by David Riggs
if at mine own election, without your honour’s, Mr Secretary’s, or some others of her honourable Council’s consent, and direction (for which consent and direction from Mr Secretary I have laboured a whole year) I should have insinuated the conversation of any at home, or abroad suspected for religion, or practice against the state; and not in convenient time (as often it must needs fall out) detected anything; then I should have been directly charged as a practiser with them, neither should my close intent have availed for my excuse …
Poley’s answer brings out the fundamental dilemma of freelance intelligence work. Spies conspired with the enemy in order to extract their secrets; but if they did so without ‘consent and direction’ from the Council, they were apt to be accused of the very crimes they sought to discover.
Poley’s fellow spy William Parry had recently been arrested for plotting to kill Elizabeth while she was riding in the park. Even though Parry had done yeoman service gathering intelligence on the Continent, he had failed to obtain a warrant in advance on this occasion, and for this oversight was hanged on 2 March 1585. The spy’s employers had real cause for concern: there was nothing to prevent men like Parry and Poley from playing both ends against the middle, and many did. The only constant in this world was avarice. Small wonder that Walsingham remained reluctant to ‘lay himself open’ to Poley.
Misrecognition and disguise were now intrinsic to the way Elizabethan Protestants and Catholics viewed one another. Burghley’s Execution of Justice in England (1583) maintained that the queen’s subjects were free to be Catholics in private if not in public: ‘none of these sort are for their contrary opinions in religion prosecuted or charged with any crimes or pains of treason,’ he insisted, ‘nor yet willingly searched in their consciences for their contrary opinions that savour not of treason.’ In other words, they were free to believe in purgatory and other Catholic doctrines so long as they kept their opinions to themselves. This so-called policy of toleration turned a blind eye to the real issue: how could Catholics practise their religion without any priests to administer the sacraments? Anyone who wanted to be a Catholic in Elizabethan England had to pretend otherwise. The hallmarks of integrity in this community were secrecy, equivocation and disguise.
In response to Burghley, William Allen produced a mirror image of the Execution of Justice. Father Allen’s True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics (1584) insisted that the missioners’ only motive for returning to England was to propagate the faith: ‘all was for religion, and nothing in truth for treason.’ ‘I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me,’ wrote Edmund Campion, ‘to deal in any respect with matter of State or Policy in this realm.’ Where Burghley collapsed religion into politics (‘Serve God by serving of the Queen,’ he advised his son Robert), Allen collapsed politics into religion. He refused to acknowledge that the Jesuit mission had a political dimension, much less that he planned to deploy missionary priests in the reconquest of England. In 1585, however, Allen privately informed Pope Sixtus V that ‘we have now … almost three hundred priests in the households of noblemen and men of substance, and we are daily sending others, who will direct the consciences and actions of Catholics in this affair when the time comes.’ Father Allen’s pious disclaimers only strengthened the Protestants’ conviction that ‘Papists are close and cunning, so subtle and crafty that their hearts and intentions cannot be known … for outwardly they are Lambs, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.’
It is an irony of political history that the Conformist policy of ‘not liking … to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’ led to a culture of secrecy and paranoia. As the plots and conspiracies of the 1580s fuelled anti-Catholic hysteria, the early Elizabethan equation between outward compliance and good citizenship came under an intolerable strain. What if external consent concealed inward treachery? One Protestant demagogue reasoned that conforming Catholics who ‘show to have a good outward carriage to civil matters’ were actually ‘more dangerous’ than recusants. By this paranoid logic, the flight of the Catholic exiles proved the disloyalty of their co-religionists in England, for ‘By the plain profession of them that are fled the realm, and have … showed themselves in their colours, we may justly doubt the affection of those, that remain with us; how demurely so ever they will show themselves.’ The same obsession with double-dealing colours the spy and journalist Anthony Munday’s grotesque reaction to the hanging, castration and disembowelling of Edmund Campion. ‘The outward protestations of this man’, he complained, ‘moved some there present to tears, not entering into conceit of his inward hypocrisy.’
