by Susan Ronald
The tragic figure in the piece was, of course, Mary herself. Now in her early forties, Mary held the delightful vision of being set free from her fourteen-year captivity to be reunited with both her son and her crown. In the negotiations for her freedom she gave away everything that she had fought for—from renouncing her pretensions to England’s throne to any determination of Scotland’s religious future—all to be set free and meet the son she had been forced to abandon around his first birthday.1
However, Mary had become detached from reality after all her years of imprisonment, as is so common. She hadn’t “known” her son’s mind or indeed that she represented the very threat that he feared most: loss of his crown of Scotland that he had worn since he was a year old. Even sadder, Mary hadn’t seen that James saw himself as Elizabeth’s putative heir and did not want his mother to ruin his chances of succeeding the childless Elizabeth, now in her early fifties. Of course, when Mary read her son’s callous reply, that he would not countenance negotiating with his mother so long as she remained a prisoner of England, the old flame of rebellion flashed once again, as Mary penned her reply to James, “I am so grievously offended at my heart at the impiety and ingratitude that my child has committed against me.”2
Mary concluded by threatening to “disinherit” James and bestow Scotland upon his greatest enemy. The same day, she wrote to Elizabeth that Patrick Gray was a troublemaker—ce petit brouillon—and James was an ungrateful, badly brought-up child. Mary rightly felt her freedom torn away from her, not by Elizabeth this time but by her own son. The shock of it was nearly too much to bear, and so Mary tried to rationalize how James could treat her so shabbily. Perhaps it was the sinister advice of his unwise counsels? It must be Patrick Gray, or James’s new favorite, Captain James Stewart, newly created Earl of Arran, surely. Yet slowly, the stark and horrid truth dawned on her. James had repudiated the “Association” that would ensure Mary’s release to maintain his own position and power. He had turned his back once and for all on his mother.
Was Mary’s threat of disinheriting James entirely idle? Her murdered husband, Lord Darnley, had a younger brother, Charles Stuart. Charles married the daughter of Bess of Hardwicke, Elizabeth Cavendish, and the young couple had a little girl, Arbella. Elizabeth, on discovery of the marriage, imprisoned the couple for marrying without royal approval just as she had done with Catherine Grey all those years earlier. Yet when Arbella’s father died in the spring after Arbella’s birth, the baby and her mother went to live with the formidable Bess. Could Arbella, an English-bred Stuart, granddaughter of the ambitious Margaret Lennox and Bess of Hardwicke, be the enemy that Mary sought to release against James? As Bess of Hardwicke was Arbella’s sole caretaker after the girl’s mother died in 1582, and Bess was increasingly estranged from her husband, Shrewsbury, Mary’s keeper. The situation was potentially volatile.
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There is little doubt that there was right and wrong on all sides of the issues surrounding Mary’s continued imprisonment. Nonetheless, Walsingham’s primary consideration remained security of the realm, and Mary, since the Throckmorton Plot, had put England on a heightened state of alert. Bess of Hardwicke, in part to keep the stain of any closeness with Mary away from her beloved granddaughter Arbella, sharpened her notoriously vituperative tongue and spread rumors about Mary to her husband, Shrewsbury. Bess declared that Shrewsbury and Mary had had two children together during her captivity. Shrewsbury was outraged; Mary, apoplectic. Bess and Shrewsbury separated, with Shrewsbury’s reputation in tatters, while Bess wove further fairy tales to an incredulous court. In the end Elizabeth had Bess examined by the Privy Council, and the stories were seen for the fabrications they were.
Of course, it was impossible in these circumstances for Shrewsbury to remain with his wife and maintain Mary as his prisoner. With all this fresh notoriety Mary would, in the council’s view, once again become a magnet for Catholic plots even if she did not instigate them. The only “winner” in the sad state of affairs would be Shrewsbury himself. By Elizabeth’s deep-searching for the truth, the hapless earl had been freed from the two women who had ruined his life—his wife and Mary—but who could take Shrewsbury’s place and under what conditions?
Mary was quickly removed back to Tutbury Castle and the custody of Sir Ralph Sadler in January 1585. Elizabeth did not want the loyal Shrewsbury to be more offended than he had been already by the allegations leveled at him, so she created a thin veil of unknown but suspected Catholic threats and the sudden need to keep Mary in the custody of Puritans.
