The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (35 page)

The final downfall of the Queen of Scots is a tale that turns on the interception and interpretation of encrypted documents. The cipher alphabet which Mary used to correspond with her devotee Anthony Babington looks convincing enough at first
sight: a curious assortment of twenty-three symbols, some like Greek letters or Arabic numbers, others reminiscent of musical notation. A further thirty-five stood for prepositions and other frequently used words: letter and bearer, send and receive, majesty, pray. Four ‘nulls’ or blanks signifying nothing, and another character that cued the reader to double the letter that followed it, made frequency analysis more problematic: the equivalent of an extra rotor on the Enigma machine. Technically this was a nomenclator, a hybrid of a cipher and a code. Who devised it? Not Morgan, presumably, since Mary had been unable to write to him for months. Perhaps one of her secretaries; or it could have been the queen herself. Mary was known to delight in emblems, working subversive iconography into the embroidery that filled the long hours of her inactivity.

As it turned out, Phelippes’s ingenuity would barely be tested. Presented with the opportunity of smuggling letters out from house arrest, Mary took the obvious precaution of changing her ciphers, sending an alphabet to the new French ambassador Châteauneuf and her other correspondents. But what seemed like wisdom was in fact a gift to her enemies. Mary’s route to her supporters had been provided by Walsingham and Phelippes, who now held the key to her deepest secrets.
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When Mary and her attendants had been moved to Chartley in Staffordshire on Christmas Eve 1585, it appeared that her fortunes were improving. Mary herself had requested the move from nearby Tutbury, where she had spent several hateful months under the piercing gaze of her new guardian Sir Amyas Paulet. Tutbury Castle was damp and neglected, its poky rooms empty of furniture and its latrines overwhelmed by the scale of Mary’s household. Chartley was a timbered manor house in the grounds of an abandoned castle, surrounded by a broad moat. Perhaps it was this apparent slackening in the bonds of her confinement that encouraged Mary to believe that she could
commune with her supporters without being detected. That, or the gnawing fear that her captivity could soon kill her. Either way, she was grievously deceived.
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Since her flight to England in May 1568 Mary Stuart had existed in a sort of limbo, in some ways accorded the courtesies of a foreign monarch and in others treated with cold contempt. For fifteen years she journeyed between the country houses of her keeper the Earl of Shrewsbury, trailing a retinue second only to the royal household. Her life was a parody of the royal progresses enjoyed by her cousin Elizabeth. The nearest that she came to normality was at Buxton spa, where Shrewsbury built her a secluded lodge so that she could take the waters, a kindness which provoked caustic comments from his wife Bess of Hardwick that he and Mary were having an affair. When the Earl was recalled to the privy council in London during the nightmare year of 1584, the venerable Sir Ralph Sadler briefly took his place. As Henry VIII’s envoy to Scotland, Sadler had balanced the infant Mary on his knee; now he took her hawking by the river at Tutbury. It was this leniency that saw him swiftly replaced by Sir Amyas Paulet.
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Paulet was an unflinching jailer. A career administrator who served as Elizabeth’s governor in Jersey before his stint at the Paris embassy, he had no patience for Mary’s pretensions to royal dignity. Paulet’s outlook on politics and religion can be read in his choice of a French Calvinist, Jean Hotman, as tutor to his sons. Hotman’s father François was a prominent Huguenot legal theorist, one of a group of academics and lawyers whose theories of resistance to absolute monarchy earned them the description of ‘monarchomachs’ or king-killers. Like Walsingham, Paulet combined his Calvinism with an understanding of royal power as limited and conditional, although he was also utterly loyal to Elizabeth.

It is difficult to imagine a less sympathetic guardian of the
Queen of Scots. Mary received visitors under a cloth of estate, the sumptuous textile canopy that transformed her chair into a throne and her room into a royal presence chamber; Paulet tore it down. Mary had her own staff to cook her meals and change her linen; Paulet quarantined them and forced them to strip when entering or leaving the house. In September 1585 he informed Mary on Walsingham’s orders that her letters could no longer be forwarded via the diplomatic bag of the French embassy, severing her contact with her devotees in Paris and beyond. Four months of this treatment left Mary defeated and brutalised. So when a young Catholic cleric named Gilbert Gifford materialised to tell her he could spirit letters out of Chartley concealed in barrels of beer, Mary swelled with excitement: at last she could regain some control over her life.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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