by Lisa Hilton
The immediate concern was the Netherlands. Walsingham’s question to Elizabeth in council, “if her Majesty shall not take them into her defense, then what shall she do or provide for her own surety against the King of Spain’s malice and forces which he shall offer against this realm when he hath subdued Holland?” summarized the queen’s choices.1 Either she could ally with the rebels or wait until Spain had crushed them, after which England would have to face Philip alone. The intelligence agents were filtering through news of the Joinville compact by the spring, and though the agreement contained no specific English aims, Elizabeth could no longer ignore the fact that the most effective military muster in France was now in league with the most powerful nation in the world, and that both were united in their loathing of Protestantism. Her hopes of Valois support were disappointed in March when Henri III conveyed that he was no longer prepared to engage in the Low Countries. Either Elizabeth had to support the Netherlanders or stand in isolation against Spain. Nonsuch “marked the final abandonment of Elizabeth’s heartfelt aim of distancing herself from European entanglements.”2 It is interesting to speculate on what could have happened had the queen at this juncture accepted the offer of the grateful Dutch Protestants to assume the sovereignty of the States General. Cecil advised against this, observing that sovereignty would produce a “perpetual quarrel,” while protectorship would result in the lesser evil of a “determinable war,” which would hopefully be brought to an end by Philip of Spain’s death. As a strategy, this proved hopelessly vague.
The subsequent campaign in the Netherlands showed neither the queen nor its most ardent supporter, the Earl of Leicester, in their best light. They had argued a decade before during the Kenilworth festivities, when Leicester had dared to portray himself as the savior-captain of the Netherlands; when this situation became a reality, it precipitated the most furious quarrel of their relationship. Leicester’s eagerness to serve was reportedly motivated by “an itching desire of rule and glory,” though he was also piously convinced that in serving he was doing God’s work. As a commander, he had little to recommend him apart from his status and willingness to fund the mission from his own purse, as his active military experience had been confined to a single battle thirty years previously. But even Leicester was better than Elizabeth, whose constant retractions of his orders and unwillingness to release sufficient finances left his starving soldiers deserting and his authority nugatory. Leicester’s opponent, Farnese, the Duke of Parma, was the most brilliant commander of his generation, and though Leicester’s troops (who soon looked like scarecrows, according to witnesses) were commendably brave, they were being deployed by a courtier, not a general. Given the English soldiers’ ancient equipment, hopeless lack of organization, and ignorance of tactics, it “is a miracle that some military action occurred.”3 Parma drove a ruthless military machine, and all Leicester could really hope to do was delay its advance. Antwerp had surrendered even before his arrival, and for all that he was greeted with fireworks displays and ecstatic crowds, pageants featuring pleasingly grateful young ladies and banners extolling the Virgin Queen as the Provinces’ savior, he knew even before he set sail that the whole enterprise was hopeless, writing despairingly to Walsingham that
I am sorry her Majesty doth deal in this sort, content to overthrow so willingly her own cause… . There never was a gentleman or general so sent out as I am. My cause is the Lord’s and the Queen’s. If the Queen fail I trust in the Lord, and on him I see I am wholly to depend.4
Having left Leicester to his own devices at the beginning of the campaign, Elizabeth furiously refused to grant him further discretion when the earl accepted the title of Governor General of the United Provinces (the role she herself had refused) at The Hague in January 1586. Her letter to him was both hysterical and hypocritical:
How contemptuously we conceive ourselves to be used by you … that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favored by us, above any other subject of this land, would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly toucheth us in honor.
It has been suggested that what particularly enraged Elizabeth in Leicester’s careerings around the Netherlands was her jealousy that his wife, Lettice, was planning to join him “with such a train of ladies and gentlewomen, and such rich coaches, litters and sidesaddles as her Majesty has none such, and that there should be a court of ladies that should far pass her Majesty’s court here.” As ever with Elizabeth, there has been too much keenness to see the personal behind the political. Leicester was eventually permitted to keep his empty title, but in flaunting it, he was drawing attention to the failure of the English venture as a whole. Elizabeth did pathetically mismanage the Netherlands campaign, but not because she was jealous of the Countess of Leicester’s sidesaddle.
