A pivotal figure in both Pembrokeshire and Westminster politics, Perrot has attracted admiration and revulsion in equal measure. His earliest biographer, the puritan Daniel Morrice, described him as ‘very zealous for the common interest of religion and the kingdom’, whereas the modern historian of early Stuart Wales considers him to have been a religious bigot, who showed ‘total unconcern for spiritual sensitivities other than his own’. Whichever view one takes, it is hard to disagree with G.D. Owen’s assessment that Perrot was as ‘an exceptional man’ who ‘deserves to be counted ... in the second rank’ of early seventeenth-century Commons’ Members.
I. Early Life
Perrot’s family was settled in Pembrokeshire by the end of the thirteenth century, but falsely claimed to have been resident there much earlier.
Perrot was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford in July 1586. His fellow students included Nicholas Adams† of Peterchurch, in Pembrokeshire, who was later to act as one of his trustees. Although Perrot did not graduate he received a thorough university education, for he later boasted in print an impressive grounding in the Classics and Greek philosophy.
In the midst of these disputes, Perrot turned to Essex, whose favour he had enjoyed since his father’s death.
As well as Essex, Perrot lobbied the queen’s first minister, Robert Cecil†, after whom he apparently named his first-born daughter.
Perrot’s South Wales estates eventually comprised more than 3,100 acres,
II. The First Jacobean Parliament
Perrot served as an esquire of the body at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in April 1603,
During the long interval between the first and second sessions, Perrot became restive. In the summer of 1605 he offered to serve the king in Ireland, where his brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Chichester, had recently been appointed lord deputy. Indeed, he suggested that the office of ‘cess-master’ be created especially for him.
Questions of religion did not entirely dominate Perrot’s parliamentary agenda. On 11 Mar. he participated in the debate on purveyance and supply, in which he expressed sympathy for the Crown’s financial difficulties. Reminding the House that the king had inherited a debt of £400,000, and that the Crown’s annual expenses exceeded its income, he approved of the proposal to increase royal revenues by draining the fens, but considered that the king’s wants should be linked to the redress of grievances.
Following the end of the session, Perrot unsuccessfully renewed his efforts to secure an Irish posting.
Perrot took no recorded part in the Union debates of the third session. Indeed, he was mentioned in connection with the Union only once, on 24 Nov., when he was instructed to attend the joint conference with the Lords the following day.
Following the prorogation of July 1607, Perrot returned to Pembrokeshire, whence he travelled to Ireland. In June 1608 he was instructed by his brother-in-law, lord deputy Chichester, to escort to London the Irish peer Robert, 4th Lord Delvin, who was suspected of treason. On the safe delivery of his captive he returned to Ireland, where he was rewarded for his conveyance of Delvin by being appointed to the command of a company of foot. He was also made a gentleman pensioner.
Perrot made little recorded impact on the fourth session, which was dominated by discussion of the proposed Great Contract. His chief preoccupation remained religion rather than the king’s finances, for five of the nine committees to which he was named, either in person or as a member of the privileges’ committee, were on religious matters.
III. The Addled Parliament
Perrot may not have troubled to return to Westminster for the final session of the Parliament; certainly there is no mention of him in the scanty records of its proceedings. Following the dissolution, he became deputy vice admiral for Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire to William Herbert, 3rd earl of Pembroke, a substantial landowner in South Wales and a leading privy councillor, whose Protestant commitment was as strong as Perrot’s. The office proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Years later Perrot would complain that the execution of several Admiralty commissions had caused him to spend £6 more than he had received, ‘which is all the gains that I have hitherto made by this office’. Were it not for his loyalty to Pembroke, he would willingly have surrendered his place ‘to those that court it more’.
The summoning of a fresh Parliament early in 1614 saw Perrot returned once again to Westminster as Member for Haverfordwest. The 1614 Parliament owed its existence in no small measure to Perrot’s new patron, the earl of Pembroke who, along with Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk, had argued that only a Parliament could furnish the king with the supply he so badly needed. In order to achieve a harmonious Parliament, Pembroke and Suffolk persuaded the king to offer the Commons various grace bills, which had first been laid before the House in 1610.
