Christopher Hodgson (1561 – after 1596) was a Catholic priest who played a minor role in the Babington Plot (Pollen 1922, Smith 1936, Thomas 1996).
A surviving letter in the English State Papers[1] shows a very close relationship with Laurence Johnson, a Catholic martyr who was executed at Tyburn in 1582 and later beatified.
One of the captured plotters (John Savage) later testified under interrogation that Hodgson had, with Gifford and others at Rheims in 1585, encouraged the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I of England (Smith 1936, p. 216).
When in England, Gilbert Gifford set up a means of communication between the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, and her allies, knowing that her letters would be intercepted by Elizabethan spies.
Before his death in prison in Paris in 1590, Gilbert Gifford wrote a letter to his brother Gerard dated 6 December 1588, which fell into the hands of the English authorities.
[4] The last definite reference to him, in a letter by Jesuit Priest Robert Parsons (or Persons), gives the following account of his wanderings: "afterwards, failing in his purpose, and having no true spirit indeed, came out again, and after much wanderings up and down entangled with many ecclesiastical censures, came at length to such misery, and desperate resolution, as that when the assault should be given by the Spaniards to Calais in the year 1596, this man being there both ragged and torn, and in vagrant sort, told a certain grave man a little before the assault given, that he must be forced to enter also with the soldiers to snatch and catch as others did for his necessary relief, and what is become of him since I know not, nor whether he be dead or alive."
(Catholic Record Society 1906, p. 205) Hodgson's impoverished arrival in Calais, and his request to pillage with the Spanish soldiers, seems to indicate that he might be trying to return to England.