High above the Derwent, with a fine panorama of the lovely valley, is this secluded village with a story of one of Englands conspirators. In the farmhouse nestling close to the tiny church are the remains of the manor house where was born Anthony Babington, who was to bring dire tragedy on the splendour of his family.
Thomas Babington had married the heiress of the Dethicks, and was at Agincourt. His son, John, was killed at Bosworth Field, his brother William was a famous Lord Chief Justice.
Anthony was sixth in descent from Thomas; he spent his boyhood in this village, and he must have known the grand old kitchen which is still here with its old turnspit, its oak beams, and its stone arches.
His father died when he was 10 and he was brought up in a strong atmosphere of the Roman Catholic faith. At 16 he was page to the captive Queen of Scots, and it was his pity for her plight which was to bring him to the scaffold. In a few years he was plotting for the death of Elizabeth and the release of Mary, his own share to be the actual deliverance of the queen, who was then imprisoned at Wingfield Manor, nearly four miles away.
The church here had its beginnings in the 13th century. Among the remains of those days is the lower masonry of the side walls, two tiny lancets, the south doorway, and the piscina. The clerestory is of the 16th century. It would be the bell in Dethick's tower which rang out a welcome to Florence Nightingale when she arrived home from the Crimea, alone and unguessed at, while all England was talking of her. She had stolen her way to London, hid herself there for a night, and refusing triumphal bands and presentations of address, had come quietly home to Lea Hurst, a mile or so away, after the two years which had made her the most famous woman in the land.
Anthony Babington, head of a house which was then still secretly clinging to Roman Catholicism, inherited great estates at Dethick and beyond the Derbyshire border. During the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots, at Sheffield Castle, he acted as one of her pages.
Married at 18, he won immediate recognition at the court of Elizabeth I, his wealth, wit, and good looks making him a conspicuous favourite. His Roman Catholic sympathies however, soon led to his becoming the centre of conspiracies which gradually crystallised into a plot for the furnishing of money and troops by Philip of Spain, the sack of London, the murder of Elizabeth's chief advisers,and the crowning of Mary as Queen of England and Scotland. All this depended upon the assassination of Elizabeth, and that fearful mission Babington himself undertook. Plot and counter-plot ran their course, but happily the secret was revealed by the discovery of Babington's letter to Mary detailing the plot. Babington fled in disguise, his hair cut off, his face and body stained with walnut juice. He hid first in the wilds of St John's Wood, near London, and then in the house of a sympathiser at Harrow, but he was arrested with 12 other conspirators and condemned to death. Though pleading for clemency the terrible sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was carried out in a manner of days.
Today Dethick remains the perfect English hamlet with its church, farms, and Manor Farm (open for bed and breakfast) surrounded by unusually beautiful countryside which the visitor can explore untroubled by traffice or the bustle of modern life.