After the Easter recess, however, Perrot found it increasingly difficult to stand aloof from the controversy surrounding impositions. On 25 May he moved to absolve his fellow puritan Thomas Wentworth I from the charge of having spoken ill of the king in the House four days earlier. On that occasion Wentworth had appeared to imply that James would meet the same violent end as Henri IV if he continued to impose. The House agreed that Wentworth was innocent of any wrongdoing, and immediately cleared him ‘by general acclamation’. Perrot then turned his attention to a speech which he regarded as far more offensive than anything uttered by Wentworth. Its author, Bishop Neile, represented an entirely different strand of belief within the Anglican Church from Perrot, and as such was probably already regarded by the latter with deep suspicion. Neile had reportedly told the Upper House that whosoever questioned the king’s right to impose was guilty of breaking the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and that if the Lords conferred with the Commons on impositions they would hear nothing but sedition. Like many of his parliamentary colleagues, Perrot was angry that the Commons had been thus maligned. He initially favoured seeking redress from the Lords,
Through his defence of Thomas Wentworth and his attack on Bishop Neile, Perrot had obliquely entered into the debate on impositions, but so far he had refrained from questioning either the king’s right to impose, presumably out of deference to Pembroke’s wishes. However, he dramatically broke his silence on 3 June, after the king threatened to dissolve Parliament unless the House immediately proceeded to treat of supply. Perrot was so incensed at this ultimatum that he launched into an astonishing attack on James’s management of the royal finances. After commenting that he would willingly help pay off the king’s debts provided that ‘the like not be [sic] shortly required again’, he declared that impositions were only needed because James squandered £70,000 each year on lavish Court pensions. Unless royal overspending was curbed it was pointless to vote subsidies. An investigation of the royal finances by a committee of the House was therefore an essential precondition for any future grant of supply.
During the 1614 Parliament Perrot, a member of the prestigious committee for privileges,
IV. The Parliament of 1621 and Service in Ireland, 1622-3
In the years immediately following the dissolution of June 1614 Perrot turned his thoughts once more to Ireland. On learning that the king intended to reduce his expenses and increase his Irish revenue, Perrot wrote in November 1615 to Secretary Winwood suggesting the establishment of a commission to investigate by what right the ecclesiastical livings and dignities of Ireland were held, as he suspected that money which rightly belonged to the king was being detained in private hands.
how it came to pass that Queen Elizabeth, a princess of so great fame, power and magnanimity, who contested with the greatest kings of Christendom, aided her neighbours and allies ... should yet be so long encumbered and so much infested with these, her rebellious subjects of Ireland, that all her other foreign enemies and home-bred conspirators were never able in all her reign half so much to annoy her State, destroy her subjects, or to consume her treasure as did these mean (and in comparison of other nations) contemptible rebellious subjects of Ireland.
By shedding light on this problem he hoped to demonstrate ‘how by other men’s precedents we may avoid their perils’.
Perrot was re-elected to Parliament for Haverfordwest in December 1620. On 5 Feb. 1621, the first full day of Commons’ business, he was reappointed to the committee for privileges. Then, desiring ‘that this Parliament may have a religious beginning’ and to know ‘the faith of those in the House’, he proposed a Members’ communion. The House agreed to this request, and appointed Perrot and three others to assist at the forthcoming service. Subsequently (27 Feb.), he reported from this small committee the money raised at the collection, which he was ordered to distribute as he saw fit.
Early in the Parliament Perrot gave vent to his virulently anti-Catholic feelings. On 7 Feb. he complained to the committee for religion that the recusancy laws were not being implemented; that recusants were allowed to resort to priests; that popish books continued to be printed ‘even in the High Commission prison where there is continual resort to mass’; that English children were being sent abroad only to return as Jesuits and seminary priests; and that the Catholic clergy in England were well organized, being headed by an arch-priest, four principals and 16 assistants. In addition, the lands of recusants were so under-valued that church absentees escaped with trifling fines. The Church itself was too weak to combat the threat of popery, as widespread pluralism and non-residence meant that many were not being taught the basic tenets of Protestantism. Through a combination of ‘permission in us’ and ‘practice in them’, the kingdom was gradually being overrun by popery.
