Plot For A Queen

Plot for a Queen By John Irvine

On 20th and 21st September 1586 fourteen young men were executed with barbaric cruelty at St Giles in the Fields, having been condemned for conspiring treason against Queen Elizabeth. The fourteen have become known in history as the Babington conspirators. The accusation made against them was that, “they did falsely, horribly, traitorishly and devilishly conspire, conclude and agree, the Queen’s most excellent majesty, not only from her most royal Crown and dignity to depose, but also how to kill and slay, and sedition, insurrection and rebellion to stir up and procure, and the government of the realm and the true Christian religion therein planted to subvert and the whole state thereof to destroy, and for to raise and levy war within the realm.” Although the conspiracy has become known as the Babington Plot after one of the accused, Anthony Babington, who was deemed to be the ringleader, the truth is not so clear-cut. The whole account of the period is embroiled with partisanship, but it can be argued with convincing evidence that the conspiracy was set up and fostered by Elizabeth’s Secretary, Francis Walsingham, and that the purpose of the sting was to bring Mary Stuart to her execution. Walsingham was fanatically anti-Catholic and the focus of his hatred was Mary Stuart who had been languishing for eighteen years in Elizabeth’s prisons. In order to bring about her death, fervently desired by Walsingham and the Privy Council, it was essential that they find proof that Mary was contriving the death of Elizabeth. The plot was, therefore, only a means to an end, the execution of Mary.

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For this purpose Walsingham employed his vast network of spies, particularly one Gilbert Gifford, the evil genius, who approached and seduced first John Ballard, a fanatical priest dedicated to the overthrow of Elizabeth and the restoration of the Catholic religion, and then John Savage whom he encouraged to take a vow to assassinate the Queen. From them Babington and many of his friends were drawn into a conspiracy whose primary purpose was the liberation of the Queen of Scots and the restoration of the Catholic religion. They were all young men, spirited, scholarly, from good established Catholic families. They were also adventurous and fired with romantic enthusiasm. In the reign of terror which existed at that time, when the Mass was proscribed and to admit to being a Catholic was treasonable and punishable with disembowelment and death, the young men considered that freeing the rightful heir to the throne and re-establishing the true Catholic faith was an honorable and patriotic undertaking. They were not evil, violent men. There was little of the Machiavelli about them. They saw themselves more in the role of Perseus liberating Andromeda from her chains. When these men met together, Walsingham made sure that one of his agents – Gifford, Maude or Poley – was with them, encouraging them and leading them on to further excesses. Imprudent and gullible as they were, it was not difficult to fan their enthusiasm.

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In order to have legal grounds to bring Mary to trial and execution there had to be documentary evidence that she approved of the assassination of Elizabeth. This was easily done by means of letters exchanged between Mary and Babington, a channel of communication set up by Walsingham himself. Every letter received by Mary and every reply was intercepted, deciphered, resealed and sent on. In order to trap Mary, incriminating phrases were forged and inserted in the original letters. We know that Walsingham in other places and at other times had had documents forged and used in evidence. For this particular purpose he employed a master decipherer, one Thomas Phelippes, an unscrupulous time-server skilled in forgery. One particular letter, from Babington to Mary contained the incriminating phrase “the dispatch of the usurping competitor”. Whether these words were inserted by Phelippes or not, Mary in her reply did not respond to them. However, a postscript is known to have been added on the instructions of Walsingham asking for the names of the proposed assassins. This was also ignored. These were the letters, the originals of which were never produced, that were used at Mary’s trial and which, together with the confessions of her secretaries, extracted under fear and intimidation, that brought about Mary’s execution. However, that trial is another story. To return to the conspirators: Walsingham could have nipped the whole plot in the bud at an early stage and had two of them tried - Ballard and Savage pour encourager les autres, before any of the others were thoroughly involved, but that would not have accomplished his true purpose. When he felt he had enough evidence to bring against Mary, he had the fourteen arrested. They were tried, forced to plead guilty, and condemned.

