The Queen's Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I (37 page)

Six more men died on this first day. Tichborne, the poet who helped to decipher Mary’s letters and fantasised about assassinating the lords of the council in the Star Chamber of Westminster Palace, confessed his guilt and blamed Babington for involving him in the plot. His oratory won the sympathy of the crowd, but it made no difference to his fate. Abington, who had proposed to capture Queen Elizabeth and compel her ‘to grant toleration in religion’, spat threats that a bloody reckoning was coming to England. Babington, who in happier times might have become a monk, went to his death crying out ‘
Parce mihi domine Jesus
’, ‘Spare me Lord Jesus’, words adapted from the Book of Job for the medieval mass for the dead. Such an orgy of executions would have left the scene littered with heads and body parts, the hangman and his scaffold awash with blood. Aware that a measure of mercy was welcomed by the crowd, the queen and council directed that the second day’s conspirators should hang until they were dead, and only then be cut to pieces. Londoners could soon buy a souvenir verse pamphlet addressed to the dead conspirators:

Now mayest thou see what fruitless gain, from Antichrist doth spring
And how to shamefull wretched end, the pope his people bring.

The Babington plot would provide fodder for balladeers and almanac-writers for a generation to come.
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It might seem as if Francis Walsingham held all the strings of the Babington plot. Partisan histories have sometimes claimed as much. But this would overstate the degree of his control over people and events. John Ballard did more than anyone to convert latent discontent into violent action, and he had been thinking about regicide since his 1584 pilgrimage to Rome to petition the pope to bless the enterprise. John Savage, the ex-soldier who haunted the English Catholic seminary at Rheims, took his assassin’s oath of his own volition. Gilbert Gifford was an unpredictable agent of the crown. Given the task of tracking down Ballard, he chose to slip out of England in disguise a few days before Babington was taken. Walsingham received the news of Gifford’s escape with alarm. Although he wrote a letter of apology from Paris, Gifford may have had a shadow of sympathy for the plot against Elizabeth. Certainly he was trading on his own account.

As for the forged postscript, apologists for the Queen of Scots have taken it as proof that the rest of Mary’s 17 July letter, even the whole conspiracy, was the fabrication of Walsingham and Phelippes. Following his arrest, Mary’s secretary Claude Nau wrote to Elizabeth to deny that his mistress had practised against her life. But he subsequently reaffirmed his initial testimony, that Mary’s letter to Babington was genuine. His reward was to be allowed out of confinement to walk in Walsingham’s garden. Burghley wrote on Nau’s letter that it contained ‘things of no importance’, and since he and Walsingham effectively controlled Elizabeth’s correspondence between them, there is a real chance that the queen never saw it.
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Was Mary Stuart betrayed by her own people, as well as ensnared by her enemies? Thomas Morgan has appeared in this narrative as a client of the Queen of Scots, a veteran of the
Throckmorton and Parry plots who was shut up in the Bastille but still true to the woman he had fallen for when she first fled to England. So many trails lead back to him: the cipher secretary who devised secret alphabets for Mary, the gentleman exile who recruited Babington as a courier in Paris, the author of the letter that persuaded Mary to believe in Gilbert Gifford. Morgan had counselled Mary ‘to write three or four lines of your own hand’ expressing her confidence in Anthony Babington. He knew Babington to be passionate but uncertain, susceptible to flattery: a personal letter had the best chance of persuading him to commit. Then again, to encourage Mary to provide an autograph record of her dealings with Babington, in plain text rather than cipher, was curious advice from the man entrusted with the security of her correspondence. When he travelled to Flanders following his release from the Bastille, Morgan was accused of spying for England and spent a further two years in prison. A rumour did the rounds that he had been seen in conversation with Walsingham’s agents in Paris.

Maybe Morgan was loyal to the Catholic cause as he interpreted it. It is possible that he was hunting after some political advantage in the conflicts that were afflicting relations between Welsh and English exiles, seculars and Jesuits. His trust in Gilbert Gifford could perhaps be excused by his prison isolation. One piece of evidence, however, looks more damning. Morgan knew Thomas Phelippes; they had been close friends, or so claimed Gifford, who had himself lodged with Phelippes. Their association presumably dated back to the time when Phelippes was working for Ambassadors Paulet and Cobham in Paris. Phelippes could mimic Morgan ‘to the life’; may even have been the source of his knowledge of ciphers. This does not necessarily make Morgan a traitor to the Queen of Scots. Gifford is a tainted witness, his true allegiance – if the concept is even appropriate in such a conflicted world – impossible to
determine. But the connection between Morgan and Phelippes shows just how far Walsingham and his agents had penetrated the community of English Catholics in exile.
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Questioning Morgan’s motives, exposing the treachery of Gilbert Gifford and the radical politics of Ballard and Savage, should not obscure the fact that Mary had also brought ruin upon herself. Elizabeth tried in vain to minimise references to her cousin during the trial of the 1586 conspirators. The prosecution named the Queen of Scots as having ‘willingly allowed of these treasons’, and charged her with writing letters to Babington that ‘did animate, comfort and provoke’ him to take action. Mary kept up a pretence of innocence, casting herself as Elizabeth’s ‘good sister and friend’ when summoned to Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire to testify before a royal commission. But she also based her defence on the principle that no monarch could be put on trial: ‘I am an absolute prince, and not within the compass of your laws … for that I am equal to any prince of Europe’. Six of the forty-odd commissioners seem to have agreed, since they failed to attend the hearing on 14 and 15 October. Lord Burghley, who presided for the crown in the absence of a judge, told her differently: treason had to be answered, whatever the claims of sovereignty and privilege.
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The papers of Robert Beale contain a pair of ink-and-pencil drawings of Mary’s two final appearances on the public stage, her trial in the great hall at Fotheringhay and her execution in the same chamber four months later. Each drawing has a key identifying the principal players. Burghley had planned the layout of the room with precise attention to detail. Elizabeth’s presence was represented by an empty throne under a cloth of estate. Burghley sat close by, facing Mary and surrounded by the peers who lined two sides of the hall. Lawyers in caps and mortar-boards made notes at a central table which had been covered with a cloth. As a commoner, Walsingham sat on a
bench that made up the fourth side of the square, facing Elizabeth’s throne and accompanied by Paulet, Sir Walter Mildmay and Sir Christopher Hatton. The local gentry crowded at the back.

