Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 53.djvu/479

  a contest as betwixt a child and man, not to say dwarf and giant.’

On the nomination of the king he was appointed bishop of St. Asaph by papal bull dated 28 May 1518, and was consecrated by Archbishop Warham at Otford, Kent, on 11 July following. Pace, in a letter to Wolsey, expresses his mortification at the promotion. He was one of those appointed in May 1522 to receive Charles V on his expected visit to Canterbury, and in the same year was assessed to find 200l. towards the king's expenses in France. In February 1523–4 he was sent with Sir John Baker on an embassy to Hamburg with a view to the restoration of the king of Denmark (, Eccl. Mem. i. 90). He was one of Wolsey's examiners of heretics in 1525; received the recantation of Richard Foster in December 1527, and was on the bench of judges who tried Billney and Arthur in 1527, and John Tewkesbury on 20 Dec. 1531. On the return of Wolsey from Rome in December 1527, Standish was among the bishops who attended at St. Paul's to welcome the cardinal.

At the beginning of the proceedings for Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine, Standish bore an important part as one of the queen's counsellors (The Pretended Divorce of Queen Katherine, Camden Soc. p. 177); and when the proctors appeared before the papal legate on 29 June 1529, he spoke against the divorce after Bishop Fisher, ‘but with less polished eloquence.’ Catherine viewed him with distrust, as, though on her side, he was thought to be entirely in the king's favour. He afterwards assisted at the coronation of Anne Boleyn.

On Warham's death in August 1532 he was deputed by the prior and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, to preside in convocation, and he was one of the three bishops who on 13 March 1533 consecrated Cranmer as metropolitan of the church of England in succession to Warham.

In 1533 (d. 1573) [q. v.] reported to Cromwell that he had great difficulties in serving an indictment of præmunire on Standish and his vicar-general, who both defied him. On 1 June 1535 he formally renounced the papal jurisdiction, the renunciation being dated at Wrexham, and on the 9th of the following month he died at an advanced age. He was buried in the Minories, afterwards Christ Church, London, where a monument, for which he left money, was erected over his remains, which perished in the great fire. By his will he left legacies to the cathedral of St. Asaph, and to the Franciscans of Oxford.

Wood makes him the author of:
 * 1) ‘Sermons preached to the People.’
 * 2) ‘Treatise against Erasmus his Translation of the New Testament;’ but there is no trace of them having been printed.



STANDISH, JOHN (1507?–1570), archdeacon of Colchester, born about 1507, is said to have belonged to the family of Standish of Burgh in Lancashire. The pedigrees, however, are not full enough to decide the matter. His uncle was [q. v.], bishop of St. Asaph. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, whence he was moved as a probationary fellow to Corpus Christi. He graduated B.A. on 16 May 1528, and proceeded M.A. on 11 July 1531, B.D. 1540, and, after long teaching in London and preaching at St. Paul's, D.D. on 2 Aug. 1541. Wood speaks of his ‘drudging much in the faculty of divinity,’ and he was fellow of Whittington College when he took his doctor's degree. In 1543 he became rector of St. Andrew Undershaft, in 1544 vicar of Northall, Middlesex, and in March 1550 rector of Wigan. On 2 Aug. 1550 he became canon of Worcester, and in January 1552–3 he was for a few days archdeacon of Colchester (, ii. 342). Strype says that he was chaplain to Edward VI; and he was also in 1553 vicar of Medbourne, Leicestershire. In 1554, after Mary's accession, he was deprived of his rectory of Wigan because he was married; but he seems to have put away his wife, and in 1555 he became rector of Rodmarton, Gloucestershire. On 21 Oct. 1557 he was collated to the prebend of Ealdland in St. Paul's Cathedral, and he again became archdeacon of Colchester on 15 Oct. 1558. When Elizabeth came to the throne he lost his archdeaconry, his prebend, and the living of Paglesham, Essex, which he had received in 1554. But subsequently he was restored to his prebend, and died in possession before 31 March 1570.

Standish wrote: ‘A Little Treatise against the Protestation of Robert Barnes 