BAYLY, Lewis (1574/5-1631)

Little is known about Bayly’s origins or education. His earliest biographer claimed he was born in Carmarthen, an assertion which may well be accurate, as Bayly left £5 to the corporation in his will, to buy a bell. The identity of his father is unknown, but given the bishop’s career path it seems likely that he was related to the town’s Elizabethan curate, Thomas Bayly.26 Ath. Ox. i. 485; PROB 11/161, f. 420; Dodd, 13. While a contender for the bishopric of Bangor in 1616, Bayly was described to Sir William Maurice^‡ as having ‘lived once with my lady in Abermarlais’ – the household of the Carmarthenshire squire Sir Thomas Jones^‡, whose widow married Maurice as her second husband.27 NLW, Clenennau 326; Griffith, Peds. 218, 251.

Being well versed in Latin and having some Greek, Bayly evidently received a classical education in his youth, perhaps at the newly-founded Carmarthen grammar school; and by the time of his institution as rector of Llanedi, Carmarthenshire in 1605 he had proceeded MA, though apparently not at either of the English universities. Possibly Bayly was sent to Trinity College, Dublin, which opened its doors in 1593, for in the 1580s Sir Thomas Jones had served in Ireland under Sir John Perrot^‡, then lord deputy.28 Barnard, 100-4; CCEd; HP Commons 1558-1603, ii. 383, 385. However, if Bayly did indeed begin his career in Ireland, his prospects there were dashed by Tyrone’s rebellion. Nevertheless, by 1597, when he was appointed to the rectory of Shipston-upon-Stour, Worcestershire, he was both ordained and married, as two of his sons were baptized during his brief sojourn in the town. He went on to become rector of All Saints’ in Evesham in 1600. In 1604-5 he collaborated with the Exchequer teller Sir Philip Kighley^‡ in securing for the borough two charters of incorporation. Under the second of these he became headmaster of the town grammar school, and a capital burgess of the corporation.29 Barnard, 100-4; G. May, Descriptive Hist. of the Town of Evesham, 190; 258-61; HP Commons, 1604-29, ii. 461; v. 14.

It was probably while lobbying for the Evesham charters that Bayly met Prince Henry: the 1604 charter claimed to be the first petition the prince requested from his father; while the one issued the following year named Henry’s chamberlain, Sir Thomas Chaloner^‡, as high steward of the borough.30 Evesham Bor. Recs. xiii-xiv; May, 258-61. By 1606 Bayly was one of the prince’s chaplains, and it was presumably under Henry’s patronage that he secured further preferment as rector of Llanedi, Carmarthenshire (1605), vicar of Weaverham, Cheshire (1607) (where his patron was Sir Warwick Hele^‡, a duchy of Cornwall tenant), and treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral (1611).31 Barnard, 103; Fincham, 305; CCEd; Fasti, i. 17. His eldest son, John Bayly, matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1611, which presumably explains why he proceeded BD from the same college that same year. In November 1612, shortly after the prince’s death, Bayly preached an ill-judged sermon at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster. In this he recalled that Henry, speaking shortly before his death, had lamented ‘that religion laid a-bleeding’, and warned

that there were some of the Council that would hear a mass in the morning, be present at noon with the king at an English sermon, sit in Council all the afternoon, and at night tell to their wives, all that had passed, who being papists would relate all again unto their confessors, and they send it unto France, Spain and Italy.

Such views were commonplace among court hispanophobes – Richard Bancroft^*, the late archbishop of Canterbury, had said as much at the Council board in 1610 – but Bayly’s rehearsal of a controversial royal opinion in a public forum earned him a sharp rebuke from George Abbot^*, archbishop of Canterbury. Ordered to preach another sermon at St Martin’s to explain himself, Bayly apparently repeated his allegations, with extra Scriptural quotations, but went unpunished.32 Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, i. 392; T. Birch, Ct. and Times of Jas. I, i. 210-11. For Bancroft, see Spain and the Jacobean Catholics I: 1603-12 ed. A.J. Loomie (Catholic Rec. Soc. lxiv), 157.

