The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I

by John Cooper

  It is not difficult to see why Gifford appeared a plausible courier to the Queen of Scots. He had an impeccable Catholic pedigree: a Staffordshire recusant whose family were suffering for their faith, an exile who had studied both in Rheims and in Rome. His boyish looks made it less likely that his real identity would be suspected. Thomas Morgan assured Mary of his good character. When he travelled from Paris to England in December 1585, maybe Gifford really did intend to serve Mary rather than to betray her. On the other hand, we know that Walsingham had been secretly negotiating with his fellow exile and kinsman Dr William Gifford, whose longing to return to England Walsingham was able to play on. When he landed at Rye Gilbert was immediately escorted to Walsingham, implying that his arrival was expected and his arrest staged. If he wasn’t already working for the English government, it proved an easy task to turn him. Gifford’s letter of commendation from Morgan offered Walsingham the means not simply to monitor Mary’s correspondence, but to ensnare the queen herself. What followed was the greatest triumph of Walsingham’s career: Mary was caught in the act of rebelling against the Queen of England whom she had so recently sworn to protect from harm.19

  Mary knew full well that, even when she had been allowed to write and receive letters via the French embassy in London, they had been read by Paulet and Walsingham. The trick was to convince her that some new way had been found to reach the outside world. Her hunger for news was an Achilles heel which Walsingham could exploit. Mary hoped that messages could be hidden in the boxes of shoes and silks that she was still allowed to order, but this proved impractical because everything was minutely examined before being allowed to reach her. The plan that Gifford put to her on 16 January 1586 was both more daring and more simple, taking advantage of a humdrum domestic routine. All great Tudor households consumed large quantities of beer, lighter than its modern equivalent and preferable to drinking unclean water. Chartley carted kegs of beer from nearby Burton rather than brewing its own, and therein lay their chance. Letters in and out could be concealed in a watertight container, slender enough to fit through the bung-hole of the beer barrel, to be passed on by the Burton brewer whose loyalty Gifford had bought. It seemed ingenious, a classic example of hiding a secret in plain view. In reality it was a sting devised by Walsingham and Gifford in collaboration with Thomas Phelippes, who spent the new year of 1586 at Chartley setting up the operation in company with his old master Paulet.20

  Mary seized her chance. Gifford’s arrest had given him the credibility in Catholic circles that he needed to play his part, and she entrusted him with an initial batch of letters to Morgan, Archbishop Beaton and the Duke of Guise. Châteauneuf in return handed Gifford all the mail for Mary that had been backing up at the French embassy since the Throckmorton plot: twenty-one packets of it, which Gifford promptly passed to Phelippes for deciphering before another carrier took it up to Chartley. Elaborate safeguards prevented this unnamed agent and the Burton brewer from discovering that they were both in government service.

  As messages passed and repassed over several months, apparently proving the security of the beer-barrel system, Mary became more candid about her feelings towards the usurper Queen of England. In May 1586 Walsingham discovered that she was deeply embroiled in treason. Her Paris agent Charles Paget had heard from a missionary priest named John Ballard that the time of reconquest was nigh. English Catholics were ready to rise, while Elizabeth’s armies were tied up in the Low Countries. Mary strongly endorsed the idea of invasion, hoping to recruit her son James for the cause. She was also in communication with Mendoza, the former Spanish envoy to England who was now ambassador in Paris.

  Before Anthony Babington even stepped onto the stage, Walsingham had enough evidence of her plotting to condemn the Queen of Scots. Why did he delay? Not out of any reluctance to strike; removing this ‘bosom serpent’ from Elizabeth’s breast had been his objective since his earliest days in crown service. But Walsingham could see that Ballard was full of bluster, and that his story didn’t quite add up. Invasion would come, Walsingham knew that, but he had also heard from his agents in Spain that Philip II wasn’t ready to commit his formidable navy against England. In the meantime, listening in to the conversations of the Queen of Scots might bring other traitors to light.

