Cecil

Across the summer of 1586, in the small Secretariat office in the south-west tower of Whitehall Palace, William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, sixty-six years old, the Lord High Treasurer and senior Privy Counsellor of England, working in close concert with his protégé and successor as Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, brought to its conclusion the eighteen-month intelligence operation that became known as the Babington Plot: the Catholic conspiracy of Anthony Babington and his fellow gentleman-conspirators to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and to replace her on the throne with Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic claimant who had been Elizabeth's prisoner in England since 1568. The operation Walsingham ran on the Babington circle through the spring and summer of 1586 (the famous Phelippes-cipher decryption of the Babington letters smuggled out of Mary's confinement at Chartley Castle through the bunghole of the beer-barrels delivered to the household by the Walsingham-controlled agent Gilbert Gifford, the so-called bunghole letters of June and July 1586) produced the documentary evidence of Mary's personal signed approval of the assassination plot. The evidence was laid before Burghley at Whitehall on the seventeenth of August 1586. Burghley ordered the arrest of Babington and his thirteen co-conspirators on the fourteenth of August (Babington was apprehended in St John's Wood by Walsingham's men on the same evening); the conspirators were tried and convicted at Westminster Hall in September; the convicted were hanged, drawn and quartered at St Giles's Fields on the twentieth and twenty-first of September 1586. Mary was brought to trial at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on the fourteenth of October 1586 under the special commission of forty-six peers and Privy Counsellors that Burghley had personally constituted; the commission convicted her on the twenty-fifth of October on the strength of the Phelippes-decrypted Chartley letters; she was executed in the great hall at Fotheringhay on the eighth of February 1587. The Babington Plot trial-and-execution, conducted under Burghley's careful constitutional-and-judicial management across the eighteen months of the operation, was the central state-security operation of the Elizabethan period and set the institutional template of the modern English security service for the next four centuries.

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