William Downham

William Downham (c. 1511 — 1577), otherwise known as William Downman, was Bishop of Chester early in the reign of Elizabeth I, having previously served as her domestic chaplain.

Notes

1. See, for example, Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1691, Vol. I at 601. However, elsewhere he is recorded as a native of Herefordshire: Matthew Parker, Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae of 1572 (ed. Samuel Drake, London, 1729) and John Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign, New Edition (The Clarendon Press, 1824), Vol. I, Part I, pp. 230, 371-372
2. He was aged 50 at his consecration in May 1561 (Parker, Antiquitate, p. 158), and his age at death in 1577 was recorded as 66 ("bis triginta et sex vixit") on a brass plate formerly affixed to his tomb (George Ormerod, History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 1819, Vol. I, p. 164).
3. Patricia Joan Cox, "Reformation Responses in Tudor Cheshire c. 1500-1577" (PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Warwick, December 2013), pp. 289-290; Alumni Oxonienses 1500-1714, ed. Joseph Foster, Oxford, 1891. At the time of the Dissolution the brethren at Ashridge were seventeen in number: A History of the County of Buckingham, Vol. I, ed. William Page (London, 1905), p. 387.
4. Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 290, 292; William Downham (ID65611), Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCEd); C. S. Knighton, "Downham William (1510/11-1577)", ODNB.
5. Knighton, ODNB; David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 187; CCEd records his resignation from Ayot St Peter occurring on 1 March 1559 but gives no date for his appointment there.
6. Knighton, ODNB.
7. Cox, Reformation Responses, p. 298; Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, p. 265.
8. Letter from the Queen to Downham dated 21 February 1568: Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 254-255.
9. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 361-372;  Knighton, ODNB.
10. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 410-411.
11. Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 292, 298; K. S. Wark, "Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire", Chetham Society, Vol. XIX, 3rd Series (1971), p. 4. The holding of a metropolitan visitation of a diocese and inhibition of the bishop’s powers for its duration have been presented by some commentators as implicit criticism of the bishop; for an explanation of the process and its actual significance, see Cox at pp. 298, 317-318. For an outline map of the diocese see ibid at p. 129 (Figure 10).
12. Knighton, ODNB; Cox, Reformation Responses, p. 320.
13. Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 302-304.
14. Calendar of State Papers of the Reigns of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, Vol. 1, 1547-1580, HMSO, 1856 (CSPD), p. 203; letter from the Queen to Downham, 21 February 1568 (Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, p. 255).
15. For Downham’s dealings with Southworth, see William A. Abram, A History of Blackburn Town and Parish (Blackburn, 1877), pp. 76-78. Southworth was High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1562; Downham considered him one who "if he could be reclaimed others would follow in embracing the Queen’s Majesty’s most goodly proceeding" (John Harland, ed., The Lancashire Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts, Chetham Society, 1859, p. 75); in the 1580s he was accused of sheltering the Jesuit Edmund Campion and was imprisoned.
16. Wark, "Elizabethan Recusancy", p. 9; David Mills, "‘Some Precise Cittizins’: Puritan Objections to Chester’s Plays", Leeds Studies in English, New Series, No. 29 (1998), p. 220.
17. Mills, Leeds Studies, p. 223; Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 295, 307-308. In 1572 Goodman accused Downham of failing properly to support Archbishop Grindal’s attempt to block performance of the Chester Mystery Plays. Downham had made representations against the performance but it proceeded under the authority of the Earl of Derby: David Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays, University of Toronto Press, 1988, p. 148; Cox, pp. 355-356.
18. Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 304-305.
19. Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 212-213; Wark, "Elizabethan Recusancy", p. 8. Downham’s report on the magistrates is printed in "A Collection of Original Letters from the Bishops to the Privy Council, 1564", ed. M. Bateson, Camden Miscellany IX, pp. 73-78.
20. John Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, The Clarendon Press, 1821, Vol. I, p. 477.
21. Anthony a Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, New Edition (ed. Philip Bliss), Part 1, 1815, p. 178.
22. CSPD, p. 305.
