When he was finally released, Gifford contacted the French embassy to note that he hoped to be transmitting letters and then headed for Chartley Hall. There, he offered himself to Mary and her secretaries, Curle and Nau, as a useful postman and they took him to their hearts. Every letter that Mary and her secretaries put in for him to transport was given to Walsingham’s man to read and decipher. Nau would take down her letter, bundle it in leather and give it to the brewer to be hidden in the cork. The brewer returned to his home, extracted the letter, gave it to Gifford – who then betrayed Mary by bringing it back to Chartley, for the perusal of Paulet. She thought he was taking them straight to the French ambassador.
Mary had no idea that her superb plans for concealment were exposed, from her secret hiding places to her invented codes. She had thrown herself into the hands of Gifford, with terrible effect. As the French ambassador put it, Mary and her servants had ‘placed great confidence in the said Gifford . . . and thence came the ruin’.4 Walsingham was so sure of success that he put his crack codebreaker, Thomas Phelippes, in rooms at Chartley, so he could read and decipher letters immediately. On the occasions when Phelippes was called back to London, Paulet put the letters on fast horses to the capital. After the letter had been read, decoded and transcribed, the set of letters were sealed back into the original leather and messengers handed them to the French ambassador.
Mary’s code ciphers are in the National Archives, beautifully scribed by her secretaries. Each letter has a code, and some names, titles and popular words also have codes: the Queen of England, the King of Spain, crown, ship, intelligence, secret, religion. The three names on top of the code decipherer are the Pope, the King of France and the King of Spain. Mary’s code an X bearing a small dot on the right, the King of Spain and France also are Xs with dots. Even in a code guide, Mary made her alliances clear. Elizabeth is a rather odd 4 shape that looks like no one else. Poor Mary – her son was signified by a tiny heart.5
The usual letters in this careful code that went back and forth were not incriminating enough to have Mary put on trial. Cecil could not afford another adjournment; he liked decisive, clear outcomes. Too many of Mary’s letters expressed support of the Catholic faith and of the efforts of France and Spain to pursue it, but fell short of demanding Elizabeth be deposed and executed. Although Mary was depressed, angry and resentful, she had only ever wanted her own throne back – and then to be noted as Elizabeth’s successor. But after 1586, Mary was desperate. James had refused her the chance to become monarch jointly with him and he and Elizabeth seemed to be so friendly, and the old suggestion of her returning to Scotland as queen mother had faded. She was worried that she might be killed – in the words of Paulet, ‘She could see plainly that her destruction was sought and that her life would be taken from her, and then it would be said that she had died of sickness.’6 She began to entertain conspirators whom she would have always refused as foolhardy or sinful before.
It was only a matter of time before Mary fell in with another secret scheme. The ringleader was Anthony Babington, who she had known because he had served George Talbot as a page. He had secretly taken letters for her, but feared her incarceration was too strong and she was too watched after she was moved to Tutbury – he had even sent back letters conveyed to him from France in early 1586, declining to be involved. Young and idealistic, as many of the plotters tended to be, he was a Catholic and had always been sympathetic to the imprisoned queen. Through contacts in the French court, he began corresponding with Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador who had been expelled from London, who was at the Spanish embassy in Paris. Furious about being removed from England, Mendoza began to conjure wild plans: the English Catholics would form an uprising, Spain would invade, Elizabeth would be deposed and executed and Mary would be queen. John Ballard, a Jesuit priest and agent for Rome, had been in frequent contact with Catholic gentry, asking them for support in the event of a Spanish invasion. He encouraged Babington to take an active role in his plot and Babington agreed to find men to support the uprising and assassinate Elizabeth – and unfortunately for him, he invited Gifford to discuss the early plans. Babington wrote to Mary to ask if she would support them.
