In the story of Mary Queen of Scots’s nineteen-year captivity in England no chapter is more extraordinary than the Babington Plot and no conspiracy more tangled. It involved a group of Catholic gentlemen plotting in London; the long labours of Mary’s chief intelligencer in Paris; a courier for the Queen of Scots who was really a double agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham; the double agent’s cousin; Walsingham’s trusted right hand in secret affairs; and, of course, Mary herself, held in confinement deep in the English midlands. Aiding these principal characters was a supporting cast of secretaries, pursuivants, spies, informants and watchers, and even one brewer of good ale. The drama was played out over the nine months between December 1585 and August 1586. It encompassed practically every theme in this book, bringing together in one magnificently disturbing episode those old and deep suspicions of the treasonous disloyalty of Elizabethan Catholics, the pernicious influence of the Queen of Scots as pretender to Elizabeth’s throne and terrible fears of the queen’s murder.
The narrative of the Babington Plot can be compressed into a short paragraph. In Paris in December 1585 Thomas Morgan, the Queen of Scots’s chief spy, recruited a young Catholic as a courier of his letters. The task of this courier, Gilbert Gifford, was to collect the letters from the house of the French ambassador in London and convey them secretly to Mary, who was being held under guard and surveillance in Staffordshire. Captured in England, Gifford became a double agent; and under the guiding hand of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s servant, he helped set up an ingenious system for intercepting and copying letters passing to and from the Queen of Scots. This postal system helped to expose a knot of Catholic conspirators in London who were planning Mary’s freedom and Elizabeth’s murder. Waiting and watching, and then trying their hand at forgery, Walsingham and Phelippes discovered evidence of the Queen of Scots’s complicity in the conspirators’ plans. The dramatic breaking up of the plot in August 1586 sent Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators to the gallows. More significantly, the letters intercepted by Phelippes and Walsingham were persuasive enough as evidence against Mary Queen of Scots for a commission to be set up under the Act for the Queen’s Surety. The commissioners tried Mary and found her guilty of treason against Elizabeth. In February 1587 she was beheaded.
But to tell it this briefly strips the story of much of its richness and complexity. Told fully, it offers a fascinating case study in just how far Elizabeth’s government was prepared to go to save queen and country from destruction.
It all began with Thomas Morgan, chief intelligencer to Mary Queen of Scots in Paris. At his trial in 1585 William Parry had named Morgan as the man who had persuaded him to kill Elizabeth. The English government tried to have Morgan extradited from France as Parry’s accomplice but instead had to make do with his imprisonment in the Bastille, where he found himself by October 1585.
From prison Morgan tried his best to reconstruct the secure and effective postal service that had operated between Paris and the Queen of Scots. This was an almost impossible task to which only a man passionate about his cause could have had the patience to attempt. Mary, too, was under restraint, though the conditions of her confinement were much tougher than those of Morgan in the Bastille. In late December 1585 she was moved from the bare and grim castle of Tutbury in Staffordshire to Chartley, a moated manor house in the same county, deep in the English midlands. The Queen of Scots’s keeper was the firm and uncompromising Sir Amias Paulet, a stickler for security, who insisted on random searches of Mary’s private chambers and even strip searches of any members of her household who had contact with the outside world. Of Paulet the Queen of Scots wrote that he was one of the most pitiless and zealous men she had ever known.
The strictness of the Queen of Scots’s restraint was not the only one of Thomas Morgan’s difficulties. He knew that even in the Bastille he was watched by servants of the English ambassador in Paris, Sir Edward Stafford. Morgan saw, too, as Elizabeth’s government did also, that the city’s English Catholics were at one another’s throats, dividing themselves into factions. Charles Arundel, Lord Paget’s fiery companion, had even drawn a dagger on Charles Paget, Morgan’s great friend and comrade in Mary’s cause. And yet in spite of all this Thomas Morgan persisted in his work. In the strange unreal world of the Catholic exiles he tried his best to provide the Queen of Scots, otherwise cut off from her allies and supporters in Europe, with the lifeline of information.
