The Other Tudors (25 page)

Of course Sir John’s enemies pretended to believe in the letter, but Roughan had actually already been prosecuted by Sir John – for forgery. The letter might muddy the waters and shift attention to England, but it never had any real chance of being believed. In March the Privy Council ordered Fitzwilliam to deliver Roughan to the Bishop of Meath and the Bishop of Leighlin or Sir Lucas Dillon. They were to set out the particulars of the convictions of Roughan for previous acts of forging Sir John’s signature. Roughan was to be handed over to John Worsley, appointed by the Privy Council to oversee the interrogation of the prisoner. The Privy Council wrote to the Bishops of Meath and Leighlin, Sir Lucas Dillon, Sir Nicholas White, Sir Edward Moore, Sir Edward Waterhous, Justice Walshe and Charles Calthorpe to appoint them commissioners ‘to examine Sir Dennis O’Rowghan, priest, who had been formerly condemned in the Castle Chamber for counterfeiting Sir John Perot’s hand to a certain letter purporting to be addressed to the King of Spain, importing a foul and disloyal intent’. Also they were to look into the matter of his forging Sir John’s signature to three warrants whilst he was Lord Deputy.

Fitzwilliam sent over a lengthy letter dated 30 April to Burghley. It dealt with his actions relating to Roughan. He then went on to cover himself in case the matter proved false: ‘If there be any cause of doubt in Sir Denis O’Rawghane’s book, it shall be his fault, and not mine, who have delivered but what I received from him’. Apparently, even Fitzwilliam could see that the story was weak. The Lord Deputy ended his letter by saying that he was having great difficulty in allowing any of the Council to try the evidence of the priest, Roughan. They were either favourites of Sir John’s (like Dillon and White) or confidently expected his return to Ireland and were therefore totally unwilling to put their names to anything that slandered him. An attempt was made to find other witnesses. Mr John Ball made a declaration, ‘About a three or four days before my coming for England, James Reynolds, late servant of Mr Michael Kettlewell, told me that his brother, John Reynolds, had received a message from one Charles Trevor (Travares) saying that if he would get his protection from my Lord Deputy he would reprove the letter which the priest did charge Sir John Perrot withal ...’
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As a witness, a man who said his brother had told him that a friend of his might confirm Roughan’s story, was plainly ridiculous.

By May even the participants in the plot were giving up. Loftus, the Archbishop of Dublin and Chancellor, wrote to the Bishop of Meath and others Commissioners that Roughan should go to trial. Loftus told Fitzwilliam on his return from Connaught that Roughan was a ‘lewd, dishonest man, void of the truth.’ An array of documents was forwarded to England relating to previous trials for forgery, where the accused counterfeited Sir John’s name to illegally seize property.

And so the matter dragged on. Sir John noted his opinion that he believed Ireland to be the most unfortunate country in the world. He knew of no ‘good Governor who sincerely served there but who was stung, maligned, or bitten by some means.’ Still Sir John was to have no peace concerning Ireland. In May Roughan escaped from prison in Dublin and the Privy Council demanded a number of persons should be sent over to England to take part in a hearing into the events. In the event, 46 persons were to be examined in Ireland touching the disclosures of Roughan. A number of selected persons were to be sent to England for questioning, including the Bishop of Leighlin, Sir Nicholas White, Philip the gaoler, the priest Rice ap Hugh, and Margaret Leonard, the wife of Roughan. Sir Nicholas White was certainly not prepared to take this lying down; he wrote to Burghley, ‘the bad priest, Roughane, hath told many malicious tales of the Commissioners to the Lord Deputy.’ Sir Nicholas found himself under restraint, which, he believed, was dangerous for his health. He begged Burghley for parole to go into the country.
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By July, Fitzwilliam was writing to Hatton and Burghley, the former of whom hated Sir John and the latter who supported him. The Lord Deputy told both men he would not make any further accusations until he heard how the Privy Council felt about what had been presented so far. However, to maintain his case against Sir John he enclosed a note dated 30 June, which was an account by Sir Robert Dillon, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, that ‘Sir John Perrot, in time of his government, was desirous to have pardoned himself, but that the Lord Chancellor demurred to seal the warrant.’ The suggestion was that Sir John wanted to give himself a formal pardon for unspecified crimes, but that Loftus refused to authorise it.
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By August, the Court was at Oatlands Palace in Weybridge, where the Lord Chancellor, the Treasurer, Admiral and Chamberlain sent a response to the Lord Deputy. They raised a series of comments on the examinations, indicating that there had been ‘palpable concealments of truths and variances in the several answers of the Commissioners’; only the Bishop of Meath seemed to have been wholly and truthfully forthcoming. Fitzwilliam replied by expressing his wish that Sir John, the Bishop of Leighlin, Sir Nicholas White and the rest might come by their just deserts.