Henry’s death might have spelt the end of Bayly’s hopes for preferment but for the astonishing success of his only known foray into print, The Practise of Pietie, a work of practical divinity, presumably honed to meet the needs of his Evesham parishioners. The date of the first edition is unknown, but the second, published shortly after Henry’s death, was dedicated to Prince Charles (Stuart^*, later prince of Wales). In the preface, he lamented that ‘they are now reputed most discreet, who can make the least profession of their faith’. He therefore aimed much of his advice at ‘the carnal Christian’, who ‘presumeth that, though he continue a while longer in his sin, God will not shorten his days’, an outlook he characterized as being that of ‘an implicit atheist’. As an antidote to the staple diet of polemic, Bayly offered ‘the old practise of true piety, which flourished before these controversies were hatched’, urging his readers to internalize the message of the Gospels by prayer, meditation, amendment of life and strict observance of the Sabbath, ‘the mother of all religion and good discipline in the Church’. Appealing as his work must have been to the godly, Bayly also urged conformity to the rubric of the Prayer Book:

It is … an ignorant pride for a man to think his own private prayers more effectual than the public prayers of the whole Church. … Pray therefore when the Church prayeth, sing when they sing, and in the action of kneeling, standing, sitting and such indifferent ceremonies (for the avoiding of scandal, the continuance of charity, and in testimony of thine obedience) conform thyself to the manner of the Church wherein thou livest.

Bayly’s work satisfied a voracious demand, going through 20 editions during his lifetime. It was also translated into French, German and Welsh before his death, and had a significant impact on popular religious devotions for a century thereafter.33 L. Bayly, The Practise of Pietie (?1612/13), preface, 262-3, 513, 552-3, 594-5; Dodd, 14-15; I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 348-51.

It is likely that Bayly’s pen secured both his appointment to the London rectory of St Matthew, Friday Street and to a royal chaplaincy in 1613. That same year he also took his doctorate at Oxford, offering as his thesis a refutation of the Catholic doctrines of purgatory and invocation of the saints. One consequence of these developments was that he spent less time at Evesham, where he installed a curate, and ceased to attend corporation meetings.34 Dodd, 18-19; Fincham, 305; Barnard, 106; Evesham Bor. Recs. 11.

In 1616, following the death of Henry Rowlands^*, Bayly became a contender for the bishopric of Bangor. He faced stiff competition from two men better acquainted with the diocese: Dr Richard Lewis of Llanaber, Merioneth and Dr John Williams of Ruthin, Denbighshire. Archbishop Abbot was widely reported to be opposed to Bayly’s appointment, but the latter carried the day by offering £600 to the king’s new favourite, George Villiers^* (later 1st duke of Buckingham). His appointment was reported to be ‘generally distasted’ at court, and the controversy over it was increased by rumours that he had paid his bribe (albeit only of £400) to a Scottish courtier.35 NLW, Clenennau 326, 339; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 29-30, 48; NLW, 9056E/831; Holles Letters ed. P.R. Seddon (Thoroton Soc. xxxv), 329; Procs. 1626, iii. 5, 10; SP16/164/23.

With an income reckoned at only £120 p.a., Bangor was the poorest see in either province. Bayly’s appointment was therefore followed by a series of exchanges designed to augment his income to between £300 and £400 p.a. In return for surrendering his livings in Evesham, London and Cheshire, he acquired half a dozen parishes in his new diocese, the treasurership of Bangor Cathedral and the archdeaconry of Anglesey, and was licensed to retain the treasurership of St Paul’s Cathedral in commendam. He also retained a canonry and the mastership of a hospital at Lichfield, which were perhaps useful as a residence while travelling to London.36 Trans. Congregational Hist. Soc. vi. 56; C58/20; CCEd.

Bayly’s tenure at Bangor, dogged by persistent allegations of maladministration, embezzlement and moral lapses, was one of the most controversial of the early Stuart episcopate. Some of the charges levelled against him were doubtless embellished by his enemies, but his conduct clearly fell below the pastoral standards expected of a bishop. There is no independent evidence to verify the accusations of sexual incontinence and drunkenness, but his reputation for cursing, swearing and preaching in a ‘violent manner’ was palpably justified.37 NLW, 9057E/918; SP16/30/8. The administrative charges brought against him in 1621 and 1626 covered a wide range of failings: he was said to have raised a double benevolence from his clergy upon arrival at Bangor; to have presented ministers who were unqualified, or unable to preach in Welsh; to have charged excessive fees and accepted simonaical bribes to make appointments or influence rulings in his courts; and to have acted arbitrarily while serving on local commissions.38 NLW, 9059E/1183; SP16/30/8. These allegations were intended to suggest Bayly’s shocking disregard for the problems of his diocese, but the problems of funding a resident, graduate, preaching ministry from poor upland livings where ‘the stipend is not sufficient to maintain an university man’ was a considerable challenge for any Welsh bishop, and he was not the only diocesan to resort to such measures. In his defence, he insisted he had appointed more ‘grave and learned preachers’ than any of his predecessors, a claim which seems to be borne out by the surviving diocesan records.39 SP16/164/23; Fincham, 181-2, 195; W.P. Griffith, Learning, Law and Religion, 311-19.

