The Watchers (31 page)

This art of ciphering, hath for relative, an art of deciphering … For suppose that ciphers were well managed, there be multitudes of them which exclude the decipherer. But in regard of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands, through which they pass, the greatest matters, are many times carried in the weakest ciphers.

Who knew what secrets might be revealed through Berden's correspondence?

The weight of all this responsibility certainly made Nicholas Berden nervous. He knew how useful he could be; he was also worried, like Phelippes, about Richard Young. Justice Young, his eyes sharp for suspicious men, had nearly arrested him: ‘if the said Master Young be not warned by your honour to be silent my travail will be but vain.' Berden asked Walsingham to assure his free movement and safety.

Nicholas Berden ended his letter with a declaration of loyalty: ‘I shall be always ready … to manifest myself a public persecutor rather than a private practiser with any traitor or their confederates.' By ‘persecutor' Berden meant a pursuer. English Catholics, however, would have taken him at his word.

Thomas Morgan the intelligencer in Paris; Morgan's young couriers
Gilbert Gifford and Robert Poley in England; Thomas Phelippes, Sir Francis Walsingham's right hand in secret matters; John Ballard the Catholic in London; Nicholas Berden the spy: all of these men became key players in the Babington Plot.

Always close to Mary Queen of Scots at Chartley were her two loyal secretaries, Claude Nau, who was responsible for her French correspondence, and Gilbert Curll, who wrote for Mary in English. They worked as efficiently as they could under the harsh conditions of security imposed by zealous Sir Amias Paulet. After all, monarchs – even those not free to do as they wished – could hardly be expected to write everything for themselves.

If Gilbert Gifford wanted to establish proper contact with Mary Queen of Scots he had to be able to write to Curll or Nau. By what appeared to be Gifford's hard work and ingenuity (though in fact it was facilitated for obvious reasons by Thomas Phelippes and Sir Amias Paulet) Gifford got a letter to Curll in the last week of April 1586. He affirmed his loyalty to Mary and prayed Curll not to spare him any work. Curll, Gifford wrote, knew him as well as ‘good Francis did': he meant Francis Throckmorton, that martyr to the Queen of Scots's cause. In other words, Gilbert Gifford was a man Curll and his mistress could trust.

Naturally Gifford wrote this letter under the control and direction of Thomas Phelippes, and indeed it was Phelippes who went one step further in May by setting out the main points of a report from Gifford to Thomas Morgan in Paris. Before Gifford had come over to England, he and Morgan had agreed code names. Gifford was Nicholas Cornelys; Morgan was Thomas Germin. Never a man to disregard a perfectly good arrangement, Phelippes too used Cornelys as an alias for his double agent.

The one complication to Gifford's courier system in April and May 1586 was the journey he had to make to France to meet two Catholics who were willing to work for Walsingham, one of whom was a Gifford kinsman. This meant that a temporary courier had to be found. It was a delicate job, for in the interests of security this courier had to know nothing about Gifford's work for Phelippes. But Gifford had just the man. He and Phelippes called him Roland, though his real
name was Thomas Barnes and he was Gifford's cousin. Gifford recruited Barnes in about the middle of the Easter law term (between 20 April and 16 May), when they met in Barnes's chamber probably in London. Gifford called the job of carrying Mary's letters ‘a piece of service'. Apparently with no reservations, Barnes agreed to take it on. He took to his new task with ease. He was set quickly to work, showing at times a worrying over-enthusiasm that must have caused Phelippes, who could work with Barnes only through intermediaries, some anxiety. Barnes, like his cousin Gifford, was not shy in professing his loyalty to the Queen of Scots – though unlike Gifford he probably meant it.

And yet somehow the system held together. More than this, in fact, it worked beautifully. At the centre of the mechanism was Phelippes. From the beginning Phelippes recognized Gifford's potential. The use of Thomas Barnes as a substitute courier was a complication, though knowing something of Thomas Phelippes's methods and personality we should imagine that he and Gifford talked about cousin Barnes and the courier system in great detail. With Barnes ignorant of the government's involvement, Phelippes would have to stay very much in the background. Not to have prepared carefully would have been an extraordinary risk. It was one both Phelippes and Walsingham could not have been willing to take. They knew how valuable this operation was in divining the true intentions of the Queen of Scots.

