BARLOW, William (1563/4-1613)

Barlow does not appear to have been related to his namesake, William Barlow^†, bishop of Chichester (d.1568); nor should he be confused with the latter’s son William Barlow, treasurer of Lichfield Cathedral from 1589 to his death in 1625.18 Fasti, ii. 2; x. 18. The generous legacies Barlow left to the London Fishmongers’ Company establish that his father was Ralph Barlow (d.1564/5), a member of the company yeomanry, and that Barlow himself was almost certainly the unborn child mentioned in his father’s will of 1563. The modest scale of his legacies suggests that Ralph was not a wealthy man, but he bequeathed his three children two-thirds of his estate. Barlow’s mother subsequently married another Fishmonger, Thomas Field.19 PROB 11/48, f. 86; 11/68, f. 366; 11/122, ff. 350-1.

Early career to 1603

The Jacobean bishop matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1580, receiving financial support from the civil lawyer Richard Cosin^‡. During Elizabeth’s reign, William Cecil^†, 1st Lord Burghley, ensured the college was a bastion of Calvinist orthodoxy, but it also became a hotbed of presbyterianism under the mastership of William Whitaker (1587-95).20 W. Barlow, Vita et Obitus … Richardi Cosin (1598); P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 170-200; R. Rex, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, St. John’s Coll. Camb.: a Hist. ed. P. Linehan, 84-9. As it was his own patron, Cosin, who led the prosecution of nonconformity in High Commission, Barlow is unlikely to have welcomed this development. Indeed, his later writings suggest an unremitting hostility to all forms of puritanism, and this may have been the reason he secured a fellowship at Trinity Hall (where Cosin had begun his own academic career) in 1590. Barlow avoided involvement in the controversies over the doctrine of predestination provoked at Cambridge by Peter Baro in 1595, but in a private letter of 1599 to John Overall^*, then Regius professor of divinity, he nevertheless cast doubt upon some aspects of Calvinist soteriology. Overall, then under investigation for voicing similar opinions, was doubtless sympathetic, but their views were highly controversial at the time, and it should be noted that Barlow took an orthodox Calvinist line when he spoke at the Cambridge degree ceremony that July.21 Al. Cant.; N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 20, 37.

It was presumably Cosin (shortly before his death in 1597) who recommended Barlow to his own patron, John Whitgift^†, archbishop of Canterbury. In the autumn of 1596 Barlow began acting as one of the archbishop’s censors, licensing works of theology and educational textbooks for publication by the London Stationers’ Company, suggesting that he had already become one of Whitgift’s chaplains.22 Transcript Reg. Stationers’ Co. of London ed. E. Arber, iii. 16-20; G. Paule, Life of Abp. Whitgift (1699), 98. The earliest date Barlow is known to have been Whitgift’s chaplain was 1601: McCullough, (suppl. cal. 87). In 1597 Barlow was instituted as rector of St Dunstan-in-the-East, London – a peculiar of Cosin’s deanery of the Arches – where he probably inaugurated a major refurbishment of his church, an initiative which would not have been a priority for most Calvinists. At the same time, he was granted the sinecure rectory of Orpington, Kent, while Whitgift secured him a reversion to a prebend at Westminster Abbey.23 CCEd; K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored, 93; CSP Dom. 1595-7, p. 475.

Barlow was one of three clerics who attended Robert Devereux^†, 2nd earl of Essex, at the latter’s execution on 25 Feb. 1601. On several occasions, he and his colleagues prompted the earl to make a good death by expressing remorse for his rebellion, and afterwards they sent the Privy Council a detailed report of his conduct on the scaffold. Barlow was ordered to preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross on the following Sunday by Secretary of State Sir Robert Cecil^* (later 1st earl of Salisbury), at whose behest he emphasized Essex’s obstinacy and the fright the rising had given the queen, ‘in her own court and chamber’. Barlow also rehearsed familiar theological arguments against rebellion; blamed the Jesuit Robert Persons for implanting the ‘original poison’ in Essex’s heart by dedicating his Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) to the earl; and revealed Essex’s contempt for Londoners as ‘a very base people’.24 CSP Dom. 1598-1601, pp. 592-5, 598; W. Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1601), sigs. B5v, D1v, D6. Aware that those who had censured the rebellion were regarded as ‘time-servers and men-pleasers’, Barlow emphasized that he had never courted Essex’s favour, beyond preaching a sermon celebrating the sack of Cadiz in 1596, and that he preached on this occasion on the orders of the Privy Council. He claimed to report no more than what was seen or heard by eye-witnesses, but, anticipating criticism that he had broken the sanctity of ‘a penitent’s confession’, he insisted that the earl had wanted his remorse to be made known. Inevitably, Essex’s sympathizers found his arguments unconvincing.25 Barlow, Sermon, sigs. A4v, B7v-C1; HMC Rutland, i. 370; HMC Hatfield, xi. 178.

