biography
| name: |
Walsingham, Sir Francis
|
pronunciation:
[wolsingam]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (c.1530–90)
|
| biography:
| English statesman, born in Chislehurst, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, became a diplomat, and was made a secretary of state to Elizabeth I (1573–90), a member of the Privy Council, and knighted. A Puritan sympathizer, and a strong opponent of the Catholics, he developed a complex system of espionage at home and abroad, enabling him to reveal the plots of Throckmorton and Babington against the Queen, and was one of the commissioners to try Mary at Fotheringay. In his last months he increasingly took up religious meditation. |
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