On 17 January 1574 Ralph Lane, then in Greenwich, addressed a deliberately cryptic letter to Burghley, concerning ship-traffic with Portugal and three individuals: Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish agent; one ‘R. B.’; and Lane himself. The Privy Council had offered a lieutenancy first to R. B., who declined, then ‘soodenly resolued vppon another Agent for them, which ys Rowlande Yorck’, overlooking Lane, who was considered too hot in spirit.

Rowland York, evidently the ninth of ten sons of Sir John York, was a man of extraordinary notoriety, as noted by Camden in his 1615 Annales (p. 470), whose Latin was Englished by George Carleton in his Thankful Remembrance of 1624 (p. 116): ‘York was a Londoner, a man of loose conversation, and actions, and desperate.’ The balance of the passage has been cited above in connection with Oxford's 1567 killing of Thomas Brincknell; a translation of 1625, A True and Royal History, gives a slightly different rendering (Book 3, p. 223):

As we have noted, it was not Rowland York but Edward de Vere who, as early as 1567, killed his man with an unmanly thrust of his rapier beneath the waist.

Rowland York's character may be judged by his subsequent actions (DNB). On 28 October 1580 William Herle reported to Walsingham that York had been arrested on a felony. In 1584 York was caught up in a plot to betray Ghent to the Duke of Parma. In 1586 he joined Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries, where, serving under Sir Philip Sidney, he betrayed the sconce of Zutphen to the Spanish, encouraging Sir William Stanley's more disastrous betrayal of Deventer.