The first member of the Perceval family who settled in Ireland was Richard, eldest son of George Perceval Lord of Tykenham and Rolleston. He was born in Somerset in 1550 and educated at St Paul’s Westminister and Lincoln’s Inn where brilliance as a student was only matched by his dissipated and disorderly conduct. His father cut him off from his inheritances when he married a Miss Young of Dorset. He quickly acquired a large family and took himself off for Spain at the age of a effort to support them.
When his wife died in the year 1586, Estranged from his father, Richard Perceval won the patronage of Lord Burleigh and a lowly position of great trust and secrecy in the service of Elizabeth I. Documents recently captured from a Spanish ship on its way to Holland lay in Elizabeth’s court but could not be de-coded and Perceval got the task of and decoding them, having an exceptional aptitude for languages and for code-breaking. He returned the documents the next day to Elizabeth in person, deciphered, translated and fairly written in Spanish, Latin and English.
