ABSTRACT
Whitgift's household comptroller and first biographer, George Paule, relates an extraordinary anecdote about the great Elizabethan prelate's near-miss experience with the plague while he was a schoolboy in London in the mid-1540s, quite possibly in 1546 when a severe plague epidemic afflicted the city. Archbishop Cranmer set an early example for his Protestant episcopal colleagues. Personally ascetic and frugal, indeed conspicuously so, he spent most of his £3000 income on housekeeping. The numerous allusions to Croydon and to the archbishop himself in Summer's Last Will suggest strongly that Whitgift commissioned Thomas Nashe to write it for this specific occasion in 1592. The puritans saw Whitgift and Bishop Aylmer of London reversing the policies of their predecessor Edmund Grindal, who banned church ales and all manner of pastimes on church property as symbols of Catholic survivalism during his tenure as archbishop of York and who continued this campaign when he settled at Canterbury.