  Enter Anthony Babington. The plot that bears his name was the greatest challenge to Elizabeth’s rule since the rising of the northern earls, although Babington was not the most radical of the conspirators and was reluctant to assume their leadership. Like the Throckmorton plot it threatened to unite foreign military support with an uprising of English Catholics. Its security was compromised from the start, and more than one of the plotters had connections with Francis Walsingham. It is fair to question how close they came to replacing Elizabeth and her ministers with a Catholic regime under Mary Stuart. That said, there can be no doubt about the importance of the Babington plot. It led directly to the execution of the Queen of Scots, a savage end to the dream that she might one day accede to a united British kingdom. By associating Catholicism with treason, the plot also accelerated the fusion between English national identity and the Protestant faith: a lasting legacy of the age of Elizabeth.

  Anthony Babington was not quite twenty-five when he was executed for conspiring against queen and country. His family of Derbyshire gentry had clung onto their Catholicism ever since the days of his great-grandfather Thomas, Lord Darcy, beheaded by Henry VIII for supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace. Babington was well educated, had literary leanings, was highly regarded by his friends – qualities which remind us of Francis Throckmorton. Camden describes him as ‘rich, pleasant witted, and learned above his age’. But he was also ‘addicted’ to the Roman religion, a phrase which already carried the sense of enslavement to a drug. His role in the plot that took his name can be reconstructed from a full series of confessions that he made shortly after his arrest in August 1586. In his later interrogations he was clearly responding to questions put to him, but his first and fullest explanation was volunteered to Sir Christopher Hatton and Lord Burghley at Hatton’s London house. Babington seems keen to tell his story in his own words, ruefully at times, but without the fawning appeals for mercy that characterise the outpourings of other traitors against the Tudors.21

  He began with his 1580 visit to Paris, where Morgan and Beaton recruited him for the Queen of Scots’s service. If Babington already knew Mary from his earlier service as a page in Shrewsbury’s household, he made no mention of it. When he returned to London a year or so later, Castelnau’s secretary persuaded him to use his contacts to send packets of letters to Mary, ‘affirming the service to be very meritorious, full of honour and profit’. It was dangerous work, and Babington was troubled by doubts about what he was doing. He resolved to return to France or Italy and contemplated entering a monastery, but couldn’t get a passport to travel. At this point, in about May 1586, the renegade Catholic priest John Ballard made contact with him, telling a tale similar to the one he had peddled to Charles Paget. The pope, the Kings of France and Spain, and the Dukes of Guise and Parma were all preparing for war against English apostasy. Passive support from English Catholics was not enough, said Ballard, since foreign troops ‘would enter by right of conquest’. No one would be spared unless they had explicitly declared their support for the invasion. Babington was sceptical, and said so. Little could be done ‘so long as her majesty doth live, the state being so well settled’. Ballard replied that this wasn’t an obstacle; he had already found a way to deal with Elizabeth.22

  In the summer of 1585, the English exile John Savage swore a sacred oath to assassinate Elizabeth. Savage had initially found his vocation as a soldier in Parma’s army, but then took up residence in the English college in Rheims, where Gilbert Gifford witnessed his oath and Dr William Gifford suggested how it might be fulfilled. Savage could lurk in the gallery of the queen’s chapel and stab her. Or he could shoot her in the royal gardens, or run her through when she took the air with the gentlewomen o
f her privy chamber. Savage duly returned to London, at which point Ballard became the link-man between his plot and Anthony Babington’s. Tyrannicide was at the core of the Babington conspiracy from the start.23

  Horrified and fascinated by the scale of the mission entrusted to him, Babington turned to his friends. The poet Chidiock Tichborne had been with Babington in France and was questioned for bringing ‘popish relics’ back with him. Thomas Salesbury was even younger than Babington, a gentleman’s son from Denbighshire whose Catholic piety had intensified during his studies at Trinity College in Oxford. The state papers describe him as Babington’s ‘bedfellow’, implying shared lodgings rather than anything more intimate. As Babington later explained to his interrogators, ‘we seemed to stand in a dilemma’: a stark choice between death at the hands of Protestant magistrates, and the invasion and sacking of England by foreigners.

