Sir George Carey (1547 – 1603)

At this time the future Baron Hunsdon (1596), and future Lord Chamberlain (1597) Brother-in-law of the company’s late lamented patron Ferdinando Stanley, fifth Earl of Derby, who was murdered in April 1594. In the letter that informs his wife on the death of her sister’s husband on 16 April 1594, he refers to Derby’s successor as ‘the nidicock his brother’. The Earl himself seems to have shared that opinion, because he placed on his dying bed a trust in control of his most valued estates, rather than the next Earl. The patronage of the Earl of Derby’s Men went to the widow’s other brother-in-law. Even if he was not qualified for patronage until he inherited his fathers title in 1596. The bypassed nidicock, by the way, is William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby ; a playwright with no plays on his name, and for that reason admitted to the longlist of true and only Bards.