Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  If serving a stint in an English jail cell was a letter of recommendation to Thomas Morgan, then having sparred with the English faction at the English seminaries in Rome and Rheims was an even better one. There were few hatreds that men could work up like the hatred toward a rival in the same cause, and Morgan had effectively become the leader of the Welsh “seculars” arrayed against the Jesuits and the English “religious.” From Paris, Berden had sent back to Walsingham reports, penned in invisible ink, full of news of the seething enmities between the two.

  Gifford now followed the well-worn trail to Morgan’s cell in the Bastille, and came away bearing the best letter of introduction yet to the Queen of Scots. Morgan assured Mary that Gifford was “a Catholic gentleman to me well known for that he was brought up in learning of this side the seas this many years past, where I have been always his friend to my power.” He had undertaken to travel to where she was being held, to “practice” with her host, Sir Amias Paulet, his servants, “and such as depend on him or his wife,” to “haunt the market towns adjoining the place of your continuance, to see whether he may thereby find any of your Majesty’s people.” The “said Gilbert” had also been “instructed how to send your letters to my hand to these parts.”

  Gifford would try to see if he could obtain an actual place of service with Paulet, though if that failed there would be another avenue to try: “It is very likely that one Phelippes hath great access to your host at this time.” Phelippes was said to be a “severe Huguenot, and all for that state, yet glorious and greedy of honor and profit. By this means he may perhaps be won to your service.” Phelippes himself, Morgan earnestly added, had raised the possibility that he might “serve and honor your Majesty.” That Morgan could seriously entertain hopes of corrupting Walsingham’s own man to their cause only showed how completely Mary’s supporters were entangled in a web woven by Mr. Secretary by this point.

  Gifford arrived at Rye in mid-December 1585 and was at once arrested and taken to London. Whether this was when he actually agreed to do Walsingham’s service, or whether his arrest was merely a prearranged sham, was never definitely established. In any case, his subsequent cover story was a minor masterpiece of psychological manipulation: Gifford sent word back to Morgan that the story he had told Mr. Secretary while under arrest was that he had come over to try to advance the interests of their Welsh side in the internecine fight of the Catholic factions, and that Walsingham was so taken with the idea that he had let him go, giving him twenty pounds for good measure to carry on his work of agitating the English Catholics against the Jesuits and Dr. Allen.

  From Paris, Berden reported that there had been no difficulty in getting Morgan to swallow the story. “Here is great joy that Gilbert Gifford escaped your Honor’s hands so easily,” Berden informed Walsingham on the 2nd of January 1586.

  Gifford spent a few weeks at large in London, being entertained by Catholic noblemen, calling several times at the French embassy to meet the new ambassador’s secretary. Finally, Gifford showed the secretary his letter from Morgan and made his pitch: Morgan had told him how Mary’s letters were being carried between Paris and the embassy in the diplomatic bag, he confided in the secretary; he was now willing to carry them on their dangerous second leg, between the embassy and Mary. Gifford’s father lived near where Mary was now being held in Staffordshire, in a moated manor house called Chartley Hall, so he would have an excuse for traveling there without raising suspicions; even better, since he had been gone from England for nearly a decade but looked much younger than his twenty-five years—he still had no beard—no one would be likely to recognize him anyway.

  Châteauneuf was by nature cautious; he had his secretary give Gifford just one letter for Mary, in which he put little of consequence. The letter was enciphered using the last cipher that Mauvissière had used in his communications with Mary, nearly two years earlier.

  For most of that time, Mary had been effectively cut off from word from her friends. On the 16th of January, Gifford, having traveled north to Chartley, succeeded in delivering the letters from Morgan and Châteauneuf. Mary replied at once, expressing great pleasure at receiving news; sorrow at Morgan’s continuing detention in the Bastille; gratitude “for this bringer, whom I perceive very willing to acquit himself honestly of his promise made to you.” But she feared for his discovery: “My keeper having settled such an exact and rigorous order in all places where any of my people can go, as it is very strange if they receive or deliver anything which he is not able to know very soon after.” She would accordingly communicate nothing of importance until she was sure the ambassador had received a new cipher, which she was enclosing.

  She begged the ambassador also to send the large packet of letters for her that had been accumulating in the embassy since Mauvissière’s courier system was blown. She begged him, too, to be on strict guard against the spies who, under the color of the Catholic religion, would be assiduously working to penetrate his house, and her secrets, as they had under his predecessor.

  10

  THE FINAL ACT

  The first time Mr. Secretary Walsingham had discovered Mary in clandestine contact with her allies, he had moved too quickly; he had succeeded in plugging a dangerous breach in her wall of isolation, a wall that he had zealously erected to prevent any collusion with her supporters in and out of England; but in so doing he had thrown away a valuable opportunity to learn more about the plotters who wished to reach her, and the plots by which they hoped to secure her liberation.

  The second time he discovered such a clandestine communication system, he had bided his time, having come to recognize in the interval that there was more to be gained by letting a plot mature, and little danger in letting it mature while he was privy to the very confidences exchanged by the plotters themselves. Only after the plot was exploded did he move to plug the breach.

