The Watchers (29 page)

Eight days later Parry and Nevylle walked together in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Parry proposed a plan for them to execute. They would kill Elizabeth in Westminster near St James's Palace, recruiting eight or ten household servants on horseback, all armed with pistols, to surprise her coach from both sides. Nevylle found ‘an excellent pistollier',
a tall and resolute gentleman whom he introduced to Parry at young Sir Edward Hoby's house on Cannon Row, in the shadow of Westminster Palace. Parry, careful to keep the conspiracy between himself and Nevylle for the time being, declined the help of this sinister marksman.

At some point Parry and Nevylle discussed a much more fantastic plan. Doubtless influenced by the experience of his private audiences with the queen, Parry suggested the murder of Elizabeth in her private garden at Whitehall Palace. Helped by Nevylle, he would escape over the palace wall to one of the landing stairs near by, taking a boat on the River Thames. Both proposals were fraught with dangers, but only the assault on Elizabeth's coach near St James's was even remotely plausible. Still, even this ambitious scheme required the kind of premeditation and intricate planning for which William Parry and Edmund Nevylle were constitutionally unsuited.

The two conspirators did nothing. Doctor Parry's feelings of injustice and resentment continued to simmer away in his mind. From late November 1584 he sat in the House of Commons for the tiny borough of Queenborough in Kent, thanks very probably to his young patron Sir Edward Hoby. It was Parry's first time in parliament, and he certainly left his mark.

In December the Commons debated a bill for the queen's safety. It was the bill that became the Act for the Queen's Surety, the extraordinary statute that gave the force of law to the killing by private subjects of anyone who challenged either Elizabeth's life, throne or kingdom. It was a measure aimed squarely at the pernicious influence of Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters. Not surprisingly, though with a marked lack of judgement, Parry spoke angrily against the bill. On 17 December he said in open debate that it ‘carried nothing with it but blood, danger, terror, despair, [and] confiscation'. Shocked at this violent outburst, the officials of the Commons hauled Parry out of the chamber. He was called before Elizabeth's Privy Council and disciplined by the speaker of the Commons. Next day Parry went down on his knees to say to the house that had spoken rashly and intemperately; he apologized. Disciplined and chastened, Doctor
Parry was readmitted to his seat in parliament. But he still intended to kill the queen.

The House of Commons was in recess from late December till the first week of February 1585. In this break from parliamentary business came the deciding moment of William Parry's treachery. Parry, who had volunteered in Rome to play the assassin and who could never resist a dramatic performance, began to live his role. But his cousin Edmund Nevylle was beginning to have doubts.

On Saturday, 6 February, at between five and six o'clock in the evening, Parry visited Nevylle at the Whitefriars. The time to make their final plan had come at last. He wanted to talk to his cousin alone, and so, presumably because they were in company, they withdrew to a window. Nevylle told Parry about his reservations. He would not go through with the conspiracy. It was the moment of crisis. Parry wanted Nevylle to leave England straight away, promising him a safe passage to Wales and so on to Brittany. Nevylle refused, saying that in conscience he had decided to ‘lay open this his most traitorous and abhominable intention against Her Majesty'. At this last meeting between the hesitant conspirators, when their plot finally fell to pieces, it seems Edmund Nevylle paid the final insult to Doctor Parry by being wrapped in his cousin's gown. And so Nevylle surrendered himself to the authorities. He made his confession on Tuesday, 9 February, spoke again on the 11th, and was questioned for a third time a day later. Apprehended, William Parry made his own ‘voluntary confession' on the 13th, at last telling the story of his reconciliation to the Church of Rome and his negotiations with the Cardinal of Como.

Parry the doctor of laws knew that two accuser-witnesses would be required to convict him of a treasonable act: it was Nevylle's word against his. This was probably Parry's reason for not taking Nevylle's gentleman marksman into his confidence at their meeting on Cannon Row. But it helps to explain why between them Parry and Nevylle, though convinced of the justice of murdering Elizabeth, had never quite come up with a feasible plan. As soon as Nevylle voiced his doubts, Parry had no choice but to abandon the mission.

