Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 42.djvu/55

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Oglethorpe
49
Oglethorpe

pointed Walter Haddon [q.v.], master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, president in his place. The fellows remonstrated, to no purpose; and Oglethorpe, seeing that resistance was vain, entered into an amicable, but not very honourable, agreement with Haddon, on which he resigned the presidency, 27 Sept. 1552, and Haddon was admitted by royal mandate (ib. li. 320-1).

On Mary's accession next year the intruding president was removed by Gardiner, and Oglethorpe resumed his old place, 31 Oct. 1553 (ib. p. lv; Strype, Memorials, vol. iii. pt. i. p. 81). At the memorable disputation the next year between Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and a committee of theologians elected from Oxford and Cambridge, he was one of the Oxford divines, and ou 14 April presented the Cambridge doctors for incorporation (Strype, Cranmer, i. 480). The same month he resigned his presidency. He had been appointed dean of Windsor in the preceding year, with the rectory of Haseley attached, and in 1555 became registrar of the Order of the Garter (Rymer, Fœdera, xv. 421), being the first dean of Windsor to hold that office. Higher preferment was not long in coming. He was nominated by Mary to the bishopric of Carlisle, and was consecrated by Archbishop Heath at Chiswick on 15 Aug. 1557. In little more than a year Mary died, and Oglethorpe was once more placed in the dilemma of having to choose between the old and the new form of religion. He showed some firmness when called upon to say mass before the queen in the first days of her reign. Elizabeth forbade him to elevate the Host, which, according to a Roman authority, he insisted on doing (Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. p. 73). The coronation soon followed. In the vacancy of the see of Canterbury, it naturally fell to the Archbishop of York to perform the ceremony; but Heath, alarmed by ominous presages of a change in religion, refused to officiate. Tunstall of Durham was too old, and perhaps shared in Heath's objection. It devolved, therefore, on Oglethorpe, as his suffragan, to take his metropolitan's place, and on 16 Jan. 1559, the other diocesan bishops attending, with the exception of Bonner, who, however, lent him his robes for the function, he placed the crown on the head of Elizabeth, but it is asserted that he never forgave himself for an act the momentous consequences of which he hardly foresaw, and remorse for his unfaithfulness to the church is said to have hastened his end. The same month he attended Elizabeth's first parliament, when he expressed his dissent from the bills for restoring the first-fruits and tenths to the crown, and the royal supremacy, the iniquitous forced exchange of bishops' lands for impropriate tithes, and other measures (Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. pp. 82-7). He was also present at the opening of the disputation on religion at Westminster in March 1559, and was one of those who were fined for declining to enter on the dispute when they saw which way things were tending. The fine imposed on him amounted to 250l., and he had to give recognisances for good behaviour (ib. pp. 129, 137-9). On 15 May, together with Archbishop Heath and the other bishops who adhered to the old faith, he was summoned before the queen, and, on their unanimous refusal to take the oath of supremacy, they were all deprived (ib. pp. 206, 210). He only survived his deprivation a few months. He died suddenly of apoplexy on the last day of that year. The place of his death was probably a house in Chancery Lane, belonging to his private estate, which he had given to his old college in 1556, reserving four chambers for himself. He was buried, 4 Jan. 1560, in the adjacent church of St. Dunstan's in the West, Fleet Street (Bloxam, vol. iv. p. xxix ; Machyn, Diary, p. 221). Had his life been prolonged, Wood says, 'it was thought the Queen would have been favourable to him.' Some courteous letters passed between him, when residing at Oxford, and Bullinger, chiefly letters of introduction, which have been printed by the Parker Society (Original Letters, i. 126, 425). A letter of his, on his election to the see of Carlisle, to the Earl of Shrewsbury on Lancelot Salkeld's claim to the manor of Linstock, is contained in the Lansdowne MSS. (980, f. 312). Among the Additional MSS. (5489, f. 49) is a weak, shuffling reply of his to articles proposed by Sir Philip Hoby respecting the sale of the plate at St. George's Chapel, Windsor; he acknowledges he had consented to the sale and shared to some extent in the proceeds, but all the while disapproved of it. His replies to Cranmer's 'Seventeen Questions,' referred to above, are printed with those of the other commissioners by Burnet in his 'History of the Reformation' (pt. i. bk. iii. records xxi. ; see also pt. ii. bk. i. records liii.) He founded and endowed a school and hospital at Tadcaster, near his birthplace (Strype, Annals, iv. 212, No. xcix). His name appears on the list of benefactors to be commemorated at Magdalen on 31 Dec, the day of his death.

[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ii. 792, 768, 807 Fasti, i. 66, 81, 96, 100, 102; Godwin, De Praesul. i.

175; Foster's Alumni, 1500-1714, iii. 1088; Fuller's Worthies, ii. 226, Church History, ii. 466, iv. 193; Strype, 11. cc; Rymer's Fœdera,