Jane Martyn of Athelhampton
married Chidiock Tichbourne, a poet and a Catholic. Tichbourne was a
conspirator in the Babington Plot of 1586 and one can imagine the conspirators
secretly meeting by candlelight. So confident were they in the potential
success of their plot, they even had a group portrait painted! However, their
network of encrypted messages concealed in beer barrels was discovered by
Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s top spy. He intercepted their messages and ensnared
the treasonous parties into revealing their names. This coded letter is now
safely conserved in the National Archives. With its careful folds and four
hundred year old ink, it is a compelling artefact of cryptology. The letter
inspires the structure of this painting and brings to mind the use of deception
in war and the coded metaverse of our Digital Age. Emblazoned upon this, the
stone obelisks of Francis Inigo Thomas’s Jacobean-inspired Corona Garden appear
as a crown of swords, symbolic of the Tudor’s powerful reign.
