1794, admiral on 14 Feb. 1799, and at the age of eighty died suddenly at Bath on 10 Jan. 1808. ‘He was at the rooms the preceding evening and played at whist.’ He married in 1792 Eliza, daughter of Mr. W. Gunthorpe of Southampton, but left no children, and the estates of Stradbally (in Queen's County) passed by his will to his next of kin, Thomas Cosby, who traced back to a common ancestor, their respective great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather. Phillips Cosby himself was the second son of the ninth son of his grandfather, who had eleven sons and four daughters; and had, contrary to all probabilities, succeeded to the estate in 1774, on the failure of all the elder branches of the family.
[Burke's Landed Gentry; Charnock's Biog. Nav. vi. 435; Naval Chronicle (with a portrait), xiv. 353; Gent. Mag. (1808), vol. lxxviii. pt. i. p. 92; official letters in the Public Record Office.]
COSIN or COSYN, EDMUND (fl. 1558), vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, a native of Bedfordshire, entered King's Hall, Cambridge, as a bible clerk; proceeded B.A. early in 1535, M.A. in 1541, and B.D. in 1547; was successively fellow of King's Hall, St. Catharine's Hall, and of Trinity College (on its formation in 1546); and held from 21 Sept. 1538 to November 1541 the living of Grendon, Northamptonshire, which was in the gift of King's Hall. Cosin was proctor of the university in 1545, and his zeal in the catholic cause combined with Gardiner's influence to secure his election early in Mary's reign to the mastership of St. Catharine's Hall, and his presentation by the crown to the Norfolk rectories of St. Edmund, North Lynn (1553) and of Fakenham (1555), and to the Norfolk vicarages of Caistor Holy Trinity, and of Oxburgh (1554). In 1555 Trinity College presented him to the rectory of Thorpland, Norfolk. At the same time Cosin held many minor ecclesiastical offices, being chaplain to Bonner, bishop of London, and assistant to Michael Dunning, chancellor of Norwich diocese. In 1558 he was elected vice-chancellor of his university, but failing health and the ecclesiastical changes which accompanied Elizabeth's accession induced him to resign all his preferments in 1560 (cf. his letter to Parker in Strype's Parker, i. 176). He subsequently lived in retirement in Caius College, Cambridge, of which he was a pensioner in 1564. In 1568 the lords of the council summoned him before them to answer a charge of nonconformity, but Cosin appears to have preferred leaving the country to complying with the order. He was known to be living abroad in 1576.
[Strype's Memorials, III i. 80; Cooper's Athenæ Cantab. i. 204, 552; Egerton Papers (Camd. Soc.), p. 65; Nichols's Prog. Eliz. iii. 173; Blomefield's Norfolk.]
COSIN, JOHN (1594–1672), bishop of Durham, was born on 30 Nov. 1594 (Sloane MS. 1708, f. 109) at Norwich, where his father, Giles Cosin, was a wealthy citizen. His mother, Elizabeth Cosin (née Remington), belonged to a Norfolk county family. He was educated at the Norwich grammar school, and at the age of fourteen was elected to a Norwich scholarship at Caius College, Cambridge. In due time he was elected fellow of his college, and was then appointed secretary and librarian to Bishop Overall of Lichfield. A similar offer was made to him by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes of Ely; but on the advice of his tutor he preferred Bishop Overall's offer. As the bishop died in 1619, Cosin was not long with his patron, but long enough to acquire an immense reverence for him, whom he always spoke of in later life as his ‘lord and master.’ Cosin next became domestic chaplain in the household of Bishop Neile of Durham, by whom he was appointed in 1624 to the mastership of Greatham Hospital, and (4 Dec. 1624) to a stall in Durham Cathedral. He speedily exchanged his mastership for the rectory of Elwick. In 1625 he became archdeacon of the East Riding of Yorkshire, and in 1626 rector of Brancepeth in Durham. In the same year he married Frances, daughter of Matthew Blakiston of Newton Hall, a canon of Durham, and a man of ancient family in that county. Cosin was soon brought into collision with the puritans. He was a personal friend of Laud, and still more intimate with Montague; and in 1626 he attended the conference at York House respecting Montague's books, ‘Appello Cæsarem’ and ‘A Gagg for the New Gospell,’ as a defender of the author. The publication of his ‘Collection of Private Devotions’ in 1627 brought Cosin into still more hostile relations with the puritan party, and in 1628 he was further embroiled with them, owing to a violent sermon preached in Durham Cathedral by one of the prebendaries, Peter Smart, who inveighed against ‘the reparation and beautifying of the cathedral,’ in which Cosin had taken a leading part. The preacher referred to Cosin as ‘our young Apollo, who repaireth the Quire and sets it out gayly with strange Babylonish ornaments.’ For this sermon Smart was cited before a commission of the chapter, Cosin being one of the commissioners, and was suspended ‘ab ingressu ecclesiæ,’ and soon after his prebendal stall was sequestered. Smart twice (1628 and 1629)
