Juliana Penn, Robert Cecil and the Silver Bell, &c.

When I wrote the first installment (“Juliana Penn! Robert Cecil! Who Knew?” [link]) on the surprising relationship between Juliana Penn and Robert Cecil, I was not aware that diligent search could arrive at a surprising amount of information on Mrs. Penn, much of it now long forgotten.  Again, it was she who sent a now infamous 1591 letter to the Earl of Oxford, demanding payment for rooms let under the bond of Thomas Churchyard [link][1], a swatch from which appeared in A Cotswold Family: Hicks And Hicks Beach[2] and has since been reprinted in all biographies of the Earl.

You know my Lord you had anything in my house whatsoever you or your men would demand, if it were in my house ; if it had been a thousand times more, I would have been glad to pleasure your lordship withall.

While Mrs. Beach-Hicks makes clear that there is a collection of at least some of the letters of Juliana Penn, from which this swatch to Oxford is quoted, as well as the oft quoted letters she received from Churchyard, on the matter, she neglects to tell the reader with certainty where they are deposited.[3]

Almost as surprising as Mrs. Penn’s friendship, through her son Michael Hickes, with Robert Cecil, is the earliest letter that I have yet to find between the two.  It is dated October 3, 1588.  In it we discover that Cecil is already well enough acquainted with her that he feels comfortable calling upon her to act as his front in the purchase of an item he covets among the booty taken from the Armada fleet.

 Good Mrs. Penn. I do receive from you many kindnesses, for which I heartily thank you, and yet at this time must I make bold with you for a thing which you may get, and to which I would be beholden to no other but yourself. So it is my Lady Gorge hath a pretty silver bell, that was Don Pedro's the Spaniard. It was taken at sea. The weight of it in silver is all that to her it can be valued at. If you of yourself would desire to buy it, I would willingly pay whatsoever she will ask, so that it might not be known unto her that I am to have it, for I would not be beholden unto her; you see how bold I am with you. If I may pleasure you or yours I will be most ready. And thus wishing you health and long life for my friend's good your eldest son, I commit you to God. From my Lodging this 3 of Obre 1588.

" Yor loving frend

" Robt Cecils."[4]

I am not yet aware of how the matter turned out.

This may be the proper place to mention that Robert Cecil was quite familiar with at least two of Mrs. Penn’s sons.  Michael has already been mentioned.  After the death of her first husband, Robert Hickes, Juliana married her husband’s close friend and business partner Arthur Penn.  Arthur would manage her interest in Robert Hickes’s mercer shop, in Cheapside, until his own death.  Some two years after the passing of Robert, Juliana bought the messuage on Peter’s Hill, that seems clearly to have been the boarding house in question, and moved into it from over the shop.  Her second son, Baptist, must have participated in the running of the mercer business, taking it over upon the death of Arthur.

It is at about the time of Arthur’s death that Cecil received a request from Baptist described in an undated letter to Michael.

SIR ROBERT CECIL TO MICHAEL HICKES.

… Sir W. Rawley and I dined together in London : we went to your brother's shop, where your brother desired me to wryte to my wife, in anywise not to let anybody know that she paied under 3l. 10s. a yard for her cloth of silver.[5]

So then, in the early 1590s Robert Cecil knew Juliana Penn as more than the mother of his friend Michael.  He was already long on a familiar basis with the Michael and Juliana and at least of recent acquaintance with her second son Baptist.

For all the mercer’s shop and boarding house must have brought in a very decent living, though, they were not the main Hickes-Penn financial concerns.  While Robert Cecil did not need to avail himself of the service, the Hickes-Penns made most of their wealth through money-lending at interest (a.k.a. usury).  Juliana seems to have learned the business from her first husband.  Michael is somewhat famous for being also a close friend of Francis Bacon.  What is not generally known is that the basis of the friendship was the monies he would begin lending to the impecunious secretary in 1593.  Bacon frequently rolled over the loans — being unable to meet scheduled payments — until he received the first of his royal offices (solicitor general) under James I.  Second son, Baptist, would prove so capable at usury that he would become one of the richest men of his time and be created Viscount Campden.  Sir Michael Hickes himself was quite a wealthy man at the time of his death in 1612.

