| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
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He made sure that the Queen’s long-term chief advisor, the all-powerful Lord Burghley, heard this news. Implicated with the witches was a servant at the palace, one Robert Doughtie, who had fled the scene and been sighted in London. Carey asked that he be given the power to arrest and interrogate Doughtie. But nobody went after Doughtie.
And nothing more is ever heard about any investigation into the death of the fifth earl of Derby. Amongst Tudor historians, only one, John Stow, the government’s semiofficial chronicler, bought into the murder-by-witchcraft theory—or said he did. The rest, led by the great William Camden, believed that the earl had died of poisoning, and their consensus opinion was that the Jesuits were responsible. Most of the people in England agreed—and they remained, according to several contemporary sources, outraged. By the time James came to the throne in 1603, nine years later, the entire matter had apparently been forgotten.
In the end, nothing even remained of the glorious palace called Lathom Hall. Upon Oliver Cromwell’s victory, the Puritans burned it to the ground in their ascetic fury, and with hammers and anything else they could find at hand, they smashed every decadent, idolatrous “icon” therein—that is to say, everything, with not a wrack left behind.
Revisionist
The second, rivalrous version of the story is that put forth by the Jesuit historians and their followers, starting with the well-known (to scholars) 1962–1963 essay by Christopher Devlin, “The Earl and the Alchemist.” Most influential accounts since that time, Jesuit and non-Jesuit, have depended in whole or in part upon this essay. Their argument can be briefly summarized in one sentence: The Jesuits abroad did not send Hesketh to offer the crown to the Derby earl, and neither the Jesuits abroad nor the Catholics in Lancashire had anything to do with his death.
Rather, Hesketh was coming back on his own to visit his wife Isabel and his large family in Lancashire after having fled England to avoid being jailed for inciting a riot and murdering one Squire Thomas Houghton in the process. Because he was still wanted for the murder and thus could not