Babington Plot
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Image:Babington postscript.jpg The Babington Plot was the event which most directly led to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. This was a second major plot against Elizabeth I of England after the Ridolfi plot.
It is named after the chief conspirator, Sir Anthony Babington (1561–1586), a young Catholic nobleman from Derbyshire. John Ballard, a Jesuit priest and Catholic agent, persuaded Babington to become involved in a plot to overthrow and/or murder Queen Elizabeth I of England, replacing her on the throne with the Roman Catholic Queen of Scotland, who had for many years been imprisoned under the care of the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury at one or another of his estates in Derbyshire.
Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's Secretary of State and a strict Protestant, was responsible for the recruiting of agents to support England and identify threats to Elizabeth's rule. Through his agents, Walsingham identified a conspiracy against the Queen. Walsingham with his established cipher school in London proceeded to discover the conspiracy and the conspirators.
In January 1586, Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined to Chartley Hall in Staffordshire, placed under strict observation, and placed under the control of Sir Amyas Paulet. Paulet was a Puritan, and watched Mary closely. He was told to watch the comings and goings of servants and visitors to Mary. As a result, Walsingham identified a 24-year-old former page of Mary named Anthony Babington who had organized a plot to assassinate Elizabeth and put Mary in power. Anthony Babington recruited a Catholic named Gilbert Gifford who had been trained as a priest and was known to Mary to pass messages to and from the Scottish queen.
In July 1586, Gifford delivered his first message from Mary to Anthony Babington. The letter from the imprisoned queen said that there were reported supporters of her in Paris. The reply to Mary from Babington said that Babington had a hundred followers to assist in delivering Mary from Elizabeth, and the conspiracy had six personal friends of Babington who were carrying out Mary's release. In the message Babington, a Catholic, betrayed his feelings about Elizabeth and described her as a usurper, claiming that he was free from obedience to Elizabeth as a result of her excommunication. Elizabeth had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V in 1570, and many Catholics in England believed they were released from duty to the excommunicated queen of England as a result.
The messages between Mary and Babington were encoded using symbols for some words and phrases and letter substitutions (23 symbols for letter substitutions and 36 characters for words and phrases). The messages were smuggled in and out through beer barrel stoppers where a nearby brewer delivered and picked up the barrels. Queen Mary's servants would retrieve the messages from the beer barrels and place messages back into the hollow of the beer barrel stopper.
Walsingham already had the conspiracy identified and was attempting to find out the identities of all six conspirators who formed the inner circle of the plot. Gilbert Gifford, who delivered the messages to and from Queen Mary, was a double agent, actually working for Walsingham since 1585. Each message between Mary and Babington was first read by Walsingham, copied by Walsingham's spy school, and sent to its destination intact. Walsingham's spy school decoded each message by trial and error by starting with letter substitutions and using the frequency of common characters (see frequency analysis) until a readable text was found, and then the rest was guessed at by the message context from what was decoded until the entire cipher was understood. After the cipher was found the messages were read the same day they were copied. Each message was returned in good enough condition that it was not evident that it had been read and copied.
The correspondence between Mary and Babington was about the conspiracy. Without the endorsement of Queen Mary the plot would fail, since the supporters would have no future crown to support. In July 1586, Babington proposed to Mary that Elizabeth be assassinated, and he referred to an invasion by Spain — King Philip II had promised to send a military expedition to England when Queen Elizabeth was no longer in power, and had a plan for Mary's release from her imprisonment. The July 1586 letter also described plots to kill Walsingham and Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister. Sir Francis Walsingham thus had the evidence he needed, but he needed the identities of the six conspirators.
In Mary's last letter to Babington, in which Mary acknowledged Babington's enterprise, Walsingham had Thomas Phelippes, a cipher and language expert in his employ, forge a post script asking for the identity of the six conspirators. Babington received the forged postscript and message, but he never replied with the names of the conspirators, as he was arrested while seeking a passport in order to see King Philip of Spain. The identities of the six conspirators were nevertheless discovered, and they were taken prisoner by August 15, 1586.
The conspirators were sentenced to death for treason and conspiracy against the crown, and were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. This first group included Babington, Ballard, Chidiock Tichborne, Thomas Salisbury, Robert Barnewell, John Savage and Henry Donn. A further seven men, Edward Habington, Charles Tilney, Edward Jones, John Charnock, John Travers, Jerome Bellamy, and Robert Gage, were tried and convicted shortly afterwards. Ballard and Babington were executed on September 20 along with the other men who had been tried with them. Such was the horror of their execution that the queen ordered the second group to be allowed to hang until dead before being disembowelled.
Queen Mary herself went to trial at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire and denied her part in the plot, but her correspondence was the evidence; therefore, Mary was sentenced to death. Elizabeth signed her cousin's death warrant, and on February 8, 1587, in front of 300 witnesses, Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed. Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's spymaster, had saved England from invasion, and saved Queen Elizabeth I from assassination, and this ended the Babington Plot.
The story of the Babington Plot is dramatised in the novel "Conies in the Hay" by Jane Lane. (ISBN 0755108353).
See also
References
- Military Heritage did a feature of Mary, Queen of Scots and the Babington conspiracy (David Alan Johnson, Military Heritage, August 2005, Volume 7, No. 1, p. 20, p. 22, and p. 23), ISSN 1524-8666.