And there is still much more…

---

[1] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley.  Edward de Vere's Retainer Thomas Churchyard: the Man Who Was Falstaff.

[2] Beach-Hicks, Mrs. William.  A Cotswold Family: Hicks And Hicks Beach.  London: William Heinemann, 1909. 71.

[3] Ibid., 65.  “The letters to and from Juliana Hicks, who became Juliana Penn, are few in number, but, if they illuminate her only partially, they illuminate her rather vividly.”  This is reported alongside a discussion of the Hickes family letters included among the Lansdowne MSS.

[4] Ibid., 73.

[5] Queen Elizabeth And Her Times, A Series Of Original Letters,… (1838), Thomas Wright, ed. II. 414.

• Juliana Penn! Robert Cecil! Who Knew?  February 11, 2018.  "Good Mrs. Penn, I am very sorry to heare how extreme syck you are, by your son Michael,..."
• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Did Falstaff Write a Poem for Lowe’s Chyrirgerie?  December 2, 2017. "Can honour set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? air."

• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Juliana Penn! Robert Cecil! Who Knew?

Tomb of Michael Hickes, Leyton.

Reading letters from the Elizabethan era has so often proven rewarding on so many levels that I do so often.  While rereading volume 2 of Queen Elizabeth And Her Times, A Series Of Original Letters,… (1838) I was delighted to fill out my knowledge of the period still more.  Passing through the letters of the early 1590’s I was stunned to find the following:

SIR ROBERT CECIL TO MRS. PENN.

Good Mrs. Penn, I am very sorry to heare how extreme syck you are, by your son Michael, my frend, and the rather, understanding that you have not bene well ever since you were here. If you took any cold by coming to my Lord's howse, being no way accustomed to stirr abroade of long tyme, I hope it wyll away with discreet and warme keeping. If any other conceipt shold trouble you, surely this letter may assure you that there was not, nor is, the least suspicion conceaved of any privity of yours to any ill of his who is now a prisoner in the Gate-house. For my part, I do wish the poore soule no harme. Some thyngs there are found out of his lewd disposition to the State, which is the cause of his restraint. With tyme it may be qualified, wherin though no private respects shall make better or worse my conceipts of any man's offences, yet shall I be the more apt in pity to deale for him (I must confess,) if he do forbeare, according to his vile humour, to raile at Mr. Henry Cecill out of the prison by letters, wherof I am informed, being of my blood, and one who never deserved of him but too well. For the letter you sent, it shews your sincerity, of which I was never doubtfiill, as I have told your son often when he sued to me for him. I wish you helth and contentment, and so do byd you hartely farewell.

Your loving friend,

Ro. Cecyll.[1]

I have only just published my Edward de Vere’s Retainer Thomas Churchyard, the man who was Falstaff [link].  While doing the research I had discovered that Gabriel Harvey even inserted the long infamous Mrs. Penn incident into his even more infamous literary combat with Thomas Nashe.  I wondered for the first time in print whether the incident hadn’t supplied some part of the Mrs. Quickly incident, in which the hostess complained to the authorities that Falstaff had failed to pay his bill, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Part 2.

Now I found myself reading a letter from Robert Cecil, the son of William Cecil, Baron Burghley, and recently added member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, to a Mrs. Penn!  Moreover, a note on page 414, attached to Churchyard’s pleading to Mrs. Penn, informed me that

Mrs. Penn was the mother-in-law of Michael Hickes. Poor Churchyard appears to have been continually in some difficulty. By other papers in the same volume from which this letter is taken, it would seem that Churchyard had taken lodgings of Mrs. Penn for the Earl of Oxford, giving his own bond for the payment, and that the Earl leaving without paying, the burden fell upon the poet.[2]

We have earlier been informed that Michael Hickes was:

… the eldest son of Robert Hickes, a wealthy citizen and mercer of Cheapside, in London. Michael was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was afterwards entered at Lincoln's Inn, and finally became private secretary to Lord Burghley, with whose son, Sir Robert, he formed a friendship that lasted all their live. He was made a baronet by James I. and died in 1612.[3]

While the information is  not quite correct it was close enough to make the point.  A few hours riding over literary hill and dale and it was clear that Michael was not her son-in-law but her son.  It was Michael’s younger brother, Baptist, who was created a baronet, not he.  Michael was eventually knighted, however, by James I, acting on Robert Cecil’s nomination.  Much more was clear as well.

