The Watchers (33 page)

On 24 July 1586 Sir Francis Walsingham was at court at Greenwich Palace, expecting Thomas Phelippes's return home. Thomas Cassie was in London, carrying messages between Walsingham and his secretary, Francis Mylles. Mylles was at his house on Tower Hill. Four men – Walsingham, Phelippes, Mylles and Sir Amias Paulet at Chartley – pulled together the strands of what was becoming a difficult and complicated operation. They had to keep watch as best they could on Mary Queen of Scots and her secretaries at Chartley. They also had to keep John Ballard the conspirator under close surveillance. And they had to find and detain Anthony Babington, who was anywhere between London and Staffordshire. Phelippes scrutinized the letters passing between Mary and Babington and the other supposed conspirators. Through the eyes of Maliverey Catilyn and Nicholas Berden in London, Mylles kept watch over Ballard and others of his group. Mylles had ready their arrest warrants. And it was Mylles who,
with Phelippes away at Chartley, kept (or tried to keep) in touch with the double agent Gilbert Gifford using Phelippes's servant Thomas Cassie.

It was difficult for Mylles or Cassie to know exactly where Gifford was, for like his cousin Barnes he had a habit of disappearing. Gifford was supposed to meet Mylles at night on 22 July. Mylles waited till one o'clock the next morning; Gifford did not turn up. A few hours later, before noon on Saturday, 23 July, Cassie returned to Tower Hill to tell Mylles that he too had not seen Gifford for a few days. Cassie thought that Gifford had ridden out for a day or two in the country with Ballard. By the 24th Mylles was seriously worried. Cassie, however, was sure that he would turn up eventually.

Francis Mylles pondered how best to capture Ballard without compromising any of Walsingham's men. If either Gifford or Berden arrested him, they would be shown to be government agents. Mylles wondered whether one or the other of them should be taken with Ballard and sent to prison for a time as a way to maintain his cover. Mylles was anxious about secrecy and security. He was nervous of the help to be given by the city authorities and he even said nothing of the operation to the two pursuivants lodging in his house. The difficulties of arrest impressed themselves upon Mylles's mind. A night raid, for example, meant doors could take too long to open, giving time for escape. He hoped that Ballard might be ‘trained [lured, enticed] to dine or sup in any place with half an hour's knowledge'. Mylles, by now a worried man, hoped (probably against all the evidence) for an easy, tidy and efficient arrest of a very dangerous conspirator.

Phelippes left Chartley for London late on the afternoon of Tuesday, 26 July, carrying with him the original of the Queen of Scots's reply to Anthony Babington's letter. By six o'clock Sir Amias Paulet reckoned that his friend was twelve or fourteen miles on the road south. Paulet wrote to Phelippes on the 29th: ‘I trust you are safely arrived at the court, and it seemeth by Master Secretary's letters that upon your coming thither some resolution will be taken.' By this Paulet meant the critical meeting that Walsingham and Phelippes would have when Phelippes arrived in London. Then they would have to decide what to do next; the ‘resolution' was their plan of action. Having had Mary's
‘bloody letter' for a week, there was a need for Phelippes to post it on to Babington quickly and efficiently: time was ticking by.

Walsingham and Phelippes met probably on 28 July. They discussed how exactly the Queen of Scots's letter should be delivered to Babington. But they considered a much more significant question. Was the letter as it stood strong enough evidence against Mary? If it was so, as Phelippes had believed on 19 July, then why did Walsingham seem to hesitate? There was a note of doubt in his letter to Phelippes of the 22nd. It seems he hinted of something to Paulet. And if Mary's reply to Babington did not stand as definitive evidence against her, another question may have formed itself in Walsingham's mind: What could be done to make it so?

Walsingham and Phelippes discussed this last question, or at least some formulation of it, on Thursday, 28 July. Their answer was to doctor the original ‘bloody letter'. Intimately familiar with the cipher employed by the Queen of Scots and Anthony Babington, Phelippes, probably with the assistance of Arthur Gregory in opening and resealing the packet, added to the letter a postscript. The only surviving evidence of this postscript in any original (or near original) form is a draft in Walsingham's papers of eight densely packed lines of cipher characters that run when deciphered to seventy-six words. This was an audacious and risky piece of forgery. The decision to execute it may have been Walsingham's alone, or perhaps Phelippes had brought the idea with him from Chartley. The evidence seems to point, not to long premeditation, but rather to the growing realization of a possibility. But one fact is really not in doubt. When Babington eventually deciphered and read what he took to be a letter of reply from the Queen of Scots, he held in his hands a document that was not what it was when Gilbert Curll had sealed it up.

