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A deer hunt ended in arrest
The deer hunt
Paulet, who was usually unfriendly to her, offered the outing, and Mary suspected nothing. Her legs had stopped oozing, and she gladly climbed onto a horse for what would be her last ride. She had galloped out into the woods with him when a troop of horsemen approached. Her heart leapt: they might be men sent by Babington, or Elizabeth might be dead. Instead the captain of horse rode up, addressed her curtly, told her a plot against Elizabeth's life had been uncovered, and informed her that she was under arrest.
The conspirators
Several of Babington's conspirators had already been seized. Babington himself was arrested on 14 August and interrogated repeatedly, and his interrogators found that Phillips had completely hoodwinked him. He had even swallowed a forgery that Walsingham and Phillips concocted to extract an even more direct confession. The conspirators confessed to plotting Mary's release, sponsoring a foreign invasion, and working to restore Catholicism, but denied plotting to murder Elizabeth, since that admission would doom Mary.
The executions
Babington was publicly executed on 20 September and his fellow conspirators the next day, in Holborn, where Tottenham Court Road station stands now. Elizabeth had insisted the deaths be as salutary as possible, and the quartered bodies were sent to the gates of London as warnings. Mary left Chartley on 21 September behind an enormous wagon train of clothes, furnishings, and luxuries, and after four days on the road and 80 miles she reached Fotheringay Castle.
Why were traitors' bodies cut into quarters?
Hanging, drawing, and quartering was the English punishment for men convicted of high treason, and the offence was defined in law by the Treason Act of 1351. The prisoner was hanged until nearly dead, cut open, beheaded, and the body divided in four. The parts were displayed in public places to warn others. Women convicted of treason were burned instead, a punishment that lasted until 1790.
Why was Walsingham's spy network so effective?
Walsingham kept agents and informants in many European cities, and he paid for much of the network himself. They gathered reports on Catholic exiles, foreign courts, and the movement of letters. He died in 1590 deeply in debt, partly because of the cost of that intelligence work.
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