Sir John Oldcastle to Henry Carey's son George, second Lord Hunsdon, and the actors regained their previous patronage. Soon after the premier of Shakespeare's Oldcastle/Falstaff in 1597–98, literary and dramatic works began to appear that defended the reputation of the historical Oldcastle; scholars argue that the muse that inspired these works was Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham. In 1601 a narrative poem, "The Mirror of Martyrs," by one John Weever, was published; it praises Oldcastle has a "valiant captain and most godly martyr." And two years earlier, in 1599, the play "Sir John Oldcastle" was performed by the Admiral's Men, the main theatrical
Sir John Oldcastle play, which has not survived; because of this fact, the extant play has sometimes been called "Sir John Oldcastle, Part I" or "1 Sir John Oldcastle.") In 1664, the play was one of the seven dramas added to the second impression of the Shakespeare Third Folio by publisher Philip Chetwinde. Like other subjects of Elizabethan history plays, Sir John Oldcastle was an actual person, a soldier and Lollard dissenter who was hanged and burned for heresy and treason in 1417 — thus earning himself a place in the seminal text of the Protestant Reformation in Tudor England, John Foxe's "Book