John Bird (bishop)
John Bird (died 1558) was an English Carmelite friar and subsequently a bishop.
He was Warden of the Carmelite house in Coventry, and twice Provincial of his order.[1][2] He attracted the attention of Henry VIII by his preaching in favour of the royal supremacy over the English Church.[3]
Life
He was one of the divines sent in 1531 to confer and argue with Thomas Bilney, the reformer, in prison; and in 1535 he was sent by Henry VIII along with Richard Foxe, the royal almoner, and Thomas Bedyll, a clerk of the council, to Catherine of Aragon, now divorced by Henry, to try to persuade her not to use the title queen.[4]
He was suffragan to the Bishop of Llandaff (titled Bishop of Penrydd (then spelled Penreth), after Penrydd in Pembrokeshire[5] and was then translated to become Bishop of Bangor. He then was appointed as the inaugural Bishop of Chester. The new diocese had both administrative and financial problems: Bird tried to address the finances, and dispensed with archdeacons, but succeeded only in making disadvantageous agreements with the Crown and with leaseholders.[6]
After the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary he was deprived of his bishopric on 16 March 1554 since he had married.[7] He at once repudiated his wife, and soon afterwards Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, appointed him his suffragan, and on 6 November 1554 presented him to the vicarage of Great Dunmow in Essex.
He died in an obscure condition about the close of 1558, and was buried in Chester Cathedral.[4]
Notes
- ^ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=36508
- ^ http://www.carmelite.org/chronology/york.htm
- ^ http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03649a.htm
- ^ a b Cooper 1896.
- ^ Parish of Penrhudd in Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments of Wales and Monmouthshire: VII – County of Pembroke (Google Books)
- ^ Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (1975), pp. 7-10.
- ^ John Gough Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, London, 1848, p. 58.
- Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cooper, Thompson (1886). "Bird, John (d.1558)". In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 5. London: Smith, Elder & Co.