Chapter 4

A Disputed Election

On 24 February 1596 (N. S.) John Harmar heard the news he had been waiting for.

The earl of Leicester had elicited from the queen a promise that Thomas Bilson,

the warden of Winchester College, was to be the next bishop of Worcester. This

would mean the election of a new warden, and Harmar was the obvious choice. He

wrote immediately to Bilson, ‘putting him in mind of his suit which has, on the

expectancy of his remove, so long depended’. 1

The wardenship of Winchester College was one of the more desirable positions in

Tudor England. As schoolmaster, Harmar’s stipend was £11 10s. per annum. He also

had his accommodation and meals provided. There were some minor additional

benefits in kind and in cash: every year he was given eight yards of broadcloth,

worth fourteen shillings, for a gown, and three shillings and fourpence for fur with

which to trim the gown. There were few other available sources of income, and 2

after resigning his regius professorship, which was worth £40 per annum, Harmar’s

total income had been severely reduced. The warden’s stipend was supposed to be

£23 4s. 8d., but the scrutiny of the College’s finances in 1557 by the commissioners

of the Act for First Fruits and Tenths had come to the conclusion that the warden’s

real income was £101 18s. 8d. In addition he had a number of valuable 3

perquisites. There was very comfortable accommodation in lodgings which had

been newly built at the expense of Warden Bilson; all meals were provided and, in

addition to the normal fish allowance each fellow received, the warden was

allowed 100 oysters every Friday and fast-day. He was also allowed 15 gallons of 4

beer a day. Where the schoolmaster received eight yards of broadcloth for his 5

gown, the warden was given twelve. Moreover, under William of Wykeham’s

statutes, the warden had two horses reserved for his use and three servants – a

clerk, a groom and a boy—whose wages, food, accommodation and livery were all

paid for by the College. The difference in living standards of the two positions 6

was considerable.

There was a further attraction. William of Wykeham’s intention had been that his

two foundations were to provide a seamless progress for the brightest students

from their education in Winchester to their fellowships and degrees in Oxford. This

can be clearly seen in his choice of names: St Mary College of Winchester near

Winchester, and St Mary College of Winchester in Oxford. In acknowledgement of

this seamless education, Acts of Parliament passed during the reigns of both Henry

VIII and Elizabeth I specifically refer to Winchester College as a constituent college

of the University of Oxford. This status was maintained in a royal proclamation of

James I and in Commonwealth Acts of Parliament; and when, in 1675, Daniel

Loggan published his collection of prints of the Oxford colleges, Winchester was

one of the colleges depicted. As late as 1857 Winchester’s unique status was

recognised again when it was the Oxford University Commissioners who revised the

statutes of both Wykehamical foundations. To be warden of Winchester was to

have the status of the head of a university college, without any of the associated

administrative duties. The geographical distance was also a boon. In late sixteenth

century Oxford, a city of approximately 5000 in the 1580s, had a lord mayor, 7

fourteen heads of colleges, each of whom would have had views in matters of

precedence, and a bishop whose see had been founded as recently as 1542

following the dissolution of the monasteries. Winchester, a somewhat smaller city,

with a population estimated to have been less than 3800, had a lord mayor, one 8

head of a college, and one of the senior bishops in England who, as bishop of

Winchester, was the prelate of the Order of the Garter and thus closely in touch

with the reigning monarch. The warden was well-remunerated, comfortably

accommodated, and one of the three most powerful figures in the city.

John Harmar must have thought his qualifications were unmatchable. He had been

nominated to a scholarship at Winchester College by the queen, and she and the

earl of Leicester had supported his progress from Winchester to New College.

When he had graduated, it was Elizabeth I who had paid for him to tour Europe for

three years and three months, during which tour he had acted as an agent of

English religio-political foreign policy by engaging in public disputes with senior

Roman Catholics in Paris and with the leading Lutheran polemicist in Strasbourg. In

Strasbourg he had stayed with Johannes Sturmius who was a key figure in the

Walsingham-Cecil European espionage-ring, and that scholar-spy had published an

account of Harmar’s part in the public debates in highly complimentary terms.

That he had there publicly advocated a Calvinist interpretation of the Gospels was

proof of his religious conformity – always a useful element of public life in Tudor

times. On his return to England the queen had manifested yet more royal favour by

appointing Harmar regius professor of Greek in the University of Oxford; he had

been a university proctor; and after he had become schoolmaster of Winchester

College, she had, on one of her royal progresses through Hampshire, assured him

of her intention to see him further preferred. He had, only two years earlier, kept

himself in good favour with the secretary of state, Sir Robert Cecil, by reporting a

conversation he had had in London with the brother of Dr Roderigo Lopez, the

queen’s physician who had been found guilty of planning to poison the queen, and

was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Cecil had great influence in court.

Harmar’s academic credentials were impeccable. While travelling in Europe he had

arranged for a volume of translations of Calvin’s sermons to be published in

London, with a second edition two years later; during the first two years of his

regius professorship he had published an edition of the homilies of St John

Chrysostom, the first book to be printed in Greek at Oxford, and a translation of

Theodore Beza’s sermons – further proof of religious conformity. He had, while

schoolmaster of Winchester, published a second volume of Chrysostom’s homilies.