Many in the House undoubtedly shared Perrot’s belief that domestic Protestantism was under siege. Like him they were keen to uphold existing laws, such as those governing the observation of fasts,
Among the faults outlined by Perrot on 7 Feb. was the low yield of the recusancy fines. He returned to this theme ten days later, when he alleged that the king should be receiving £40,000 annually from this source rather than the £6,000 which he actually obtained. Under Elizabeth, when there had been four times fewer recusants than now, the fines had been worth £18,000 p.a. A select committee was therefore needed to establish the true value of recusants’ estates.
One reason why Perrot persisted in pursuing Spiller so vigorously was that he saw in the recusancy fines a means to halt the spread of popery. If some of the fines were used to educate the children of recusants, as a bill debated before the House on 4 May proposed, and if these same children were prevented from travelling abroad to be educated, the kingdom’s Catholic population would, he believed, shrink dramatically. Indeed, he claimed that a former pope had thanked God that Parliament had never enacted such legislation, for then ‘there had not been a papist left in England by this time’.
During the Parliament, Perrot emerged as an energetic spokesman for his native Wales. It was he who proposed that the Welsh cloth bill be committed on 2 Mar., and when this measure received its third reading on 24 Apr. he defended it from Sir Richard Newport’s accusation that it ‘procureth forestalling’. On 7 Mar. Perrot seconded (Sir) Thomas Trevor’s request that Wales should not be charged with subsidies until it had finished paying those voted in 1610, and on 26 Mar. he defended the Welsh butter bill after the Bristol Member John Guy endeavoured to widen its provisions to include the whole of England. Perrot was naturally perfectly happy to support legislation that was restricted to Wales, but he was far from pleased when the boot was on the other foot, for on 19 Apr., when the bill to prevent the return of insufficient jurors in England was debated, he argued for the inclusion of Wales.
If English interests were not always synonymous with those of Wales, Irish interests were often incompatible with both. Nowhere was this more starkly illustrated than in the Irish cattle bill, which aimed to prohibit the import of Irish beef. When this measure was reported on 18 May, Serjeant Davies objected that Ireland could not subsist if it was passed. Perrot, however, like many English and Welsh Members, was an enthusiastic supporter of the bill, and countered Davies by arguing that if Irish cattle imports continued, English and Welsh landowners would be compelled to lower their rents in order to compete. Although he denied wishing to inflict any harm on the Irish economy, he was unprepared to benefit Ireland at the expense of England and Wales. Besides, Ireland need not suffer from a ban, for if its farmers exported their beef to Spain instead, in barrels, it ‘would bring them £46,000 per annum, besides their pipestaves, tallow, hides and other commodities’.
Perrot took no visible part in the parliamentary attack on lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*). He nonetheless approved of the House’s investigation, for when on 19 Mar. the king notified the Commons that he would issue a commission to examine the witnesses against Bacon, Perrot not only described the royal message as ‘most cordial to us’, but requested that the Commons communicate its thanks to James, which was agreed.
The patents in which Perrot demonstrated the keenest interest were those concerned with lighthouses. This was not altogether surprising, as he remained a deputy vice admiral. In 1615 Sir Edward Howard I* had procured letters patent permitting him to erect a lighthouse at Dungeness and to exact a levy for doing so; a short while later, two other projectors, Sir John Meldrum and Sir William Erskine, had obtained similar authorization in respect of Winterton, on the Norfolk coast. Both patents infringed the monopoly on lighthouse construction which had been enjoyed since 1566 by the Trinity House of Deptford, and therefore a bill was laid before the Commons which aimed to restore the latter’s privileges.
