persons were executed for contriving his escape), and passed two years at Liège. In the autumn of 1590 he again returned to England, and officiated for some time in the west, eluding capture in spite of there being at one time sixteen warrants out against him. Eventually one of Sir William Waad's agents discovered him; but his imprisonment, apparently in the Gatehouse, was comparatively mild until Topcliffe again intervened with his tortures. Once again Watson, ‘taking occasion of the dores set wyde open unto me,’ effected his escape, in order, he maintained, to avoid legal proceedings on account of 200l. which had been ‘taken up’ by some one using his name; possibly this was on 18 May 1597, when he escaped from Bridewell with ‘an Irish bishop’ (Cal. Hatfield MSS. vii. 204). On 30 June 1599 it was reported ‘Watson, a seminary priest, has again escaped from the Gatehouse and cannot be heard of; he is thought to have with him a servant who, with his consent, has stolen his master's best gelding and 40l. in money for Watson's use’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1598–1601, p. 226). He now seems to have fled to Scotland, hoping to cross thence to France, but returned to the north of England, and thence once more to London. Here apparently he was again arrested, and he was one of the thirty-three secular priests in prison at Wisbech Castle who on 17 Nov. 1600 signed the famous ‘appeal’ against the appointment of George Blackwell [q. v.] as archpriest, on the ground that he was a tool of Parsons and the jesuits. Watson's thirty articles against Blackwell's appointment are printed by Mr. T. G. Law in ‘The Archpriest Controversy’ (Camden Soc.), i. 90–8.
To this struggle between the secular priests and the jesuits Watson had devoted his entire energy. Like other seculars, he was bitterly opposed not only to the domination of the jesuits, but also to their anti-national intrigues, especially the project for securing the succession to the infanta of Spain; he maintained that but for these plots Elizabeth's government would grant a large measure of toleration to Roman catholics. As early as 1587, while in the Marshalsea, he had protested against Babington's plot, and the jesuits denounced him as a government spy and his sufferings in prison as fictitious; Watson himself declared that he endured more from the tongues of the jesuits than from Topcliffe's tortures. Possibly his visit to Scotland was in connection with his project of answering the ‘Conference about the next Succession,’ which Parsons had published under the pseudonym of Doleman in 1594, advocating the claims of the infanta. The account which Watson gives of his book is obscure and possibly untrue; at first apparently he wished to advocate the exclusion of all ‘foreign’ claims, the Scottish included, and he says that the queen and Essex liked what he wrote; then he maintained James's right, and when this proved unpalatable at court he suggested that he had only been entrapped into writing the book at all by jesuit intrigues.
This book does not seem to have been printed, but in 1601 appeared four works, all probably printed at Rheims and ascribed to Watson. The first, ‘A Dialogue betwixt a Secular Priest and a Lay Gentleman concerning some points objected by the Jesuiticall Faction against such Secular Priests as haue shewed their dislike of M. Blackwell and the Jesuit Proceedings,’ was erroneously assigned by Parsons and Anthony Rivers to John Mush [q. v.], another of the appellants (Foley, Records, i. 42; Law, Jesuits and Seculars, p. cxxxvii). The second, ‘A Sparing Dis-coverie of our English Iesuits and of Fa. Parsons' Proceedings under pretence of promoting the Catholike Faith in England … newly imprinted’ (Rheims? 4to), is ascribed by Rivers to Christopher Bagshaw [q. v.] (ib.) But ‘the most notable of these later writings on the side of the appellants was the “Important Considerations.” It forms, however, an exception to the general character of Watson's productions, both in matter and style. Indeed it has so little of Watson's manner that it is not improbable that he was the writer of no more than the prefatory epistle, which is signed with his initials. The book itself professes to be “published by sundry of us, the Secular Priests,” and is a brief, and on the whole fair, historical survey of all the rebellions, plots, and “bloody designments” set on foot against England by the pope or others, mainly at the instigation of the jesuits’ (ib. p. xci). Its title was ‘Important Considerations which ought to move all true and sound Catholickes who are not wholly Jesuited to acknowledge … that the Proceedings of Her Majesty … have been both mild and merciful.’ It was reprinted in ‘A Collection of Several Treatises concerning … the Penal Laws,’ 1675 and 1688, in ‘The Jesuit's Loyalty,’ 1677 series, in ‘A Preservative against Popery,’ 1738, vol. iii., and was edited by the Rev. Joseph Mendham in 1831. It was also extensively used by Stillingfleet in his ‘Answer to Cressy,’ and by Joseph Berington [q. v.] in his ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Religion,’ 1813 (ib., p. cxxxv; Mendham, pref. pp. xiv–xv). In 1601 also
