The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I by Alford Stephen

Author:Alford, Stephen [Alford, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141930848
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

13

Alias Cornelys

In the story of Mary Queen of Scots’s nineteen-year captivity in England no chapter is more extraordinary than the Babington Plot and no conspiracy more tangled. It involved a group of Catholic gentlemen plotting in London; the long labours of Mary’s chief intelligencer in Paris; a courier for the Queen of Scots who was really a double agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham; the double agent’s cousin; Walsingham’s trusted right hand in secret affairs; and, of course, Mary herself, held in confinement deep in the English midlands. Aiding these principal characters was a supporting cast of secretaries, pursuivants, spies, informants and watchers, and even one brewer of good ale. The drama was played out over the nine months between December 1585 and August 1586. It encompassed practically every theme in this book, bringing together in one magnificently disturbing episode those old and deep suspicions of the treasonous disloyalty of Elizabethan Catholics, the pernicious influence of the Queen of Scots as pretender to Elizabeth’s throne and terrible fears of the queen’s murder.

The narrative of the Babington Plot can be compressed into a short paragraph. In Paris in December 1585 Thomas Morgan, the Queen of Scots’s chief spy, recruited a young Catholic as a courier of his letters. The task of this courier, Gilbert Gifford, was to collect the letters from the house of the French ambassador in London and convey them secretly to Mary, who was being held under guard and surveillance in Staffordshire. Captured in England, Gifford became a double agent; and under the guiding hand of Thomas Phelippes, Walsingham’s servant, he helped set up an ingenious system for intercepting and copying letters passing to and from the Queen of Scots. This postal system helped to expose a knot of Catholic conspirators in London who were planning Mary’s freedom and Elizabeth’s murder. Waiting and watching, and then trying their hand at forgery, Walsingham and Phelippes discovered evidence of the Queen of Scots’s complicity in the conspirators’ plans. The dramatic breaking up of the plot in August 1586 sent Anthony Babington and his fellow conspirators to the gallows. More significantly, the letters intercepted by Phelippes and Walsingham were persuasive enough as evidence against Mary Queen of Scots for a commission to be set up under the Act for the Queen’s Surety. The commissioners tried Mary and found her guilty of treason against Elizabeth. In February 1587 she was beheaded.

But to tell it this briefly strips the story of much of its richness and complexity. Told fully, it offers a fascinating case study in just how far Elizabeth’s government was prepared to go to save queen and country from destruction.

It all began with Thomas Morgan, chief intelligencer to Mary Queen of Scots in Paris. At his trial in 1585 William Parry had named Morgan as the man who had persuaded him to kill Elizabeth. The English government tried to have Morgan extradited from France as Parry’s accomplice but instead had to make do with his imprisonment in the Bastille, where he found himself by October 1585.

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