As letter followed letter, the extent of the plot, and the names of the plotters, all came into Walsingham’s possession. Once there was enough information to convince Queen Elizabeth of Babington’s intentions, he presented his case to the crown. Elizabeth agreed that Babington had to be stopped. ‘In such cases’, she said, ‘there is no middle course, we must lay aside clemency and adopt extreme measures . . . when the welfare of my state is concerned, I dare not indulge my own inclinations. . . . If they shall not seem to you to confess plainly their knowledge, then we warrant that you cause them . . . to be brought to the rack and first to move them with fear thereof to deal plainly with their answers. Then, should the sight of the instrument not induce them to confess, you shall cause them to be put to the rack and to find the taste thereof till they shall deal more plainly or until you shall see fit.’ All Walsingham had to do now was wait for the conspirators to provide enough evidence to issue a warrant – and the next letter was a blockbuster.
In his own handwriting, Babington now outlined a plan to rescue Mary. He opened with ‘Most mighty, most excellent, my dread sovereign Lady and Queen . . .’. Shortly thereafter he referred to Queen Elizabeth as ‘a mortal enemy both by faith and faction to your Majesty’, and insisted that he and his men were devoted to ‘The deliverance of your Majesty [and] the dispatch of the usurping Competitor. . . . For the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by the excommunication of her [by the Pope] made free, there are six noble gentlemen, all my private friends, who . . . will undertake that tragical execution.’ Babington was planning to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
As if to sweeten the pot, he asked for Mary’s advice and blessing in carrying out the plan ‘by your wisdom to direct us and by your princely authority to enable such as may advance the affair. Upon the XIIth of this month I will be at Lichfield, expecting your Majesty’s answer. Your Majesty’s most faithful subject and sworn servant, Anthony Babington.’ Now Walsingham even knew where and when to find Babington.
Obviously Babington was reticent about committing regicide. He justified his course by stating the obvious; Elizabeth had been excommunicated by Rome. Still he asked for Mary’s blessing to keep the blood off his hands. Babington’s hesitancy was Walsingham’s blessing, for not only had he put a noose around his own neck, but by asking for Mary’s help he had made her a party to the plot. All Walsingham needed to do was wait for Mary’s answer to have an airtight case he could take to Elizabeth. As he waited, Walsingham closed the snare around Babington and his men. When the group met at Lichfield, a battalion of soldiers was there to greet them. Swooping down on the unsuspecting rebels, they arrested Babington and fifteen others, hauling them away to London and the Tower. Two of their number, Gilbert Gifford and Thomas Harrison, were quickly released because they were in the employ of the spymaster; the rest were sent for trial on charges of treason. While Walsingham waited for the trial to begin, Mary obligingly answered Babington’s letter.
It would have been politically astute for Mary to have told her cousin, the queen, all about Babington and his plot. It might have persuaded Elizabeth to trust her and it might even have bought her freedom, but Mary rarely exercised good sense. On the off-chance that the plot would succeed, Mary gushed with enthusiasm. It was a decision she would live to regret: ‘For diverse and important considerations . . . I can but greatly praise and commend your common desire’, she began. Almost immediately she quizzed Babington as to how much and what kind of support he had – ‘for to ground substantially this enterprise and to bring it to good success, you must first examine deeply: What forces, as well on foot as on horse, you might raise amongst you. . . . Of what towns, ports and havens you may assure yourselves. . . . What place you esteem fittest and of greatest advantage to assemble the principal company of your forces.’ If all this were not enough to show Mary’s complicity, she now offered to arrange for foreign troops to invade England to ensure the success of the plan: ‘What foreign forces, as well on horse as foot, you require . . .’. Obviously she was in contact with France and Spain and was willing to arrange a full-scale invasion on behalf of her cause.
As to her rescue, Mary suggested ‘fifty, or three score men, well horsed and armed, come to take me as they may easily [do], my keeper having with him ordinarily but eighteen or twenty horsemen only.’ For her part in the ensuing uprising, Mary said, ‘take me forth from this place . . . to set me in the midst of a good army . . . where I may safely stay [until] the . . . arrival of said foreign succours . . .’. After pages of details, offers and suggestions, Walsingham must have been desperate to know Mary’s view on the queen’s assassination. Finally, it came: ‘The affairs being thus prepared and forces in readiness both within and without the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work.’
