Her Majesty's Spymaster

by Stephen Budiansky

  for the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen all my private friends who for the zeal they bear to the Catholic cause and your Majesty’s service will undertake that tragical execution.

  On the 13th of July, Mary’s secretary sent Babington a short reply saying that she had received his letter and would answer in two or three days, when the next chance to smuggle out a letter came.

  The next day, Phelippes sent Walsingham a note reporting this, adding: “We attend her very heart at the next.”

  On the 17th, Mary replied. Phelippes sent the decipher to Mr. Secretary at once with a cover note:

  You have now the Queen’s answer to Babington, which I received yesternight. If he be in the country, the original will be conveyed unto his hands, and like enough an answer returned. I look for your honor’s speedy resolution touching his apprehension… . I think under correction you have enough of him.

  I am sorry to hear from London that Ballard is not yet taken …

  Mary’s letter was long and detailed. She praised Babington for his service; she asked for details of the numbers of forces, the arms and money they would require, what captains they would appoint in each shire, what ports would be used for the invasion. “The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both within and without the realm,” she concluded, “then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work, taking order, upon the accomplishing of their design, I may be suddenly transported out of this place.” She made it clear that it would be a mistake to try to free her before Elizabeth had been taken care of, for in such a case, if the attempt to free her failed, “that Queen, in catching me again,” would “enclose me forever in some hole, forth of which I should never escape, if she did use me no worse.”

  She ended, “Fail not to burn this present quickly.”

  Phelippes endorsed the packet with a doodle of a gallows.

  Babington received the letter on the 29th of July. But in truth, for two months he had been wavering, as Mr. Secretary well knew: for this simple, slightly dreamy soul, who preferred philosophy to action when it came to it, had been confiding his increasingly troubled state of mind to his newfound boon companion Robert Poley.

  Not that Babington didn’t have his doubts about Poley. In his letter to Mary, Babington had added a postscript to her secretary asking what kind of man Poley was: “I am private with the man and by means thereof know somewhat but suspect more. I pray you deliver your opinion of him.” Mary’s secretary had replied cautiously. “There is great assurance given of Mr. Poley his faithful serving of her majesty, and by his own letters hath vowed and promised the same,” he wrote. But: “As yet her majesty’s experience of him is not so great as I dare embolden you to trust him much.”

  Not much help; though Babington was heading swiftly beyond help. He had begun to look for a way out: in fact, it was his search for an escape that had driven him to make Poley’s acquaintance in the first place, for he had suddenly promised Poley a fabulous, a desperate sum, £300, if Poley could use his connections with Mr. Secretary to secure him a passport. Maybe if he went abroad, Babington pressed Poley to tell Mr. Secretary, he could do Elizabeth some service “by way of discovery in his travels.”

  It was a strange twilight that Anthony Babington now wandered through; actually meeting with Walsingham at Greenwich in the last week of June; Walsingham toying with him, holding out hints that he might save himself yet, urging him to be “open,” stretching out his hand and saying, “Come now, act with confidence, do not fear to speak out freely”; then sending word back through Poley that he was now rather disinclined to help, disappointed that Babington “was so close and spare in opening himself and the means of his offered service.”

  Then offering a second meeting, Babington coming to Barn Elms, Walsingham suggesting he could arrange a meeting between Babington and the Queen herself to discuss his offer. Babington was now unsure who was playing with whom. He confessed to Poley that he was growing uneasy about “the course holden with Mr. Secretary both by him and me”; they seemed to be standing in a limbo between two courses and “not very sincere unto either”; perhaps it would be better if they were both to just give it all up, “to dedicate ourselves to a contemplative life, leaving the practice of all matters of state.”

  Then the two met with Walsingham a third time, on the 13th of July, again at Barn Elms; Walsingham again pressed Babington to tell everything he might know.

  As they were rowed down the Thames back to London, Babington, more doubtful and suspicious than ever, asked Poley how it was that “your credit grows with Mr. Secretary.”

