| Chapter 1: | The Traditional Story, the Revisionist Story, and the Story |
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including the Isle of Man, in an undivided state; to establish a 1,000-year trust to pay off all of his debts; and, in order to ensure that those outcomes were achieved, to disinherit his younger brother William, whom he knew would shortly be the sixth earl of Derby. (For reasons that remain unclear to this day, William, although beloved by the common people and nobles alike of England, was despised by the leading living members of his own family and their spouses—although there is no reason to believe that his father, biological mother, or stepmother shared these views.)
Then, on 14 April, a Sunday, another witch appeared outside the palace. Her name was Jane. She saw the earl’s major secretary, Golborne (the same man to whom Ferdinando had said he had seen a tall male apparition a few days earlier when they were at Knowsley). She asked him if the earl felt any pain in his lower parts and if his “water had stopped.” At the very moment she asked Golborne this, it was reported (on the same day), the earl lost the ability to urinate.
After much more suffering, Earl Ferdinando summoned Countess Alice to his bedside to say good-bye. He did so with the much-quoted words, “I am resolved presently to die, and take away only one part of my arms, I mean the Eagle’s Wings, so will I fly swiftly into the bosom of Christ my only saviour.”8 (As several historians have observed, this flowery farewell is worthy of the dying hero in a Victorian romance novel.) At around 4:00 p.m., he died.
Elizabeth heard of the death within a day or two. She was inconsolably aggrieved, saying to Sir George Carey (who was, coincidentally, Ferdinando’s brother-in-law) while walking with him in the cool evening that she “thought not any man in the world loved her better than [Ferdinando] did”—“that he was the most honourable, worthiest and absolutely honest man that she had in her life ever known.”9
On 19 April, a Friday, she charged a top-ranking team to investigate the death, as people were starting to gossip all over England, and especially at court, about poison. There was also talk about the likely perpetrators, the feared and despised Jesuits, whom many thought had ordered Ferdinando to be killed, both to revenge Hesketh and also to execute the earl for committing the mortal sin of refusing a crown the pope had,