John Bossy's Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair and Charles Nicholls' The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe represent two of the most compelling recent studies of our period. Both use imaginative and painstaking detective work to reveal the conspiratorial underbelly of Elizabethan politics. The following preliminary study explores another aspect of the same murky amoral world. It is equally compelling, with a rich cast of dubious characters and a splendid plot involving espionage, counterfeiting, mistaken identity, betrayal and courtroom drama. The subject is the treason trumped up against Sir John Perrot at the start of the 1590s. The object is not to vindicate Perrot, that much is obvious from a glance at the Calendars of State Papers, but rather to show how he was deliberately and systematically framed and in conclusion to offer some explanation of the mysterious fall of such a staunch supporter of the Elizabethan régime.

Of course it is not for his alleged treason that Perrot is best known. Rather it is for who he may have been – the reputed son of Henry VIII – and for what he did as Lord Deputy of Ireland. Perrot was born in 1527 or 1528 out of wedlock to Mary Berkeley who afterwards married one Thomas Perrot Esq. If he was Henry VIII's son, the king never acknowledged the fact. But Perrot was popularly held to be his son, being large in frame, choleric in temper, tyrannical in government and a lady's man by inclination.