Babington Plot

• 1. Introduction

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  The Babington Plot was the 1586 conspiracy that came apart the moment Elizabeth I's spymaster intercepted one letter meant only for Mary, Queen of Scots. Sir Francis Walsingham had spent months building a secret channel to route her mail through his own hands. Every word she sent or received passed through his decoders before it ever reached the person it was addressed to. Mary was held captive in England, a cousin to the very queen who kept her confined. Two Catholic men, Anthony Babington and John Ballard, believed they were organizing her rescue with the promise of foreign soldiers and a restored Catholic England. Neither man understood how completely Walsingham's agents already controlled the correspondence they trusted. Neither grasped how many double agents moved among their own friends, or what the discovery would ultimately cost everyone involved. Elizabeth survived. Mary did not. What connected those two outcomes was a hidden channel of letters and a spymaster's patience. Walsingham guarded his secret until the moment he chose to spring it.

• 2. A Prisoner Since 1568

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  In 1568, Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped captivity by Scottish rebels and crossed into England, seeking aid from her first cousin once removed, Elizabeth I. She had been forced to abdicate the Scottish throne the year before. Rather than aiding her, Elizabeth had her imprisoned instead. That confinement would stretch on for nineteen years, under a series of jailers, chiefly the Earl of Shrewsbury. Roman Catholics across Europe saw Mary differently. To them, she was the legitimate heir to England's throne, not a fugitive to be locked away. On the 25th of February 1570, Pope Pius V issued the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, which granted English Catholics the authority to overthrow Elizabeth. Mary became the focus of one plot after another aimed at restoring Catholicism and removing Elizabeth from power, sometimes by force. In 1584, Elizabeth's Privy Council, at the design of William Cecil and Walsingham, drafted the Bond of Association. It declared that anyone who stood to benefit from a plot against the Queen would be stripped of succession rights and executed. Hundreds of Englishmen signed it. Mary herself agreed to sign. The following year, Parliament passed the Act of Association, extending that same penalty into law. Whoever would benefit from the Queen's death, if a plot were uncovered, could be executed for it. Because of the Bond, Mary could be put to death for a plot she had not started. It only had to be carried out on her behalf. In 1585, Elizabeth ordered Mary moved under heavy guard to Chartley Hall in Staffordshire. There she was placed in the custody of Sir Amias Paulet, a strict Puritan chosen partly because he despised her Catholic faith. All outside correspondence was forbidden. Walsingham had already put his fear into words in a letter to the Earl of Leicester: 'So long as that devilish woman lives, neither Her Majesty must make account to continue in quiet possession of her crown, nor her faithful servants assure themselves of safety of their lives.' That warning was about to shape his next move.

• 3. The Spymaster's Web

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  Gilbert Gifford was already working for Walsingham by the end of 1585, or the very start of 1586, though the exact date was never settled. Gifford was a Catholic deacon by training, but records describe him as turbulent, someone prone to conflict wherever he went. Walsingham's network relied on more than one man. Robert Poley and Thomas Phelippes worked as double agents alongside Gifford, joined by a Puritan spy named Maliverey Catilyn. Phelippes brought a rarer skill: he was a trained cryptanalyst, able to break codes as well as write them. Gifford's route to Mary ran through Thomas Morgan, a longtime confidant and spy of hers. By this point Morgan was locked in the Bastille in Paris. Morgan had once worked for George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, an earlier jailer of Mary's. It was through Shrewsbury that Mary first came to know him. Morgan later became entangled in a separate plot devised by William Parry, which was what landed him in the Bastille. In 1585, Gifford was arrested at Rye in Sussex while carrying letters of introduction from Morgan to Mary. Walsingham released him on the condition that he work as a double agent inside the new conspiracy. Gifford operated under the alias 'No. 4,' one of several he used, alongside Colerdin, Pietro, and Cornelys. Walsingham used him chiefly as a courier, the trusted go-between who could carry messages without raising suspicion. That trust was about to be tested from inside Chartley Hall, the fortress where Mary was imprisoned. Gifford and Phelippes would soon be placed there, alongside the queen Gifford was betraying.

