Thomas Bilson (1547 – 18 June 1616) was an Anglican Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of Winchester. With Miles Smith, he oversaw the final edit and printing of the King James Bible.W. Richardson, 'Bilson, Thomas (1546/7–1616)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP 2004).
Life Years under the Tudors (1547–1603) Thomas Bilson's father, Harmann Bilson, is said to have been a descendant of the Duke of Bavaria through his own grandmother, the wife of Arnold Bilson, a citizen of "High Germany".W.H. Challen, 'Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester, his family, and their Hampshire, Sussex, and other connections', Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society XIX Part 1 (1955), (Part 1) at pp. 35-46, and (Part 2) at pp. 253-75 (Society's pdfs). Harmann became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1537 and graduated B.A. on 27 March 1538/39. Thomas was one of his six children (three sons and three daughters), and was born in the city of Winchester.'Thomas Bilson', in A. a Wood, ed. P. Bliss, Athenae Oxonienses, Third Edition, with additions (F.C. and J. Rivington, etc., London 1815), II, pp. 169-71 (Internet Archive). Other sources highlight the fact that the celebrated William Twisse was a nephew of Thomas Bilson's.K. Matto, 'The Qualifications of the King James Translators' (abstracted from McClure, below), at Scion of Zion website (retrieved 12 April 2014).A.W. McClure, The Translators Revived: A Biographical Memoir of the Authors of the English Version of the Holy Bible (Charles Scribner, New York 1853) Internet Archive.
Bilson was educated at William of Wykeham's twin foundations of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He was a fellow of New College from 1563 to 1572, graduating B.A. in 1566 and M.A. in 1570."T. Bilson" in 'Bennell-Bloye', in J. Foster (ed.), Alumni Oxonienses 1500-1714 (Oxford 1891), pp. 106-41 (British History Online), accessed 13 March 2022. He began to distinguish himself as a poet until, on receiving ordination, he gave himself wholly to theological studies, in which he was awarded B.D. in 1579 and D.D. in 1580/81. He was soon made prebendary of Winchester, and headmaster of the college there until 1579 and warden from 1581 to 1596.'Winchester: St Mary's College', in W. Page (ed.), A History of the County of Hampshire, Vol. 5 (VCH, London 1912), pp. 14-19 (British History Online), accessed 13 March 2022.T.F. Kirby (ed.), Winchester scholars. A list of the wardens, fellows, and scholars of Saint Mary college of Winchester, near Winchester, commonly called Winchester College (H. Frowde, London 1888), at p. 1, p. 136 and pp. 143-49 (HathiTrust). His pupils there included John Owen, and Thomas James, whom he influenced in the direction of patristics.P. Nelles, 'The uses of orthodoxy and Jacobean erudition: Thomas James and the Bodleian Library,' in M. Feingold (ed.), History of Universities, Vol. XXII Part 1 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 21-70 (Academia pdf, recovered 15.03.2022), at p. 23. In 1596, he was made Bishop of Worcester, where he found Warwick uncomfortably full of recusant Roman Catholics.Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1982, orig. Methuen 1967), p. 441.Anthony Boden, Denis Stevens et al., Thomas Tomkins: The Last Elizabethan (Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot 2005), p. 73. For appointment in 1597 to the wealthy see of Winchester, he paid a £400 annuity to Elizabeth I.Hugh Trevor-Roper, William Laud (2000 edition) p. 11.
The True Difference Thomas engaged in most of the polemical contests of his day, as a stiff partisan of the Church of England. In 1585, he published his The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth.T. Bilson, The True Difference between Christian Subjection and Un-Christian Rebellion (Ioseph Barnes printer to the Vniuersitie, Oxford MDXXCV): full text at Umich/eebo. (A pirated edition appeared in London in the following year.W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, "The two editions of Thomas Bilson's True Difference between Christian Subjection and Un-Christian Rebellion", Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society Vol. 2, No. 2 (1955), pp. 199-203.) This work took aim at the Jesuits and replied to Cardinal William Allen's Defence of the English Catholics (Ingoldstadt, 1584).'Bilson, Thomas', in S.M. Jackson (General editor), The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, II: Basilica-Chambers (Online format: Baker Book House, (under licence from Funk and Wagnalls), Grand Rapids, Michigan 1952), article under name (retrieved 5 September 2022), citing Wood (ed. Bliss), Athenae Oxoniensis, and Grosart, 'Bilson, Thomas', (Old) D.N.B. It was also a theoretical work on the "Christian commonwealth" and it enjoyed publishing success.
