Thomas Phelippes was a close and secret man who trusted few beyond his immediate circle. Even with Sir Francis Walsingham’s secretary, Francis Mylles, the watchers and informants Nicholas Berden and Maliverey Catilyn, Arthur Gregory the forger, and his own manservant Thomas Cassie he exercised a testing and critical judgement. Those inside the circle could be found wanting: once Cassie fell out of his master’s favour and Phelippes threatened him with the Tower of London. Those outside his circle he found it harder to trust. At times he doubted the discretion of Justice Richard Young, the harrier of priests in Westminster and Middlesex. The royal messengers – the pursuivants – were certainly beyond the pale, as Phelippes wrote bluntly to Walsingham: they were ‘very knaves’, a view which, given common accusations of corruption and bribery, was probably a fair one. By summer 1586 Phelippes had earned the privilege to speak as plainly as this. For at least three years he had been Sir Francis’s trusted right hand in secret affairs. Phelippes, always careful and precise, practised espionage, the object of which, as he saw it, was to protect the cause of God, queen and country. Phelippes often used a phrase that has a modern ring to it: the security of the state.
As well as being an expert in the breaking of codes and ciphers, Phelippes was an intuitive and skilled handler of agents. He briefed informants like Berden and Catilyn and read the reports they wrote. No less importantly, he made sure that they had money to live on. They received no salary: espionage in the reign of Elizabeth had everything to do with patronage and favour and the financial pickings, though occasionally rich, were infrequent. It was not a trivial matter when on 6 July 1586, shortly before he set out for Chartley, Phelippes attended to the reward of Nicholas Berden and Gilbert Gifford with a handsome piece of royal patronage, which to Berden alone was worth £30.
Gifford was all the time growing in confidence and trust. On Thursday, 7 July he was near Chartley, but getting ready soon to travel south. Phelippes had sent him into Staffordshire to test ‘the honest man’ – the brewer of Burton upon Trent – and to find Thomas Barnes. Gifford wrote as ‘Cornelys’ to Phelippes in London. Gifford felt the brewer could be trusted. He was very well paid and was, Gifford wrote, ‘totaliter ours’. Beyond the money, ‘the honest man’ sought nothing more than to impress Sir Amias Paulet. But of Thomas Barnes, his cousin and fellow courier to and from Mary Queen of Scots, he could write nothing. Worryingly, Barnes had disappeared.
The fact that Gifford had no clue of Barnes’s whereabouts nagged him. The brewer told Gifford that Barnes had set out for London at least a week before without fixing an appointment with him for another meeting. Gifford thought his cousin was probably in the city and, given the length of time he had been away from Staffordshire, likely to be leaving London to travel north once again. The brewer did not know Barnes’s real name, and only now did Gifford give Sir Amias Paulet the identity of their mysterious second courier: ‘His name is Barnes. I know him well. But I think he hath no chamber in London. Neither were it expedient [for] you to lean harder of him for the cause I told, for that would spoil all.’ He undertook, for both Paulet and Phelippes, ‘to cut him clean off from this course’. Cousin Barnes could expect, in other words, a stiff dressing down for disappearing – when Gifford found him. But even on 11 July there was still no sign of him. Gifford thought Barnes might be with the French ambassador but dared not go to the ambassador’s house till he had a packet of letters to deliver.
On Sunday, 10 July Gifford met John Ballard for the first time in England. He knew Ballard a little already, from Paris, but not very well. He was not surprised by Ballard’s visit. Thomas Morgan played his agents close to his chest, and Gifford knew from their meeting in Paris that Morgan had a scheme in play and that he had already sent someone ‘to solicit matters’ in England. This was Morgan’s method, small revelations when the time came, no one knowing the whole picture. Gifford quickly perceived that this unexpected meeting with a man he hardly knew was another unfolding of Thomas Morgan’s plan. Ballard, on the other hand, seemed to know all about Gifford and had been searching for him for some time. When he met Gifford that Sunday, he was both relieved and angry.