  Other young Catholics began to adhere to them as they talked, enticed by the prospect of power or martyrdom and linked to each other by minor court office. Charles Tilney was a gentleman pensioner to the queen, cousin to Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney who regulated the London playhouses. He was a recent convert to Catholicism, John Ballard acting as his confessor. Edward Abington was the son of Elizabeth’s under-treasurer, Edward Jones the son of her master of the wardrobe. Jones was recruited by Salesbury, who believed he was of the same bloodline as Henry Tudor; the two of them were deputed to spark an uprising in Wales. Robert Barnewell, described by one of Walsingham’s men as tall and pockmarked with a flaxen beard, had attended court in the service of the Irish peer the Earl of Kildare, and knew that the queen was sometimes lightly guarded. His presence added a further British dimension to the Babington plot. Henry Donne was a Londoner, a clerk in one of the revenue offices of the crown and probably a relative of the poet John Donne. The list builds up to fourteen names from various points of the compass: Southampton and Suffolk, Worcestershire and Derbyshire, Wales and the Irish Pale. As if aware of their place in history, they took time to have their portraits painted. Camden claims the canvases were secretly shown to the queen so that she could recognise the plotters if they came to court.24

  The gravity of what they were attempting weighed heavily on the conspirators. They had to be sure that God would not condemn them for the death of an anointed sovereign. Babington’s confession lets us hear them conferring urgently among themselves. Edward Abington would have preferred to kidnap the queen, take her to a safe place and surround her with Catholic councillors. Babington was wracked with doubts of his own, fearing that the realm would be brought into ‘misery and wretched estate’ and fought over by rival claimants: perhaps a reference to the Wars of the Roses, a time of strife which still haunted the Elizabethan mind. Again he felt the call of the cloister, a yearning to leave ‘the practice of all matters of estate’. But always there was the figure of John Ballard, spreading news of the coming invasion, suggesting ways that English naval guns could be sabotaged, and above all hastening Babington into action.

  Ballard seems to have been a genuine radical, willing to use any sort of violence to force a Catholic restoration. There is little evidence that he was playing a double game. As Walsingham would point out at Mary’s trial, if Ballard had been working for him then why did he not reveal the secret and save his life? The same cannot be said for Robert Poley, ‘sweet Robin’ to Anthony Babington. The conspirators believed Poley to be a Catholic agent within Walsingham’s household. He lived up to expectations by suggesting that Leicester and Burghley and Walsingham could be neutralised ‘by poison or violence’. Even as he said so, however, he was working for Walsingham. Using Poley as an intermediary, Babington requested an interview with Walsingham at his country house at Barn Elms in early July 1586. What passed between the two men, plotter and spymaster, quarry and hunter? Babington later confessed to ‘having made proffer of service in general terms’ in return for licence to travel abroad. Suspecting that he was under surveillance, perhaps he was gambling on turning queen’s evidence. Walsingham gave him a courteous reception, but no passport. Babington was far too valuable a property to be allowed to slip away; not because his band of poets, priests and dreamers had any real chance of killing the Queen of England, but because he was corresponding with the Queen of Scots.25

  As we have seen, the lives of Mary and Babington first intersected in the early 1580s, when Babington forwarded some letters for her. They were reconnected now by Thomas Morgan, who counselled Mary in April 1586 to send a note to Babington declaring the faith that she still placed in him. Crucially, Walsingham did not initially pass on this letter to Mary once it had been deciphered. He only released it when he heard news from Poley in June about Babington’s deliberations with Salesbury, Tichborne and Barnewell regarding the lawfulness of tyrannicide. When she received Morgan’s message, Mary did as she was bid. She wrote to Babington as his ‘assured good friend’, exhorting him to locate packets of mail that had been unable to reach her. Paulet passed her letter to Walsingham, who made sure that it reached its destination. For months Babington had been frozen between obedience and revolt, ‘indifferent betwixt the two states, and not very sincere unto either’, as he put it in his confession. Now, flattered by Mary and urged on by Poley and Ballard, he made his choice and sealed the fates of all who were caught up in the conspiracy.26

