Sir Francis Walsingham (32 page)

Getting into bed with the devil was, however, a hazardous pastime. Gray’s objective was supreme power in Scotland. While Walsingham was not averse to seeing his ally at the helm of Scottish affairs, he refused to condone Gray’s calm proposal that Arran should be assassinated. Gray dropped the sanguinary plan and satisfied himself with playing Iago to Arran’s Othello. Once again, Walsingham had to contend with Burghley’s different assessment of the political situation. The Lord Treasurer was inclined to back Arran. However, the earl proved no match for his wily opponent. By March 1586 he had been forced into exile. Shortly afterwards the long-drawn-out negotiations reached their culmination in the Treaty of Berwick, a defensive alliance which safeguarded the Protestant religion in both states and ensured joint action in the event of aggression by a third power. The machine oil of this agreement was a pension of
£
4,000 to be paid to James. This was a major coup for Walsingham and his associates – and it made no mention of Mary Stuart.

By this time Walsingham had spread a net for the captive queen from which she could not escape. He had already isolated her so completely that she was ready to grasp any opportunity to make contact with her friends and supporters. Walsingham hoped that she would be tempted to abandon her habitual caution and so incriminate herself. What turned into the Babington plot did not begin life as a carefully crafted entrapment, planned over several months with military precision. Walsingham did not work that way, nor did his extensive and elaborate ‘zoo’ of agents lend itself to such organization. There was, of necessity, an element of opportunism about Mr Secretary’s espionage activities, which depended for their effectiveness on whatever agents he had available at any given time. Thus it is impossible to discern a beginning of the Babington plot. It emerged from the coming together of various elements. It bubbled up from the steaming cauldron of hatred, fanaticism, internecine rivalry and confused hopes which was the English Catholic community in exile.

Just as English Protestants living abroad in Mary Tudor’s reign divided into Calvinist, Zwinglian, Knoxian and Coxian groups, so the Catholic movement fractured along numerous stress lines – Jesuits, secular clergy, laymen, Francophiles and Hispanophiles. Nor was there any common purpose among the zealots who lived abroad or spent some time travelling abroad. While the Jesuits, ever faithful to the incumbent pope, had no problem contemplating or even helping to engineer a Spanish invasion, others balked at the idea of their homeland being overrun by foreigners. The more pragmatically minded considered past failed enterprises and argued that no religious breakthrough could be achieved while Elizabeth remained queen. Whether a change of regime could be wrought by direct action or left to the working out of divine providence was a topic of major discussion among the exiles. Some who fled to English havens fired with the enthusiasm of religious conviction became disillusioned when they encountered Catholic leaders such as Mendoza, Guise, Arundel and Paget whose piety was heavily salted with personal resentment and desire for revenge. It is not difficult to imagine how confused many became, torn between their families back home who were quietly avoiding trouble and their activist peer groups determined on heroic action. Out of this confusion came the turncoats who were ready to betray their fellows and enter the ever-extending pool of Walsingham’s counter-conspiracy. Only such an atmosphere of doubt, personal rivalries and divided loyalties explains how the English government was able to penetrate the Catholic communities with comparative ease and recruit double agents.

One such was Gilbert Gifford. He came from a Staffordshire recusant family and between 1577 and 1585 had had a troubled and troublesome career as a member of the English Colleges at Douai, Rheims and Rome. An argumentative and at times violent student, he was a thorn in William Allen’s flesh and Edward Stafford later called him ‘the most notable double treble villain that ever lived, for he hath played upon all the hands in the world’.
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In 1585 he met up with John Savage, who had served in Parma’s Netherlands army, and John Ballard, a graduate of Rheims, who had travelled extensively in England encouraging the recusant community. One of the projects
the trio discussed – at this stage no more than a dream – was the feasibility and desirability of murdering Elizabeth. All three men were known to Walsingham and it was now that his massive intelligence expenditure bore fruit. When Gifford returned to England in December he was picked up and conveyed to Seething Lane. He seemed to have no problem in transferring allegiance, though doubtless Walsingham made him an offer he was in no position to refuse. What interested the secretary was that Gifford had arrived from Paris charged with finding some means of re-establishing a communication system between Mary and her supporters.