Ballard’s anger was directed at Morgan and Charles Paget. They had promised him regular news from Paris, but he had so far heard nothing; he said he was in half a mind to return to France. Gifford tried to calm him: the delay, he said, could be explained by the usual problems of communication. Ballard thanked God that he and Gifford could now help each other. It was obvious to Gifford that Ballard knew more of Morgan’s plan than he did, for Ballard said that even if they did not hear from Morgan and Paget their mission could at least be completed by Gifford and Ballard doing their parts.
Gifford asked Ballard plainly: What was it they had to do? Ballard told Gifford that he should obtain from the Queen of Scots her hand and seal ‘to allow of all that should be practised for her behalf’: without such a document they laboured in vain. Gifford said that this kind of warrant had never been obtained by any man, and to do so would be very difficult. They agreed to think about the proposal; Gifford would give his answer next day. Ballard left Gifford’s lodgings and travelled out of London. He left his manservant to wait upon Gifford for his answer. Gifford was left with the impression after their meeting that Ballard was working alone and that he was ‘marvellous earnest’ in hearing Gifford’s reply. Though Gifford did not yet know the full extent of Ballard’s knowledge, he was sure that Ballard would reveal everything to him in time. Certainly Ballard was very keen to keep Gifford’s company. Straight away Gifford wrote to Walsingham to find out what answer he should give to Ballard.
Ballard and Gifford met again two days later, a Tuesday morning, when Ballard was in what Gifford called ‘a marvellous rage’, still furious that he had heard nothing from either Morgan or Paget. He was again thinking about returning to France. He spoke of the great men in England, nobility and gentry, who supported him. Gifford was reluctant to press him too hard for names. Ballard had heard that Gifford was under Walsingham’s protection, but Gifford was able to persuade him that he was not. Ballard railed against Thomas Phelippes. He knew that Phelippes was at Chartley and said that Phelippes was opening and reading packets of letters, causing Gifford to suspect that Ballard had a spy close to Walsingham. Gifford advised Sir Francis to keep special guard on his correspondence.
About six days before Gilbert Gifford’s second meeting with John Ballard, Anthony Babington wrote to the Queen of Scots. By now he and his group of Catholic friends had concocted a plan to free Mary from captivity. He been approached, he wrote, by a man called Ballard, who had informed him of great preparations by the Catholic princes of Europe ‘for the deliverance of our country from the extreme and miserable state wherein it hath too long remained’. England would be invaded; Mary would be freed; Queen Elizabeth, ‘the usurping competitor’, would be dispatched. Babington’s meaning was clear. Elizabeth was to be murdered, and members of his group of conspirators would do the killing:
[for] the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.
He told Mary that he would be at Lichfield, a few miles from Chartley, where he would expect her reply. Once he had finished his letter, Babington gave it to the boy, who was unknown to him, who came to collect the Queen of Scots’s packets. The boy worked for Thomas Phelippes.
Phelippes saw and read for himself Babington’s letter to Mary. Waiting patiently near Chartley for Mary to betray herself in her reply to Babington, Phelippes may have remembered some words from the Act for the Queen’s Surety passed by parliament only a year earlier. A special judicial commission would try the Queen of Scots on the evidence of any plot or conspiracy ‘compassed or imagined, tending to the hurt of Her Majesty’s royal person by any person or with the privity of any person that shall or may pretend title to the crown of this realm’. With the privity of any pretender to the English throne: in other words, if the Queen of Scots gave her support to the conspiracy of Babington and his friends, she would in effect sign her own death warrant.
The Queen of Scots was too clever and experienced to fall into an easy trap. She replied to Babington’s letter but took ten days to do so. She was careful to leave no evidence in her own handwriting. Any notes she may have made for the letter’s composition were carefully destroyed, and she dictated the letter to her secretaries. It was Gilbert Curll, Mary’s secretary for the English language, who put the plain words into cipher.
The Queen of Scots acknowledged Babington’s ‘zeal and entire affection’ to the Catholic faith and her cause and commended his efforts to prevent ‘the designments of our enemies for the extirpation of our religion out of this realm with ruin of us all’. She encouraged Babington to consider each element of his proposal and to confer with Don Bernardino de Mendoza, King Philip’s ambassador in Paris. The nearest she came to acknowledging Babington’s conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth was in a question: ‘By what means do the six gentlemen deliberate to proceed’? But it was enough.