Back in Ireland, Archbishop Loftus added his weight to the accusations when he answered Burghley’s letter of 21 October, requiring Loftus’s testimony for the examination of Sir John. Loftus reported that in his government he had ‘showed himself void of pity and compassion and without measure in his punishment.’ He added that Sir John had remarked on one occasion that he would ‘send the Council out of Dublin Castle riding upon cabbage stalks.’ This foolish remark was remembered and used to show Sir John’s contempt for his colleagues and, through them, for the Privy Council and the Queen. Fitzwilliam joined in with the story of the cabbage stalks, although he changed it to ‘cole staffs’ (a pole carried between two people on their shoulders, hung with goods).

On 31 January 1591 Loftus sent a lengthy letter to Burghley laying out the bones of his information against Sir John:

‘I have lately received a joint letter from your Lordship, and others, of the Lords reproving me for my last answer sent unto you, both for the generality and doubtfulness thereof, and requiring me in more particular manner to signify to Her Majesty, and your Lordships my knowledge of Sir John Perrot’s behaviour towards her Majesty, and the State in his late government … I humbly crave your Lordship’s pardon, protesting that no other respects in the world stayed me hitherto from informing your Lordship against Sir John Perrot … but the remembrance of that known mislike between us, which made me very unwilling to intermeddle in his causes.’
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More accusations surfaced against Sir John as his enemies sensed that he was now vulnerable. Loftus added to his dossier and reported that Sir John once said to Sir Henry Bagenall, ‘You shall see that shortly I shall pull the Bishop in as small pieces as I would do yonder grass, if I had it between my fingers’, and pointed out of a window. Mathew Smith, who had witnessed the cole staff incident, gave a statement concerning Sir John’s answer to John Kilcarte, a Scot, who brought a letter on his own behalf from the Scottish King, and importuned Sir John for an answer, to whom Sir John said, ‘Thy King! Thy King! What tellest thou me of the King! I will give thee an answer when I will, and as I see cause.’
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In the climate of fear generated by the threat of a Spanish invasion and plans uncovered for Elizabeth I’s assassination, the forged letter focused attention on Sir John and even the Queen may have had her doubts about his temper, if not about his loyalty. Above all, she could not let it be imagined she took such matters lightly. Sir John’s adversaries changed tack; they brought forward testimony from his Irish colleagues and servants that he had frequently spoken rudely and disparagingly of the Council, of the Scottish King and even of the Queen herself. Such a thing was unforgivable and, if true, could not go unpunished. Despite support from Lord Burghley, Sir John was arrested, as were his supporters, ‘for Sir John Perrot’s cause,
viz
. the bishop of Leighlin [a close prisoner in the Fleet, but ‘merry as ever he was’], Sir Nicholas White [in the Marshalsea, and in a depressed state], Philip Williams, Theobald Dillon, Francis Barkeley, Nicholas Halye, Wm Lombard, Thos Clynton, Leonard Walker, John Evans, Walter Androwes, all prisoners, and Sir Edward Moore depending upon bond.’
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After spending a short period under house arrest at Lord Burghley’s London home, Sir John was sent to the Tower of London in March 1591. In April 1592 he was tried for treason before a panel comprising Lord Hunsdon, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert Cecil (Burghley’s son) and others. A note in Burghley’s own hand dated to 15 November, listed the material points against Sir John. Along the margin are the names of those who gave evidence for each article. These ranged from his favouring of Catholics to making contemptuous references to the Queen. He was supposed to have railed against Elizabeth I’s letters when she took him to task or reprimanded him. He allegedly claimed that he failed in his government of Ireland because the Queen would not support him. He also is alleged to have poured scorn on her courage. According to one witness, John Garland, he had called the Queen a ‘base bastard piss-kytching’. Elizabeth I was prepared to forgive a lot, but not anyone who doubted her courage or the strength and authority of her rule.
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The charge of treasonable correspondence was dropped (no one really believed in the Roughan letter), but the charge of speaking disrespectfully about the Queen was upheld, and this was treason. Sir John was now in poor health, having spent over a year in prison. Though he hardly remembered the incidents, he admitted that he might, in the heat of the moment, have said something along the lines of the reported words, but that they were out of context and had been misinterpreted. He was found guilty of treason and returned to the Tower. Even then, he could not control his tongue. He is reputed to have exclaimed as he was led into captivity, ‘God’s death! Will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up a sacrifice to the envy of his frisking adversary?’
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This is probably apocryphal, but it does have the ring of Sir John about it; mentioning his supposed paternity before witnesses and questioning the Queen’s decision when he had just been found guilty of insulting her.