As a zealous Protestant Perrot was naturally keen to aid the Palsgrave, even if he was unwilling that his native Wales should be burdened with subsidies before those granted in 1610 had been collected. On 27 Apr. he reminded the House that many counties, including his own, had still not paid in the money they had voluntarily raised for the Palatinate. His suggestion that a committee be appointed to investigate was not taken up as it was revealed that the Privy Council already had the matter in hand. Perrot remained dissatisfied, however, and on 2 June he seconded Sir Thomas Roe, who called upon the House to order that the Benevolence money be paid into the Exchequer.
It was on the final day of the sitting (4 June) that Perrot gave full expression to his views on the Palatinate, when he called upon the House to make a public declaration of its future intentions. He began by reminding his listeners that the king had set them an example, by promising to spend his own life and that of his son in the defence of the Palatinate. It was entirely appropriate that the House should follow his lead, he said, not least because ‘religion is shaked everywhere’, for ‘if it decrease not fearfully at home, ‘tis near to withering and ruin abroad’. For this reason, the House should declare that, if the elector had not been restored to his possessions by the time Parliament reconvened, its Members ‘would be ready to adventure the lives and estates of all that belong unto us, or wherein we have interest, for the maintenance of the cause of God, and of His Majesty’s royal issue’. Such a declaration would, he asserted, strengthen the bargaining position of the king’s special ambassador to the emperor, Sir John Digby*, and if set down in the clerk’s Journal it would have the effect of obliging the entire House ‘to the performance of this promise’. The effect of this speech on the assembled gathering was electric. Before Perrot spoke, many Members, including Perrot himself, had felt despondent that the forthcoming adjournment would leave them with insufficient time to complete the passage of various important bills, but now the atmosphere of gloom which had pervaded the Commons was lifted. A joyful Sir Edward Cecil remarked that ‘this declaration is come from Heaven’, and would do more good ‘than if we had 10,000 soldiers on the march’, while an equally pleased Sir Nathaniel Rich said that it would ‘show to the world that we are not insensible of the sufferance of those of our religion, nor of the wrong done to the count palatine’. Both men spoke for the entire gathering. Members cheered and waved their hats in ‘a visible testimony of their unanimous consent’, a gesture which, as Edward Nicholas recorded, ‘had scarce ever been seen in Parliament’. It was immediately resolved that a declaration along the lines suggested by Perrot should be drafted.
Soon after Parliament reassembled in November, Perrot defended the bill to allow magistrates to punish scandalous ministers after it was opposed at second reading by Sir Dudley Digges. A servant of Archbishop Abbot, Digges denied that the measure was needed as inadequate clergy were already subject to the authority of the Court of High Commission. Perrot, however, was far from persuaded by this argument. ‘If the gentleman that spake last lived where I lived’, he observed (23 Nov.), ‘I think he would be of another mind’, for in Pembrokeshire there were many scandalous ministers who remained unpunished.
It is scarcely surprising that Perrot’s speech did not elicit same enthusiasm as his earlier address of 4 June. Few Members would have taken kindly to being told how they should spend their own money, while the prospect of a more realistic rating system horrified Sir George More, who condemned Perrot for suggesting it.
Over the next few days Perrot fanned the flames of anti-Catholicism, returning to the issues which he had first brought to the attention of the House nine months earlier. On the 28th he regaled the House with the story of how a youth committed to his charge by an anxious father had been secretly stolen from him by papists, ‘and in one month was made a papist, and so continueth’. Those who wished to prevent the seduction of Protestants by papists should seek to punish those who published popish books or sent youths abroad to be educated, and consequently he urged the House to petition the king for a Proclamation.
