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SIR JOHN PERROT, HENRY VIIFS BASTARD? THE DESTRUCTION OF A MYTH by R. K. TURVEY, B.A., Ph.D. To students of Welsh and Irish history, studies of the sixteenth century would be incomplete without reference to Sir John Perrot. Besides noting his public offices those of privy councillor and lord-deputy of Ireland among them almost without exception they taint him with the stain of illegitimacy, and the oft-quoted myth of his royal origins continues to flourish. The allegations that he was a base son of King Henry VIII engenders far more interest than the fact that he was the heir of a minor marcher family from Pembrokeshire. Yet, students of sixteenth-century English history should take more serious note of this contemporary of Burghley, Leicester, Sidney and Essex for, in a career spanning over forty years, Perrot made as deep and lasting an impression oh Elizabethan society as several of his more illustrious colleagues. Portrayed as an arrogant, avaricious, dominating bully almost fated to die as a traitor, the traditional image of the man has been sustained by generations of historians.2 Despite the pioneering biographical research undertaken by P.C.C. Evans between 1937 and 1940, the enigma that is Sir John Perrot persists.3 In the year that marks the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, this deserves to be challenged and resolved if we are to succeed in uncovering the man behind the myth. The purpose of this article is to investigate the origin and substance of the Perrot myth and to conclude the debate regarding his supposed bastard origin. 1 Armed only with her personal disbelief, E. M. Tenison alone dismisses the myth of Perrot's royal illegitimacy. Elizabethan England (14 vols., Leamington, 1933-61), IX, 74. More recently by B. E. Howells (ed.), Early Modern Pembrokeshire 1536-1815 (Haverfordwest, 1987), III, 140. P. C. C. Evans, 'Sir John Perrot' (Unpublished University of Wales M.A. thesis, 1940).