The letter from Babington to Mary asking whether she would agree to the assassination of her cousin and take her position as queen was sent in the tiny box suspended in the beer keg – and it was written in code. It seemed an impregnable scheme. Mary could never have guessed that Walsingham’s man was reading every word, copying it out for the spymaster, and then carefully folding it back up into the box. She received the letter on 14 July 1586 – and her heart was torn. Babington had made it quite clear what would happen. As he put it, ‘Myself with ten gentlemen and a hundred of your followers will undertake the delivery of your royal person from the hands of your enemies. For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by the excommunication of her made free, there will be six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who for the zeal they bear the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service, will undertake that tragical execution.’ The English queen was to suffer a ‘tragical execution’ at the hands of the six men. They were, he noted, not required to be obedient to Elizabeth due to her excommunication.7
The words ‘tragical execution’ were all Cecil needed.
If the plan worked, Mary would have her heart’s desire. And yet, having seen so much bloodshed, she could not bear the thought of Elizabeth’s death. And if the plan failed, she would be executed for treason, without a doubt. She agonised over her decision – and then made the fateful choice to throw her lot in with the plotters, for better or worse. At that point, she felt she had nothing to lose. Her secretary, Claude Nau, took down her dictation in French and then translated it to English – from which it was then written in code. Spies observing her noted she seemed in good spirits after she had sent the letter, smiling and gay. Poor Mary dreamed of gaining Elizabeth’s throne in a blaze of glory.
In her letter to Babington, Mary noted his enthusiasm to stop the ‘designments of our enemies for the extirpation of our religion out of this realm with ruin of us all’,8 and suggested he enter into discussion with Mendoza. ‘The affairs then being thus prepared and forces in readiness both within and without the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work taking order, upon the accomplishment of their design, I may suddenly be transported out of this place.’ She told him to burn the letter as soon as he had read it.9
The reference to the ‘six gentlemen’ was fateful proof that she knew about and assented to the plot to kill the queen. Cecil, Paulet, Walsingham and their networks were eagerly awaiting her reply.
Mary also condemned herself by her emphasis on the importance of Spanish military assistance. She did not simply ask to be freed by Babington and dash back to Scotland – which could hardly be seen as an act of treason. She wanted and needed a full Spanish invasion.
For I have long ago shown unto the foreign Catholic princes, what they have done against the King of Spain, and in the time the Catholics here remaining, exposed to all persecutions and cruelty, do daily diminish in number, forces, means and power. So if remedy be not thereunto speedily provided, I fear not a little but they shall become altogether unable for ever to rise again and receive any aid at all, whensoever it was offered . . . I shall always be ready and most willing to employ therein my life and all that I have, or may ever look for, in this world.10
Mary’s letter was extracted from the beer keg and deciphered. Phelippes, Walsingham’s genius decoder, knew he had dynamite. He sent his copy to Walsingham with a picture of the gallows on the front. Before he folded it back up into the beer keg, he added a postscript, on Walsingham’s orders, trying to extract the names of the six gentlemen. ‘I would be glad to know the names and quelityes of the sixe gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment’, ‘she’ wrote, asking for further particulars and reiterating her desire for the names. It was poorly forged and sat oddly with the rest of the le
tter.
His task done, Gifford fled to France as he would surely be arrested as Mary’s postman and scapegoated, even though he had been working for the English.
Walsingham’s trap was closing in. He had the plotters surrounded on all sides. He had asked another spy, John Scudamore, to befriend Babington, and the two were dining at a local inn when a message arrived for Scudamore. Babington caught sight of it and realised it was a command to arrest him. Pretending he was going to the counter to pay, he fled the tavern, leaving his sword behind. Walsingham put a command out across the realm to find the men. John Ballard was taken on 4 August and Babington was found ten days later hiding in St John’s Wood, disguised as a peasant with green slime on his face.
Walsingham’s spy, Robert Poley (a man who had a gift for turning up in the midst of the action; he was later in the Widow Bull’s Inn Tavern when Christopher Marlowe was killed), had also taken up Babington in an intense friendship and told all to Walsingham. Babington suspected that honeytrap Poley had betrayed him but could never admit it to himself, such was his devotion. Four days after his capture, he started to confess.