Perrot never dared to blame James openly for the resurgence of English Catholicism, but in his persistent calls for the proper enforcement of the penal laws, and in his attitude to the Spanish marriage negotiations, this thought clearly lay at the back of his mind. The prospect of a Spanish bride for Prince Charles horrified Perrot, who declared on 3 Dec. that James should be petitioned to prevent it. When Sir Edward Sackville cautioned against making such a request on the grounds that ‘it is the privilege of princes to marry where they list’, Perrot remarked that the perils of mixed marriages were great ‘even in private families ... much more among princes’. Besides, James had promised to match his son ‘for the glory of God, his church and the realm’, and if he then proceeded to marry his son to a Catholic it was impossible to see how this promise could be kept.
Soon afterwards the Parliament broke up. Before the end of the year, Perrot’s name was included on a short-list drawn up by lord treasurer Cranfield of those most suitable to serve on a commission shortly to be established for inquiring into the ecclesiastical and temporal affairs of Ireland. This appointment was presumably intended as a punishment for Perrot’s forthright criticism of the Spanish Match, but Perrot may have actually welcomed the opportunity to serve on the Irish commission, a body whose brief appeared to offer him an opportunity to help reshape the affairs of a country for which he felt the deepest passion, and he may even have volunteered his services.
V. The Parliament of 1624
After the Irish commission was wound up, Perrot returned to his estates at Haroldston. In September 1623 he again complained of the onerous nature of his duties as deputy vice admiral, having been forced to assume the functions of the local Admiralty Court judge, there being no-one else to supply the place.
On hearing that there was to be a fresh Parliament, Perrot sought election for Pembrokeshire rather than Haverfordwest, the borough which he had previously represented. The reason he decided to seek the county seat is unclear. He may have felt that it was high time that his parliamentary status more accurately reflected his standing within his native county, but it may also be that he was concerned that, as mayor of Haverfordwest, his right to represent that borough in Parliament would be questioned. Both in 1614 and 1621 he had witnessed the expulsion from the Commons of mayors who had returned themselves (Robert Berry and Richard Foxton). He may have concluded, correctly, that by sitting elsewhere he would avoid censure, as he could not then be accused of having returned himself. However, by transferring his attentions to the county seat Perrot encountered opposition from John Wogan of Wiston, who had represented Pembrokeshire in the previous two parliaments. Although he triumphed over Wogan, it seems likely that he only did so by suborning the sheriff, Sir John Stepneth, at whose house at Prendergast the election was held rather than at its customary location of Haverfordwest. Wogan subsequently complained to the Commons, but his petition was not submitted within the time allowed for such protests to be entered and it was therefore dismissed.
Perrot had taken his seat by 23 Feb., when he commended to the House the veteran Sabbath bill, which was given a first reading.
Perrot’s commendation of the Sabbath bill, and his motion for a Members’ communion, set the tone for his involvement in the 1624 Parliament, for he took little interest in matters that had no bearing on religion. Like most other Members, Perrot regarded religion and foreign policy as inextricably intertwined, and thus the need to achieve security for religion at home and the need to make war on Spain were merely two sides of the same coin. He had made this perfectly clear in 1621, when he had argued that no consideration could be given to a Spanish war until the Protestant religion had been safely secured at home. In 1624 he reiterated that point, for when on 11 Mar. Rudyard proposed a preliminary vote of supply and the establishment of a committee of both Houses to act as a Council of War, Perrot replied that, before either of these things could be done, the Jesuits should be expelled and a committee appointed to consider the state of the king and kingdom.
Perrot was just as keen to have popishly inclined officials removed from their posts as he was about petitioning to have the recusancy laws enforced. Indeed, on 27 Apr. he was named to help examine the certificates supplied by the knights of each shire that identified both recusant officeholders and those officeholders who were married to recusants. Moreover, on 12 May he singled out for special criticism Lord Scrope, lord president of the Council in the North, for having allegedly attended communion only once in the last five years. Nonetheless, for Perrot the issue of recusant officeholders was peculiarly sensitive, for on 27 Apr. he was forced to reveal to the House that his own wife was a recusant.
Shortly after he revealed that his wife was a papist, Perrot was, perhaps somewhat mischievously, named to the committee for the bill to levy more quickly the fines payable by recusant wives (1 May).
