| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
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obtain a legal passport through ordinary means (according to these historians’ accounts), he was surreptitiously pardoned by the government and then supplied with a passport by Lord Burghley or one of his high-placed minions. Burghley had heard from his own spies abroad that Hesketh was homesick and wanted to return to England as soon as possible. Knowing that Hesketh would have to visit the earl in order to present his passport upon arriving home in Lancashire, Burghley sensed a rare opportunity to get some much-desired information about the intentions of the Derby earl about the succession. He decided to create a forged letter from Sir William Stanley (a close kinsman of both Ferdinando and his father who had entrusted his two sons to their care owing to his absence from the country due to treason) and Dr. Thomas Worthington, perhaps also “signed” by Cardinal Allen, and to send that letter to the earl via the “innocent courier” Hesketh. This, Devlin said, was the typical Burghley method of creating spies and other secret agents. After landing in England on 9 September 1593, Hesketh lodged in a Canterbury inn, the Bell, where he met William Baylie (an “innocent lad,” Devlin described him) and hired him to be his man. The two traveled toward Lancashire, stopping over at the White Lion, an inn at Islington.
Then, on the morning of 16 September, while the two men were leaving the inn, a crucial event happened. A boy named Waterworth, who was in service at the inn, handed Hesketh a sealed letter addressed to the Earl of Derby. He said the letter was given to him by one Mr. Hickman (identified by Devlin as William Hickman), who had asked the boy to deliver it to Hesketh, whom he had heard was on his way to Lancashire. Hesketh could deliver the letter to the earl when he presented the earl with his passport—a formality the letter’s initial deliverers knew that Hesketh must observe by law. Hesketh, without thinking twice, agreed. The envelope contained the forged letter, supposed to be from the Catholic leaders abroad, offering the earl the crown. But Devlin and his followers believed that this letter was actually from Lord Burghley (or, just barely possibly, from the Earl of Essex, who will enter this story prominently later). They believed that the letter was part of an elaborate scheme to test the earl’s loyalty. If he declined the offer, they would