Anthony à Wood remarked that Queen Elizabeth employed Bilson to write the book (which gave "strange liberty" for subjects to cast off their religious obedience to the state), as a convenience to shelter, with the Dutch Protestants, from the influence of king Philip II of Spain, as much as to counter the Jesuits' attacks on Elizabeth I.H. Dunthorne, 'Resisting Monarchy: the Netherlands as Britain's school of revolution in the late 16th and 17th centuries', in R. Oresko, G.C. Gibbs and H.M. Scott (eds), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton (Cambridge 1997), at p. 141. Glenn Burgess considered that, in The True Difference, Bilson showed a sense of the diversity of legitimate political systems.G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (Macmillan, 1993), pp. 104–05. Bilson conceded nothing to popular sovereignty, but wrote that there were occasions when a king might forfeit his powers.M.A. Brydon, The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 132–33. James Shapiro observed that Bilson "does his best to walk a fine line", in discussing 'political icons', i.e. pictures of the monarch,J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber, 2005), p. 177. echoing Lamont's verdict, "a judicious piece of tightrope walking on behalf of an embarrassed queen".W.M. Lamont, 'The rise and fall of Bishop Bilson', Journal of British Studies, Vol. V, no. 2 (Cambridge University Press, May 1966), pp. 22-32 (Jstor).
Theological controversy A theological argument over the Harrowing of Hell led to several attacks on Bilson personally in what is now called the Descensus controversy. Bilson's literal views on the descent of Christ into Hell were orthodox for "conformist" Anglicans of the time, while the Puritan wing of the church preferred a metaphorical or spiritual reading.P. Marshall, 'The map of God's word': geographies of the afterlife in Tudor and early Stuart England', in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2000), at pp. 118–9. He maintained that Christ went to hell, not to suffer, but to wrest the keys of hell out of the Devil's hands. For this doctrine he was severely handled by Henry Jacob and also by other Puritans. Hugh Broughton, a noted Hebraist, was excluded from the translators of the King James Bible, and became a vehement early critic.
The origin of Broughton's published attack on Bilson as a scholar and theologian, from 1604,Declaration of general corruption, of religion, Scripture, and all learninge: wrought by D. Bilson. is thought to lie in a sermon Bilson gave in 1597, which Broughton, at first and wrongly, thought supported his own view that hell and paradise coincided in place. From another direction the Roman Catholic controversialist Richard Broughton also attacked Anglican conformists through Bilson's views, writing in 1607.Willem Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia (c. 1532 – 1613): Dutch Calvinist, First Reformed Defender of the English Episcopal Church Order on the Basis of the Ius Divinum, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, XXI (Brill, Leiden 1980), p. 182.Charles W. A. Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church: The Politics of Religious Controversy, 1603–1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 49–50, and note. Much feeling was excited by the controversy, and Queen Elizabeth, in her ire, commanded Bilson "neither to desert the doctrine, nor let the calling which he bore in the Church of God, be trampled under foot, by such unquiet refusers of truth and authority."
Bilson's most famous work was entitled The Perpetual Government of Christ's Church and was published in 1593. It was a systematic attack on Presbyterian polity and an able defence of Episcopal polity.J. Dowden, Outlines of the History of the Theological Literature of the Church of England from the Reformation to the Close of the Eighteenth Century, The Bishop Paddock Lectures 1897 (S.P.C.K., London/E. & J.B. Young, New York 1897), Lecture I at pp. 30-36, and Lecture II, pp. 44 ff., at pp. 53-54. Following on from John Bridges,R. Zaller, The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England (Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2007), p. 342. the work is still regarded as one of the strongest books ever written in behalf of episcopacy.
Southwark and the theatres Winchester Palace, the official London residence of the Bishops of Winchester, was a fine edifice on the south waterfront of the Thames opposite the city of London, situated in the district of Southwark (in Surrey), and surrounded by its own manor, called the Manor of the Bishop of Winchester, over which the bishops held nominal jurisdiction.'The borough of Southwark: Manors', in H.E. Malden (ed.), A History of the County of Surrey, Vol. 4 (VCH, London 1912), pp. 141-51 (British History Online). In Clink Street, Southwark, one end wall of the palace hall, containing a rose window thirteen feet in diameter, is all that now remains standing. The manor was also called the "Liberty of the Clink", because it included the prison called "The Clink". Being free of the county jurisdiction of Surrey, and of London, the Liberty became especially associated with the late Elizabethan theatres, and was renowned for its brothels, its gambling dens, skittle alleys and places for bear-baiting. Rules for the regulation of the brothels were introduced by the bishops (who benefited by receiving taxes), and an unconsecrated graveyard was established for the women who had worked in them.