  Now Mr. Secretary had simply taken such thinking to its logical conclusion. The advantages of allowing Mary to communicate far outweighed the advantages of maintaining her isolation. And so he would not wait for Mary’s friends to attempt the next resurrection of the secret post; he would simply supply it himself, a breach of his own creation, one that would be his from the start.

  The means by which Gilbert Gifford delivered his letters to Mary on the 16th of January 1586, and by which he received her replies, was the handiwork of Sir Amias Paulet and Thomas Phelippes, who had traveled to Chartley earlier in the month. Another small psychological masterpiece: completely believable, relying as it apparently did on the venality of a low tradesman; intricate enough in its working to have a certain fascination that was a useful distraction from any suspicion that it was all just a fake.

  A local brewer delivered beer to Chartley once a week, taking away the empty barrels at the same time. “The honest man,” Paulet facetiously called him. He was first bribed by Gifford to slip packets of letters to and from Mary into a corked tube that could be shoved into the beer barrels through the bunghole. Then he was bribed by Paulet to let him have a look at the parcels before they continued their journey: back into the barrel for the incoming post, to Gifford for the outgoing.

  The brewer, like the Scottish Queen herself, assumed Gifford truly was Mary’s man; the reason Paulet would take his own look at the parcels was to keep a check on both Gifford and the “honest man,” to make sure neither was playing a double, or a triple, game. Once the outgoing letters were in Gifford’s hands, Gifford passed them to Phelippes, who deciphered the originals while Gifford made his way leisurely back to London; the originals were then sent by express, restored to Gifford, who showed up at the French embassy and turned them over. Going north, the procedure was reversed: the embassy to Gifford; Gifford to Phelippes; Phelippes back to Gifford; Gifford to the brewer; the brewer to Paulet; Paulet back to the brewer; and so into the beer barrel and so to Mary.

  Châteauneuf had his doubts about Gifford; Paulet and Phelippes had their doubts; Mary had none. In her first letter to the Fr
ench Ambassador, she had eagerly pressed Châteauneuf to entrust the large packet to Gifford at once, placing it in “a strong leather box or pouch”: she was clearly taken with the beer barrel scheme. She gave the “honest man” twenty pounds for his good work, then another ten, then various tips of gold “angels,” coins worth a half-pound each. Gifford, recognizing an opportunity to make a profit himself while he was at it, managed to convince Morgan that he needed money to bribe the brewer, too; Morgan sent along eight angels and a promise of twenty crowns more.

  Not to miss a unique chance himself, the “honest man” then raised the price he charged for the beer he delivered to Chartley.

  Gifford had returned to London in mid-February to collect from Walsingham Mary’s first return post, and had appeared at the French embassy to deliver those letters on the 19th of the month. Châteauneuf, now considerably reassured, turned over the large packet Mary eagerly awaited: it was actually twenty-one packets, virtually every letter that had arrived for Mary since the exposure of the Throckmorton Plot. They were too many to cram all at once through a barrel hole and so would have to be broken into smaller bundles—a convenient excuse for the time it would take Phelippes to decipher them all, and also for breaking the seals on them: no need for the finesse of Mr. Secretary’s seal-lifter. They were the last letters to present any real decipherment challenge to Phelippes, too, for henceforth the letters to and from Mary would all be in the new cipher she herself had supplied the ambassador, which had landed in Phelippes’s hands along with Mary’s very first reply.

  The web that Mr. Secretary had woven about Mary and her friends was now drawn so tight that the flies were colliding with one another on their way to being trapped. For the past year, Mr. Secretary’s spy Berden had been sending the occasional news of an English missionary priest named John Ballard. He was traveling about London and the countryside under false names; he had pitched up at the same time as Berden, in August 1585, in Paris, where he enjoyed a great reputation as a leading agitator among the Catholic nobility in England. In May 1586, a letter to Mary from Charles Paget (a letter that Mr. Secretary now read as a matter of course) commended Ballard’s efforts to rally the Catholic forces in England to take up arms if the promise of foreign troops could once again be revived.

  Yet another spy was on Ballard now, a man named Bernard Maude, another of Mr. Secretary’s lowlifes, sprung from prison where he had been serving three years for blackmailing the Protestant Archbishop of York: a satisfactory enough recommendation in Catholic circles. Maude was Ballard’s great friend, haunting the Plough Inn tavern with him every night just outside the Temple Bar in London’s legal precincts, securing false passports, traveling with him to Paris in May 1586, clinging to him like the shirt on his back.

  Ballard was a priest but a priest with dreams of glory; in the taverns he called himself “Captain Fortesque,” treated the young soldiers and gentlemen and various hangers-on to suppers and feasts, wore a cape laced with gold and a hat with silver buttons, presented himself to the world as a gallant swashbuckler.

