It is easy to understand how in a house like this, teeming with menials and servants, the substitution of a servant for a spy or messenger for Mary Stuart would be an easy matter. The kitchen staff must have been enormous, as, according to Sir Ralph Sadleir’s report, the daily meals of the Queen “on Fishe days and Flesh days” consisted of “about 16 dishes dressed after their owne manner, sometimes more or less, as the provision serveth.” The price of necessary foodstuffs at Wingfield at the time was not high according to present day reckoning, for “a good ox cost £4, sheep £7 a score, veal and other meats reasonable good charge, about 8s.” Wheat was priced at £1 a quarter; malt at 16s. a quarter; hay 13s. 4d. a load; oats 8s. a quarter; and peas 12s. for the same quantity. The drink bill—no small item in those days—run up by Queen Mary was for ten tuns of wine annually. The captive’s linen was provided by the Earl of Shrewsbury, for that supplied by Queen Elizabeth was declared to be “nothing of it serviceable, but worn and spent.” The before-mentioned report of Sir Ralph Sadleir states that the Queen’s stable held four good coach horses of her own; her gentlemen had six, and the total number kept was about forty. It would thus seem easy for a stranger to obtain a post among such numbers without a fresh face being observed, and in the crowded kitchens the entrance of a disguised stranger through the little door opening towards Dethick and the west would possibly be unobserved. Then, among the number of servants some might be won over by a bribe, a note concealed in food might reach the Queen; or among the stable helps one might be found who could give news to the captive for some trifling reward. Chances seem to have existed on every hand. But to return to the ill-fated Babington. Babington had been brought up by his mother and two guardians in an atmosphere of stout but secret Roman Catholicism, and no doubt his situation at the age of sixteen as Queen Mary’s page was productive of a chivalrous love for the fair captive. At nineteen years of age he was the moving spirit in a plot to conceal two Jesuits; and three years later his thoughts reverted to the release of the Queen, whose plight had so strongly appealed to his youthful mind. The following year he formed a plot for Mary’s release and Queen Elizabeth’s assassination; but all the while the busy spies of Walsyngham were quietly collecting material from the correspondence relative to his cherished scheme, and were suiting their actions to his, with a view to successfully foiling his attempt. He was hunted down, but escaped till 1587, when he was caught and tried with a dozen other well-born youths, and met his death on September 20th at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the report of the apprehension of the conspirators is the following:—