Parma had perceptively observed to Philip that Elizabeth was by no means fond of expense, yet even the inadequate monies she was prepared to grant absorbed half of the ordinary royal revenues in the three years before 1588. This expense was all the more intolerable in that the Netherlands enterprise was actually proving advantageous to Spanish interests. Any projected attack on England now had a justification, while the financial burden of the war could only diminish the likelihood of the English forces being prepared for it. Elizabeth had authorized the intervention in the reasonable fear of an imminent Spanish threat, and in doing so had made that threat ever more likely. The presence of Leicester’s army was a provocation, but his force was too small and ill funded to present a serious challenge to Parma, while equally representing an unforgivable challenge to Spanish sovereignty. It was wasteful, horribly careless of life, and ultimately fruitless. The “hawkish” members of Elizabeth’s council had seen the combination of Throckmorton and Joinville as the preparations for the long-feared Catholic crusade against reform, but in 1585, there was no pressing reason to seek confrontation. It was English policy which was influencing Spain, not the other way around. The rebels’ cause looked more or less lost, particularly if England could be kept out of the equation, but after the first English forces landed at Middelburg, Philip finally acceded to the pope’s demands for the “recovery of England.” When Leicester appeared in Holland, he might as well have been carrying an invitation to the Armada.
Sir Anthony Standen, a Walsingham agent at the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, provided a copy of a terrifying document to Elizabeth just weeks after Philip himself had seen it in April 1586. It detailed an invasion plan projected by the Marquess of Santa Cruz, numbering a fleet of 206 warships, 60,000 troops, and 200 landing-barges, to sail from Spanish harbors to Ireland, where they would depose English authority. Elizabeth would then be offered a reprieve if she agreed to come to terms; if not, the vast fleet would sail on. The details were less threatening than the fact that the idea was being mooted so openly, as while Santa Cruz’s suggestions were so absurdly expensive that neither Philip nor Elizabeth took them seriously, Parma was formulating an alternative strategy, of invading via Flanders. At the same moment in London, Walsingham was examining another set of documents, the correspondence between Mary, Queen of Scots, and a young Catholic named Anthony Babington.
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VIDEO E TACEO, “I see and say nothing,” was one of Elizabeth’s mottoes; it applied very well, in the slow campaign against Mary Stuart of 1585–87, to William Cecil. Having enacted the legislation which would condemn Mary when the time came, he stayed quiet, waiting out the delicate scheme of entrapment which became known as the Babington plot. Key to this was one of the most intriguing characters of the Elizabethan secret world, the cryptographer Thomas Phelippes. Given the significance of Phelippes to the whole enterprise, it seems surprising that Elizabeth’s later encounters with this quiet graduate of Trinity College should have been admonitory, but, then again, perhaps not. To favor the man who gave some of the most sensitive service of her reign would simply have been too compromising.
At some point in the mid-1580s, Phelippes returned from
doing no-one-quite-knew-what for Walsingham in France and became the roommate of one Gilbert Gifford. A relative of Francis Throckmorton, Gifford was yet another double agent, operating between the warp and weft of Catholic and reformist loyalties which tangled across the Continent. Educated in the martyr factories of Douai and the English College at Rome, he had worked with Mary Stuart’s agent in Paris, Thomas Morgan, before being “turned” by Walsingham. Mary trusted Morgan, and Morgan trusted Gifford. So did Cordaillot, the French ambassador’s secretary, when Gifford arrived at the embassy and offered to convey letters to Mary. At Christmas 1585, the Scots queen had been moved from Tutbury to Chartley in Staffordshire, a house belonging to the Earl of Essex, and after months of isolation under the stern eye of the pedantic Paulet, her joy can be imagined when she began to receive letters from Morgan, concealed in protective tubes slipped into the beer brewed for her household. What Mary did not know was that the “honest brewer” of Burton-upon-Trent was in the pay of Paulet, who happened to be acquainted with Phelippes, who had served him in France. With Gifford acting as courier, Mary’s letters were handed to Phelippes, who deciphered their coding and passed the documents on to Walsingham. The packets were then resealed (by a specialist named Arthur Gregory) so that Gifford could deliver them to the French embassy, whence they eventually made their way to Morgan in Paris. For incoming letters this process was reversed, and though it was time-consuming, laborious, and dependent on the patchy communications which affected all sixteenth-century correspondence, it was remarkably efficient. When Elizabeth remarked tellingly to the French ambassador Guillaume de l’Aubespine in April 1586 that she was perfectly aware of his secretive communications with Mary, she added, “believe me, I know everything that is done in my kingdom.” De l’Aubespine may have smiled confidently at her naiveté, but she spoke the truth. Thanks to the beer-barrel system, the English government had obtained complete control over Mary’s correspondence.
