Cylchgronau Cymru

The book remains a memorial to Francis Jones's life of painstaking labour for the county in which he was born and to which he was devoted. Nothing has been done, however, to heal the 'almost universal disap- pointment', and nothing can be done as long as it remains in incom- petent hands. He deserved better much better. A critical edition of the Sir James Perrot's "The Life, Deedes and Death of Sir John of Perrott, Knight". Edited with an introduction by Roger Turvey. Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston/Lampeter, 2002. Pp. xxii, 178. £ 69.95. By Hiram Morgan, Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge. This is an excellent new edition of The Life of Perrott. This biography of the late sixteenth-century Welsh statesman was originally written in the early seventeenth century but only published a century later. In the 1610s and 1620s there was a concerted attempt to rehabilitate Sir John Perrot's career which had ended in disaster with his trial for treason and death in the Tower (1592). This was partly driven for personal reasons by Sir James Perrot, the bastard son of Sir John. He wrote The Chronicle of Ireland, 1584-1608 but left it unpublished probably as a result of the appearance of The Government of Ireland under the Honorable Just and Wise governor Sir John Perrot by E.C.S in 1626. The author of the latter was almost certainly Sir Edward Cecil and its publication was almost certainly timed to coincide with new demands by the crown for the reform of the government of Ireland. Sir John Perrot was the last in a line of reform governors who had tried a generation earlier to tackle the problem. The Life is in a similar vein to the Government. It portrays an active governor of Ireland who was stymied by vested interests in Ireland and by enemies at home but the author is very obviously an interested party. As the anonymous eighteenth-century editor wrote 'Our author, whoever he was, seems to have a very great tenderness for Sir John Perrot'. Roger Turvey, who is the leading expert on the Perrot family, establishes here that The Life was also written by Sir James between 1614 and 1619 and that its subsequent editor and publisher in 1728 was