The Watchers (35 page)

That by means of Gilbert Gifford they had intelligence with the French ambassador.

It was clear as day that Babington, Savage and the others had been deceived completely. Savage confirmed that in the ‘bloody letter' Mary had assented to the plot to murder Elizabeth. Savage believed, wrongly, that the brewer of Burton upon Trent worked for the Queen of Scots, whereas in fact he was paid by Sir Amias Paulet and Thomas Phelippes to do exactly what they told him to do. And finally Savage thought that Gilbert Gifford was a trusted courier who carried letters between Mary and ambassador Châteauneuf in London. Here was the early confirmation, if Walsingham and Phelippes needed it, of the staggering success of their secret operation against the Queen of Scots.

It was only a matter of time before all the members of Babington's group were rounded up. A few of them managed to get well away from London: two were caught as far as Cheshire, one in Worcestershire. Most, however, made it only a little way out of London before being captured. From Westminster, Babington and two of his companions ran to St John's Wood, north of London. Joined by some of the others, they hid in deep countryside for ten days before going on to Harrow, where, by now desperately hungry, they begged for food. They were arrested on 14 August and taken to the Tower of London the following day.

Babington in particular was interrogated with an almost obsessional intensity. We know of nine separate examinations, each one accompanied by a written statement, conducted by privy councillors and the crown's law officers between 18 August and 8 September. On 1 September Babington was presented with the cipher he had used in his correspondence with the Queen of Scots, meticulously set out by Phelippes; after all, Phelippes knew the cipher better than Babington did himself. In the presence of a notary public, Babington affirmed
that it was the alphabet ‘by which only I have written unto the Queen of Scots or received letters from her'.

Mary Queen of Scots's cipher is attested to by Anthony Babington before the Privy Council, 1 September 1586. [National Archives, Kew, SP 12/193/54]

Just as significantly, given Savage's confession on 11 August, Babington recalled from memory the contents of the last letter he had received from the Queen of Scots. She ended, he wrote, ‘requiring to know the names of [the] six gentlemen: that she might give her advice thereupon'. He was referring to the forged postscript added to the original letter by Phelippes. Babington had not the faintest idea of Phelippes's sleight of hand.

One young man who could have given critical help in these long summer days of interrogation was Gilbert Gifford, Walsingham's prize double agent in penetrating the conspiracies of the Queen of Scots. Walsingham, more anxious about Babington and Ballard, had noticed his disappearance on 3 August. Gifford, seeing that the group of conspirators was about to be broken up, panicked. Terrified of being
implicated with John Ballard and then swept up in the arrests of Babington and the others, he left England secretly. More at home in France, Gifford went to the city he knew best in Europe, Paris.

In the middle of August Gifford revealed himself to Walsingham and Phelippes. He was very nervous: he knew full well that he had left England without the queen's licence; he was now just another émigré. Choosing his words carefully, he wrote to ask Walsingham to forgive his sudden departure and offered his continued service. To Phelippes, with whom he had worked so closely for months, he excused his flight abroad, wrote of his willingness to serve Walsingham ‘as long as there is blood in my body', and asked for £10.

Walsingham and Phelippes were always quick to see an opportunity. Gifford could spy once again in Paris. After all in England he had been a devastatingly effective agent and he knew the émigré scene in Paris as well as anyone. Keen to be of use to Elizabeth's government (especially after his unlicensed journey to France) he made an offer of espionage that Walsingham accepted. Within weeks Gifford wrote with joy and relief at Sir Francis's favour and protection ‘in doing that dutiful service towards my dear country whereunto by all laws I am bounden'.

So by September Gifford was spying once more, picking up packets of foreign correspondence for Phelippes. He had left his cipher for Phelippes's letters in England and was signing reports with own name. He was offered a new means of secret communication. Anything of importance was to be written by Phelippes in alum: often called alum-water, this substance was normally used in medicines and to dye cloth and leather, but here Gifford suggested its use as a secret ink. Gifford asked too for money, which Phelippes was able to get to him by means of bills of exchange through Gifford's uncle, a merchant who traded out of Rouen. He was sent Phelippes's equipment ‘for the manner of secret writing' with Phelippes's instructions on how to use it.

It was obvious that Gifford's cover story in Paris would have to be maintained. The blunt fact, of course, was that Elizabeth's government had to denounce Gifford as a conspirator and a traitor. As Walsingham wrote to Phelippes: ‘He must be content that we both write and speak bitterly against him.' This kind of cover was necessary, but it came with a cost.

Sure by September of Walsingham's confidence, Gifford was at last completely honest in saying why he had bolted so unexpectedly in August. He called Babington, Ballard and the other conspirators ‘ambitious treacherous youthful companions'. He was terrified of being exposed to their treasons. But his greatest fear was to be called as a witness in their public trials, which, when he left England, he could clearly see were imminent. Standing before a packed courtroom, he would have to acknowledge that he had not only spied on the Babington group but had also betrayed the Queen of Scots. It was a profound risk he was not willing to take. For Gifford, the familiar émigré haunts of Paris were safer than the courts of royal justice in Westminster Palace. His father had little sympathy. Hearing reports and rumours of the confessions of the Babington plotters, John Gifford understood the dangerous tangle in which Gilbert found himself. He wrote to Phelippes: ‘Sir, I have written to my unfortunate son. I would God he had never been born.'

Sir Francis Walsingham, Thomas Phelippes, Gilbert Gifford, Thomas Barnes, Robert Poley, Anthony Babington, Chidiocke Tycheborne, John Savage, Sir Amias Paulet, the honest brewer of Burton upon Trent: each of these in his own way, some playing greater parts than others, had set in motion judicial proceedings against Mary Queen of Scots. That was clear as early as August 1586. By the first week of September Walsingham and Lord Burghley were directing a very serious effort to gather definitive evidence of Mary Stuart's complicity in the plot to kill Elizabeth and invade her kingdoms. Their chief expert researcher, naturally, was Phelippes.

