sister he afterwards married) that if they heard of any man in the country to be esteemed more valiant and resolute than others, one or the other of them would surely have picked a quarrel against him and fought with him. ... He had a great wit and a very good delivery of his mind, and so was able to speak as well as most in the things wherein he had experience. He was tall, and of a very comely face and fashion; of age near fifty,[1] as I take it, for his head and beard was much changed white.' Brought up a Protestant, it is difficult to ascertain when he became a Catholic, according, vaguely, to Gerard 'about the time of Essex his enterprise.'[2] Of Lord Essex he was a warm admirer and devoted adherent. On the accession of James I., whom he had visited (shortly before Elizabeth's death) with a view to getting from him a promise to help the English Catholics—a promise which that monarch deliberately broke—Percy became quite a turbulent recusant, in spite of his position in his patron's household. By Lord Northumberland he was enrolled one of the royal gentlemen pensioners, but without swearing the usual oath. On the discovery of the plot, the crafty and unscrupulous Cecil seized upon this trivial circumstance as an excuse to imprison the innocent
