William Nugent

He first acquired notoriety in December 1573 by his forcible abduction and marriage of Jane (Janet) Marward, an heiress and the titular Baroness Skryne, and ward of his uncle, Nicholas Nugent.

Shortly afterwards, his uncle Nicholas, who had already been removed from his office as Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, was charged with inciting William to rebellion, found guilty of treason, and hanged.

William at first met with a chilling reception in Rome but when the scheme of a Spanish invasion of England began to take definite shape, he was frequently consulted by the Cardinal of Como and Giacomo Buoncompagno, nephew of Gregory XIII, as to the prospects of a general insurrection in Ireland.

About Easter 1584 he was ordered to Paris, where he had an audience with Archbishop Beaton and the Duke of Guise, by whom he was sent, 'in company of certain Scottish lairds and household servants of the king of Scots' with letters in cipher to James VI and the Master of Gray.

Meanwhile, his wife had, on the intercession of the Earl of Ormonde, been restored to her possessions, and Nugent, though figuring in Fitzwilliam's list of discontented persons, quietly recovered his old position and influence.

Roger Wilbraham, the Solicitor General for Ireland said that there was little doubt that Dillon had been guilty of inferior crimes dishonourable to a judge, but 'it was no policy that such against whom he had done service for her majesty should be countenanced to wrest anything hardly against him unless it was capital.'

For example, as noted above, he was imprisoned by the state for opposing the cess in Ireland in the 1570s, and he rebelled in 1581, losing a number of supporters to the hangman's noose and causing him to flee into exile, first into Scotland, then France and Italy – locations which are prominent in Shakespeare's works.

[4] During his exile he met most of the great European leaders, including the Pope, the kings of Spain, France and Scotland, and the Duke of Guise, and was involved in Europe-wide planning for an invasion of England.