Francis Walsingham: Beer Barrel Ciphers, the Babington Plot and Cadiz

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Sir Francis Walsingham was born around 1532 into a family of lawyers in Kent and went into exile on the Continent under the Catholic Mary I, studying law in Switzerland and northern Italy. As English ambassador in Paris he lived through the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, sheltering Protestants including Philip Sidney in his home. From 1573, as Elizabeth I's joint principal secretary, he built an intelligence network reaching across Europe to the Ottoman Empire, staffed by specialists such as the codebreaker Thomas Phelippes and the seal forger Arthur Gregory. In the Throckmorton plot of 1583 he combined a spy inside the French embassy, intercepted letters and the confession of the tortured Francis Throckmorton.

To trap Mary, Queen of Scots, Walsingham moved her to Chartley Manor under Sir Amias Paulet and let the double agent Gilbert Gifford run a channel of letters hidden in the brewer's beer barrels. In 1586 Mary approved Anthony Babington's plan to kill Elizabeth, and Phelippes forged a postscript asking for the other conspirators' names. At her trial Mary blamed Walsingham, who said that as Secretary of State he had only done his duty. He stayed away from court while secretary William Davison took the blame for the execution. Against Spain he backed Francis Drake and used the agent Anthony Standen, who had befriended the Tuscan ambassador in Madrid. He died in 1590 deeply in debt and was buried at night.

• Letters sat in a watertight leather tube inside the barrel's bung.
• Gregory lifted wax seals with a thin heated blade and recast them from a copy of the original.
• Walsingham asked Paulet to quietly kill Mary; Paulet refused.
• Drake's 1587 raid on Cadiz burned the seasoned barrel staves, so the Armada sailed with leaking casks and rotting food.
• Walsingham took on the large debts of his son-in-law Philip Sidney after Sidney died fighting in the Netherlands.