Rebecca Heminges (1571-1619)

KW
1 day ago
14 min read

by Meryl Faiers, 20 April 2026

Evidence of the lives of non-elite women is often fragmentary and frequently found in administrative records. The first stage of thinking about the experiences of someone like Rebecca Edwards Heminges is to comb the archives to assemble a timeline of her documented life. Meryl Faiers has compiled a narrative of what we know so far about the wife of actor and grocer John Heminges.

Cite: Meryl Faiers, 'Rebecca Heminges (1571-1619)', The King's Women, 20 April 2026 <https://www.kingswomen.org/post/rebecca-heminges-1571-1619>

Rebecca Heminges lived her whole life in one parish, St Mary Aldermanbury, in the City of London. Although there is little obvious documentary evidence of her existence, parish records and those of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, of which her husband, John, was a member, allow us to create a timeline of her life. The parish registers and vestry minutes of St Mary Aldermanbury are held at The London Archive and the records of The Worshipful Company of Grocers at the Guildhall Library in the City of London.

1571

Rebecca Edwards was baptised on 23 December. Her father's name is not given but he was possibly the Robert Edwards who appears in the St Mary Aldermanbury vestry minutes in the 1580s. The family was probably reasonably well to do - Stow describes Aldermanbury as 'meet for merchants' - and there were plenty of affluent families in the parish. If her father was indeed the Robert of the vestry minutes, Rebecca was related to the prominent Swynnerton family through her maternal line, the Fawntes/Fautes. Sir John Swynnerton, a leading parishioner of St Mary's, Lord Mayor of London in 1612, referred to her as 'cosen' in his will and left her the substantial sum of £20.

1586

Nothing is known of Rebecca's childhood but on 30 January 1586 when she was barely 14, she married the well-known actor, William Knell. Knell was 11 years her senior, born with his twin Ellen in the City parish of St Botolph without Aldgate in January 1559/60. He was a leading player with the Queen's Men, Elizabeth I's own company, known for playing the King in The Famous Victories of Henry V; Thomas Nashe wanted to write his praise in Latin in Pierce Pennilesse; and Knell heads the list of famous English actors of his time in Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors.

1587

On 13 June 1587 Knell was touring in Thame, Oxfordshire, with the Queen's Men when he started a fight with a fellow actor, John Towne. Towne stabbed Knell in the neck with his sword, claimed self-defence, and was acquitted of Knell's murder. Rebecca, at home in Aldermanbury, was widowed at 15. In December the same year, aged just 16, she was granted administration of Knell's estate. It's unknown what that estate amounted to but it's possible that she was now a (very) young widow with some capital.

1588

On 5 March 1587/8 a marriage licence was granted to John Heminges and Rebecca, 'relict [i.e. widow] of William Knell', and five days later they were married at St Mary Aldermanbury. Rebecca was now 16 and her new husband was 21, already a member of the Grocers' Company and Citizen of London - and a relative newcomer to the acting profession. For over a century, since the work of Chambers (The Elizabethan Stage) and Nungezer (A Dictionary of Actors), scholars have surmised that Rebecca and John met via her first husband but it is equally possible that they had known each other before her first marriage: John had been a teenage apprentice in the household of wealthy grocer James Collins in Honey Lane when Rebecca was growing up just around the corner in Aldermanbury.

The Agas Map of early modern London showing Aldermanbury (upper) and Honey Lane (lower). Janelle Jenstad, Greg Newton, and Kim Mclean-Fiander (eds), Civitas Londinvm. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 6.6, http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm.

1589

On 7 May 1589 the Grocers' Company held their annual dinner and members were required to bring their wives unless they were ill or heavily pregnant, when a daughter could attend in their place. There is no record of the dinner having been held in 1588 so that the dinner in 1589 gave Rebecca her first opportunity to join in the social life of the Grocers' Company.

1590

In late October 1590, Rebecca gave birth to her first child, her daughter Ales/Alice, baptised on 1 November - although, of course, Alice was named in the register only as her father's daughter rather than her mother's. Alice was probably delivered with the help of the parish midwife, Margaret Clark. There had been no children from Rebecca's marriage to William Knell and there is no record of any infant burial or stillbirth in the 2.5 years leading up to Alice's birth, perhaps suggesting that John was absent on tour with a playing company (perhaps the Queen's Men) for much of the time.

1591

In this year the parish tax assessment shows iiii^d due from [blank] Heminges, his forename perhaps unknown due to his frequent absence. In later years he would be recorded as John Heminges and latterly as Master Heminges. Rebecca was left in London with her baby daughter.