The events of Bayly’s first years at Bangor demonstrate both the generic problems of an upland diocese, and also the difficulties caused by his pugnacious behaviour. He initially picked a fight with the powerful local squire, Sir John Wynn^‡ of Gwydir, Caernarvonshire, for control of the parsonage of Llanvair Dyffryn Clwyd, Denbighshire, which, as it emerged, he intended for his eldest son John Bayly. After three years of strife, he settled his differences with Wynn, but appointed his son to the precentorship of Bangor Cathedral and five other benefices instead.40 NLW, 9056E/797, 802, 831; 466E/829; J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘Bp. Lewes Bayly and the Wynns of Gwydir’, Welsh Hist. Rev. vi. 404-12; C.W. Boase, Reg. Exeter Coll. Oxf. i. 95. Bayly then clashed with the enemies of Gwydir in February 1620, when he informed the Privy Council that the wife of Sir William Williams of Vaynol, Caernarvonshire had been allowed to take a modified version of the oath of allegiance by Edmund Griffith, dean of Bangor, a member of a family from Cefnamwlch, in the Llŷn peninsula, which had long been Gwydir’s sternest critics. At the same time, Bayly managed to offend the king by praying for James’s son-in-law as king of Bohemia, a title the latter had recently accepted in defiance of the Habsburg claimant, to James’s dismay.41 APC, 1619-21, pp. 139-40, 163; CSP Dom. 1619-23, p. 112.

The Bohemian crisis erupted into war over the summer, and in November 1620 James called a Parliament. In Caernarvonshire, Gwydir and the Llŷn faction promoted rival candidates; Bayly loudly declared his support for Sir Richard Wynn^‡, preaching in favour of Gwydir from the pulpit at Bangor, and remonstrating with those who had promised their voices to the Llŷn candidate, John Griffith^‡ of Cefnamwlch, before Wynn had declared his intentions. The enthusiasm of Bayly’s support was such that Wynn feared the bishop would be censured in Parliament ‘for threatening his tenants to give their voices with him’; but his desperate behaviour was born of a growing awareness that Gwydir was facing defeat. Bayly advised Sir John Wynn to clinch the vote by standing in person, but defeat in such circumstances would have been a greater disgrace, and Griffith carried the shire comfortably at the election, against a last-minute substitute for the Wynns, Griffith Jones of Castellmarch.42 NLW, 9057E/918, 924-5, 931; Gwynfor Jones, 412-14; HP Commons 1604-29, ii. 552-4.

Bayly was assiduous in his attendance at the 1621 Parliament, being present for over 85 per cent of the sittings. At the start of the session he was nominated to attend two conferences with the Commons about the delivery of a petition to the king for stricter enforcement of the recusancy laws, and when a new recusancy bill received its second reading in the Lords on 2 May, he called for a proviso ‘against the women recusants who return scoffs, flouts and taunts when the bishops offer to instruct them’, which presumably reflected the slights he had received.43 LJ, iii. 17a, 18b; LD 1621, p. 40. When the patentee Sir Giles Mompesson^‡ escaped from custody on 3 Mar., Bayly was one of the Lords who conferred with the Commons on the best means to effect the fugitive’s recapture. He was later nominated to attend a conference about the wider nuisance of monopolies, and when impeachment charges against Mompesson were filed in the Lords, he was one of a subcommittee appointed to investigate the accused’s patent for the licensing of inns. On 25 Apr., when the Lords discussed whether to incarcerate the ecclesiastical judge Sir John Bennett^‡ pending his trial on corruption charges, Bayly was one of the majority who successfully argued that Bennett should be allowed bail for a large sum, if his credit was good.44 LJ, iii. 34a, 42a, 47a; LD 1621, pp. 22-3. Bayly was among those sent to visit the disgraced lawyer Sir Henry Yelverton^‡ in the Tower on the eve of his trial in the Lords. At his hearing, Yelverton defended himself by labelling Buckingham as the promoter of the monopolies attacked in the opening months of the session, and comparing the favourite to Hugh Despenser^†, which invited the inference that James was as bad a king as Edward II. Buckingham’s allies ensured that Yelverton was condemned, but the king intervened on 2 May, urging that he be left to punish Yelverton for the aspersions against himself. Bayly insisted that Yelverton ‘did not directly speak anything against the king’s honour’, and argued that ‘a hard construction was made out of some speech of resuming regal authority, and of the matter of H. Spencer’. He concluded by cautioning the House against ‘the squeezing of blood out of words’, an implicit criticism of the king, for which he was called to order by Buckingham. Two days later, Bayly was swifter to censure the alehouse patentee, Sir Francis Michell, endorsing a motion for the latter to be stripped of his knighthood.45 LD 1621, pp.54-8, 65; R. Zaller, Parl. of 1621, pp. 118-21.

