D.D. In 1545 he was pastor and schoolmaster at Bergzabern in the duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken. In March 1548 he was at Frankfort, when the new English Order of Communion reached him; he at once translated it into German and Latin and sent a copy to Calvin, whose wife had befriended Coverdale at Strassburg. Calvin, however, does not seem to have approved of it so highly as Coverdale.
Coverdale was already on his way back to England, and in October 1548 he was staying at Windsor Castle, where Cranmer and some other divines, inaccurately called the Windsor Commission, were preparing the First Book of Common Prayer. His first appointment had been as almoner to Queen Catherine Parr, then wife of Lord Seymour; and he preached her funeral sermon in September 1548. He was also chaplain to the young king and took an active part in the reforming measures of his reign. He was one of the most effective preachers of the time. A sermon by him at St Paul’s on the second Sunday in Lent, 1549, was immediately followed by the pulling down of “the sacrament at the high altar.” A few weeks later he preached at the penance of some Anabaptists, and in January 1550 he was put on a commission to prosecute Anabaptists and all who infringed the Book of Common Prayer. In 1549 he wrote a dedication to Edward for a translation of the second volume of Erasmus’s Paraphrases; and in 1550 he translated Otto Wermueller’s Precious Pearl, for which Protector Somerset, who had derived spiritual comfort from the book while in the Tower, wrote a preface. He was much in request at funerals: he preached at Sir James Wilford’s in November 1550, and at Lord Wentworth’s before a great concourse in Westminster Abbey in March 1551.
Perhaps it was his gift of oratory which suggested his appointment as bishop of the refractory men of Devon and Cornwall. He had already, in August 1549, at some risk, gone down with Lord Russell to turn the hearts of the rebels by preaching and persuasion, and two years later he was appointed bishop of Exeter by letters patent, on the compulsory retirement of his predecessor, Veysey, who had reached an almost mythical age. He was an active prelate, and perhaps the vigorous Protestantism of the West in Elizabeth’s reign was partly due to his persuasive powers. He sat on the commission for the reform of the canon law, and was in constant attendance during the parliaments of 1552 and 1553. On Mary’s accession he was at once deprived on the score of his marriage, and Veysey in spite of his age was restored. Coverdale was called before the privy council on the 1st of September, and required to find sureties; but he was not further molested, and when Christian III. of Denmark at the instance of Coverdale’s brother-in-law, MacAlpine, interceded in his favour, he was in February 1555 permitted to leave for Denmark with two servants, and his baggage unsearched; one of these “servants” is said to have been his wife. He declined Christian’s offer of a living in Denmark, and preferred to preach at Wesel to the numerous English refugees there, until he was invited by Duke Wolfgang to resume his labours at Bergzabern. He was at Geneva in December 1558, and is said to have participated in the preparation of the Geneva version of the Bible.
In 1559 Coverdale returned to England and resumed his preaching at St Paul’s and elsewhere. Clothed in a plain black gown, he assisted at Parker’s consecration, in spite of the facts that he had himself been deprived, and did not resume his bishopric, and that his original appointment had been by the uncanonical method of letters patent. Conscientious objections were probably responsible for his non-restoration to the see of Exeter, and his refusal of that of Llandaff in 1563. He objected to vestments, and in his living of St Magnus close to London Bridge, which he received in 1563, he took other liberties with the Act of Uniformity. His bishop, Grindal, was his friend, and his vagaries were overlooked until 1566, when he resigned his living rather than conform. He still preached occasionally, and always drew large audiences. He died in February 1568, and was buried on the 19th in St Bartholomew’s behind the Exchange. When this church was pulled down in 1840 to make room for the new Exchange, his remains were removed to St Magnus.
Coverdale’s works, most of them translations, number twenty-six in all; nearly all, with his letters, were published in a collected edition by the Parker Soc., 2 vols., 1846. An excellent account is given in the Dict. Nat. Biog. of his life, with authorities, to which may be added R. W. Dixon’s Church History, Bishop and Gasquet’s Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer; Acts of the Privy Council; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.; Lit. Rem. of Edward VI. (Roxburghe Club); Whittingham’s Brief Discourse of Troubles at Frankfort; Pocock’s Troubles connected with the Prayer-Book (Camden Soc.). (A. F. P.)
COVERTURE (a covering, an old French form of the modern
couverture), a term in English law applied to the condition of a
woman during marriage, when she is supposed to be under the
cover, influence and protection of her husband, and so immune
in certain cases from punishment for crime committed in the
presence and on the presumed coercion of her husband. (See further Husband and Wife.)
COVILHÃ, a town of Portugal, in the district of Castello Branco, formerly included in the province of Beira; on the eastern slope of the Serra da Estrella, and on the Abrantes-Guarda railway. Pop. (1900) 15,469. Covilhã, which has been often compared with a collection of swallows’ nests clinging to the rugged granitic mountain side, is shaped like an amphitheatre of closely crowded houses, overlooking the river Zezere and its wild valley from a height of 2180 ft. Over 4000 operatives are employed in the manufacture of saragoça, a coarse brown cloth worn by the peasantry throughout Portugal. The village of Unhaes da Serra (1507), 6 m. W.S.W., is noted for its sulphurous springs and baths.
COVILHAM (Covilhão, Covilhã), PERO or Pedro de, Portuguese explorer and diplomatist (fl. 1487–1525), was a native of Covilhã in Beira. In early life he had gone to Castile and entered the service of Alphonso, duke of Seville; later, when war broke out between Castile and Portugal, he returned to his own country, and attached himself, first as a “groom,” then as a “squire,” to King Alphonso V. and his successor John II. On the 7th of May 1487, he was despatched, in company with Alphonso de Payva, on a mission of exploration in the Levant and adjoining regions of Asia and Africa, with the special object of learning where “cinnamon and other spices could be found,” as well as of discovering the land of Prester John, by “overland” routes. Bartholomeu Diaz, at this very time, went out to find the Prester’s country, as well as the termination of the African continent and the ocean route to India, by sea. Covilham and Payva were provided with a “letter of credence for all the countries of the world” and with a “map for navigating, taken from the map of the world” and compiled by Bishop Calcadilha, and doctors Rodrigo and Moyses. The first two of these were prominent members of the commission which advised the Portuguese government to reject the proposals of Columbus. The explorers started from Santarem and travelled by Barcelona to Naples, where their bills of exchange were paid by the sons of Cosimo de’ Medici; thence they passed to Rhodes, where they lodged with two other Portuguese, and so to Alexandria and Cairo, where they posed as merchants. In company with certain Moors from Fez and Tlemçen they now went by way of Tor to Suakin and Aden, where (as it was now monsoon time) they parted, Covilham proceeding to India and Payva to Ethiopia—the two companions agreeing to meet again in Cairo. Covilham thus arrived at Cannanore and Calicut, whence he retraced his course to Goa and Ormuz, the Red Sea and Cairo, making an excursion on his way down the East African coast to Sofala, which he was probably the first European to visit. At Cairo he heard of Payva’s death, and met with two Portuguese Jews—Rabbi Abraham of Beja, and Joseph, a shoe-maker of Lamego—who had been sent by King John with letters for Covilham and Payva. By Joseph of Lamego Covilham replied with an account of his Indian and African journeys, and of his observations on the cinnamon, pepper and clove trade at Calicut, together with advice as to the ocean way to India. This he truly represented as quite practicable: “to this they (of Portugal) could navigate by their coast and the seas of Guinea.” The first objective in the eastern ocean, he added, was Sofala or the
