Sir John Perrot: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII's Alleged Bastard
Was the enigmatic Elizabethan courtier really the virgin queen's illegitimate half-brother?
In my first Substack article, I retold the story of the Norman castellan Gerald de Windsor and his wife, Princess Nest ferch Rhys, who was abducted from her home at Carew Castle - others claim Cilgerran - by her cousin and lover, Prince Owain ap Cadwgan. On being released from captivity two years later, Nest returned to Carew and resumed her life with Gerald.
According to some, she never left.
Owners of political importance were by no means absent from Carew’s later history. Of particular note was the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Perrot (pictured below), who became the castle’s owner in 1558. According to most history books, Sir John was the son of one Thomas Perrot and his wife Mary Berkeley, famously a mistress of Henry VIII. Though Thomas raised the lad as his own, John was conjectured to have been the king’s bastard.
Born a stone’s throw from Haverfordwest in South Wales between 7 and 11 November 1528, the young John first appeared on the scene when Henry VIII was negotiating his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. On joining the household of William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, Perrot was introduced to the king and was knighted at Edward VI’s coronation. Edward appointed him High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire in 1551 before Perrot impressed Henry II of France when part of the party charged with arranging Edward’s betrothal to the French king’s daughter Elisabeth of Valois. After suffering incarceration in the Fleet under Mary Tudor for sheltering heretics, Elizabeth I entrusted him control of South Wales’s naval defences. In 1570, he reluctantly accepted the new post of Lord President of Munster and faced down the Desmond Rebellions before resigning in July 1573.
Free from the inconvenience of government and aided by his father’s business prowess in Wales, Perrot returned to Carew, aspiring to lead a ‘countryman’s life and keep out of debt’. Over the next five years, he oversaw many improvements at the castle, most notably the north range (above), which housed several domestic rooms, including a Long Gallery. He also rerouted several roads and moved the village to improve the views (below).
An interesting insight into his time there came in May 1577, when Perrot imprisoned one Bernard Jourdain for waylaying a French merchant ship off the Cornish coast in league with an infamous pirate named Hicks. However, rather than mete out justice, Perrot chained the apparent wrecker up in the castle dungeons (the entrance can be seen below) until he received a ransom and a share of the cargo.
Despite his questionable character and temperament, Perrot’s influence at Elizabeth’s court was still to peak. To crown his astounding rise, the queen appointed him Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1584. That Elizabeth should have made such an appointment is intriguing. Even more so is Perrot’s apparently careless remark in response to her change of mood to him in an audience that ‘now she is ready to piss herself for fear of the Spaniard, I am once again one of her white boys’.
Irrespective of Elizabeth’s reasons for appointing him, the arrogant rogue was not without enemies. News of his loose tongue, coupled with the embellishment of his plans for Ireland, culminated with the queen recalling him around the coming of the Spanish Armada and sending him to the Tower of London the following year on charges of treason. On being tried in 1591, he was found guilty despite the lack of definitive evidence. That he spoke further ill of Elizabeth is certain. Nor did he deny at his trial having uttered the words, ‘Stick not so much upon Her Majesty’s letter, she may command what she will, but we will do what we list… Ah, silly woman, now she shall not curb me, she shall not rule me now… God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman, if I had served any prince in Christendom I have not been so dealt withal’. Despite his blatant rudeness, Elizabeth appears to have sympathised with Perrot’s view that the guilty verdict was politically motivated. Further to labelling the jury ‘knaves’, the queen apparently showed unwillingness to sign the death warrant.
As fate had it, Perrot did not die of the axe but from seemingly natural causes, not three months after the verdict was delivered. A short time earlier, the same fate had befallen one of his officers, Sir Thomas Williams, also in the Tower. Incredibly, Williams had not been the first. Also in Perrot’s number was Sir Thomas Fitzherbert, who had been transferred there in January 1591 under strict orders that he remain in solitary confinement. Despite being allowed the freedom of the Tower, he perished three days before Perrot’s funeral. A fourth, Sir Nicholas White, fared little better, dying in 1593. Perrot’s body was interred in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula (below), where it lies to this day, close to the headless remains of Anne Boleyn.
Exactly how this luckless quartet met their respective ends is another enigmatic riddle for which the Tower has become famous. Officially, all succumbed to the same fate as Henry VI – of pure displeasure and melancholy – yet it seems highly suspicious that four seemingly strong and healthy men could all die inside the Tower of broken hearts. Were they murdered? Committed suicide? Succumbed to illness? Sadly, we will never know.
Equally likely to remain a mystery is Perrot’s true origins. Was he really the son of Henry VIII, or was it mere conjecture? Artistic representations certainly imply that he resembled the marriage-loving king in many ways. A handsome man with a muscular, imposing presence, he also shared much of the king’s temperament. During his time in Munster, Perrot authorised more than 800 hangings. He also fathered several illegitimate children and married more than once; however, fortunately, he avoided divorcing or beheading either of them!
Yet, despite seemingly fitting the profile, the suggestion is suspicious. True, Henry VIII’s enjoyment of Mary Berkeley is well known. Equally valid, Henry fathered several children out of wedlock, Henry Fitzroy perhaps the most famous. However, the main gossip in Perrot’s case came courtesy of Sir Robert Naunton, who later married Perrot’s granddaughter, Penelope, and never knew him personally. Naunton recorded in his own words:
on his return to the town after his trial, he said, with oaths and with fury, to the Lieutenant, Sir Owen Hopton, “What! will the Queen suffer her brother to be offered up as a sacrifice to the envy of my flattering adversaries?” Which being made known to the Queen, and somewhat enforced, she refused to sign it, and swore he should not die, for he was an honest and faithful man. And surely, though not altogether to set our rest and faith upon tradition and old reports, as that Sir Thomas Perrot, his father, was a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and in the Court married to a lady of great honour, which are presumptions in some implications; but, if we go a little further and compare his pictures, his qualities, gesture, and voice, with that of the King, which memory retains yet amongst us, they will plead strongly that he was a surreptitious child of the blood royal.
Was Elizabeth I aware of, or at least open to, the possibility that Perrot was her half-brother? While it may explain elements of his rise, no official acknowledgement is known to have occurred. Furthermore, when Perrot was found guilty of treason, eighteen months had passed since Hopton had left his post as Lieutenant of the Tower, which raises questions over in what capacity Hopton overheard Perrot’s downhearted remarks. Incidentally, Sir John was Mary Berkeley’s third child, and Berkeley appears to have been geographically removed from the king at the likely time of conception.
Though Perrot was likely not Henry VIII’s son, a wry thought emerges that if the stories were true and Henry VIII had followed in John of Gaunt’s footsteps and married his mistress, Perrot could have reigned as John II. In that event, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour would never have been queen, and Edward VI and Elizabeth I would never have been born.
The story of the enigmatic Sir John Perrot features in my book, A Hidden History of the Tower of London - England’s Most Notorious Prisoners, published by Pen&Sword History