  Poley replied he had been able to feed some information about the Catholics to Walsingham and allay his suspicions. Babington said this was impossible, since no Catholics trusted Poley and wouldn’t tell him anything of importance. Poley said he had been able to get some news from Morgan.

  “How is that possible, considering how suspicious Morgan is?” Babington pressed.

  “Such points are better imagined, than questioned or resolved,” Poley replied, with a small laugh: the endless resources of the double agent to blow layer upon layer of smoke in his twilight world.

  Phelippes had urged Babington’s arrest at once; Mr. Secretary, however, was not quite finished with him. He had Phelippes add a postscript to Mary’s letter to Babington, using the same cipher in which Mary’s words had been encoded, asking for the names of the six gentlemen. It was a virtuoso bit of counter-intelligence, but apparently wasted, for Babington had still not answered the letter.

  On Wednesday, the 3rd of August, Walsingham told Phelippes to wait one more day but no longer before moving against Babington: it was “better to lack the answer, than to lack the man.” Mr. Secretary had already issued a warrant for Ballard, “signed by the Lord Admiral for that I would not be seen in the matter.” But he feared Babington was alarmed: a messenger sent to his lodgings for his answer to Mary had found him gone.

  Throughout the day, a flurry of messages went from Mr. Secretary at Richmond to Phelippes as the search for Babington continued:

  I look for Poley from whom I hope to receive some light… . You will not believe how much I am grieved at the event of this case. I fear the addition of the postscript hath bred the jealousy. And so praying God to send us better success than I look for, I commit you to his protection. At the Court the iii of this present 1586.

  Yr loving friend, Fra: Walsyngham

  Now Babington cracked—too late. He poured out to Poley a complete confession of the conspiracy, naming Ballard, offering to tell Walsingham all. Poley went down to Richmond with the offer, but now Walsingham put off a proposed meeting with Babington until Saturday—“to the end he may in the meantime be apprehended,” Walsingham wrote Phelippes later that day, adding, “Though I do not find but that Poley hath dealt honestly with me, yet I am loath to lay myself in any way open unto him, but have only delivered such speeches as might work… . I do not think good notwithstanding to defer the apprehension of Bab. longer than Friday.”

  On Thursday, the 4th, Ballard was arrested at Poley’s garden house, where he had come for a meeting. Poley—a slight comedy of errors—had taken it upon himself to keep Babington close to him, which was why the searchers had not found him at his own lodgings earlier; Babington now probably watched Ballard’s arrest from the window of Poley’s house. Babington still could not quite grasp Poley’s role, or his own situation. He had returned from a walk to find Poley making a copy of the letter from Mary; Poley had torn it up and tried to make a joke out of it; but Babington could see the game was almost up.

  That night, he sat in Poley’s house and wrote a bittersweet farewell note:

  Robyn,

  Sollicitae non possunt curae mutare rati stamina fusi [Neither worry nor pains can alter the thread of fate]. I am ready to endure whatsoever shall be inflicted. Et facere et pati Romanorum est [Both to do and to bear is Roman]. What my cou
rse hath been towards Mr. Secretary you can witness, what my love towards you, yourself can best tell. Proceedings at my lodgings have been very strange.

  I am the same I always pretended. I pray God you be, and ever so remain towards me. Take heed to your own part, lest of these my misfortunes you bear the blame. Est exilium inter malos vivere [It is an exile to live amid the wicked].

  Farewell, sweet Robyn if, as I take thee, true to me. If not, adieu, omnium bipedum nequissimus [of all two-footed things the wickedest]. Return me thine answer for my satisfaction, and my diamond, and what else thou wilt.

  The furnace is prepared wherein our faith must be tried. Farewell until we meet, which God knoweth when.