Enter Anthony Babington, a twenty-four-year-old Derbyshire gentleman of Catholic sympathies. Some six years earlier he had met Mary Stuart in his capacity as page to the Earl of Shrewsbury, her guardian. Subsequently he had travelled to Paris, met Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent, and conveyed letters between them. Around 1583–4 his activity ceased, probably in the wake of the Throckmorton plot. In August 1585 Castelnau, the French ambassador, was recalled and replaced by Claude de l’Aubespine, Baron de Châteauneuf. The new envoy was a member of the Guise party and much more astute than his predecessor. Walsingham thus lost his most important source of information about French activity and contacts with English Catholics. Moreover, this happened at a time when France was plunging back into religious war and the Catholic League seemed invincible. Guise’s followers denounced Henry III and Catherine for their edicts of religious toleration, refused to acknowledge Henry of Navarre as heir presumptive and bound themselves by solemn oath ‘to use force and take up arms to the end that the holy church of God may be restored to its dignity’. Once again a crusade was launched to annihilate French Protestantism. It seemed inevitable to Walsingham that Mary Stuart would once more feature prominently in the plans of her kinsmen. Removing her from the equation became a matter of top priority. Even with good luck and a following wind that would take time. Meanwhile he had to find out what the French were up to. That meant opening up a fresh channel of communication between Paris and the Queen of Scots – a channel to which he had access.

Walsingham’s instructions to Gifford were very simple: he was to do precisely what Mary’s friends had sent him over to do – well, not quite precisely. Gifford easily won the confidence of the ambassador and the captive queen when he proposed a system for smuggling messages in and out of Mary’s latest lodging, the Staffordshire manor house of Chartley, concealed in beer barrels. What the sender and the recipient did not know was that their letters were opened, copied and re-sealed in transit. Their contents were deciphered by Walsingham’s crack code expert Thomas Phelippes. Mr Secretary knew all the plans of the Catholic network often before the members of that network knew them themselves.

In May 1586, John Ballard, back in England on another tour of recusant houses, made contact with Anthony Babington and attempted to recruit him in an assassination plot whose details he and his co-conspirators had already worked out. Was this a sting operation, set up by Gifford on Walsingham’s instructions, or a hamfisted attempt by Ballard to draw a coterie of young English gentlemen into a genuine plot? Ballard certainly knew that no Catholic rebellion could succeed without the leadership of the leading families of the shires and Babington had many valuable contacts. Whether or not Ballard and Babington were set up, little that passed between them was unknown to Walsingham. The basic elements of the plan as they emerged at subsequent meetings were that Savage would undertake the murder of Elizabeth. Once this was accomplished, Babington with a posse of friends would effect Mary’s escape.

Babington was not taken in. He knew how heavily the odds were stacked against the success of the venture. He understood the mood of recusant gentry better than Ballard and realized that the vision of a Catholic uprising had more to do with wishful thinking than reality. Furthermore, he did not relish the idea of a Spanish invasion. As clandestine meetings continued through the early summer the young man continued to be in two minds. Eventually he decided to escape the conflict of conscience by going to live abroad, where he hoped to enter a religious order and devote himself to the contemplative life. He asked one of his confederates, Robert Poley, to approach Walsingham for a passport. Here there is a double irony. Poley
had been insinuated into the household of Frances Sidney (Walsingham’s daughter-in-law) by the Catholic underground but soon concluded that it was more profitable to work for Mr Secretary. Walsingham’s response was to interview Babington and press him for information about the conspirators (presumably as a quid pro quo for travel documents). It seems that, at this point, Walsingham had no thought of using Babington to incriminate Mary.