Morgan needed couriers to carry his letters and reports to Mary. These couriers had to be trusted intermediaries who could cross the English Channel from France, safely enter the ports of the English south coast and then travel on to London. Letters were delivered to the house of the French ambassador at Salisbury Court, not far from Fleet Street, where the packets could be taken on to Mary’s household, kept under tight security, in Staffordshire. That at least was the theory; in practice it was immensely difficult to make this postal system – essentially conceived in two parts, each as challenging as the other – work successfully.
Not surprisingly, the recruits were few. But in October 1585 one English gentleman of about twenty-six years of age seemed especially suited for Morgan’s difficult and important task. His name was Gilbert Gifford. He was a young man from a family of Staffordshire Catholics, and in fact a kinsman of Francis Throckmorton; this last fact, in the months after Francis’s execution and his brother Thomas’s exile abroad, seemed to carry a special cachet. Gilbert Gifford had been educated at the English College in Rome (where in 1579 Charles Sledd the spy had noticed him) and later at William Allen’s seminary in Rheims, from where, in the autumn of 1585, he travelled to meet Morgan in Paris. Morgan, assured of the young man’s faith and honesty, briefed him on how to be a courier and instructed him in methods of secret writing. Morgan was sure that Gilbert Gifford would solve all the problems of communicating with the Queen of Scots in England. In Paris at the same time as Thomas Morgan and Gilbert Gifford was Nicholas Berden, one of Sir Francis Walsingham’s most trusted and prolific secret agents. He knew of, and may have even known, Gifford. Berden’s keen eyes did not miss the fact that in December 1585 Gifford had set out from Paris for England.
Berden was a modest kind of gentleman, the son of a citizen of London comfortably in business. First suggested for secret service by Sir Horatio Palavicino, a wealthy international merchant who also did intelligence work for Walsingham, Berden wrote regular ‘secret advertisements’. He was in London between March and May 1585 but went over to Rouen in early August. By late August he was in Paris, where he stayed till the early months of 1586, alert to the business of the Catholic exiles. With a busy pen, Berden noted rumours of the plans of the Duke of Guise and news of the movements of William Allen, the Paget brothers and Thomas Throckmorton. He was a useful spy.
In London Berden’s reports were noted and filed by Thomas Phelippes, the young man who been in Bourges and Paris in 1582 on a mission for Walsingham, a careful and discreet member of Sir Francis’s household staff and a skilled breaker of codes and ciphers. By hard work, application, ingenuity and cunning, Phelippes was Walsingham’s trusted right hand in all secret matters and operations.
So it was Phelippes who from one of Nicholas Berden’s reports learned in late December 1585 that Gilbert Gifford had left Paris. Berden’s news was that Pope Sixtus V had published a ‘new excommunication’ of the queen to reinforce the bull of his predecessor Pius V in 1570, denouncing Elizabeth as a bastard heretic schismatic. The rumours circulating in Paris said that this new excommunication had been smuggled into England; it was ‘gone already about five weeks past, and that either Gilbert Gifford or some of the priests that went in about the same time did carry it’. Gifford, it was said in Paris, had been arrested in England. Phelippes wrote on the outside of Berden’s secret report the following words: ‘New proclamation to go into England. Gilbert Gifford’s apprehension in England known.’ Within weeks, however, the news in Paris had changed. Berden reported to Walsingham: ‘Here is great joy made that Gilbert Gifford did escape your honour’s hands so easily and he hath certified hither that England is in great fear to be invaded.’ Once again, Thomas Phelippes calmly noted the fact, giving the packet from Berden a special cipher mark.