This climate of suspicion exposes the gravity of the charge that Marlowe ‘was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims’ on his own initiative. Whatever one makes of it, the rumour singled out Marlowe as an object of suspicion. It situated him at the entrance to the no man’s land peopled by provocative agents like Robert Poley, and at the outset of what Richard Baines called ‘the high way to Infidelity, Heresy and Atheism’. Marlowe’s own intentions are too mysterious for us to fathom, but he will reappear at Flushing five years later, and again in London towards the end of his life, in the dangerous position of the double agent.
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Although the Throckmorton plot collapsed, George Gifford’s oath remained in force. Poley later reported that Gifford ‘had received £800 or £900 at several times for the attempt’; but these incentives failed to produce any results. At this juncture, George Gifford’s brother William, the future Archbishop of Rheims and Primate of France, together with George’s scapegrace cousin Gilbert Gifford, persuaded the soldier John Savage to do the killing. In the summer of 1585 Savage took a solemn oath at Rheims to assassinate the queen. Savage then returned to England, studied law at the Inns of Court and waited for a suitable opportunity to carry out his vow. He did not appear to be in any hurry.
The two men who kept the plot afloat through thick and thin were Gilbert Gifford and the incendiary cleric John Ballard. Like every missionary priest in Elizabethan England, Father Ballard had a false identity. His alias was Captain Fortescue, ‘Foscue’ to his many friends, a swashbuckling soldier dressed to the nines in fine military regalia. Ballard played his part to the hilt. A long-time companion remembered consorting with him
in London, when Foscue had his attendants as thick as might be, every gentleman calling him Captain: insomuch that at every tavern and inn in London he was called Captain Foscue: and every man thought, that knew him, that he with a great band should have gone over with my Lord of Leicester.
Every missionary priest ran the risk of being absorbed into the role he had adopted, and John Ballard fell into this delusion. He hatched plots with Queen Mary’s agents in Paris. Back in England, Captain Foscue became a recruiting officer for the impending Catholic war of liberation. He made his way north to Yorkshire, where he ‘repaired unto the Tippings’, one of the many diehard papist families in that county. He became acquainted with Anthony Babington, Charles Tilney, Edward Windsor and other disaffected Catholic gentry. He promised Tilney and Windsor ‘places and entertainment’ if they went abroad to join the Catholic army of invasion. He heard about John Savage’s vow to kill the queen and befriended him. He recruited the well-connected Bernard Maude as his adjutant. Maude had a friend at court, and procured the passport for Captain Fortescue’s return visit to Paris in the spring of 1586. Unfortunately for Ballard, Bernard Maude was a mole. Sir Francis Walsingham, Maude’s contact at court, was only too happy to provide Father Ballard with logistical support. From the Secretary’s standpoint, more conspirators meant more hangings and fewer enemies, once the plot had run its course.
If John Ballard was the grand strategist in this conspiracy, Gilbert Gifford was the arch motivator, though his own motives were utterly devious. On his way back to England that December, Gifford encountered one of Walsingham’s searchers at Rye. The conspirator and the Secretary soon came to a mutual understanding. Gilbert Gi
fford had initiated the plot when he persuaded John Savage to murder Queen Elizabeth. Now Secretary Walsingham wanted the plot to go forward so that he could entrap the conspirators and – his real quarry – the Queen of Scots. Gifford moved in with Walsingham’s right-hand man Thomas Phelippes and began working for both sides at once. Gifford soon confronted Savage, ‘much discontent that he had left off to execute what he had vowed, and that he could not be discharged in conscience’. Gifford told many lies to keep the plot in motion. Walsingham’s man Maude persuaded backsliders to stay the course. The Catholic plot against Queen Elizabeth had become Secretary Walsingham’s plot against Mary, Queen of Scots.