Bayly was also actively involved in the legislative business of the session. It was hardly surprising that the author of The Practise of Pietie was named to the committee for the Sabbath bill, and ordered to attend a conference with the Commons about this same measure. His role as a trustee of Beaumaris grammar school probably explains his nomination to the committee for the bill to confirm the endowments of hospitals and schools, and his local interests clearly explain his nomination to committees for two Welsh bills, one to regulate the trade in Welsh cottons, the other to repeal a clause in the 1543Act of Union allowing the Crown to make statute law for Wales by proclamation. His nominations to committees for bills against swearing and drunkenness suggest that someone in the House had a dry sense of humour. On 4 June, the day the House adjourned for the summer, Archbishop Abbot reported a complaint against a man who had threatened to pistol Bishop Bayly, which was dismissed, on the grounds that the witness might have misheard the remark.46 LJ, iii. 39b, 101b, 107b, 130a-b, 136a, 157b.

It is difficult to see why Bayly chose to provoke the king with his comments about the Yelverton case; he can hardly have been put up to it by the Wynns’ ally at court, John Williams^*, later bishop of Lincoln, as the latter was riding high in royal favour at this time. James was almost certainly apprised of Bayly’s speech, as the bishop was summoned before the Privy Council on 24 June. There the king took issue with the views Bayly had expressed about the Sabbath in The Practise of Pietie, where he had insisted that ‘man was not created for sports, plays and recreation’, and that on Sundays men should abstain ‘from all recreations and sports which at other times are lawful’ in order to focus on the study of divinity. These opinions contrasted sharply with those James himself had set out in his Book of Sports (1618). Although Bayly’s work had been written several years earlier, it had been reprinted since, without alteration.47 Bayly (1612/13 edition), 396, 567, 611-12; APC, 1621-3, p. 10; Birch, ii. 265; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 387. For the argument with King James, see also NLS, ms Adv.33.1.7, a reference we owe to Ken Fincham. Whatever offence this exchange may have caused, Bayly was allowed to leave London, visiting Evesham to arrange for the return to Parliament of Sir Edward Conway^* (later 1st Viscount Conway) at a by-election; but when he reached Bangor he found an arrest warrant awaiting him. On returning to the board, Bayly was accused by Abbot not only of insulting the king, but also of ‘false and erroneous opinion in point of doctrine and religion’, including charges of simony. Committed to the Fleet and removed from the treasurership of St Paul’s, it was also rumoured that he would be displaced from the episcopal bench, but in fact his incarceration was merely a punishment for his contempt against the king, which he purged with an abject apology.48 Evesham Bor. Recs. 22-3; APC, 1621-3, pp. 1, 10-11, 26, 36-7; Fasti, i. 17; NLW, 9057E/966. The Council referred the doctrinal charges to the Court of High Commission, enthusiastically assisted by testimony from the Llŷn faction, but in February 1622 John Williams, newly appointed lord keeper, persuaded Prince Charles to secure Bayly’s restoration to royal favour, whereupon the proceedings against him were, most irregularly, taken off file and burned.49 Birch, ii. 267; NLW, 9057E/972; 9058E/1007; Procs. 1626, iii.181, 184, 317. The charges in NLW, 9059E/1183 probably arose from the 1621 investigation. This scandal notwithstanding, Bayly attended Parliament in the autumn of 1621, when he was quick to defend Lord Keeper Williams against a complaint of malpractice in the Court of Chancery. On the following day Bayly was called to order for suggesting that some of the Lords had intended a conspiracy against Williams, an accusation he swiftly denied, insisting that the allegation was mere gossip, which he preferred not to repeat in public; the House accepted this response.50 LD 1621, pp. 107, 120.