  Thine, how far thou knowest, Anthony Babington

  With several of the other conspirators, Babington now fled to Saint John’s Wood, a remnant of a thick forest near the city, and, as the chronicler Camden later told the tale, cut off his hair and “disguised and sullied the natural beauty of his face with the rind of green walnuts.” The conspirators had not helped their escape by having vaingloriously posed for a portrait, with Babington in the center; they had even had the painter inscribe a Latin verse, Hi mihi sunt Comites, quos ipsa Pericula ducunt, “These men are my companions, whom very dangers draw.” On reflection, they had thought that too much a giveaway, and had a new verse put in, Quorsum haec alio properantibus? , “To what end are these things to men who hasten to another purpose?” Not that it mattered now. On the 14th of August, Babington and companions, half starved and in rags, were arrested and carried back to London.

  On the 20th of September, Babington and his six principal accomplices were hanged—barely—before being drawn and quartered in Saint Giles fields, close to Babington’s lodgings at Hern’s Rents.

  The arrest of the conspirators was a sudden blaze of light cast onto the twilight verge where Mr. Secretary’s agents provocateurs and the double agents had been feeding; Poley was momentarily dazzled and was taken with the rest.

  Gifford, a wilder or shrewder hare, bolted. From Paris he wrote Phelippes and Walsingham that he hoped his flight would not be taken “sinistrously”; but his situation, however honestly he had served his country in exposing such evil practices, had become precarious in the extreme. “I say, to deal with such treacherous, youthful companions, without any warrant or discharge, in how dangerous a practice: I beseech your Honor to know this to have been the only cause of my departure.” Walsingham was eventually convinced; the tracks were covered; Gifford’s name vanished from the indictments later officially published; and, a rare token from a parsimonious service, Gifford was granted a pension of £100 a year, enough to set him up for life. He had a bad end: ordained a priest at Rheims in 1587, he was caught in a Paris brothel in December of that year and cast into prison by the Archbishop of Paris; he died, still in prison, in November 1590.

  Poley was kept in the Tower for two years; mostly for show. He wrote out a long “confession”; then he went back to doing odd jobs for Walsingham, as a court “messenger.” He will “beguile you either of your wife, or of your life,” a friend warned the London tradesman in whose house Poley lodged upon his release—and whose wife Poley was indeed bedding. Poley had money to burn, forty pounds to fix up his rooms; he was full of boasts. “Mr. Secretary did deliver me out” of the Tower, he bragged: “There are further matters between him and me than all the world shall know of.”

  Mr. Secretary now pressed for Mary herself to be brought to trial. For a dozen years or more he had sought her destruction, and now the means were at last at hand. Mary’s rooms were searched and all her papers seized. There was some muttering about doing away with her by poison and saving the trouble; Walsingham, with an eye as always toward the public case, wanted an open trial, all of the evidence laid out for the world to see, the endorsement of Parliament to any sentence of death.

  Elizabeth dragged her feet but finally consented. In late September 1586, a special commission of forty-two peers, Privy Councilors, and judges, among them Burghley and Walsingham, was named to try the Queen of Scots. On the 25th of September, Mary was brought to Fotheringay Castle, an ancient stronghold in Northamptonshire, near Peterborough, surrounded by a double moat on three sides and the River Nene on the fourth.

  Over the next two weeks the commissioners arrived. Mary swore she would have nothing to do with the trial: she would die “a thousand deaths” before acknowledging herself a subject under the Queen of England’s jurisdiction. Only when it was made clear to her that she would be tried in absentia did she relent.

  The trial opened in the castle’s great hall on the 15th of October. The charge was read against her; Mary denied she even knew Babington. Confessions of Babington and the conspirators were read in which they admitted receiving Mary’s fatal letter approving their intentions; then the testimony of her own secretaries, who admitted that they had copied and dispatched the letter; Mary blustered that if her secretaries had “written any thing prejudicial to the Queen my sister they have written it altogether without my knowledge, and let them bear the punishment for their inconsiderate boldness.” And furthermore, “the majesty as the safety of all princes must fall to the ground if they depend upon the writings and testimonies of secretaries.”

  A copy of her letter to Babington was produced; she responded that “it was an easy matter to counterfeit the ciphers and characters of others”: she was “afraid this was done by Walsingham” to bring her to her end.

