Barn Elms replaced the earlier one occupied by Sir Francis Walsingham, "Elizabeth's Spymaster". Queen Elizabeth I would visit Barn Elms to see her Spymaster. Barn Elms features in English literary history from the time the royalist poet Abraham Cowley moved to the house belonging to John Cartwright in 1663. In the 1660s Barn Elms became a fashionable destination for boating picnics. Samuel Pepys, who arranged many a Sunday afternoon or moonlit evening boating party to Barn Elms himself, recorded that on 26 May 1667: "I walked the length of the Elmes, and with great pleasure saw some gallant ladies and people come
Francis Walsingham the principal secretary's activities, Walsingham brought to it flair and ambition, and large sums of his own money. He cast his net more widely than others had done previously: expanding and exploiting links across the continent as well as in Constantinople and Algiers, and building and inserting contacts among Catholic exiles. Among his spies may have been the playwright Christopher Marlowe; Marlowe was in France in the mid-1580s and was acquainted with Walsingham's kinsman Thomas Walsingham. From 1571 onwards, Walsingham complained of ill health and often retired to his country estate for periods of recuperation. He complained of "sundry carnosities",