| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
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They could say, in effect, that Ferdinando had been involved in Jesuit treason and that it may have caused his death—most likely at the hands of the Jesuits, who were furious that he had gone back on their agreement and turned in their beloved agent Hesketh, sending him to the gallows.
The logic behind the Jesuit narrative attempts to answer an obvious question: Why would the government leadership, unbeknownst to the Queen, do this? First, these historians have argued, they wanted to ensure that Ferdinando never became king. The leadership did not like him, they did not trust him, and they were terribly afraid that if a powerful territorial earl got the throne, it would lead to renewed civil war—more of their dreaded so-called “Barons’ Wars”(that is, civil war in England with various powerful earls [barons] leading large and strong armies). Second, Devlin implied that he believed a report from the (innocent, in his view) exile leaders Sir William Stanley and Sir Roland York that Burghley had had Ferdinando killed in order that his younger brother William might then become the Derby earl. They knew that Burghley knew that William had no interest in being the king (he was reportedly a “nidicock”— that is, a fool—who would soon be spending all of his time writing stage comedies after having frittered away much of his youth in adventurous foreign travel).13 Also, they believed that Burghley, the Queen’s semiofficial matchmaker, having knocked off Ferdinando, would then marry the new Earl William to his own granddaughter, Elizabeth Vere, the daughter of the earl of Oxford, thus placing his surrogate in what one scholar termed “the power seat of the Stanley-Derby empire.”14 Devlin was arguing after the fact here, knowing that this marriage, which did indeed take place, was solemnized nine months after Ferdinando’s death.Hesketh confessed on 28 November. Devlin thought the confession (which is extant) was forced and untrue, being made only in Hesketh’s hope of getting clemency—or, at the very least, in an effort to protect his wife and children from government reprisal, official or unofficial. On the same day, there was a fast trial, prosecuted by the greatest legal mind of the age, Sir Thomas Egerton. (Devlin believed that Egerton, along with several other eminent Burghley minions, was in on Hesketh’s railroading.) The next day Hesketh was hoisted at Tyburn.