ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



are frequent traces of decay and impoverishment, which were partly due to 

 previous carelessness and in part to the troubles of the closing century. The 

 bishop resisted further invasion of his rights, with increasing vigour, as his 

 episcopate went on, and as the queen's rapacity grew more spasmodic with 

 her advancing age.'" Border history now assumes a prominence and interest 

 unknown in the first thirty years of Elizabeth's reign. War with Scotland 

 had become a distant tradition. Doubtless there had been something healthy 

 in the old periodic struggles, but towards the end of the sixteenth century 

 much bad blood had accumulated, and constant feuds and biclcerings had 

 steadily come to a head. Men were carried off and held to ransom,'^'* animals 

 were raided,'^* outlaws maintained themselves in remote valleys, and sallied 

 forth to plunder in every direction."^ Graemes and Armstrongs on the borders 

 had been particularly insolent. 



All this turbulence brought the bishop into new prominence, and much 

 time in the earlier years in the see was taken up as a border commissioner to 

 regulate the disordered affairs of the district. He had a chief hand in drawing 

 up the Treaty of Carlisle in 1597, which was designed to end the troubles on 

 the Marches, and was the special outcome of an inquiry held at Auckland in 

 the previous year,'^" and a bill drafted to ' strengthen the borders.' '" 



The Romanist recusants seem to have increased much during these 

 troubles. Hutton's complacency was premature. The old families who had 

 been harbouring the seminary priests were in correspondence with friends on 

 the Continent, who allured them with large designs for the future. A northern 

 province of three bishops had been sketched, with Blackwell at York, Haddock 

 at Durham, and a third at Carlisle, but the plan somehow miscarried.'^^ Ten 

 years later, in 1602, Parsons, the Jesuit, made an elaborate plan for the conver- 

 sion of England, in which an academy was to be located at Durham or some 

 other place, when the coming triumph should be effected.'" There is full 

 evidence of a growing volume of recusancy in the bishopric. In face of this 

 the bishop complained bitterly that the Ecclesiastical Commission as now 

 constituted was abridged rather than extended by the omission of his own name 

 and that of the bishop of Carlisle from a recent renewal of the High Com- 

 mission.'^" The exact reference is not clear, and the Patent Rolls for that time 

 do not appear to contain a fresh commission. The long reign of Elizabeth 

 had not served to make the inhabitants of the bishopric content with the 

 ecclesiastical changes forced upon them. Sir William Bowes, in 1595, re- 

 ported that 



True religion hath taken very little place, not by the unwillingness of the people to hear, 

 but by want of means, scant three able preachers being to be found in the whole country. 

 False and disloyal religion hath taken deep root, and that in the best houses, increasing daily 

 by the number and diligence of the seminaries, with more liberty resorting hither, being 

 driven from other places of both the realms.'*^ 



'" Surtees, Hist. Dur. i, p. Ixxxvi. •" Cal. Bord. Papers, ii, 301. 



"'Ibid, ii, 433. "'Ibid. 



"' S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 257, No. 80. . "' Cal. Bord. Papers, ii, 462. 



'" S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 2 5 I , No. 89. 



'" Paragraph 20 in S.P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 288, No. 48. 'Academia nova Richmondiae, Dunelmiae, aut 

 Novocastri, in partibus borealibus construenda est.' 



^'^ Cal. Bord. Papers, \\, \zi. ' The cause of religion laid chiefly upon my weak shoulders by the said 

 instructions can not possibly be so promoted as it might if the ecclesiastic.il high commission lately renewed 

 were ai large and effective as the former was.' '" Cal. Bord. Papers, ii, 171. 



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