The plan they contrived was both ingenious and successful. With the help of one Gilbert Gifford, trained in unscrupulous cunning by the Jesuits, they encouraged Mary to open a correspondence with her confederates abroad, and they tapped this correspondence at the fountain-head. Mary was removed to Chartley, near the home of Gifford, whose family was staunchly Catholic. A brewer at Burton supplied Chartley with beer. Into the cask of specially good beer for Mary and her attendants and secretaries was fitted a water-tight box, and in this box were placed the letters. With the brewer was staying Walsingham's secretary Phillipps, a thin red-haired man skilled in cypher, and he transcribed all the letters at Burton before they were sent through an underground post, which had been carefully arranged by the young and innocent-looking Gilbert Gifford, to the Jesuit agency in London. Only six people knew of the whole scheme. Elizabeth, Walsingham, Gifford, Phillipps, Paulet, Mary's Puritan keeper, and the brewer of Burton. The brewer was evidently a man whose business instinct was fully developed. Not only did he receive large and complicated bribes from Elizabeth and from Mary, but he demanded also a higher price for his beer. This demand shocked the good Paulet unspeakably, and throws an interesting sidelight upon the moral sense of the day, and proves that it worked as subtly then as it works now. From this correspondence Elizabeth learned, what her strange foresight taught her to expect, that France and Spain were too frightened of each other to take any resolute step against her in favour of Mary. But it happened also that she learnt something quite unexpected and of extreme importance, and that was the plot which is known as the Babington conspiracy. She was able to thwart a national calamity and to preserve her own life.