Some youths, worthy of ranking with the heroes, rather than with the traitors of England, had been practised on by the subtilty of Ballard, a disguised Jesuit of great intrepidity and talents, whom Camden calls “a silken priest in a soldier’s habit:”  for this versatile intriguer changed into all shapes, and took up all names:  yet, with all the arts of a political Jesuit, he found himself entrapped in the nets of that more crafty one, the subdolous Walsingham.  Ballard had opened himself to Babington, a Catholic; a youth of large fortune, the graces of whose person were only inferior to those of his mind.  In his travels, his generous temper had been touched by some confidential friends of the Scottish Mary; and the youth, susceptible of ambition, had been recommended to that queen; and an intercourse of letters took place, which seemed as deeply tinctured with love as with loyalty.  The intimates of Babington were youths of congenial tempers and studies; and, in their exalted imaginations, they could only view in the imprisoned Mary of Scotland a sovereign, a saint, and a woman.  But friendship the most tender, if not the most sublime ever recorded, prevailed among this band of self-devoted victims; and the Damon and Pythias of antiquity were here out-numbered.

But these conspirators were surely more adapted for lovers than for politicians.  The most romantic incidents are interwoven in this dark conspiracy.  Some of the letters to Mary were conveyed by a secret messenger, really in the pay of Walsingham; others were lodged in a concealed place, covered by a loosened stone, in the wall of the queen’s prison.  All were transcribed by Walsingham before they reached Mary.  Even the spies of that singular statesman were the companions or the servants of the arch-conspirator Ballard; for the minister seems only to have humoured his taste in assisting him through this extravagant plot.  Yet, as if a plot of so loose a texture was not quite perilous enough, the extraordinary incident of a picture, representing the secret conspirators in person, was probably considered as the highest stroke of political intrigue!  The accomplished Babington had portrayed the conspirators, himself standing in the midst of them, that the imprisoned queen might thus have some kind of personal acquaintance with them.  There was at least as much of chivalry as of Machiavelism in this conspiracy.  This very picture, before it was delivered to Mary, the subtile Walsingham had copied, to exhibit to Elizabeth the faces of her secret enemies.  Houbraken, in his portrait of Walsingham, has introduced in the vignette the incident of this picture being shown to Elizabeth; a circumstance happily characteristic of the genius of this crafty and vigilant statesman.  Camden tells us that Babington had first inscribed beneath the picture this verse:—­

Hi mihi sunt comites, quos ipsa pericula ducunt. 
These are my companions, whom the same dangers lead.