Thus was established the system that gave us oversight of all the Queen Mary’s correspondence with Thomas Morgan, and with all those in England who plotted the murder of Queen Elizabeth on her behalf. Gilbert called again on the house and suggested the arrangement to Curll, who thought it excellent, Mr Secretary agreed and Sir Amias dropped more silver into the open hands of the honest man. The result was that we knew the intelligence conveyed to her before she did, and read her replies before they reached their recipients. We would have managed without Christopher’s ingenious suggestion but it would have been more cumbersome, more vulnerable to discovery, and taken longer.
His second contribution to the great matter was less clear-cut. It occurred later in the summer, by which time we had a comprehensive understanding of what Babington and his fellow plotters intended. Do I really need to describe this to you, sir? It became very well known. His Majesty surely knows it. Unless His Majesty has reason to fear such a plot against himself? Could that be the reason for his interest? If so I—
Very well, Christopher Marlowe’s role. But I need to describe the whole to make that clear. Is it possible perhaps that we could order more coals for the fire? And more ale? I thank you, sir, I thank you.
You will know, then, that Queen Mary entered a fateful correspondence with the wealthy and foolish young Babington, a gentleman of Derbyshire who had previously delivered messages from Morgan to the Queen. Now, leaving his wife and children at home and restless for further adventure, he took lodgings in London where he met John Ballard, the priest who pretended to be Captain Fortescue. They had known each other in Paris and Ballard travelled secretly to London, armed as I have said before with the Pope’s commission to dispose of the usurper Elizabeth and install Mary on the throne. He recruited Babington, and Babington in turn a number of other young Catholic gentlemen with time on their hands, money in their purses, adventure in their hearts and little in their heads. They were persuaded by Ballard that unless Elizabeth was removed there would either be a massacre of Catholics in England, as there had been of Protestants in France, or Spain and France would jointly invade. Thus, the plot against Elizabeth seemed to them not only a rightful restoration of the old faith but a patriotic duty and a great saving of Christian lives.
In July of that year, 1586, young Babington wrote the letter that eventually caused the Queen to reply in what we called ‘the bloody letter’, the letter that damned her. In his letter Babington told her that the princes of Europe were preparing ‘for the deliverance of our country from the extreme and miserable state wherein it hath too long remained’. I have it by heart, that letter, even after these many years, so familiar did I become through going over my decipherment with Mr Secretary time and again. Babington proposed that England would be invaded, Mary freed and Elizabeth removed: ‘the dispatch of the usurper, from the obedience of whom we are by excommunication of her made free, there be six noble gentlemen, who… will undertake that tragical execution.’ Those words were the plotters’ death warrants. But not quite Queen Mary’s because it did not absolutely prove her complicity. For that we needed her own words.
Babington wrote the fateful letter in his London lodgings then handed it to one of the anonymous young men who collected correspondence for the Queen of Scots on behalf of the French ambassador, usually without knowing what they were doing. The ambassador would then have the letters secretly conveyed by Gilbert to our honest man in Burton-upon-Trent who would conceal them in the beer barrels for Curll to find. I would meanwhile have copied and deciphered them. Sometimes we intercepted them immediately, as on this occasion when the anonymous young man was provided by us and brought the letter straight to me. Babington was a careless encipherer who made frequent mistakes, which in some ways aided my work and in others slowed it because his errors were meaningless and I had to reconstruct what he must have thought he was saying. When I had finished the copying the original was resealed and sent on its way to Staffordshire.
As I said, that letter was sufficient to hang Babington and Ballard and the other plotters but not enough to hang Queen Mary. We needed an incriminating response, and for that we had to wait. Ten long days we waited. Queen Mary, for all her foolish past conduct, was cautious of commitment and exposure. She wrote nothing in her own hand, not even notes. She would dictate her replies to Curll, who would put her words into cipher and conceal the missive in an ale barrel. On this occasion I was in Staffordshire awaiting it when the honest man, who by now knew my business, retrieved it and handed it to me. Thus was I copying, deciphering and reading Queen Mary’s reply long before the original reached young Babington in London.
Curll was a much better encipherer than Babington and, knowing his keys, it took me little more than a day to unlock his work, make a fair plain-text copy for Mr Secretary and send it by rapid despatch. I took the original with me back to London, confident that Babington would know nothing of any delay when eventually he received it from one of the anonymous young men. I wanted Mr Secretary to see it, in case he wished to show it to the Privy Council or even Queen Elizabeth herself, such was its import. The crucial passage was that in which Queen Mary commended Babington for his zeal in combating
