Shortly before her death, 10 Nov. 1558, she granted to him a lease of the manor of Bolmer and other lands in Yorkshire at a rental of 30l. (State Papers, Dom. xiv. 8); and it is said that his pleasantries, often acceptable in her privy chamber (Anthony à Wood ap. Warton, iv. 81), helped to amuse her even on her deathbed. He had in former days enjoyed Elizabeth's favour (see the entry of a gratuity of 30s. to him in the Household Book of the Princess Elizabeth, ap. Madden, p. 239), but on her accession, or later, he retired to Malines, where he is supposed to have passed the remainder of his days. In 1570 he is mentioned as still alive; and he is probably the John Heywood who (18 April 1575) wrote to Burghley from Malines, ‘where I have been despoiled by Spanish and German soldiers of the little I had,’ thanking him for ordering the arrears from his land at Romney to be paid to him, and speaking of himself as an old man of seventy-eight (which would date his birth about 1497). His name is included in a return of catholic fugitives, dated 29 Jan. 1577, about which time he was found by the royal commissioners to be nominal tenant of lands in Kent and elsewhere. A small estate belonging to his wife Eliza had been made over by grant to their daughter Elizabeth (Sharman, p. xlv). In 1587 Thomas Newton, in his ‘Epilogue, or Conclusion to Heywood's Works,’ speaks of him as ‘dead and gone.’ His two sons, Ellis and Jasper, are separately noticed.
Heywood, though superior in social position to Henry VIII's jester, Will Summers, or the Princess Mary's fool, Jane, was professionally a lineal descendant of the minstrels, and, like these humbler colleagues, expected to amuse by his powers of repartee. The sayings recorded of him are not always deficient in point; and his humour is perhaps less coarse than might have been expected (see a small collection of his witticisms in Camden, Remains, ed. 1674, pp. 378–9). In 1514 Henry VIII placed his theatrical establishment on an enlarged footing. Heywood seems not to have belonged to it, but to have trained a company of boy-players for performances, probably in the intervals of banquets at court. His interludes, in which personal types entirely supersede personified abstractions, were the earliest of their kind in England, though familiar on the continent (cf. Collier, i. 114); nothing so good of the same kind was afterwards produced. The bridge to English comedy was thus built, and Heywood, whose name to Ben Jonson meant uncouth antiquity (A Tale of a Tub, v. 2), deserves the chief credit for its building.
Of Heywood's three interludes, in the more restricted sense of the term, the ‘Mery Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte,’ was probably the earliest, if the reference to Leo X (d. 1521) implies that he was the reigning pope. It is a contest of words between the friar and the pardoner, on whose behalf the author coolly borrows a considerable portion of the ‘Prologe of the Pardoner’ in the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ and of blows between them and the representatives of secular clergy and laity. In the same year (1533) as the above was printed the ‘Mery Play between Johan the Husbande, Tyb the Wife, and Syr Jhan the Priest.’ The most amusing situation in the piece is also to be found in the old French ‘Farce de Pernet.’ The most famous of the triad is the ‘Four P's, a merry interlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedlar,’ printed probably between 1543 and 1547, and very possibly written fifteen years or so earlier (Collier, ii. 303). Chaucer is here again laid under contribution (cf. C. H. Herford, pp. 247–8, 328). The satire upon quackery is fresh and original, and although Heywood's humour is bold and broad, it is wholesome and compatible (see the closing lines of the Four P's) with unaffected piety.
Besides these interludes, Heywood composed at least one dialogue, which served the purpose of quasi-dramatic entertainments. The dialogue ‘Of Wit and Folly’ (so named by Collier) is carried on, not in the ordinary mediæval fashion (cf. C. H. Herford, pp. 31–3), by abstractions, but by concrete human characters, ‘in maner of an enterlude.’ It discusses the superiority of the life of a fool (such as ‘sot Somer’), or a wise man (such as ‘sage Salaman’). The manuscript is an autograph of the writer, with whose ‘Amen qd John Heywod’ it concludes. He probably did not write ‘Of Gentylnes and Nobylyte,’ printed without a date by Rastell, who was perhaps its author (cf. Collier, ii. 310; and see Dyce, Skelton, ii. 277). Two pieces of intermediate character by Heywood were formerly confounded with one another by bibliographers (cf. Fairholt, pp. xii sqq.), viz. the ‘Play of Love’ and the ‘Play of the Wether,’ which has an ingenious plot as well as a wholesome moral.
Of Heywood's remaining writings the most celebrated are his ‘Epigrams.’ Later writers in the same style often refer to ‘the old English epigrammatist’ (see the quotations from Heath, Bastard, Fitzgeoffrey, Sir John Harington, and Sir John Davies ap. Warton, iv. 87, 1 n., 423, 3 n.) The earliest edition extant, that of 1562 (though a reference on the title-page to additions proves
