in 1686 a reply to the Popery of Thomas Barlow (1607–1691), bishop of Lincoln; and other works. In these writings he consistently upheld the doctrine of civil liberty against the pretensions of the papacy.
See S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War; G. Burnet, History of his own Times, i. 195; T. Carte, Life of Ormonde (new ed. 1851); Dict. Nat. Biog. lix.
WALSH, WILLIAM (1663–1708), English poet and critic, son of Joseph Walsh of Abberley, Worcestershire, was born in 1663. He entered Wadham College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner in 1678. Leaving the university without a degree, he settled in his native county, and was returned M.P. for Worcester in 1698, 1701 and 1702. In 1705 he sat for Richmond, Yorkshire. On the accession of Queen Anne he was made “gentleman of the horse,” a post which he held till his death, noted by Narcissus Luttrell on the 18th of March 1708. He wrote a Dialogue concerning Women, being a Defence of the Sex (1691), addressed to “Eugenia”, and Letters and Poems, Amorous and Gallant (preface dated 1692, printed in Jonson’s Miscellany, 1716, and separately, 1736); love lyrics designed, says the author, to impart to the world “the faithful image of an amorous heart.” It is not as a poet, however, but as the friend and correspondent of Pope that Walsh is remembered. Pope’s Pastorals were submitted for his criticism by Wycherley in 1705, and Walsh then entered on a direct correspondence with the young poet. The letters are printed in Pope’s Works (ed. Elwin and Courthope, vi. 49-60). Pope, who visited him at Abberley in 1707, set great value upon his opinion. “Mr Walsh used to tell me,” he says, “that there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct, and he desired me to make that my study and my aim.” The excessive eulogy accorded both by Dryden and Pope to Walsh must be accounted for partly on the ground of personal friendship. The life of Virgil prefixed to Dryden’s translation, and a “Preface to the Pastorals with a short defence of Virgil, against some of the reflections of Monsieur Fontenella,” both ascribed at one time to Walsh, were the work of Dr Knightly Chetwood (1650–1720). In 1704 Walsh collaborated with Sir John Vanbrugh and William Congreve in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, or Squire Trelooby, an adaptation of Molière’s farce.
Walsh’s Poems are included in Anderson’s and other collections of the British poets. See The Lives of the Poets, vol. iii. pp. 151 et seq., published 1753 as by Theophilus Cibber.
WALSINGHAM, SIR FRANCIS (c. 1530–1590), English statesman, was the only son of William Walsingham, common sergeant of London (d. March 1534), by his wife Joyce, daughter of Sir Edmund Denny of Cheshunt. The family is assumed to have sprung from Walsingham in Norfolk, but the earliest authentic traces of it are found in London in the first half of the 15th century; and it was one of the numerous families which, having accumulated wealth in the city, planted themselves out as landed gentry and provided the Tudor monarchy with its justices of the peace and main support. To this connexion may also be attributed much of the influence which London exerted over English policy in the 16th century. Sir Francis’s great-great-great-grandfather, Alan, was a cordwainer of Gracechurch Street; Alan’s son Thomas, a vintner, purchased Scadbury in Chislehurst, and Thomas’s great-grandson William bought Foot’s Cray, where Francis may have been born. His uncle Sir Edmund was lieutenant of the Tower, and his mother was related to Sir Anthony Denny, a member of Henry VIII.’s privy council who attended him on his death-bed.
Francis matriculated as a fellow-commoner of King’s College, Cambridge, of which Sir John Cheke was provost, in November 1548; and he continued studying there amid strongly Protestant influences until Michaelmas 1550, when he appears, after the fashion of the time, to have gone abroad to complete his education (Stahlin, p. 79). Returning in 1552 he was admitted at Gray’s Inn on January 28, 1553, but Edward VI.’s death six months later induced him to resume his foreign travels. In 1555–1556 he was at Padua, where he was admitted a “consiliarius” in the faculty of laws. Returning to England after Elizabeth’s accession he was elected M.P, for Banbury to her first parliament, which sat from January to May 1559. He married in January 1562 Anne, daughter of George Barnes, Lord Mayor of London and widow of Alexander Carleill, whose son-in-law Christopher Hoddesdon was closely associated with maritime and commercial enterprise. He was elected to represent Lyme Regis in Elizabeth’s second parliament of 1563 as well as for Banbury, and preferred to sit for the former borough. He may have owed his election to Cecil’s influence, for to Cecil he subsequently attributed his rise to power; but his brother-in-law Sir Walter Mildmay was well known at court and in 1566 became chancellor of the exchequer. In that year Walsingham married a second time, his first wife having died in 1564; his second was also a widow, Ursula, daughter of Henry St Barbe and widow of Sir Richard Worsley of Appuldurcombe, captain of the Isle of Wight. Her sister Edith married Robert Beale, afterwards the chief of Walsingham’s henchmen. By his second wife Walsingham had a daughter who married firstly Sir Philip Sidney, secondly Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and thirdly Richard de Burgh, earl of Clanricarde.
Walsingham’s earliest extant communications with the government date from 1567, and in that and the following two years he was supplying Cecil with information about the movements of foreign spies in London. The Spanish ambassador in Paris declared in 1570 that he had been for two years engaged in collecting contributions from English churches for the assistance of the Huguenots in France, and he drew up a memorial depicting the dangers of Mary Stuart’s presence in England and of the project for her marriage with Norfolk. Ridolfi, the conspirator, was committed to his custody in October 1569, and seems to have deluded Walsingham as to his intentions; but there is inadequate evidence for the statement (Dict. Nat. Biog.) that Walsingham was already organizing the secret police of London. In the summer of 1570 he was, in spite of his protestations, designated to succeed Norris as ambassador at Paris. La Mothe Fénelon, the French ambassador in England, wrote that he was thought a very able man, devoted to the new religion, and very much in Cecil’s secrets. Cecil had in 1569 triumphed over the conservative and aristocratic party in the council, and Walsingham was the ablest of the new men whom he brought to the front to give play to the new forces which were to carve out England’s career.
An essential element in the new policy was the substitution of an alliance with France for the old Burgundian friendship. The affair of San Juan de Ulua and the seizure of the Spanish treasure-ships in 1568 had been omens of the inevitable conflict with Spain, Ridolfi’s plot and Philip II.’s approaches to Mary Stuart indicated the lines upon which the struggle would be fought, and it was Walsingham’s business to reconcile the Huguenots with the French government, and upon this reconciliation to base an Anglo-French alliance which might lead to a grand attack on Spain, to the liberation of the Netherlands, to the destruction of Spain’s monopoly in the New World, and to making Protestantism the dominant force in Europe. Walsingham threw himself heart and soul into the movement. He was the anxious fanatic of Elizabeth’s advisers; he lacked the patience of Burghley and the cynical coolness of Elizabeth. His devotion to Protestantism made him feverishly alive to the perils which threatened the Reformation; and he took an alarmist view of every situation. Ever dreading a blow, he was always eager to strike the first, and alive to the perils of peace, he was blind to the dangers of war. He supplied the momentum which was necessary to counteract the caution of Burghley and Elizabeth; but it was probably fortunate that his headstrong counsels were generally overruled by the circumspection of his sovereign. He would have plunged England into war with Spain in 1572, when the risks would have been infinitely greater than in 1588, and when the Huguenot influence over the French government, on which he relied for support, would probably have broken in his hands. His clear-cut, strenuous policy of open hostilities has always had its admirers; but it is difficult to see how England could have secured from it more than she
