PERROTT, Sir James. The History of that Eminent Statesman, Sir John Perrott, Knight of Bath, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Containing I. An account of his descent, birth … II. His travels into France … III. The Rebellion of Fitz-Morris supressed, 1572. IV. The Remarkable Attainder of James, Viscount Baltinglas … V. The manner of Sir John Perrott’s departure from Ireland … VI. His fatal catastrophe; his last will and testament and his death in the Tower.

Edited by Richard Rawlinson. London: Printed in the Year, 1728. pp. [vi], 315, 16. Recent half brown morocco on marbled boards, title in gilt on red morocco label on spine. Inscribed on titlepage ‘by Richard Rawlinson’. A very good copy.
ESTC n008862. Includes a few bibliographical footnotes, and an index.
Sir John Perrot (1527-1592), President of Munster, and Lord-Deputy of Ireland, was probably an illegitimate son of Henry VIII, whom he resembled in stature and appearance. He was a favourite of Edward VI, but being a Protestant suffered under Queen Mary and was imprisoned. In the spring of 1571 he came to Ireland as first President of Munster, with the purpose of quelling the rebellious Geraldines. A day or two afterwards James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald burned the town of Kilmallock. Froude said: “He could never catch Fitzmaurice. The Irish gentlemen would not help him, and the kerne were too swift of foot for the heavy English men-at-arms. Castles, however, could not run away, and castles contained men. After two years of work, he had killed in fighting, or captured or hanged, some 800 miserable creatures of one sort or another. He burnt or blew up every stronghold, large or small, which closed its gates against him”.
In 1583 he was appointed Lord Deputy and his early policy was one of appeasement in Connaught and Ulster. In Cork, Kerry and Limerick the land was mapped out and divided into blocks of 12,000 acres each, to be held on quit rents under the Crown. The chief military success during his government was the defeat of the Mayo Bourkes and their Scottish Clandonnell [McDonnells] Gallowglas at the battle of Ardnaree in September 1586.
Perrott was a man of great physical strength and had “a violent and arbitrary disposition” and at sixty years, came to blows with Sir Nicholas Bagenal on the floor of the Council Chamber. In 1588, after his return to England, he fell into disgrace with Queen Elizabeth and was lodged in the Tower. In 1592 he was brought to trial for that he “did imagine in his heart to deprive, depose, and disinherit the Queen’s most excellent Majesty from the royal seat, to take her life away, to make slaughter in her realm, to raise rebellion in England and Ireland”. To these charges he protested his innocence, was condemned and sentenced to be executed. Reprieved by the Queen (his stepsister), he died in the Tower the following September.
Richard Rawlinson FRS (1690-1755) was an English clergyman and antiquarian collector of books and manuscripts. Rawlinson bequeathed his estate to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This constituted perhaps its biggest benefaction after that of its founder, Sir Thomas White. Rawlinson’s books and manuscripts left to the Bodleian Library form one of its richest collections, he was the founder of the university’s Anglo-Saxon professorship (known as the Rawlinson Professorship until 1916 when it was renamed the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship) and held by a long line of illustrious philologists and scholars of Old English, including J.R.R. Tolkien.

[LIBC IA]