On 23 December 1591, Sir John wrote to Burghley from the Tower. He complained that his memory had become impaired through his lengthy imprisonment and his misery, and the incommodity of the lodging he was in. Even now, however, he could not resist his work, responding presumably to Burghley’s query. He had some comments to make on Mr Fowle’s dealing for a very large charter of incorporation for the town of Athenry. Fowle had suffered expenses in bringing in men for mineral extraction for the benefit of Athenry and should be recompensed with £30 or £40 a year.
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In May, Sir John drew up his will and in June he was brought before the Court for sentence. Found guilty of treason, there was only one punishment – death. It is doubtful that the Queen believed him to be a traitor, and it is possible that she would have pardoned him or allowed him to pay a fine in return for his freedom. His health, however, proved his undoing. In September 1592 he died in the Tower, either from an exacerbated pre-existing medical condition or from the ever-present gaol fever, typhus. Given the sustained attacks by his enemies, and the real possibility that Sir John might be pardoned and released, it was rumoured that he had been poisoned. Sir John technically died destitute since, as a convicted traitor, his lands and possessions had already been seized by the Crown. The suggestion that Elizabeth planned to forgive him is reinforced by the fact that he was not executed immediately and that she allowed his estate to pass intact to his eldest son, Thomas Perrot.

Thomas was the son of Sir John’s first wife, Ann, daughter of Sir Thomas Cheyney. Sir John’s second wife, Jane Pruett, was a widow when they married and she bore Sir John another son, William (who died unmarried) and two daughters, Lettice and Ann. Jane Pruett’s first husband had been Sir Lewis Pollard, Judge of the Common Pleas. By his first wife, Anne Hext, he had had 11 children, 5 sons and 6 daughters – Grace, Elizabeth, Agnes, Thomasin, Philippa and Jane. Mistress Jane Pollard would later marry Sir Hugh Stukeley and was the mother of Thomas Stukeley, another of Henry VIII’s illegitimate sons. Jane’s son William died a bare five years after his father. Lettice married three times, to Roland Lacharn of St Brides, Walter Vaughan of St Brides and Arthur Chichester, Baron Chichester of Belfast and eventually Lord Deputy of Ireland. Ann married John Philips.

Sir John also had a number of natural children. He had a son, James Perrot, by Sybil Jones of Radnorshire, as well as a daughter, Elizabeth, by Elizabeth Hatton. Sir James tried unsuccessfully to claim part of the Perrot estate but he did receive a knighthood in 1603. He was MP for Haverfordwest, a town alderman, Vice Admiral for Pembrokeshire (like his father) and an author – his most famous work was
Meditations and Prayers on the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments
, published in 1630. An unnamed natural daughter of Sir John’s married a gentleman called David Morgan.