If this were not enough, he was personally known to the men who were to elect

the new warden: the warden and fellows of New College, Oxford. As a result of

William of Wykeham’s statutes for the two colleges he had founded, the electors

were almost to a man Wykehamists. Harmar had been a scholar at Winchester with

a number of them; had been a fellow at New College with many of them; and had

even taught some of them before their progress to New College. The warden,

Martin Culpeper, had been in post when Harmar had first entered New College as a

scholar. His future must have seemed secure.

When John Harmar first heard of the rival candidature of the Reverend Henry

Cotton, he would not have been unduly concerned. This was not the first occasion

when Elizabeth had sought to impose her own candidate on Winchester College. On

9 February 1581 Dr Thomas Stempe had died. He had been warden throughout

John Harmar’s time in the school. Within a fortnight of his death the queen had

written to New College ordering them to arrange for a degree for a certain Mr

Larke, whom she described as ‘a learned man and a good preacher’, as she wished

him to become the next warden of Winchester and some objections had been

raised on the grounds that he was not a graduate. On 22 February, the chancellor,

Robert Dudley, the first earl of Leicester, wrote to the Congregation, effectively

the governing body of the university, reporting the queen’s order that they ‘try him

in the Schools, and permit him to proceed to such degree as shall be meet to allow

him’. The following day the Congregation sent back their reply: they did not think

Larke should be awarded a degree immediately and they asked if the queen wished

him to be promoted ‘ad titulum gradus’ [to the nominal title] ‘before he is

examined.’ There do not appear to be any further communications on this topic. 9

Nothing beyond this is known of Larke: not being a graduate he does not appear in

either Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses or Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses and there is

no reference to him in the State Papers, Domestic Series.

The queen was not so easily rebuffed in 1596.

Henry Cotton would have been known to John Harmar. They were both members of

the cathedral chapter: Cotton as the canon of the sixth prebend; Harmar as canon

of the fourth prebend. The latter would have known that Cotton was a royal

chaplain and might possibly also have known that Cotton was one of Elizabeth I’s

god-children – though almost certainly not that Elizabeth had been only fourteen

at the time. A pluralist, Cotton was at the time of the contested election rector of

Havant, where his mother rented the manor, Vicar of Wanborough, and rector of

Calbourne on the Isle of Wight. He is said to have had nineteen children, though

only seven survived to be mentioned in his will, so family financial pressure could 10

well have motivated his application for such a well-rewarded post as the

Winchester wardenship.

In a memorandum prepared for Elizabeth, Cotton pointed out that he had only 11

once before asked her for preferment, to the deanery of Winchester, but the post

had already been promised to another (presumably the 1589 appointment of Martin

Heton). The two key elements of Cotton’s application to the queen for her 12

support in this election would have minimised any apprehensions Harmar might

have had: Cotton declared that his two principal qualifications were that he was

conveniently resident in Winchester, though the place of the candidate’s current

abode was an irrelevance, as the statutes required the warden to live on-site; and

that he was not a Wykehamist. In Harmar’s eyes, such qualifications would have

been disqualifications, particularly in view of rubric VI of William of Wykeham’s

statutes specifically required of the warden that ‘He is to be elected by the

Fellows of New College, and must be, or have been, a Fellow of one of the two St.

Mary Winton Colleges, a graduate in Canon or Civil Law or Master of Arts, in

priest’s orders, and at least thirty years of age’. Cotton had been educated at

Guildford Grammar School and had been a rather elderly commoner at Magdalen

College, Oxford. Harmar and the Winchester fellows might however have had 13

some cause for concern at the proposed justification of an appointment of an

outsider:

That it may haply be that one being not of the foundation, and living so

near as he hath done, may see and reform more abuses than those that have

lived in them, and suffered them.

On the face of it Cotton’s candidature was doomed to failure. And one item in his

list of reasons for being appointed is singularly unconvincing: ‘He continueth this

suit not so much for any benefit to himself, as for the disgrace he shall receive if

he miss of the same’. The avoidance of wounded amour propre is hardly a

convincing argument in a job application.

Once the election had become a contest, two other candidates appeared. George

Ryves was a Wykehamist, indeed at the time was the sub-warden of Winchester,

and his application was supported in a letter to the chancellor of Oxford

University, Lord Buckhurst, signed by the warden and the fellows of New College.

Given that they were the electors, this was a much more serious challenge to

Harmar’s prospects. Similar letters supporting Ryves were sent to Buckhurst and Sir

Robert Cecil signed by Anthony Beeley and five other fellows of Winchester. There

are interesting variations in the contents of these latter two documents: to Lord

Buckhurst they emphasise that Ryves is ‘a gentleman by birth’ and to Cecil that 14

he is ‘also unmarried’. Harmar, who entered Winchester and New College as a 15

‘plebei filius’, was not born a gentleman, and the reference in the Cecil letter is 16

the first allusion to his marital status, which was evidently thought an additional

disadvantage. Bilson had been the first married warden of Winchester, and it may

be that the fellows objected to his dining with his wife rather than the collegiate

community. These various documents were all forwarded by Buckhurst to Sir

Robert Cecil with a covering letter in which he says he has received ‘from both

Winchester and New College, and from the Dean of Winchester, an earnest

recommendation of the present sub-warden of Winchester [Ryves], as one most fit

for the good of the college’. He adds that Bilson ‘commends both him and Mr.

