Cecil · 1586
Burghley and the Babington Plot
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 single state-security operation of the Elizabethan period and set the institutional template of the modern English security service for the next four centuries.
A reign is rarely secured by a single intelligence operation. Most state survivals across the long history of the early-modern English crown were the work of a sustained policy of careful constitutional management of a contested succession across decades. Burghley conducted the careful constitutional management of the Elizabethan settlement across forty unbroken years from 1558 to his death in 1598. The Babington Plot of 1586 was the single hinge moment of the forty years: the operation by which the principal constitutional alternative to Elizabeth, the Catholic Queen of Scots whose existence was the standing temptation to every Catholic conspirator in Europe, was eliminated by judicial process.
THE STAMFORD MAN
William Cecil was born at Bourne in Lincolnshire on the thirteenth of September 1520, eldest son of Richard Cecil, the Master of the Robes to King Henry VIII and a substantial Lincolnshire gentleman of recent Welsh-border-family extraction (the Cecils had migrated east from the Welsh Marches in the late fifteenth century on the strength of the family's service at the Bosworth campaign of 1485, where William's grandfather David Cecil had attended Henry Tudor in person). He was schooled at Grantham and Stamford grammar schools, took the place at St John's College, Cambridge, at fourteen in 1535 in his fifteenth year, read the standard Tudor humanist syllabus under the leading Cambridge Greek-scholar Sir John Cheke, was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1541 to read for the bar, and through the 1540s built the small administrative-and-legal career on the strength of the Cheke connection and his father's court influence.
He took the position of Secretary to the Duke of Somerset (the Lord Protector under the boy King Edward VI) in 1547 in his twenty-seventh year, held the Secretaryship across the four-year Somerset Protectorate, transitioned smoothly to the service of the new Lord President of the Council John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, on Somerset's fall in 1549, and was appointed Principal Secretary of State by Northumberland in September 1550 at twenty-nine. He survived the dynastic crisis of July 1553 (the Lady Jane Grey episode in which Northumberland attempted to put his daughter-in-law on the throne in defiance of the legitimate succession of the Catholic Mary I) by the careful manoeuvre of declining to sign the Devise for the Succession and retreating to his Lincolnshire estate at the moment of Mary's victory. He served quietly under Mary I in administrative-but-not-political positions across 1553 to 1558, and on the accession of Elizabeth I on the seventeenth of November 1558 was appointed by the new queen as her Principal Secretary of State at thirty-eight on the strength of her father Henry VIII's standing instruction to her to retain Cecil at the centre of any household she would establish.
THE QUEEN AND THE SECRETARY
Burghley served Elizabeth I as Principal Secretary 1558 to 1572, as Lord High Treasurer 1572 to 1598, and as the senior Privy Counsellor of the realm continuously from 1558 to his death on the fourth of August 1598, the longest continuous tenure of any English Crown minister in the post-Reformation period. He was the architect of the Elizabethan religious settlement (the Act of Supremacy and Act of Uniformity of 1559 that established the Elizabethan Church of England), the architect of the Elizabethan currency-and-financial reform of 1560 to 1561 (the Great Recoinage that returned the English silver coinage to the pre-Henrician standard and restored the financial credibility of the Crown), and the architect of the long Elizabethan-Spanish diplomatic standoff that culminated in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
He was elevated to the peerage as Baron Burghley in February 1571 in his fifty-first year on the queen's recognition of his thirteen years of unbroken Principal Secretary service. He built Burghley House in Lincolnshire (the great Elizabethan prodigy-house outside Stamford, on which he spent the equivalent of approximately two million pounds in modern-money construction costs across the 1570s and 1580s) and Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire (the smaller Elizabethan-and-Jacobean prodigy-house that became James I's preferred royal residence and was exchanged in 1607 for the royal manor of Hatfield). The two houses, both standing today, are the central single architectural monuments of the late-Elizabethan English country-house tradition.
THE MARY OF SCOTLAND PROBLEM
The central single political-and-constitutional problem of Burghley's tenure was the Mary, Queen of Scots problem. Mary had fled into England in May 1568 after the Scottish lord-confederate rising that drove her from the Scottish throne; Elizabeth had received her into protective custody at Carlisle, transferred her to Tutbury Castle, and held her in successive Midlands country-house confinements for the next eighteen years. The Mary problem was constitutional: as the senior Catholic claimant to the English throne (her descent from Henry VII through Margaret Tudor was uncontested), she was the standing-and-obvious candidate for every European Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth, and every Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth across the period was organised around the proposed substitution of Mary for the Protestant queen.
The Catholic plots ran in continuous sequence across the 1570s and 1580s: the Ridolfi Plot of 1571, the Throckmorton Plot of 1583, the Parry Plot of 1585, and finally the Babington Plot of 1586. Each was uncovered by Walsingham's intelligence service through the standard combination of paid informers, intercepted correspondence, and the small cipher-and-cryptanalysis bureau Walsingham had set up at his Seething Lane office under the chief decryptor Thomas Phelippes (the Cambridge mathematician who was the foundational English-language cryptanalyst of the modern era).