On returning to his diocese, Bayly was required to raise a benevolence from his clergy for relief of the Palatinate, now under Spanish occupation. A contribution equivalent to a clerical subsidy was solicited, but Bangor only delivered £100, half the sum expected. He was nevertheless interested in the fate of the Protestant cause on the Continent, for in September 1622, fresh from a visit to London, he sent Sir John Wynn news of the latest developments in Germany and France, and reported Prince Charles’s hopes that the Spanish Match would secure the restoration of the Palatinate, a claim he regarded with scepticism.51 SP14/133/13; NLW, 466E/1035. Meanwhile, presumably in response to his investigation by High Commission, Bayly played a more active role in diocesan administration: he attended the diocesan synod at Bangor in October 1622; at Beaumaris free school, he replaced an inadequate master and usher with graduates; and he even risked offending Wynn by imposing a temporary curate upon a rectory owned by Wynn’s son-in-law, Sir John Bodvel, in order to catechize the parishioners in advance of his visitation in the summer of 1623.52 NLW, 466E/1037; 9058E/1116; Anglesey Archives, David Hughes mss (letter now lost, notes taken by Antony Carr); Cal.Wynn Pprs. 176.

During the 1624 Parliament, Bayly attended the Lords almost every day, holding the proxy of Miles Smith^*, bishop of Gloucester together with Thomas Morton^*, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. On 1 Mar. Bayly, considering the likelihood of a breach with Spain, called for the disarming of recusants, and the blocking of Milford Haven in South Wales against any potential invasion force, a motion which was seconded by William Laud^*, bishop of St Davids (later archbishop of Canterbury). In April, the Lords and Commons combined to urge the king to stricter enforcement of the recusancy laws, and Bayly was one of the delegation which presented a petition to James.53 LJ, iii. 212a, 287b, 304a; LD 1624 and 1626, p. 16; PA, HL/PO/JO/5/1/2, f. 22v. As a corollary to preparations for a war, Buckingham and Prince Charles pressed for the downfall of the Spanish party at court and the impeachment of its most prominent figure, the lord treasurer, Lionel Cranfield^*, 1st earl of Middlesex. When the Lords debated Middlesex’s sentence on 13 May, Bayly moved that part of his fine be assigned to fund the war effort. Lord Keeper Williams, another hispanophile, also came under attack, but on 20 Mar., when he informed the House that he had been libelled by a disgruntled litigant, Bayly – still grateful for Williams’s support in 1621-2 – leapt to his defence, attacking ‘this high indignity of libels’ and calling for the petitioner to be punished.54 LJ, iii. 371b-2a; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 36, 89.

Bayly played an active role in scrutinizing the legislation which came before the Lords. As in 1621, he was named to the committee to repeal the prerogative clause of the 1543 Act of Union, and another for the Welsh cottons bill. His other committee nominations included the monopolies’ bill and the usury bill.55 LJ, iii. 267b, 273a, 303b, 304b, 314b, 325a. At its third reading on 1 Apr., Bayly was the only peer to oppose the bill to naturalize the Dutch merchant Philip Jacobsen, though the nature of his objections went unrecorded. On 14 May, he risked offending Buckingham by opposing the bill to exchange crown lands in York for the freehold of York House in the Strand, the lease of which the favourite had recently acquired; his objection was that this would deprive the archbishops of York of a London residence.56 Add. 40088, f. 2; LD 1624 and 1626, pp. 92-3. Finally, on 28 May, he was ordered to join with three judges after the prorogation to resolve a disputed title to lands held by the Edwards family of Chirk, Denbighshire. This was a slightly irregular order, as the parish lay within St Asaph diocese, but as John Hanmer^* was new to that see, it was presumably felt that an arbitrator with local experience was required.57 LJ, iii. 414b; Add. 40088, f. 138v.