23. CSPD, p. 307; Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 254-255. Chester diocese contained 80 parishes, some of which had chapels of ease that were serviced by clergy additional to the parish incumbent. Many clergy were ejected or fled following Elizabeth’s succession and Downham’s natural anxiety to retain those remaining was increased by difficulty in recruiting replacements. Although no graduates were among the 179 candidates he ordained between 1562 and 1568, at least a third of incumbents appointed by him thereafter had graduated (Cox, pp. 338-339). His concern to recruit men who were able preachers is exemplified in his letter of 21 March 1573 to the Earl of Leicester (Add.MSS. 32091).
24. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol.1, Part 2, pp. 258-261; Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 313-314.
25. The Acts of the Privy Council of England (APC), New Series, Vol. VIII, HMSO, 1893, p. 317; Cox, pp. 307-309; The Victoria History of the County of Lancaster, Vol. 2 (ed. Farrer and Brownbill), Archibald Constable, 1908 (VHCL): William Arthur Shaw, "Ecclesiastical History since the Reformation", pp. 51-53.
26. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 257-260.
27. APC, Vol. VII, p. 399 (Letter to Downham, 12 November 1570) and Vol. VIII, p. 5 (Letter to Archbishop Parker). The "disorders" for which Downham was required to account were refusals to comply with the laws "for the use of Common Prayer and other Ecclesiastical Orders". Strype’s biography of Parker contains an extensive account of the convocation to which the archbishop proposed to refer the complaint (April 1571) and makes no mention of it.
28. Patrick Collinson, Godly People, Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, The Hambledon Press, 1983, p. 67. Downham subsequently wrote to Leicester asking him to use his moderating influence on Goodman whom he described as "somewhat singular by fervent zeal of God’s truth": Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 316-317.
29. Brett Usher, William Cecil and Episcopy, 1559-1577, Routledge, 2007, p. 31; Wark, "Elizabethan Recusancy", p. 13.
30. A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth, 2nd Edition, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, p. 500; Haigh, Reformation and Resistance, pp. 210, 265; Wark, "Elizabethan Recusancy", p. 5; VHCL: Shaw, p. 55; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, Methuen, 1967, pp. 206-207.
31. F. R. Raines in notes to "Remains Historical and Literary connected with the Counties of Lancaster and Chester", Chetham Society, Vol. VIII (1845). Downham’s practice in dealing with clergy of doubtful conformity is illustrated by the case of William Langley, Rector of Prestwich: see Raines’s notes to "A Description of the State, Civil and Ecclesiastical, of the County of Lancaster, c. 1590", Chetham Society, Vol. XCVI (1875), pp. 18-19.
32. Cox, Reformation Responses, p. 371 and generally.
33. APC, Vol. VIII, p. 258.
34. Letter to the Earl of Derby, 27 July 1574: APC, Vol. VIII, pp. 276-277.
35. APC, Vol. VIII, p. 317.
36. "The Lancashire Lieutenancy under the Tudors and Stuarts - Part 1", ed. John Harland, Remains Historical and Literary connected with the Counties of Lancaster and Chester, Vol. XLIX (1858), pp. 67-75; VHCL: Alice Law, "Political History from the Reign of Henry VIII", p. 224.
37. Ormerod, History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, Vol. I, p. 164; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, p. 601.
38. This description appears in Paul Rogers’s A Breviary or some few Collectiones of the Cittie of Chester, a compilation of papers left by his father, Archdeacon Robert Rogers, who, like Goodman, found an early patron in Sir Edward Fitton: see Mills, "Recycling the Cycle", pp. 52-54.
39. Cox, Reformation Responses, pp. 310, 311, 320, 322, 368. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 257-258.
40. Cox, Reformation Responses, p. 368; F. A. Bailey, "The Churchwardens’ Accounts of Prescot, 1523-1607" - Part 2, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 95 (1943), p. 19.
41. In the 1570s outwardly conforming families in Lancashire sent their sons to the English Colleges at Douai and Rome to be trained at Catholic missionaries. The return of these proselytisers at the end of the decade was marked by an upsurge in papist sentiment both in the county and nationally and new laws were introduced to combat the increase in recusancy. For which see VHCL: Shaw, pp. 54-56.
42. Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 265-266.
43. To Elizabeth "the marriage of the clergy was detestable; the marriage and especially the remarriage of her prelates approached incest": J. A. Froude, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, Vol. IX, p. 383. For Downham’s second wife see Cox, Reformation Responses, p. 301.
44. Ormerod, History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, Vol. I, p. 146; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, p. 601; "The Visitation of the County Palatine of Lancaster 1664-5", Chetham Society, Old Series, No. 84 (1872), p. 54.

Church of England titles
Preceded by Cuthbert Scott	Bishop of Chester 1561–1577	Succeeded by William Chaderton