Harmar,’ which suggests that latter was rather lacking in-house support, and

Buckhurst ends up sitting on the fence by declaring ‘being desired by both colleges

to name them as the fittest men for the good of the college, I thought it my duty,

as their Chancellor, to do so’. A rather tepid reference. 17

The fourth candidate was also a Wykehamist: Dr William Tucker (or Tooker), who

was one of the chaplains-in-ordinary to the queen. John Whitgift, the archbishop

of Canterbury, wrote to Robert Cecil on behalf of the earl of Essex, who had

recently been called away from the court, and who had indicated that he wished

Tucker to be elected to the wardenship. Tucker was also supported by Sir Walter

Ralegh, ‘Mr Killigrew’ and ‘Mr Drake’. Whitgift’s letter implies that he, Essex and 18

Tucker believe (mistakenly as it turned out) that Cecil had agreed to support

Tucker’s candidature and he makes an important point: that Tucker is ‘one of that

foundation [i.e. a fellow of one of the Wykehamical colleges], which I could wish

to be observed’. This was to prove an essential element in all the subsequent 19

electioneering.

Harmar’s chances of election, having looked so strong, were now clouded by the

three opponents: one supported by the queen; one by Harmar’s own colleagues

and the electors; and one by a group of courtiers and the archbishop of

Canterbury. An anonymous note in the Cecil papers at Hatfield House, referring to

John Harmar rather cryptically as ‘A.B.’, reported ‘He is altogether undesired of

the fellows of both colleges’. Things could hardly have got worse. But they did. 20

The election descended into the mire. A letter was sent to the queen alleging that

while he had been a scholar at Winchester, John Harmar had been involved in an

act of gross indecency with a fellow student. This allegation threatened not only

Harmar’s aspirations to be warden, if believed it would also have led to his

expulsion from the post of schoolmaster. He turned to the only person who could

defend him: the out-going warden, Thomas Bilson. Bilson wrote a strongly-worded

letter to Sir Robert Cecil in which he explained the matter: ‘The truth of the

cause, I protest before God, I will not conceal’. The matter to which the allegation

referred had taken place in Bilson’s time as schoolmaster, and he was uniquely

qualified to reveal the truth. Not only had Harmar not indecently assaulted a

fellow-student, wrote Bilson, he had himself been the victim of unwarranted

advances. They had come, not from another student, but from the school’s usher,

the William Miller who had taught under Christopher Jonson:

The then usher, being one that might command and correct him, had made

him the child of his chamber, and sought by some means to abuse him;

whereat the youth—I term him as he then was—repining, made means by

one Mr. Shingleton yet living, then a fellow of our College, to give me to

understand of his thraldom and misery. I forthwith acquainted Bishop Horne

therewith, who taking present occasion to come hither, removed the usher

and recommended the scholar, being very towardly, to the then Warden, Dr.

Stempe, and to myself. And when some of the fellows not knowing the case,

because it was kept close to cover the usher's shame, envied the scholar as

a false accuser of his master, and laboured to stop his going to Oxford, I did

the second time report to Bishop Horne the malice of those men that sought

with authority to abuse boys, or else to deprive them of all preferment. The

honest inclination of the scholar, being otherwise very religious, I so well

liked that I did not only hasten his advancement to Oxford, but afterward

made choice of him to be schoolmaster since I was Warden; which no

earthly means should have won me to do but that I liked from the beginning

his disposition and hatred of that vice wherewith some now so perversely

slander him, and truly, since his being schoolmaster, I have found him not

only learned, sober, and religious, but pursuing all suspicions of any such

offence with severe correction. 21

It could be argued that in this letter the bishop is as much concerned to protect his

own reputation as that of his protégé. He had been, after all, the schoolmaster at

the time of the alleged offence, which may be dated to 1571, the sole year in

which Shingleton held a fellowship, and when Harmar was 16 or 17; Bilson had 22

also been the warden who had appointed the accused to a position in which he

could have convenient access to further possible victims. And to a twenty-first-

century reader the notion of ‘cover[ing] the usher’s shame’ by maintaining a

silence about the episode has powerful and unpleasant resonances. Throughout

Bilson’s long career he did have his detractors: George Abbott, who became

archbishop of Canterbury, thought him ‘imperious’ and later scholars have

described him as nepotistic, while many of his letters show him as intemperate 23

and dictatorial. No one, however, appears ever to have questioned his veracity.

Bilson made it quite clear that Harmar had been traduced, and this forthright

letter was evidently accepted as the truth by the royal court, as the subject was

not raised again. It is not known which of the other three candidates (or their

supporters) had made this attempt at denigration, though Tucker is the most likely

suspect.

Having disposed of this serious threat to his own candidature, if Harmar had

thought that the failure to satisfy an essential rubric of Wykeham’s statutes would

be fatal to Cotton’s aspirations, then he was wrong.

Dr William Day had been elected provost of Eton College in October 1561. During

his long provostship he had on a number of occasions been put forward as a

candidate for a see: in 1568 it had been suggested that he become bishop of

Chichester; in 1570 Archbishop Parker proposed that he become bishop of London;

in 1580, Aylmer, who had been made bishop of London ten years before, suggested

Day succeed him if he were himself to be translated to Winchester; three years

later Archbishop Whitgift proposed London again; in 1587 Lord Burghley

campaigned for Day to have the palatine see of Durham, and got Elizabeth’s

approval, only to see the offer rescinded on the return from the Netherlands of the

earl of Leicester, who had other candidates in mind for that bishopric. In 1594

London was suggested for a third time. Confusion followed: the bishop of

Worcester, Richard Fletcher, was translated to London; the earl of Essex and the

archbishop of Canterbury proposed Day for the vacancy created at Worcester; Lord

Burghley simultaneously continued to press his claims for Durham and in a

carefully worded letter to Burghley Day indicated his acceptance of Durham, while

at the same time pointing out that a previous offer had been retracted. He was

right to be cautious: Burghley’s own son, Sir Robert Cecil, had entered into an

agreement without his father’s knowledge to have Tobie Matthew promoted to

Durham, and Day was then offered Worcester, which he accepted. Confusion was

worse confounded when, on mature consideration of the relative financial rewards

of the provostship of Eton and the bishopric of Worcester, Day decided that he

could not afford to move and withdrew his acceptance. Elizabeth was displeased.

