Babington Plot
Morgan and Charles Paget recruited Anthony Babington, a young English nobleman ready to give his life for Mary, to murder Queen Elizabeth I in the famous Babington plot. Lewes Lewkenor described Morgan as ‘a man not inferior to any of them all in drifts of policy’.
In 1585 Gilbert Gifford arrived in Paris for a meeting with Morgan and Charles Paget who sent him to England. Francis Walsingham's agents arrested him at the port of Rye, East Sussex and he was taken to London for questioning. It appears that Walsingham's persuasive techniques were enough to convince Gifford to spy for him and intercept the letters from Mary, Queen of Scots which ultimately brought about her downfall and subsequent execution. Gifford even told how Walsingham's chief decipherer, Phelippes ‘could take off Morgan to the life’. However, there was a mole spying for Elizabeth in the embassy, Gilbert Gifford, who was copying all the letters exchanged between Thomas and Mary and passing them to Walsingham. Elizabeth's top codebreaker, Thomas Phelippes, was able to decipher the code used by Thomas Morgan. The plot was discovered, Babington was arrested, and he and his co-conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered. The Jesuits accused Morgan of being the 'setter on' of Gilbert Gifford and had him ‘clapt close prisoner in a miserable dungeon called the Truerenborche’ where he remained until the death of the Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma in December 1593. Thomas Morgan, escaping extradition and a dreadful fate, was thrown into the Bastille and then in Truerenborche another prison in Flanders before finally being set free in 1593.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Morgan (of Llantarnam)
Famous quotes containing the words babington and/or plot:
“To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)