Dr Philippa Hoskin, Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Fellow Librarian, looks at how Matthew Parker dealt with unwanted guests in time of plague.

Dealing with prisoners during outbreaks of epidemic disease has always  posed a problem for governments. In 1563, as plague rampaged through London, the Privy Council turned to Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury and former Master of Corpus, to help them solve the problem of providing safe accommodation for high-status, political prisoners. On 15 September 1563, the Council wrote to the archbishop declaring that it had agreed to requests from Thomas Thirleby, former bishop of Ely, and his colleague John Boxall, to be removed from the Tower of London ‘for their better safeguard from the present infection of the plague’, and that they would become his charge. The letter is the beginning of the story of how Matthew Parker dealt with this less than welcome responsibility.

Thomas Thirleby had been imprisoned in the Tower since June 1560 after he refused to swear the Oath of Supremacy to Elizabeth I in 1559, which he followed up by preaching against the changes happening in the newly reformed Church of England. He could have remained in the Tower a very long time, but when plague began to decimate London, the Privy Council decided that Thirleby – with Boxall (who had been secretary of state to the Catholic Queen Mary I) – was best released into the care of Archbishop Parker. They acquainted Parker with the good news in writing – assuring him that Thirleby and Boxall could be placed ‘in such convenient lodging as your lordship shall think meet, having each of them one servant to attend upon them’ and that the two prisoners would pay for their own keep.

Unsurprisingly, Parker was reluctant to house Thirleby, Boxall and their servants in his own house at Lambeth – then outside the urban area – since, as Thirleby admitted in another letter, he had no idea how to avoid bringing the plague with them as they travelled through the most infected parts of the city.

In the end, Parker refused to admit these guests to his own household immediately, but allowed them to use his empty house at Bekesbourne near Canterbury, believing that a spell of quarantine in clean air was in order: ‘till such time as they were better blown with this fresh air for a fourteen days’.

This particularly serious outbreak of Plague lasted until January 1564, by which time Parker was writing to his colleague the bishop of London about composing a form of thanksgiving to be read in churches. But, having seen the back of the Plague for the time being, Parker was not able to rid himself of his guests, who by this time were with him at Lambeth. He was to be a reluctant host to these adherents of the pre-Reformation church until Thirleby’s death in 1570.

Image: Letter from the Privy Council to Matthew Parker, 15 September 1563, CCCC ms.114A, p. 87.