Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/388

 382

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s, HI. MAY 20,

in " A Paradox, in the praise of a Dunce, to offices through the reigns of Edward VI.

Smectymnuus. By H. P. London, Printed for Thomas Paybody, in Queenes Head Court in Pater Noster Row, 1642." The author, who is said to be Henry Peachain, enumerates several " Dunsticall Schoole - Masters," and gives the following anecdote :

" One Sir Hugh, a Welchman, who was a Brownist or the like, taught a Schoole in Gloustershire, who when he was accused before the Major of the Towne for teaching his boyes to speake false Latine, and that they profited little or nothing, hee told their fathers, they should play at Cat, or Spanne Counter with all the boyes in the Countrey." This Sir Hugh, I venture to suggest, may be the original of Sir Hugh Evans. We know very little about Sir Hugh Evans as a school- master, but it is certain that he was willing to give his boys a holiday with very little excuse, and that Page thought that his boy ' 'profits nothing in the world at his book " under his tuition ; so that an unfriendly critic might be excused for calling him a dunce. As to his being " a Brownist or the like " we have no evidence, but there is no- thing in the play that excludes the view that he might have been something Puritanical.

We are accustomed to look on Sir Hugh Evans as a sort of Elizabethan Parson Adams ; but if this identification were accepted, it would rather tend to show that Shakespeare meant him to be a purely farcical figure; for a schoolmaster who was a dunce and a Brownist must have been ridiculous and entirely unattractive to the playgoing pub- lic a very good match for the French doctor. In any case, whether the identification be accepted or not, the passage from Peacham will no doubt be thought worth noting.

G. E. P. A.

CHENEY OR CHEYNE. SIR THOMAS CHENEY, K.G., of Shurland, Kent, was a personage of considerable im- portance in the reigns of Henry VIII. and the two succeeding sovereigns. Dugdale, in his ' Baronage,' records that he was Constable of Queenborough Castle in 1511; in 1520, ,, then a knight, one of the challengers against all gentlemen who were to exercise feats on horseback or on foot for thirty days at that famous interview of King Henry VIII. and Francis I. of France betwixt Ardres and Guisnes [Field of the Cloth oJ Gold!";

in 1525 Governor of the Castle of Rochester in 1539 Knight of the Garter, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and Treasurer of the House hold ; in 1544 in the expedition to Boulogne in 1546 sent to France to stand in the king's stead as godfather to Elizabeth, daughter to the Dauphin. He bore his honours and his

and

Mary (having apparently the faculty of adapting himself to changing circumstances), xnd died three weeks after the accession of Elizabeth, 8 Dec. (Dugdale has 20), 1558.

Holinshed names him as one of the distin- guished captains in the Duke of Norfolk's division of the English army sent to Boulogne n 1544. They

'passed over to Calais about Whitsuntide, and rom thence marching forward to France [Calais, ,n English possession, not being in France !] left Boulogne on their right hand, and keeping towards Muttrell [=Montreuil] joined with an army which

jhe Emperor raised for that purpose and so

>eing united came before Muttrell, and then laid jiege to that town" (twenty miles S.S.E. Boulogne).

3ut it was an unfortunate indeed, a lament- ableenterprise for Sir Thomas Cheney. For t appears, though Holinshed does not say so, }hat the knight had with him his elder son and heir, John Cheney, and that the young man was slain in one of those

skirmishes which occurred daily between them that watched and warded in the trenches, inso-' much that divers lost their lives, and some were rrecoverably wounded."
 * hat sallied forth of the gates and the Englishmen

And in the end, after a siege of three months, Montreuil was left untaken, the siege being raised after the surrender of Boulogne.

John Cheney, the young soldier who fell fighting for his country, or at least for his king, has scarcely had worthy treatment at the hands of historians and genealogists, and it is more particularly to supply their omis- sion that this note is offered. Trie historians, including Dugdale, ignore him, and the genea legists in general give merely his name, 01 perhaps record his marriage with Margaret Nevill, one of the daughters of George, Lord Abergavenny. To these gentlemen he is oi little consequence, as he died s.p. ; but having lived to manhood and marriage he is not tc be summarily dismissed as "died young," anc the manner of his death deserves mention It is one of Dugdale's numerous mistakes ii his ' Baronage ' to omit John Cheney alto gether in his account of that family, and moreover, to enumerate his wife Margaret; with the daughters of Sir Thomas Cheney! and to marry her to Lord Abergavenny j really her father ! This error, however, is noij repeated in the account of 'Bergavenny, where the alliance is properly recorded, bu 1 nothing said of the fate of poor John Cheney Daniel Rowland in his history of the Nevillf! (1830) is more attentive to facts, and show.'; that the young man was " slain at Bologne " \ and Berry in his Kentish pedigrees repre' sents him as " slain at Mutterd." The nan*