  Babington’s ciphered reply to Mary was carried to Chartley by Thomas Phelippes himself. It was a bold pledge of fealty to a queen ‘unto whom only I owe all fidelity and obedience’. Elizabeth is unnamed, reduced simply to ‘the usurping Competitor’. In lofty language that suggested he was already thinking of himself as a royal councillor, Babington outlined an aggressive plan of campaign. An invasion from Catholic Europe would be assisted by loyal lieutenants appointed in Wales, the West Country and the north. Six noble gentlemen would see to ‘the dispatch of the usurper’, while Mary’s rescue would be undertaken by Babington himself. The religious context is explicit throughout. Elizabeth’s excommunication by the pope was also a deposition, freeing Catholic subjects of their allegiance to her. Babington hailed Mary as a sacred ruler miraculously preserved by God, ‘the last hope ever to recover the faith of our forefathers, and to redeem our selves from the servitude and bondage which heresy hath imposed upon us with the loss of thousands of souls’. She had only to say the word, and her supporters would swear on the sacrament to risk their lives.27

  For nine days, Mary considered her response. Few documents of this period have been so intently examined as the reply that she finally sent to Babington on 17 July. Eighteen years under house arrest, and the bitter disappointments of the 1569 uprising and the Throckmorton plot, had left their mark on the Queen of Scots. Although desperate to believe in Babington, she needed to be certain he could make good his claims. How many soldiers and horses could he muster, and what quantities of munitions and armour? Which ports were most suitable for a foreign landing? She pressed Babington with plans for her own liberation, favouring a midnight raid on Chartley to set its stables and barns ablaze, or using overturned carts to barricade the gatehouse while she was carried away on horseback. She urged him to organise a Catholic uprising in Ireland as a diversion, and a parallel action in Scotland to put her son James in her hands. As for Elizabeth, the ‘queen that now is’, there was no explicit endorsement of regicide; Mary referred simply to the ‘time to set the six gentlemen to work’. But what she had written was already enough to condemn her under the 1585 Act for the surety of the queen’s person. Phelippes knew it, and drew a gallows on the decrypt that he sent to Walsingham.

  Babington was instructed to burn Mary’s letter after reading, although he memorised its contents and provided his interrogators with a clear summary. The letter was dictated in French, Mary’s first language, to her secretary Claude Nau before being translated into Scots English by his colleague Gilbert Curll; the absence of a manuscript in her own hand would weaken the government’s case against her. When the empty barrel was opened and Phelippes g
ot hold of the letter, he used his copy of Mary’s cipher to add a postscript requesting Babington to name the six gentlemen who would be dealing with Elizabeth. This was a gamble on Phelippes’s part: it might have yielded unknown traitors close to the court, but could equally have blown the whole operation. As events would unfold, Babington would not have the chance to reply.28

  Although it left the details of Elizabeth’s killing to others, Mary’s letter clearly gave her blessing to the Babington plot. Babington himself had been coldly specific about what he termed ‘that tragical execution’, and Mary made no denials. Instead she responded to his rhetoric in kind, identifying her own cause with that of the true religion. Mary echoed Babington’s note of urgency that persecution was sapping the life of English Catholics, who would soon ‘become altogether unable for ever to arise again and to receive any aid at all’. It was now or never. The letter was delivered to Babington in London by ‘a homely serving man in a blue coat’, in reality a servant of Thomas Phelippes. With more time, Babington might have taken Mary’s advice to recruit a Catholic nobleman as a figurehead (she named the Earls of Arundel and Northumberland as possibles) and the haul of traitors would have been even greater. But Walsingham’s decision to arrest Ballard at Poley’s lodging house on 4 August sent the plotters into a spasm of activity.

  At last Babington took charge. Meeting Savage in Poley’s garden, Babington urged him to carry out his oath while he rallied their friends. Killing the queen was their ‘last and only refuge’. When Savage protested that he would never get near the court dressed as he was, Babington gave him money and a ring from his finger to buy what he needed. And yet even when he seemed to be drenched in treason, Babington was trying to strike a bargain with Walsingham. On 31 July he had sent word to Walsingham via Poley that he could reveal the details of a conspiracy against the state. When Poley was arrested with Ballard, presumably to preserve his cover, Babington went to a tavern in the company of another of Walsingham’s agents named Scudamore. Why was he not already galloping towards Chartley, mobilising the fifth column about which he had boasted to the Queen of Scots? According to his confession, Babington aimed ‘to obtain liberty for Ballard under pretence of better service’: in other words to play on his relationship with Walsingham for long enough to enable the conspirators either to escape, or to activate their plans for invasion.