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.

(Plot for a Queen/1)

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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.”

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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.