| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
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When it comes to Ferdinando’s death, Devlin and his followers ended in equivocating mightily. Devlin insinuated that the actual assassins were William and Bartholomew Hickman, one of whom was identical, in his view, to the man who had the fatal letter delivered to Hesketh as he was leaving the White Lion in Islington. He artfully implied at the very end of his essay that these two men rode off northward from the home of their friend Dr. John Dee in Mortlake to commit the murder.15 The Hickman brothers, Devlin indicated, were Burghley agents (like almost everybody else in his story). But Devlin was at pains to say that his main purpose was not, in the end, to accuse anyone in particular of killing Ferdinando (although he had already been at obvious pains to do just that). He even conceded that Ferdinando’s doctors, who, he said, had originally thought that several days of overeating and overexercising had killed the young earl, may have been right after all. (There is no contemporaneous report that the doctors said this, although the government historian John Stow later reported it, and Devlin got it from Stow, whom he otherwise considered to be an unreliable source because he thought he was actually working for Burghley, like everybody else in London. On the contrary, as is now known from Case’s recorded utterance at Ferdinando’s deathbed, their original diagnosis was poison.16) Devlin also conceded, albeit in a bare sentence or two, as noted earlier, that Essex could have been the man who was responsible all along for sending Hesketh and for assassinating Ferdinando.17
What is clear after examining Devlin’s account closely and after reviewing his primary sources is that he wrote only in order to exculpate the Catholics at home and abroad, particularly the Jesuit leadership abroad—a fact he tried to hide with wondrous rhetoric. One of his weapons in achieving this end was to implicate Lord Burghley and the small, secret army that was supposedly working for him toward this end. (As a matter of fact, Burghley did have a small, secret army working for him, but not on this matter.) After having done this work with a vengeance, however, Devlin backpedaled at the end, acknowledging, in a last-minute attempt to seem fair-minded (actually employing feigned vacillation as a rhetorical tool) that he did not really know who