While Bess of Hardwicke ranted and testimonies were given before the Privy Council, Mary became more and more isolated in her dour prison at Tutbury, as well as increasingly impoverished. Henry of Guise, as Mary’s financial adviser, was busily feathering his own nest in France and was guilty of either severe maladministration or simply pilfering Mary’s marriage settlement from her days as queen of France. Before that, Henry III, under the ever-watchful Catherine de’ Medici, had forced Mary to swap her valuable estates in Touraine for loss-making ones elsewhere. In no time at all, her ambassador James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, was obliged to raise a mortgage to the value of 33,000 crowns against these. Beaton, who was the only man still answerable to Mary, shouldered the entire blame for her poverty, though it is difficult to see how he could have avoided a royal order for the exchange of lands—an exchange that benefited Francis of Anjou, and ultimately the French crown. The only person to escape her thoughts of wrongdoing was Shrewsbury’s former secretary, Thomas Morgan, who now served in the powerful position of Beaton’s chief cipher clerk. It was Morgan who sent Gilbert Gifford to Mary in December 1585 with letters that would foreshadow Mary’s own end.
* * *
Unfortunately for Mary, she had trusted Morgan. Though he had constructed over forty cipher alphabets for Mary and held virtually all of her foreign correspondence with Spain, Rome, and France, as well as having been at the heart of the Throckmorton and Parry plots, Morgan had also become sloppy. When Gifford presented himself to Morgan as a former student of William Allen’s at Rheims, Morgan took Gifford into service as a courier within weeks, without carrying out adequate checks. Gifford was given a letter of introduction to Mary, recommending him in the warmest terms as a trustworthy Catholic gentleman who had “offered to do all the friendly Offices he may do.”3
The glowing reference for Gilbert Gifford did not stop there. Morgan wrote that he had given Gifford specific instructions to establish correspondence with Mary. “This,” Morgan added confidently, “he promised to put into execution with care and I hope he will show his good will and diligence in the cause. He required my letters to your Majesty, thereby to give him credit and a mean to enter into intelligence with your Majesty.”4
On Gifford’s landfall at Rye, the port searcher apprehended him straightaway and took him to Walsingham. There is no record of their interview. Though it is possible Gifford had always been in Walsingham’s service, it is only after they met that we know for certain Gilbert Gifford had agreed to betray Mary and all his Catholic friends to enter Walsingham’s pay.
* * *
Obviously Walsingham knew Gifford was coming and a further Catholic plot was already under way. In fact, at the time Gifford approached Morgan in Paris, Walsingham had finally succeeded in moving Mary to the Earl of Essex’s home, Chartley Hall. To Mary’s chagrin, her jailer, the staunch Puritan Sir Amias Paulet, tightened her security even further. Though Mary complained bitterly to Elizabeth about Paulet’s stern treatment, prohibiting her from even taking fresh air, he had been acting on orders of Walsingham himself. All discussions between Mary and the castle servants, as well as those serving in Mary’s household, could only take place with Paulet in the room. None of Mary’s servants were allowed to leave the grounds without a guard. No stranger was allowed admission on any pretext. Laundresses, coachmen, or other seemingly innocuous tradespeople were put to the closest scrutiny possible.
Mary’s
isolation was near complete, and the more isolated she became, the more desperate her plight. The only correspondence allowed was through the French ambassador, though even then diplomatic privilege was suspended. All packets, whether incoming or outgoing, were carefully examined by either Walsingham or his unquestionably zealous secretary and cryptographer Thomas Phelippes. Walsingham had devised a method of opening Mary’s letters without disturbing their seals so that neither the ambassador nor Mary knew the letters had been searched for hidden meaning. After three short months of this charade, Walsingham wrote to Paulet to tell him that Mary should be informed that all her letters for France would need to be sent directly to Walsingham before they could be forwarded. Mary’s last vestige of privacy had been removed with her transfer to Chartley.5
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The success of Gifford’s mission as Walsingham’s spy depended entirely on his ability to get letters to the information-starved Mary. The man who made this possible was none other than Thomas Phelippes. Around Christmastide 1585, Phelippes was dispatched to Chartley to arrange a plausible means by which letters could be passed to Mary without arousing her suspicions that her loathed jailer was facilitating her communications.
