ngton and
Gifford made known to the Queen of Scots and the French ambassador that
here was a sure way of sending and receiving letters. The Queen's
butler, old Hannibal, was to look in the bottom of the barrel with the
yellow hoop, and one Barnes, a familiar of Gifford and Babington,
undertook the freight at the other end. The ambassador, M. de
Chateauneuf, seemed to doubt at first, and sent a single letter by way
of experiment, and that having been duly delivered and answered, the
bait was swallowed, and not a week has gone by but letters have come
and gone from hence, all being first opened, copied, and deciphered by
worthy Mr. Phillipps, and every word of them laid before the Council."

"Hum! We should not have reckoned that fair play when we went to
Master Sniggius's," observed Humfrey, as he heard his companion's tone
of exultation.

"Fair play is a jewel that will not pass current in statecraft,"
responded Cavendish. "Moreover, that the plotter should be plotted
against is surely only his desert. But thou art a mere sailor, my
Talbot, and these subtilties of policy are not for thee."

"For the which Heaven be praised!" said Humfrey. "Yet having, as you
say, read all these letters by the way, I see not wherefore ye are come
down to seek for more."

Will here imitated the Lord Treasurer's nod as well as in him lay, not
perhaps himself knowing the darker recesses of this same plot. He did
know so much as that every stage in it had been revealed to Walsingham
and Burghley as it proceeded. He did not know that the entire scheme
had been hatched, not by a blind and fanatical partisan of Mary's,
doing evil that what he supposed to be good, might come, but by Gifford
and Morgan, Walsingham's agents, for the express purpose of causing
Mary totally to ruin herself, and to compel Elizabeth to put her to
death, and that the unhappy Babington and his friends were thus
recklessly sacrificed. The assassin had even been permitted to appear
in Elizabeth's presence in order to terrify her into the conviction
that her life could only be secured by Mary's death. They, too, did
evil that good might come, thinking Mary's death alone could ensure
them from Pope and Spaniard; but surely they descended into a lower
depth of iniquity than did their victims.

Will himself was not certain what was wanted among the Queen's papers,
unless it might be the actual letters, from Babington, copies of which
had been given by Phillips