I hope you will inform His Majesty, sir, that this postscript, those fatal words Mr Secretary and I put together, was never used against his mother? When the letter – her own alone, the real letter – was read out at her trial it was shorn of that paragraph we forged. She was judged and condemned through her own words entirely. Mr Secretary discussed it with the Privy Council and after much debate they agreed it was better to trust to the words the Queen of Scots herself had dictated than to risk the whole case against her through allegations of forgery. It was not that the forged paragraph said anything she did not believe or wish for but that any doubt about it – she would surely protest it was not hers, as would Curll – might undermine the truth of what she had in fact said. That alone should have been enough to execute her – and was, as proven. I must tell you, sir, I was much relieved.
As for Christopher, I give you this detail so that you may know the context of his dealings with us and understand what his role was and was not. For all his fame as a play-maker, he was never a principal player in our great drama. Yet, as you shall hear, it was through his association with us that he met his end.
While Mr Secretary and I worked on the letter, Anthony Babington gave a great supper for his friends at the Castle tavern in Cornhill. At the same time and at a separate dinner Nicholas Berden, who had come from Paris, was hoping to be introduced to Ballard, the moving spirit of the conspiracy. We had both events covered but Ballard did not turn up – he was in Sussex, it transpired – and anyway Babington had not yet received the incriminating letter, still less had time to act upon it. Time was pressing – delivery of the letter could not be long delayed – but Mr Secretary was determined that we should not move until the trap was set for springing.
He ordered me to his house at Barn Elms two days hence with Robert Poley, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Christopher, if he was still in London. Thus, unknown to any of us, we assembled the full cast of Christopher’s death a few years later. I did not know Skeres except by name as someone who worked with Poley and Frizer and, though I had met Frizer since Christopher’s unfortunate introduction to him at Lyford Grange, I could not claim to know him. Poley I knew as well as anyone could know a man who was at all times all things to all men. As well as getting himself recruited by Thomas Morgan he had become the bosom friend of young Babington, nurturing him like the fondest of wet-nurses. They shared lodgings, Poley presenting himself as a trusted intermediary to Mr Secretary. Babington, you see, never knew what he really wanted – he veered between plotting to murder the Queen, desiring to negotiate with her via Mr Secretary for the safety of Catholics in England, or himself fleeing abroad. I suspect he would most have liked the second of these, had it been practical, but the third would have been better for him. Intelligencing is like war, in that anyone lacking sureness of aim pays a price, as Anthony Babington did.
When the letter was finished and delivered I was instructed to find Christopher if he was still in London. If he wasn’t, there was no time to get him back from Cambridge. Mr Secretary had not told me why he was required; he had hitherto been kept as a man apart, not mixed with others in our business apart from Gilbert Gifford. But those were busy times. We had watchers and spies everywhere – in and around the French and Spanish embassies, following Babington and his friends, in and around Chartley and watching for Ballard, as well as messengers and couriers speeding throughout the kingdom. Anything of interest had to be reported to Mr Secretary or Francis Mylles or me, then assessed and acted upon. There were watchers too at the Channel ports, spies in Paris, Rome, Madrid and the Low Countries. Every strand of this great web stretching over all Europe was drawn into the mind of Mr Secretary, the only place where all was known.
Deciphering and translating are silent, sedentary, solitary tasks demanding time and concentration. Our successes created a flood of letters and documents. Journeying to Staffordshire and even downriver to Greenwich were interruptions whose disruptive effect spread well beyond the time they took, since whenever I returned to deciphering I had to rebuild my concentration. Also, I had for that year been made a member of parliament for the port of Hastings in order to vote for government business and therefore had to attend some sessions, though I never went to Hastings. But when I sat at my own desk with a cipher before me I had to empty my mind of all other thoughts and preoccupations. Anything else – from daily bread to worry about my father’s business, to what might be happening at Chartley, to where I might find Christopher, even daily prayer – was a distraction. But once I was grappling with a cipher, when I was properly in it and my mathematical imagination engaged, I felt I was in a purer realm. It was as if God had lifted me out of time, purged me of earthly considerations and granted me a glimpse of that truth and beauty of which Plato writes. I do truly believe that the secrets of all the heavens must be mathematical.
I was not pleased, therefore, to begin
