BABINGTON, ANTHONY (1561–1586), leader of a catholic conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth, was descended from a family of great antiquity. John de Babington, who traced his ancestry to the Norman era, was, in the reign of Henry III, the owner of the district round Mickle and Little Babington, or Babington, in Northumberland. By the marriage, early in the fifteenth century, of Thomas Babington, the fifth in descent from John, with the heiress of Robert Dethick, of Dethick, the main branch of the family became identified with Derbyshire, and by a series of intermarriages with neighbouring heiresses acquired additional property in adjoining counties. A northern branch of the family continued to flourish till the eighteenth century, and offshoots of the Derbyshire branch settled in Leicestershire and Oxfordshire. Lord Macaulay was named after his father's brother-in-law, Thomas Babington, of the Leicestershire branch, in whose house at Rothley Temple he was born.
Anthony was born at Dethick in October 1561. He was the third child and eldest son of Henry Babington, of Dethick, by his second wife, Mary, daughter of George, Lord Darcy, of Darcy, and granddaughter of Thomas, Lord Darcy, who was beheaded in 1538 as a principal actor in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Anthony's father is said to have been 'inclined to papistrie,' and to have 'had a brother that was a doctor of divinitie' of the same religious profession. He died in 1571, at the age of forty-one, and left Anthony his infant heir. To his three guardians—his mother, the descendant of a catholic rebel, to her second husband, Henry Foljambe, and to Philip Draycot, of Paynsley, Staffordshire—Anthony was indebted for his education. Although all the three outwardly conformed to protestantism, they were undoubtedly secret adherents of the Roman catholic faith, and in that belief Anthony was brought up. He apparently remained at Dethick till about 1577, only diversifying his life with occasional visits to Draycot's house at Paynsley, where his Roman catholic predilections were sedulously encouraged. There, too, he made the acquaintance of Margery, Draycot's daughter, whom he seems to have married about 1579, when barely eighteen. For a short time, probably before his marriage, he served as page to Queen Mary of Scotland, when she was imprisoned at Sheffield under the care of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and he then became passionately devoted to her and her cause. In 1580 Babington came to London, with the avowed intention of studying law, and he is stated to have entered as a student at Lincoln's Inn. But he soon abandoned all prospects at the bar for fashionable town life. His wealth, his cultivated intelligence,, his charm of manner, his handsome features,, secured for him a good reception at court, and he met there many young men of his own creed, infatuated admirers of Queen Mary, whom Jesuit conspirators from the Continent were drawing into treasonable practices. Early in 1580, on the arrival of Edmund Campion and Parsons, the Jesuits,. in disguise in England, Babington joined a number of youths of good family in the formation of a secret society for the protection and maintenance of Jesuit missionaries in England. To the conversion of 'heretics' (i.e. protestants) all the members swore to devote their persons and abilities and wealth. On 14 April 1580 Pope Gregory XIII sent them a message blessing the enterprise (cf. Simpson's Edmund Campion, p. 157). Babington and his friends—Lady Babington, of Whitefriars, London, and Lady Foljambe, of Walton, Derbyshire—did all in their power to advance the society's cause, and frequently invited Fathers Campion and Parsons to lodge in their houses on their secret tours through England in 1580 and 1581. Early in 1582, after the capture and execution of Campion, Babington withdrew to Dethick. In the same year he came of age, and assumed the management of his vast landed property. He acknowledged the disinterested care with which his stepfather Foljambe had administered his estates during his minority by settling upon him an annuity of one hundred marks. At the same date the names of Babington and of his wife appeared in a list of Derbyshire recusants (Cal. State Papers. 1581-90, p. 88). Subsequently Anthony travelled in France and made the acquaintance of Charles Paget and Thomas Morgan, Mary Stuart's emissaries at Paris, who were vigorously plotting with Spain in their mistress's behalf. According to a passage in Leti's Vita di Sisto V (iii. 103, ed. 1821), Babington extended his journey to Rome, and was accompanied by many fellow-members of the Roman catholic secret society. Queen Mary's friends abroad evidently marked Babington out, while on the continent, as a fitting leader of a catholic insurrection in England. After his return, in 1585, they sent him letters to be delivered to the imprisoned queen. But it was not until April 1586 that he was induced to take the leading