Mary continued blithely unaware of the plot closing around her, not knowing that her dear ‘sister and cousin’ had called her a ‘wicked murderess’ and that her trial had already been ordered.11 Walsingham needed Mary out of her rooms so he could go through her papers. Her secretary, Claude Nau, had implored her to get rid of them, but she had refused, saying her dear cousin would never wish to read her private writings. This was terribly naïve. Mary was taken to the house of Sir Walter Aston near Chartley Hall. There, Paulet seemed to soften towards her and suggested they go out with a deer hunt at Sir Walter’s park – she was delighted with the plan and was so keen to take some exercise that she was able to mount her horse.
On 11 August, Mary set off for the hunting trip she so desired. Beautifully gowned, for she expected to meet with the hunt, she went out accompanied by her secretaries, her page and her valet and was delighting in the fresh air and exercise. She barely noticed when Paulet and his men dropped behind her. And then, towards her came a company of men on horseback, galloping fast. For a brief moment, all was euphoria. She must have thought they had come to free her and her trials were about to be ended. But instead, they were called to a stop and the chief horsemen spoke to Paulet – and turned to her. He declared that there was a plot against Elizabeth, and Mary was to be arrested and conducted to Aston’s house. ‘The queen my mistress finds it very strange that you, contrary to the pact and engagement made between you, should have conspired against her and the state, a thing which she could not have believed had she not seen proofs of it with her own eyes and known it for certain.’12 Mary was caught.
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘I Am a True Queen’
Mary vehemently denied the accusations, said she had never conspired against the queen, declared herself always Elizabeth’s ‘good sister and friend’.1 She begged her servants to defend her with their swords, but they were surrounded and Curle and Nau were arrested and taken away. She agreed to return with Paulet and his escort to Chartley, but then when she realised they were riding in a different direction, she pulled herself off her horse, sat on the ground and refused to move, saying piteously that she wished to die on the spot. Paulet threatened to forcibly remove her and only when her doctor came to comfort her and beg her to move did she agree to stand. He came up with the strange idea that Elizabeth was already dead and the men were simply attempting to keep her safe. Mary knew it was a lie. But she was still defiant. She knelt against a tree to pray and said she would not leave until she had finished.
While Mary was out riding, her rooms in Chartley had been searched, men ransacking her drawers and cabinets, collecting together the carefully drawn keys for codes. Four justices of the peace arrived to oversee the search and three boxes of her letters were packed up and taken post-haste to Elizabeth. Mary, meanwhile, was taken off to Aston’s house, Tixall, at which there was nothing for her, not even a change of clothes. Two of her ladies and an equerry were sent to attend her in her new prison. She begged Paulet to allow her to write to Elizabeth but he refused her paper. He told her he would not speak to her either.2
Mary passed days of misery, afraid and terrified of when men were going to invade, seize her, accuse her. After a fortnight, she was returned to her rooms at Chartley, devastated and shocked, crying out to those who watched her go in, ‘All is taken from me,’ and saying she had nothing to give the beggars for she was one too. She was still defending herself, saying she had not been ‘privy to anything intended against the queen’.3 She saw how her rooms had been ransacked: her papers and drafts confiscated, the keys to her various secret codes taken. She wept bitterly and said that she still had two things that could not be taken from her: her royal blood and her religion.
Elizabeth had moved to Windsor Castle, a fortress that she disliked but which was judged her most secure of palaces. She wrote a grateful letter to Paulet, addressing him as ‘my most faithful and careful servant’, telling him God would reward him ‘for the most troublesome charge so well discharged’.4 But the thought of executing a queen sickened her and, as they knew, Spain might protest and use it as a ruse for invading. For if a queen could be executed, then what did it say about the special blood of monarchy?