1592

On 7 May this year, Rebecca's second daughter, Mary, was born. Earlier in the year, Strange's Men, the company John Heminges was now with, had started performances at the Rose playhouse in Southwark so that he was based at home with Rebecca and toddler Alice when Mary was born. But plague broke out early that summer and in June Strange's Men left London to tour again, leaving Rebecca alone to cope with the death of Mary in August at the age of just 3 months.

1593

On 29 August, Rebecca's third daughter, Judith, was baptised. Decades later she would show herself to be a formidable opponent, going to law to secure her late husband's property, and would become the matriarch of the family.

1595

With the formation of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, John Heminges was now mostly London based and the Heminges family grew rapidly through the next decade. Their fourth daughter, Thomasine, was baptised on 15 January. She may have been named for Thomasine Swynnerton, wife of Rebecca's relative Sir John Swynnerton. In an echo of her mother's first marriage, Thomasine would marry an actor, William Ostler, and be widowed suddenly at the age of 19. In November this year, John Heminges took on his first apprentice in the Grocers' Company who would have lived with Rebecca and John and their children. Just a few months earlier the Grocers Company had restated the requirement for apprentices to be 16 years old or more at the start of their apprenticeship so that Thomas Belte would have been at least this age when he joined the Heminges household.

1596

Another daughter, Joan, was baptised on 7 May. Rebecca now had four children under the age of six to raise.

1597

There was another mouth to feed this year, with a new apprentice, 17-year-old Alexander Cooke, joining the household. His apprenticeship was due to last 8 years but, due to long periods of playhouse closure because of plague, it extended until 1609 when he formally became a Citizen and Grocer at the age of 29.

1598

In April this year, Rebecca's first son was born and named John for his father. He lived only two months and was buried in June.

1599

A second son named John was baptised on 12 August. His father John was at home but also preparing for the opening of the Globe playhouse a little later in 1599. He eventually predeceased his father, dying overseas sometime around 1630.

1601

Rebecca's eighth child, Bevis, was baptised on 24 May.

1602

In October this year another son, William, was born. He was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, and would become a poet and playwright but would eventually lose all his father's theatrical holdings.

1603

1603 was a terrible year for Londoners, the theatre, and the Heminges family, with a severe outbreak of plague closing the theatres for months on end. John Heminges may well have been a practising member of the Grocers' Company - there is even a suggestion in the official history of the Grocers' Company, From Grossers to Grocers (Helen Clifford, 2018), that Rebecca operated the business whilst he worked as an actor - so may have been luckier than his fellows in having another source of income this year. But even that would not have compensated for the terrible loss of two of their children, seven-year-old Joan on 20 August and two-year-old Bevis on 23 August. Their burials are recorded in the register of a neighbouring parish, St Michael Bassishaw, the only known instance of the family appearing other than in St Mary Aldermanbury. St Michael's possessed a newer and larger churchyard that appears to have been used for the plague victims of both parishes. The two churches were so close together that today it takes only a minute to walk from the site of one to the site of the other.

Memorial markers of St Mary Aldermanbury and St Michael Bassishaw. Photographs by Meryl Faiers.

1604

George Heminges, Rebecca's fourth son, was baptised a few months later in February 1604.

1605

Exactly a year later, in February 1605, Rebecca's namesake daughter was baptised. And during this year, John and Rebecca purchased the Addle Street house in which they had lived as tenants, paying £90 for it to Thomas Savage, who had earlier acted as trustee for the complicated transaction for the lease of the Globe. If John did, indeed, pursue a parallel career as a grocer alongside the playhouse, their first house, on Aldermanbury itself, was likely to have been a modest dwelling two rooms deep, with a street-facing room as a retail space and the family quarters above and behind. The Addle Street house, described in legal Latin in 1615 as a 'mansio', was probably much larger with any shop and associated storage still facing outwards and the family spaces now in a separate range of buildings, perhaps across a courtyard, away from the noise of the street. John Heminges's will, dictated in 1630, offers a glimpse of its furnishing with his bequest of cushions that had been their mother's to three of his daughters: red embroidered with bugle beads to Margaret; green to Elizabeth; cloth of silver striped cushions to Judith. It is possible that Rebecca had worked these herself and she may also have undertaken the embroidery on a set of linen 'wrought with Cutworke which was her mothers' that John left to the daughter named for her mother, now Rebecca Smith, wife of Captain William Smith, a sea captain.

Embroidered cushion, made in London c 1600; image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. <https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O317798/cushion-cover-unknown/?carousel-image=2006BD4600>

1606

This is likely to have been the year in which another daughter, Margaret, was born but no record of her birth has been confirmed as yet. She would go on to make an apparently advantageous marriage to Thomas Sheppard, a lawyer and former MP.