When code-breaker Thomas Phelippse translated these lines, he could not resist drawing a little gallows in the margin of the letter. The implication was clear. Mary Stuart had just hanged herself. As damning as all this was, Walsingham was still not happy. The Scottish queen had not specifically endorsed Elizabeth’s murder. She was clearly involved in the plot, and was obviously guilty of breaking the Bond of Association, but would it be enough to make Queen Elizabeth change her approach after nearly two decades of protecting Mary? While Walsingham pondered his next move, the courts had decided the fate of Babington and his fellow conspirators.
Of the sixteen arrested, fourteen (excluding Gifford and Harrison) had been convicted of treason and sentenced to death. According to the law, the Queen had to sign the traitors’ death warrants. The warrant not only stated the time and place of their death, but also the manner in which they were to be executed. Had they been noblemen, they might have got away with the block, but they were not and faced the worst execution imaginable – being hanged, drawn and quartered. Their sentence read as follows: ‘You shall be led hence to remain [at the Tower] until the day of execution. And from there you shall be drawn on a hurdle through the open streets to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes. Then your head to be stricken off from your body and your body shall be divided into four quarters, to be disposed of at the [Queen’s] pleasure. And may God have mercy on your soul.’
Surprising though it may seem, medieval executioners were adept enough at their craft to keep the hapless victim not only alive, but also conscious throughout the grisly procedures. The almost unspeakable act of castration was to demonstrate to the public that traitors would not be allowed to breed more traitors.
On 20 September 1586 Babington and six of his companions were taken from the Tower to Lincoln’s Inn Field. The remaining eight were to follow the next day. Almost as bad as the executions themselves was the fact that the remaining victims were forced to watch their companions go through the horrifying ordeal before their turn came. The first to go was Father Ballard. As he was hanged, revived, stripped naked, tied to a ladder and raised so that the crowd of spectators had a clear view of the proceedings to come, Babington shouted that the plot to murder Queen Elizabeth had been ‘a deed lawful and meritorious’. An eyewitness recalled Babington’s reaction to Ballard’s torture. ‘Babington looked on with an undaunted countenance, steadily gazing on that variety of tortures which he himself, in a moment [was] to pass through. . . . When the executioner began his tremendous work on Babington, the spirit of this haughty and heroic man cried out amidst the agony, “
Parce mihi, Domine Jesu
”‘ (Spare me Lord Jesus).
Although hanging, drawing and quartering had been in use for centuries, because this was the first time in Elizabeth’s long reign that it had been used, it is unlikely that the Queen actually understood how barbaric it was. On hearing the details of the executions and the public’s horrified reaction, she ordered that the remaining eight conspirators should simply be hanged. There would never be another public dismemberment in the realm of England.
Even with Babington and his men out of the way, Walsingham was uneasy. They had only been a symptom of a much larger disease; one that could only be cured by removing Mary Stuart’s head. Mary had obviously been complicit in the plot, but he needed enough proof to convince Elizabeth that she was too dangerous to remain alive. He found the solution in her letter to Babington. Beneath her signature, Walsingham had his forger insert a brief paragraph that made it look as though, at the last minute, Mary had decided to approve of Babington’s plan to murder Elizabeth. The forged postscript read ‘I would be glad to know the names of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment, for it may be I shall be able, upon knowledge of the parties, to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein, as also from time to time particularly how to proceed . . .’. The paragraph closed with, ‘Let the great plot proceed.’ Now, with Mary apparently complicit in the conspiracy to commit regicide, Walsingham went to the queen.