  In Paris that May, Paget had taken Ballard to see Bernardino de Mendoza, who had become the Spanish Ambassador to France following his expulsion from England for his part in the Throckmorton Plot. In his letter to Mary, Paget reported on the state of their efforts to dust off the old plot. Mendoza had asked for a list of the principal noblemen and knights in the north who would support a rising; they talked about the best ports at which to land an invasion force; Mendoza had already “advertised the King of Spain in general terms what Ballard came for.” The ambassador had asked him to keep it quiet for now and not inform Mary, but Paget could not resist: “For though to content him I said I would not, yet I know my duty and obedience ever command me to declare to your Majesty what importeth to you; and specially such a matter of importance as this: and therefore am I humbly to beseech your Majesty to direct me in what sort you will have me proceed further.”

  Ballard returned that month to London, still dogged by the spy Maude, and at the end of May he sought out one of his Plough Inn acquaintances at his lodgings. Anthony Babington was wealthy, handsome, twenty-five years old, Catholic. He had worked as a page in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s establishment when the Earl was the Queen of Scots’ keeper, had traveled to France and played some part in aiding the missionary priests. His name had a small place in Walsingham’s files: he had been mentioned by Henry Fagot among those helping to sell papist books out of the French embassy.

  Inevitably, Babington, too, was soon dogged by one of Walsingham’s men: Robert Poley, whose work to set up a secret channel between Morgan and Mary had been supplanted by Gifford’s far more satisfactory results, and who now had the leisure to resume trolling among the Catholic demimonde of London.

  Everyone knew Poley. He kept a house in London with “a table handsomely supplied” where all his Catholic acquaintances could come and go—as one would later recall with the bitterness that comes from betrayal not just of a cause but of one’s own emotional gullibility. There was nothing “Robin” would not promise his friends; they could use his house even when he was not there; if they wanted letters or money sent overseas, he could arrange it.

  And then there was another hapless conspirator, John Savage, who had been a student at the English seminary at Rheims, where he had, in the presence of none other than Gilbert Gifford, sworn an oath to kill Queen Elizabeth. It was Gifford who now, not unnaturally, attached himself to Savage in London as Mr. Secretary’s spy, and a bit of a provocateur as well: Gifford made a point of reminding Savage of his earlier pledge, and Gifford also offered to travel to France to secure theological reassurance on the validity of political assassination in a holy cause. Gifford assured him that, although there was a treatise that had been sent over from Rheims “inveighing against such as should seek her majesty’s death,” that was merely a ruse to “blind the eyes of the Privy Council here to have less fear of her majesty’s person.”

  The plotters were a slightly dreamy, slightly unbalanced bunch, thirteen eventually, who met at Babington’s lodgings in Hern’s Rents, or at the Plough Inn, or around Saint Paul’s, or in Saint Giles fields, near the city, night after night.

  Ballard was the most enthusiastic. At his meeting with Babington in late May, he had excitedly insisted that Mendoza had promised to send sixty thousand Spanish troops; they would definitely come by September; the job of the plotters was now to organize the English Catholic armies that would rise with them. And Ballard himself raised the necessity of dispatching Elizabeth, proposing Savage as the “instrument” to see it done.

  Gifford had by now become one of the inner circle, edging things along as needed, though in truth there was little need. Morgan and Paget themselves, from Paris, kept up a drumbeat of encouragement, urging Savage to make cause with Ballard, seconding Ballard’s fantastically exaggerated version of the true state of play with respect to the promised Spanish aid.

  By June, Poley was also beginning to pick up hints of a plot from his soundings of Babington. Though Poley did not have anything like the whole picture, he reported to Mr. Secretary that Babington was worried whether it was lawful to murder the Queen of England. Morgan had written Mary in April urging her to send a word of favor and encouragement to Babington; Walsingham had held up that letter, but now, after getting Poley’s report, he let it go through to see what hares it might start. On the 25th of June, Mary wrote her young, idealistic supporter, all charming royal graciousness:

  My very good friend,

  Albeit it be long since you heard from me, no more than I have done from you, against my will, yet I would not you should think I have in the meanwhile, nor will ever be, unmindful of the effectual affection you have shewn heretofore towards all that concerneth me.

  And so it was put in cipher, and into the beer barrel, and so to London and to Walsingham, and so to Babington.

  On the 7th of July, Babington’s answer was on its way, this time conveyed by Phelippes himself, who, having
been in London of late, was returning to Chartley so he could decipher Mary’s letters on the spot. Babington now laid out the entire hazy plan and sought Mary’s explicit approval. It was part lament, part boast, part desperate seeking of sanction for so dread a step. He confessed he had been near despair when Mary was placed in the custody of Paulet, “a wicked Puritan and mere Leicesterian, a mortal enemy both by faith and faction to your Majesty and the State Catholic”; he had been preparing to depart the country to spend the remainder of his days in solitary wretchedness until

  there was addressed to me from the parts beyond the seas one Ballard, a man of virtue and learning, and of singular zeal to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service. This man informed me of great preparation by the Christian princes (your Majesty’s allies) for the deliverance of our country from the extreme and miserable state wherein it hath too long remained.

  And so here was laid out the whole scheme that had been hatched in too many tavern feasts on too many late nights. Babington himself would lead ten gentlemen and a hundred followers to “undertake the delivery of your royal person from the hands of your enemies.” And: