Thomas Cokayne

In a 13 August 1548 muster, he was listed among the captains selected "For the Battaile", as part of the relief for George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury at the Siege of Haddington.

[1] In 1587, on her way to her final imprisonment and eventual execution at Fotheringhay Castle, he attended Mary, Queen of Scots' travel "with but a small trayne" as far as Derby.

Black, writing for The History of Parliament: "under Elizabeth, Cokayne was evidently one of the local pillars of church and state".

[1] He was commissary for relief in 1550, for subsidy in 1563, and "to inquire into Jesuits and seminarists" in 1585; keeper of Ravensdale Park in May 1553; collector for loans in Derbyshire in 1562; and steward for the manors of Ashbourne and Hartington by 1590.

In 1564, he advised Scottish Protestant, Thomas Bentham, on the religious conformity of his fellow justices of the peace in Derbyshire; he was charged with investigating the dispute between the Earl of Shrewsbury and his Glossopdale tenantry in 1581; he questioned a correspondent of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1584; and he impounded the belongings of the Derbyshire-born attempted assassin of Elizabeth, Anthony Babington, in 1586.

With 52 years' experience in hunting, Cokayne was quick to commend the sport as a pastime; "hunters", he wrote in its preface, "by their continual travail, painful labour, often watching, and enduring of hunger, of heat, and of cold, are much enabled above others to the service of their prince and country to the wars [...] and their minds also by this honest recreation the more fit and the better disposed to all other good exercises".

Though he was wont to shield hunting from the "carping speaches of the enemies thereof", he warned his readers against using the sport as "an occupation to spend therein daies, moneths, and yeres, to the hinderance of the service of God, her maistie or your Countrey".

Its main feature is a recess, where full-length figures of Thomas and Dorothy face each other, while kneeling over a prayer desk (which is inscribed with a Latin memorial).