Gifford returned to England, though now both he and Barnes travelled with letters between London and Staffordshire. In acts of delicate and secret ventriloquism, Phelippes used Gifford to communicate with Morgan in Paris. Dictating Gifford's letters to Morgan, Phelippes wanted to have the names of servants and friends of the Queen of Scots in or about London, together with Morgan's ‘opinion how far every of them hath been, is or may be used' by Gifford to deliver a message or take a letter. Phelippes wanted also to have the names of ‘honest friends as we may be bold to trust' in Scotland. He wanted Morgan, in other words, to expose the whole Marian network in London and Scotland.

To get the information he needed from Morgan through Gifford, yet to sustain Morgan's belief in Gifford, it was essential for Phelippes to get the balance of force and gentleness just right. He had to push,
but not too much or too hard. All the time Phelippes was getting to know Gifford and, through Gifford, Morgan himself. It was a deliberate discovery of character. Phelippes understood the importance of paper, information and detail. But he also recognized the human factor of his work; and to his intuition he brought a secret inventiveness, taking the risk of working through Barnes (though without Barnes's knowledge) for the first time. In June, perfecting his techniques, Phelippes wrote in cipher as Barnes to Gilbert Curll, penetrating to the heart of Mary Queen of Scots's household at Chartley.

The target was always Mary. To Walsingham and Phelippes, and indeed to all of Elizabeth's advisers, she was the greatest enemy to Queen Elizabeth, to England and to the Protestant religion. They believed that for many years she had been at the centre of a web of international conspiracy. It was obvious to Elizabeth's Privy Council that there were few plots against England in which Mary or her supporters were not in some way connected. The Catholic cause in England was her cause: to Catholics she was the obvious legitimate alternative to Elizabeth as queen: she was always, to a lesser or greater extent, part of the effort to bring the Tudor kingdoms back from the horrible error (as the English Catholic exiles saw it) of schism and heresy.

In 1572 Elizabeth's advisers had wanted Mary to be executed for her part in the Ridolfi Plot. Elizabeth resisted, and Mary survived and in some ways prospered. Her influence was both pervasive and pernicious. But it probably seemed to Walsingham and Phelippes in 1586 that their grip was at last tightening. With the willing assistance of Gilbert Gifford, and the unconscious efforts of Thomas Barnes, they controlled the flow of Mary's letters and dispatches. They could read the correspondence between the Queen of Scots and Paris sent through the French embassy in London. Perhaps they could, if a chance so presented itself, shape and direct that correspondence.

The only surviving physical description of Thomas Phelippes comes from the Queen of Scots herself. It was in July, the 14th, a Thursday, when Phelippes was near Chartley. Mary saw from the window of her coach a youngish man ‘of low stature, slender every way, dark yellow haired on the head, and clear yellow bearded'. She must have been
close enough to him to see that he was ‘eaten in the face with small pocks' – scarred, in other words, by smallpox. She guessed from his appearance that he was about thirty years old.

Mary smiled at Phelippes from her coach. We can only guess whether he smiled back. He wrote to Walsingham that when he saw the Queen of Scots at Chartley he had thought of the saying:

When someone gives you a greeting

Take care it isn't an enemy.

But Mary's smile was genuine. She had heard about a man called Phelippes in Secretary Walsingham's service. She thought he might be working secretly for her. She had not an inkling that he was reading every word of the letters she sent or received by means of her trusted couriers.

By July 1586 Phelippes was having to perform extraordinary labours in deciphering the letters passing to and from Mary at Chartley. The courier system he had worked out with Gilbert Gifford, and through Gifford with Thomas Barnes, was a phenomenal success. There was so much material to work on that Phelippes had to leave London to travel north to Staffordshire – hence Mary's physical description on the 27th of her secret pursuer.

Mary's keeper at Chartley, the redoubtable Sir Amias Paulet, was a good and old friend of Phelippes. They had worked together in Paris when Paulet was ambassador at the French court between 1576 and 1579. Phelippes had wanted to travel to Chartley in the early days of June 1586, but he was too busy in London. At last he set out for Staffordshire on Thursday, 7 July at nine o'clock on a long summer's evening. He was working furiously on Mary's correspondence. Folio after folio of deciphers survive, all in Phelippes's tiny intricate handwriting. Even with the cipher keys to hand, it was unforgiving and laborious work.

