Bishop John Aylmer
Many Aylmers have had a significant role in religious life.
The most prominent of these was undoubtedly John Aylmer, Bishop of London to Queen Elizabeth I, from 1577 to his death in 1594.
John was born in Norfolk in 1521. The precise location is open to some doubt:
different web sources, and the DNB, name it variously as Tilney St Lawrence, Tilney All Saints, or Tivetshall St Mary.
The two Tilneys are in north Norfolk, south of the Wash, and these references give the place of birth as Aylmer Hall in that vicinity,
this having been the family home for generations, rather nearer St Lawrence than All Saints.
Tivetshall St Mary is in south Norfolk, north of Diss.
A local history group in Wacton, not far away, tell me of village 'folklore/myth/legend/story/fact' of his birth at Wacton Hall,
which as recently as 1906 was also known as Aylmer Hall,
though this may not have been grand enough to have been the dynastic home of a wealthy family.
Wherever, he would have been baptised at the local church,
but whether it was that of Tilney All Saints (top picture in sidebar) is therefore a matter of some speculation.
He studied at Queen's College, Cambridge, and in 1549 became tutor to the 12-year old Lady Jane Grey,
later famously to be Queen of England for nine days.
She found him the opposite of her strict parents; he, some say, fell in love.
Into exile - and back again
John became Archdeacon of Stow, Lincolnshire, in 1553, but like many non-Catholic churchmen fled to exile during Queen Mary's reign.
Here he lived principally in Strasbourg and Zurich.
Returning after Elizabeth's accession in 1558, he soon became noticed, and secured the Archdeaconry of Lincoln in 1562.
He was a proud Englishman, writing in 1559:
"Oh if thou knewest thou Englishmen in what wealth thou livest, and in how plentiful a country:
Thou woldst VII times a day fall flat on they face before God and give him thanks that thou ws born an Englishman,
and not an Italian, nor German."
(Quoted in Asa Briggs's "A Social History of England")
In that same year, he published a devastating critique of Knox's 'Monstrous Regiment of Women'.
This was not to say he was a feminist. He was to preach - allegedly before Queen Elizabeth herself - that women were:
"of two sorts, some of them wiser, better learned, discreeter, and more constant than a number of men;
but another and worse sort, and the most part fond, foolish, wanton flibbergibs, tatlers, triflers,
wavering, witless, without council, feeble, careless, rash, proud, dainty, nice, talebearers, eavesdroppers, rumour-raisers,
evil-tongued, worse-minded, and in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil's dunghill."
Lincoln was (and is) a major diocese, and with his undoubted intellectual abilities
and appropriate (for the time) religious certainty, promotion may have been no surprise.
Promotion to London
John Aylmer became Bishop of London in 1576. It seems alas to have been an over-promotion.
The fault was not in his intellectual capabilities: he was a talented linguist and a formidable logician,
and when challenged as misappropriating church funds he marshalled all the books in perfect order to defeat the argument.
As the Dictionary of National Bibliography admits,
John 'deserves to be commended for his attachment to learning and for his discerning patronage of scholars'.
The fault was in his nature. Bishop John used judicial process to keep both Puritans and Catholics at heel,
sought to strangle the newly-reborn Cambridge University Press - the publishing house of his own alma mater -
and ostentatiously played bowls on the Sabbath. The DNB minces no words:
[his] arbitrary and unconciliatory disposition comes frequently into unpleasing prominence ...
Both from his views and temperament, Aylmer was ill-qualified to fill the episcopal office in the trying times in which he lived.'
He seems to have recognised that his personality was overstretched,
and tried to escape to the quieter sees of Ely, Winchester, and Worcester (the latter at Elizabeth's personal request), but to no avail.
Yet John's significance to the still-young Protestant state can hardly be under-estimated.
Militantly anti-Catholic, he has been reported as
"[assigning] to Queen Elizabeth the messianic task of destroying Antichrist in Britain".
(See the Alchemy website).
As one of the commission that examined whether England should adopt the Gregorian calendar, as had the rest of Europe,
he was influential in ensuring that it would not do so for another two centuries -
apparently, because English Protestant theologians could not countenance adopting a measure approved by a papal bull.
(See Electronic Seminars in History).
Marriage, line and burial
John married Judith Bures, of a notable Suffolk family, and with her had ten children.
One (unnamed) daughter made an apparently unsuitable match in Adam Squier,
a Staffordshire rector, who John made Archdeacon of Middlesex - another case, it seems, of ecclesiastical over-promotion.
(See the records of the
Cumnor Historical Society).
Another daughter, Elizabeth, made it seems a better match in Sir John Foliot, of Pirton Court, near Pershore in Worcestershire.
Through them 'Aylmer' persisted as a Midlands forename - it is an area with few Aylmer connections otherwise -
for example their son Aylmer Foliot (picture 3, age 15), later of Blakesley Hall, Yardley, Warwickshire.
I am indebted to the Birmingham City library service for this information.
Bishop John was buried at St Paul's Cathedral, and granted an inscription (no longer visible) that gave no praise.
|