Leaving Babington in God’s protection, Mary instructed him to destroy the letter once he had read it: ‘fail not to burn this present quickly’. On 18 July Curll posted this startling document from Chartley, where it went, of course, not straight off to Babington but first, by way of Phelippes’s complicated postal system, to Phelippes himself, to be deciphered, read and analysed in careful detail.
It took Phelippes less than twenty-four hours to decipher Mary’s reply to Babington and to make a copy for Walsingham. ‘It may please your honour. You have now this queen’s answer to Babington which I received yesterday’ were the opening words of Phelippes’s letter to Walsingham on Tuesday, 19 July. The copy Phelippes sent by fast despatch to his master. The original he kept, and would send on to Babington if he was in Staffordshire, as Babington had said he would be. Phelippes thought that if Babington were caught quickly enough Mary’s letter would ‘not be so sore defaced’, even though the Scottish queen had instructed the young man to destroy it. He asked Walsingham to find out from Nicholas Berden or Thomas Cassie, Phelippes’s servant, whether Babington was in London.
Phelippes was confident that in what he called the ‘bloody letter’ Elizabeth’s government at last possessed the evidence necessary to proceed against the Queen of Scots. He hoped that God would inspire Elizabeth ‘with that heroical courage that were meet [fit, appropriate] for avenge of God’s cause and the security of her self and this state’. In other words, Phelippes believed the time had come to destroy Mary for the good of Elizabeth’s throne and kingdom. But at the very least, Phelippes hoped that the queen would hang Mary’s two secretaries, Nau and Curll.
Receiving Phelippes’s letter, Walsingham briefed the queen on what had been happening at Chartley. Sir Francis wrote to Phelippes on Friday, 22 July to say that nothing would be done about Anthony Babington till Phelippes was back in London; for the time being the young man was free. Walsingham knew that Phelippes had the original of Mary’s letter with him and he instructed Phelippes to bring it to court. Already Walsingham’s mind, like Phelippes’s, was moving. It was clear to him that so brilliant a chance for action needed thought, planning and care. He wrote: ‘I hope there will be a good course had in this cause. Otherwise we that have been instruments in the discovery shall receive little comfort for our travail.’ In other words, given this opportunity, there had to be decisive and definitive action against the Queen of Scots. What now, he must have wondered, should or could be done?
On 24 July 1586 Sir Francis Walsingham was at court at Greenwich Palace, expecting Thomas Phelippes’s return home. Thomas Cassie was in London, carrying messages between Walsingham and his secretary, Francis Mylles. Mylles was at his house on Tower Hill. Four men – Walsingham, Phelippes, Mylles and Sir Amias Paulet at Chartley – pulled together the strands of what was becoming a difficult and complicated operation. They had to keep watch as best they could on Mary Queen of Scots and her secretaries at Chartley. They also had to keep John Ballard the conspirator under close surveillance. And they had to find and detain Anthony Babington, who was anywhere between London and Staffordshire. Phelippes scrutinized the letters passing between Mary and Babington and the other supposed conspirators. Through the eyes of Maliverey Catilyn and Nicholas Berden in London, Mylles kept watch over Ballard and others of his group. Mylles had ready their arrest warrants. And it was Mylles who, with Phelippes away at Chartley, kept (or tried to keep) in touch with the double agent Gilbert Gifford using Phelippes’s servant Thomas Cassie.
It was difficult for Mylles or Cassie to know exactly where Gifford was, for like his cousin Barnes he had a habit of disappearing. Gifford was supposed to meet Mylles at night on 22 July. Mylles waited till one o’clock the next morning; Gifford did not turn up. A few hours later, before noon on Saturday, 23 July, Cassie returned to Tower Hill to tell Mylles that he too had not seen Gifford for a few days. Cassie thought that Gifford had ridden out for a day or two in the country with Ballard. By the 24th Mylles was seriously worried. Cassie, however, was sure that he would turn up eventually.
