indisputable authenticity, supplied damning evidence of her relations with the conspirators. Walsingham indignantly vindicated himself from the imputation that any of the evidence that he caused to be produced against the queen was forged. He sat in the commission that tried and convicted her in October 1586 at Fotheringay, and was present at Westminster on 25 Oct. when sentence of death was passed. In the months that followed he was one of those councillors who sought most earnestly to overcome Elizabeth's scruples about signing the death-warrant. He has been charged by Mary's champions with employing a confidential secretary, one Thomas Harrison, to forge Queen Elizabeth's signature to Mary Stuart's death-warrant (Strickland, Lives of the Queens, iii. 404; cf. Cotton. MS. Caligula C. ix. f. 463); but Elizabeth personally delivered the death-warrant to William Davison [q. v.], after she had signed it at his request in his presence on 1 Feb. 1586–7. Davison in the previous autumn had been nominated Walsingham's colleague in the office of secretary. Subsequently the queen charged Davison with procuring her signature by irregular means, and although Walsingham was equally open to the charge, which had its source in the queen's reluctance to strike with her own hand the final blow against Mary Stuart, Davison was suffered by the queen and her councillors to serve alone as scapegoat. Walsingham endeavoured throughout this crisis to strengthen Elizabeth's resolution, and he had to defy many ethical considerations in order to achieve success (cf. Labanoff, Lettres de Marie Stuart, vi. 383–98; Poulet, Letter-book, pp. 227 et seq.) There is no doubt that a few hours after the queen had signed the warrant, on 1 Feb. 1586–7, he drafted a letter by the queen's order to Mary Stuart's warders, Paulet and Drury, hinting that the assassination of their prisoner would relieve Elizabeth of her dread of the consequences of a public execution.
Walsingham justly claimed that he sought no personal profit from the energetic discharge of his duties. On 27 July 1581 he asked Sir Christopher Hatton ‘to put her majesty in mind that in eight years' time wherein I have served her I never yet troubled her for the benefitting of any that belonged unto me, either by kindred or otherwise; which I think never any other could say that served in the like place.’ His public services did not go wholly without recognition, but he never received any adequate reward. In 1584 he was custos rotulorum of Hampshire and recorder of Colchester, and in the same year the bailiffs, aldermen, and common council of Colchester entrusted to him the nomination of both their burgesses in parliament. In May 1585 he was high steward of the city of Winchester. On 17 Aug. in the same year the queen granted him a lease (which was subsequently renewed) of the customs payable at certain ports. In 1587 he was appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. But his revenues were to the last placed freely at the service of the state, and the result of his self-denial was a steady growth of pecuniary difficulties.
Domestic affairs were in part responsible for the financial distresses of his later years. His daughter Frances had on 20 Sept. 1583 become the wife of his young friend Sir Philip Sidney. Walsingham became security for the debts of his son-in-law, and after Sidney's death in November 1586 he found himself at the mercy of Sidney's creditors. A legal informality in Sidney's will rendered its provisions, which were designed to lighten Walsingham's obligations, inoperative. In these circumstances Burghley appealed to the queen for her assistance. The estates not only of Babington but of many other convicted traitors in recent years had been forfeited to the crown through Walsingham's watchfulness, but the queen with characteristic waywardness turned a deaf ear to Burghley's appeal. Most of Babington's property was bestowed on Ralegh. Walsingham retired in disgust to his house at Barn Elms, and wrote with pain to Burghley of her majesty's ‘unkind dealings’ (16 Dec. 1586). He returned to his work depressed and disappointed, and for the remaining years of his life was gradually overwhelmed by his private embarrassments, in addition to the anxieties of public life.
It was in connection with Philip's scheme of the Spanish armada that Walsingham's elaborate system of espionage achieved its most conspicuous triumph. Through the late months of 1587 Walsingham's agents in Spain kept him regularly informed of the minutest details of the preparations which the Spanish admirals were making for their great naval expedition. He knew the numbers of men who were enlisted, the character of the vessels that were put into commission, with full inventories of the purchases of horses, armour, ammunition, and food supplies. The queen, as usual, turned a deaf ear to Walsingham's solemn warnings, and declined to sanction any expenditure of money in preparing to resist the designs of Spain. Walsingham grew almost desperate. ‘The manner of our cold and careless proceeding here in this time of peril,’ wrote