We can imagine Walsingham and Phelippes together composing their text, testing each word, measuring meaning, master and servant working together. The postscript was then put into cipher using the same method that Curll had done days earlier. Next the passage was read with great care once again. They deleted part of a sentence. This is the document that survives, which when deciphered reads:

I w[ould] be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment, for that it may be I shall be
able upon knowledge of the parties to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein; and
even so do I wish to be made acquainted with the names of all such principal persons as also w[h]o be already as also who be a
as also from time to time particularly how you proceed and as soon as you may for the same purpose who be already and how far every one privy hereunto.

The object of this paragraph was to prove beyond all doubt an unbreakable connection between Mary Queen of Scots and the treasonous conspiracy of Anthony Babington and his group. That suggestion was there already in the text of Mary's letter. But what Walsingham and Phelippes probably had in the mind were the precise words of the Act for the Queen's Surety and the need to have water-tight evidence of the Queen of Scots's ‘privity' in a conspiracy.

They must have felt this fantastic risk was one worth taking. The smallest slip could easily disable the surveillance coordinated by Mylles and, more importantly, ruin the chance to throw the net over Mary Stuart. Phelippes's forgery had to appear like a seamless continuation of a letter that had been written first in French and then in English and finally turned into cipher. It had to reflect Gilbert Curll's habits of enciphering Mary's letters. Above all it had to look like Curll's handwriting. Only someone with Phelippes's experience and sharp eye for detail could have done it.

Certainly it was a danger for Walsingham to provoke so revealing an answer from Babington. It was also a risk to put so much evidential weight on a piece of fabrication. But this second point, which caused Walsingham and the Privy Council some anxiety in the following months, was not urgent enough to prevent Sir Francis from sanctioning the forgery. After all, as Phelippes had written ten days earlier, this was for God's cause, Queen Elizabeth's safety and the security of the state. It was self-evident that Mary Queen of Scots was guilty of a most horrible crime against her royal cousin. Now Walsingham and Phelippes had the proof, by hook or by crook.

On the evening of the same day of the meeting between Walsingham and Phelippes, Thursday, 28 July, Anthony Babington gave a great supper for his friends at the Castle tavern on Cornhill right in the heart of the city of London. The Castle occupied a large stone house;
from the tavern door there was a passageway leading out to Threadneedle Street and the Royal Exchange, one of the busiest meeting places of Elizabethan London. It would seem that Babington, a very rich young man with the money to dine his companions, chose to conspire in plain sight. That evening Nicholas Berden watched the tavern closely, making his dispositions and hoping that John Ballard would be one of Babington's guests. Berden had put one of his men in the next room to Babington and his friends, from where he was able to watch who came to supper.

Hurriedly Berden wrote a letter to Francis Mylles. Rushed across London, it arrived at Mylles's house on Tower Hill at seven o'clock. Berden asked Mylles to be at the Exchange ‘somewhat disguised' at eight. Mylles should use his discretion. The tavern had two doors, but Berden assured him that the place was ‘most safe'. To avoid all suspicion Berden said he would stay away from the Castle. It occurred to him that he might in fact be dining with Ballard that evening. One of their mutual acquaintances had promised to bring Ballard for supper, and within the hour Berden's friend had sent over a capon and two rabbits. This was enough food for at least three, and it seemed likely that he was bringing a guest to Berden's lodging, though Berden knew not whom. Nicholas Berden ended his letter to Francis Mylles in haste and with the observation that he had no arrest warrant.

It turned out in the end that there was no opportunity to miss. John Ballard did not go to the Castle tavern, nor did he have supper with Nicholas Berden. But at least, thanks to Berden's guests for supper, Mylles and Walsingham had an idea of where Ballard was. He was in Sussex, but would very soon return to London. Berden was promised the favour of an introduction to the man who called himself Black Fortescue. Mylles was unconvinced; he thought that Ballard was probably preparing to leave England by ship. Nevertheless, still clinging to a little hope, he asked Walsingham for a blank arrest warrant to give to Berden.