Barlow licensed his own sermon for publication on 18 Mar. 1601, and Whitgift ensured that his chaplain was suitably rewarded, both ‘for his desert and worthiness, and to stop the mouths of his adversaries’. In June Barlow was appointed to a royal chaplaincy – a post he had probably coveted for some time – and also to a prebend at St Paul’s Cathedral, while his reversion at Westminster Abbey fell vacant in August.26 Transcript Reg. Stationers’ Co. of London, iii. 69; HMC Hatfield, xi. 232; HMC Cowper, i. 27; Fasti, i. 28. Having preached at the opening of Convocation in November 1601, he published a tract (at Whitgift’s entreaty) refuting a Catholic polemic against the Church of England. The preface included a gratuitous anti-puritan barb, directed at the ‘wildfire zeal of some university men, who pronounce every position to be popish which is not within the verge of their paper book commonplaces’.27 Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 132; W. Barlow, A Defence of the Articles of the Protestants Religion (1601), sig. A3; p. 2. This tract may have been a bid for further preferment, as on 13 Feb. 1602, the day Dean Nowell of St Paul’s died, Barlow asked Cecil to support him for the vacancy; John Overall was appointed instead. It was said that Elizabeth avoided Barlow’s company in her final years, because of the vehemence of his sermon against Essex, but he took his normal turn in preaching before the queen during Lent 1602, and was presently appointed dean of Chester.28 Fasti, i. 5; xi. 43; Diary of John Manningham ed. R.P. Sorlien, 87; McCullough, (suppl. cal. 90-1); Chamberlain Letters, i. 144. The 1602 sermon was published as W. Barlow, The Eagle and the Body (1609).

The Hampton Court Conference, 1604

As a resident of the precincts of Westminster Abbey, Barlow can rarely, if ever, have visited Chester Cathedral, but it was as dean that he attended the Hampton Court Conference, held in January 1604 to discuss puritan criticisms of the Elizabethan church. He took notes of the debates, but none of the surviving sources – even his own – record him as having spoken. In the aftermath of the conference, Richard Bancroft^*, bishop of London, instructed him to prepare an account of the proceedings, which was published in May 1604; the text derived from notes made by himself, Bancroft, and some of the other deans in attendance.29 W. Barlow, Summe and Substance (1604), sig. A3r-v, p. 1; HMC Hatfield, xvi. 95. Although Barlow claimed that ‘what is here set down for the truth … shall be justified’, his work offered a subtly partisan narrative, emphasizing the differences between the king and the puritans, and stressing James’s support for Bancroft, even when the bishop rudely dismissed puritan complaints. The Scottish presbyterian Andrew Melville later expressed outrage ‘that such a one [as Barlow] was suffered to live unpunished exemplarly, [sic] for making the king to be of no religion’.30 Barlow, Summe and Substance, 36, 48-51, 53-8, 81-3. P. Collinson, ‘Hampton Ct. Conf.’, Bef. the Eng. Civil War ed. H. Tomlinson, 42-4; W.B. Patterson, King Jas. VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, 44-8; D. Calderwood, Hist. of the Kirk of Scot. ed. T. Thomson, vi. 598.

