archbishop presented him to the rectory of Boscombe, Wiltshire, where he soon completed half his treatise. On 17 July 1591 he was instituted to a minor prebend of Salisbury.
In July 1595 the crown, doubtless on Whitgift's recommendation, presented him to the better living of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, and there he continued his literary labours. Dr. Hadrian Saravia, a Dutch protestant, who had lately become prebendary of Canterbury, strongly sympathised with Hooker's views, and in his later years was his dearest friend. His reputation spread rapidly, and many interested in the controversy in which he had engaged sought him out at Bishopsbourne. He died at Bishopsbourne on 2 Nov. 1600, and was buried in the chancel of the church. Bishop Andrewes wrote five days later that ‘his workes and worth’ were ‘such as behind him he hath not (that I know) left anie neere him.’ Sir William Cowper, grandfather of William, first Earl Cowper [q. v.], built in 1635 a monument above Hooker's grave, with a bust of the scholar upon it. Sir William's epitaph, in English verse, first associated the epithet ‘Judicious’ with Hooker's name.
Hooker's will, dated 26 Oct. 1600, was proved 3 Dec. The value of his estate, which chiefly consisted of books, was 1,092l. 9s. 2d. His wife Joan, who was sole executrix and residuary legatee, died in March 1600–1, five months after her husband, but not, it is said, until she had married a second husband. To each of his four daughters, Alice, Cicely, Jone, and Margaret, Hooker left 100l. as their marriage portions. Alice died unmarried 20 Dec. 1649, and was buried 1 Jan. following at Chipstead, Surrey. Cicely married ‘one Chalinor, sometime a schoolmaster in Chichester.’ Jone married Edward Nethersole at Bishopsbourne 23 March 1600. Margaret, the youngest daughter, was wife of Ezekiel Charke, B.D., rector of St. Nicholas, Harbledown, near Canterbury, and had a son, Ezekiel, rector of Waldron, Sussex (d. 1670). Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden in 1618 that Hooker's children were then beggars (Conversations with Drummond, Shakesp. Soc. p. 10).
Hooker's chief personal characteristic, according to his friends, was his humility, or, to use Fuller's phrase, ‘his dove-like simplicity.’ Walton describes him when living at Bishopsbourne as ‘an obscure harmless man, a man in poor clothes, his loins usually girt in a coarse gown or canonical coat; of a mean stature and stooping, and yet more lowly in the thoughts of his soul; his body worn out not with age but study and holy mortifications; his face full of heat pimples, begot by his unactivity and sedentary life.’ ‘God and Nature,’ Walton continues, ‘blessed him with so blessed a bashfulness that, as in his younger days his pupils might easily look him out of countenance; so neither then nor in his age did he ever willingly look any man in the face, and was of so mild and humble a nature that his poor parish-clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on or both off at the same time; and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet was short or weaksighted, and where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended.’ At one time he was the victim of the blackmailing persecution of a scheming woman, who threatened to charge him with immorality; but his pupils Cranmer and Sandys finally relieved him of her visits.
Hooker was an active and exemplary parish priest, and personally practised much fasting and private prayer. He was not a popular preacher. According to Walton, his ‘sermons were neither long nor earnest, but uttered with a grave zeal and an humble voice.’ ‘He seemed to study as he spake: the design of his sermons, as of all his discourses, was to show reasons for what he spake, and with these reasons such a kind of rhetoric as did rather convince and persuade than frighten men into piety.’ Fuller draws attention to ‘the copiousness of his style’ as a preacher, and the severe demands he made on the intelligence of his audience, some of whom censured him as ‘perplext, tedious, and obscure.’ ‘His voice was low, stature little, gesture none at all, standing stone-still in the pulpit.’ But attentive hearers, who closely followed his argument, ‘had their expectation ever paid at the close thereof.’
On 29 Jan. 1592–3, John Windet, the publisher, obtained a license from the Stationers' Company for the publication of ‘The Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Eight books by Richard Hooker’ (Arber, Transcript, ii. 295). On 13 March Hooker presented a manuscript copy to Lord Burghley. The first edition—a small folio—was issued by Windet without a date, and bore the title ‘Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. Eyght Bookes by Richard Hooker. Printed at London by John Windet.’ The first forty-five pages are occupied by Hooker's preface, addressed ‘to them that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of lawes and orders Ecclesiasticall in the church of England.’ The forty-sixth page supplies a list of the ‘things handled in the bookes following,’ and the contents of eight books are enumerated. Four books only follow, and prefixed to the concluding list of errata is ‘An advertisement