Although largely preoccupied with the state of religion at home, Perrot did not ignore the growing clamour for war with Spain. On 4 Mar. he proposed that when the House came to inform the Lords of its reasons for breaking off the Spanish marriage negotiations, it should in the first instance do so orally rather than in writing, as the Lords might well have considered arguments which the Commons had not. This motion was generally ‘well liked’, although (Sir) Heneage Finch persuaded the House to make an exception for Prince Charles, who was to receive written reasons ‘for his satisfaction’.
His enthusiasm for a Spanish war probably explains Perrot’s involvement in the parliamentary attack on lord keeper Williams who, as a strongly Calvinist bishop, might otherwise have merited Perrot’s support. In declaring that he was opposed to a war, Williams had laid himself open to criticism in the Commons for alleged corruption. The case which attracted Perrot’s attention concerned Lady Grace Darcy, who had been denied the right of presentation to a church in Surrey of which she was the patron by Williams. On complaining to Chancery, Lady Darcy had been prevented from pursuing her case by a cursitor, who informed her that he was acting under instructions from Williams. During a debate held in grand committee on 21 Apr., Perrot expressed outrage at Williams’ behaviour, describing it as ‘an obstruction of the law and a denying of the right of the subject’. Three weeks later, on 7 May, he not only argued that Williams had wrongly stayed justice in his own cause, but claimed that the case was not an isolated incident as two other petitions had been received by the committee against the lord keeper. These, he suggested, should be considered alongside Lady Darcy’s complaint. Shortly afterwards a bill to install Lady Darcy’s candidate was given two readings. Perrot was not only named to the committee but attended both of its meetings.
Perrot’s campaign against Williams contrasts sharply with his attitude towards lord treasurer Middlesex (Sir Lionel Cranfield) who, like Williams was opposed to a Spanish war. Astonishingly, Perrot played no part in Middlesex’s impeachment other than to suggest, on 5 Apr., that the lord treasurer should be permitted to have a copy of a note of his alleged misdemeanours. The most likely explanation for Perrot’s silence probably lies in the fact that one of his relatives, Richard Perrot, was one of Middlesex’s employees. The brother of Robert Perrot of Moreton-on-Lugg,
VI. The Parliaments of 1625 and 1626
Perrot hoped and expected to be returned to the first Caroline Parliament. Having defeated John Wogan for the county seat in 1624, he naturally supposed that he might do so again in 1625, but he had not counted on the ruthlessness of his rival, who was determined to avenge his earlier humiliation. During the election campaign, rumours were spread that Perrot had died, and those who knew this to be untrue were threatened with impressment by Wogan who, like Perrot was a Pembrokeshire deputy lieutenant. Some who tried to make their way to the hustings anyway to vote for Perrot were hindered from doing so, while others were beaten up. As a result of this concerted campaign of intimidation, Wogan got himself returned, leaving Perrot without a seat. Perrot was so despondent at this setback that at the end of May he obtained a licence to travel abroad for three years.
By the time that a fresh Parliament was summoned Perrot had resolved to revive his former parliamentary interest at Haverfordwest. However, the borough seat was now no longer his for the taking, for in 1625 it had been occupied by his local rival and arch-enemy, the crypto-Catholic Sir Thomas Canon. The enmity between the two men stretched back almost 30 years: during the later 1590s Canon had sided with the countess of Northumberland in her attempts to acquire the lands of her late husband, Sir Thomas Perrot, while in 1605 Perrot had tried unsuccessfully to implicate Canon in the Gunpowder Plot.
For a second time Perrot found himself without a seat. This was a bitter pill to swallow, and Perrot initially contemplated seeking reappointment as governor of Newry, the position he had held 16 years earlier. However, as the result of a sudden turn of events Perrot once again found himself with a seat in the Commons. On 24 Mar. a burgess-ship at the Cornish borough of Camelford fell vacant after it was ruled that the previously chosen Member, Sir Thomas Monck, was incapable of sitting. It seems likely that it was Perrot who filled the place - certainly he was a Member of the Commons by 17 Apr. - and that he was nominated by his old patron the earl of Pembroke, who may have hoped that he would join the parliamentary attack on the king’s favourite, the duke of Buckingham. Perrot, however, showed no inclination to criticize Buckingham.