Father Ballard received a warm welcome in Paris. His plot included the three main elements in all the major Catholic conspiracies from the 1570s and 1580s – a Spanish invasion from abroad, a Catholic uprising at home and the rescue of Mary, Queen of Scots – together with the volatile new ingredient of assassination. In addition to John Savage, Ballard’s short-list of hit men would have included three Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Guard, Charles Tilney, Edward Windsor and Edward Abington. Queen Mary’s agents were most enthusiastic. Don Bernardino de Mendoza, now the Spanish ambassador in Paris, sounded a more cautious note. Mendoza wrote to King Philip II that he was ‘advised from England by four men of position who have the entry into the Queen’s house, that they have discussed for at least three months the intention of killing her’. Now that they had ‘mutually sworn to do it’, he continued, the conspirators proposed to ‘advise me when it is to be done: and whether by poison or steel, in order that I may send the intelligence to your majesty, supplicating you to be pleased to help them after the business is effected’. Mendoza responded to Ballard’s proposal with guarded optimism. He told him to go back to England, ‘and return to me with full details, as in so important a matter we must have more than generalities’. The ambassador was especially keen to learn more about the number of English Catholics who could be counted on to rise in support of the conspirators. Once this condition had been met, Spain would prepare an army of invasion.
On returning to London at the end of May, Captain Fortescue called on Anthony Babington, a wealthy young gentleman from Derbyshire who had been active in the Catholic underground. Ballard beguiled his credulous listener with a grossly inflated account of what the Spanish ambassador had said. ‘Being with Mendoza in Paris,’ Ballard reported, he learned that Spain, France and the Pope were preparing to invade England, ‘this summer without further delay, having in readiness such forces and all warlike preparations as the like was never seen in these parts of Christendom’. When Babington replied that he ‘held their assistance on this side small … so long as her majesty doth live’, Ballard said that ‘her life could be no hindrance therein’, adding that ‘the instrument thereof was Savage, who had vowed the performance thereof’. On 7 June, Ballard changed his story. Mendoza now ‘required’ the English Catholics to procure ‘some means by which the … Queen of Scots could be delivered from custody and set free’ as a precondition for the grand invasion. There was no way to accomplish this feat ‘except by the killing and final destruction’ of Elizabeth. Would Babington agree to lead this effort?
The twenty-four-year old Anthony Babington had, in the words of a sympathetic contemporary, ‘gathered around him, other young men of his own rank, zealous and adventurous Catholics, bold in danger, earnest for the protection of the Catholic faith, or for any enterprise intended to promote the Catholic cause’. He was the natural leader of the plot that bears his name; but cold-blooded regicide was not his natural destination. The Babington Plot became a curiously static operation. While John Ballard and Gilbert Gifford pressured Babington to be resolute, Babington stalled for time.
Babington applied for a licence to travel abroad. Since passports had to be approved by the queen, the conspirator needed a friend at court. He soon found a helpful insider in the person of Robert Poley, who was ostensibly employed by Secretary Walsingham’s daughter Frances, the wife of Sir Philip Sidney. Babington grew fond of Poley, whom he dubbed ‘sweet Robin’, and began sleeping at his house. Poley egged Babington on. When the conspirator ‘still entertained the practice, but with such extreme delays as might well betray the repugnance which was in my nature’, Poley ‘cried out of [regarding] my delay, as a thing tending to the discovery thereof’. The Secretary’s waiting game paid off when Babington rashly sent Queen Mary a letter ‘touching every particular of this plot’. Mary wrote back endorsing the conspiracy, Thomas Phelippes intercepted her letter and the trap snapped shut. On the strength of this evidence, Mary Queen of Scots would soon be tried, convicted and beheaded under the Act for the Queen’s Surety.
Gilbert Gifford fled to France on 20 July. Six weeks later, he wrote to Walsingham explaining that
For my departure, your Honour may perceive what just cause I had, dealing by your Honour’s consent, with so impious members, practisers of the ruin of my dear country. I say, to deal with such treacherous, youthful companions, without any warrant or discharge in how dangerous a practice … I beseech your Honour to know this to have been the only cause of my departure.
In a moment of panic, Gifford feared that he would be charged along with the other conspirators. He had Walsingham’s ‘consent’, but not the written ‘warrant’ that would indemnify him from prosecution. Gifford was entangled in the same double bind that cast Poley’s loyalty into doubt and sent William Parry to the scaffold. As the plot lingered on, even Father Ballard got cold feet. The arch-conspirator requested an audience with Walsingham, but the Secretary would not see him. Babington too decided to inform on his confederates, but Walsingham put him off, two days at a time.