There seemed no further prospect of advancement for Day, and certainly not to a

bishopric. Suddenly and unexpectedly, William Wickham, the bishop of Winchester

died: he had been installed on 29 March 1595 and had died on the second (or

twelfth) of June the same year. After having been unsuccessfully in the frame for

a bishopric on multiple occasions, and despite having rejected Worcester, Day was

offered and accepted the vacant see. 24

On 25 January 1596 (N.S.) the elderly and not entirely decisive Dr William Day was

consecrated bishop of Winchester and by virtue of that position he also became

Visitor of Winchester College – the official who, in theory, sat in final judgment on

any college dispute. He was not to find the contested election a comfortable

situation.

Day’s elevation to the see of Winchester was not, it is quite evident, a just reward

for merit. Henry Savile, a great favourite of the court, was the warden of Merton

College, Oxford. His acquisition of that post had not been without some dispute. As

the Dictionary of National Biography records:

The warden was, according to the college's own statutes, elected by the

fellows. Despite—or perhaps because of—his long association with the

college and familiarity with the fellows, Savile invested no faith in this

democratic process and obtained the post instead through his influence with

the queen. In a letter to the college of 1586, William Cecil, first Lord

Burghley, lord treasurer, and Sir Francis Walsingham, principal secretary,

recognized that the fellows had, by tradition, the freedom to choose their

own warden, but trusted that they would ‘concur with Her Majesty's

wishes’. They of course did, but clearly this imposition from above rankled

with some of the fellows. 25

In 1595 Savile set out to add to his Merton wardenship the provostship of Eton,

which he was to acquire with a similar disregard for the niceties of the statutory

requirements. First of all it was necessary to remove the incumbent, Dr Day, which

explains his move to Winchester.

Just as the Reverend Henry Cotton failed to satisfy the statutes of Winchester

College, so Henry Savile had failed to satisfy those of Eton: he was a layman.

Elizabeth I, however, was determined that he should be elected. Sir Henry Maxwell

Lyte’s history of Eton College summarises the events:

On the elevation of Dr. Day to the see of Winchester, Secretary Cecil took

care that the Fellows of Eton should have no excuse for ignoring the claims

of the royal prerogative, and accordingly ordered them to suspend the

election of a new Provost until the Queen’s pleasure should be known. He

justified this prohibition on two grounds—partly on the general right of the

Crown to present to every benefice rendered vacant by the incumbent’s

acceptance of a bishopric, and partly on the particular right of nomination

which the Queen and her predecessors had ever exercised in regard to the

Provostship of Eton. The Fellows sent an obsequious answer, and so the

matter rested for several months.

The first, and, for aught that is known, the only candidate of high position,

was Henry Savile, Warden of Merton College Oxford, but he was not

considered unexceptionable, and Elizabeth seemed to have appointed him

“to be Secretary of the Latin tongue,and to hold the Deanery of Carlisle in

commendam, in order to stop his mouth from importuning her any more.”

Backed, however, by the powerful influence of the Earl of Essex, he

eventually obtained a definite promise of the Provostship, although

everybody was well aware that, as a layman, he was technically

unqualified. The claims of the royal prerogative were pushed to an extreme

point in the mandamus, which declared that it was merely “for the respect

and honor” that the Queen bore to her “noble progenitors, founders” of the

College, that she allowed the Fellows to go through even the form of an

election, the place being in her “sole and absolute gifte” in consequence of

Day’s promotion. The Queen’s nominee was according elected on the 26th

May, 1596. 26

What Maxwell Lyte minimises in this account is the brusque way in which the

question of Savile’s ineligibility as a layman was dealt with. In a letter to the Eton

fellowship of 18 May 1596, after declaring ‘We have chosen Sir Hen. Savile to be

provost of Eton, the gift being in our hands by the promotion of the present

provost to the bishopric of Winchester’, Elizabeth’s message concluded: ‘In regard

of his worthiness, we have granted him a dispensation from the statute requiring

the provost to be a priest’. This was at least slightly politer than the original 27

draft which bluntly read: ‘Having admitted Sir Hen. Savile as your provost, we

require you to admit him, dispensing with the statutes of the college requiring that

the provost be a priest’. Had John Harmar or the fellows of Winchester and New 28

Colleges been aware of the details of these exchanges, they would have had real

cause for concern about their own positions. The Reverend Henry Cotton did not

satisfy the Winchester statutes: Henry Savile had not satisfied the corresponding

Eton statutes; but the queen had merely brushed this aside in her decision. Even

more disturbing was the justification offered for her action. Not, it will be

noticed, that she had a right to nominate based upon Eton’s position as a royal

foundation: the justification was that there was a Crown entitlement which

derived from Dr Day having accepted a bishopric. Parallels with the Winchester

election were all too obvious, and if the royal argument did indeed establish that

as a legal right of nomination, then the election of Harmar, Ryves or Tucker was

doomed.

