Aston Cockayne

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Sir Aston Cockayne (1608 – 1684) was in his day a well-known Cavalier and a minor literary figure, now best remembered as a friend of Philip Massinger, John Fletcher, Michael Drayton, Richard Brome, Thomas Randolph, and other writers of his generation.

He was the son of Thomas and Ann Cockayne. His mother was the daughter of Sir John Stanhope; Cockayne was born at Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, and baptized on December 20, 1608. He was educated at both Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of Oxford, and at the Inns of Court. Like many other aristocrats of his time, he travelled through Europe in his youth, spending much of 1632 in France and Italy; like a few, he became fluent in their languages, and translated works of literature into English.

He married Mary Kniveton, daughter of Sir Gilbert Kniveton, High Sheriff of Derbyshire. Charles I elevated him to Baronet. He was a Roman Catholic, and like other Catholics in his country in his era, was active in resistance against the Church of England and the social order that supported it. During the English Civil War he took the Royalist side, and joined the future Charles II in exile for a time. For much of the English Interregnum he lived on his estate of Poolley, at Polesworth in Warwickshire.

He is the author of A Masque at Bretbie, which was performed on Twelfth Night of the Christmas seaon in 1639, and of Small Poems of Divers Sorts, published in 1658. He also wrote plays: The Obstinate Lady, a comedy, and Trappolin Suppos'd a Prince, a tragicomedy, both first printed in 1658; and The Tragedy of Ovid (or Ovid's Tragedy), first printed in 1662. All three were published in one volume by Francis Kirkman in 1669. His works and his surviving letters constitute still-useful sources of information on the social and cultural affairs of mid-17th-century England.

His Small Poems collection of 1658 icluded verses to Humphrey Moseley, publisher of the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio. In that poem, Cockayne, a friend to both Massinger and Fletcher, noted that Massinger was part-author of many plays in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio—which eventually inspired a sweeping examination of the authorship problem in the canon of John Fletcher and his various collaborators.

Cockayne was a cousin of the poet Charles Cotton (1630-87), to whom he dedicated his tragedy on Ovid, and had connections with Cotton's circle, which included Izaak Walton (1598-1683).

In his later years Cockayne suffered financially, and lost his manor in Warwickshire. He died in poverty.