Sir Francis laid on extra agents, such as the moneylender’s tout Nicholas Skerres, who created the illusion that the conspirators’ numbers were increasing. On 2 August, Phelippes asked Walsingham ‘whether Babington is to be apprehended or otherwise played with?’ The conspirators were at Sweet Robin’s house on 4 August, when Thomas Walsingham dropped by to collect more intelligence from Poley. The Secretary’s men arrested John Ballard soon after young Walsingham’s departure. The conspirators finally grasped what they were up against. Sweet Robin was an actor; his house was a stage-set in Secretary Walsingham’s ‘sting’ operation. They could now look forward to dismemberment and death.
Three, if not four, of Secretary Walsingham’s operatives from the 1580s would play prominent parts in the murder of Christopher Marlowe. By the middle of May 1593, Marlowe was implicated in the ill-fated Stanley plot, one of several Catholic attempts to complete the work of assassinating the queen. Or was the Stanley conspiracy another sham plot, a ‘sting’ engineered by the Council in order to entrap mutinous subjects?
7.4 The Persecution of English Papists. From Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Heareticorum nostris temporis, 1587.
When the Privy Council sent its agents to arrest Marlowe on 18 May 1593, they sought him at Thomas Walsingham’s manor house in Kent. Around 27 May, Richard Baines supplied the Council with the incriminating ‘Note’ itemizing Marlowe’s crimes and blasphemies. Marlowe was probably back at Walsingham’s house on 31 May, when he set out for the fatal meeting on Deptford Strand. His three companions at the scene of the murder were Robert Poley, Nicholas Skerres – the bit player in the Babington conspiracy – and Thomas Walsingham’s servant Ingram Frizer.
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After her arrest, Queen Mary entreated her foes to ‘Remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’ Although the verdict in Mary’s trial was a foregone conclusion, the final outcome remained in doubt. Queen Elizabeth sought Mary’s death, but was unwilling to bear the responsibility for executing her cousin and fellow queen. The precedent of killing the queen was detrimental to Elizabeth’s own safety as well. Elizabeth took extraordinary measures to contrive that Mary die a ‘natural’ death. The queen twice jailed her cousin in a draughty, foul-smelling addition to Tutbury Castle, where Mary was affli
cted by the odour of manure heaps. Mary’s acute mental and physical distress was compounded by frequent relocations. Her personal physician Burgoyne recalled that the Queen of Scots ‘was never quite sure where they would take her, not even to the last day when she arrived at her new quarters … they never would tell her the place she was to remain overnight.’
The queen dropped broad hints that one of her loyal subjects should do away with Mary on his own initiative. She ordered her private secretary William Davison to write to Mary’s jailers complaining that they had not ‘found out some way to shorten the life of that Queen considering the great peril she [Elizabeth] is subject unto hourly so long as the said Queen shall live’. Elizabeth made it clear that one of her ministers would have to trick her into signing Mary’s death warrant.
A few days before Elizabeth signed the death warrant, Secretary Walsingham’s man Michael Moody gulled the French ambassador with a fresh assassination plot. Moody offered to kill Queen Elizabeth by putting a bag of gunpowder under her bed, or by poisoning the stirrup of her shoe, or by ‘some other Italianate device’. When the ambassador fell for the bait, Moody ‘confessed’ to the Council, and Burghley placed the ambassador, the one person in England who could have mounted an effective protest against Mary’s execution, under house arrest. At this juncture, Secretary Davison obligingly placed Mary’s death warrant in a stack of routine documents that required the queen’s signature.
7.5 Memorial portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots.
After the Privy Council carried out this sentence, Elizabeth flew into a rage, insisting that she had never intended to shed her cousin’s blood. She had Davison, the scapegoat, imprisoned and fined £10,000 for transmitting the warrant that she had signed. On 14 February 1587, just six days after Mary was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle, Elizabeth wrote to Mary’s son King James VI: ‘I would you knew though not felt the extreme dolour that overwhelms my mind for that miserable accident, which far contrary to my meaning hath befallen.’ The theatre of the world, however, was wider than England. Instead of being pacified by Elizabeth’s show of grief, King Philip II began to assemble the Spanish Armada.