been expected, in the diocese of London. In February 1556 Bonner was sent to Oxford with Thirlby, bishop of Ely, to degrade Archbishop Cranmer; but this is the only instance in which we read of his being so employed out of his diocese. The catalogue of burnings there is horrible enough. At Smithfield as many as seven were sometimes burned together; at Colchester, one day, five men and five women suffered; while at Chelmsford, Braintree, Maldon, and other towns in Essex, individual cases occurred from time to time.
That Bonner condemned these men is certain; that he took a pleasure in it, as Foxe insinuates, is by no means so clear. It may be that he did not protest as he might have done against the severity of an inhuman law. A victim himself to the injustice of puritanism in the days of King Edward, he saw tendencies destructive of the commonwealth in the opinions which he condemned, and rough remedies were but the fashion of the times. Still, though his functions were merely judicial, the revulsion of feeling created by these repeated severities extended to their agents, and there is no doubt at all that Bonner was unpopular. Even Queen Elizabeth, it is said, looked coldly on him, and refused him her hand to kiss when he, with the other bishops, went out to meet her at Highgate; but for some months he retained his bishopric, and in 1559 he sat both in parliament and in convocation. He was compelled, however, to make some arrangement with Bishop Ridleys executor's, and was for some time confined to his house, In the course of the summer he and the whole of the bishops then in England, except Kitchin of Llandaff, refused to take the oath of supremacy, and were accordingly deprived of their bishoprics and committed to prison. Bonner refused the oath on 30 May, and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. There a few years later the oath of supremacy was again tendered to him by Dr. Horne, the new bishop of Winchester, as his diocesan, under the statute 5 Eliz. c. 1. On his refusal to take it he was indicted of a præmunire; but by his legal astuteness he raised the question whether Horne had been rightly consecrated as bishop even by statute law, and the objection was found so important that an act of parliament had to be passed to free the titles of the Elizabethan bishops from ambiguity. The charge was then withdrawn, and the oath was not again tendered to him. He died in the Marshalsea prison on 5 Sept. 1569, and was buried three days later at midnight in St. George's churchyard, Southwark, the hour being selected in order to avoid disturbances.
Sir John Harington, who was quite a boy when Bonner died, says that he was so hated that men would say of any ill-favoured fat fellow in the street, that was Bonner. This, however, tells us little of the real character of the man. The special merit by which he rose was that of being an able canonist, quick-witted and ready in argument. From some recorded anecdotes, it would appear that he had a quick temper also, and was given to language that nowadays would certainly be called unclerical. A number of his sharp repartees are preserved by Harington, which show that he was a man of lively and caustic humour, rather than the cold-blooded monster he is commonly supposed to have been.
[State Papers of Henry VIII; Calendar of Henry VIII; Foxe's Acts and Monuments; Burnet's Reformation; Strype; Wood's Athenæ (Bliss); Wriothesley's Chronicle (Camden Soc.); Machyn’s Diary (Camden Soc.); Chronicle of Queen Jane and Queen Mary (Camden Soc.); Sir John Harington's Brief View of the State of the Church of England, p. 16. The Life and Defence of the Conduct and Principles of the venerable and calumniated Edmund Bonner, by a Tractarian British Critic, Lond. 1842 (this book is a very bad sarcasm, its aim not being biographical so much as polemical. It is attributed to the late prebendary Townsend of Durham, who had previously edited Foxe's Book of Martyrs).]
BONNER, RICHARD (fl. 1548), was the author of a black-letter treatise on ‘The Right Worshipping of Christ in the Sacrament of Bread and Wine,' published in 1548. In the preface, addressed to Thomas (Cranmer), archbishop of Canterbury, the author styles himself ‘your obedyent diocesan and dayly orator.’
[Maunsell's Cat. of English Bookes, 1595, p. 22; Ames's Typographical Antiqq.. ed. Herbert, 1790, ii. 752; Strype's Eccles. Memorials, 1822, ii. i. 229.]
BONNEY, HENRY KAYE, D.D. (1780–1862), divine, was son of Henry Kaye Bonney, rector of King’s Clifte and prebendary of Lincoln, and was born 22 May 1780 at Tansor, Northamptonshire of which parish his father was at that time rector. His father's family friend, Lord Westmorland, procured for him a foundation scholarship at the Charterhouse, where he obtained an exhibition, and went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Having been elected to one of the Tancred divinity studentships, he migrated to Christ’s College. He became B.A. in 1802, B.A. 1805, D.D. 1824. He was ordained deacon in 1803 and priest in 1804, with a charge at Thirlby, in Lincolnshire. After a few months he went to live with his parents at King’s Cliffe, and undertook
