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 who forwarded them to Walsingham. The letters indicated a conspiracy among the Catholic powers to invade England and displace Elizabeth with Mary, Queen of Scots. By April 1583, Walsingham had a spy, identified as Giordano Bruno by author John Bossy, deployed in the French embassy in London. Walsingham's contact reported that Francis Throckmorton, a nephew of Walsingham's old friend Nicholas Throckmorton, had visited the ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. In November 1583, after six months of surveillance, Walsingham had Throckmorton arrested and then tortured to secure a confession—an admission of guilt that clearly implicated Mendoza. The Throckmorton plot called for an