1608

On 6 March, Elizabeth Heminges was baptised; she would be the last of Rebecca's and John's children to survive infancy and was probably the last of Rebecca's babies to be delivered by midwife Margaret Clark, who died in 1610. Elizabeth may have been sickly or in some way disabled but she married following her father's death and her sister Judith, in her will in 1645, is concerned about her sister Elizabeth Barnet's future support, requiring her executrix to 'put her forth to some sure person as will undertake to maintayne and keepe her during her life'. This was another year blighted by a major outbreak of plague, keeping the playhouses closed nearly all year and thus removing the Heminges family's major source of income. Perhaps as a direct result, Rebecca and John mortgaged their home back to the previous owner, Thomas Savage. Three weeks after Elizabeth was born, John was chosen as one of the two churchwardens of the parish - maybe he was now viewed by his neighbours as having ample time to fulfil parish responsibilities. By the end of the year, he had secured (perhaps with Savage's assistance) a sought-after City function as one of the ten seacoal meters for London, responsible for supervising the weighing of coal arriving in London from the north-east of England. The job itself could be carried out by a deputy but each seacoal meter was entitled to a small fee for every chaldron (large wagon) of coal loaded: it was a highly lucrative position and transformed the family's finances.

1610

In July this year a new apprentice, 16-year-old George Birch, joined the household, replacing Alexander Cooke, who had finally completed his apprenticeship. There were now nine children, four of them teenagers plus a teenage apprentice, living with Rebecca and John.

1611

In February the household grew again with the arrival of 15-year-old John Wilson as the latest apprentice. Wilson was highly musical and perhaps brought his lute with him into the Heminges home. After his apprenticeship ended in 1621, John Wilson became the leading composer for the King's Men, lutenist to the King, and ended his career as Professor of Music at Oxford University. In June, Rebecca's final daughter, a second Mary, was baptised but survived only a month. The latter part of this year saw 16-year-old Thomasine Heminges marrying a colleague of her father's, actor William Ostler.

1612

In May this year, Rebecca became a grandmother at the age of 40, when Thomasine's son, Beaumont Ostler, was born and baptised in the family parish. This was also possibly the year in which Rebecca's own final baby would be born: Swynnerton, named for his mother's relative, Sir John Swynnerton.

1613

This year brought major changes to the family. In February, Alice married a newly qualified scrivener, John Atkins, who would work with his father-in-law and the King's Men for several decades. And then in May Judith married Rafe Merifeild, an adventurer later involved in the colonisation of St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. The same month brought sadness with the death of Swynnerton, buried as an infant at Mary's, and on 29 June came the devastating fire which destroyed the Globe.

1614

Rebecca was almost certainly largely on her own for the first half of this year managing her remaining children and her husband's apprentices whilst he oversaw the reconstruction of the Globe, completed within twelve months. Possibly in anticipation of the Globe reopening, John took on an additional apprentice, Nicholas Crosse, so that there were now three adolescents - Nicholas aged 14, John Wilson now 18, and 20-year-old George Birch - for whom Rebecca was a surrogate mother. The year ended with the sudden death of her son-in-law, William Ostler, widowing her 19-year-old daughter Thomasine.

1615

The birth of Rebecca's second grandchild, Alice's son James Atkins, in April no doubt brought joy but much of the year was taken up in dispute with the widowed Thomasine. Like Rebecca before her, she had been granted administration of her husband's estate and she now sought compensation from her father for the value of Ostler's shares in the King's Men's playhouses. In September Thomasine had a sub poena issued against her father, and on 26 September she went to the family home and ‘with tears dropping from her eyes performed & did her duty’ before her parents, as required by her father in exchange for the promise of compensation. This must have proved an extraordinarily emotional meeting for all of them with resonances of Capulet and Juliet - especially as John Heminges may well have created the role of Capulet.

1616

1616 got off to a terrible start when in January Thomasine had her father arrested for non-payment of the promised compensation for Ostler's playhouse shares. Some unknown settlement was reached but the family was fractured for ever. If little Beaumont Ostler was still alive aged 4, it is unlikely that Rebecca ever saw him again. More happily, Judith's first son, Edward Merifeild, was born in February - a grandson who would emigrate to the Caribbean. Also in February yet another apprentice, Richard Sharpe, joined the Heminges household; at the end of the year, Rebecca's relative Sir John Swynnerton died, leaving her £20 in a codicil to his will.

1617

This year saw the births of more grandchildren for Rebecca and John, including a short-lived Atkins granddaughter named for Rebecca.

1618

By this time, the Grocers' Company seems to have been less concerned about the starting age for apprenticeship so that Thomas Holcombe was just 13 when he was apprenticed to John Heminges in April; as a result there may have been as many as five apprentices in the household, alongside the three Heminges daughters and their two brothers.