• 4. Recruiting Babington

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  In 1585, John Ballard crossed into England on behalf of Mary's supporters in France. He hoped to secure promises of aid from Catholic gentry in the north. A Jesuit priest by training, he made the crossing more than once that year. In March 1586, Ballard met John Savage, a former soldier who had already sworn an oath to kill Elizabeth on his own. Savage had reached that resolve after talking it over with three friends: Dr. William Gifford, Christopher Hodgson, and Gilbert Gifford. The historian Conyers Read notes that Walsingham already knew of Savage's plan by that point. Ballard later reported to Charles Paget and the Spanish diplomat Don Bernardino de Mendoza. He told them English Catholics stood ready to rise against Elizabeth, provided foreign support was guaranteed. Whether his account of Catholic strength was accurate is unclear, but he did secure assurances of support. Back in England, Ballard turned to Anthony Babington, a young member of the Catholic gentry, and persuaded him to lead the effort. Babington's own confession recorded what Ballard told him about the Catholic League's backing. The Duke of Guise, or his brother the Duke de Main, would lead the French forces. The Prince of Parma would lead the Italian and Spanish troops. The Pope stood as chief disposer of the whole enterprise, backed by a combined force of about 60,000 men. Despite these assurances, Babington hesitated. He doubted that any invasion could succeed while Elizabeth remained alive. Ballard countered that John Savage's plan would solve that problem. After further discussion with friends who would become his fellow conspirators, Babington agreed to lead the plot. Walsingham already knew much of this through his spies, especially Gilbert Gifford, but he still lacked the one piece of evidence that could prove Mary's own hand in it.

• 5. The Beer Barrel Cipher

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  After the Throckmorton Plot, Elizabeth issued a decree in July 1584 cutting off all communication to and from Mary. That silence protected Mary, but it also blocked Walsingham and Cecil from gathering the evidence the Bond of Association required. So Walsingham built a new channel of his own, one he could watch from end to end. Gifford approached the French ambassador, Guillaume de l'Aubespine, Baron de Châteauneuf-sur-Cher, and laid out Walsingham's plan for a hidden line of correspondence. He and jailer Paulet arranged for a local brewer to carry messages in a watertight box hidden inside a beer barrel. Thomas Phelippes, the cipher expert, was the one who would read every letter before its intended recipient ever did. Gifford supplied Châteauneuf with a code table Walsingham had prepared, along with a request to send Mary her first message under the new system. From there, the routine repeated with each letter. Messages for Mary traveled in diplomatic pouches to Châteauneuf, who handed them to Gifford, who passed them to Walsingham. Walsingham gave them to Phelippes, who decoded them using what was called a nomenclator cipher, copied them, resealed the originals, and returned them to Gifford. Gifford handed them to the brewer, who smuggled them in to Mary. Anything she sent back followed the same path in reverse. By the summer of 1586, every letter crossing Chartley's walls in either direction was already in Walsingham's hands before its intended reader ever saw it.

• 6. The Letters That Doomed Her

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  Babington's letter to Mary promised force enough for a rescue: 'Myself with ten gentlemen and a hundred of our followers will undertake the delivery of your royal person from the hands of your enemies.' The letter named six further conspirators, described as private friends of Babington willing to carry out what he called 'that tragical execution' of Elizabeth. Mary received the letter on the 14th of July 1586, already in a dark mood after learning her own son had sided with Elizabeth. Three days later, on the 17th of July, she replied with a long letter accepting the plan. She stressed that foreign aid was essential if the rescue was to succeed. 'I shall be always ready and most willing to employ therein my life and all that I have,' she wrote, pledging herself to the cause. Deciphered portions of her letter carried her own hope of escape in plain terms: 'The affairs being thus prepared' and 'I may suddenly be transported out of this place.' Phelippes intercepted this letter too, and, on Walsingham's order, kept the original while sending on a copy. He added a forged postscript asking for the names of the six gentlemen who would carry out the killing. He also wanted the names of everyone else involved. Mary never got the chance to answer that final request. She was arrested before a reply could be sent.

