Francis Walsingham The Murder of Christopher Marlowe" (1992), which was used as a source by Anthony Burgess for his novel "A Dead Man in Deptford" (1993). The 1998 film "Elizabeth" gives considerable, although sometimes historically inaccurate, prominence to Walsingham (portrayed by Geoffrey Rush). It fictionalizes him as irreligious and sexually ambiguous, merges chronologically distant events, and inaccurately suggests that he murdered Mary of Guise. Rush reprised the role in the 2007 sequel, "". Both Stephen Murray in the 1970 BBC series "Elizabeth R" and Patrick Malahide in the 2005 Channel Four miniseries "Elizabeth I" play him as a dour official. Francis Walsingham
Francis Walsingham for an invasion of England. Walsingham's recruitment of Anthony Standen, a friend of the Tuscan ambassador to Madrid, was an exceptional intelligence triumph and Standen's dispatches were deeply revealing. Walsingham worked to prepare England for a potential war with Spain, in particular by supervising the substantial rebuilding of Dover Harbour, and encouraging a more aggressive strategy. On Walsingham's instructions, the English ambassador in Turkey, William Harborne, attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the Ottoman Sultan to attack Spanish possessions in the Mediterranean in the hope of distracting Spanish forces. Walsingham supported Francis Drake's raid of Cadiz in 1587, which wrought havoc with