Almost the only dissenting voice in the House of Commons against the penal bill was that of Dr. William Parry, member for Queenborough. In a violent and abusive speech, he said that the House was so evidently biassed that it was useless to give it the special reasons he had for opposing the bill, but would state them to the Queen alone. This was considered insulting to the House, and he was committed to the charge of the sergeant-at-arms, but was released by the Queen and Council the following day. The events which followed form one of the unsolved riddles of history. Parry was a man of bad character, who for years had been one of Burghley’s many spies upon the English refugees on the Continent. He appears, however, to have been esteemed more highly by the Treasurer than such instruments usually are.
When young Anthony Bacon was sent on his travels to France, his uncle, Burghley, specially instructed him to cultivate the acquaintance of Dr. Parry. Leicester complained to the Queen of this, and the Lord Treasurer undertook that his nephew should not be shaken either in loyalty or religion by his acquaintanceship with Parry.[495] After the latter returned to England in 1583 he was elected member of the Parliament of the following year, after having persistently but unsuccessfully begged a sinecure office from Burghley. From his first arrival he had been full of real or pretended plots for the assassination of the Queen, which he professed to have discovered on the Continent. He was, like all men of his profession, an unprincipled scamp, and made these secret disclosures the ground for ceaseless demands for reward. He was disappointed and discontented, as well as vain and boastful, and overshot the mark. In one of his interviews with the Queen he produced a somewhat doubtfully worded letter of approval from the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Como,[496] which, he said, referred to a pretended project undertaken by him (Parry) for the murder of the Queen. He talked loosely to Charles Neville and other Catholics of this plot as a real one, and six weeks after his escapade in Parliament was arrested and lodged in jail. At first he would admit nothing, but the fear of the rack, or some other motive, produced from him a full and complete confession of a regular plan—once, he said, nearly executed—for killing Elizabeth; but before sentence he vehemently retracted, and appealed to the knowledge of the Queen, Burghley, and Walsingham that he was innocent. But if they possessed this knowledge they never revealed it, and Parry died the revolting death of a traitor, clamouring to the last that Elizabeth herself was responsible for his sacrifice.