James Sicklemore

From the Hyten family archive; subject is James Sicklemore (circa 1580–1605), a thirteenth great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers his probable birth in Middlesex, his marriage to Rose Mary Bellinger, his early death in Surrey, and his sole recorded daughter Mary. Notable: an Elizabethan-era English forebear whose line carried forward through a daughter born in the year of his death.

James Sicklemore (circa 1580–1605) stood among the most distant of the compiler's identifiable English forebears, a man whose brief life spanned the closing years of the Elizabethan age and the opening of the Jacobean. He was born about 1580 in Old Ford, in the county of Middlesex, then a small settlement on the eastern fringes of London where the River Lea wound through marsh and meadow before reaching the Thames. The England of his youth was a kingdom of some four million souls, governed by the aged Queen Elizabeth I, alive with the theatres of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and lately emboldened by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

In the course of his short adulthood, James was joined in marriage to Rose Mary Bellinger, a union that produced at least one recorded child, a daughter named Mary Sicklemore. Mary was born in 1605 — the very year of her father's death — and would go on to live nearly a full century, surviving until 1698 and carrying the Sicklemore line forward into a transformed world that her father never witnessed.

James died in 1605 in Surrey, the county lying south of the Thames opposite his native Middlesex. He cannot have been much past five-and-twenty at the time of his passing. The year of his death was a momentous one in the realm: it was in November 1605 that the Gunpowder Plot was uncovered beneath the Houses of Parliament, an event that shook the kingdom of the new king, James I. Whether James Sicklemore lived to learn of it, or had already been laid to rest, the record does not say.

No further particulars of his occupation, station, or place of burial have been preserved in the family papers. He survives in this register chiefly through his daughter Mary, the conduit by which his blood passed onward. James was a thirteenth great-grandfather of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.