Barlow was probably the only individual who took notes at the meeting between the king and bishops on 14 Jan. 1604. The positive tone of his narrative may have overstated the level of consensus between those present: in particular, Barlow omitted to mention a confrontation between Bancroft, the arch-conformist, and James Montagu^*, dean of the Chapel Royal, whose eldest brother Sir Edward Montagu^* (later 1st Lord Montagu), was a prominent lay puritan.31 Barlow, Summe and Substance, sig.A4; pp. 12-13; R.G. Usher, Reconstruction of the Eng. Church, ii. 338, 342. The separatist Henry Jacobs later complained of Barlow’s bias: S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, 70. On 16 Jan., the puritan ministers presented their grievances. During a lengthy and sometimes intemperate debate, attacks on the ecclesiastical hierarchy angered the king, but Barlow’s account was the only one to record James pronounce his famous anti-presbyterian dictum, ‘No bishop, no king’. He was also alone among the reporters in noting the barbed aside James allegedly uttered at his departure: ‘if this be all … [the puritan ministers] have to say, I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of this land, or else do worse’.32 Barlow, Summe and Substance, 82-3; F. Shriver, ‘Hampton Ct. Revisited’, JEH, xxxiii. 60-1.

Having attended his patron Whitgift on the latter’s deathbed on 29 Feb. 1604, Barlow worked his way into Bancroft’s favour over the following months, as the two men liaised while Barlow prepared his account of the Hampton Court Conference for publication. The prominence the final text afforded Bancroft’s speeches – well beyond that noted in other sources, including accounts by Dean Montagu and Tobie Matthew^*, bishop of Durham – was presumably designed to reinforce Bancroft’s reputation as the indispensable defender of ecclesiastical authority at a time when he was under consideration as Whitgift’s successor at Canterbury.33 Paule, 121; HMC Hatfield, xvi. 95; Barlow, Summe and Substance, 36, 48-51, 53-8. For other accounts of the conference: Usher, Reconstruction of the Eng. Church, ii. 341-52; Winwood’s Memorials ed. E. Sawyer, ii. 14-16; J. Strype, Life of Whitgift, iii. 402-5. After completing the text, Barlow offered to dedicate it to Cecil, but the latter declined. It therefore seems likely that Barlow was recommended for promotion to the bishopric of Rochester in June 1605 by Bancroft (by then archbishop of Canterbury), rather than Cecil.34 HMC Hatfield, xvi. 95, 242.

Bishop of Rochester 1605-8

Barlow surrendered his deanery upon consecration, and exchanged his living at St Dunstan’s for another at Southfleet, Kent (within his new diocese) and a prebend at Canterbury, which he held in commendam with the sinecure at Orpington and his two other prebends. He calculated that these livings, with the revenues from Rochester (valued at £330 a year), gave him an income of perhaps £450 p.a.35 Ibid. xvii. 580; Fasti, iii. 51; C58/9; Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc. vi. 56. Barlow conducted his diocesan visitation in person that summer, when his articles of inquiry urged his clergy to devote an improbably generous seven hours a day to their studies. Losses among the diocesan records make it difficult to assess his involvement in the affairs of his own see thereafter, but there is no evidence that he made any serious effort to impose the king’s policy of strict subscription to the 1604 Canons. However, he is known to have conducted a visitation of Canterbury diocese for Bancroft in 1607. Despite having an episcopal residence at Bromley, Kent, he seems to have lived at Westminster Abbey, where he served as sub-dean between 1605 and 1607. He also headed the team of biblical scholars appointed (following a decision at Hampton Court) to translate the Pauline epistles.36 Fincham, 119, 124-5, 322; Acts of Dean and Chapter of Westminster, 1560-1609, pp. 214, 220; D. Norton, King James Bible, 59-60, 83-5.

Barlow was naturally horrified by ‘the dreadfulness of the danger’ from the Gunpowder Plot, which would have made his first day in Parliament his last. Rostered to preach at Paul’s Cross on the following Sunday, he hastily garnered information from the statements made to Parliament by King James and the lord chancellor, Thomas Egerton^*, Lord Ellesmere (later Viscount Brackley), on 9 Nov., and received a briefing from Salisbury later that night. In the pulpit the following day, he read out excerpts from Fawkes’s confession, condemned the ‘hyperdiabolical devilishness’ of the plotters, and speculated that the explosion would have set fire to much of Westminster. He naturally observed ‘this practice of murdering princes is made an axiom of theology among the Romanists’, but also attacked the Scottish presbyterians John Knox and George Buchanan for having warned ‘that if their reformation should not be yielded unto, there would be shortly a bloody day in England’; this sermon was printed in 1606.37 W. Barlow, Sermon Preached at Paules Cross (1606), sigs. A3v, C2v-3, E3r-v.

