Better get it in writing

"It is not possible, it cannot be,
The king should keep his word in loving us;
He will suspect us still, and find a time
To punish this offense in other faults...."

                                                              Henry IV, Part 1     (V, ii)


A decision has to be made, in an unforgiving minute.

Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester, isn't stupid. He knows that a king is but a man, and can go back on his word as quickly as the lowliest pickpurse. Shakespeare has him fill the ear of his brother-in-arms, Sir Richard Vernon, with his fears that the man they had inadvertently helped to the throne as King Henry IV has already discarded any sense of gratitude for their prior service.

This king has offered them a general amnesty after distinct rumblings of rebellion. Worcester isn't buying it, and he urges that his nephew and ally Hotspur, who is itching for a fight, not even be told of the king's suspicious offer of an olive branch.

The concept of a royal pardon appears and reappears throughout much of English history. Pictured above and in detail below, on display at Agecroft Hall, is a pardon from Queen Elizabeth I bestowed upon Agecroft's owner Robert Langley and his family in 1559, just a year after Elizabeth had ascended the throne as a young woman of 25. William Shakespeare was born five years later.

The short reign of Elizabeth's predecessor and half-sister Mary had been disastrous. Mary was an ardent Catholic who had tried to forcibly turn back the tide of the Protestant Reformation in England. To a considerable degree, at least by the standards of the age, the young Elizabeth had wanted to stop the swinging pendulum of persecution that had been set in motion by her own father, the hot-headed King Henry VIII, when he decided to bolt from Roman Catholicism and take his country with him.

For Henry it was quite an undertaking, allowing him to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's mother and a woman who would see soon enough Henry's cruelty, in the form of an executioner's sword.

During the course of Elizabeth's reign, a papal excommunication and plots against her life both real and imagined made her more circumspect. Her decision to allow the execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 came only after years of fearful soul-searching. The attack of the Spanish Armada was quick to follow. 

Although there is no absolute certainty that Robert Langley of Agecroft Hall was Catholic, his wife and a number of other members of his family were known to be so; this was not the least bit unusual at the time in Lancashire. The whole north of the country, for that matter, was regarded as a stronghold of the Old Faith. Interestingly, the Langley pardon does not specifically cover any religious non-conformity in the family: written in Latin, it essentially defends the honor of the Langleys against any unmerited claims that the family was anything less than faithful to the English Crown.

There's just one little complication in all this: such pardons could, at times, be purchased. It was a way for the Crown to raise money, much like the "papist" sale of indulgences prior to the earthquakes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Elizabeth, like her predecessors on the throne, was faced with the duty of running a country, and that costs money. Money was something that neither she nor those who came before her ever had enough of, at least in the royal estimation.

She is pictured below, quite youthful in her coronation portrait. The lines of worry would follow, in time.