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Thomas Walbot: The last ‘Freewiller’ in Elizabethan England?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The special character of discipline and diversity in the London of the 1560s has never lacked commentators. Following Elizabeth I’s settlement of religion in the parliament of 1559 the new government had many factors to consider. Although convinced Roman Catholic clergy were no longer to be tolerated Elizabeth was anxious not to alienate leading Catholic laymen. Convinced Protestant clerics or potential ordinands, many of them returning from exile or else emerging from prudent seclusion in the British Isles, would either accept her Settlement and shoulder the burden of governing her Church or else, wanting more than it had offered them, move into increasingly militant revolt. These things have been intensively studied and altogether the government’s agenda, like that of many a government swept suddenly to power, can be described as ‘the imposition of discipline and the quashing of diversity’.
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References
1 For a full bibliography of the Vestiarian Controversy, which wrecked any future possibility of blanket conformity to the 1559 Settlement, see Usher, Brett, ‘The Deanery of Bocking and the Demise of the Vestiarian Controversy’, JEH 52 (2001), 434–55.Google Scholar
2 The most comprehensive bibliography of the Elizabethan Settlement is now that appended to Heal, Felicity, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Usher, Brett, William Cecil and Episcopacy (Aldershot, 2003).Google Scholar
3 Strype, John, Annals of the Reformation, 3 vols (2nd edn, Oxford, 1824), 1, pt 2: 494–8.Google Scholar
4 Registrum Matthei Parker diocesis Cantuarensis, AD 1559–1575, ed. Frere, W. H., CYS 39, 3 vols (London, 1928–33), 1:338.Google Scholar
5 Parker was consecrated on 17 December and Scory (consecrated under Edward VI) confirmed to Hereford on 20 December 1559.
6 This Thomas Walbot stood surety with John Woode of Terrington, generosus, for the first fruits of Marmaduke Wood as rector of ‘Terrington’ – but St Clement or St John? – on 14 November 1559: TNA, E334/7, fol. 31r.
7 It was further bounded to the east by All Hallows Honey Lane; to the west by St Michael Wood Street and St Peter Westcheap; and to the south, where it briefly straddled Cheapside, by All Hallows Bread Street. No memory of the parish, razed in the Great Fire of 1666, survives. Today Milk Street is merely a corridor of modern concrete buildings connecting Cheapside and Lombard Street. No plaque commemorates the site of the church or churchyard.
8 The Registers of St. Mary Magdalen Milk Street 1558–1666 and St. Michael Bassishaw London 1538–1625, ed. A. W. Hughes Clarke, Harleian Society 72 (London, 1942) [hereafter. Registers]; Churchwardens’Accounts 1518/9-1605/6: London, G[uildhall] L[ibrary], MS 2596/1 [here after: ‘Accounts’].
9 Cambridge, C[orpus] C[hristi] C[ollege], MS 122, [page] 28; London, GL, MS 9537/2, fol. 28r.
10 TNA, E334/7, fol. 111v. They were set at £15 11s; 8d in 1535, but from the church-wardens’ calculations it appears that in 1566–7 the ‘p[ar]sons dewtie’ now amounted to £24 5s 4d: the Valor Ecclesiasticus, ed. Caley, J. and Hunter, J., 6 vols (London, 1810–34), 1: 372 Google Scholar; ‘Accounts’, fol. 137r.
11 CCCC, MS 122, [page] 80.
12 L[ondon] Metropolitan] Archives], DL/C/332, fol. 45r.
13 Registers, 1. The Pilkington family’s connection with the parish remained strong throughout Walbot’s tenure. John Chapman, merchant tailor, had stood surety for James Pilkington, future bishop of Durham, as prebendary of Mapesbury in St Paul’s (12 February 1560). One of Walbot’s own sureties, Richard Hill, also guaranteed John Pilkington’s first fruits as archdeacon of Durham later that year. The latter was married in the parish on 6 November 1564: ibid.; TNA, E334/7, fols 47v, 182v.
14 Elizabeth’s second parliament met on 12 January and was prorogued on 10 April: Neale, J. E., Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581 (London, 1953), 93, 125.Google Scholar
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16 What follows, with interpolated comments, is a full transcript from the original manuscript preserved in London, Inner Temple Library, MS Petyt 538, vol. 38, fols 59r-60r. Surviving evidence from the Convocation of 1563 is preserved in the same collection, vol. 47, fols 575r-588r.
17 On fol. 6ov, in a different hand, is an endorsement: Touching yequarrell of p[re]destination’; and a pasted slip (fol. 60x): ‘Exhibited by Thomas Walbot person of mary magdaleens in milk strete’.
18 Freeman, , ‘Dissenters’, 136.Google Scholar
19 Ibid, 145.
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21 Freeman, ‘Dissenters’, 147.
22 LMA, DL/C/332, fol. 75f.
23 Registers, 38–9.
24 Registers, 18.
25 LMA, DL/C/332, fol. 95r.
26 ‘Accounts’, fol. 135V. John Bullingham, later bishop of Gloucester (1581–98), evidently had the full backing of the ‘masters’ of the parish. When he compounded for the living (20 December 1566) his sureties were two parishioners, John Whitebroke, cloth- worker, and William Jennyns, mercer. Two others, Richard Seintman, grocer, and Richard Procter, merchant tailor, stood surety for his prebend of Wenlakebarn in St Paul’s (10 January 1567) and a fifth, John Hunt, cloth worker, for his bishopric in May 1582: TNA, E334/8, fols 96V, 98r; /10, fol. 12v.
27 For examples of Grindal’s methods as a disciplinarian, see Collinson, Patrick, Archbishop Grindal: the Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979), 113–26.Google Scholar
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29 Hasler, P. W., The House of Commons 1558–1603, HMSO, 3 vols (London, 1981), 2: 201–2.Google Scholar
30 In order of signing the minutes they are Clement NEWCE, mercer (for Robert Wisdom, archdeacon of Ely, 30 December 1559; for John Aylmer, archdeacon of Lincoln, 15 December 1562): TNA E334/7, fols 40v, 182v. Robert OFFLEY, haberdasher (for John Pullan, prebendary of Wenlakebarn in St Paul’s, 25 October 1561): ibid., fol. 163V. Christopher RINGSTEAD, goldsmith (for Gregory Garth, vicar of Hemel Hempstead, Herts, 13 February 1566): E334/8, fol. 72v. Richard HILL, mercer: see n. 13, above. William KYNGE: see 286–7, above. John WHITEBROKE, clothworker (for Thomas Cole, rector of High Ongar, Essex, 10 November 1559; for John Bullingham, rector of St Mary Magdalen Milk St): E334/7, fol. 3or, and see n. 26, above. Nicholas CAREW, clothier (for Thomas Jenkinson, rector of St Mary Woolchurch, London, 22 February 1560): E334/7, fol. sor. John LACYE, clothworker (for Bishop Gilbert Berkeley as chancellor of Wells Cathedral, 16 Oct 1560; for Thomas Edmunds, rector of St Mary Magdalen Milk St, 16 October 1571): E334/7, fol. 7or, /8, fol. 266r. Richard PROCTER, merchant tailor (for John Bullingham, prebendary of Wenlakebarn; for William Sage, rector of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, 29 April 1570; for Thomas Edmunds, rector of St Mary Magdalen Milk St, 16 October 1571): E3 34/8, fols 203V, 266r; and see a 26, above.
31 Registers, 19, 39.
32 Collinson, , Archbishop Grindal, 152.Google Scholar