Tucker joined the fray at this point, writing to Cecil a five point document in which

he declared that to overthrow the founder’s wishes would be ‘in breach of all good

order and discipline’; rashly threatening that in the event of Cotton’s election

‘many thousand there are who have been nourished in that college who will make

application to her Majesty that the founder’s will may be observed’; making the

contemptuous comparison: ‘To draw Winchester College which was never yet

violated into the like inconsequency of Eton College, which hath been many times

usurped upon’ (not language calculated to go down well with the queen);

reinforcing the argument that to elect Cotton would involve the electors in

perjury; and concluding by claiming that her majesty had never before ‘offer[ed]

violence’ to the founders of colleges. The intemperateness of Tucker’s missives 29

may be the reason why during the subsequent discussions of the election his name

never occurs.

Elizabeth wrote to the fellows of New College, informing them that they were to

elect her nominee: Henry Cotton. Unlike the obsequious Etonians, they responded

with a surprising display of backbone, writing to both Cecil and Buckhurst whom

they had clearly identified as being most influential with the queen. Initially they

founded their argument on Cotton’s neither being nor having been a fellow of

either of Wykeham’s foundations. This appears to have carried some weight, for 30

the queen, rather than simply overriding the statute as she had done at Eton,

made an effort to remedy the matter. Pressure was brought to bear on Thomas

Geffreys, a fellow of Winchester, to resign his position in favour of Cotton, and on

14 May he made a declaration in front of the out-going warden, the archdeacon of

Winchester, Dr Michael Reniger, and Edward Cole, a public notary, that he would

resign his fellowship in favour of Cotton, but added the rider ‘if the said Hen.

Cotton be not elected, then his resignation is to be held nul and void’. If the 31

queen and her advisers thought this would be a successful and diplomatic solution,

they were wrong. The fellowships of both colleges were up in arms at what they

interpreted as chicanery. Bilson, thinking to strike while the iron was hot,

summoned a meeting of the Winchester fellows in the chapel on the same day that

Geffreys had made his declaration and explained the new development. The

immediate response was that Geffreys had failed to give the statutory four months

notice of resignation and there was therefore no vacant fellowship into which to

elect Cotton. Geffreys was summoned: his original oath of admission was read to

him and he then attempted to withdraw his resignation ‘from danger of manifest

perjury’. The same afternoon, Bilson received letters from the queen directing 32

him to ensure the election of Cotton to a fellowship as soon as one became

available. The re-assembled fellows, realising they had the upper hand legally,

‘expressed willingness to perform her pleasure, as far as their oaths and law would

permit, but said that as their number of fellows was complete, they could not

proceed to elect another until a place was void’. 33

Temporarily frustrated, Bilson returned to the combat the following day, once

again summoning the fellowship to the chapel. This time he publicly required

George Ryves, as sub-warden, to proceed to an election in Geffreys’ stead. Ryves,

who as a candidate himself was not anxious to ensure the election of a competitor,

introduced a new objection: not only had there been a failure to supply the

required notice, but the statutes did not permit conditional resignations. If

Geffreys were to resign he had to make it an absolute and final departure. Bilson,

faced with Ryves’ point-blank refusal to co-operate, turned to the senior fellow

present, Robert Watton, and requested him to administer the necessary oath. At

this point one of the short-comings of fellowships-for-life made itself farcically

evident. Watton had been elected a fellow thirty-five years before, in 1561, and at

this key moment ‘through extreme age and the palsy, he was not able to express

his mind’. Bilson then demanded that Anthony Beeley and five others, not named 34

in the document, should carry out his instructions. They too refused. Bilson had

the queen’s letters read to the assembled company in an effort to persuade them

‘to show the obedient care they ought to have of her pleasure’; but they held fast,

declaring, with a degree of hyperbole, ‘that they assured themselves she would

mislike their rashness, if they should venture to elect one so highly favoured by her

to be a fellow, with open and inevitable perjury of a poor simple old man, proved

to do he knew not what, as he now, with grief and terror of conscience, affirmed

in the presence of them all’. 35

The following week the warden and fellows of New College joined in. They wrote

to Buckhurst a letter which mixed legal argument and collegial sentiment:

. . . having had a free election to the wardenship for more than 200 years, it

would now be no small grief to us to see a man placed there altogether

ineligible for it, who was never of the foundation of either of our colleges,

and who, not having had the necessary education, is not likely to love the

place like former wardens, as though it had been his mother and nurse. 36

They had also found a precedent which appeared to contradict the claim that the

Crown had the right of appointment to a post vacated by one who had accepted a

bishopric, pointing out that ‘we find by our records that although Queen Mary

preferred Dr. White from the Wardenship of Winchester to the Bishopric of Lincoln,

yet we had the choice of warden placed in his room’. This was, perhaps, not the 37

most tactful of precedents, as John White, who had been made bishop of Lincoln

in 1554, was translated to Winchester in 1556, of which post he had been deprived

on the accession of Elizabeth, and imprisoned in the Tower of London, for

delivering a sermon at the funeral of Queen Mary in which he referred to

Ecclesiastes 9:4: ‘better a live dog than a dead lion’. This apparent reference to

contemporary preachers was interpreted as a coded comparison of the two

queens, and was described by John Jewel, who became bishop of Salisbury in

1560, as mad and very seditious. The fellows of New College then reiterated their 38

support for George Ryves.

