The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (36 page)

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 of 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 got 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.

Camden explains how drama quickly collapsed into farce. During dinner, Scudamore received a message from the royal court. Suspecting that this was the warrant for his arrest, Babington offered to pay the bill at the bar and then fled, leaving his cloak and sword behind him. He hid out in St John’s Wood, cutting his hair and soiling his fair complexion with green walnut shells. But it was not easy for a young Elizabethan gentleman to evade a manhunt on this scale, to merge into the society of the apprentices and groundlings that he previously had despised. After ten days on the run, sleeping in barns and dressed as a farm labourer, he was captured in Harrow. The city of London lit bonfires and rang its church bells as Babington and his fellows were paraded through the streets.
²⁹

Following a month of interrogations, fourteen plotters were
tried over three days of hearings at Westminster. Savage attempted to plead guilty to conspiracy and stirring up sedition while denying that he had assented to the murder of the queen, but the crown would not allow it. He agreed that he had confessed without fear of torture. Babington made a strong impression on the judges, tracing his pathway to treason ‘with a mild countenance, a sober gesture, and a wonderful good grace’. He blamed Ballard for convincing him that the queen was excommunicate, and that it was therefore lawful to murder her. The most interesting exchanges came on the final day, when Edward Abington’s plea of not guilty meant that a jury was summoned to hear him mount a vigorous defence. Abington called for writing materials so that he could record the allegations against him, but was denied. He cited the Elizabethan statute which demanded the evidence of two witnesses in treason cases, but was told he was indicted under the law of Edward III. A vehement protest, ‘before heaven and earth, as I am a true Christian’, that he did not know that Babington intended him to be one of the six gentlemen tasked with murdering the queen was countered with the evidence of a Holborn armourer that Abington was preparing armour for himself and others. The jury had little difficulty in finding him guilty.
³⁰

Justice followed swiftly. On 20 September seven of the convicted conspirators were taken to a gibbet newly constructed in St Giles Fields, the parish where their plots had been laid. Ballard, the only priest among them, was the first to die. Having been stripped of his clothes, he read from a borrowed copy of the meditations of St Augustine before climbing the ladder to the scaffold. An observer recorded his exchanges with the sheriff and Protestant minister who harangued him during these final minutes. Ballard was urged to confess his treason and pray for forgiveness. ‘You would have killed the queen’s majesty,’ shouted the sheriff to a roar from the crowd, ‘you would have sacked
London, and overthrown the state’. When Ballard replied that he trusted to be with the angels within half an hour, the gallows chaplain gleefully pointed out that he clearly didn’t believe in purgatory: ‘take heed of falling out of the world with a wrong faith, for then you go to the condemned angels’. Ballard ended the disputation by reciting the Lord’s prayer and creed in their Latin versions, symbolic of the old faith. The eyewitness confirms that he was cut down alive before being castrated, disembowelled and cut into quarters. His head was put on a stake, the people crying out ‘God save the queen’.