According to Holinshed: there ensued a fray within the Counter gates between Ferrers and the officers, not without hurt of either part, so that the serjeant was driven to defend himself with his mace of arms, and had the crown thereof broken off by bearing off a stroke, and his man struck down.
[4] Weldon, the creditor who had instigated the arrest, and the two sheriffs and others were then summoned before the Commons on 28 March 1542 to answer charges of breach of parliamentary privilege, and were committed to the Tower for two days.
[6] During the Scottish campaign of 1547 Ferrers was a commissioner of transport, and is described by William Patten in The Late Expedition in Scotland as being at the time 'a gentleman of my lord Protectors'.
Ferrers survived Somerset's downfall in October 1549 and execution in January 1552, and was appointed by the Duke of Northumberland to devise entertainments to amuse the young King Edward VI during the Christmas season of 1551–2.
[7]Ferrers was reappointed as Lord of Misrule to devise entertainments during the 1552-1553 Christmas season, and as in the previous year there were jousting, a mock midsummer show, a visit to the city of London, and various masques, and on Twelfth Night a triumph of Cupid, Venus, and Mars, devised by Sir George Howard, Master of the Henchmen, and produced by Ferrers.
After this incident there is little trace of Ferrers, and no record that he was at court during Queen Elizabeth's reign, although he was appointed escheator for Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1562–3 and for Essex and Hertfordshire in 1566–7.
Woudhuysen conjectures that Ferrers wrote several pieces for a suppressed edition of The Mirror for Magistrates published about 1554 which survives only in fragments.
[6] Confusion concerning Ferrers' literary career was engendered in 1589 by the author of The Arte of English Poesie (thought to be George Puttenham), who in comparing Ferrers to other poets of the reign of Edward VI stated that he was "the principal man in this profession", and in relation to the others "a man of no less mirth & felicity … but of much more skill, & magnificence in his meter, and therefore wrate for the most part to the stage, in Tragedy and sometimes in Comedy or Interlude, wherein he gave the king so much good recreation, as he had thereby many good rewards".
This misidentification was copied by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia in 1598, and repeated by later historians and literary critics until corrected by Sir Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography.
[11] He is said to have supported the claim to the succession of Mary, Queen of Scots, and to have corresponded with her agent in England, John Lesley, Bishop of Ross.
[2] His second wife was Jane, the daughter of John Southcote of St Albans, whom he married by licence dated 5 March 1546, and with whom he had a son, Julius.