Francis Mylles pondered how best to capture Ballard without compromising any of Walsingham’s men. If either Gifford or Berden arrested him, they would be shown to be government agents. Mylles wondered whether one or the other of them should be taken with Ballard and sent to prison for a time as a way to maintain his cover. Mylles was anxious about secrecy and security. He was nervous of the help to be given by the city authorities and he even said nothing of the operation to the two pursuivants lodging in his house. The difficulties of arrest impressed themselves upon Mylles’s mind. A night raid, for example, meant doors could take too long to open, giving time for escape. He hoped that Ballard might be ‘trained [lured, enticed] to dine or sup in any place with half an hour’s knowledge’. Mylles, by now a worried man, hoped (probably against all the evidence) for an easy, tidy and efficient arrest of a very dangerous conspirator.
Phelippes left Chartley for London late on the afternoon of Tuesday, 26 July, carrying with him the original of the Queen of Scots’s reply to Anthony Babington’s letter. By six o’clock Sir Amias Paulet reckoned that his friend was twelve or fourteen miles on the road south. Paulet wrote to Phelippes on the 29th: ‘I trust you are safely arrived at the court, and it seemeth by Master Secretary’s letters that upon your coming thither some resolution will be taken.’ By this Paulet meant the critical meeting that Walsingham and Phelippes would have when Phelippes arrived in London. Then they would have to decide what to do next; the ‘resolution’ was their plan of action. Having had Mary’s ‘bloody letter’ for a week, there was a need for Phelippes to post it on to Babington quickly and efficiently: time was ticking by.
Walsingham and Phelippes met probably on 28 July. They discussed how exactly the Queen of Scots’s letter should be delivered to Babington. But they considered a much more significant question. Was the letter as it stood strong enough evidence against Mary? If it was so, as Phelippes had believed on 19 July, then why did Walsingham seem to hesitate? There was a note of doubt in his letter to Phelippes of the 22nd. It seems he hinted of something to Paulet. And if Mary’s reply to Babington did not stand as definitive evidence against her, another question may have formed itself in Walsingham’s mind: What could be done to make it so?
Walsingham and Phelippes discussed this last question, or at least some formulation of it, on Thursday, 28 July. Their answer was to doctor the original ‘bloody letter’. Intimately familiar with the cipher employed by the Queen of Scots and Anthony Babington, Phelippes, probably with the assistance of Arthur Gregory in opening and resealing the packet, added to the letter a postscript. The only surviving evidence of this postscript in any original (or near original) form is a draft in Walsingham’s papers of eight densely packed lines of cipher characters that run when deciphered to seventy-six words. This was an audacious and risky piece of forgery. The decision to execute it may have been Walsingham’s alone, or perhaps Phelippes had brought the idea with him from Chartley. The evidence seems to point, not to long premeditation, but rather to the growing realization of a possibility. But one fact is really not in doubt. When Babington eventually deciphered and read what he took to be a letter of reply from the Queen of Scots, he held in his hands a document that was not what it was when Gilbert Curll had sealed it up.
We can imagine Walsingham and Phelippes together composing their text, testing each word, measuring meaning, master and servant working together. The postscript was then put into cipher using the same method that Curll had done days earlier. Next the passage was read with great care once again. They deleted part of a sentence. This is the document that survives, which when deciphered reads:
I w[ould] be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment, for that it may be I shall be able upon knowledge of the parties to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein; and even so do I wish to be made acquainted with the names of all such principal persons as also w[h]o be already as also who be a as also from time to time particularly how you proceed and as soon as you may for the same purpose who be already and how far every one privy hereunto.
The object of this paragraph was to prove beyond all doubt an unbreakable connection between Mary Queen of Scots and the treasonous conspiracy of Anthony Babington and his group. That suggestion was there already in the text of Mary’s letter. But what Walsingham and Phelippes probably had in the mind were the precise words of the Act for the Queen’s Surety and the need to have water-tight evidence of the Queen of Scots’s ‘privity’ in a conspiracy.