The items of news and gossip Berden reported were both true and false. The first report, which said that Gilbert Gifford had been captured, was correct. He was arrested at the port of Rye trying to enter England and on about 20 December he was interviewed by Walsingham. The second report, of Gifford’s freedom, was false. It was, however, essential to Walsingham’s purpose, for Sir Francis had recruited Gifford as a double agent to work against Thomas Morgan and Mary Queen of Scots. The rumour in Paris of the young man’s freedom was either a lucky coincidence for Walsingham or may have been planted in émigré circles and nourished for a definite purpose. Whatever the truth, one fact was startling: Walsingham and his servant Phelippes now possessed a potentially devastating weapon against the cause of the Queen of Scots. Her new trusted courier – Thomas Morgan’s great hope for the service of his mistress Mary – was Walsingham’s spy.
Walsingham knew from long experience exactly how to persuade Gifford to work for Elizabeth’s government. Probably Gifford’s motivations were, in order of necessity, freedom, continued protection and money. One point of vulnerability may have been a confused sense of loyalty and identity common in English Catholics, formed by the strange unreality of exile, the idealisms, hopes and anxieties, always strained, never achieved. Leaving behind him an émigré community in Paris divided against itself, in Walsingham and Phelippes Gifford met an absolute steadiness of purpose. Perhaps also he enjoyed the prospect of living on the dangerous edge of conspiracy.
So Gifford, Mary’s supposedly loyal courier, was a gift to Walsingham. If Gifford behaved himself – and if of course Walsingham and Phelippes played a clever game – he could carry the letters Morgan wanted him to and allow Elizabeth’s government access to them. For a long time letters had been piling up at the French ambassador’s house at Salisbury Court; now, with a new courier in place, they could be taken to the Queen of Scots. Thomas Morgan’s relief at finding so ideal a man was Walsingham’s chance to penetrate Mary’s correspondence. Gifford became the bridge between Thomas Morgan, the new French ambassador in London, Guillaume de l’Aubépine Baron de Châteauneuf, and Mary Queen of Scots. No wonder that under Phelippes’s watchful eye Gifford was quickly put to work.
Morgan did the best he could to keep Mary informed of what was happening in Europe. With the help of other émigrés Morgan was able to get letters out of the Bastille. Each one of them was long and intricate, consisting of many folios of dense cipher; Morgan must have been a very patient man. There was no guarantee that the Queen of Scots or her secretaries would ever read Morgan’s letters, and probably little chance that any reply by Mary would leave Chartley, let alone reach Paris. Morgan knew that sometimes letters were intercepted, though of course he would have been horrified to know that those reports on which he had worked for hours were now being handed by Gifford to Walsingham and Phelippes.
As well as Gilbert Gifford, Morgan had another agent in England. He was a poor English gentleman called Robert Poley. Poley’s name, like Gifford’s, is one to remember: he would play an important part in the Babington Plot. Also like Gifford, Poley was a volunteer for the cause of the Queen of Scots. He knew the ways from England into Scotland, and Morgan felt that this geographical knowledge made him a good man for ambassador Châteauneuf to know about.
As well as working as a courier, Poley spied for Morgan in England. Morgan placed Poley in the household of Sir Philip Sidney and his wife Lady Frances. She was Sir Francis Walsingham’s daughter, and so it seemed to Morgan that Poley was in an ideal position to be able to give valuable information. But Robert Poley, like Gilbert Gifford, was Walsingham’s man. Without knowing it, Thomas Morgan was helping once again to set the spring of the trap that within months would catch and hold Mary Queen of Scots fast.
In the early months of 1586 Thomas Phelippes worked tirelessly with Gilbert Gifford. He gave Gifford tasks and supervised the quality of his agent’s work. Doubtless, too, he acted as his adviser and perhaps also his friend, while always keeping the kind of distance that was necessary in so delicate a professional relationship. Always a careful and discreet man, Phelippes referred in letters to Walsingham only of his work with ‘the party’. This was in late February 1586, when Gifford had brought to Phelippes twenty-one packets ‘great and small’ from the house of ambassador Châteauneuf. Now, thanks to Gifford, coaxed and coached by Phelippes, the letters began to move again.