With the interceptions running smoothly, what Walsingham needed was an agent provocateur, and here he was spoiled for choice. Just as Elizabeth had absorbed the practices of courtly love and melded them with the dynamics of Protestantism in her self-presentation as a monarch, so too was there an answering trope within the fervent atmosphere among Catholic sympathizers and exiles and the training colleges of the Continent. One of Edmund Campion’s biographers discusses the scent of martyrdom which hovered in the very air of the English College at Douai. From a few years after its foundation, the seminary sent about 20 young priests a year to England, of whom 160 had been executed by the end of Elizabeth’s reign: a whole generation of young men who “gallantly squandered” their lives for their faith. To the Elizabethan government, they were effectively terrorists; to Catholic moderates, the relays of martyrs seemed “a gruesome and intolerable waste,” but there were many, including William Allen, the director at Douai, who saw martyrdom as “the supreme privilege of which only divine grace could make them worthy.”1 It was a privilege which was talked of, and even prayed for. But many of the young men of Catholic gentry families educated on the Continent were more than products of what their enemies termed theological fanaticism. They were products of the education of their age, as saturated as Elizabeth’s courtiers in the refinements of the classics and the tradition of courtly love. Elizabeth’s “suitors” played the game for places and preferment; those who chose Mary Stuart as their mistress offered their lives as love tokens. Mary’s legendary beauty, her royal blood, her mistreatment, and above all her faith lent her a dark glamour which blended with the sincere desire for “gallant martyrdom” in some and adventurous meddling in others and produced an intoxicatingly heady concoction which provoked a “confusion of conspiracies.”2
Anthony Babington, a Derbyshire native, had met Thomas Morgan in Paris in 1580. He also knew a priest named John Ballard, a member of the Guise/Mendoza set in the city. With the former Spanish ambassador’s endorsement, Ballard was engaged in a plot to murder Elizabeth, and when he returned to England in 1586, he met Babington and encouraged him to believe that a plan to release Mary would be supported with aid from Spain and Rome. Babington had by now gathered around him a whole group of young men “ready for any arduous enterprise whatsoever that might advance the common Catholic cause.”3 With Ballard’s promises in his ears, Babington decided not only to free Mary but to crown her. In May, Mary received a letter from Morgan endorsing Babington as a contact, and in July, Babington wrote her an extraordinarily indiscreet letter outlining the scheme for her deliverance. He described the foreign troops who would arrive to support Catholic musters, who would free Mary and depose Elizabeth, whom he called the “usurping Competitor.” Babington’s fanciful statistics make pathetic reading—Elizabeth was to be dealt with by six gentlemen, Mary to be released personally by Babington with the aid of a further ten, backed up by a hundred soldiers. At the time of writing, Babington had only about fourteen companions who were committed to the plot. In her reply of 17 July, Mary painstakingly dictated her own death warrant.
Mary’s letter, like all her correspondence, was dictated in French to her secretaries, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curll, who made a simultaneous translation into Scots-English. If she was sensible enough at least to give nothing in her own hand, she could not have avoided knowing that, by merely responding to Babington, she was condemning herself under the Act for the Queen’s Surety. Babington himself had been explicit about Elizabeth’s death, which he termed “that tragical execution,” and while Mary made no direct reference to it, her acquiescence was signaled in the phrase “time to set the six gentlemen to work” in regard to “the queen that now is.”4 Her eagerness was expressed in questions about Babington’s arrangements for horses and troops, and suggestions for her own escape, such as the starting of a fire in the Chartley outbuildings and the use of carts to block the gates. She even proposed persuading a powerful magnate—perhaps the Earl of Arundel or Northumberland—to act as a “figurehead” for the revolt. Babington received her letter in London on 29 July, but by now something had been added to Mary’s own ideas. Thomas Phelippes had received the original on 19 July, and had immediately sent a copy to Walsingham, adorned with a gleeful little cartoon of a gallows. He then doctored Mary’s letter with the addition of a forged postscript, requesting that Babington explain “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 everyone privy unto.” That is, Walsingham wanted Babington to name names.
