Late in March 1604, as his biographer John Strype records, Archbishop John Whitgift's “Corps was carried to Croydon … and there honourably interred in the Parish-Church … with a decent Solemnity.” Sir George Paule concurred, noting that the “Funerall was very honourably (as befitted his place) solemnized.” The funeral's honor, decency, and solemnity were somewhat marred, however, for among those laudatory elegies and epitaphs traditionally placed upon hearses, some audacious soul had contrived to pin a far from complimentary piece of doggerel. Entitled “The Lamentation of Dickie for the Death of his Brother Jockie”—Jockie being Whitgift and Dickie his successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft—the poem was a vicious tirade against the late archbishop and his policies. The fullest extant copy survives in a collection of political papers once owned by the Kentishman Sir Peter Manwood:
The prelats pope, the canonists hope,
The Cortyers oracle, virginities spectacle,
Reformers hinderer, trew pastors slanderer,
The papists broker, the Atheists Cloker
The ceremonyes procter, the latyn docter
The dumb doggs patron, non resid[e]ns champion
A well a daye is dead & gone,
and Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Prelats relent, Cortyers lament
Papiste bee sadd, Athiests runn madd
Grone formalists, mone pluralists
frowne ye docters, mourne yee Procters
Begge Registers, starve parators
scowle ye summoners, howle yee songsters
Your great Patron is dead & gone,
& Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Popishe Ambition[,] vaine superstition,
coulured conformity[,] canckared envye,
Cunninge hipocrisie[,] faigned simplicity,
masked ympiety, servile flatterye,
Goe all daunce about his hearse,
& for his dirge chant this verse
Our great patron is dead and gone,
& Jhockey hath left dumb dickey alone.
Yf store of mourners yet there lacke
lett Croyden coull[i]ers bee more blacke
And for a Cophin take a sacke
bearing the corpes upon their backe
dickye more blacke then any one
as chief mourner may marche alone
Singinge this requiem Jhocky is gone,
& dickye hopes to play Jhocky alone
holla dickye bee not so bould,
to woulve yt in Cheif Jhesis fould
as yf to hell thy Soule weare sould,
lest as Jhocky was oft foretould
If thou a persecutor stand,
God likewise strike thee wth his hand:
A-rankinge thee in the bloudy band
of ravening cleargie woolves in the land.