While he attended almost 90 per cent of the sittings of the House of Lords during the 1605-6 session, Barlow did not play a very prominent part in its proceedings. Early in the session, he was ordered to attend a conference with the Commons about revisions to the recusancy laws, and he was later included on committees instructed to scrutinize four of the bills which emerged. On 10 Apr. he was named attend another conference, at which the Lords informed MPs that their bill to abolish purveyance without compensation had been rejected.38 LJ, ii. 367b, 412b-13a, 419b, 427a, 429a. Barlow was also one of the delegation sent to confer with the Commons about MPs’ ecclesiastical grievances, chief among which was the enforcement of clerical subscription to the 1604 Canons. The same committee was required to attend subsequent conferences on this subject, and to scrutinize a bill defining the role of Parliament and Convocation in the passage of ecclesiastical legislation. However, he was not recorded to have spoken in any of the lengthy and intemperate debates on ecclesiastical affairs.39 Ibid. 411a, 415b, 424a, 429a; CJ, i. 303b; Bowyer Diary, 52. Other bill committees to which he was named included the endowment of two divinity lectureships at Cambridge; the estate of Sir Christopher Hatton^‡, whose brother served in Bancroft’s household; free trade, the restraint of the export of undressed cloth; and two rival measures to regulate the Marshalsea court.40 LJ, ii. 386a-b, 399b, 410a, 436b.

In September 1606 the king convened another conference at Hampton Court, at which Bancroft argued with Scottish presbyterians who were resisting royal attempts to impose a form of episcopacy on the Kirk. Barlow was one of four English clerics ordered to preach sermons refuting the objections of the Scottish ministers. As Bancroft had done in a notorious sermon of 1589, Barlow made a strong case for jure divino episcopacy, founded on scripture, a wide range of the Church Fathers, and a brief reference to James’s own Basilicon Doron. Printed by the king’s ‘express commandment’, his text included a preface castigating Scots presbyterians for ‘entitling the Church governors among us, papistical English bishops … a slander I say untrue and unchristian’. It was in response to this provocation that Andrew Melville attacked Barlow’s account of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference.41 W.R. Foster, Church Before the Covenants, 111-13; D.G. Mullan, Episcopacy in Scot. 105-8; Patterson, 114; W. Barlow, The First of Foure Sermons (1607), sigs. A3v, E2v; Calderwood, vi. 598.

On the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, Barlow preached before the Privy Council and judges. Instead of attacking the perfidy of the king’s would-be assassins, as he had a year earlier, Barlow advocated Zerubbabel, rebuilder of the Temple at Jerusalem, as a model for his own sovereign: ‘a good king must expect to be destroyed before his time, if he seek to destroy the wicked in their time, especially if he be, as Zerubbabel here, a temple-builder, a religious king, one that endeavours to restore and retain religion in her first purity’. This text could be directed against either Catholics or puritans, but Barlow chose the latter option. He recounted the criticisms levelled at bishops in the early church – ‘are they severe in punishing the refractories and disobedient? … discharge they any public service imposed by authority? They are carnalists, time-servers, men-pleasers, preaching for preferments’ – but then he slipped into the present tense, observing ‘thus we are scorched as black as any coal’. He also alluded to the puritans’ attempt ‘to cry them [bishops] down into praemunires’ in Parliament in May 1606.42 Zechariah, chapters 3-4; W. Barlow, A Brand, Titio Erepta (1607), sigs. D1, D3v, E1; CSP Ven. 1603-7, p. 353. For the praemunire incident of 1606, see RICHARD BANCROFT.