Phelippes saw at once that Chartley, unusually for a Tudor manor house, had no private brewery. Considering that England’s population of around four million people drank eighteen million barrels of beer annually, with over three-quarters of it brewed domestically, the answer to Walsingham’s dilemma was obvious. The beer casks brought to Chartley could feasibly serve as mailboxes for Mary’s correspondence. They could be delivered “full” with inward letters to the Scots queen and returned “empty” with Mary’s replies inside. A watertight casket needed to be built and hidden inside the casks, and Chartley’s brewer taken into Walsingham’s confidence. Mary was no fool; if the casks were delivered by someone other than the proper person, the elaborate ploy could fail.
While these preparations were made, Gifford remained in London among the closed world of the Catholic community. When the time was ripe, around January 12, 1586, Gifford made himself known to the new French ambassador, Châteauneuf, to lay before him a cunning plan. Gifford claimed full credit for the “brewery plan” and insisted that all was ready. Though deeply mistrustful, Châteauneuf gave Gifford a letter for Mary, without any matters of importance discussed therein. Gifford went straight from the ambassador’s London residence to Chartley’s brewer. Within four days, the letters were safely in Mary’s hands. How Mary knew about the first casket letters, or indeed that the beer casks would provide a new conduit for her to the outside world, remains a mystery.
After nearly a year cut off from any external contact, Mary clearly felt hopeful once again. She set to work to let those who were faithful to her know that she had a secret means by which she could write and receive letters. Once her letters were written, the method for placing them into the casket was simple. Mary would dictate to her secretary, Claude Nau. He transcribed the letters into code, wrapped them securely in a leather packet, and handed it across secretly to the Chartley brewer. The brewer placed the packet into the corked tube in the bung of the cask. The “honest fellow,” as Paulet nicknamed the brewer, then took out the leather packet and handed it over to Gifford. Gifford would redeliver the letters that same evening to Paulet back at Chartley. The code in the letters was easily decrypted and the contents noted for the government’s use; then the packet was resealed, and Gilbert Gifford rode off to London to give the letters to the French ambassador. The first letters arrived with Thomas Morgan in Paris by mid-March.6
This first packet contained letters to Morgan and James Beaton in Paris, a letter to Henry of Guise, and one to Châteauneuf. All that was to be learned from this first group of letters was Mary’s elation at being able to communicate with them once more. In her instructions on how to reply, Mary told Châteauneuf to send all packets that had been held for her at the embassy via Gifford. At last Walsingham knew that the plan had worked. All he needed now was to ensure that the chain of control wasn’t breached.
They didn’t have long to wait. In the twenty-one packets sent through to Mary were all the letters written since the discovery of the Throckmorton Plot. Morgan, Charles Paget, a noble exiled Catholic, and James Beaton all wrote from Paris. Sir Francis Englefield and Robert Persons wrote to her from Spain. From the Low Countries two other correspondents wrote of developments there—albeit a year out of date. The vindication Walsingham must have felt at being able to read at one sitting all the foreign correspondence relating to the Throckmorton Plot should have been tremendous.
How Mary had pinned her hopes and prayers on the empty promises of Henry of Guise for years, how she had turned to Philip of Spain, and how Philip with Parma had planned her escape, as well as how all these schemes had failed, were laid before Walsingham. He could see with absolute clarity where the chinks in Mary’s armor were: whom she trusted and how she thought over the previous two years. Among this treasure trove, two of the letters demonstrated beyond any doubt that Mary had full knowledge of the Throckmorton Plot encompassing the Guise and Spanish invasion plan and she approved of it. Based on those two letters alone, Walsingham could have presented an open-and-shut case against Mary for treason based on the Oath of Association. Still, Walsingham wanted more.
