Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/142

 Bastard, in his ‘Chrestoleros’ (1598), apostrophised his ‘excelling worth’ and purity (cf., Linsie Woolsie, 1621). According to John Stow, who dedicated his ‘Annals’ to him in 1592, he was ‘a man born for the benefit of his country and the good of his church.’ Camden asserts that ‘he devoutly consecrated both his whole life to God and his painful labours to the good of his church.’ Sir Henry Wotton terms him ‘a man of reverend and sacred memory; and of the primitive temper, as when the church did flourish in highest example of virtue.’ Fuller pronounces him ‘one of the worthiest men that ever the English hierarchy did enjoy.’ Izaak Walton asserted that ‘he was noted to be prudent and affable, and gentle by nature.’ Hooker credited him with patience. Despite the pomp which he maintained at Lambeth and on his visitations, he was not personally self-indulgent. When master of Trinity he usually took his meals with the undergraduates in the college hall, and shared ‘their moderate, thrifty diet.’ In his latest years he frequently dined with his poor pensioners at his Croydon hospital, and ate their simple fare. But the animosities which he excited by his rigorous coercion lived long after him, and such features in his character as these were overlooked or denied. Prynne, in his ‘Antipathy of the English Lordly Prelacy’ (1641), condemned him not only for his oppression, but for his lack of spiritual temper, as evidenced by the magnificence of his household and his maintenance of a garrison of retainers. Macaulay, echoing the views of the puritan historians, calls him ‘a narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting both those who agreed with Calvin about church government and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of reprobation.’

Whitgift's public work can only be fairly judged in relation to his environment. The modern conceptions of toleration and comprehension, by which Macaulay tested his conduct, lay outside his mental horizon. He conceived it to be his bounden duty to enforce the law of the land in ecclesiastical matters sternly and strictly. The times were critical, and he believed the Anglican establishment could not resist the assaults of catholics on the one hand and puritans on the other unless they were repressed summarily and by force. His personal acceptance of the doctrinal theories of some of the revolting clergy went in his mind for nothing when he was engaged in the practical business of governing the church. The passive obedience of the clergy to the bishops in all matters touching discipline and ritual was in his eyes the fundamental principle of episcopacy. Active divergence from discipline or ritual as established by law, of which the bishops were sole authorised interpreters, placed the clergy in the position of traitors or rebels. Much cruelty marked his administration, and he gave puritanism something of the advantage that comes of persecution. The effect of his policy was to narrow the bounds of the church, but within the limits that he assigned it he made the Anglican establishment a stubbornly powerful and homogeneous organisation which proved capable a few years later of maintaining its existence against what seemed to be overwhelming odds.

Whitgift was unmarried. Throughout his life he encouraged learning and interested himself in education. At Lambeth, as at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took charge of young men to whose training he devoted much attention. According to his earliest biographer, Sir George Paule, ‘his home, for the lectures and scolastic exercise therein performed, might justly be accounted a little academy, and in some respects superior and more profitable—viz. for martial affairs and the experience that divines and other scholars had, being near, and often at the court and chief seats of justice, from whence they continually had the passages and intelligences both for matters of state and government, in causes ecclesiastical and civil.’

While rector of Teversham Whitgift and Margaret, widow of Bartholomew Fulnetby of that place, founded a bible clerkship at Peterhouse. They also settled 3l. per annum for the relief of poor widows of the parish of Clavering in Essex. He gave to Trinity College a piece of plate and a collection of manuscripts. He also gave a manuscript of the Complutensian bible to Pembroke Hall, and a hundred marks to the city of Canterbury. Under letters patent from Queen Elizabeth, dated 22 Nov. 1595, he founded at Croydon a hospital and a free school dedicated to the Holy Trinity, for a warden, schoolmaster, and twenty poor men and women, or as many more under forty as the revenues would admit. The structure, a brick edifice of quadrangular form, was finished on 29 Sept. 1599, at a cost of 2,716l. 11s. 1d., the revenues at that period being 185l. 4s. 2d. per annum. Whitgift's statutes, from a manuscript at Lambeth, were printed in Ducarel's ‘Croydon,’ 1783, and separately in 1810. The foundation is still maintained, and the endowment is now worth 4,000l. a year. The hospital maintains thirty-nine poor per-