SAMUEL HARSNETT, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. 293
antidote to papal autocracy; nor need we blame him if he
was blinded by his age and strenuous life to the desirability
of co-operating with that rising tide of political liberalism which
influenced the sons of grave and cultured Elizabethan squires
and thrifty merchants among whom his earlier years were
passed. "The fathers had eaten sour grapes and the children's
teeth were set on edge." After a vain search for health at the
Bath waters the Archbishop turned homewards to his palace at
Southwell, but died before reaching it, at Moreton-in-the-Marsh,
Gloucestershire, on May 25th, 1631, within a month of completing
his 71st year.
On June 7th, appropriately enough St. Botolph's day, he
was buried, not amid the glories of York minster, but in the
humble village church at Chigwell, ''at the foot of Thomazine,
late his beloved wife,"—a proof that the pride often associated
with prelacy had not usurped the place of natural affection in
the old man's heart. His will, made a few months before his
death, is a characteristic document. Its opening sentence, "I
die in the ancient faith of the true Catholic and Apostolic Church,
renouncing from my heart all modern papal superstitions and
all novelties of Geneva not accordant with the maxims of the
Primitive renowned Church," indicates his consistent lifelong
orthodoxy.
His desire that his brass should show him clothed in the
ancient vestments appropriate to his Order as a Bishop, with
his mitre and crosier, is valuable as the first, and for long the
only, instance of an Anglican bishop, consecrated after the final
breach with Rome, so depicted.
His poorer parishioners, his servants and his few surviving
relatives all received full and appropriate benefactions, besides
generous bequests of ornaments to the churches he had served.
The childless old man had especially tender thoughts for the
"poor scholars" at his recently founded Grammar School at
Chigwell, whom he wished "nurtured and disciplined in good
manners rather than instructed in good arts," much as he desired
their liberal education.
His curious insistence on his "unworthiness" was surely
no mock humility—conscious as he may have been of much
falling short of his high ideals. We, who are perhaps more
conscious of our neighbours' unworthiness than of our own,