The Dictionary of National Biography identified him tentatively as the son of Owen Roydon who co-operated with Thomas Proctor in 1578 in the latter's Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions; and as the Mathew Royden who graduated M.A.
He was soon afterwards a prominent figure in literary society in London, and knew the poets of the day, including Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Lodge, and George Chapman.
He wrote of Roydon, It is in the exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge, none knoweth better than thyselfe, sweet Mathew, that maketh men manfully indure th'extremes incident to that Herculean labour[3]John Davies of Hereford addressed to Roydon highly complimentary verse in the appendix to his Scourge of Folly, 1611.
Robert Armin, when dedicating his Italian Taylor and his Boy (1609) to Lady Haddington, the Earl of Sussex's daughter Elizabeth, refers to Roydon as 'a poetical light .
Apart from his elegy on Sidney, the only other compositions by Roydon in print are some verses before Thomas Watson's Sonnets (1581), and before Sir George Peckham's True Reporte (1583).
In The Marlen of Prague: Christopher Marlowe and the City of Gold, a historical fantasy by Angeli Primlani, Roydon appears as one of the Queen's mages.