How much more did Langston guess? He had told Babington the story current among the outer circle of Mary's followers of the maiden being the daughter of the Scotch archer, and had taught him her true name, encouraging too, his aspirations towards her during the time of his courtship. Babington believed Langston to have been at that time still a sincere partizan of Queen Mary, but all along to have entertained a suspicion that there was a closer relationship between Bride Hepburn and the Queen than was avowed, though to Babington himself he had only given mysterious hints.
But towards the end of the captivity at Tutbury, he had made some further discovery, which confirmed his suspicions, and had led to another attempt to accost Cicely, and to make the Queen aware of his knowledge, perhaps in order to verify it, or it might be to gain power over her, a reward for the introduction, or to extort bribes to secrecy. For looking back, Antony could now perceive that by this time a certain greed of lucre had set in upon the man, who had obtained large sums of secret service money from himself; and avarice, together with the rebuff he had received from the Queen, had doubtless rendered him accessible to the temptations of the arch- plotters Gifford and Morgan. Richard could believe this, for the knowledge had been forced on him that there were an incredible number of intriguers at that time, spies and conspirators, often in the pay of both parties, impartially betraying the one to the other, and sometimes, through miscalculation, meeting the fate they richly deserved. Many a man who had begun enthusiastically to work in underground ways for what he thought the righteous cause, became so enamoured of the undermining process, and the gold there to be picked up, that from a wrong-headed partizan he became a traitor-often a double-faced one-and would work secretly in the interest of whichever cause would pay him best.
Poor Babington had been far too youthfully simple to guess what he now perceived, that he had been made the mere tool and instrument of these traitors. He had been instructed in Gifford's arrangement with the Burton brewer for conveying letters to Mary at Chartley, and had been made the means of informing her of it by means of his interview with Cicely, when he had brought the letter in the watch. The letter had been conveyed to him by Langston, the watch had been his own device. It was after this meeting, of which Richard now heard for the first time, that Langston had fully told his belief respecting the true birth of Bride Hepburn, and assured Babington that there was no hope of his wedding her, though the Queen might allow him to delude himself with the idea of her favour in order to bind him to her service.
It was then that Babington consented to Lady Shrewsbury's new match with the well-endowed Eleanor Ratcliffe. If he could not have Cicely, he cared not whom he had. He had been leading a wild and extravagant life about town, when (as poor Tichborne afterwards said on the scaffold) the flourishing estate of Babington and Tichborne was the talk of Fleet Street and the Strand, and he had also many calls for secret service money, so that all his thought was to have more to spend in the service of Queen Mary and her daughter.
"Oh, sir! I have been as one distraught all this past year," he said. "How often since I have been shut up here, and I have seen how I have been duped and gulled, have your words come back to me, that to enter on crooked ways was the way to destruction for myself and others, and that I might only be serving worse men than myself! And yet they were priests who misled me!"
"Even in your own religion there are many priests who would withhold you from such crimes," said Richard.
"There are! I know it! I have spoken with them. They say no priest can put aside the eternal laws of God's justice. So these others, Chidiock here, Donne and Salisbury, always cried out against the slaying of the Queen, though-wretch that I was-and gulled by Ballard and Savage, I deemed the exploit so noble and praiseworthy that I even joined Tichborne with me in that accursed portraiture! Yea, you may well deem me mad, but it was Gifford who encouraged me in having it made, no doubt to assure our ruin. Oh, Mr. Talbot! was ever man so cruelly deceived as me?"
"It is only too true, Antony. My heart is full of rage and indignation when I think thereof. And yet, my poor lad, what concerns thee most is to lay aside all such thoughts as may not tend to repentance before God."
"I know it, I know it, sir. All the more that we shall die without the last sacraments. Commend us to the prayers of our Queen, sir, and of her. But to proceed with what imports you to know for her sake, while I have space to speak."
He proceeded to tell how, between dissipation and intrigue, he had lived in a perpetual state of excitement, going backwards and forwards between London and Lichfield to attend to the correspondence with Queen Mary and the Spanish ambassador in France, and to arrange the details of the plot; always being worked up to the highest pitch by Gifford and Ballard, while Langston continued to be the great assistant in all the correspondence. All the time Sir Francis Walsingham, who was really aware of all, if not the prime mover in the intrigue, appeared perfectly unsuspicious; often received Babington at his house, and discussed a plan of sending him on a commission to France, while in point of fact every letter that travelled in the Burton barrels was deciphered by Phillipps, and laid before the Secretary before being read by the proper owners. In none of these, however, as Babington could assure Mr. Talbot, had Cicely been mentioned,-the only danger to her was through Langston.
Things had come to a climax in July, when Babington had been urged to obtain from Mary such definite approbation of his plans as might satisfy his confederates, and had in consequence written the letter and obtained the answer, copies of which had been read to him at his private examination, and which certainly contained fatal matter to both him and the Queen.
They had no doubt been called forth with that intent, and a doubt had begun to arise in the victim's mind whether the last reply had been really the Queen's own. It had been delivered to him in the street, not by the usual channel, but by a blue-coated serving-man. Two or three days later Humfrey had told him of Langston's interview with Walsingham, which he had at the time laughed to scorn, thinking himself able to penetrate any disguise of that Proteus, and likewise believing that he was blinding Walsingham.
He first took alarm a few days after Humfrey's departure, and wrote to Queen Mary to warn her, convinced that the traitor must be Langston. Ballard became himself suspected, and after lurking about in various disguises was arrested in Babington's own lodgings. To disarm suspicion, Antony went to Walsingham to talk about the French Mission, and tried to resume his usual habits, but in a tavern, he became aware that Langston, under some fresh shape, was watching him, and hastily throwing down the reckoning, he fled without his cloak or sword to Gage's house at Westminster, where he took horse, hid himself in St. John's Wood, and finally was taken, half starved, in an outhouse at Harrow, belonging to a farmer, whose mercy involved him in the like doom.
This was the substance of the story told by the unfortunate young man to Richard Talbot, whom he owned as the best and wisest friend he had ever had-going back to the warnings twice given, that no cause is served by departing from the right; no kingdom safely won by worshipping the deviclass="underline" "And sure I did worship him when I let myself be led by Gifford," he said.