Barlow returned to Parliament in November 1606 as one of four custodians of the proxy of William James^*, bishop of Durham; as previously, he attended almost all of the Lords’ sittings. In a poorly reported session, he was noted to have made only one brief speech, on 22 Nov. 1606, when he excused the absence of Archbishop Bancroft ‘for want of health’. He played little part in the debates on the Union with Scotland, which dominated the crown’s agenda, as these chiefly took place in the Commons. On 24 Nov. 1606 he was ordered to attend the conference at which MPs were urged to begin their debates, but the only legislation which reached the Lords was that to repeal hostile laws against the Scots; in June 1607, Barlow was one of the members appointed to the committee for this bill when it finally arrived in the Lords.43 LJ, ii. 449a, 451b, 453a, 520a. Bancroft ensured that most of the ecclesiastical legislation promoted by puritans in the Commons never reached the committee stage, but Barlow joined the archbishop in scrutinizing two bills that were committed: one to prevent bishops from imposing subscription under the 1604 Canons; the other to correct a defect in a 1559 statute for an exchange of lands between the Crown and the archiepiscopal estates of Canterbury. I t may be assumed that Barlow supported Bancroft’s opposition to both of these measures: the former vanished in committee; while the latter was rejected at the report stage.44 Ibid. 503a, 504a, 532a; HMC Hatfield, xix. 140. Many of the other legislative committees on which Barlow was included concerned the interests of the Home Counties: restrictions on new building in London and its suburbs; confirmation of the endowments of London livery companies; drainage of Plumstead marshes, which lay within his own diocese in Kent; the incorporation of the vestry of St Saviour’s church, Southwark; and reform of the Marshalsea court.45 LJ, ii. 460b, 479a, 490b, 513b, 516b.

Polemic and Parliament 1608-10

Barlow’s reward for services rendered as a court prelate was translation in June 1608 to the see of Lincoln, where the episcopal estates, worth £830 a year, almost doubled his income. He was required to surrender all his other preferments, except for the prebend at Westminster Abbey, and to live in his manor house at Buckden, Huntingdonshire; in 1609 he mournfully described himself as ‘a country retired bishop’ in a letter to Salisbury.46 Fasti, ix. 2; Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc. vi. 56; C58/12; HMC Hatfield, xx. 134. However, in 1609 James called upon his services as a polemicist once again, this time to respond to The Judgment of a Catholicke English-man, a tract written by the Jesuit Robert Persons in refutation of Triplici Nodo, the king’s defence of the 1606 oath of allegiance. Barlow’s preface attempted to explain away James’s apparent reluctance to spar with Persons: ‘your Majesty vouchsafed not the conflict with such a rake-shame, but adjudged a rope the fittest answer for him; therein your Majesty showed your magnanimous spirit, giving unto him his just doom’.47 W. Barlow, An Answer to a Catholike Englishman, sig. A1; P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age, 109-10. Dudley Carleton^* (later 1st Viscount Dorchester) noted that Barlow had even-handedly attacked the monarchomach pretensions of both ‘Jesuited’ and ‘Genevated divinity’, but Catholics, recalling his role at Essex’s execution, mocked him as the king’s hangman; the volume even provoked controversy at the dinner table of one of Barlow’s Huntingdonshire neighbours, Sir Robert Payne^‡. At his death in 1610, Persons was working on a riposte, which was completed by another Jesuit, Thomas Fitzherbert, and published in 1612, but it presumably appeared too late for Barlow to respond before his own death.48 T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 99; Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead ed. M.C. Questier (Cam. Soc. 5th ser. xii), 49; STAC 8/11/23; Milward, 110-11.

Having established his credentials as an anti-Catholic polemicist, Barlow apparently now felt able to express some reservations about Calvinist theology in public: in 1611 the Venetian ambassador claimed he had praised auricular confession and the invocation of saints in a sermon at court. The ambassador probably failed to notice the caveats any Protestant cleric would have been expected to offer in handling these subjects, but shortly thereafter Barlow was contacted by the Dutch Arminian Petrus Bertius, who, having read his account of the Hampton Court Conference, saw him as a kindred spirit.49 A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 206, 296, 436; CSP Ven. 1610-13, p. 127; Fincham, 282; P. Croft, ‘Religion of Robert Cecil’, HJ, xxxiv. 792-3.

At the parliamentary session in the spring of 1610, Barlow was again regular in his attendance; one of his rare absences was attributed by ill health. The fuller records of this session offer a more rounded perspective on his contribution to the Lords’ proceedings. He was one of the large delegation ordered to attend Salisbury’s speech on the crown’s financial troubles at the start of the session, while on 18 Apr. and 26 May he was among those sent to advise the king about the progress of negotiations over the fiscal reform package known to posterity as the Great Contract. When Bancroft’s client Dr John Cowell, master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, was criticized in the Commons for the absolutist language of his civil law textbook, The Interpreter, Barlow was one of those sent to confer with MPs about their complaints.50 LJ, ii. 550b, 553b, 557b, 579b.