Above a half-dozen of the letters in the volume were written by Robert Cecil to Michael Hickes.  This was definitely the same Mrs. Penn.  So then she had visited the Burghley’s house on the Strand, the house of her son Michael’s employer, during the early 1590s, and received a follow-up letter from Robert Cecil hoping that she hadn’t caught cold as a result.  Furthermore (if she did not dictate it to another), she was sufficiently literate to have written at least the one letter referred to by Cecil.

Unfortunately, the name of the prisoner in the gate house, who seems at least in part to have been the object of the visit, is never expressly stated.  If it had been, it would have been much easier to assert that Cecil’s next letter to Mrs. Penn referred to the same matter:

Good Mrs. Penn, your son, Mr. Mich. Hycks, hath delt very ernestly with me, as from you, to be a meane to my Lord in Mr. Skynner's behalf, for mitigation of his fyne and enlargement owt of prison, of whom, although I have some cause to think unkyndnes, in a particular matter of mine owne, and that a very trifle, yet I am so persuaded in that point by your son, as that being now required by you, I will not only forget former cause, but also do for him any friendship I may in his honest and good occasion. For the matter it depends before the whole body of the counsaile, where my Lord hath but one voice in number and equall power with most of the rest, wherof some are greatly offended with Mr. Skynner's detraction of his submission, which in reasonable sort th'other Alderman hath performed willingly.[4]

If this letter was written at about the same time that Churchyard was pleading with Mrs. Penn, and all of the London literary world were laughing (as loud as they would when Mistress Quickly pressed for charges against Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 2), it was also written at the time that Edward de Vere had claimed that the  London Alderman, Thomas Skinner, had defrauded the Queen of monies supposed to be collected against his Court of Wards fees. 

The above Skynner is identified as an Alderman.  Mrs. Penn, we learn, has enough stature to vouch for him and to request leniency in the matter.  By all appearances, leniency was granted.  Five years later, Thomas Skinner would be elected mayor of London.

Matters only start here….  Next: "Juliana Penn, Robert Cecil and the Silver Bell, &c."

---

[1] Queen Elizabeth And Her Times, A Series Of Original Letters,… (1838), Thomas Wright, ed., 415.

[2] Ibid., 414

[3] Ibid., 366

[4] Ibid., 416

• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Leonard Digges and the Shakespeare First Folio.  November 30, 2017.  "Upon receiving his baccalaureate, in 1606, Leonard briefly chose to reside in London. After that he went on an extended tour of the Continent which ended around the year that Shaksper died."
• Did Falstaff Write a Poem for Lowe’s Chyrirgerie?  December 2, 2017. "Can honour set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? air."

• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

The Great Waugh-Bate Debate #1: Steven Steinburg’s Rebuttal and Alexander Waugh’s Encrypted Polimanteia.

I am delighted to see Steven Steinburg’s “The ‘Post-Truth World’ of Sir Jonathan Bate” [link], an extended evaluation of Jonathan Bate’s half of the recent Waugh-Bate authorship debate.  For better or worse, Mr. Steinburg is clear from the first that he has neither the intention of evaluating the performance of both participants nor approving of anything Mr. Bates said for his part.  This evaluation is intended for the faithful.

Fair enough.  My own plans include constructive, respectful criticism of both participants.  I suggest that the Oxfordian movement would be particularly well served to be challenged on those methods or findings which make us vulnerable to caricature.  That said, I admit that the long habit of ridicule has become fixed among Stratfordians and the public that chooses to believe in them.  Like all habits, it has become so emotionally satisfying that it no longer discriminates as  to proper objects.

If there is any hope of gaining an amount of respect it will only come with time and only then with the willingness to adopt a general scholarly discipline that, to be entirely truthful, does not seem at all likely.  This is not to say we don’t have our moments.  Mr. Bate was not particularly rigorous at any number of points during his presentation and Steinburg nicely catches him out.  Bate’s asserts that:

Look at the countryman in The Winter’s Tale speaking about tods equaling pounds and shillings for wool. This is countryman’s language.

