Elizabeth's Spymaster (17 page)

In mid-December of that year, new legislation against Jesuits and seminary priests was debated in the House of Commons. Parry was the only member to speak against it, saying it was ‘cruel and bloody, full of desperation and hurtful to the English nation’. These were rash, imprudent words at such a tense time, and it was no surprise that Parry quickly found himself in the custody of the serjeant of arms, before being freed
by Sir Christopher Hatton, on Elizabeth’s orders, the following day. Still short of funds, Parry returned to spying to augment his income, and sought the role of freelance agent provocateur in concocting a new plot against the queen. He suggested to Edmund Neville, cousin of the exiled rebel Westmorland, during a meeting at St Giles in the Fields that Elizabeth should be murdered. The assassination would be attempted on horseback

with eight or ten horsemen, when she should ride abroad at St James. It was once thought fit [to be attempted] in a garden and the escape would be easiest by water to [the Isle of] Sheppey [in Kent] but we resolved upon the first [plan].
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Neville promptly betrayed Parry and he was arrested and taken to Walsingham’s home in Seething Lane for interrogation, sleeping there that night but later taken to the Tower. Neville was also imprisoned (and released a decade later), but for the unpredictable and mercurial Parry there was only the march to the scaffold, in Great Palace Yard, Westminster, on 2 March 1585.

A special prayer of thanksgiving for the deliverance of Elizabeth was promulgated which castigated Parry as a

miserable, wretched, natural-born subject, a man of no religion, [who] under colour seeking to be a diligent and most careful servant to our gracious queen and pretending to discover … how her own person was in danger … determined very often most desperately to have with his own cursed hand destroyed her majesty’s sacred person …

Fortunately, God was on her side, and had ‘diverted [Parry’s] desperate heart and bloody hand’.
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Propaganda and religion sometimes cannot be separated.

No one within the London-based nobility with the merest hint of Catholic sympathies was now immune from suspicion. Philip, Earl of Arundel, was detained off the coast of Hampshire after sailing out of the small port of Lymington in April 1585 and taken to the Tower. During interrogation the following month, he was taxed about a three-page letter
allegedly written by him that was said to hold ‘great danger to the queen and state’. Addressed to William Dix, one of his estate officials in Norfolk, it began: ‘Sir – This letter contains such matter as is fitter for the fire to consume, than to be laid up in your study.’ The contents included specific issues relating to his Norfolk lands – such as recent sales of timber – and appeared to be in handwriting ‘very much resembling his’. Howard denied all knowledge of it, and Catholic sources at the time maintained it was a complete forgery. The letter was first brought to light by Walsingham’s agents and ‘was pretended to have been intercepted at the very time of his going to sea’. It was claimed to have been ‘forged by some who had notice beforehand of his going, as the secretary and some of his greatest enemies had …’
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Can one detect here the clever hand of Thomas Phelippes, that shortsighted wizard of forgery? His skills were to become crucial in removing the greatest threat to the Protestant throne and state – Mary Queen of Scots.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Babington Plot

‘Is it like our Sovereign’s safety should be grounded and depend upon her who has deciphered herself to be a competitor of this crown? I speak of things publicly known. I leave other secret practices tending to the same end … If she falsify her faith, no pleading will serve
–
the sword must be the remedy.’

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM,
A DISCOURSE TOUCHING THE PRETENDED MATCH BETWEEN THE DUKE OF NORFOLK AND THE QUEEN OF SCOTS,
1569.
¹

After the thwarted Throgmorton Plot, there were very real fears that an assassin would succeed in his attempts to kill Elizabeth. The murder of the Prince of Orange in the Netherlands was on everyone’s lips. Burghley and Walsingham needed once and for all to neutralise the threat of Mary Queen of Scots as a successor to the throne in order to defuse the powder keg of conspiracy they believed was threatening the survival of the Protestant realm of England.

The so-called ‘Bond of Association’ was their adroit solution.