  At which point Walsingham rose from his place among the commissioners to defend himself:

  I call God to witness, that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, neither in my public condition and quality have I done anything unworthy of my place. I confess that, out of my great care for the safety of the Queen and realm, I have curiously endeavored to search and sift out all plots and designs against the same… .

  A careful distinction, but not a disingenuous one: a gentleman’s private reputation rested upon his honor and truth in dealing with others, his integrity in office upon his allegiance to the law and to the safety of the realm; but there were times when law and safety demanded, or at least did not forbid, a measure of deception that would be an affront in private affairs. In any case, Mary accepted Walsingham’s word, and withdrew her accusation against him.

  On the 25th of October, the commissioners reconvened in Westminster and convicted Mary of the “compassing, practicing, and imagining of her Majesty’s death.”

  And now Elizabeth once again began dragging her feet; she cast about for some means to execute sentence while leaving her own hands clean. Parliament at once ratified the commissioners’ decision; the Queen responded with regal obfuscation, refusing to answer one way or the other their demand that sentence be executed without delay.

  Walsingham prepared a lengthy memorandum arguing the extreme danger of delay; he soon found himself once again out of royal favor for his persistent refusal to indulge the Queen’s vacillations. On the 16th of December, he took himself to Barn Elms, leaving behind a note for Burghley displaying a rare burst of self-pity:

  I humbly beseech your lordship to pardon me in that I did not take my leave of you before my departure from the court, her Majesty’s unkind dealings towards me hath so wounded me as I could take no comfort to stay there. And yet if I saw any hope that my continuance there might either breed any good to the church or furtherance to the service of her Majesty or of the realm, the regard of my particular should not cause me to withdraw myself. But seeing the declining state we are running into, and that men of best desert are least esteemed, I hold them happiest in this government that may be rather lookers-on than actors.

  A week later, Walsingham wrote to Leicester, “The delay of the intended and necessary execution doth more trouble me, considering the danger her Majesty runneth, than any particular grief.” In January 1587, he told Burghley that his grief had plunged his health into a dangerous state.

  The Queen’s vacillations now took a
n even more duplicitous turn. On the 1st of February 1587, she at last signed the warrant for Mary’s execution; she told William Davison, Walsingham’s assistant, that on his way to the Lord Chancellor to have the warrant receive the Great Seal she should stop by Walsingham’s house and show it to him. “Go tell all this to Walsingham who is now sick, although I fear me he will die for sorrow when he hears it,” she wisecracked.

  But then she suddenly demanded that Davison and Walsingham write to Paulet and point out how much more convenient it would be if Mary died at the hands of someone other than an official executioner. It was Paulet’s finest hour; no one else’s. The secretaries did as they were bidden: “We find by speech lately uttered by her Majesty that she doth note in you both a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looketh for at your hands,” they wrote Paulet, “in that you have not in all this time found out some way to shorten the life of that Queen.” The Bond of Association, which Paulet himself had signed, was adequate justification for the deed; Elizabeth “taketh it most unkindly” that Paulet should “cast the burthen upon her, knowing as you do her indisposition to shed blood, specially of one of that sex and quality, and so near to her in blood as the said Queen is.”

  Paulet wrote back at once an appalled but steadfast refusal: “My own good livings and life are at her Majesty’s disposition and I am ready to so lose them this next morrow… . But God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of my conscience, or leave so great a blot to my poor posterity, to shed blood without law or warrant.”

  The Queen sneered that Paulet seemed to be a “precise and dainty fellow.”

  Meanwhile, she gave Davison still more contradictory instructions about whether the warrant should actually be dispatched; Davison, inexperienced in her Majesty’s talent for shifting blame upon others, was more bewildered than suspicious that he was being set up for a fall. He nonetheless consulted Burghley, and the Privy Council agreed to take responsibility for putting the now fully executed and legal warrant into effect at once—before Elizabeth changed her mind yet again. On the 4th of February, Robert Beale was sent to Fotheringay with the warrant in hand. An executioner headed north, too, his axe concealed in a trunk, his way paid by Walsingham.