On the following day, Friday, 29 July, Babington at long last received the ‘bloody letter' from Mary Queen of Scots. Babington took the packet from ‘a homely serving man in a blue coat' who was unknown to him. In fact, of course, the servant worked for Thomas Phelippes;
he may have been Thomas Cassie. And so the delivery was made at last. How would Babington respond to Mary Queen of Scots's supposed request for information about the six men who had volunteered to assassinate Elizabeth? Phelippes and his men watched and waited for Babington's reply.

By now, in the closing days of July 1586, Robert Poley was Anthony Babington's close companion, playing the part of Babington's friend but in fact Walsingham's man and a government informant. Babington still wanted Walsingham's favour to travel abroad; Poley was his contact with Sir Francis. Was Babington a conspirator or merely a young man caught up in a plot? To Walsingham he was a traitor, though he made use, through Poley, of Babington's tentative offer of service. On 30 July Sir Francis instructed Poley ‘to move [encourage, persuade] Babington to deal with the principal practisers in the state' – in other words, to involve himself fully with the plot to kill Elizabeth.

By now Babington trusted the friend he called Robin Poley. Poley was Babington's hope for mercy and escape, his intermediary with Walsingham, his advocate and confidant. Through Poley, Babington could alert Sir Francis to the plot against the queen's life and then, with thanks for his service, leave England to travel comfortably around Europe. That was his hope and expectation; he was a naive young man.

On Saturday, 30 July Babington admitted Poley to the secret of the conspiracy. Asking for Poley's hand and promise of good faith, Babington told his friend ‘that it lay much in him and certain [of] his friends either to maintain this [Protestant] state and religion as it now stood, [or] else utterly to subvert this [state], and bring in the Catholic religion, and alter the government'. The plan, in other words, was for a Catholic
coup d'état
that would overthrow Elizabeth's government and the Church of England.

Babington was not quite truthful with Poley. He suggested that the conspirators proposed to topple the queen's government, not to kill Elizabeth. But this was the very day that Babington began to decipher the all-important letter he had received only the day before from the Queen of Scots. In Babington's letter to Mary, and in the reply he was
about to decipher, he and his friends and the Queen of Scots also had compassed and imagined Elizabeth's murder. The painstaking work of making sense of Mary's letter – working cipher character by cipher character to put it into plain prose – Babington found so tedious that he asked his friend and co-conspirator Chidiocke Tycheborne to help him. The task would have been more painful to him still if he had known that the postscript to the letter was the work of Thomas Phelippes.

Poley went first thing next morning, 31 July, to Babington's lodgings. Poley left because Babington was deep in conversation with his fellow conspirators John Ballard and John Savage, but he returned in the afternoon. Walking together through London, they talked about the plot. It was, said Babington, not quite ready to be executed. Poley advised him to see Walsingham as quickly as he could: if Babington revealed the conspiracy himself, he stood the best chance possible of the queen's clemency and Sir Francis's favour. Poley said that he would see Master Secretary.

They walked and spoke together for two or three hours and had supper with some of Babington's fellow plotters, including John Savage and John Ballard, at the Rose tavern at Temple Bar. That night Poley persuaded Babington to stay at his lodgings near by. On Tuesday, 2 August, Poley went to Walsingham's country house, Barn Elms in Surrey, to make the arrangements for a meeting with Babington at which the young conspirator would reveal to Sir Francis everything he knew about the plot.

Walsingham had not even the slightest intention of meeting Babington. He wanted both Babington and Ballard to be arrested, but like Phelippes he was waiting for Babington to post a reply to the ‘bloody letter', the final proof (if any were needed) of a horrible treason. Walsingham needed time, and for this reason at Barn Elms he told Poley to tell Babington that he would meet him in two days. Walsingham instructed Phelippes in the meantime to apprehend Ballard and Babington and his friends. Babington and Ballard would be kept at Walsingham's house on Seething Lane near the Tower of London. Sir Francis instructed Phelippes to plan their interrogations and Nicholas Berden, the watcher, to draw up a list of the names of the ‘principal practisers' in the conspiracy.