In the end William Parry was undone by his own cleverness, self-possession, greed and arrogance. Probably he would have settled for
Burghley's patronage if it had been offered in 1584. Instead the bitterness of service left unrewarded corroded any loyalty he had to Burghley, Walsingham or the queen. Burghley in particular had thrown Parry's service back in his face, or so Parry must have thought; the obsequious letters to the great man, all that energy expended on acting the eager gentleman, the lord treasurer's slights and the silences – we can well imagine these provoked in a character as fractured as Parry's murderous ill-feeling. So the seeds of treason had long been sown. Playing the great assassin in Paris, encouraged by men as influential as Thomas Morgan, Charles Paget and the Cardinal of Como, was in the end irresistible to Parry. Those seeds were nourished by long months of frustration in England. Parry's plan was desperate, unfeasible, even a fantasy. But it was, in his own mind at least, real enough.

William Parry's letter to the queen, 14 February 1585: ‘you may see … the dangerous fruits of a discontented mind'.

On Saint Valentine's Day in 1585, Sunday, 14 February, Doctor Parry wrote to Queen Elizabeth from the Tower of London: ‘Your Majesty may see by my voluntary confession the dangerous fruits of a discontented mind, and how constantly I pursued my first conceived purpose in Venice for the relief of the afflicted Catholics, continued it in Lyons and resolved in Paris to put it in adventure for the restitution of England to the ancient obedience of the see Apostolic.' To the Earl of Leicester and to Lord Burghley, once his employer, he emphasized just how special he was: ‘My case is rare and strange, and, for anything I can remember, singular: a natural subject solemnly to vow the death of his natural Queen … for the relief of the afflicted Catholics, and restitution of religion.'

A week later he was tried for treason in Westminster Hall. The clerk of the crown set out the facts and stated that Parry had been seduced from his true allegiance by the Devil. Yet Parry did his best to control even his own trial; he refuted as well as confessed, saying that he wanted to die; he was determined to explain his thinking, volunteering to read to the court his own confession and letters. Words he had written to Burghley and Leicester became part of the public record: ‘My cause is rare, singular and unnatural.'

For William Parry the desire to play a great part both in secret and in public was a powerful and compelling one. His treason was, of course, sensational news. Even the trial of John Somerville in 1583, after which Somerville hanged himself in Newgate prison, had nothing like the performance of a star like Parry: with Parry being as self-possessed and fluent as ever, the crown's lawyers had found it difficult to keep him quiet. Lord Burghley was troubled about eager London printers getting their presses ready to tell Parry's story. They, like Parry himself, had to be controlled. Some of the most powerful men in England, councillors and law officers, met at Burghley's house on the Strand to discuss how best to publish what they called ‘the truth' of Parry's treason. In other words, they decided what could and
could not be told. The official account, produced by the queen's printer, was truly savage. Carefully edited copies of documents were used to prove Parry's vile treasons. The pamphlet demolished his character (especially his ‘proud and arrogant humour') and the insulting pretensions at good family and gentility of such a ‘vile and traitorous wretch'. Burghley hated a traitor, more so one who was also a social upstart.

This unrelenting public denunciation of the man was a mark of the depth and horror of Doctor Parry's betrayal. Public prayers celebrated the deliverance of Elizabeth from Parry's wicked plot. What gave his treason a special edge were the debates in parliament on the bill for the queen's safety. After the murder of the Prince of Orange in 1584, the Elizabethan political establishment had been terrified of the queen's assassination. Parry made that fear real and tangible. Nowhere in the propaganda was it admitted that he had spied for queen and country: the public story was that he had been simply an assassin hired by the Pope's cardinals to kill Elizabeth. Parry's long if erratic service to Lord Burghley, his secret intelligence from Paris, Lyons and Venice, his closeness to members of the powerful Cecil family: all these strands of his varied career were lost to official amnesia.

