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Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), known as the 'Wizard' Earl because of his penchant for science, is chiefly remembered today as the nobleman who was falsely accused of involvement in the Gunpowder Plot and who spent sixteen years in the Tower of London as a result. His distant cousin and officer as Constable of Alnwick, Thomas Percy, was one of the conspirators and robbed Northumberland of L3,000 or so from the rents for which he was responsible to pay for the plot, but there was no evidence that the Earl was involved. Northumberland was fined L30,000 in the Star Chamber in June 1606 for 'misprision' (concealment of knowledge) of treason, deprived of his place as a Privy Councillor which he had held only under James and of his Captaincy of the Gentleman Pensioners, the nearest bodyguard to the Sovereign, and sentenced to imprisonment during the King's pleasure.
It was not the first time by far that the Percies were in trouble with the Crown in the period. Henry's uncle Thomas, the seventh Earl, a professed Catholic, was one of the noblemen involved in the Rising of the North in 1569; he had fled to Scotland but was betrayed and executed at York in August, 1572, avowing supremacy of the Pope, affirming that England was in a state of schism, and declaring that those obedient to the Queen were no better than heretics. Mercifully for the family, the title had been entailed to Thomas's brother Henry who became the eighth Earl, so that his son Henry became heir to one of the richest families in England at the age of eight.
The eighth Earl was a Catholic but had Henry taught by a clergyman of the Church of England, Parson Thompson of Egremont, and although he was to be accused of being an atheist in later life the boy came to be a loyal communicant of the Anglican Church. For example, when he was in trouble over the Gunpowder Plot he wrote to the Earl of Exeter:
I pray the Great God of Heaven may lay all the plagues that ever was inflicted upon mortal man upon me... if I were privy to this horrible Act.
Or again he later wrote to his son...