John Thornborough (1551–1641) was an English bishop.
Life
Thornborough was born in Salisbury, and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford.
In a long ecclesiastical career, he was employed as a chaplain by the Earl of Pembroke, and Queen Elizabeth. He was Dean of York, Bishop of Limerick in 1593, Bishop of Bristol in 1603, and Bishop of Worcester from 1617.Concise Dictionary of National Biography He was appointed Clerk of the Closet in 1588, serving Queen Elizabeth I in that capacity until the end of her reign in 1603.
He was tolerant of Puritans, encouraging his congregation to attend puritan lectures.The Civil War in Worcestershire, Malcolm Atkin, 1995, p. 25 Alan Sutton, Stroud, Gloucestershire. . He also shielded the future biographer Samuel Clarke (1599–1683).Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660, Ann Hughes, 2002, p. 85.
He wrote an alchemical book, Lithotheorikos of 1621.Lithotheorikos, sive, Nihil, aliquid, omnia, antiquorum sapientum vivis coloribus depicta. He is known to have employed Simon Forman."The Making of an Astrologer-Physician" , p. 31. Robert Fludd dedicated Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623) to Thornborough.William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (1988), p. 32.
References
Further reading A. L. Rowse, "Bishop Thornborough: A Clerical Careerist", in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (editors), For Veronica Wedgwood These Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (1986)
External links