Barlow made the first of his recorded speeches in the Lords on 2 Apr., at the third reading of the bill to reverse the attainder of the former Essex rebel Sir John Davies. Salisbury observed that the bill, having been uncontested at its second reading, had not been scrutinized in committee, whereupon Richard Parry^*, bishop of St Asaph, objected that Davies, who had converted to Catholicism while under threat of execution in 1601, had not fully conformed. Ellesmere and Salisbury both offered assurances that he would do so, while Barlow, who had examined Davies, confirmed that he had taken the oath of allegiance, and that his only scruple was ‘in the matter of the Lord’s Supper’ – presumably transubstantiation – ‘wherein he was not obstinate, but, proposing some doubts in that point, desired me that I would excuse him’; the bill was eventually passed.51 Ibid. 569b, 576a; Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 61-2.

Puritan MPs sent several contentious items of ecclesiastical legislation up to the Lords in 1610, which encountered a frosty reception from the bishops, including Barlow. At the second reading of the bill against pluralism and non-residence among clerics on 30 Apr., Bancroft made a coruscating attack, wishing the bill to be consigned to ‘the uttermost pit of hell’. Several bishops followed this lead, including Barlow, who, having reminded the House that he had never held more than one living with cure of souls, urged that the bill ‘ought not to be committed; for it is a matter ecclesiastical, and therefore to be redressed by that power, viz. the Convocation House, not the Parliament House’. Despite the bishops’ objections, the debate was continued in a committee of the whole House, on 3 May.52 Procs. 1610, i. 72-3, 226; LJ, ii. 584a. On this occasion, Bancroft read out the heads of the bill, and asked if anyone took issue with his earlier objections. Oliver St. John^*, 3rd Lord St. John, recalled that pluralism had been condemned by the 1572 Canons, but Barlow, speaking as St. John’s diocesan, brushed him aside: ‘this law looketh backward, for it taketh away a man’s living which he hath already, and for which he suffered much charge. It is also full of iniquity in respect of things to come, for it will not leave us livings competent’. He ended with the assertion that if pluralism was ‘covetousness’, then lay impropriation was surely ‘sacrilege’. Before anyone could take issue with these provocative words, Salisbury diverted the debate with a motion for lay impropriators to promise their curates a proportion of the value of their living, but no conclusion was reached on the improvement of clerical stipends.53 LJ, ii. 587b; Procs. 1610, i. 75-6, 229-30. This contentious bill was laid aside until 8 June, when St. John – taking advantage of Bancroft’s absence – called for a fresh debate. Salisbury moved to postpone the meeting to 11 June, and to invite Bancroft to brief another bishop if he were not well enough to attend, at which point Barlow interjected that he had brought Bancroft’s notes with him. This offer notwithstanding, the debate was scheduled for 11 June, but it never took place, and the bill progressed no further.54 LJ, ii. 609b, 616b, 621a; Procs. 1610, i. 99-100; RICHARD BANCROFT.

Instead of considering the pluralism bill, the Lords gave a second reading to an equally contentious measure on 11 June, to prevent the bishops from depriving puritan ministers for refusing subscription to the 1604 Canons. This provoked another intemperate outburst from Bancroft, supported by numerous bishops including Barlow, who was included on the bill committee as one of those who had spoken. His words went unrecorded, but he presumably expressed vehement opposition to the bill, as Richard Fiennes*, 7th (or 1st) Lord Saye and Sele, claimed he had said ‘that the lower House loved not the bishops’.55 LJ, ii. 611a; Procs. 1610, i. 102. Finally, at the second reading of the bill to allow the secular courts to institute proceedings against scandalous ministers (12 July), George Abbot^*, bishop of London, insisted that the ecclesiastical courts were perfectly able to deal with the problem, and cited an example from Lincoln diocese to illustrate his point; Barlow was named to the bill committee, but it was never reported.56 Procs. 1610, i. 134-5; LJ, ii. 641b.

