| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
exiles and the Queen in this matter did not, to put it mildly, lead to any possibility of agreement between the two. The Queen had the legal right to name her own successor, needing only to provide a credible bloodline claim, and she guarded this right fiercely. In contrast, the Catholics abroad (just like their counterparts in England) felt they were ruled by a papal decree which amounted to a virtual “hit order” upon Elizabeth, as she was, in the view of Rome, sitting upon her throne in defiance of God. The Catholics believed that God’s will was that the English monarch must be Catholic, as such monarchs had always been before Elizabeth’s own father, King Henry VIII, took over the English church and established it as such—the Church of England. To put things only a little differently, the leading Catholic exiles considered it their primary sacred duty to place a Catholic upon the English throne as soon as possible—a duty which, in their perfectly logical conclusion, mandated assassination. They viewed such action as urgent, too, because the Queen was old, sickly, and thought to be near the end—whereas she actually outlived Earl Ferdinando Stanley by nine years, ruling strongly in those years and cheating death until 1603. There were some tender-hearted Catholic leaders who felt that she might be captured and imprisoned for the rest of her life, but the experienced players on both sides knew that this was so unworkable a solution as to be laughable.
The Catholic exiles, in the view of mainstream historians (although this view is denied by most Catholic historians), thus launched a series of plots against the Queen’s life. The plot to kill her and then put the earl of Derby on the throne in her place, launched early in 1593, was the chief of these—and it is the best remembered today. It has always been known as the “Hesketh Plot,” as the agent who was chosen to travel from the continent up to Lancashire to sound out the earl was one Richard Hesketh, a native of the shire who had gone abroad (for debated reasons) two or three years earlier. Again according to the standard story, these high-up “senders-on,” as one spy later termed them, were Sir William Stanley and Father Thomas Worthington, probably in close collaboration with Cardinal William Allen, Father Robert Parsons, Father Hugh Owen, and Father William Holt.1 Reliable English intelligence also reported that