Phelippes and Gifford seem to have worked well together. Phelippes had the rare ability to combine the mastery of fine detail with a profound sense of the object of a task. Above all, he possessed imaginative cunning. There can be no doubt that Gifford did what he was told to do, but he had initiative and sense. The two young men were in many ways an enviable pairing.
With these foundations set down, Walsingham began to move other pieces into place. In early March Gifford’s father John, a recusant Catholic who had suffered heavy fines and imprisonment, was licensed by the Privy Council to leave London to take the waters for his health. He was even allowed to visit his house in Staffordshire. All of this may have been a discreet favour for Gilbert, but it also opened up new possibilities for his journeys into the English midlands. Not surprisingly, Phelippes and Walsingham did everything they could to facilitate the easy carrying of letters between Morgan in Paris, ambassador Châteauneuf in London and the Queen of Scots at Chartley.
Like any example of the subtle art of double-cross, it was a delicate business. Certainly Gilbert Gifford’s work was most secret – so secret, in fact, that any danger to Gifford came not from Morgan or the French ambassador but from zealous English officials who knew nothing of whose side he was really working for. Phelippes, protective of Gifford and his work, was worried about the informants that Richard Young, a zealous justice of Westminster with a nose for Catholic conspiracy, had positioned close to the French ambassador. He feared they would compromise Gifford as a courier of letters, something Phelippes felt would prejudice their task of trying penetrate the Queen of Scots’s correspondence. Phelippes wanted Walsingham to be firm with Young: ‘it may please you to limit him by some peremptory speech’.
By the spring of 1586 Walsingham had his best informants hard at work. The two most prolific were Maliverey Catilyn, long used by Walsingham to spy on Catholics in England, and Nicholas Berden, the agent who had worked for Walsingham and Phelippes in Paris in the later months of 1585.
Using his many local contacts, Catilyn wrote a long paper giving the names and descriptions of Catholic men and women throughout England. Thomas Phelippes, who read the report, called it Catilyn’s ‘observations touching corrupt subjects’. In early summer, Catilyn was sent off to spy on Catholics in Portsmouth with ‘a pair of writing tables’ (a ‘table-book’ was a notebook or memorandum book) hidden in the padding of his doublet.
Berden, returned from Paris to London, was busy in April scouring the streets and lodging houses of the city for dangerous Catholics. Berden informed Walsingham of the espionage of one of Thomas Morgan’s spies in the royal household, a man who kept company with Catholic priests living secretly and illegally in London, and who was on familiar terms with Walsingham’s servants. Berden kept a record of where many of the priests lodged in London. Among many suspicious Catholics in London, he noted the name of one ‘Fortescue alias Ballard’. Berden probably as yet knew very little about him. Yet he soon would: John Ballard, another of the enterprising Thomas Morgan’s agents, quickly became one of the most wanted men in England.
In spring 1586 Nicholas Berden’s contacts in Paris were paying off handsomely. To his surprise, he found himself recruited as a courier for Charles Paget, Charles Arundel, William Allen, Robert Persons and other Catholic exiles. True, the terms of his employment were a little uncertain, though there was nothing so unusual in that. He had no precise idea of what he was expected to do. Berden wrote to Walsingham: ‘From Charles Paget I have only received a cipher without any other directions whatsoever, except that he prayed me to promise him to receive letters hereafter when he should send them to me.’ Their arrangement was that, fearing Berden’s arrest, Paget would send nothing till he knew of his safe arrival in England and the hope of Berden’s ‘quiet continuance’ as a free man.
Berden had the promise of more enemy ciphers than he knew what to do with. One was for letters to and from Charles Paget. Another would allow him to communicate with Charles Arundel. Reflecting bitter arguments among the émigrés in Paris, Arundel did not know that Berden was in contact with Paget, while Paget believed that Berden wrote only to him. Even Don Bernardino de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in Paris, had intimated to Berden that he too might use Berden’s services.
