ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



For their career zeal was a necessity and learning was provided. The 

 Calvinistic lecturer, or conductor of ' prophesyings,' had zeal too, and 

 no social or educational disadvantage compared with the beneficed 

 clergy/ 



Of the Bishops of Winchester who presided over Surrey, after 

 Elizabeth's accession, Robert Home was a Calvinist. He had been 

 dean of Durham under Edward VL and an exile under Mary. He was 

 a learned man, but was a zealous destroyer of the ancient rites and beauty 

 of worship which Elizabeth would have liked to see preserved in order 

 to conciliate the conservative majority of her subjects. He was fully 

 occupied in establishing the Elizabethan settlement, but he died in i 579, 

 just before the more rigorous persecution of the recusants began under 

 the Act of 1 58 1. 



His successor, John Watson, 1580, to January, 1584, was a man of 

 a different school. He was an M.D. of Oxford, who had relinquished 

 medicine for orders, and had managed to hold a stall at Winchester 

 under both Edward VI. and Mary. He further conformed under 

 Elizabeth, and was made archdeacon of Surrey in 1559 after Edmund 

 Mervyn's deprivation. He was dean of Winchester from 1572 to 1580. 

 The persecution of the recusants raged in his time, but he was perhaps 

 personally not very zealous. He was old and in ill-health. On 4 May, 

 1 58 1, he wrote to Sir William More that owing to his grievous ill- 

 health he must depute his visitation to his chancellor.'' A great part of 

 his correspondence with the Surrey county magnates is concerned with 

 encroachments upon his timber and game at Farnham, and the queen's 

 intended visit there. 



His successor was Thomas Cooper, a man of great learning and of 

 high character. Bishop of Lincoln 1570 to 1584, of Winchester 1584 

 to 1594. He may be said to have fully represented the official view of 

 the time as to the position of the Church, equally severe upon Romanist 

 and Puritan nonconformity. He was active in suppressing the recusants, 

 and at the same time was attacked in the Martin Marprelate tracts, with 

 a violence and scurrility which shows that he was considered worth 

 powder and shot by the party which they represented. His answer, ' An 

 Admonition to the People of England,' is at all events superior in gravity 

 and decency to the work of his assailants. Penry, the author of some of 

 the Marprelate Tracts, was hanged at St. Thomas' Waterings in 1593 ; 

 but he was not otherwise connected with Surrey, except that he had 

 consulted with Udal at Kingston about his publications. Cooper's zeal 

 against the recusants had a result for which he was not perhaps pre- 

 pared. He had been pressing upon the council the deportation of 

 the worst offenders of the labouring class to serve as pioneers in the 

 army in the Netherlands, where one would suppose they would desert to 



' A subsequent Bishop of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, said at the Hampton Court Conference 

 that the chief cause of the inefficiency of the clergy was the presentation of ' mean clerks ' by the 

 laity, whom the bishops were compelled to institute by writs of quare impedit. 



* Loseley MSS. date cited. 



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