In June 1596 the Oxford fellows delivered a further petition to Sir Robert Cecil,

declaring their profoundest respect for her majesty’s commands, but asking him to

inform the queen that there were ten articles which supported their statutes

requiring any warden to be or have been a fellow of either New College or

Winchester, and diplomatically pointing out that, in the event of the Reverend

Henry Cotton being elected warden, any leases or collegiate activity during his

wardenship would have no legal standing, thus creating endless and expensive

proceedings in the courts; adding that to carry out the queen’s wishes would

require them to engage in ‘manifest perjury’. 39

Elizabeth was singularly unamused by this response and issued to the bishop of

Winchester a mandate, to which was affixed the Great Seal of England, instructing

him to proceed to the College and install her candidate as warden. When Dr

William Day and the Reverend Henry Cotton took the short walk—of almost exactly

one hundred yards—from the gates of the bishop’s residence, Wolvesey Palace, to

the gates of Winchester College, they discovered that the fellows, having been

alerted to their approach, had closed and barred the great outer gate, and simply

refused to let them in. Their justification for this action, which was even more

courageous than the initial answer to the queen’s proposals, was a convenient

legal obfuscation. They acknowledged that Thomas Bilson was now bishop of

Worcester, having been formally elected on 26 April 1596, with the royal assent

dated 10 May, and he had been consecrated on 13 June. That might indeed, if the

queen’s argument were to be accepted, give Elizabeth the right to nominate the

new warden. But, reported the fellows, Bilson had not yet formally resigned as

warden, and they were legally incapable of electing a new warden when the post

was still technically held by another. Singing from the same songsheet, the warden

and fellows of New College wrote to Cotton ‘desiring him to stay untill such time

as the Fellowes of Winton Colledge did know that the wardenshipp was voide’,

while at the same time assuring him rather optimistically that this delay, ‘we trust

will not be disliking unto Her Highness’. Though this now may appear rather 40

specious temporising, it is true that throughout the negotiations Bilson had been

acting as, and was referred to in all the documents as the warden of Winchester.

This was the moment when Thomas Bilson was finally hoist by his own petard. He

had benefited throughout his life from the educational foresight of William of

Wykeham: a scholar at Winchester; scholar and fellow of New College;

schoolmaster and warden of Winchester. Yet during this election, in an attempt to

ingratiate himself with Elizabeth I, he had set out deliberately to subvert the

statutes of the institution which had done so much for him. Unbeknown to the

fellows of either Winchester or New College, Bilson had deliberately not resigned

as warden in order to ensure that the queen’s candidate, Cotton, would be elected

despite not satisfying the key rubric of being a fellow. In a letter to Cecil he

recounted his efforts. On the announcement of his elevation to the bench of

bishops Bilson had been approached by the fellows who had asked him to resign

the wardenship as no election could proceed unless the position were vacant. He

had told them that he could not resign without the queen’s consent, explaining to

Cecil that this was because he suspected that they would proceed to the election

of a candidate other than Cotton and ‘prevent the Queen’s prerogative’. The royal

consent to his resignation was in fact not required by the statutes, and Bilson

admitted to being unsure whether or not his consecration as bishop of Worcester

did not of itself constitute an effective resignation from the wardenship. He

repeated his concern that the fellows would fail to elect the ineligible Cotton and

asserted that his sole motivation in acting in this manner was ‘to save the Queen’s

prerogative’. That he thought it might be a long-drawn-out matter is shown by his

bringing Cecil’s attention to the statutory requirement for the warden not to be

absent for a period of more than eight weeks, which he envisaged might be the

case when he had to move to his diocese. In the event, this underhand behaviour 41

failed: events moved more rapidly than the new bishop had anticipated. As early

as the 16th of May he had begun to try to extricate himself and had written to

Cecil: ‘I have these two days treated and laboured with the fellows, first with

entreaty and then with more vehemence, to proceed to the election of Mr.

Cotton’, but had to admit that even his vehemence was inadequate in the face of

the argument that such an election would have involved the fellows in an act of

perjury. 42

Henry Cotton at this point appears to have lost patience. On 9 July Bishop Bilson

wrote a rather indignant letter to Sir Robert Cecil complaining that:

The fellows of Winchester College have some intimation, as well by letters

from London as by secret threats from some near about Mr. Cotton, that a

pursuivant shall be sent suddenly for two or three of the chiefest and

stoutest of them, and that in their absence, the rest being fearful of

themselves and the more terrified by that example, will easily yield to Mr.

Cotton’s admittance, which he meaneth to secure in their absence by virtue

of his former patent. 43

Pursuivants were royal officers with the power to effect arrest, and those arrested

could be held in locations and for unspecified periods of time at the queen’s

pleasure. This was a serious threat. And Bilson was all too well aware of the

seriousness of this matter as in the same letter he points out that pursuivants had

removed eight of his own supporters from his election as warden in 1580, and that

he had only managed to secure his position by procuring their discharge from

confinement by the intervention of Sir Francis Walsingham.

This public rejection of the queen’s candidate at the gate of the college, and the

implication in Bilson’s letter that Cotton was relying on a ‘former patent’ – one no

longer operative – must have given John Harmar some relief from what had

become an increasingly difficult election campaign. It needs to be remembered

that while having to deal with the allegations of sexual impropriety and the

inevitable negotiations with the electors, many of whom had publicly declared for

one of the other candidates, Harmar was teaching over a hundred boys, was a

prebend of the cathedral and had parochial responsibilities as rector of Compton.