This, as Berden recognized, was potentially the means to unlock the secrets of some of the most dangerous men in Europe. To have the cipher keys, or ‘alphabets’, of the enemy meant that their increasingly complex systems of secret communication could be easily broken. A skilled cryptographer like Thomas Phelippes could see immediately the symbols chosen for important international politicians and churchmen, and begin to make sense of the three or four cipher characters that could be used for each letter of the alphabet. He could also avoid the traps of ‘nulls’, symbols or characters of no significance that were inserted to mislead and confuse an enemy trying to crack the cipher. So it seemed that Berden had stumbled across a treasure trove of secret cipher: the alphabets of Charles Paget, Robert Persons, the émigré Catholic printer Stephen Brinkley, as well as the texts of Brinkley’s letters to Jesuit priests. As the Elizabethan scholar and politician Francis Bacon wrote:
This art of ciphering, hath for relative, an art of deciphering … For suppose that ciphers were well managed, there be multitudes of them which exclude the decipherer. But in regard of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands, through which they pass, the greatest matters, are many times carried in the weakest ciphers.
Who knew what secrets might be revealed through Berden’s correspondence?
The weight of all this responsibility certainly made Nicholas Berden nervous. He knew how useful he could be; he was also worried, like Phelippes, about Richard Young. Justice Young, his eyes sharp for suspicious men, had nearly arrested him: ‘if the said Master Young be not warned by your honour to be silent my travail will be but vain.’ Berden asked Walsingham to assure his free movement and safety.
Nicholas Berden ended his letter with a declaration of loyalty: ‘I shall be always ready … to manifest myself a public persecutor rather than a private practiser with any traitor or their confederates.’ By ‘persecutor’ Berden meant a pursuer. English Catholics, however, would have taken him at his word.
Thomas Morgan the intelligencer in Paris; Morgan’s young couriers Gilbert Gifford and Robert Poley in England; Thomas Phelippes, Sir Francis Walsingham’s right hand in secret matters; John Ballard the Catholic in London; Nicholas Berden the spy: all of these men became key players in the Babington Plot.
Always close to Mary Queen of Scots at Chartley were her two loyal secretaries, Claude Nau, who was responsible for her French correspondence, and Gilbert Curll, who wrote for Mary in English. They worked as efficiently as they could under the harsh conditions of security imposed by zealous Sir Amias Paulet. After all, monarchs – even those not free to do as they wished – could hardly be expected to write everything for themselves.
If Gilbert Gifford wanted to establish proper contact with Mary Queen of Scots he had to be able to write to Curll or Nau. By what appeared to be Gifford’s hard work and ingenuity (though in fact it was facilitated for obvious reasons by Thomas Phelippes and Sir Amias Paulet) Gifford got a letter to Curll in the last week of April 1586. He affirmed his loyalty to Mary and prayed Curll not to spare him any work. Curll, Gifford wrote, knew him as well as ‘good Francis did’: he meant Francis Throckmorton, that martyr to the Queen of Scots’s cause. In other words, Gilbert Gifford was a man Curll and his mistress could trust.
Naturally Gifford wrote this letter under the control and direction of Thomas Phelippes, and indeed it was Phelippes who went one step further in May by setting out the main points of a report from Gifford to Thomas Morgan in Paris. Before Gifford had come over to England, he and Morgan had agreed code names. Gifford was Nicholas Cornelys; Morgan was Thomas Germin. Never a man to disregard a perfectly good arrangement, Phelippes too used Cornelys as an alias for his double agent.
The one complication to Gifford’s courier system in April and May 1586 was the journey he had to make to France to meet two Catholics who were willing to work for Walsingham, one of whom was a Gifford kinsman. This meant that a temporary courier had to be found. It was a delicate job, for in the interests of security this courier had to know nothing about Gifford’s work for Phelippes. But Gifford had just the man. He and Phelippes called him Roland, though his real name was Thomas Barnes and he was Gifford’s cousin. Gifford recruited Barnes in about the middle of the Easter law term (between 20 April and 16 May), when they met in Barnes’s chamber probably in London. Gifford called the job of carrying Mary’s letters ‘a piece of service’. Apparently with no reservations, Barnes agreed to take it on. He took to his new task with ease. He was set quickly to work, showing at times a worrying over-enthusiasm that must have caused Phelippes, who could work with Barnes only through intermediaries, some anxiety. Barnes, like his cousin Gifford, was not shy in professing his loyalty to the Queen of Scots – though unlike Gifford he probably meant it.