Bayly was widowed for a third time in October 1623, but he resolved to seek a new wife from among the local gentry, and around a year later married Ann Bagnall, co-heiress to the Plas Newydd estate in Anglesey. This match cemented his hitherto fractious relationship with Buckingham, whose wife was related to the Bagnalls, but within north Wales it served to align him with some of the critics of the Gwydir interest. At the general election of 1625, when Sir John Wynn’s grandson John Mostyn^‡ was backed by Lord Keeper Williams as knight of the shire for Anglesey, Bayly advised that his wife’s stepfather, Sir Sackvill Trevor^‡, ‘had resolved to stand for it’, and was likely to succeed; Trevor was duly returned unopposed. However, this was not intended as a deliberate snub to Gwydir, for when Bayly received the first commission of the peace of the new reign a few days later, he offered Wynn the opportunity to take the oath of office first among all the magistrates, as a public snub to the ‘baboons’ of Llŷn.58 Cal. Wynn Pprs, 430; NLW, 9059E/1160; 9060E/1331, 1333; Griffith, 57; Procs. 1625, p. 684; HP Commons 1604-29, ii. 547-8.

Despite an outbreak of the plague, Bayly attended almost every day of the Westminster sitting of the 1625 Parliament. On 28 June, during a debate on the details of the fast day scheduled for 7 July, he moved that those who absented themselves from the service without leave should be required to make a charitable donation; he was one of the peers appointed to take the names of those present, and ordered to disburse the money collected.59 Procs. 1625, pp. 68-9, 111. He was again named to the committee for the Sabbath bill, and during a debate of 4 July on the military threat from Catholics, he warned of ‘a great concourse of people to St Winifred’s well’ in Holywell, Flintshire, a pilgrimage site where, he claimed, mass was ‘said continually’ by Catholic priests.60 Ibid. 72, 86. He was named to a committee considering a petition from prisoners in the Fleet to be allowed bail during the plague and on 9 July, he delivered his report on the Edwards of Chirk estate bill, although he observed that a meeting of 25 June to arbitrate a settlement had not taken place.61 Ibid. 111, 113. The session was subsequently adjourned to Oxford, but Bayly failed to attend.

At the coronation on 2 Feb. 1626, Bayly helped to hold the cloth of estate above the king’s head at the anointing. He boasted of being ‘now grown again in extraordinary favour with the duke of Buckingham’, and took the opportunity to lobby both the favourite and the king for a naval captaincy for Trevor.62 NLW, Carreglwyd III/10; HP Commons, 1604-29, vi. 572. He attended almost every day of the 1626 Parliament, which was dominated by the impeachment proceedings brought against Buckingham and John Digby^*, 1st earl of Bristol. It was doubtless his membership of the Villiers affinity which explains Bayly’s appointment to the committee charged with taking depositions from witnesses in Bristol’s case, which met only twice before the dissolution.63 Procs.1626, i. 540, 597, 631; A. Hughes, List of Sheriffs (PRO, L. and I. Soc. ix), 248. The political agenda of the session crowded out much of the ordinary business of the House, and while Bayly was named to the standing committee for petitions, he was only included on a handful of legislative committees, including one for the bill for hospitals and free schools, and another to enfranchise copyholders in the crown lordships of Bromfield and Yale, Denbighshire.64 Procs. 1626, i. 48, 104, 327. He spent more time on a privilege claim for his servant Henry Griffith, who had been arrested by Griffith Bodurda, the under-sheriff of Caernarvonshire; the latter appeared before the Lords after the Easter vacation, and claimed he had arrested Henry Griffith for eating the process served upon him. Bodurda was released, but on 13 June the sheriff, Sir Thomas Williams, was accused of slandering Bayly’s servant, and briefly incarcerated for contempt.65 Ibid. 232, 258-9, 313, 315-16, 616, 622-3, 626, 628.