The counterpoint to Babington’s activities with Mary in July 1586 was a series of extraordinary encounters with Walsingham. One of Babington’s gang, Robert Poley, was Walsingham’s man. His fellow plotters believed him to be a Catholic spy in Walsingham’s household; in fact, he was working for the government. Via Poley, Babington sought an audience with Walsingham at his country home early in the month, where he later claimed to have made an offer of “general service” in return for a passport to leave the country. Was this a feint, designed to throw Walsingham off the scent? Or was Babington planning to betray his supposed future queen? Or was he simply terrified by the enormity of what he was about to engage with? The passport was not granted.
By 30 July Babington had deciphered Mary’s letter of the 17th. On 31 July, Babington again sent word through Poley that he had evidence of a plan against the queen. Walsingham was anxious. Had Babington seen through the forgery? It was time to draw the noose. On 4 August, the priest Ballard was arrested at Poley’s home, along with Poley himself (presumably to retain the latter’s cover). Later that day, Babington went to a tavern to eat with another Walsingham agent, Scuadamore. He had already sent word to Poley that “the furnace is prepared wherein our faith must be tried. Farewell till we meet, which God knows when.” Babington clearly knew that the plot was hopeless, and that any last-minute attempt at a plea bargain with Walsingham was futile. There were no foreign ships, no fast horses, no loyal Catholics waiting at country crossroads, and there never had been
. The whole plot had been romantic folly, a game of words in which, it transpired, Walsingham, not he, had been the player. Babington ran. When a note arrived for Scuadamore as they ate, he pretended to be going to pay the bill and escaped. He discovered two of his fellow plotters at Westminster and they made first for St. John’s Wood above the city, then for Harrow, where they were rounded up ten days later, bedraggled and starving. It was time for Cecil to take over.
In the first of nine interrogations, beginning on 18 August, Babington confessed to Cecil, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Lord Chancellor Bromley. As search warrants for over thirty London houses were produced, and other members of Babington’s group were hunted down, Cecil had to confront an essential problem. Babington had destroyed Mary’s doctored letter of 17 July. The only document in the possession of the government was Phelippes’s copy, which as a piece of evidence was almost worthless. His second difficulty was the queen.
Elizabeth has been judged as having a greater taste for realpolitik than her minister. She was at ease with the demands of Machiavellian statecraft, at heart a political pragmatist. Yet she could not bring herself to indict Mary Stuart. She emphasized to Cecil that she had no wish to draw attention to the evidence against Mary, and while insisting that the punishment of the Babington conspirators should be left to her and her council, maintained that “no sharp speeches” should be “used in condemnation or reproof of the Queen of Scots.”5 She explained to a bemused Cecil that this was a measure of self-protection, lest Mary’s supporters fear for the Scots queen’s life. While Elizabeth wavered, Cecil and his legal team worked frantically to draw up the terms of a royal commission which would permit them within the framework of the law to put an anointed queen on trial. Finally, on 6 October, Elizabeth wrote to Mary from Windsor, informing her that she would be tried at Fotheringhay for her part in “a most horrible and unnatural attempt on [Elizabeth’s] life.”6 She advised Mary to respect the officers of her commission and to respond to them, though Mary still stubbornly maintained that she had sent no letter to Babington, and that if her secretaries claimed she had, it was under torture. By the time defense and prosecution were assembled at Fotheringhay on 12 October, Babington and his fellow plotter Chidiock Tichborne had already suffered the full horror of the traitor’s death—first hanged, “then they were … cut down, their privities were cut off, bowelled alive and seeing, and quartered”—along with Ballard and four others.7 Seven further members of the group were at least permitted to strangle before they were cut down and sliced up. The crowds at St. Giles Fields roared “God Save the Queen” as one by one the slippery heads were scooped up from the bloody swamp of the scaffold and impaled on stakes.