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On 20th September the first seven – John Ballard, Anthony Babington, John Savage, Chidiock Tichborne, Charles Tilney, Robert Barnwell and Edward Abingdon – were taken from the Tower and led in carts through jeering crowds to the scaffold. The populace had been deliberately incited by the government. Rumours of invasion (that the French had already landed), of murder, revolution and arson, had been spread to fan their fear and hatred of papists. In spite of this, the large crowd that had come to witness the executions were not all unsympathetic to the accused. With their last words they all confessed that it was zeal for their religion that had induced them to join in the conspiracy. Charles Tilney said; “I am a Catholic and believe in Jesus Christ and by his Passion I hope to be saved, and I confess I can do nothing without him; which opinion all Catholics firmly hold; and wherein they are thought to hold the contrary, they are in that, as in all things, greatly abused.” When a Protestant clergyman objected, Tilney said: “I came here to die, doctor, not to argue.” When questioned further about the faith he upheld, he said: “I am of that faith which prevails in almost all Christendom, excepting here in England.” Chidiock Tichbourne spoke the longest. He said: “I am descended from a house from two hundred years before the Conquest, never stained till this my misfortune. I have a wife and one child: my wife Agnes, my dear wife, and there’s the grief – and six sisters left in my hand - my poor servants, I know, their master being taken, are dispersed, for all which I do most heavily grieve.” He composed a poem in the Tower the night before his execution* which could stand as an epitaph for all his companions, and he wrote a touching letter to his wife. Disraeli said of him: “He perished with all the blossoms of life and genius about him in the May time of his existence.” (Plot for a Queen/4)

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Ballard, the ordained priest, was the first to be executed. Having swung on the rope for a few seconds, he was cut down while still alive, disembowelled slowly and then cut up. Babington was next. When he was taken down and during his disembowelment, while still conscious, he cried aloud several times: “Parce mihi, Domine Jesu!” Then came Savage, a big man who broke the rope and fell down from the gallows. He was castrated (“his privities were cut off”) and disembowelled. The other four suffered a similar fate. A dangerous change came over the crowd of onookers during the executions. Even in those sanguinary times they were horrrified at the barbarity and the suffering. It was considered prudent not to repeat the horrors the next day. The official version was that Elizabeth herself “detesting such cruelty” had ordered the clemency. This is unacceptable as it was Elizabeth who a few days even before the trial had demanded of Burghley that the sufferings of the condemned should be protracted and made more horrible than the law of the time allowed. The second batch – Thomas Salisbury, Henry Dunn, John Charnock, Edward Jones, John Travers, Robert Gage and Jerome Bellamy – were therefore hanged until dead before being bowelled and quartered. The last two had been merely accessories after the fact – Gage because he had lent Savage a horse to ride to Croyden, Bellamy because he had given shelter in a barn to Babington and his friends. Jerome’s brother, Bartholomew, had also been arrested but died in prison while being tortured. Their mother, too, was arrested and she died of the intolerable prison conditions after a few months.

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Thus ended the Babington conspiracy, but it was not the end of the affair. The inevitable conclusion, carefully planned by Walsingham and Burghley, was the execution five months later of Mary Queen of Scots on the trumped-up charge of collusion with the plotters. Walsingham and Elizabeth had had their way. As the Earl of Kent said to Mary the night before her execution: “Your life would be the death of our religion and your death will be its preservation.” Mary Stuart was the first monarch in the history of these islands to be executed by the State. Her grandson, some sixty years later, was to be the second. (1,510 words) • The elegy written by Chidiock Tichborne while awaiting death: My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is gone and yet I saw no sun, And now I live and now my life is done. The spring is past and yet it hath not sprung, The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green, My youth is gone and yet I am but young, I saw the world and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut and yet it was not spun, And now I live and now my life is done. I sought my death and found it in my womb, I looked for life and saw it was a shade, I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb, And now I die and now I am but made.

The glass is full and now the glass is run, And now I live and now my life is done.