And yet somehow the system held together. More than this, in fact, it worked beautifully. At the centre of the mechanism was Phelippes. From the beginning Phelippes recognized Gifford’s potential. The use of Thomas Barnes as a substitute courier was a complication, though knowing something of Thomas Phelippes’s methods and personality we should imagine that he and Gifford talked about cousin Barnes and the courier system in great detail. With Barnes ignorant of the government’s involvement, Phelippes would have to stay very much in the background. Not to have prepared carefully would have been an extraordinary risk. It was one both Phelippes and Walsingham could not have been willing to take. They knew how valuable this operation was in divining the true intentions of the Queen of Scots.
Gifford returned to England, though now both he and Barnes travelled with letters between London and Staffordshire. In acts of delicate and secret ventriloquism, Phelippes used Gifford to communicate with Morgan in Paris. Dictating Gifford’s letters to Morgan, Phelippes wanted to have the names of servants and friends of the Queen of Scots in or about London, together with Morgan’s ‘opinion how far every of them hath been, is or may be used’ by Gifford to deliver a message or take a letter. Phelippes wanted also to have the names of ‘honest friends as we may be bold to trust’ in Scotland. He wanted Morgan, in other words, to expose the whole Marian network in London and Scotland.
To get the information he needed from Morgan through Gifford, yet to sustain Morgan’s belief in Gifford, it was essential for Phelippes to get the balance of force and gentleness just right. He had to push, but not too much or too hard. All the time Phelippes was getting to know Gifford and, through Gifford, Morgan himself. It was a deliberate discovery of character. Phelippes understood the importance of paper, information and detail. But he also recognized the human factor of his work; and to his intuition he brought a secret inventiveness, taking the risk of working through Barnes (though without Barnes’s knowledge) for the first time. In June, perfecting his techniques, Phelippes wrote in cipher as Barnes to Gilbert Curll, penetrating to the heart of Mary Queen of Scots’s household at Chartley.
The target was always Mary. To Walsingham and Phelippes, and indeed to all of Elizabeth’s advisers, she was the greatest enemy to Queen Elizabeth, to England and to the Protestant religion. They believed that for many years she had been at the centre of a web of international conspiracy. It was obvious to Elizabeth’s Privy Council that there were few plots against England in which Mary or her supporters were not in some way connected. The Catholic cause in England was her cause: to Catholics she was the obvious legitimate alternative to Elizabeth as queen: she was always, to a lesser or greater extent, part of the effort to bring the Tudor kingdoms back from the horrible error (as the English Catholic exiles saw it) of schism and heresy.
In 1572 Elizabeth’s advisers had wanted Mary to be executed for her part in the Ridolfi Plot. Elizabeth resisted, and Mary survived and in some ways prospered. Her influence was both pervasive and pernicious. But it probably seemed to Walsingham and Phelippes in 1586 that their grip was at last tightening. With the willing assistance of Gilbert Gifford, and the unconscious efforts of Thomas Barnes, they controlled the flow of Mary’s letters and dispatches. They could read the correspondence between the Queen of Scots and Paris sent through the French embassy in London. Perhaps they could, if a chance so presented itself, shape and direct that correspondence.
The only surviving physical description of Thomas Phelippes comes from the Queen of Scots herself. It was in July, the 14th, a Thursday, when Phelippes was near Chartley. Mary saw from the window of her coach a youngish man ‘of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded’. She must have been close enough to him to see that he was ‘eaten in the face with small pocks’ – scarred, in other words, by smallpox. She guessed from his appearance that he was about thirty years old.