However, it was this which enabled the idealistic young man to resolve his crisis of conscience. It obliged him to choose once and for all whether to be loyal to his country or his faith. Spurred on by his confessor, he chose the latter. This meant that he threw all his efforts into the plot which came to bear his name. On 6 July he wrote to Mary the letter which would seal the fate of them both. It set out all the elements of the scheme and sought her permission to proceed. Mary’s impatiently awaited reply was penned by her secretary on 17 July and, to Walsingham’s delight, it was a long letter explicit about her acquiescence in the conspirators’ treason. She advised them how to go about their several tasks, even to proposing the most effective PR slogans for winning public support. Babington and his friends should give out that their intentions were to protect the realm from Puritans and prevent Leicester coming back from the Netherlands to usurp the crown. Her reference to the actual despatch of the queen by six designated assassins was oblique but when taken in conjunction with Babington’s letter of the 6th became quite clear. A frisson of excitement ran through her written words as she contemplated her release.

The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both without and within the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design, I may be suddenly transported out of this place, and that all your forces in the same time be on the field to meet me in tarrying for the arrival of the foreign aid, which then must be hastened with all diligence.
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Mary entered enthusiastically into the enterprise by suggesting three possible ways in which she might be ‘snatched’.

Everyone in any way privy to these negotiations was now in a high state of nervousness – and that included Walsingham. There was so much at stake, as he confided to Leicester on 9 July:

I have acquainted this gentleman with the secret to the end he may impart the same unto your lordship. I dare make none of my servants here privy thereunto. My only fear is, that her majesty will not use the matter with that secrecy that appertaineth, though it import it as greatly as ever anything did sithence she came to this crown, and surely, if the matter be well handled, it will break the neck of all dangerous practices during her majesty’s reign. I pray your lordship make this letter an heretic after you have read the same [ie burn it]. I mean, when the matter is grown to a full ripeness, to send some confidential person unto you, to acquaint you fully with the matter.
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For Walsingham this was the big one and he was anxious not to let it slip off the hook.

One problem was holding Babington to the sticking place. The young man might have decided where his prime loyalty lay but he was still jittery, capable of aborting the exercise or, worse still, going into hiding. Walsingham had to decide the right moment to bring him and his accomplices in. The longer they were at large, the more incriminating evidence his surveillance team could gather. But also the greater was the risk that they would become suspicious and that some of them might make their escape. Indeed, there were so many agents and double agents involved that it is remarkable that matters were brought to what Walsingham considered a satisfactory conclusion. It was not until the early days of August that he gave the orders for the conspirators to be rounded up. Then began the work of extracting confessions and information, mostly under torture. The trials took place on the 13, 14 and 15 September. Execution by hanging, drawing and quartering followed a few days later.

Even while these events were taking place, Walsingham moved decisively against Mary. He had her transferred, without warning, from Chartley to another nearby location and held there for two weeks while her quarters were thoroughly searched and all her papers
parcelled up and taken to London, where he examined them minutely. At the same time all Mary’s staff were brought south for interrogation. Early in September the Council met to discuss how to proceed against the ex-queen. There could not really be any doubt about their decision. The evidence against her was overwhelming. She had to be put on trial for her life.

The problem, as ever, was the reaction not of Mary, but of Elizabeth. She responded emotionally to the plot and her advisers knew that it would be very difficult to hold her to a logical course of action. The whole Babington affair had frightened and outraged her. She insisted that the executions of her would-be assassins should be carried out with the maximum cruelty. When hanged, they were to be cut down while still breathing and forced, in their final pain-racked minutes, to watch themselves being disembowelled. Only when officials reported back to her that this barbarity had been counterproductive, drawing sympathetic murmurings from the crowed, did she relent and order the next batch of executions to be carried out more humanely (ie the victims were hanged until dead). The queen’s ferocity extended also to her rival. She sent word to Paulet to remove all Mary’s money and servants, deny her any privileges and subject her to virtual solitary confinement. There was, doubtless, an element of calculation in this. It would have suited Elizabeth’s book for Mary to die of natural causes, thus lifting the burden of responsibility from herself. It might be that subjecting the prisoner to the utmost privations would hasten her end. From Walsingham’s point of view this would have been the worst possible outcome. Mary’s devotees would immediately have proclaimed her a martyr. There had to be a trial, so that her crimes could be publicly demonstrated and no doubt cast upon the justice of her subsequent punishment.