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mould. Sir John pursued outspoken Puritans and Catholic priests to the scaffold. Under him, hundreds of Jesuits and suspected sympathisers were sent to Tyburn or Smithfield to be hanged, drawn and quartered, or, if a woman, perhaps to be crushed to death or strangled before being burnt at the stake.
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    WHITE CARGO
    When it came to the rich, Sir John could be lenient if the price was right. There was no more corrupt age than the Elizabethan and the future Lord Chief Justice proved himself as buyable as any. In the 1580s, a midwife’s story horrified all who heard it. She told of being taken blindfolded in a closed coach to attend the delivery of a child in a great house, and after the birth seeing a masked man seize the newborn infant and cast it into the fire, where it perished. When the story became known, a hue and cry was raised for the perpetrator of what Lord Macaulay called this ‘horrible and mysterious crime’.6
    The murderer was tracked down, only to be let off after he paid the judge in the case a truly massive bribe in the shape of his mansion, Littlecote Hall in Wiltshire. John Popham was the judge. By this and other means he became a very rich man. ‘He left behind him the greatest estate that has ever been amassed by any lawyer.’7
    This intimidating man was involved in colonialism years before the Plymouth Company was created. In the 1580s, the Queen decided to stamp out rebellion for ever in Munster by confiscating the vast estates there of the Desmond family and repopulating them with English Protestants. Catholic Irish were ordered out and the land was offered at tuppence an acre to English landlords who would undertake to ‘plant’ it with tenants from England. Popham was one of many who saw himself accumulating a huge Irish estate.
    He assembled more than eighty families and dispatched them to Munster. However, another English worthy was already off the mark and had tenanted the land, leaving Popham’s tenants no choice but to return home. A few decades later, a not dissimilar scheme called the headright system would be introduced in America and the wealthy would become still richer by obtaining grants of land for importing the poor to settle the New World.
    The experience in Munster did not deter Popham from such schemes and his Lordship was soon propelled towards the far more ambitious project of colonising America. He was now in his late fifties, so why did the New World consume him in the last years of his life? The avarice of a rapacious old man certainly played a part, but for Popham it was also about the pursuit of a dumping ground for the criminals that even he, the draconian law officer, could never eradicate.
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    THE JUDGE’S DREAM
    As we have seen, social conditions had produced levels of crime that frightened the gentry. Now, as the century ended, a new crime wave swept over England. This was the price of peace with Spain, for, as ever, when a major war ended, newly released soldiers and mariners spread across the realm. Many of these men had been criminals beforehand and returned to their former profession. In Plymouth, London, Bristol and York, they had taken the Queen’s shilling as an alternative to the rope. In the late 1590s, when war with Spain wound down and peace negotiations began, ‘The land then swarmed with people who had been soldiers, who had never gotten (or else quite forgotten) any other vocation . . . too proud to beg, too lazy to labour. These infected the highways with their felonies.’8
    In 1597, the year before the Treaty of Vervins officially ended the war, Popham had pushed through Parliament the tough new Vagrancy Act described in the previous chapter, under which persistent rogues could be banished to ‘parts beyond the seas’ at the behest of members of the Privy Council. The act was a prelude to what was to come.
    Five years later, Popham drew up an Order in Council identifying those ‘parts beyond the seas’ where England’s unwanted could be