HUTTON, Matthew (1529-1606)

A Lancashireman by birth, Hutton pursued an academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge amid the religious upheavals of the mid-Tudor period. Though Hutton continued to reside at Cambridge during Queen Mary’s reign, proceeding MA and acquiring a fellowship at Trinity, the former exile Edmund Grindal^†, bishop of London, had no doubts about his Protestantism, appointing him as his chaplain in 1561, and as his successor as master of Pembroke Hall in the following year. Primarily motivated by anti-Catholicism, Hutton had sympathy for the godly who chafed at the restrictions imposed by the Elizabethan hierarchy: in 1565 he was one of the college heads who urged the university chancellor, William Cecil^† (later 1st Lord Burghley), not to impose too precise a conformity in the matter of wearing ecclesiastical vestments; and he later held that ‘with wisdom and policy it [the vestiarian controversy] might have been quietly appeased’.26 Oxford DNB, xxix. 70; J. Strype, Life and Acts of Abp. Parker (1821), iii. 125-6; P. Lake, ‘Matthew Hutton – a Puritan Bishop?’, HJ, lxiv. 183-5; B. Usher, William Cecil and Episcopacy, 1559-77, p. 129.

Hutton was promoted to the deanery of York in 1567, which allowed him to exercise his talents on the most obstinate Catholics in the realm. It also facilitated the efforts of John Whitgift^† (later archbishop of Canterbury) to impose a more strict conformity at Cambridge, though Hutton never held this against his former colleague. He successfully lobbied to have Grindal join him as archbishop of York, but the latter soon departed for Canterbury. Though alarmed by Grindal’s suspension in 1577, there was never any question that Hutton might resign; indeed, as early as 1570 he was being considered for a bishop’s mitre.27 Hutton Corresp. 58-61; Usher, 110; P. Collinson, Abp. Grindal, 188. In the event, he was not promoted until 1589, after a convoluted struggle at court about the prospects for his promotion, when he was translated first to Durham, then (in 1595) to York, as archbishop. Within months of his return to York, he was also appointed acting head of the council in the North, largely because rival factions at court could not agree on an aristocratic nominee for the presidency. He relished the chance to make life difficult for Catholics, but his limitations as a civil magistrate were laid bare when he mishandled the Yorkshire county election of 1597, and he offended the queen with a court sermon in which he bluntly urged her to name James VI of Scotland as her successor.28 B. Usher, Ld. Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577-1603, pp. 90-101; Reid, 230; M. Kishlansky, Parlty. Selection, 49-55; Hutton Corresp. 29-30. In 1599, ostensibly because of ‘great years and want of ability of body’, Hutton was superseded as president by Thomas Cecil^*, 2nd Lord Burghley (later 1st earl of Exeter), but he was affronted by the suggestion that he had neglected his primary duty, the suppression of Catholics. He then blundered by attempting to defend Robert Devereux^†, 2nd earl of Essex, just as the latter fell from favour, and, shortly before Elizabeth died, he was suspected by Whitgift of refusing to co-operate with Lord President Burghley.29 Hutton Corresp. 145-8, 153-8, 162-8.

The accession of King James, with whom Hutton had previously been corresponding, augured well for the archbishop. However, being by now too old to leave Yorkshire, he was granted leave of absence from the 1604 session of Parliament, and so granted his proxy to Richard Bancroft^*, bishop of London and Tobie Matthew^*, bishop of Durham. As this meant he would also miss the Hampton Court conference, which immediately preceded the session, he dispatched a memorandum to Whitgift outlining his views on ecclesiastical reform. He reminded those who intended to complain about the Prayer Book that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer^† had been burned for defending it, and he endorsed James’s Basilicon Doron for demonstrating the king’s ‘dislike both of superstitious papists and giddy-headed puritans, so God may give him courage and constancy to withstand them both’.30 Ibid. 168-70; J. Strype, Life and Acts of Abp. Whitgift (1822), iii. 392-402.

In the summer of 1604, following the Commons’ decision not to vote any taxation while the 1601 subsidies were still being collected, the bishops were required to assess their clergy for loans to the crown. Hutton contributed £200 himself, and rated the clergy of York diocese for £1,820. Only half of this sum was received by the Exchequer, representing around two-thirds of a clerical subsidy, a disappointing yield for such a large diocese.31 CUL, Ff.ii.28, ff.73v-4v (excluding some of the clerics listed, who held livings in other dioceses, for which see CCEd); SP14/133/13.

Hutton may have been reluctant to invest too much of his waning energy in the Privy Seal loans because of his dismay at the campaign for strict clerical conformity overseen by Whitgift’s successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft, who threatened hundreds of ministers with deprivation unless they subscribed to article 36 of the newly promulgated set of Canons. In December 1604, upon receipt of Bancroft’s instructions for the enforcement of subscription, Hutton fired off an indignant protest to the king’s chief minister, Robert Cecil^*, Viscount Cranborne (later 1st earl of Salisbury), which was (as he presumably intended) widely circulated among the godly. Although he had forwarded Bancroft’s orders about the puritan clergy to the bishops of his province, Hutton complained to Cranborne that it was the Catholics who grew ‘mighty in number, courage and insolency’, whereas the puritans, ‘all, or the most of them, love his Majesty and the present state; and I hope will yield to conformity’.32 Lake, 196-9; D. Newton, Making of the Jacobean Regime, 68-70; Strype, Whitgift (1822), iii. 420-1; HMC Hatfield, xvii. 52, 70, 76, 78, 121. The king responded by reciting the measures he had taken for the enforcement of recusancy legislation, and advised Hutton of the measures some clerics, ‘blinded herein with some indiscreet zeal’, had taken to overturn their deprivations at law. In a response to Hutton (also widely circulated) Cranborne attacked radical presbyterians, ‘that dream of nothing but a new hierarchy, directly opposite to the state of a monarchy’, and wondered whether ‘in labouring to reform the one’ – moderate puritans – Hutton might have ‘some purpose to tolerate the other’ – schismatics.33 Hutton Corresp. 171-5; Illustrations of Brit. Hist. ed. E. Lodge, iii. 125-30. In the aftermath of this angry exchange, Hutton deprived four puritan ministers in his diocese. However, if Bancroft intended to press his fellow metropolitan to undertake a more thorough purge, he was not granted the opportunity, as Hutton’s health failed that autumn: the latter missed the start of the new parliamentary session in November, and apparently failed to nominate a fresh proxy.

Having already purchased Yorkshire estates for his surviving sons Thomas and Timothy, Hutton made no provision for his family in his will of 20 Nov. 1605, in which he endowed the grammar school he had founded in his native Lancashire with lands worth £24 p.a.; left cash and books to various servants, diocesan officials and relatives; and made a number of other charitable bequests. He died on 16 Jan. 1606, five days before the parliamentary session resumed, and was buried in York Minster, where his monument survives.34 K. Fincham, Prelate as Pastor, 326; Hutton Corresp. 178-83. His grandson Matthew Hutton was returned as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire in 1628; while a more distant namesake held the sees of York and Canterbury in succession in the mid-eighteenth century.