Nonetheless he also found the time to engage in negotiations with the newly-

appointed Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, to acquire the living

of Droxford, a parish in the Meon valley eleven miles south-east of Winchester. The

negotiations were complicated: one of the requirements was that Harmar, as long

as he remained rector of Droxford, had to make regular payments to ‘To such and

so many poor scholiers within the universitie of Oxford towards their relieffe &

maynten[a]nce’ as the Lord Keeper should nominate. In return Harmar had to sign

a bond for one hundred pounds as security. According to an anonymous note in 44

the Cecil papers, the living of Droxford was handsomely rewarded – worth £160 a

year, but from a psychological point of view, what may have been most 45

encouraging to Harmar was that the negotiations were successfully completed in

the same month the gates had been barred to Cotton; that he was clearly in favour

with the new Lord Keeper of the Great Seal; and that the man he was succeeding

as rector of Droxford was Thomas Bilson, whom he was also seeking to succeed as

warden of Winchester.

This combination appears to have spurred John Harmar on to a final effort to save

his candidacy. He wrote a powerful letter to Sir Robert Cecil, in which he

rehearsed his manifest qualifications. Cecil appears to have persuaded the 46

queen that, all things considered, John Harmar was a better candidate than either

Henry Cotton or George Ryves. The bishop was sent a licence to elect on 20 July;

the New College fellows were summoned two days later to agree a date for the

election.

Unaware of these developments, Dr Tucker wrote again to Cecil the day after the

New College meeting putting him in mind of his ‘promised favour to the Earl of

Essex and to Sir Walter Raleigh’ and again attacking Harmar without using his

name:

I shall be sorry if, upon this dismission of Mr. Cotton, myself dispossessed of

your favour by him that is possessed of 300l. per annum within these two

years or less, and now maketh suit after the fourth preferment, and all of

her Majesty’s gift.

Tucker’s denigration of Harmar as a pluralist does not come very well from one

who was a prebend of Exeter Cathedral, rector of St James the Great,

Kilkhampton, Cornwall, archdeacon of Barnstable, rector of St Andrew’s, West

Dean, Wiltshire, a royal chaplain, a prebend of Salisbury Cathedral, and rector of

St Peter’s, Clovelly, Devon. 47

On 28 July the queen sent a letter to the warden and fellows of New College in

which she now declared that she nominated ‘one Harmar’ for the position. The 48

tone and content of this communication were both very different to the curt

missive received by the fellows of Eton instructing them to elect Savile. Harmar,

the queen’s letter says, is ‘every way capable by the orders of your foundation’—

thus acknowledging the requirement that the warden of Winchester have been a

fellow of one of the two Wykehamist colleges—and moreover is described as being

suited for the post ‘for his learning, integrity, and experience of Governement’.

His learning was never in dispute; his integrity had been questioned when the

insinuation had been made of inappropriate behaviour when a boy at the school,

but this objection has evidently been rejected out of hand. ‘Experience of

Governement’ is a slightly ambiguous term: it may refer to the running of the

school; it may be an allusion to a now obsolete meaning of ‘government’ – the

Oxford English Dictionary’s sense 2b: ‘In moral sense: Conduct, behaviour;

becoming conduct, discretion’. If the latter, it draws a clear line under the matter

of the innuendo. The queen emphasises that the ‘nomination’, which in truth was

a face-saving device as she had no right of nomination for the post, was fully in

accord with the wishes of William of Wykeham:

Although we doubt not , but you are apt to follow such directions, as from

him (whom we have constituted the head of that university [i.e. the

chancellor, Lord Buckhurst]) you shall receyve, yet have wee thought yt not

amisse, for your better knowledge of our pleasure, to signify as much unto

you by our owne hand writing: no waye doubting, but as wee have forbourne

to presse you for any forainer, contrary to your Statute: so you will in

requitall of that favoure, proceed with the more diligence and full consent,

to the election of him, whom wee have thus particularly comended.

It should be noted that it is not the whole letter which is ‘our owne hand writing’,

merely the signature at the head. What the warden and fellows of New College

and the fellows of Winchester College thought of the disclaimer ‘wee have

forbourne to presse you for any forainer’ is not recorded. But this solution allowed

both sides to sing Te Deum.

The New College fellows met on 2 August and duly elected John Harmar warden of

Winchester College, and he took the oath the following day. Henry Cotton was

compensated for his disappointment by being made bishop of Salisbury in 1598.

The following year George Ryves was also given a consolation prize: he was elected

to be the warden of New College, Oxford, where, according to one of the histories

of the college, he ‘is only remembered as the founder of the endowment for the

Trinity Sunday University sermon in the College Chapel’. William Tucker does not 49

appear to have gained any benefit from his intemperate campaign: it was not until

the next reign that he was elevated to the deanery of Lichfield in 1605.

Bishop Day was somewhat less fortunate. His indecisive nature is best seen in a

rather plaintive letter he wrote to Lord Buckhurst, the chancellor of Oxford

University, in which he recounted his humiliation at the gates of the College. He 50

pointed out that in accordance with an order to which was attached the Great Seal

of England he had been required to admit Cotton as warden—which, indeed, he

claimed to have done despite being refused entry to the College, although quite

how he thought he could have done this is a mystery in view of the evident lack of

an election. Now, he complains, he has received a letter from Buckhurst in which

he has been told that her majesty’s pleasure is that John Harmar be made warden.

