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."

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[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

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• 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.