Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/381

 John Savage [q. v.], Robert Barnewell, and three others, one of the six to whom the task of despatching the queen was specially allotted. Ballard was arrested on 4 Aug. 1586, Babington and others of the conspirators took refuge in St. John's Wood, but Tichborne, who was laid up with a bad leg, was compelled to remain in London. There he was seized on 14 Aug. along with Savage and Charles Tilney [see under ], and lodged in the Tower. He was tried with six of the other conspirators before Lords Cobham and Buckhurst, Sir Christopher Hatton, and the body of special commissioners, on 13 and 14 Sept., and after some hesitation pleaded guilty, as did also his companions. The pathetic letter which he wrote to his wife Agnes on 19 Sept. (the night before he suffered) is preserved along with three beautiful stanzas commencing ‘My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,’ which he is said to have written in the Tower on the same occasion. The poem has been with little justification assigned to others (Lansdowne MS. 777, art. 2; Harl. MS. 6910, f. 141 verso; Ashmol. MS. 781, f. 138; Malone MS. 19, f. 44; cf. Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, 1672, ii. 395–6). An ‘Answer to Mr. Tichborne, who was executed with Babington,’ was printed with Tichborne's poem in Hannah's ‘Poems of Raleigh,’ &c., from ‘a manuscript belonging to J. P. Collier;’ it is of no merit. Tichborne was the fifth of the conspirators to be hanged on 20 Sept. He was ‘a goodly young gentleman,’ and his speech as well as his demeanour moved many to compassion. He spoke feelingly of his good mother, his loving wife, his four brethren and six sisters, and of his house, ‘from two hundred years before the Conquest never stained till this my misfortune.’ He suffered the full penalty of the law, being disembowelled before life was extinct. The news of these barbarities reached the ears of Elizabeth, who forbade their recurrence.

[The Censure of a Loyall Subject, 1587 (by George Whetstone); Howell's State Trials, i. 1157; Bund's State Trials, 1879, i. 255; Morris's Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, 1875, ii. 293; Labanoff's Lettres de Marie Stuart, vi. 441; Camden's Annals, 1630, pp. 78 sq.; Holinshed's Chronicles, 1587, iii. 1573; Froude's History, xii. 171, 175; Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature; Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, &c., ed. Hannah, p. 114; Betham's Baronetage, vol. i.]  TICHBORNE, HENRY (1581?–1667), governor of Drogheda, born in or about 1581, was fourth son of Sir Benjamin Tichborne of Tichborne, Hampshire, a gentleman of the privy chamber to James I, who was created a baronet on 8 March 1620, died and buried at Tichborne in 1629 (Epitaph in Gent. Mag. 1810, i. 305). His mother was Amphillis, daughter of Richard Weston of Skrynes in Roxwell, Essex (, County Genealogies, ‘Hampshire,’ pp. 31–2). ‘He was,’ says Borlase (Reduction of Ireland), ‘early educated in the wars,’ and, being in 1620 (Warrant in Egerton MS. 2126, f. 6) admitted captain in a regiment of foot stationed in Ireland (Cal. State Papers, Ireland, James I, v. 343), he was shortly afterwards created governor of Lifford. On 29 Aug. 1623 he was knighted by James at Tichborne, and in December of the same year appointed a commissioner of plantations in the county of Londonderry. He himself received a large grant of lands in co. Tyrone, to which were subsequently added others in counties Leitrim and Donegal.

When the rebellion broke out on 23 Oct. 1641, Tichborne was residing near Finglas on the outskirts of Dublin, and, on removing the following day with his wife and family for greater safety to Dublin, his services were at once enlisted by the lords justices for the defence of Drogheda. He entered the town as governor on 4 Nov. with a thousand foot and a hundred horse, and, disdaining to notice his cold reception by the majority of the inhabitants, whose sympathies were on the side of the insurgents, he set to work energetically to strengthen the fortifications. The task he had undertaken was one of no small difficulty and danger. The besiegers, whose numbers increased daily, made no doubt of capturing the place by assault, by treachery, or by starving out the garrison. Provisions were scarce. On 3 Dec. a foraging party was rescued by Tichborne at the peril of his own life. An attempt to storm the town on the 20th was followed by a plot to surprise it on the night of 12 Jan. 1642. The plot would have succeeded had not Tichborne, hearing an alarm, ‘instantly ran down unarmed, only with his pistols in his hands,’ and himself aroused the garrison. After this narrow escape he and Lord Moore [see, second ] walked the rounds nightly. By the middle of February the garrison was reduced to feeding on horseflesh ‘and other unclean sustenance.’ The situation was wellnigh desperate. As for Tichborne, he meant to hold out ‘till the last bit of horseflesh was spent; and then, to prevent the advantage which the enemy might receive from the arms and ammunition within the place, he resolved not to leave the broken barrel of a musket nor a grain of powder behind him, and to fight his way through the rebels, giv-