Steinburg’s answer is brief and definitive:

A nobleman concerned with the wool trade would have known what ‘tods’ were. Wool trading was one of the preferments requested by (but not granted to), Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

For that moment, no attempt is made to be witty at the opponent’s expense.  None to freight the answer with some favorite Oxfordian speculation.  The answer is based upon documentary evidence that can be cited or looked up in short order.

While there are other answers somewhat as strong our champion is just a smidge discursive.  Correct points are made even if they are not particularly close to the center of the target.  Instead of a "very palpable hit" the swordsman settles with inflicting a rash of nicks.  I have tried my own hand at Bate’s Capulet-and-his-kitchen servants and Elsinor comments in the first installment of my “Bystander” column [link].  The format forces me to keep the critique off-the-cuff but sometimes there is something to be said  for that.

As much as I am delighted to see rational answers to Bate’s assertions, however, and hopeful that it will help build momentum toward a trend, Steinburg cannot help but dally around the potential for conspiracy in the interlineated gifts to Hemmings, Condell, and Burbage, in Shaksper of Stratford’s Will.  Bate’s comments do not put an end to it, his critic wishes to make clear.  Even a bit of irritated quibbling is engaged in.  While I don’t expect Mr. Steinburg to have read my “Shaksper’s Second Best Bed: the (almost) final chapter” [link], if he is going to imply conspiratorial possibilities it is his responsibility to do that necessary research.

Nor can he resist claiming in a footnote riposte that the plays of John Lyly were actually written by Edward De Vere.  This is among the most common bad habits of the Oxfordian community.  The fact that De Vere can be shown to have likely written works under three or four pen names unleashes the faithful to claim half the literature of the time for his pen. 

There is as of yet no sufficient basis to assign the writings attributed on contemporary title pages to writers living at the time to the secret pen of De Vere.  John Lyly wrote the plays attributed to him on the quarto title pages.  He may or may not have written the songs that were left blank (with the exception of the later play, Mother Bombie) in the original quartos.  He may or may not have contributed some lines or even a scene in one or another of the plays.  But while Shakespeare was much influenced by the euphuism of Lyly, and by his plays, he chose not to incorporate most of its traits into his own work.  There are clear and substantial differences.

I have suggested, in my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof  [link], that De Vere did write the play Agamemnon and Ulysses, directed by Lyly, in 1584, but never published.  Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida is actually half about Ulysses’ appeals to Agamemnon to put Achilles in his proper place.  The theme, as it appears in Troilus, is precisely in line with Oxford’s complaints against Leicester from an interrogatory he gave shortly before the date of the earlier play.

Unfortunately, our champion, Alexander Waugh, started his presentation, in part, on a still worse foot when he repeated a favorite claim of a hidden message in the marginal text of William Covell’s Polimanteia.  The reference beside it to Oxford was to the university. There is nothing to suggest freighting it with a cipher identifying the Earl.  Shakespeare appeared in the margin because Covell had no idea who he was, beyond being a popular poet, therefore could not assign him, in the main text, as an ornament of either Cambridge or Oxford. There is nothing that requires the coincident location of “Shakespeare” in the margin, beside “Oxford” and “courte-dear-verse” in the main text to be an “encrypted allusion” to “Oxford… our De Vere,” except for Mr. Waugh’s exasperated tone when he speaks of resistance to it.

The only fact that is clear is that the reference is to the highly valued courtier poet Samuel Daniel, ornament of Oxford University, his alma mater, as is stated outright.  That there might be encryption lacks any confirming evidence.

Waugh’s claim does attract attention in a way that documented fact does not.  There is something to be said for that.  In the long run, however, such claims can easily be cited as evidence that the Oxfordian position is not serious.

All of this said, I felt that Alexander Waugh started off slowly but continually grew stronger as the debate proceeded.  He did well.  Jonathan Bate, on the other hand, is a much more effective public speaker.  For all of his many errors, he probably appeared to the general public to be the more knowledgeable party.  But, then, post-debate spin tends to be more important than the debate itself.

• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Leonard Digges and the Shakespeare First Folio.  November 30, 2017.  "Upon receiving his baccalaureate, in 1606, Leonard briefly chose to reside in London. After that he went on an extended tour of the Continent which ended around the year that Shaksper died."
• Did Falstaff Write a Poem for Lowe’s Chyrirgerie?  December 2, 2017. "Can honour set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? air."

• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.