They must have felt this fantastic risk was one worth taking. The smallest slip could easily disable the surveillance coordinated by Mylles and, more importantly, ruin the chance to throw the net over Mary Stuart. Phelippes’s forgery had to appear like a seamless continuation of a letter that had been written first in French and then in English and finally turned into cipher. It had to reflect Gilbert Curll’s habits of enciphering Mary’s letters. Above all it had to look like Curll’s handwriting. Only someone with Phelippes’s experience and sharp eye for detail could have done it.
Certainly it was a danger for Walsingham to provoke so revealing an answer from Babington. It was also a risk to put so much evidential weight on a piece of fabrication. But this second point, which caused Walsingham and the Privy Council some anxiety in the following months, was not urgent enough to prevent Sir Francis from sanctioning the forgery. After all, as Phelippes had written ten days earlier, this was for God’s cause, Queen Elizabeth’s safety and the security of the state. It was self-evident that Mary Queen of Scots was guilty of a most horrible crime against her royal cousin. Now Walsingham and Phelippes had the proof, by hook or by crook.
On the evening of the same day of the meeting between Walsingham and Phelippes, Thursday, 28 July, Anthony Babington gave a great supper for his friends at the Castle tavern on Cornhill right in the heart of the city of London. The Castle occupied a large stone house; from the tavern door there was a passageway leading out to Threadneedle Street and the Royal Exchange, one of the busiest meeting places of Elizabethan London. It would seem that Babington, a very rich young man with the money to dine his companions, chose to conspire in plain sight. That evening Nicholas Berden watched the tavern closely, making his dispositions and hoping that John Ballard would be one of Babington’s guests. Berden had put one of his men in the next room to Babington and his friends, from where he was able to watch who came to supper.
Hurriedly Berden wrote a letter to Francis Mylles. Rushed across London, it arrived at Mylles’s house on Tower Hill at seven o’clock. Berden asked Mylles to be at the Exchange ‘somewhat disguised’ at eight. Mylles should use his discretion. The tavern had two doors, but Berden assured him that the place was ‘most safe’. To avoid all suspicion Berden said he would stay away from the Castle. It occurred to him that he might in fact be dining with Ballard that evening. One of their mutual acquaintances had promised to bring Ballard for supper, and within the hour Berden’s friend had sent over a capon and two rabbits. This was enough food for at least three, and it seemed likely that he was bringing a guest to Berden’s lodging, though Berden knew not whom. Nicholas Berden ended his letter to Francis Mylles in haste and with the observation that he had no arrest warrant.
It turned out in the end that there was no opportunity to miss. John Ballard did not go to the Castle tavern, nor did he have supper with Nicholas Berden. But at least, thanks to Berden’s guests for supper, Mylles and Walsingham had an idea of where Ballard was. He was in Sussex, but would very soon return to London. Berden was promised the favour of an introduction to the man who called himself Black Fortescue. Mylles was unconvinced; he thought that Ballard was probably preparing to leave England by ship. Nevertheless, still clinging to a little hope, he asked Walsingham for a blank arrest warrant to give to Berden.
On the following day, Friday, 29 July, Babington at long last received the ‘bloody letter’ from Mary Queen of Scots. Babington took the packet from ‘a homely serving man in a blue coat’ who was unknown to him. In fact, of course, the servant worked for Thomas Phelippes; he may have been Thomas Cassie. And so the delivery was made at last. How would Babington respond to Mary Queen of Scots’s supposed request for information about the six men who had volunteered to assassinate Elizabeth? Phelippes and his men watched and waited for Babington’s reply.
By now, in the closing days of July 1586, Robert Poley was Anthony Babington’s close companion, playing the part of Babington’s friend but in fact Walsingham’s man and a government informant. Babington still wanted Walsingham’s favour to travel abroad; Poley was his contact with Sir Francis. Was Babington a conspirator or merely a young man caught up in a plot? To Walsingham he was a traitor, though he made use, through Poley, of Babington’s tentative offer of service. On 30 July Sir Francis instructed Poley ‘to move [encourage, persuade] Babington to deal with the principal practisers in the state’ – in other words, to involve himself fully with the plot to kill Elizabeth.