1619

In March, John Heminges' longstanding friend and colleague, and the most celebrated actor in London, Richard Burbage, died. His death was widely mourned and would have affected the Heminges household profoundly. But much worse was to come: on 2 September Rebecca's burial was recorded in the parish register of St Mary Aldermanbury. The date of her death is unknown, as is the cause. She was 47 and had survived 15 live births, and there may have been unrecorded stillbirths or miscarriages. Four of her babies had died in infancy: the first and second Marys, the first John, and Swynnerton. Joan and Bevis had succumbed to plague in 1603; and George disappears from the record before adulthood, leaving eight children to reach maturity. She and John had been married for 31 years.

But her life was not all childbearing and childrearing. As well as running and/or supervising a household often comprising ten people or more, she may also have been her husband's practical partner in a grocery business. This may have been conducted as a retail operation or simply as the means of providing food and drink for sale at the King's Men's playhouses. In either case, it is most likely that Rebecca and any domestic servants saw to the weighing out of packets of spices, dried fruits and loaf sugar that were the mainstay of any grocery business. If there was a retail shop, in John's absence she would have kept a tally of customers' credit and received money on John's behalf. It is unknown if she was literate, but she had to have known her numbers, at least. If she were literate as well as numerate, it may have been Rebecca who dealt with the merchants who shipped the spices, sugar and other grocery commodities into the port of London. An apprentice master was responsible for the education of his apprentices and while the Grocers' Company required literacy for membership, the trade itself required numeracy, so that it is likely that tuition was taking place in the Heminges household for both the apprentices and the children. The only Heminges child for whom there is any evidence of education is William, but John and George may have been educated at other schools within the City, perhaps in what were known as reckoning schools, where basic accounting and bookkeeping were taught, while Rebecca may have helped all of them with their numbers and letters at home to begin with. Perhaps it was Rebecca who instilled a love of learning into her daughter Judith who, in her will in 1645, directed that £10 should be spent towards her own granddaughter's education.

There is no known image of Rebecca (although her husband later had portraits painted of two of her daughters, Rebecca and Margaret) but portraits exist of two of her known contemporaries.

Joan Alleyn, English School, 1596, Dulwich Picture Gallery. <https://assets.dulwich-gallery.substrakt.net/images/Joan_Alleyn_40C3lUG_OFlDpFT.width-1800.jpg>

Joan Alleyn was not only a contemporary but almost certainly someone she knew, the wife of the leading actor with the Admiral's Men, Edward Alleyn: three years after Rebecca's death, in 1622, her widower, John, dined with Alleyn.

Portrait of Margaret Layton, Marcus Gheeraerts the younger, London, c. 1620, image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. <https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O69443/margaret-layton-formerly-laton-oil-painting-gheeraerts-marcus-the/?carousel-image=2006AT4192

Margaret Layton was the daughter of Sir Hugh Browne, a wealthy vintner and grocer, and so may have been known to Rebecca through the Grocers' Company. The V & A museum in London has on display not only her portrait but also the jacket in which she was painted, a jacket dating a few years earlier than the painting. These two portraits give an idea of the likely quality and style of Rebecca Heminges's wardrobe.

Rebecca spent the whole of her married life as an actor's wife, no doubt attending performances frequently, perhaps in a prime seated position or perhaps standing at the back of a gallery simply to catch a favourite moment in a favourite play. There is a tradition (possibly apocryphal) that credits John Heminges as the originator of the roles of Julius Caesar and Polonius: it must have been difficult for Rebecca, the widow of William Knell, to watch these characters stabbed to death on stage, as Knell had been in life.

John Heminges lived on without Rebecca for a further 11 years and never remarried. When he dictated his will in October 1630 he requested to be buried 'in the parrish Church of Mary Aldermanbury in London as neere vnto my loueinge wife Rebecca Heminges who lieth there interred and vnder the same stone which lieth in parte over her there'. Rebecca and John remain buried together, beneath the footprint of St Mary Aldermanbury, now marked out in a memorial garden in the City of London.

Garden on the site of St Mary Aldermanbury showing the nave. Photograph by Meryl Faiers.

Sources

Parish register of St Mary Aldermanbury, The London Archives, P69/MRY2/A/001/MS03572/001

Vestry minutes of St Mary Aldermanbury, The London Archives, P69/MRY2/B001/MS03570/001

Parish register of St Botolph Without Aldgate, The London Archives, P69/BOT2/A/001/MS09220

Parish register of St Michael Bassishaw, The London Archives, P69/MIC1/A/002/MS06987

Worshipful Company of Grocers, Wardens' Accounts, The London Archives, CLC/L/GH/D/001/MS11571/007-11

Will of John Heminges, The National Archives, PROB10/484

Will of Judith Merefeild, The National Archives, PROB 11/193/435 (register copy)

Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s A Day at Home in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2017) provides much useful background on urban homes and shops.