THE BABINGTON OPERATION
Anthony Babington was a twenty-five-year-old Catholic gentleman of an old Derbyshire-Catholic family with a small London townhouse near St John's Wood and a substantial Catholic-recusant social network across the senior English-and-French Catholic exile communities at Rheims and Paris. He had been a junior page in the household of the Earl of Shrewsbury during Mary's confinement at Sheffield Castle in 1581 to 1582; he had met Mary personally and had developed across the next four years the romantic-Catholic-loyalist commitment to her cause that he carried into the 1586 plot. The plot, drafted by Babington with the French-Catholic priest John Ballard at Babington's London house in May and June 1586, proposed the simultaneous assassination of Elizabeth by six Catholic gentlemen-conspirators at Whitehall, a Catholic-rising in the Midlands and the West Country, the landing of a Spanish expeditionary force at the south coast, and the release of Mary from confinement and her installation on the English throne.
Walsingham's intelligence service had identified the Babington circle through the standard informer-network in late 1585. Walsingham arranged for Mary's confinement to be transferred from Tutbury to the more isolated Chartley Castle in Staffordshire under the new keeper Sir Amias Paulet in December 1585, and arranged for a Walsingham-controlled double-agent (Gilbert Gifford, a Catholic priest's son who had been turned by Walsingham in Paris in early 1586) to set up the secret correspondence-channel between Mary at Chartley and the Babington circle in London. The channel ran through the famous beer-barrels: the brewer who supplied Chartley Castle had been recruited by Walsingham and would receive each week a small sealed packet of correspondence from Mary's household concealed in the bunghole of an empty beer-barrel; the packet would be transmitted to Gifford in London; Gifford would carry it to Phelippes at Seething Lane for decryption and re-encryption; the re-encrypted-and-modified packet would be carried back through the same channel to Babington in London. Babington's replies would be intercepted on the return journey and decrypted in the same way at Seething Lane.
The famous Babington Letter (the seventeenth of July 1586 letter from Mary to Babington in which Mary set down her personal signed approval of the proposed assassination of Elizabeth) was intercepted at Seething Lane on the eighteenth of July, was decrypted by Phelippes overnight, and was laid before Burghley at Whitehall on the morning of the nineteenth of July 1586. The decrypted letter (the famous postscript on the small added gallows-and-noose symbol that Phelippes added in his own hand at the foot of the decryption-margin, with the marginal note of which Walsingham's Cecil-archive papers preserve the original) was the documentary evidence Burghley had been waiting for. He ordered Walsingham to allow Babington to draft and send the reply-to-Mary that would confirm the operational plan, then to arrest the conspirators and bring the plot to public trial.
THE FOTHERINGHAY CONSEQUENCE
Babington was apprehended at his London house in St John's Wood on the night of the fourteenth of August 1586 by Walsingham's officers; the thirteen co-conspirators were rounded up across the next ten days. They were tried at Westminster Hall on the thirteenth and fourteenth of September 1586 before the special commission Burghley had constituted, were convicted on the strength of the Babington-Mary correspondence, and were hanged-drawn-and-quartered at St Giles's Fields outside London on the twentieth and twenty-first of September 1586.
The Mary trial was the central single constitutional question for Burghley. Mary was a foreign anointed queen; she was the cousin of the English queen; she was the senior Catholic claimant to the English throne; and the precedent of trying her on a treason charge under English law was unprecedented and constitutionally radical. Burghley personally drafted the constitutional case for the trial in a memorandum to Elizabeth on the twenty-fourth of September 1586, persuaded Elizabeth (who hesitated until October) to convene the special commission, and on the fourteenth of October 1586 conducted the formal opening of the Mary trial in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire (the Crown-owned Edward-of-York castle that had been Mary's confinement-residence since the previous month). The commission of forty-six peers and Privy Counsellors heard the Phelippes decryptions of the Mary-to-Babington correspondence and convicted Mary on the twenty-fifth of October 1586.
Mary was executed in the great hall at Fotheringhay on the morning of the eighth of February 1587 (the warrant signed by Elizabeth on the first of February and despatched by Burghley to the Fotheringhay commission against Elizabeth's last-minute hesitation; the famous Davison-episode in which the Privy Council acted in advance of Elizabeth's final confirmation). The execution closed the Mary problem permanently. The Spanish Armada was launched the next year on the strength of the Mary execution as the casus belli, was defeated in August 1588 by the combined Anglo-Dutch fleet under Charles Howard, and the Elizabethan Protestant settlement was secured on the strength of Burghley's careful constitutional management. The Cecil name in modern English constitutional history carries the weight of the eighteen-month Babington operation and the morning at Fotheringhay.