Buckingham’s ability to escape impeachment depended on his majority in the Lords. One of the ploys his enemies used to erode his position was to bring separate impeachment charges against Bayly. At the Commons’ committee for religion on 13 Feb., Sir Eubule Thelwall intervened in a debate about ministers’ stipends to complain that Bayly had failed to encourage preaching or catechizing in his diocese, had ordained ‘an apparitor, a lewd fellow’, and had even failed to provide daily prayers in some churches. As most of Thelwall’s estates lay in Ruthin lordship, a detached portion of Bangor diocese, his testimony carried some weight.66 Ibid. ii. 26-9; HP Commons 1604-29, vi. 505-6. On 17 Apr. Thelwall tendered a long list of charges against Bayly, while the latter’s old adversary John Griffith of Cefnamwlch subsequently offered to pay the expenses of witnesses summoned to Westminster. Charges of simony, drunkenness and concealment of witnesses were later added to the indictment, and on 6 May the House uncovered the suppression of the High Commission proceedings in February 1622, which led to a bill being drafted to prevent such arbitrary actions in the future.67 Procs. 1626, iii. 3, 5, 10-11, 167, 181, 184, 301-2, 304, 306-7, 317-18, 320-1, 332. Although the charges against Bayly were never sent to the Lords, they were widely remarked upon outside Parliament, and linked to Buckingham’s impeachment. One wit quipped that MPs ‘would not have a secular lord of his place [Buckingham] to be unattended with a chaplain suitable’, while others called Bayly the ‘bishop of Bang-whore’; yet the duke predicted that he and Bayly ‘would do very well’, and both were saved by the dissolution of 15 June.68 Procs. 1626, iv. 257; NLW, 9061E/1413-16; Holles Letters, 329.

Bayly attempted to ingratiate himself with the king by promoting the collection of privy seals and benevolences which followed the dissolution, and in August 1626 he was tipped to replace Bishop Laud at St Davids. However, John Griffith took it upon himself to forward the Commons’ charges against Bayly to the king, and while no action was taken against Bayly, Charles opted to promote Theophilus Field^* to St Davids instead.69 NLW, 9061E/1422-3, 1427, 1430; SP16/30/8. Bayly went on to address one of the charges brought against him – the dilapidation of Bangor Cathedral – by seeking a gift of lead from Sir John Wynn for repairs to the roof, but the latter’s death in March 1627 deprived him of his most powerful local ally.

Bayly stayed away from the 1628 Parliament, granting his proxy to two of Buckingham’s allies, Laud and Richard Neile^*, bishop of Winchester. He was also absent during the 1629 session, although he left no proxy on this occasion. He was nevertheless mentioned in the Commons on 23 Feb. 1629, when Thelwall, at the second reading of the simony bill, insisted that ‘in Bangor not one living given by the present bishop but for money’.70 NLW, 9061E/1440; CSP Dom. 1628-9, p. 32; Lords Procs. 1628, p. 25; CD 1629, p. 234.

In 1630 the king charged Bayly with failure to insist upon full subscription to the Canons of 1604 by his clergy. Bayly replied that he had done nothing wrong, blaming ‘some malignant adversaries’ for this allegation, but admitted that his chaplain had been less scrupulous in examination of ordinands. The individual in question was probably his son Thomas, a Cambridge graduate whom he had appointed to several livings within the diocese.71 SP16/164/23; C58/35. In the same year, Bayly intervened with Laud (then bishop of London), as chancellor of Oxford University, to dispense with the residence requirements for higher degrees, so that his son John could be allowed to take his doctorate.72 CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 358, 360-1, 366; Griffith, Learning, 113-14. The bishop’s relations with his diocese remained fraught: he was prosecuted in Chancery by his diocesan registrar, who claimed that he had been withholding fees from the archdeaconry of Anglesey; yet as he held the latter post in commendam, he was entitled to appoint his own commissary to run the island’s jurisdiction. His attempt to promote one of Wynn’s pet projects, the printing of the Latin-Welsh dictionary of Dr John Davies, by undertaking to purchase 100 copies of the work for sale among his clergy, were frustrated by delays in publication; the volume did not appear until the year after his death.73 Barnard, 120-2; J. Gwynfor Jones, Wynn Fam. of Gwydir, 175-8.

Bayly was sick when he drafted his will on 8 Sept. 1631, bequeathing his estates to his wife, with a reversion to his youngest son Nicholas, who was still under-age. He left his library to his son Thomas, with small legacies to his older surviving children, and two grandchildren. He died on 26 Oct. 1631, and was buried, as requested, near the altar of Bangor Cathedral, without any tomb or monument. His widow proved the will in May 1632, but died in the following year. In 1769 his great-great-grandson inherited a peerage, as 9th Lord Paget.74 PROB 11/161, f. 420; B. Willis, Survey of the Cathedral Church of Bangor (1721), 110-11; Griffith, Peds. 57.