Walsingham's spy network completely penetrated Mary's correspondence through the double agent Gilbert Gifford and his beer barrel smuggling scheme.

18:37she is completely desperate to reestablish contact with sympathizers, to know what prospects there are for her being released from prison, and perhaps what prospects there are for um her to to win the throne of England, which she is now starting to you know, to recognize is the only way she's ever going to escape this form of imprisonment. But, you know, how is she to do this? Because Paulet is a very, very effective

19:03jailer. You know, he's not allowing her any letters. He conducts random searches of her quarters to check that, you know, that not hiding notes there. And should anyone from her personal household kind of go out into the outside world, visit the local villages or whatever, then when they come back they they will be subjected to strip searches. So, the situation looks really bad for Mary, but over the course of her very lengthy

19:28imprisonment in England, she has learnt the value of patience. And fortunately for her, Mary's partisans are patient as well. And they're determined and they are very very ingenious. And in April, so 4 months after Mary had been moved to Chartley Manor, an agent from the French Embassy in London manages to get a letter through to her. And this is a a guy called Gilbert Gifford, and he is English, he's from

19:59Staffordshire, he's Catholic, and he's actually a kinsman of Francis Throckmorton, who had been implicated in the the previous plot to set um Mary free. He'd studied at um one of the seminary set up by William Allen, who is the kind of the great Catholic leader of the exiles on the continent, and he'd been ordained a deacon there. Uh and in Paris, where where he'd moved to after his

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