For some weeks Paulet had been overseeing a remarkable system of interception. He had bought the services of a brewer in Burton upon Trent who supplied Mary's household at Chartley with beer. Sir Amias and Phelippes both knew the brewer as ‘the honest man'. There was an irony here; the brewer was interested only in money, and he was
very well paid to be honest. Gifford or Barnes delivered the letters for Mary to the brewer's house in Burton. He made sure that they were securely sealed in waterproof tubes in the casks of ale going off from Burton to Chartley, where they were retrieved by Mary's men, who used the same system to return replies to Gifford or Barnes.

For Elizabeth's government, the practical difficulties of this operation were potentially immense. It had to be coordinated with Gifford and his cousin Barnes, moving up and down the country between Staffordshire and London. Walsingham was generally at court, sometimes at his London house on Seething Lane near the Tower, but often on his estate in Surrey, Barn Elms. Phelippes was first in London and then at Chartley. Paulet was always with Mary. Gilbert Gifford was a conscious volunteer, his cousin Barnes an unconscious agent. The brewer of Burton upon Trent was a highly paid and often demanding employee. The only methods of communication were by conversation or letter. The very complexity of this system was a risk. But, once again, it worked superbly well for Walsingham and Phelippes against Mary Queen of Scots.

Everything was directed at a clear end. This could be expressed in a question, given here as Walsingham and Phelippes would have asked it in July 1586. Would the Scottish queen, after years of conspiring against her cousin Elizabeth, at last betray clear and unambiguous evidence of her plottings in the letters she wrote to her supporters? There was the tantalizing prospect at last of a prosecution of Mary Queen of Scots under the Act for the Queen's Surety and the clean judicial elimination of Queen Elizabeth's greatest rival.

Any courier who gave himself to the cause of the Queen of Scots lived a dangerous life. Even for someone who, like Gilbert Gifford, worked secretly for Sir Francis Walsingham there were few guarantees of a happy future. Utility, not compassion, guided men like Walsingham. They were pragmatic and unflinching in their work for the queen. They had no time for sentiment.

Those few couriers who found themselves recruited to Mary's service were young men in their twenties, well connected, of once wealthy Catholic families. Francis Throckmorton had been one of them. He
had paid the highest price for his service. Found guilty of treason at the Guild Hall in London in 1584, he had quickly thrown himself upon the queen's mercy, asking her to forgive ‘the inconsiderate rashness of unbridled youth'. Elizabeth graciously allowed him to meet his wife and mother before going to the gallows. In 1586 the name of Francis Throckmorton still meant a great deal to supporters of the Queen of Scots. Indeed it was used to clever effect by Gifford and Barnes to gain the trust of Mary's secretary, Gilbert Curll. Gifford was of the same stamp as Throckmorton, a gentleman of a good family with experience of life on the continent of Europe.

Yet another young man who volunteered to carry letters for the Queen of Scots was Anthony Babington, a gentleman of Dethwick in Derbyshire, twenty-five years old, who in summer 1586 was moving between his various lodgings in London, at Hernes rents in Lincoln's Inn Fields, at his own house near the Barbican and at the house of a tailor just outside the Temple Bar on Fleet Street. Babington had spent six months in France in 1580. At Thomas Morgan's request he carried packets to the Queen of Scots, probably in 1583 and 1584. By 1586, though married and with a daughter, he was keen to be off once again on his travels.

For Anthony Babington money was no object. His father had left him a rich man; one estimate gave Anthony an income of £1,000 a year, £400 of which he had put aside for his journey; this was an enormous fortune. He wanted, in June 1586, a licence to travel for three or five years, and he went to Elizabeth's court to get it. He came to the notice of Sir Francis Walsingham, who mistakenly thought Babington might be persuaded to work for him. A gentleman close to Walsingham became friendly with Babington. His name was Robert Poley, infiltrated into the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham by Morgan in Paris but in fact one of Walsingham's agents.

History has given young Anthony Babington the dubious honour of lending a name to a conspiracy that, thanks to the system of secret correspondence with Chartley set up by Thomas Phelippes and Gilbert Gifford, sent the Queen of Scots to the executioner's block. It was evidence offered by Babington that finally caught Mary in Walsingham's trap.