ndered
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