popular. Ascham commends the elegance of the style (loc. cit.). The first edition contains a letter to Hoby from Sir John Cheke, dated 16 July 1557. A reprint, with an introduction by Prof. Walter Raleigh, appeared in ‘Tudor Translations,’ 1900.
Elizabeth, Lady Hoby (1528–1609), received from the queen, in September 1566, a letter condoling with her on the death of her husband (Cal. State Papers. Foreign, 1566-8, p. 112); printed from Harleian MS. 7035, f. 161, in Ellis's ‘Original Letters’ (1st ser. ii. 229–30). Lady Hoby remarried, on 23 Dec. 1574, John, lord Russell, who died in 1584 (Lysons, Mag. Brit. vol. i. pt. ii. pp. 243, 451). Like her sisters, she acquired reputation for linguistic attainments. Her translation from the French of a treatise ‘A Way of Reconciliation touching the true Nature and Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament,’ was printed in 1605, and the inscriptions at great length in Greek, Latin, and English on the family tombs at Bisham, and on that of Lord Russell in Westminster Abbey, which were written by her, sufficiently prove her skill in the learned languages. Her letters to Lord Burghley testify to her remarkable force of character (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80 pp. 301, 407, 459, 1566–79 p. 5). The ordering of pompous funerals was her delight. Just before her death she wrote a long letter to Sir William Dethick, Garter king of arms, desiring to know ‘what number of mourners were due to her calling, … the manner of the hearse, of the heralds, and church’ (cited in Imitations of Original Drawings by Hans Holbein, 1792 and 1812). She was buried at Bisham on 2 June 1609, aged 81 (Nichols, Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, iii. 131; also her will registered in P. C. C. 56, Dorset). Her portrait was drawn by Holbein.
[Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. i. 242–3, 554; Murdin's State Papers, p. 762; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1547–80, For. 1564–8, Venetian 1558–80; Ballard's Memoirs of British Ladies, 1775, pp. 136–41; Lowndes's Bibliograph. Manual (Bohn), iv. 2153.]
HOCCLEVE or OCCLEVE, THOMAS (1370?–1450?), poet and a clerk in the privy seal office for twenty-four years, is known to us only by his poems and by what he tells us of himself in them. In his biographical ‘Male Regle,’ ll. 17–21, he appeals to ‘my lord the Fourneval that now is treasurer’ to pay him the yearly 10l. due to him. Furnival was treasurer from 1405 to 1408. Hence Hoccleve's appeal may be dated late in 1406 or early in 1407. As the poet confesses in the same poem, ll. 110–12, that he had been over-eating and over-drinking for twenty years past (? from 1387 to 1407), he cannot well have been born after 1370. He also confesses himself a coward, and fond of treating ‘Venus femel lusty children deer’ to sweet wine and wafers. He haunted the taverns and cookshops at Westminster (ll. 177–84). When he wrote his best-known work, ‘De Regimine’ (1411–12), he lived at ‘Chestres Inne, right fast by the Stronde’ (De Reg. p. 1). Before that, he belonged to a dinner-club in the Temple (Phillipps MS. leaf 42). Henry IV granted Hoccleve an annuity of twenty marks a year for his long service, but he could not get it paid, and he had only six marks a year besides (De Reg. pp. 30–4). On 4 July 1424 ‘votre tres humble clerc Thomas Hoccleve de l'office du prive seal’ was granted by the king and council such ‘sustenance’ yearly during his life in the priory of Southwick, Hampshire, as Nicholas Mokkinge, late master of St. Lawrence in the Poultry, had (Addit. MS. Brit. Mus. 4604, art. 34; Privy Council Proc. iii. 152). All Hoccleve's volumes complain of his poverty and his inability to get his pension or salary paid, so that he and his fellows will, he tells the king, have ‘to trotte vnto Newgate’ (Phillipps MS. leaf 40 back). His last poem, written when he had nearly lost his sight, but was too proud to wear spectacles, mentions Prince Edward, probably in 1449 (Mason, p. 29 n.)
Hoccleve's longest work, his ‘De Regimine Principum,’ written about 1411–12, is in 784 seven-line stanzas, or 5,488 lines. It is in English, and was compiled from three sources, the supposititious Epistle of Aristotle addressed to Alexander the Great, known as the ‘Secretum secretorum,’ the ‘De Regimine Principum’ of Egidius de Colonna, and the ‘Game of Chess moralized by Jacques de Cessoles.’ Three manuscripts are in the British Museum, viz. Harl. MSS. 4826, 4866, and Royal MS. 17 D. vi., and many are elsewhere. The poem was edited from the Royal MS. by Thomas Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1860.
Hoccleve's most interesting work is the Phillipps MS. 8151 at Cheltenham, which contains his account of his disordered life, ‘La Male Regle de T. Hoccleve’ and his ‘Mother of God,’ once attributed to Chaucer, together with sixteen other English poems, chiefly balades. The latter are in many cases addressed to distinguished persons like Henry V and John, duke of Bedford. Five of them, together with ‘La Male Regle,’ were printed by George Mason in ‘Poems by Thomas Hoccleve never before published,’ 1796, 4to. Miss Toulmin Smith has since printed from the same manuscript a previously unpublished
