Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/305

Veysey Through his ‘accomplished manners and business talents’ he quickly rose into the monarch's favour. He was accounted the best courtier among the bishops, and in 1515 after the mysterious death of Hunne in the Lollards' Tower, he zealously supported the king in forcing criminous ecclesiastics to submit to the civil law (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 352). The Earl of Derby in 1520 left him one of the executors of his will, and Henry VIII, in the seventeenth year of his reign, appointed him president of the court of marches of Wales. In 1519 and 1520 Veysey made a visitation of his diocese, and at first spent a part of every year within its borders; but then his periods of absence became more frequent, and it was usually left to the care of coadjutors. He accompanied Henry VIII to the Field of the Cloth of Gold at Guisnes, on his visit to the French king in 1520, was one of the ecclesiastics to meet the Emperor Charles V at Dover in 1522, sent twenty able men, with 100l., to attend Henry at the siege of Boulogne in 1544, and twice as many to suppress the insurrection in Norfolk in 1549. His household expenses at Moor Hall in Sutton-Coldfield, where he lived in great splendour, are stated to have amounted to 1,500l. per annum.

Veysey, with the bishops of Lincoln and St. Asaph, consecrated Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury; but he received numerous letters from the crown compelling him to alienate to those about the court the choicest possessions of the see. Through this action, and through his lavish expenditure on his kindred, the bishopric during his tenure passed from being one of the wealthiest to one of the poorest in England. Miles Coverdale [q. v.] acted as his coadjutor in 1550 (, Sermons, Parker Soc. p. 272), and at the command of the privy council he surrendered his see, being then a very old man, on 14 Aug. 1551, to Edward VI, and Coverdale was appointed in his place, the income of the bishopric being further reduced by the grant of a handsome pension to Veysey. He retired to Sutton-Coldfield, where he was surrounded by relatives, but after the accession of Mary was restored to his see on 28 Sept. 1553. In November and December of that year he was at Exeter, arranging the affairs of the diocese, and in January 1553–4 he returned to Sutton Coldfield. He died there, at his house of Moor Hall, on 23 Oct. 1554, aged about eighty-nine—the inscription on his monument says 23 Oct. 1555, in his hundred-and-third year—and was buried in the north aisle of the church. A very handsome monument was erected to his memory. The bishop is represented as a recumbent figure with hands uplifted, and in the pre-Reformation episcopal vestments, with mitre and pastoral crook. His arms are over the monument and against the wall over his feet. Above are the arms of Henry VII. The effigy was restored at the expense of his grand-nephew, Sir John Wyrley of Handsworth. It was renewed in 1748, when the corporation placed it in a niche in the wall and opened the tomb, so that the bishop's remains crumbled away. In 1875 the effigy was brought out and laid upon a renewed base, and on 25 Aug. the tomb was reopened and the skull exposed to view (, Warwickshire, p. 669). When Dugdale wrote, in 1656, the bishop was depicted, kneeling and with crozier and mitre, in a window of the north side of the chancel. His arms were formerly in one of the windows in the founder's chamber in Magdalen College. His initials are on a shield on the façade at Ford Abbey, Devonshire.

Veysey expended much of his wealth on the inhabitants of his native town. In 1527 he obtained from the king certain parcels of inclosure called Moor Crofts and Heath Yards, and more than forty acres of waste, with license to inclose, and erected the mansion of Moor Hall. He procured on 16 Dec. 1528 the incorporation of the village by the name of a warden and society of the king's town of Sutton-Coldfield, with a yearly fair and a weekly market, and he granted to them and their successors for ever the chase, park, and manor, extending over many hundreds of acres, so that the occupiers might feed their cattle on the common lands at trivial sums. He erected the moot hall, with a prison beneath it, and constructed a market-place; he paved the whole town and inclosed the coppices, paying for the ditching, hedging, and the gates. The aisles of the parish church were rebuilt at his cost, and he provided an organ for it. He built a free grammar school (probably the building called St. Mary's Hall, opposite the southeast corner of the churchyard), and endowed it with money, as well as with the dwelling-house for the master, which was demolished in 1832. To promote the prosperity of the town, he endeavoured to introduce the manufacture of ‘Devonshire kersies,’ one of his looms remaining until 1835; and for the workers of this new industry he erected fifty-one houses in stone, a few of which still stand. Other houses were built by him in the wilder parts of the waste land for the protection of travellers. His other benefactions included two stone bridges at Curd-