Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
5 - The fall of Sir John Perrot
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
Summary
John Bossy's Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair and Charles Nicholls' The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe represent two of the most compelling recent studies of our period. Both use imaginative and painstaking detective work to reveal the conspiratorial underbelly of Elizabethan politics. The following preliminary study explores another aspect of the same murky amoral world. It is equally compelling, with a rich cast of dubious characters and a splendid plot involving espionage, counterfeiting, mistaken identity, betrayal and courtroom drama. The subject is the treason trumped up against Sir John Perrot at the start of the 1590s. The object is not to vindicate Perrot, that much is obvious from a glance at the Calendars of State Papers, but rather to show how he was deliberately and systematically framed and in conclusion to offer some explanation of the mysterious fall of such a staunch supporter of the Elizabethan régime.
Of course it is not for his alleged treason that Perrot is best known. Rather it is for who he may have been – the reputed son of Henry VIII – and for what he did as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Perrot was born in 1527 or 1528 out of wedlock to Mary Berkeley who afterwards married one Thomas Perrot Esq. If he was Henry VIII's son, the king never acknowledged the fact. But Perrot was popularly held to be his son, being large in frame, choleric in temper, tyrannical in government and a lady's man by inclination.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Reign of Elizabeth ICourt and Culture in the Last Decade, pp. 109 - 125Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
- 18
- Cited by