Edmund Grindal

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Edmund Grindal : biography

– 6 July 1583

Legacy

St. Bees School, Cumbria, the Foundation block. The original Elizabethan school is the range on the left of the quad. By the seventeenth century, Grindal came to be admired by the Puritans who were experiencing persecution at the hands of Archbishop Laud. John Milton, who thought the Elizabethan bishops Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, and who rejected episcopal church government, thought Grindal "the best of them" in his tract Of Reformation of 1641.Collinson, p. 17. William Prynne had no time for Parker ("over pontifical and princely") and Whitgift ("stately pontifical bishop") but praised Grindal in 1641 as "a grave and pious man".Collinson, p. 17. Richard Baxter in 1656 claimed of Grindal: "Such bishops would have prevented our contentions and wars".Collinson, p. 283. Daniel Neal a century later in his History of the Puritans called him "the good old archbishop", "of a mild and moderate temper, easy of access and affable even in his highest exaltation", "upon the whole…one of the best of Queen Elizabeth’s bishops".Collinson, p. 17.

Conversely, Grindal came to be attacked by High Church Tories. Dr. Henry Sacheverell in his famous sermon of 5 November 1709, The Perils of False Brethren, Both in Church and State, attacked him as "that false son of the Church, Bishop Grindall…a perfidious prelate" who deluded Elizabeth into tolerating the "Genevan Discipline" and thereby facilitating "the first plantation of dissenters". This attack on Grindal’s memory led to John Strype publishing his biography of Grindal, helped by a subscription list that included many leading Whig politicians and churchmen.Collinson, p. 18.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was Sacheverell’s portrayal of a weak and ineffective prelate that had come to be the predominant view. Sidney Lee claimed Grindal "feebly temporised with dissent"; Mandell Creighton called him "infirm of purpose"; Walter Frere said Grindal possessed a "natural incapacity for government"; and W. P. M. Kennedy claimed he had "a constitutional incapacity for administration" which was Grindal’s "outstanding weakness". However in 1979 was published the first critical biography of Grindal, by Patrick Collinson, who claimed Grindal was neither weak nor ineffectual but had the support of his fellow bishops and led the way for how the Anglican Church would develop in the early seventeenth century.

He left considerable benefactions to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, the Queen’s College, Oxford, and Christ’s College, Cambridge; he also endowed a free school at St Bees, and left money for the poor of St Bees, Canterbury, Lambeth and Croydon.

The most enduring monument to Grindal has proved to be the "free grammar school" which he founded in his native village of St Bees, where he had not been for perhaps forty-five years. Only three days before his death Grindal had published statutes for the school; a series of minute and specific regulations which are a noted treasury of information for historians of Tudor education. Although the school was to be sometimes at risk in its early years, a school building had been erected by 1588 at a cost of £366.3s.4d. and endowed with annual revenues of £50. Nicholas Copland was nominated by Grindal as the first Headmaster and a tradition of learning had begun which has continued without a break for over four centuries.

Grindal also played a part in the establishment of Highgate School in North London, and is credited with having introduced the tamarisk tree to the British Isles.

Archbishop of York

In 1570 Grindal became Archbishop of York, where Puritans were few and coercion would be required mainly for Roman Catholics. His first letter from his residence at Cawood to Cecil told that he had not been well received, that the gentry were not "well-affected to godly religion and among the common people many superstitious practices remained." It is admitted by his Anglican critics that he did the work of enforcing uniformity against the Roman Catholics with good-will and considerable tact. He must have given general satisfaction, for even before Parker’s death two persons so different as Cecil (now Lord Burghley), and Dean Nowell independently recommended Grindal’s appointment as his successor, and Edmund Spenser spoke warmly of him in The Shepheardes Calender as the "gentle shepherd Algrind."