Sir John Hothams letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull together with Master Beckwiths letter, a recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great actor in that dangerous businesse.

Sir John Hothams letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull together with Master Beckwiths letter, a recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great actor in that dangerous businesse.

Table of contents

Sir John Hothams Letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull; Together with Master Beckwiths Letter, a Recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great Actor in that dangerous businesse.

The true Copy of Master Beckwiths Letter, a Recusant.

§

[Page]

Sir John Hothams Letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull; Together with Master Beckwiths Letter, a Recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great Actor in that dangerous businesse.

SIR,

SInce my last to you, It hath pleased the Almighty God, out of his great mercy to us here, and the Kingdom, to preserve us from, an eminent danger, and ruine plotted against us here, which I thought fit to acquaint you with. I writ a word of it to the Committee at York, but since have made a more ample discovery, I have within my Company, a Lievtenant, his name is Foolks, Sonne in law to one Master Thomas Beckwith a Recusant at Beverley, a good Souldier, but poor. This man, his Father in law, thought a fit Instrument to work upon, and to that end, sent for him, to come over to him. The Gentleman presently acquaints me with it, and asked my leave and advice therein: Protesting, that both in regard of the honour of a Souldier, and a Gentleman, nothing should passe, but I should know. He had formerly been obliged to me, and therefore I gave him leave to go with directions to yeild to such Propositions, as should be made him; for otherwise being in their power, I knew not how they might have used him. At his return he told me, that at his first coming, after an unusuall kinde welcome, that Master Beckwith broke the matter to him, That if he would do service, &c. he should be rewarded in a great measure, intimating to him how unable I was to preferre him in any way of subsistance: To be short, He made a plain contract with him, That if he could betray a Port, he should have five hundred pound in hand, and two hundred and fifty pound, per annum, for his life, this he willingly accepted; then Beckwith discoursed with him of the means, how he could do this: he told him, That upon Thursday night, the six and twenty day of this May, he had the guard at the Northgate, and if Alarum were given at another Gate, called Hessell Gate, he could then let them in. This thus overnight concluded upon, next morning he was brought into the presence of one Trist, he was a Papist, and commanded Mr Percies Troop of Horse at the defeat at Newbourne, and one Captain Courtney, and six others; some of which, his father in-law told him, were Lord disguised: these promised him to make good his reward; but they doubted, unlesse some Captain might likewise be ayding, it might misse of performance, and therefore propounded to him to draw his Captain into the businesse. Lowanger a Dutch man (a man truely of that faith, courage, and ability, that were I to manage an enterprise of the greatest moment that might be, I would not wish a better second) they propounded to him that he should have in reward 1000 pounds, 500 pounds for his life, and be made a Knight. You see, Sir, what ever the performance would have been, they were not spare in promises. Trist told him he had a man of his, whom under colour of carrying Arms as a Voluntiere, he might employ as he saw cause. Beckwith, it appears some time before, had an eye to have corrupted Lowanger, for he had invited Lowanger to his house, and sent him word he would bestow a Gelding upon him, which he presently then acquainted me with, and told me he though there was some ill meant in it, and so would not go: He hath exceedingly laboured in the discovery of this, being in a great measure sensible of his honour herein. Upon Tuesday we caused the Lievtenant to write back to his father-in-law that Lowanger liked well of the businesse, but desired some better assurance of his reward then Trist and Courtneyes words, and sent a boy with the Letter; and that it might appear to Mr Beckwith to be carryed with more secrecy, the boy was caused to put the Letter in his Shoe: the return was this letter enclosed; the originall (being well known to be his hand) I keep (to be sent when the Parliament shall command) lest it might miscarry, as some other Letters of his, whereby his hand may be known. I have Trists man in hold, who confesseth h [...]s sent hither by Trist (under colour to carry Arms) to give Intelligence: and I finde he had endeavoured to send to York [...] of my souldiers. This morning I received a Letter from Mr Major of Beverley, the Copy of which I send you, of divers assembled at Mr Beckwiths house: We had another, as I think, to surprise the Block-house, being the strong Fort of the Town; but how that is, I have not yet made a full discovery.

I have sent to the Major of Beverley to search Mr Beckwiths house, being a Recusant, and to tender them the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy, and to know their names. If there had been open Warre, I could soon have told what to have done in this businesse: And truely, If I should have let the Plot gone on, and given them what they deserved, I think, being they came that way to have taken the Town, I might have justified it before God and man: But being loath to be the first letter of Blood, I resolved of another course, which was, To advertise His Majesty of the Plot discovered, least some should advise Him upon a designe might prove dishonourable and dangerous to Him. This dispatch I sent away last night. I shall trouble you no farther, but rest,

Hull, 1642.

Your affectionate faithfull friend,

Iohn Hotham.

The true Copy of Master Beckwiths Letter, a Recusant.

SOnne, the Iron is hot, I guesse at the sense of your Letter, that all is right as was intended, for more security, in the morning, I expect strong here. My Sonne went yesternight to York, comes with great ones this night Lor: I send what I have from you this night thither: if it may breed inspition, Let your friend beleeve well, and not come to morrow; If I could send safe, I would, But the trust holds on our part, as I shall be advised by your Fathers Master to morrow, I must work; yet this Boy is a fine way to come and return; Your Letters are so wasted in his shoe, as I guesse at the sense, Yet send it broken with my exposition, for I dare not bogle with promises, no doubt is to be made of any thing promised; I write more confidently, because I know your hand, I name non [...] but your self, he cannot come to morrow I fear, without suspition, But I referre all to your selves, wishing to see him I mean (in the morning) it will be better satisfaction to him, to all heer:

T. B.

§

§

London, Printed for Edward Husbands, and are to be sold at the next door to the Kings-Head in Fleet-street. 1642.

Information about this book

Title statement

Sir John Hothams letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull together with Master Beckwiths letter, a recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great actor in that dangerous businesse.

Hotham, John, Sir, d. 1645 Jan. 2.

Edition statement

1642

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A86594

ID [STC]

Wing H2907

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.6[25]

ID [STC]

ESTC R212348

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99870974

ID [PROQUEST]

99870974

ID [VID]

160886

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A86594)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 160886)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 245:669f6[25])

Source

— Sir John Hothams letter to a worthy Member of the House of Commons, concerning the late discovery at Hull together with Master Beckwiths letter, a recusant, to Lievtenant Fooks his sonne in law, in service at Hull, under Sir John Hothams command, who was a great actor in that dangerous businesse., Hotham, John, Sir, d. 1645 Jan. 2., Beckwith, Thomas..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

Printed for Edward Husbands, and are to be sold at the next door to the Kings-Head in Fleet-street,. London :: 1642.. (The "discovery" refers to a plot to surrender the town of Hull to the King.) ("The true copy of Master Beckwiths letter, a recusant" is signed T.B., [i.e. Thomas Beckwith].) (Reproduction of the original in the British Library.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.