Anthony Babington

Anthony Babington was a wealthy, well-connected Englishman whose devout Catholicism placed him on a fatal collision course with the Protestant crown. In his mid-twenties, he became the central figure in a conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and install the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. The plot, communicated through a network of secret letters smuggled in beer barrels, was infiltrated from the start by Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Babington's arrest, following a dramatic manhunt, provided the explicit evidence needed to convict Mary of treason. His gruesome public execution in 1586 was a spectacle of Tudor justice, but it was merely the prelude to the beheading of a queen a few months later.