Walsingham and Cecil were keen for a trial, her privy councillors the same. Elizabeth, with her desire to avoid upset, hoped that Mary might die of natural causes. For surely the queen’s illnesses would only intensify if she was kept in confinement and her body would simply waste away. Cecil was resistant. Mary might take years to die, and in the meantime, plot against Elizabeth again. As he saw it, he had the evidence he needed and it was time to strike.
Elizabeth refused to listen to Cecil. The Scots queen was sick and ailing, looking much older than her forty-three years, and her body was nearly broken. Elizabeth sent orders to make Mary’s life difficult. Her servants were taken from her and Paulet was to seize her money. When he arrived to claim it, Mary was ill in bed and refused to give him the key to her closet. She pleaded but Paulet was intransigent and ordered his burly servants to break its door. Mary gave in and asked her gentlewoman to hand him the key. Paulet’s servants piled up the money under his hawkish eye and Mary dragged herself out of bed and followed him, barefoot, begging for mercy. She told him that she was keeping the money for her funeral expenses and to pay her servants their final legacies.5 He seized it anyway.
Mary had no idea of the further humiliations to come. Babington had confessed all. Her own secretaries, under punishing interrogation, had held out bravely and denied they had ever seen the letter in which Mary had talked of the ‘six gentlemen’ and given assent to Babington’s plan. But when they were shown a version in which Phelippes had written Mary’s letter to Babington back into code, they gave in and confessed all, for it was in the correct code, evidence that Walsingham really had seen the original. As Curle confessed, ‘they showed me the two very letters written by me in cipher and received by Babington’.6 Cecil thought them cowardly, shrugging that they would have given up all their information if they thought there was a chance of saving themselves. The confessions of the secretaries were key: since Mary had not written the letters herself she could otherwise still claim that Nau and Curle had written without her knowledge. Cecil needed them to say that they knew – and they obliged.
After a trial on 13 and 14 September, Babington and six others were hanged, drawn and quartered on 20 September. Their dispatch was so brutal and the public outcry so great that the men had been disembowelled while still sentient that the Privy Council panicked and Elizabeth sent a personal order that the next seven to be executed should be hanged but then not mutilated until they were entirely dead.
Mary was utterly friendless. The French ambassador pressed her case but Elizabeth refused to listen. Rome could not help. Her son, James, declared that Mary had gone too far and should stick to prayer. He even declared th
at she should be put in the Tower. Instead he occupied himself with offering marriage to Elizabeth – over thirty years his senior. The young king had not grasped the seriousness of the matter. He thought that his mother could be imprisoned for ever and had not understood that her life was under threat.
Elizabeth was accepting there must be a trial, but not in London. The sight of Mary riding through the capital’s streets in disgrace might stir people to pity or even to rise up for her. Finally, Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire was decided upon – far from Scotland and London, and Mary’s journey there would be short, which meant that fewer people would see her. The law had been passed that Mary could be put on trial by nobles and Cecil planned that it would be heard by twenty-four nobles and privy councillors, advised by common-law judges. Careful arrangements were made for accommodating and feeding such a party. The knights and gentlemen of the county would be allowed in to watch proceedings.
On 21 September, Mary left Chartley for she knew not where, escorted by a band of Protestant gentlemen and men with guns. On a stop in Leicester, the crowd protested her incarceration and made to attack Paulet’s carriage, but were driven off. She arrived after a four-day journey, in great pain due to her swollen legs. She had been much reduced but she did travel in state, with twenty baggage carts. She was still entirely unaware that all her letters had been read and intercepted – and so she believed that the evidence against her was only that which came from accusers. She naturally presumed that one of the conspirators had caved and admitted the plot, and then all the names had followed. Other men could say she knew of the plot – but how could they prove it? Her brilliant way of hiding the letters in the beer cask, put into code, meant that no one could have read her letters – and Babington had promised to burn it immediately. Even if he had not, the message had not been in her hand and was written in a code she thought no one could decipher. She was much bowed by her indignities at the hands of Paulet and the others but remained convinced that she could prove her innocence.
The Betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots Page 36