He concludes:

. . . pray you consider whether without danger I may admit another upon

your letters. If it please Her Majesty to revoke those former letters patent

by some sufficient other deed, I shall be very ready to admit any lawfully

chosen or named. To undo that done already is not in my power, and I wish

your lordship would advisedly consider whether, Mr. Cotton's right standing

as it doth, the acts and proceedings of another warden coming in after this

manner may not hereafter be called into question. For the matter itself I

stand indifferent, only my desire is, before I admit any other warden, I may

have my sufficient warrant from Her Highness. 51

This letter was dated 31 July 1596. Having been consecrated bishop of Winchester

on 25 January, Dr William Day died on 20 September. It had all been too much for

him.

24 February 1595/6, Cecil Papers, 30.86.1

Kirby, Annals, p. 85.2

VCH, p. 305.3

VCH, p. 321.4

Kirby, Annals, p. 321.5

Kirby, Annals, p. 85 (Rubric XXVI of the statutes).6

Alan Crossley (ed.), A History of the County of Oxford: Volume IV, The City of Oxford, [Victoria 7

County History], London: Institute of Historical Research, 1979, p. 76.

Estimate kindly provided by Dr Juliet Gayton, University of Exeter.8

Register of the University of Oxford, vol. II, (1571-1622), pt. 1, ed Andrew Clark, Oxford: Oxford 9

Historical Society, 1887, p. 150. Hereafter Oxford Register.

DNB, Julian Lock, ‘Henry Cotton’.10

Cecil Papers, 136.59.11

DNB, Brett Usher, ‘Martin Heton’.12

DNB, Julian Lock, ‘Henry Cotton’.13

Mary Anne Everett Green, State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1595-1597, 14

London: Longmans et al, 1869, p. 231. Hereafter SPDE.

SPDE, p. 226; Kirby, Annals, p. 83-84 cites Winchester Statutes rubric XXIII, which declared: 15

‘Causes which vacate a Fellowship. A Fellow is to be removed if he enter any religious order, or absent himself from College for more than a month in any year, absence on College business not counting’. To this Kirby adds the note (p. 84, n. 3): ‘Wykeham does not add here, ‘or marry’ as he does in the corresponding statute for New College, probably because the Fellows of Winchester College were to be priests, and he did not contemplate the possibility of any of them marrying. Consequently when priests became free to marry, as they did at the Reformation, the Fellows of Winchester College conceived themselves to be at liberty to marry and retain their fellowships. One of these fellowships, therefore was a provision for life; and a valuable one, as it carried with it the right to hold one or two College livings, an occasional nomination to a scholarship, a joint right of presenting to several benefices, and now and then a beneficial lease of some lay rectory’. The fellows of New College did not enjoy this latitude.

Oxford Register, vol. II, pt. 2, p. 60.16

SPDE, p. 227.17

‘Mr Killigrew may be either of the brothers, Sir Henry and Sir William Killigrew; ‘Mr Drake’ has 18

not been identified.

28 April 1596, Cecil Papers, 40.37.19

[? May 1596], Cecil Papers, 197.106. Though the manuscript is anonymous, the finger of 20

suspicion points to Tucker as the writer. He seems to have entertained a particular animus towards Harmar, and it is noticeable that in his communications to Cecil, though he names Cotton when appropriate, he always avoids using Harmar’s name, generally employing the third person pronoun to refer to him.

3 May 1596, Cecil Papers, 40.49.21

Kirby, Scholars, pp. 10, 137.22

DNB, William Richardson, ‘Thomas Bilson’.23

DNB, Brett Usher, ‘William Day’.24

DNB, R.D. Goulding, ‘Sir Henry Savile’.25

Sir H.C. Maxwell Lyte, A history of Eton College, 1440-1875, London: Macmillan, 1875, pp. 26

178-79.

SPDE, pp. 218-219.27

ibid., p. 218.28

Cecil Papers, 38.3.29

Cecil Papers, 48.43; SPDE, p. 230.30

SPDE, p. 228.31

14 May, 1596, SPDE, p. 228.32

ibid., p. 229.33

ibid., p. 229.34

ibid., p. 230.35

24 May 1596, ibid., p. 230.36

ibid., p. 230.37

DNB, Kenneth Carleton, ‘John White’; Patrick McGrath, ‘Winchester College and the Old 38

Religion in the Sixteenth Century’, in Roger Custance (ed.), Winchester College: Sixth-centenary Essays, Oxford: OUP, 1982, p. 250, disputes the accuracy of the sermon story.

Cecil Papers, 48.43.39

New College Archives 5083.40

Cecil Papers, 41.88.41

Cecil Papers, 40.86.42

Cecil Papers, 43.25. 43

Sir Thomas Egerton to Harmar, 5 March 1597, Warwickshire County Record Office, CRO136/44

B207, misdated in their catalogue as ‘c. 1611’.

Cecil Papers, 197.106.45

Cecil Papers, 48.28.46

DNB, J. Andreas Löwe, ‘William Tooker’. 47

WCM 23438.48

Hastings Rashdall & Robert S. Rait, New College, (University of Oxford College Histories), 49

London: Robinson, 1901, p. 145.

31 July 1596, Cecil Papers, 43.16.50

ibid.51