To protect the secret nature of the organization against Mary, Walsingham told Paulet to give a pay raise to the “honest brewer” when he demanded it. Walsingham also had other plans for Gifford back in Paris. Before his man went on to pastures new, Gifford wrote to Mary to commend his “cousin,” who was a man, apparently, “of honest credit, good wealth, good understanding and a servant of the earl of Leicester.” It was Gifford’s substitute who would hand over the return correspondence from the French embassy to Mary in dribs and drabs, in part to allow time for the complete deciphering of the letters, in part because they were too numerous to fit into the casket within the cask.7
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It is at this point that an entirely separate conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth, coupled with a romantic ideal to free Mary and put her on England’s throne, merges. A priest named John Ballard had been part of a plot in 1584 to murder Elizabeth along with his friend and fellow priest, Anthony Tyrrell. The pair later claimed that they had gone to Rome to seek Gregory XIII’s blessing. Gregory may have been favorable to Ballard’s request (so long as it didn’t interfere with his own plans), but the Jesuit rector of the English College in Rome, Alfonso Agazzari, was not. This should not have come as any surprise. The Jesuits, he said, had been clear from the outset that they had no wish to become embroiled in England’s politics.
On their way back from Rome, in the spring of 1586, Ballard and Tyrrell stopped in Paris. There they met Charles Paget, Mary’s long-standing servant. Ballard, reportedly an unstable man, bragged to Paget that he knew all the leading Catholics in England and Scotland and that he had been sent to the Continent to declare their readiness to take up arms against Elizabeth. When Ballard later repeated his story to the Spanish ambassador Mendoza, he added that the time was ripe to invade, as England’s finest soldiers were engaged in the Low Countries with Leicester. So far, Ballard had said nothing that Mendoza hadn’t already known. He was thanked for his attention and sent on his way.
Before Ballard and Tyrrell left Paris, Charles Paget told them they must visit Anthony Babington in London. En route, and certainly not suspecting to unite their plot to Babington’s, the pair met with an ex-soldier in Parma’s army, John Savage. Together with Gilbert Gifford’s cousin William Gifford, Savage had planned to murder Elizabeth as well.8 Unknown to all of them, Walsingham was following their every move.
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Anthony Babington, after whom the notorious Babington Plot is named, became an admirer of Mary Queen of Scots when he was a boy, most likely when he had served as a page to the Earl of Shrewsbury. Like many other young Catholics, he saw Mary in the romantic guise of the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and Elizabeth
as England’s “she-tyrant.” In his letters to Mary, his flowery language revealed how she could fulfill his Catholic vision for England. Originally from Derbyshire, the twenty-five-year-old was typical of well-to-do Midlands Catholic youths, like Charles Paget, who prayed for a change in their religious fortunes.
Ballard met Anthony Babington at his lodgings in London late in May 1586 but seemingly had known him for at least two years before that. Ballard, true to form and full of braggadocio, gave Babington an overblown account of the preparations under way and the great Catholic League that was at hand against Elizabeth.
To an intelligent and sensitive young man like Babington, this was not the good news that Ballard had believed it to be. On June 7, 1586, Babington met with his close circle of friends: Sir Thomas Salusbury, a ward of the Earl of Leicester and heir to Lleweni in Denbighshire in Wales; Edward Abington of Worcestershire, Elizabeth’s cofferer; Chidiock Titchborne from Southampton, a known Catholic; and Charles Tilney, cousin of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Queen’s Revels and censor of all plays. When Babington told his friends what Ballard had said, he lamented, “We seemed to stand in a dilemma … On the one side lest by a massacre … the magistrates here would take away our lives … and on the other side lest the stranger should invade and sack our country, and bring it into servitude to foreigners.”9 The only course open to them, Babington felt, was to flee England.
As a result, Anthony Babington applied to an acquaintance of his, Robert Poley, who was, of course, in Walsingham’s pay. Poley and Nicholas Skerres had just returned from their spying mission on Frederick II of Denmark, along with some of Leicester’s company of actors, Leicester’s Men.10 Babington was not to know about Poley’s double life, since he had also fooled Thomas Morgan. On March 11, Morgan wrote to Mary that they should, in fact, use Poley to their own advantage as it was known that he “is placed with the Lady Sidney, the daughter of Secretary Walsingham, and by that means ordinarily in his house and thereby able to pick out many things to the information of your Majesty.”11
