An excellent guard was placed over the Queen, for Sir Ralph Sadleir set a watch of eight soldiers at night time, taking turns in watches of four, to patrol the immediate vicinity of the Queen’s apartments in the inner courtyard. Two other soldiers kept a day and night watch in the house itself, at the entrance to her rooms. The captive Queen arrived in September, 1584, for this second enforced visit, with a huge retinue, which must have seriously taxed the accommodation of the manor house. The Earl of Shrewsbury had 120 gentlemen, yeomen, and servants; Sir Ralph Sadleir followed suit with 50, whilst there were 40 trained men at arms. Including the prisoner’s personal retinue, there were 257 persons herded together within these walls, the Queen and her suite occupying fifteen rooms; yet, despite guards and precautions, one man alone was able to plot with the Queen herself for her release. The daring plot was the child of the fertile brain of one Anthony Babington, whose family seat was at Dethick, about five miles to the west. Babington was in a way a fanatic, and the pity for, and desire to liberate, his beloved Queen was the mania which brought him to the scaffold. Stained with walnut juice, and disguised in gipsy garb, he is said to have constantly visited the captive, and a curious tale is told of his visits. Just outside the Queen’s rooms grows a huge walnut tree, and tradition hath it that this tree is sprung from a walnut dropped by Babington himself when on one of his surreptitious visits. [Illustration: The Porch of Banqueting Hall: Wingfield.] This plot was not the first having the same end in view, for in 1569 a certain Leonard Dacre was implicated. Now if this was a relation of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s, through his mother, Mary Dacre, the Earl may well have been the instigator of the plot, for we have seen how little he cared what became of his charge. What is more likely than that he should choose Dacre, a relative, to assist the enterprise—and bear the blame—as a blood tie would be less an object of suspicion, and at the same time more loyal to his employer? Dacre’s plot at once aroused the slumbering suspicions of Elizabeth, and she, giving as a reason that Lord Shrewsbury’s health was not of the best, directed the Earl of Huntingdon to watch the Queen. The immediate outcome was a reduction in her retinue to thirty persons, with the object of avoiding the influx or substitution of suspicious persons. Other futile attempts, devoid of interest, were made at various times and by various persons to effect the release of this interesting prisoner.