In anyone’s language, it was little more than lynch law.

The idea, probably the product of Burghley’s devious ingenuity, had initially been very simple. It proclaimed that any wicked person who caused the death of Elizabeth would be ineligible to succeed her as ruler
of England. Its objective was thus very clear: at a stroke, it removed Mary as the focal point of any Catholic conspiracy. Then came a series of more hard-line revisions, probably drawn up by Walsingham, and the final version, tabled at a Privy Council meeting at Hampton Court on 19 October 1584, went much further than the original concept.
²
This decreed that the procurer of the assassination of Elizabeth would be put to death
whether or not they were aware of the conspiracy
to take the queen’s life. Moreover, the Bond was also to be signed by loyal subjects who pledged themselves to ‘act [with] the utmost revenge’ on any heirs to the pretender to the throne for ‘their utter overthrow and extirpation’.
³
Its propaganda value was incalculable amongst Elizabeth’s loyal Protestant subjects, as it reinforced their belief that their religious creed and way of life were grievously threatened.

The Privy Councillors signed it ‘voluntarily and most willingly’, thereby solemnly binding themselves to

withstand, pursue and offend … by force of arms, as by all other means of revenge, all manner of persons … and their abettors that shall attempt any act, or counsel or consent to any thing that shall tend to the harm of her majesty’s royal person and will never desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons, to the utter extermination of them, their counsellors, aiders and abettors.
⁴

These were harsh, unambiguous words, a manifest symptom of just how endangered the state felt itself to be. Walsingham later circulated copies of the document to the nobility and leading gentry, pointedly suggesting that true patriots would feel impelled to sign such a ‘necessary and dutiful’ instrument for the protection of the queen.
⁵
Despite some strong misgivings within the legal classes – lawyers and magistrates – men and women in their thousands did sign copies of the Bond, the illiterate simply with a cross as their personal mark. They pledged themselves before God to take the law into their own hands and to ruthlessly hunt down and destroy anyone associated with a plot to kill Elizabeth. There were even special church services to further sanctify the process of oath-taking. As the signatures were being collected in Flintshire, a Catholic
Welsh schoolmaster called Richard White was quartered alive in Wrexham for composing a song in praise of the death of William of Orange.
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Walsingham ordered that Mary Queen of Scots should be shown the document and careful note taken ‘of her countenance and speech’ after she had read it.
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If he hoped she would be disconcerted by this very public vow of vengeance, Mary did not display it. Indeed, she happily signed the paper herself on 5 January 1585.
⁸

The Bond was enshrined in law in an ‘Act for the Surety of the Queen’s Person’
⁹
passed by Parliament in March 1585, which introduced a new legal dimension to any popular movement for revenge. Now a commission of Privy Councillors and judges would sit to hear evidence of the guilt of a claimant to the throne alleged to be involved in a conspiracy or plans for a rebellion or foreign invasion of England.

If found guilty, they would still die.

In the event of Elizabeth’s assassination, if the commissioners again came up with a guilty verdict, those involved could be ‘by all forcible and possible means prosecuted to death’ by loyal subjects.
¹⁰

Burghley also sought to introduce a Parliamentary Bill to authorise the creation of an interregnum government led by a ‘Great Council’ in the event of Elizabeth’s murder. However, this impinged too closely on the queen’s private definition, indeed, ownership of the divine right of princes and she firmly vetoed her Chief Minister’s prudent proposals, much to his chagrin.
¹¹

Mary Queen of Scots was meanwhile placed into the strict custody of the dour Puritan Sir Amyas Paulet, a close friend of Walsingham’s, in April that year at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, where she had been transferred for greater security.
¹²
It was a dark, unhealthy, dank-moated building, permeated with the stench from its crude latrines.