• 7. Arrests And Executions

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  John Ballard was arrested on the 4th of August 1586, and under torture, he confessed and named Babington. Babington himself was arrested before he could answer Phelippes' forged request for names. By the 15th of August, the rest of the group had been taken. Mary's secretaries, Claude Nau and Gilbert Curle, and a clerk named Jérôme Pasquier were also taken into custody. A chest of Mary's papers, seized at Chartley, was carried off to London. Babington, Ballard, Chidiock Tichborne, Thomas Salisbury, Henry Donn, Robert Barnewell, and John Savage were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. They were executed on the 20th of September 1586. A second group of seven, including Edward Habington, Charles Tilney, Edward Jones, John Charnock, John Travers, Jerome Bellamy, and Robert Gage, followed shortly after. Public horror at the brutality of the first executions changed Elizabeth's mind. She ordered that the second group be allowed to hang until dead, before the rest of the sentence was carried out. In October 1586, Mary stood trial at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire before 46 English lords, bishops, and earls. She was denied legal counsel, denied the chance to review the evidence, and denied the right to call witnesses. She denied ever knowing Babington or Ballard. Prosecutors countered that she had replied to Babington in the same cipher, delivered through a servant in a blue coat. Only one lord voted her not guilty. Elizabeth signed her cousin's death warrant, and on the 8th of February 1587, in front of 300 witnesses, Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded. More than a decade later, in January 1598, a French diplomat named Huraut de Maisse revisited the case. He blamed Ambassador Châteauneuf and his secretary, Jean Arnault de Cherelles, for letting Mary's ciphers fall into Elizabeth's hands. The story did not end at the scaffold. Within decades, playwrights and novelists began retelling it for audiences far from Fotheringhay.

• 8. Echoes In Fiction And Film

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  In 1800, the German playwright Friedrich Schiller staged Maria Stuart in Weimar, dramatizing Mary's final days including the Babington Plot. That play became the basis for Gaetano Donizetti's 1835 opera Maria Stuarda. The plot itself is referenced only twice in the opera. Once is when Mary privately admits her part in it to a confessor, a role played by Lord Talbot, invented for the stage. Jane Lane dramatized the plot in her novel Conies in the Hay, and it features prominently in Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford. The My Story series retold it in diary form, through a fictional Elizabethan girl named Kitty. The book was titled The Queen's Spies, later reissued as To Kill A Queen. Rory Clements built the plot into the background of Holy Spy, the seventh novel in his historical detective series. Its hero is John Shakespeare, an intelligencer for Walsingham and elder brother of the more famous Will. Alison Uttley grew up near the Babington family's home in Derbyshire. In her 1939 novel A Traveller in Time, she wrote a simplified version of the plot. In it, a modern girl slips back to the days before the plot unfolds. The BBC adapted the novel into a television mini-series in 1978. Robert DeMaria folded the plot into his 1976 novel To Be a King, framed around a fictionalized Christopher Marlowe working inside Elizabethan intelligence. More recent novelists have returned to it too. Ken Follett used it in his 2017 novel A Column of Fire, and Jacopo della Quercia in his 2015 novel License to Quill. SJ Parris included it in her 2020 novel Execution, part of a series built around Giordano Bruno. A 2024 novel by T.S. Milbourne, titled Gilbert Gifford, centers the double agent himself, exploring his conflicted position inside the conspiracy. Simon Singh gave the plot its due in nonfiction too, opening The Code Book, his 1999 history of cryptography, with its story. On screen, the plot anchored an episode of the 1971 miniseries Elizabeth R, titled 'Horrible Conspiracies.' It resurfaced again in Elizabeth I in 2005. Films returned to it too: Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971, Elizabeth: The Golden Age in 2007, and Mary Queen of Scots again in 2018. BBC Radio 4 aired its own take on the 2nd of December 2008, a 45-minute drama written by Michael Butt and directed by Sasha Yevtushenko. It was framed as a documentary made on the first anniversary of the executions. Stephen Greif played the Presenter, interviewing figures connected to the plot. The cast included Samuel Barnett as Thomas Salisbury, Burn Gorman as Robert Poley, Jonathan Taffler as Thomas Phelippes, and Inam Mirza as Gilbert Gifford. The BBC returned to the story once more in 2017, with Elizabeth I's Secret Agents. It was broadcast in the United States the next year as Queen Elizabeth's Secret Agents, carrying Walsingham's spy network to a new generation of viewers.