Mary smiled at Phelippes from her coach. We can only guess whether he smiled back. He wrote to Walsingham that when he saw the Queen of Scots at Chartley he had thought of the saying:
When someone gives you a greeting
Take care it isn’t an enemy.
But Mary’s smile was genuine. She had heard about a man called Phelippes in Secretary Walsingham’s service. She thought he might be working secretly for her. She had not an inkling that he was reading every word of the letters she sent or received by means of her trusted couriers.
By July 1586 Phelippes was having to perform extraordinary labours in deciphering the letters passing to and from Mary at Chartley. The courier system he had worked out with Gilbert Gifford, and through Gifford with Thomas Barnes, was a phenomenal success. There was so much material to work on that Phelippes had to leave London to travel north to Staffordshire – hence Mary’s physical description on the 27th of her secret pursuer.
Mary’s keeper at Chartley, the redoubtable Sir Amias Paulet, was a good and old friend of Phelippes. They had worked together in Paris when Paulet was ambassador at the French court between 1576 and 1579. Phelippes had wanted to travel to Chartley in the early days of June 1586, but he was too busy in London. At last he set out for Staffordshire on Thursday, 7 July at nine o’clock on a long summer’s evening. He was working furiously on Mary’s correspondence. Folio after folio of deciphers survive, all in Phelippes’s tiny intricate handwriting. Even with the cipher keys to hand, it was unforgiving and laborious work.
For some weeks Paulet had been overseeing a remarkable system of interception. He had bought the services of a brewer in Burton upon Trent who supplied Mary’s household at Chartley with beer. Sir Amias and Phelippes both knew the brewer as ‘the honest man’. There was an irony here; the brewer was interested only in money, and he was very well paid to be honest. Gifford or Barnes delivered the letters for Mary to the brewer’s house in Burton. He made sure that they were securely sealed in waterproof tubes in the casks of ale going off from Burton to Chartley, where they were retrieved by Mary’s men, who used the same system to return replies to Gifford or Barnes.
For Elizabeth’s government, the practical difficulties of this operation were potentially immense. It had to be coordinated with Gifford and his cousin Barnes, moving up and down the country between Staffordshire and London. Walsingham was generally at court, sometimes at his London house on Seething Lane near the Tower, but often on his estate in Surrey, Barn Elms. Phelippes was first in London and then at Chartley. Paulet was always with Mary. Gilbert Gifford was a conscious volunteer, his cousin Barnes an unconscious agent. The brewer of Burton upon Trent was a highly paid and often demanding employee. The only methods of communication were by conversation or letter. The very complexity of this system was a risk. But, once again, it worked superbly well for Walsingham and Phelippes against Mary Queen of Scots.
Everything was directed at a clear end. This could be expressed in a question, given here as Walsingham and Phelippes would have asked it in July 1586. Would the Scottish queen, after years of conspiring against her cousin Elizabeth, at last betray clear and unambiguous evidence of her plottings in the letters she wrote to her supporters? There was the tantalizing prospect at last of a prosecution of Mary Queen of Scots under the Act for the Queen’s Surety and the clean judicial elimination of Queen Elizabeth’s greatest rival.
Any courier who gave himself to the cause of the Queen of Scots lived a dangerous life. Even for someone who, like Gilbert Gifford, worked secretly for Sir Francis Walsingham there were few guarantees of a happy future. Utility, not compassion, guided men like Walsingham. They were pragmatic and unflinching in their work for the queen. They had no time for sentiment.