Elizabeth was furious. For eighteen years she had done everything she could to keep her scheming, plotting cousin from the block, but the woman simply would not let go. Elizabeth could no longer avoid the problem. Mary Queen of Scots, cousin to the English throne, would be tried for high treason. When told that Mary would be moved from Dudley Castle to Fotheringay Castle to await trial, Elizabeth knew the end was near. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Jesu, that dreadful place’. Even now, however, Elizabeth tried to give Mary a way out. In a last letter to her cousin, she wrote ‘You have in various ways and manners attempted to take my life and bring my kingdom to destruction by bloodshed. These treasons will be proved to you and all made manifest. It is my will that you answer the nobles and peers of the kingdom as if I were myself present. Act plainly without reserve and you will sooner be able to obtain favour of me.’
Mary’s trial was an unprecedented affair. Never in history had any court tried the legitimate and reigning monarch of another country. Mary tried to use this fact in her favour, insisting that as a foreigner she was not subject to the laws of England and the court had no jurisdiction over her. Next, she insisted that since the judges were not monarchs themselves, they were not her ‘peers’ and therefore not qualified to sit in judgement on her. It was a clever tactic, but it didn’t work. On 14–15 October 1586, Mary was tried as a common traitor.
Eventually, she did admit of her complicity in the plot to free herself, but repeatedly denied that she approved of the murder of Elizabeth – a fact that she stated three times in the two-day trial. Significantly, Mary’s letter with the forged postscript was never produced at the trial. In truth, none of it mattered now. Mary had plotted and schemed too long and too often to walk away. When Elizabeth signed the death warrant, she muttered ‘
ne feriare feri
’ (strike lest thou be stricken). On 8 February 1587 Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in the great hall of Fotheringay Castle. She was forty-four years old and had spent nearly half her life in captivity.
But when Elizabeth herself died in 1603, it would be Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, who would take the English crown. As James VI of Scotland and James I of England, he united the two kingdoms under a single crown. A feat that dozens of monarchs had tried to accomplish by force finally happened by an accident of birth.
Following the Catholic conspiracies centred on Mary Queen of Scots, religious bigotry and hatred bubbled to the surface all over England. All Catholics were viewed with suspicion and assumed to be agents of a foreign power (the Pope) bent on the destruction of England and its monarchy. Queen Elizabeth’s strength of character generally kept the hatred in check, but following her death in 1603 the violence crept into the open. Gangs of Protestant thugs destroyed Catholic homes searching for rosaries, holy relics and ‘priest holes’ where the dreaded Jesuits might be hiding. Any of these fanatical Protestants who were caught were prosecuted and imprisoned, but the law was half-hearted in its efforts to track them down, and this laxity only encouraged them. Sooner or later the situation was bound to come to a head, and when it did the results were nearly catastrophic.
Scotland’s King James VI was beset with problems from the moment he accepted the crown left vacant by the death of Queen Elizabeth. Scottish Presbyterians, Roman Catholics and the Church of England alike hounded him to designate an ‘official’ religion. Although he had little time for the straight-laced, puritanical Presbyterians, he was far more afraid of the Catholics, even though theirs was the church of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. Too many plots had been hatched by her and her followers against the English crown for James to trust any of them, particularly now that he was king.
Owing to his family’s violent history, James had a virtual paranoia of assassination and political upheaval. His mother had been beheaded, his grandfather had been shot dead and the Scottish lairds had attempted to blow up his father, Lord Darnley. Desperate to keep all of his subjects happy, James began negotiating a peace with staunchly Catholic Spain and commissioned an English translation of the Bible that would accommodate all the various Christian sects.
Judging by James’s private correspondence with his Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, it is obvious that he genuinely wanted to remain on good terms with all his subjects, no matter what their religious beliefs may have been. The only exception to this ecumenical view was the Jesuits. Both James and Cecil saw them as fanatics bent on stirring up anti-government and anti-Protestant sentiments on every possible occasion. In a memorandum, Cecil referred to them as ‘absolute seducers of the people from temporal obedience and consequent persuaders to rebellion’. In reaction to the Jesuit ‘problem’ King James initiated the Hampton Court Conference designed to impose harsher penalties on any Jesuit priest caught in England as well as anyone remotely associated with them. These apparently conflicting attitudes towards the Church of Rome led King James to be referred to as the ‘wisest fool in Christendom’. It was not the most positive judgement a new reign could hope for.