Paulet was a very different jailer from her former easy-going custodians, the Earl of Shrewsbury and the veteran Sir Ralph Sadler. Paulet was under strict instructions from Walsingham to halt Mary’s unauthorised communications with the outside world.
¹³
The Secretary told Paulet to ban all contact between his servants and those of the Scottish queen; to forbid Mary’s servants from leaving the castle; to admit no
stranger to its precincts; and especially to watch Mary’s laundresses and coachmen’ as they were suspected of carrying her clandestine letters in the past.
¹⁴
The strait-laced custodian had doubts on whether he could, with decency, institute all the strict security measures. He fretted about searching the laundresses by ‘stripping them down to their smocks [underclothes]’ as, with so many uncouth soldiers about, this ‘cannot be comely’.
¹⁵

Across the English Channel, Thomas Morgan, Mary’s agent in France, had been imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris on 1 March 1585,
^l6
but was still able to write letters to his mistress at Tutbury. This Welsh former servant to the Earl of Shrewsbury had fled England a decade earlier in the wake of Walsingham’s investigations into Henry Cockyn’s letter-carrying for Mary and had remained close to the vortex of Catholic conspiracy in France, being involved in both the Throgmorton and Parry plots. After Walsingham instructed Stafford, the English envoy in Paris, to protest about his activities, Morgan was jailed, but the French steadfastly refused to extradite him to England and delivered up his papers only after the compromising or incriminating material had been carefully weeded out.
¹⁷
Perfidious Gaul! A furious Elizabeth wrote to the French king:

I swear to you that if he is denied me, I shall conclude that I have joined a league not with a king, but with a Papal legate or the president of a seminary. I shall be as much ashamed at yours as I should be at their bad company.
¹⁸

However, her protests came to nought and Morgan remained in comfortable quarters in the Bastille, his incarceration merely token.

Back in England, in May Walsingham ordered Paulet to open the letters sent to Mary by Castelnau, the French ambassador in London, to read them and deliver them opened to his prisoner. There was now no need for secrecy, as those involved knew full well that their correspondence was being intercepted. Moreover, he had heard from his spy Nicholas Berden that the Scottish queen was receiving secret correspondence via Ralph Elwes, a servant to ‘Mr Fenton of Derbyshire’. But Walsingham’s efforts to track down this messenger failed totally. By now
he was less concerned with detecting her methods of communication and much more anxious to establish hard evidence of her treachery and treason.

Mary had been complaining about the living conditions at Tutbury and on 13 September, the Secretary told Paulet to examine Chartley, a manor house in the same county, as a possible new place of confinement for her. Elizabeth, he said

doubting [not] that the coldness of Tutbury Castle may increase [Mary’s] sickness, thinks it right she should be removed to some other place, and hearing that Chartley, the Earl of Essex’s house, is both large and strong, in respect that it is environed with water, she would have you to see it and certify how you like it.
¹⁹

Mary and her household were duly moved there on Christmas Eve, 1585.

Castelnau had been replaced as French ambassador in London in September by Claude de l’Aubespine de Châteauneuf, a well-known fervent sympathiser of the Scottish queen. Mary urged him to be cautious about his secretaries’ loyalties, instinctively fearing that Walsingham had subverted them, and she asked the envoy to avoid using an alum solution as a secret ink as this was too easily detected. Secret messages, she said, could be hidden in new books, ‘writing always on the fourth, eight, twelfth and sixteenth leaf and so continuing from four to four [pages]… and [to] cause green ribbons to be attached to all the books that you have written [in] in this way’.
²⁰

Thomas Morgan also cast around for more secure methods of secretly communicating with Mary. He could send packets to the French embassy in London through normal diplomatic channels, but getting them to Chartley without them being intercepted was a more intractable problem. Fatefully, he decided to employ Gilbert Gifford, a member of a Catholic family with a somewhat chequered career as a trainee priest. He had been expelled from the English College in Rome but had been allowed to join the Rheims establishment in 1582. After three years there, he became a deacon and a reader in philosophy. He left France for England in early December 1585 with letters for Mary from the
Archbishop of Glasgow, Morgan and the fugitive Catholic Charles Paget.