Parry was executed in Westminster Palace yard on 2 March, the only serving member of the English House of Commons ever to have been arrested for high treason. On the scaffold he maintained his innocence, denying any plan or even any thought to have murdered the queen:

I die a true servant to Queen Elizabeth; from any evil thought that ever I had to harm her, it never came into my mind; she knoweth it and her conscience can tell her so … I die guiltless and free in mind from ever thinking hurt to Her Majesty.

Perhaps he really believed that this lie was in fact the truth. If so, then William Parry had yet another reason to feel that his service to Elizabeth and Burghley, for so long unrewarded, had once again been abused. He died a traitor's death, hanged till he was almost dead, disembowelled, beheaded and dismembered, his head and limbs put on display throughout London to warn others of the cost of treason.

In the story of Mary Queen of Scots's nineteen-year captivity in England no chapter is more extraordinary than the Babington Plot and no conspiracy more tangled. It involved a group of Catholic gentlemen plotting in London; the long labours of Mary's chief intelligencer in Paris; a courier for the Queen of Scots who was really a double agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham; the double agent's cousin; Walsingham's trusted right hand in secret affairs; and, of course, Mary herself, held in confinement deep in the English midlands. Aiding these principal characters was a supporting cast of secretaries, pursuivants, spies, informants and watchers, and even one brewer of good ale. The drama was played out over the nine months between December 1585 and August 1586. It encompassed practically every theme in this book, bringing together in one magnificently disturbing episode those old and deep suspicions of the treasonous disloyalty of Elizabethan Catholics, the pernicious influence of the Queen of Scots as pretender to Elizabeth's throne and terrible fears of the queen's murder.

The narrative of the Babington Plot can be compressed into a short paragraph. In Paris in December 1585 Thomas Morgan, the Queen of Scots's chief spy, recruited a young Catholic as a courier of his letters. The task of this courier, Gilbert Gifford, was to collect the letters from the house of the French ambassador in London and convey them secretly to Mary, who was being held under guard and surveillance in Staffordshire. Captured in England, Gifford became a double agent; and under the guiding hand of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham's servant, he helped set up an ingenious system for intercepting and copying letters passing to and from the Queen of Scots. This postal
system helped to expose a knot of Catholic conspirators in London who were planning Mary's freedom and Elizabeth's murder. Waiting and watching, and then trying their hand at forgery, Walsingham and Phelippes discovered evidence of the Queen of Scots's complicity in the conspirators' plans. The dramatic breaking up of the plot in August 1586 sent Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators to the gallows. More significantly, the letters intercepted by Phelippes and Walsingham were persuasive enough as evidence against Mary Queen of Scots for a commission to be set up under the Act for the Queen's Surety. The commissioners tried Mary and found her guilty of treason against Elizabeth. In February 1587 she was beheaded.

But to tell it this briefly strips the story of much of its richness and complexity. Told fully, it offers a fascinating case study in just how far Elizabeth's government was prepared to go to save queen and country from destruction.

It all began with Thomas Morgan, chief intelligencer to Mary Queen of Scots in Paris. At his trial in 1585 William Parry had named Morgan as the man who had persuaded him to kill Elizabeth. The English government tried to have Morgan extradited from France as Parry's accomplice but instead had to make do with his imprisonment in the Bastille, where he found himself by October 1585.

From prison Morgan tried his best to reconstruct the secure and effective postal service that had operated between Paris and the Queen of Scots. This was an almost impossible task to which only a man passionate about his cause could have had the patience to attempt. Mary, too, was under restraint, though the conditions of her confinement were much tougher than those of Morgan in the Bastille. In late December 1585 she was moved from the bare and grim castle of Tutbury in Staffordshire to Chartley, a moated manor house in the same county, deep in the English midlands. The Queen of Scots's keeper was the firm and uncompromising Sir Amias Paulet, a stickler for security, who insisted on random searches of Mary's private chambers and even strip searches of any members of her household who had contact with the outside world. Of Paulet the Queen of Scots wrote that he was one of the most pitiless and zealous men she had ever known.