He may have been the son of Richard Niccols who entered the Inner Temple in 1575, and who wrote ‘A Treatise setting forth the Mystery of our Salvation,’ and ‘A Day Star for Dark Wandring Souls; showing the light by a Christian Controversy’ (posthumous, 1613).
The younger Richard Niccols accompanied Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham's 1596 expedition against Cadiz, and was on board the admiral's ship Ark at the taking of the city.
[1] In 1607 appeared a narrative poem called The Cuckow, with the motto "At etiam cubat cuculus, surge amator, in domum".
The volume, which is dedicated to Master Thomas Wroth, and was printed by F[elix] K[ingston], has no author's name, but in his later Winter Nights Vision Niccols describes himself as having "Cuckow-like" sung "in rustick tunes of Castaes wrongs".
Another poetical induction precedes the poem on Elizabeth, which, Niccols states, he wrote at Greenwich, apparently in August 1603, when the plague raged in London.
But in 1655 William Rider published a tragi-comedy called The Twins, which Frederick Gard Fleay suggested may be a printed copy of Niccols's piece.