Barlow attended two-thirds of the Lords’ sittings during the brief autumn session of 1610, but is not recorded to have spoken. He was one of the delegation sent to prompt the Commons to indicate whether they were willing to proceed with the Great Contract, and when MPs eventually rejected this project, he was ordered to attend another conference to ascertain whether any other form of supply might be possible.57 LJ, ii. 671a, 678a. Barlow was also included on committees ordered to scrutinize a handful of bills, including the preservation of woods, and confirmation of leases made by the duchy of Cornwall.58 Ibid. 669a, 677a.

Diocesan administration 1608-13

A tenure of just four years allowed Barlow little opportunity to put his stamp upon a large diocese such as Lincoln. He installed Christopher Wyvell, a civil lawyer who had been his contemporary at Trinity Hall, as joint diocesan chancellor, but the latter played a modest role in diocesan administration until after his patron’s death. Barlow also appointed Alexander Chapman as archdeacon of Stow, Lincolnshire, while his secretary, Simon Bibby, acquired the unfortunate nickname of ‘simony and bribery’. Among the few leases of episcopal estates made during his tenure, he assigned prebendal lands at Buckden to his wife and daughters.59 H. Hajzyk, ‘Church in Lincs. c.1595-c.1640’ (Camb. Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1980), 63-5, 71-2, 115; Fincham, 137, 153, 169; Fasti, ix. 22. The loss of most of his official correspondence, and the records of his personal court of audience, makes it difficult to assess his effectiveness as a diocesan. His consistory court took a particular interest in litigation over tithes, perhaps at his behest, and he defended clerical incomes and interests against lay encroachment. At the consecration of a new church in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, he praised the patron, Sir Marmaduke Darrell^‡ for undertaking such work in ‘demolishing and destroying days’.60 Hajzyk, 80-3, 89; Fincham and Tyacke, 100; Fincham, 137. His suspicion of puritanism led him to suspend three clerical combination lectures and refuse a licence for another at Sleaford, Lincolnshire. However, none of his efforts to enforce subscription on his clergy were pursued as far as deprivation, while he endorsed the appointment of the Cambridge puritan John Preston to a prebend in 1610. He even granted preaching licences to two ministers deprived in 1605, John Burges and Arthur Hildersham, although the king ordered him to rescind Hildersham’s licence in 1612, when the latter was accused of encouraging the heresies of the anabaptist Edward Wightman. He was no more energetic in pursuing the Catholics recorded in his diocesan visitation of 1611.61 Hajzyk, 93-5, 270, 442; Lincs. AO, DIOC/COR/B/2, f. 56; Fasti, ix. 56; Winwood’s Memorials, iii. 239-40; Fincham, 83, 219, 225-6, 242; HMC Hastings, ii. 54; Babbage, 185.

On 7 Sept. 1613, having apparently been ‘well and at bowls after dinner’, Barlow was ‘dead before nine o’clock that night’; he was buried in the parish church at Buckden. Despite his dissent from some aspects of Calvinist theology, his will included a lengthy preamble in which he professed ‘comfortable assurance’ of salvation through Christ’s merits alone. It also hinted at a serious rift with his wife, who was bequeathed £2,000, with the proviso that this sum was to be halved ‘if she asperge [sic] me or my calling with any reproachful or contumacious terms after my decease’. He gave his daughters Alice and Jane £1,000 apiece, sums which were consigned to the Fishmongers’ Company until they came of age, while his sister’s son William Johnson was left £100 and most of his books. His choicest folio volumes and a silver gilt standing cup went to Trinity Hall, while the Fishmongers received another standing cup and £100 to furnish revolving loans to four young men of the company, with the interest thereof to provide a yearly sermon for the inmates of Archbishop Whitgift’s hospital at Croydon, Surrey. His wife proved the will on 13 Oct. 1613; his daughter Alice subsequently married a younger son of the judge Sir Henry Yelverton^‡.62 Chamberlain Letters, i. 478; PROB 11/122, ff. 349v-51v; GL, CLC/L/FE/B/001/MS055570/002, pp. 128, 132. His successor at Lincoln was Richard Neile^*, probably the informant who landed him in trouble with King James over the leniency he had shown to Arthur Hildersham.63 Fincham, 45-6.