Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/462

Shaxton  1537, he apologised by reason of debt for not sending the king a greater new year's gift than 20l. In 1538 he was told that the king considered him ungrateful for hesitating to grant him an advowson, on the plea that he had already given it away. To satisfy the king, he was compelled to re-demand it of the grantee, and wrote that he was ‘in an hell’ at the rebuke. Next year he was one of the bishops who opposed the six articles in parliament, till the king, as one of the lords present remarked, ‘confounded them all with God's learning.’ When the act was passed he and Latimer resigned their bishoprics. He was desired, when he gave in his resignation, to keep it secret; but it soon became known, and he wrote to ask Cromwell whether he should dress like a priest or like a bishop. Early in July he was seen in company with the archbishop of Canterbury in a priest's gown, ‘and a sarcenet tippet about his neck.’ A congé d'élire was issued for Salisbury on the 7th. Shaxton was committed to the custody of Clerk, bishop of Bath and Wells. On 9 Nov. he wrote from his confinement at Chew desiring liberty and a pension. He and Latimer seem each to have been allowed a pension of one hundred marks; but the first half-yearly payment was only made to him on 6 Dec. In the spring of 1540 he, like Latimer, had the benefit of the general pardon, but was released only with a prohibition from preaching or coming near London or either of the universities, or returning to his former diocese (Zurich Letters, i. 215, Parker Soc.). For some years he lived in obscurity, during which time the prohibition against preaching must have been relaxed, for he seems to have held a parochial charge at Hadleigh in Suffolk, whence in the spring of 1546 he was summoned to London to answer for maintaining false doctrine on the sacrament. He said when he left that he should either have to burn or to forsake the truth, and on 18 June he, with [q. v.] and two others, was arraigned for heresy at the Guildhall. All four were condemned to the flames; but the king sent Bishops Bonner and Heath, and his chaplains, Dr. Robinson and Dr. Redman, to confer with Shaxton and his fellow prisoner, Nicholas White, and they succeeded in persuading both of them to repudiate their heresy. On 9 July Shaxton signed a recantation in thirteen articles, which was published at the time with a prefatory epistle to Henry VIII, acknowledging the king's mercy to him in his old age. He was then sent to Anne Askew to urge her to do likewise; but Bonner had already tried in vain to persuade her, and she told Shaxton it would have been better for him that he had never been born. He was appointed to preach the sermon at her burning on 16 July. On Sunday, 1 Aug.—the day the London sheriffs were to be elected—he preached again at Paul's Cross, declaring ‘with weeping eyes’ how he fell into erroneous opinion, and urged his hearers to beware of heretical books.

In September he prevailed on Dr. (d. 1554) [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Lincoln, who had been suspected of similar heresies, to sign the same articles as he had done. At his request the king gave him the mastership of St. Giles's Hospital at Norwich. Possibly it was in going down to Norwich that he revisited Hadleigh, and declared his recantation there also. He was taxed with insincerity; but from this time his life was at least consistent, and he expressed great grief for what he called his former errors, even during the protestant reaction under Edward VI. He was already married, but now put away his wife, giving her a pious exhortation in verse to live chaste and single. At the beginning of Edward's reign, on 6 March 1547, he was obliged to surrender to the king the Norwich hospital (Dep.-Keeper of Public Records, 8th Rep. App. i. 49). Under Mary he became suffragan to [q.v.], bishop of Ely. Sitting at Ely on 9 Oct. 1555, along with the bishop's chancellor, he passed sentence on two protestant martyrs, Wolsey and Pygot. Next year (1556) he was the chief of a body of divines and lawyers at Cambridge before whom, on Palm Sunday eve (28 March), another heretic, John Hullier, was examined. He made his will on 5 Aug. following, and died immediately after; the will was proved on the 9th. He desired to be buried in Gonville Hall chapel, and left to that hall his house in St. Andrew's parish, Cambridge, his books, and some moneys.

 SHEA, DAVID (1777–1836), orientalist, son of Daniel Shea, a farmer, was born in the county of Limerick in 1777. He entered Dublin University on 3 June 1793, and in 1797 obtained a scholarship in classics. 