Walsingham orchestrated an elaborate sting operation using Gilbert Gifford and a beer barrel to intercept Mary's correspondence with Babington.

20:24ordination, he'd been recruited by Mary's agents in the city and employed as a courier taking letters from Paris to the French Embassy in London, but obviously his real ambition is to get letters from the French Embassy to Mary in Chartley Manor. And he has come up with what he thinks is a brilliant wheeze that will enable him to do it. And this is like a kind of

20:50children's book on the spycraft. The >> [laughter] >> The The kind of thing you could imagine, I don't know, Enid Blyton or someone coming up with. So, uh Gifford has gone to um the local brewer who um supplies Chartley Manor with its beer. And Gifford's plan is to put letters for Mary into a a kind of a waterproof receptacle or a beer-proof receptacle perhaps you might say, and then to insert this

21:19receptacle through the bung hole of the beer barrel. And then the beer barrel will be taken by the brewer to Chartley Manor. And when it arrives there, the message can be retrieved through the bung hole by Mary's butler who can then take the the correspondence to Mary's secretaries and they can then pass it on to Mary herself. And then should Mary want to reply to anything, the whole procedure

21:45can operate in reverse. And it sounds mad. I think it sounds good. I think it's a great scheme. Amazingly, well, it works, Dominic. And this is how Babington with his kind of plot for assassinating Elizabeth with those you know, those six gentlemen and springing Mary from Chartley Manor, this is how he'd been able to get his letter through to her. And it's also why Mary spends so much

22:07time kind of mulling over what she's going to how she's going to reply because she knows that this is really the one realistic chance she has to escape from her prison and perhaps to become the queen of England. Now, her secretaries will say, "Don't reply. It's too dangerous. There are spies everywhere." And Mary is clearly anxious herself. And so as she is mulling over what she should reply, she's keen to get out in