9 September: Richard Hesketh lands at Sandwich in Kent, having sailed from Hamburg. Apparently, he has been exonerated by someone on the Privy Council of any blame in the murder that caused his exile. He walks to Canterbury where, at the Bell Inn, he meets a young soldier named Trumpeter Richard Baylie, whom he takes on as a servant. Together, they travel to Rochester, then to Gravesend, London and Hampstead.
16 September: They stay at the White Lion, Islington. As they are leaving, a boy named John Waterworth hands Hesketh a letter ‘from one Mr Ickman (or Hickman) to take to the Earl of Derby’.
20 September: Bartholomew Ickman (like Kelley, a former ‘scryer’ to Dee) visits Dr Dee at his home in Mortlake.
22 September: Hesketh and Baylie arrive at Over Darwen. They stay there with Hesketh’s wife, Isabel, for two days before travelling south again to Lathom House in Lancashire, home of the Derby dynasty.
25 September: Hesketh arrives at Lathom House in Lancashire, the palatial home of Lord Strange, and hands him a letter urging him to snatch the crown of England for Catholicism – as well as supposedly threatening him with a wretched death if he reveals their plan. Though Hesketh says he picked up the letter in Islington, the letter is later claimed by prosecutors to be from the exiled Cardinal William Allen, head of the Catholic resistance to Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. Hesketh had intended returning to his wife, but Lord Strange – who succeeds this very day to the title Earl of Derby on the death of his father – urges Hesketh to stay over Michaelmas. Hesketh seems flattered by the attention and agrees to accompany the earl to court.
2 October: On the way to court, Hesketh stops at Brereton in Cheshire. From there, he writes to his wife, Isabel, and to his brother, Thomas, a fiercely anti-Catholic lawyer. The letters are carried by Trumpeter Baylie.
9 October: Lord Strange, the new Earl of Derby, reports directly to the Queen at Windsor and shows her the treasonable letter brought by Hesketh, who is immediately arrested.
15 October: William Wade, clerk to the Privy Council, begins Hesketh’s interrogation.
4 November: Hesketh, weeping and wailing, confesses to treason, though he maintains he was an innocent dupe in the matter and did not know the contents of the letter. Lord Strange, the fifth Earl of Derby, is excluded from the proceedings by the Cecils and their allies. No witnesses are called at the trial.
29 November: Hesketh is drawn on a hurdle to the scaffold at St Albans, where he is hanged, quartered and beheaded.
Christmas: It is a very different festive season to the one enjoyed by the earl two years earlier. Now he stays away from court, alarmed by malicious rumours circulating about him. Hesketh’s brother, the Protestant lawyer Thomas Hesketh, is known to be among those slandering him, trying to further the cause of the Duchy of Lancaster and undermine the power of the earl in the North.
27 December: Lord Burghley refuses to give the Chamberlainship of Chester to the Earl of Derby, a position that should have been the earl’s by right. Instead it is given to Sir Thomas Egerton. On top of that, the earl’s old friend, the Earl of Essex, has turned against him and is luring away his retainers. These snubs confirm what the earl and his wife, Alice, most fear: that they are ‘crossed in court and crossed in his country’.
1594
23 March: At Mortlake, Dr Dee gives a horse to Bartholomew Ickman, his former ‘scryer’ and near-neighbour. Ickman heads north.
5 Apriclass="underline" The Earl of Derby – Ferdinando, Lord Strange as was – becomes violently ill after a day’s hunting. The next day he begins to vomit blood.
The Strange Tale of Alice and Thomas
There is a curious postscript to the mysterious illness of the fifth Earl of Derby. Six years after the events described in this book (much of it true, though, of course, fictionalised), the humbly born man who investigated the affair went on to marry the earl’s aristocratic widow.
That investigator was Sir Thomas Egerton, bastard son of a Cheshire landowner. The widow was Alice, dowager Countess of Derby, née Alice Spencer of Althorp.
At one time, early in his career, Egerton had been a mere aide to the family of Lord Derby, dependent upon their largesse. But by 1594 he had risen to become one of the greatest lawyers in the land, a former attorney-general and newly appointed Master of the Rolls.
So when he arrived at Lathom House in Lancashire to investigate the devastating illness that had laid low the Earl of Derby, his relationship with the family was very different.
By now, Egerton, a convert from Catholicism, had a reputation as a fervent Protestant, an implacable prosecutor of Catholic priests and those who harboured them. He had taken a leading – and uncompromising – role in bringing Edmund Campion, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington plotters to their deaths on the scaffold.
He was responsible for ordering prisoners to be tortured and was close to the Queen’s despised priest-hunter, the cruel and relentless Richard Topcliffe.
And so his eventual marriage at the age of sixty to the cultured, beautiful Alice (a patron of the arts and the widow of a man who sponsored the early theatrical endeavours of William Shakespeare, among others) seems something of a mismatch – which is just as it turned out.
Yet it was Egerton who suffered the most. If he had hoped his marriage would bring him the aristocratic lustre he so desired, he was to discover only misery, for the haughty Alice – twenty years his junior – despised him and treated him with disdain.
She became one of the great hostesses of the court, a favourite of Elizabeth, performing in masques, and supporting playwrights and poets including Edmund Spenser and the young John Milton. Yet she had a cutting way with words and proved avaricious and careless with money, spending their great wealth with impunity, which displeased the frugal Egerton.
In the latter years of his life, Egerton (by now Lord Chancellor) confided in his son John that the marriage had brought him nothing but despair and he spewed out his venomous feelings towards his wife, accusing her of having ‘a bitter tongue’. He wrote to his son: ‘I thank God I never desired a long life, nor ever had cause to desire it since this, my last marriage, for before I was never acquainted with such tempests and storms.’
Fort El Léon: The Aftermath
The cruelty of war is aptly demonstrated by the aftermath of the battle for Fort El Léon near Brest in Brittany on 7 November 1594.
After five hours of bloodshed, only half a dozen of the four hundred Spanish defenders were found alive, hiding in the rocks of the cliff beneath the fort. The English commander, Sir John Norreys, spared them and sent them back to the main Spanish army of General Juan del Águila.
Instead of being welcomed, however, they were hanged for cowardice.
Another casualty was Martin Frobisher, the commander of the English fleet and hero of the English assault. He had personally led his marines into the fort’s breach and had been shot in the hip. The wound in itself was not life-threatening, but the surgeon who removed the bullet left wadding in the wound and the subsequent infection led to gangrene, which killed Frobisher on his return to England.
Vagabonds in the Sixteenth Century
The word ‘vagabond’ conjures up an image of romance and freedom on the open road, but the life of such people in the sixteenth century was anything but romantic.
They were the dispossessed of the age. They had no land, no welfare and were driven on from town to town. When apprehended, they could face the whip, mutilation or death by hanging.