A HISTORY OF NORFOLK 



adopted was so certain to displease in some direction. His letters, many of 

 which are preserved in the Public Library at Cambridge, describe his 

 difficulties in dealing with papistical incumbents, show him to have treated 

 them with great leniency and patience, and make it clear that he was 

 assailed with criticism from all sides. In December, i 572, he writes : ' 'The 

 Queen's Majesty is much offisnded with me that R. Willoughbie is deprived 

 of certain livings within my diocese, and her Majesty is moved thereunto, as 

 well that he was a physician to her Highness' mother, as for the respect of 

 his age ; but he was not deprived by me, but by the Act of the last parlia- 

 ment, for not subscribing to the Acts of Religion.' In the Acts of the Privy 

 Council, in an information as to papists and recusants in Norfolk, this Richard 

 Willoughbie, M.A., sometime fellow of Benet College, Cambridge, is described 

 as having ' seemed a favourer of true religion, but by travelling to Paris in 

 France is become a verie Papist, and supposed now to be a seminary priest.' * 

 A letter to the archbishop, of 30 September, i 573,* on behalf of Francis Morley, 

 describes one Morley, who had been greatly complained of by his parishioners, 

 as right honest, faithful, and of upright judgement ; and writes of the malice 

 of many of the parish (St. Gregory's), who speak of the Geneva psalms as 

 Gehenna psalms, and bewray what they be by maintaining the rood loft in a 

 fashion contrary to the rest of the rood lofts in Norwich, that is to say, ' as 

 being in a manner whole, with the vault or soller and the forepart, with the door 

 and stairs to go up, so as little is wanting of that it was in the time of popery.' 

 Another letter of 3 February, 1573,* shows that the parishioners of St. Simon's 

 church, of whom he writes, ' I could never understand of any good order or 

 conformity in the same parish,' have also decided to take matters into their 

 own hands, and have promised to seek reformation with the High Commis- 

 sioners, being weary as they say, of complaining and receiving no redress, the 

 matter they complain of being the bell ringing in the time of sermon. 



In October, 1 573, a new proclamation ordered the better enforcement 

 of the Act of Uniformity, and though the results of the proceedings in 

 Norwich show that few when brought to the point refused subscription, even 

 in this instance Parkhurst's administration and that of his subordinates was 

 exceedingly lax. Ministers who were suspended were yet allowed to 

 catechize in the parish churches, and to use the exercise of prophesying in 

 the open congregation. On the intervention of one of the commissioners to 

 point out the scandal, Parkhurst wrote to his chancellor' to put a stop to 

 it ; but at the same time he excused his action to another of the commis- 

 sioners, of puritan leanings, by saying that he did not dare do otherwise in 

 face of the opposition his lenity had evoked.' 



Another direction in which the bishop would have preferred to inter- 

 fere as little as possible was in the disputes of the Dutch and Walloon 

 congregations, which since 1565 had been established in Norwich. By the 

 Book of Orders for the Strangers, dated 20 April, 1571, it was enacted that 

 religious questions were to be referred to the bishop on appeal from the 

 consistories ot the Dutch and Walloon congregations.' The bishop, writing 



' Public Library, Cambridge, EE. 2, 34, fol. 95. ' Masters, Hist, of Corpus Christi College, 322. 



' Public Library, Cambridge, EE. 2, 34, fol. 138. * Ibid. fol. 104 r. 



' Gorham, Reformation Gleanings, 484. ' Stephens, Hist, of the Eng. Ck. v, 186. 

 ' Bloraefield, op. cit. iii, 285. 



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