When her father dies, he spends £100 a day on drinks with his friends, and sells the blocks of tin that old Curtis had used to pave his yard.
Gibbs, the ballad suggests that Stukely's marriage to Anne Curtis was the "beginning of his public life," though he was already an experienced captain (including fighting in two sieges of Bologne and serving in the French army).
[2] Karen Ordahl Kupperman reads the ballad within the context of a popular genre of the 16th century: "dramas in which men rose above their circumstances by uncommon exploits abroad."
She sees the ballad as following in the footsteps of earlier plays about Stukely's life, including The Battle of Alcazar, fought in Barbari betweene Sebastian king of Portugall, and Abdelmelec king of Marocco With the death of Captaine Stukeley (1594) by George Peele and the anonymous The Famous Historye of the life and death of Captaine Thomas Stukeley.
These plays were the prototypes of her main subject, Captain John Smith's The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), the works of Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Stukely ballads of the 17th century.