VII. The Parliament of 1628-9
Sometime during 1626 Perrot published The Government of Ireland under Sir John Perrot, 1584-8, which he himself had written.
At the general election of 1628, Perrot was returned for Haverfordwest, but it is not known whether he contested the seat with Sir Thomas Canon, who found a place at Haslemere instead. Perrot’s long parliamentary service was acknowledged soon after the Commons assembled by his appointment to the committee for privileges (20 Mar.), of which he had last been a member in 1624.
As in every previous Parliament of which he had been a member since 1604, religious issues dominated Perrot’s agenda. Inevitably, he found himself revisiting themes he had raised in the chamber many times before, such as the failure to prosecute recusants; the need to permit magistrates to punish scandalous ministers and prevent children from being educated abroad as Catholics; a bill to amend the Sabbath Act of 1625; and the undesirability of clerical subscription.
Although religion clearly dominated his thinking in 1628, Perrot was not oblivious to other important matters. Speaking during the subsidy debate of 4 Apr., he agreed that Parliament should ‘give speedily’, but suggested that satisfaction should be sought concerning the king’s message of the previous day, in which Charles had requested a vote of supply ‘without any condition’. Perrot was unhappy that the Commons was being asked to vote money without specifying its purpose, for ‘suppose there be alliance made with the Turk?’ His listeners were reminded that in 1624 Charles’s father had accepted a Subsidy Act hedged about with limitations. It was therefore not unreasonable to require that money now voted should be spent exclusively on aiding the Danes and the king and queen of Bohemia.
Perrot exercised no such restraint in his criticism of bishops Richard Montagu and William Laud during the 1629 session. Speaking at the committee for religion on 4 Feb., he brushed aside May’s claim that neither man held Arminian opinions: ‘it is said that these two bishops were before the Council on their knees, and with tears in their eyes did disclaim the [Arminian] opinions, but we see their facts’. Indeed, on the basis of information furnished by a Pembrokeshire neighbour, Robert Rudd, he was prepared to swear on oath that Laud’s former chaplain, Richard Baylie, ‘did openly hold and defend the opinions of Arminius’.
VIII. Final Years
Following the dissolution, Perrot retired to Pembrokeshire, where he quickly became embroiled in a dispute with his local rival, Sir Thomas Canon. The latter obtained a commission to investigate Perrot’s activities as deputy vice admiral while at the same time questioning the earl of Pembroke’s right to appoint deputies. However, after a delay caused by Pembroke’s death, Perrot received firm backing from the 4th earl (Sir Philip Herbert*), who succeeded his brother as vice admiral, and nothing more was heard of the matter.
Perrot published a second volume of prayers in 1630. Entitled Meditation and Prayers on the Lords’ Prayer and Ten Commandments, the volume had been circulated in manuscript form for at least two years prior to its publication. A model of puritan piety, it reveals that Perrot regarded himself as one of the Elect, and is striking for its condemnation of Catholic practice.
Perrot served as mayor of Haverfordwest for a third and final time in 1633-4. He drafted his will on 26 Jan. 1637, in which he bequeathed all his properties in Haverfordwest to Herbert Perrot of Moreton-on-Lugg, his anointed heir. Out of the rents arising from these properties Herbert was instructed to pay £3 each year to John Jessop, preacher of the town of Pembroke, who was also appointed an executor and a residual beneficiary of his estate. Twenty pounds was set aside to buy bread for the poor, and an equivalent sum was assigned to Haverfordwest’s corporation to act as a stock for putting the poor to work. Perrot died at Haroldston on 4 Feb. 1637 and was subsequently buried in the chancel of the local church of St. Mary’s in accordance with his wishes. A tomb was apparently erected to his memory, but no trace of it now remains.