By now Babington trusted the friend he called Robin Poley. Poley was Babington’s hope for mercy and escape, his intermediary with Walsingham, his advocate and confidant. Through Poley, Babington could alert Sir Francis to the plot against the queen’s life and then, with thanks for his service, leave England to travel comfortably around Europe. That was his hope and expectation; he was a naive young man.
On Saturday, 30 July Babington admitted Poley to the secret of the conspiracy. Asking for Poley’s hand and promise of good faith, Babington told his friend ‘that it lay much in him and certain [of] his friends either to maintain this [Protestant] state and religion as it now stood, [or] else utterly to subvert this [state], and bring in the Catholic religion, and alter the government’. The plan, in other words, was for a Catholic coup d’état that would overthrow Elizabeth’s government and the Church of England.
Babington was not quite truthful with Poley. He suggested that the conspirators proposed to topple the queen’s government, not to kill Elizabeth. But this was the very day that Babington began to decipher the all-important letter he had received only the day before from the Queen of Scots. In Babington’s letter to Mary, and in the reply he was about to decipher, he and his friends and the Queen of Scots also had compassed and imagined Elizabeth’s murder. The painstaking work of making sense of Mary’s letter – working cipher character by cipher character to put it into plain prose – Babington found so tedious that he asked his friend and co-conspirator Chidiocke Tycheborne to help him. The task would have been more painful to him still if he had known that the postscript to the letter was the work of Thomas Phelippes.
Poley went first thing next morning, 31 July, to Babington’s lodgings. Poley left because Babington was deep in conversation with his fellow conspirators John Ballard and John Savage, but he returned in the afternoon. Walking together through London, they talked about the plot. It was, said Babington, not quite ready to be executed. Poley advised him to see Walsingham as quickly as he could: if Babington revealed the conspiracy himself, he stood the best chance possible of the queen’s clemency and Sir Francis’s favour. Poley said that he would see Master Secretary.
They walked and spoke together for two or three hours and had supper with some of Babington’s fellow plotters, including John Savage and John Ballard, at the Rose tavern at Temple Bar. That night Poley persuaded Babington to stay at his lodgings near by. On Tuesday, 2 August, Poley went to Walsingham’s country house, Barn Elms in Surrey, to make the arrangements for a meeting with Babington at which the young conspirator would reveal to Sir Francis everything he knew about the plot.
Walsingham had not even the slightest intention of meeting Babington. He wanted both Babington and Ballard to be arrested, but like Phelippes he was waiting for Babington to post a reply to the ‘bloody letter’, the final proof (if any were needed) of a horrible treason. Walsingham needed time, and for this reason at Barn Elms he told Poley to tell Babington that he would meet him in two days. Walsingham instructed Phelippes in the meantime to apprehend Ballard and Babington and his friends. Babington and Ballard would be kept at Walsingham’s house on Seething Lane near the Tower of London. Sir Francis instructed Phelippes to plan their interrogations and Nicholas Berden, the watcher, to draw up a list of the names of the ‘principal practisers’ in the conspiracy.
Suddenly, at this critical juncture, Babington disappeared. On Tuesday, 2 August no one other than Poley, who after leaving Barn Elms had gone off to London, knew where he was. Phelippes was worried. He was waiting for Babington’s reply to the ‘bloody letter’. Babington had told the courier – Phelippes’s man – that he would have it ready that very day. But there was no sign of either the letter or Babington. Phelippes wrote urgently to Walsingham to say that they had been ‘cozened’, or deceived.
Phelippes suspected that Babington had ridden out of London. Perhaps he had gone to Lichfield in Staffordshire, where, not bothering with the London courier, he intended to post the letter himself to Chartley. Perhaps he had panicked. Phelippes, more used to sitting for hours over complicated secret ciphers, sprang into action. Something had to be done. Probably Babington had indeed gone off to Lichfield. There, as Phelippes knew, Babington would discover that the ‘bloody letter’ had not been posted from the town. Surely then he would suspect a trap. Babington had to be stopped, and Phelippes prepared to ride out in pursuit. He asked Walsingham for a couple of ‘lusty [vigorous, strong] geldings’ and a ‘lusty fellow’ of Sir Francis’s staff. They would set out next day at one o’clock to find Anthony Babington.