It cannot be doubted that Parry was an _agent provocateur_, and great question arises as to the reality of the crime for which he was punished. I have found no trace in the Spanish correspondence of his having been a tool of Mendoza or Philip, such as exists in the cases of Throgmorton, Babington, and others; and I consider that the evidence generally favours the idea that he was deliberately caught in his own lure, and sacrificed in order to aggravate the anti-Catholic fervour in the country, and secure the passage of the penal enactments. In one particular I dissent from nearly every historian who has written on the subject. All fingers point at Lord Burghley as the author of the plan. I look upon it as being the work of Leicester, Knollys, and Walsingham. It was they, and not Burghley, who were anxious to strengthen the fervent Protestant party. It was they, and not Burghley, who were forcing the penal enactments through the Parliament they had packed. The Treasurer could hardly have been blind to what was going on, but he could not afford to champion Parry. The latter, a venal scoundrel known to be in Burghley’s pay, but discontented with his patron, was doubtless bought by Leicester to play his part in Parliament, and afterwards to confess the Catholic plot on the assurance of pardon, with the object of blackening the Catholics, and perhaps, by implication, Burghley as well. That Leicester’s friends were at the time seeking to represent the Lord Treasurer as against the Protestant cause is clear from several indignant letters written by Burghley himself. “If they cannot,” he says, “prove all their lies, let them make use of any _one_ proof wherewith to prove me guilty of falsehood, injustice, bribery or dissimulation or double-dealing in Council, either with her Majesty or with her Councillors. Let them charge me on _any_ point that I have not dealt as earnestly with the Queen to aid the afflicted in the Low Countries to withstand the increasing power of the King of Spain, the assurance of the King of Scots to be tied to her Majesty with reward, yea, with the greatest pension that any other hath. If in any of these I am proved to be behind or slower than any in a discreet manner, I will yield myself worthy of perpetual reproach as though I were guilty of all they use to bluster against me. They that say in rash and malicious mockery that England is become _Regnum Cecilianum_ may use their own cankered humour.” In July of the same year he writes in similar strain to Sir Thomas Edmunds:[497] “If you knew how earnest a course I hold with her Majesty, both privately and openly, for her to retain the King of Scots with friendship and liberality, yea, and to retain the Master of Gray and Justice-Clerk, with rewards to continue their offices, which indeed are well known to me to be very good, you would think there could be no more shameful lies made by Satan himself than these be; and finding myself