Walsingham watched in silence as Mary denied any knowledge of Anthony Babington or John Ballard. ‘I am clear from all crime against the queen,’ she recited. ‘I have excited no man against her, and I am not to be charged but by mine own word or writing, which cannot be produced against me.’ She called for trial before a free and full Parliament, and made artful legal objections to the procedure of the commission. What precedent could they cite for trying a monarch as a subject? Informed that her own secretaries had spoken against her, she retorted that this was the threat of the rack.

Mary knew that she was guilty. But the crown was also on uncertain ground, and not simply because the most thorough searches of her apartments at Chartley had found nothing incriminating in her own hand. Some of the commissioners were uneasy at placing so much emphasis on the testimony of Curll and Nau. Babington’s confession presented another problem. It had to be cited with care, lest its reference to Phelippes’s postscript taint the government’s case with forgery. Mary had instructed Babington to burn the manuscript of her 17 July letter, so the paper being brandished by Burghley as evidence of her deceit must be a copy. And so it was: Burghley had acquired a facsimile of Mary’s original letter, re-enciphered by Thomas Phelippes, to substitute for the original that Babington had destroyed. Denied legal representation and hemmed in on all sides, Mary realised that the evidence which the crown was placing before the commissioners was not what it appeared to be. But she could hardly play on this without admitting she had lied about knowing Babington.
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So Mary threw down a fresh challenge to her accusers.
Turning her gaze from Burghley to Walsingham at the other end of the hall, Mary spoke to the man whom she now knew had entrapped her. Counterfeiting ciphers was an easy matter, she said. Could Walsingham claim to be an honest man in his dealings with her? The principal secretary rose to his feet and stepped forward to the lawyers’ table so that his words could be heard. ‘Madam,’ he said, using the coldly respectful form of address that Burghley had also adopted,

I call God to record that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man; nor as I bear the place of a public person, have I done any thing unworthy of my place. I confess, that being very careful for the safety of the queen and realm, I have curiously searched out the practices against the same. If Ballard had offered me his help I should not have refused it; yea, I would have recompensed the pains he had taken. If I have practised any thing with him, why did he not utter it to save his life?

There is something cinematic about this scene, the first and last in which these greatest of enemies inhabited the same space. The encounter had wrung from Walsingham a recitation of his political creed, poised but also candid. Recent biographers of Burghley and Mary have called his words ‘fabulously elusive’, an answer worthy of Machiavelli. Is this the best reading? ‘Curious’ in Elizabethan times meant attentive, while ‘practice’ equates to deception or conspiracy. Walsingham justified his actions on grounds of state security. But he also felt himself vindicated in the sight of God. Machiavelli, the Florentine politician whose name was already a byword for chicanery by Walsingham’s day, had a very different philosophy. He based his analysis of human history on a classical concept,
fortuna
, rather than the divine providence in which Walsingham so clearly believed. Walsingham’s attitude is revealed even more clearly in the letter that he wrote to Leicester the following day: ‘I see this wicked
creature ordained of God to punish us for our sins and unthankfulness’. Walsingham saw Mary Stuart as a scourge, just as the Protestants of Mary Tudor’s reign had interpreted their exodus as part of God’s deeper plan for repentance and reformation. His service to God, as much as his allegiance to Elizabeth, demanded the death of the Queen of Scots.
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The obstacle was Elizabeth herself. As Walsingham explained to Leicester, a ‘secret countermand’ from the queen had interrupted the commissioners before they could come to judgement. Her strategy of delays was all too familiar. Elizabeth’s objections to the trial had already sparked an exasperated outburst from Walsingham to Burghley: ‘I would to God her majesty would be content to refer these things to them that can best judge of them as other princes do’. Now everything rested on whether she would sign a death warrant.

The intelligence operation against Mary had been Walsingham’s alone. It is doubtful whether Burghley even knew about the trap before it sprang, although he subsequently took charge of the interrogations and the trial. But the two ministers had to work closely to persuade the queen to accept the consequences of the Babington plot. On 25 October the commissioners reassembled in the Star Chamber at Westminster. This was the same room where the lords of the council would have been gunned down if Chidiock Tichborne’s plan had come to pass. Now they finally condemned Mary to death. A joint committee of both houses of Parliament, whipped by Burghley in the Lords and Hatton in the Commons, argued for a speedy execution. But Elizabeth havered, directing them towards ‘some better remedy, whereby both the Queen of Scots’ life might be spared, and her own security provided for’. Sentence was proclaimed in London ‘in the most solemn manner that could be devised’, to the sound of trumpets and in the presence of the mayor and aldermen in gowns of scarlet and chains of gold. Elizabeth
responded by receiving embassies from France and Scotland to plead for Mary’s life.
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