Those few couriers who found themselves recruited to Mary’s service were young men in their twenties, well connected, of once wealthy Catholic families. Francis Throckmorton had been one of them. He had paid the highest price for his service. Found guilty of treason at the Guild Hall in London in 1584, he had quickly thrown himself upon the queen’s mercy, asking her to forgive ‘the inconsiderate rashness of unbridled youth’. Elizabeth graciously allowed him to meet his wife and mother before going to the gallows. In 1586 the name of Francis Throckmorton still meant a great deal to supporters of the Queen of Scots. Indeed it was used to clever effect by Gifford and Barnes to gain the trust of Mary’s secretary, Gilbert Curll. Gifford was of the same stamp as Throckmorton, a gentleman of a good family with experience of life on the continent of Europe.
Yet another young man who volunteered to carry letters for the Queen of Scots was Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Dethwick in Derbyshire, twenty-five years old, who in summer 1586 was moving between his various lodgings in London, at Hernes rents in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, at his own house near the Barbican and at the house of a tailor just outside the Temple Bar on Fleet Street. Babington had spent six months in France in 1580. At Thomas Morgan’s request he carried packets to the Queen of Scots, probably in 1583 and 1584. By 1586, though married and with a daughter, he was keen to be off once again on his travels.
For Anthony Babington money was no object. His father had left him a rich man; one estimate gave Anthony an income of £1,000 a year, £400 of which he had put aside for his journey; this was an enormous fortune. He wanted, in June 1586, a licence to travel for three or five years, and he went to Elizabeth’s court to get it. He came to the notice of Sir Francis Walsingham, who mistakenly thought Babington might be persuaded to work for him. A gentleman close to Walsingham became friendly with Babington. His name was Robert Poley, infiltrated into the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham by Morgan in Paris but in fact one of Walsingham’s agents.
History has given young Anthony Babington the dubious honour of lending a name to a conspiracy that, thanks to the system of secret correspondence with Chartley set up by Thomas Phelippes and Gilbert Gifford, sent the Queen of Scots to the executioner’s block. It was evidence offered by Babington that finally caught Mary in Walsingham’s trap.
But another man was as important as Babington in what became the greatest of all Elizabethan conspiracies, and the one that in the end destroyed the Queen of Scots. What historians know as the Babington Plot could so easily have been called the Ballard Plot instead.
John Ballard had been educated in Cambridge and at William Allen’s seminary in Rheims. He was a priest, ordained in Châlons in 1581. He was sent by his superiors to England in March 1581 and was certainly in London in 1582. In Paris in 1584 Ballard got to know Thomas Morgan and Charles Paget, who gave him a mission to complete in England. He was again in London in the early months of 1586 living under the false names of Thompson and Turner. Sometimes (as Walsingham’s spy Nicholas Berden reported) Ballard called himself Captain Fortescue or even Black Fortescue.
At the end of May 1586 Ballard had visited Anthony Babington at his lodgings in Hernes rents. The two men knew each other; they had met some time before 1584. Ballard spoke approvingly of plans by the powers of Catholic Europe – by the Pope, the King of Spain and the Duke of Guise – to invade England. Babington objected, rightly, that these powers and princes were too busy with their own affairs to be able to mount an invasion. Babington also pointed out to Ballard the immense logistical challenge for the Catholic powers. And while the queen was alive, he said, few Englishmen would rally to the invaders. Ballard replied that the way forward was to kill Elizabeth. In fact, he told Babington, the plan had already been made. The instrument was a man named Savage who, a month or so earlier, was planning the assassination. Receiving letters of support and instruction from Thomas Morgan in Paris and other émigrés, Savage plotted at the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields in London.
In June, Babington met some of his friends to talk about the situation that they as Catholic gentlemen found themselves in. They believed they faced either a massacre of Catholics in England by Elizabeth’s government or the invasion and destruction of the kingdom by foreigners. Babington wanted to avoid both horrors by leaving England.
But his mind was slowly changed. By early July, talking to his friends and once more to John Ballard, he seemed willingly to be involved in a plan to free the Queen of Scots from her captivity. That plan slowly but surely became one element in a greater and more dangerous scheme, the capture or assassination of Queen Elizabeth.
And so, in the summer months of 1586, began the extraordinary, fascinating and complicated story of Babington and Ballard’s plot.