accepted preferment in the church, he betrothed himself to his future wife Elizabeth Helyar, though his marriage did not take place till more than eighteen months afterwards.
At this time the bishop of Peterborough, who seems to have been his constant friend, wrote a letter on his behalf to the Earl of Suffolk,[1] then Lord Chamberlain, to ask preferment for him. In this letter, which is dated from Peterborough on 16th October, the bishop speaks of him as a fellow of Magdalene college, Cambridge, and says: "He is an honest man, a good scholer, and a rare preacher: this I doe report out of mine owne knowledge, being well acquaynted bothe wth the sufficiencie of his learning and wth the synceritie of his lyfe by the meanes of his domesticall conversation wth me."[2]
Shortly afterwards, namely on 13th October, 1604, he was presented by King James I. to the rectory of Lezant, in the county of Cornwall,[3] and on the 21st of the same month to the vicarage of Alvington, in the county of Devon,[4] to which last he was admitted on the 3rd of the following December.[5] In the following year he accepted a prebendal stall in the cathedral church of Peterborough, to which he was collated on 13th April, 1605,[6] by his friend and patron Bishop Dove, with whom he resided when at Peterborough.
He was made chaplain in ordinary to King James I. in 1605, he was sworn at Grafton,[7] and was in waiting at that summer's progress at Oxford.
- ↑ Thomas Howard, first baron Howard de Walden, created Earl of Suffolk in 1603.
- ↑ Contemporary copy of original letter among Family Evidences.
- ↑ Family Evidences.
- ↑ Rot. pat. 2 Jac I., part 7, memb. 27.
- ↑ Ex. inf. T. Wilkinson, Esq. As no mention is made by Mr. Bridgeman, in his accounts, of either Alvington or Lezant, it is probable that he resigned them both before 1608.
- ↑ Le Neve's Fasti and Brown Willis's Survey of Cathedrals, vol. ii. p. 516. In both these he is entered as S.T.P., but it should probably be S.T.B., for he did not take his doctor's degree till 1612.
- ↑ Family Evidences. The King reached Grafton, the seat of the Earl of Cumberland, on 16th August, where he remained four nights, and proceeded to Oxford on the 20th (Nichol's Progresses of James I., vol. i. p. 527).
