Patrick O'Collun

Patrick O'Collun (also known as Patrick Cullen or Patrick Collen) (died 1594) was an Irish soldier and fencing master who was executed at Tyburn in 1594 for treason, in that he had conspired to murder Queen Elizabeth I.

Little is known of his early life, other than the fact that he was Irish and a Roman Catholic. He first appeared in London in the late 1580s, in the entourage of Sir Florence MacCarthy, chief of the MacCarthy clan, (the MacCarthy Mór), whose own loyalty to the Crown was deeply suspect, and who was later accused by his enemies of being a party to O'Collun's plot.

About 1590 O'Collun went to the Spanish Netherlands, where he entered the service of the renegade English Roman Catholic soldier Sir William Stanley: Stanley and his associate, the Jesuit William Holt, instigated numerous plots to assassinate Elizabeth. According to the indictment at O'Collun's trial, the prime mover in the plot was Stanley's lieutenant Jacques de Francesci, (also called Jacques Fraunces or "Captain Jacques"), a shadowy individual who was regarded by the English Crown throughout the 1590s as one of the Queen's most determined enemies. It was Francesci who obtained money to bribe O'Collun to kill Elizabeth and promised him a pension from the King of Spain as a reward for the assassination..

O'Collun later claimed that he had qualms of conscience about the plot, which led him to ask Fr. Holt whether the assassination was morally justified; according to his account Holt told him that it was a meritorious act, and gave him absolution for the sin of murder. This may well be true: Holt sincerely believed that Elizabeth deserved to die, as apparently did "Captain Jacques", who is known to have said that "no action could be more glorious" (although Jacques himself had once worked as a spy for Elizabeth). Other would-be assassins, like Edmund York, said that Holt had given them absolution for the same act. Holt's plotting attracted so much notoriety that he was eventually ordered by his superiors to show more discretion.

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