him to him, to be a man worthy to serve a prince, for such singular qualities as were in him. And indeed the king soon employed him in embassies in France and elsewhere: so that he grew in the king's favour by the means of the archbishop, who had a very extraordinary love for him, and thought nothing too much to give him or to do for him.’
In 1533 he was one of the king's chaplains, and in May communicated to Cranmer ‘the king's commands’ relative to the sentence of divorce from Catherine of Arragon. In 1534 he was presented by the king to the archdeaconry of Ely, and he was a member of the convocation which recognised the king's supremacy in ecclesiastical matters. Soon afterwards he was appointed dean of the chapel royal, and in 1536 one of the members of the council of the north. On 29 Sept. 1537 the king granted to him a canonry and prebend in the collegiate church of St. Stephen, in the palace of Westminster (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, xii. 350), and on the 15th of the following month he was present at the christening of Prince Edward (afterwards Edward VI) at Hampton Court (ib. xii. 320, 350). On 2 May 1538 a royal commission was issued to Stephen Gardiner, Sir Francis Brian, and Thirlby, as ambassadors, to treat with Francis I, king of France, not only for a league of friendship, but for the projected marriage of the Princess Mary to the Duke of Orleans (Harl. MS. 7571, f. 35; Addit. MS. 25114, f. 297). The three ambassadors were recalled in August 1538. Thirlby was one of the royal commissioners appointed on 1 Oct. 1538 to search for and examine anabaptists (Wilkins, Concilia, iii. 836). On 23 Dec. 1539 he was presented to the mastership of the hospital of St. Thomas à Becket in Southwark, and on 14 Jan. 1539–1540 he surrendered that house, with all its possessions, to the king. At this period he was prebendary of Yeatminster in the cathedral church of Salisbury, and rector of Ribchester, Lancashire. In 1540 he was prolocutor of the convocation of the province of Canterbury, and signed the decree declaring the nullity of the king's marriage with Anne of Cleves. In the same year he was one of the commissioners appointed by the king to deliberate upon sundry points of religion then in controversy, and especially upon the doctrine of the sacraments.
By letters patent dated 17 Dec. 1540 the king erected the abbey of Westminster into an episcopal see, and appointed Thirlby the first and, as it happened, the last bishop of the new diocese. He was consecrated on 29 Dec. in St. Saviour's Chapel in the cathedral church of Westminster (Strype, Cranmer, p. 90). Soon afterwards he was appointed by the convocation to revise the translation of the epistles of St. James, St. John, and St. Jude. In January 1540–1 he interceded with the crown for the grant of the university of the house of Franciscan friars at Cambridge. In 1542 he appears as a member of the privy council, and was also despatched as ambassador to the emperor in Spain (Acts P. C. ed. Dasent, vol. i. passim). He returned the same year. In April 1543 he took part in the revision of the ‘Institution of a Christian Man,’ and on 17 June in that year he was one of those empowered to treat with the Scots ambassador concerning the proposed marriage of Prince Edward with Mary Queen of Scots. In May 1545 he was despatched on an embassy to the emperor, Charles V (State Papers, Hen. VIII, x. 428). He attended the diet of Bourbourg, and on 16 Jan. 1546–7 he was one of those who signed a treaty of peace at Utrecht (Rymer, xv. 120–1). He was not named an executor by Henry VIII, and consequently was excluded from Edward VI's privy council. He remained at the court of the emperor till June 1548, taking leave of Charles V at Augsburg on the 11th (Cal. State Papers, For. i. 24). Thirlby took part in the important debates in the House of Lords in December 1548 and January 1548–9 on the subject of the sacrament of the altar and the sacrifice of the mass. He declared that ‘he did never allow the doctrine’ laid down in the communion office of the proposed first Book of Common Prayer, stating that he mainly objected to the book as it stood because it abolished the ‘elevation’ and the ‘adoration’ (Gasquet and Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, pp. 162, 164, 166, 167, 171, 256, 263, 403, 404, 427). When Somerset expressed to Edward VI some disappointment at Thirlby's attitude, the young king remarked, ‘I expected nothing else but that he, who had been so long time with the emperor, should smell of the Interim’ (Original Letters, Parker Soc. ii. 645, 646). He voted against the third reading of the act of uniformity on 15 Jan. 1548–9, but enforced its provisions in his diocese after it had been passed. On 12 April 1549 he was in the commission for the suppression of heresy, and on 10 Nov. in that year he was ambassador at Brussels with Sir Philip Hoby and Sir Thomas Cheyne. On 29 March 1550 Thirlby resigned the bishopric of Westminster into the hands of the king, who thereupon dissolved it, and reannexed the county of Middlesex, which had been assigned for its diocese, to the see of London (Bentham, Hist. of Ely, p. 191). While bishop of Westminster he is said to