Phelippes's analysis of the evidence shows how tantalizingly close he and his masters had come to proving Mary's guilt. Phelippes reviewed her correspondence with Charles Paget, her ambassador in Paris the Archbishop of Glasgow, the Spanish ambassador Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Lord Paget and Sir Francis Englefield. He assembled for Burghley what he called the ‘Proofs of a plot'. But the Queen of Scots had been careful. There was nothing in her own handwriting, only in the hands of her secretaries Gilbert Curll and Claude Nau. There was at best a glimmer of a chance of tying Mary definitively to her last critical letter to Babington.

The evidence of Nau and Curll was critical. Had the Queen of Scots composed the ‘bloody letter'? Arrested and put under enormous pressure in long interrogations, Nau confessed to a preparatory ‘minute', or rough draft, of it. The very same day, recognizing at once its significance, Walsingham wrote to Phelippes: ‘I would to God those minutes were found.' But Nau had made too convenient a confession. The next day Walsingham realized from yet another interview with Nau that ‘the minute of her answer is not extant'.

Phelippes saw and understood the problem. He knew that Mary had always been at least one step removed from the letters her secretaries sent out in her name. As a practised cryptographer, he reflected that she dispatched ‘more packets ordinarily every fortnight than it was possible for one body well exercised therein to put in cipher and decipher'. She was ill and of course she was a queen who had secretaries to write for her. So not surprisingly Phelippes's view was that the ‘heads' (that is, the points to be included) of what he called ‘that bloody letter' sent to Babington ‘touching the designment of the Queen's person [i.e. the murder of Elizabeth], is of Nau his hand likewise'.

For three days, between 5 and 7 September, Phelippes found himself pulled in two directions. On the 5th, Gilbert Curll, under detention and pressed by Elizabeth's most senior privy councillors, confessed that he had deciphered Babington's letter to the Queen of Scots and that her answer had been first written in French by Nau and then translated into English and finally put into cipher by Curll himself. On the same day, suggesting something entirely different, Nau told four senior privy councillors that Mary had written the ‘bloody letter' to Babington in her own hand. Both Nau and Curll cautiously acknowledged the accuracy of the government's copies of the letter, knowing they really had little choice but to do so. They were not, so far as we can tell, ever shown the forged postscript. But this was still not quite enough for Burghley and Walsingham, which explains why on 7 September Phelippes found himself to be the recipient of a peremptory letter from the court at Windsor Castle: ‘Her Majesty's pleasure is you should presently repair hither, for that upon Nau's confession it should appear we have not performed the search sufficiently. For he doth assure we shall find amongst the minutes … the copies of the letters wanting both in French and English.'

But like the search for the philosopher's stone, neither Phelippes nor any other official could find that final and fatal proof against Mary Queen of Scots in her own hand. Elizabeth's government would have to rely on the weight of the many documents to or from Mary or in her name that Phelippes had deciphered and gathered. Against so formidable and dangerous an enemy as the Scottish Queen, they pressed on regardless.

Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators were tried in two groups between 13 and 15 September. The case of John Savage, accused of planning from the beginning the queen's assassination, was the first to be heard. Brought to the bar, the charge was put to him: that in April 1586 at the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields he had conspired to murder Elizabeth, to disinherit her of her kingdom, to stir up sedition in the realm and to subvert the true Christian religion. Soon after this he devised with John Ballard how to bring this about, encouraged by letters he had received from Thomas Morgan and Gilbert Gifford. (It was no wonder that Gifford had fled England at the first sign of a trial.) Savage was asked to plead guilty or not guilty to the charge. He equivocated, only to be then sharply corrected by Sir Christopher Hatton:

SAVAGE : For conspiring at St Giles's I am guilty; that I received letters whereby they did provoke me to kill Her Majesty I am guilty; that I did assent to kill Her Majesty I am not guilty.

HATTON : To say that thou art guilty to that and not to this is no plea, for thou must either confess it generally or deny it generally, wherefore delay not the time, but say either guilty or no. If thou say guilty then shalt thou hear further; if not guilty, Her Majesty's learned counsel is ready to give evidence against thee.

SAVAGE : Then, sir, I am guilty.

The law officers set out the evidence against him, much of it from his own confessions. The attorney-general felt they had done quite enough to prove the case. But Hatton once again interjected with an important question for the defendant:

I must ask thee one question. Was not all this willingly and voluntarily confessed by thyself without menacing, without torture, or without offer of any torture?

Savage simply said ‘yes'.

Hatton asked for an adjournment of the trial to the following day, pointing out that if the court were then to hear the evidence against all the prisoners it would be in session till three o'clock in the morning. Over the following two days Babington and his fellow conspirators were tried for treason. They pleaded guilty to conspiring to free the Queen of Scots from confinement and attempting to alter England's religion, but not guilty to planning Elizabeth's murder. Yet the evidence was overwhelming, and the jury found them guilty on all charges. In court Babington blamed Ballard for his destruction.

Elizabeth took a special interest in how they were to be executed. On the day before Savage's trial, she told Lord Burghley that ‘considering this manner of horrible treason' against her own person, the form of the conspirators' executions should ‘for more terror' be referred to herself and her Council. Burghley replied that the usual way of proceeding, by ‘protracting' the pain of the traitors in the sight of the London crowd, ‘would be as terrible as any other device could be'. Burghley was talking about hanging, drawing and quartering, a savage and brutal death. Still, Elizabeth wanted the judge and her privy councillors to understand her royal pleasure. She wanted vengeance, for the traitors' bodies to be torn into pieces.