The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

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Letter 12, to John Leech (1613)

 Letter 12, to John Leech

Mr Leech,

I do not offend usually this way, and therefore one importunacy may be the better

suffered. I pray you to be careful of this gentleman’s necessity, and succour it

willingly, and in time. You shall make me ever beholden to you; he that helps in a

business of so great charity as this, doth not more succour the needer’s want than 5

he increaseth his own good name. I pray you, sir, to write very effectually, and so

I leave to trouble you, lest I should do injury to your nature in soliciting you to

that, to which of yourself you are so prompt and willing.

Your true lover and friend,

Ben Jonson 10

To my worthy and honoured friend, Mr Leech.

Letter 12 Folger MS.V.a.321, fol. 64v. The addressee is probably John Leech, b. Montrose, Forfarshire, fl. 1610–24, who served as secretary to the Earl of Pembroke at the time this letter was written (mid-1613). A competent Latin poet, Leech later dedicated to Pembroke a collection of Latin epigrams (1620) and was commissioned to consider places of settlement in Virginia on Pembroke’s behalf (1621). Braunmuller (1983), 445, believes that the unnamed ‘gentleman’ is the probable compiler of this collection, Peter Ferryman (see Letter 2, headnote), whom Jonson is commending for a place at Sutton’s Hospital, otherwise known as the Hospital of King James, or Charterhouse: the recently established London school and almshouse richly endowed by the usurer and philanthropist Thomas Sutton (sometimes thought to be the real-life model for Jonson’s Volpone; see Evans, 1994, ch. 3), who had died in December 1611. Pembroke was to become a governor of Charterhouse in 1614 (Davies, 1922, 352). In a letter addressed to the governors elsewhere in the same collection, Folger MS.V.a.321, fol. 63v, Ferryman describes himself as ‘a gentleman in birth and education, as first at the Inner Temple, then at court in our late sovereign’s time, of blessed memory; a soldier and gentleman under the colours of the worthy Sir Philip Sidney for many years, and respected by him . . . and spent many years in travel into divers parts of Christendom and elsewhere’. Ferryman was admitted to Sutton’s Hospital on 13 November 1613 and entered the Hospital early the following year. He died in 1642. [Editor: Ian Donaldson]