Warham, WILLIAM

Warham, WILLIAM, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1503 to 1532, was born about 1450 at Church Oakley in Hampshire, and was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford. He took holy orders, but also practised law, and became advocate in the Court of Arches and moderator of the Civil Law School in St Edmund's parish, Oxford. He became known to Henry VII., and was attached to an embassy to the court of Burgundy. His services in connection with Perkin Warbeck's pretensions to the crown obtained for him rapid preferment in church and state, and he was soon Master of the Rolls (1494), Lord Chancellor (1503), Bishop of London (1503), and Primate (1503). He fell into disfavour with Henry VIII., and in 1515 resigned the great seal to Wolsey. He was a close friend and favourer of the New Learning and of its apostles in England—Erasmus, Dean Colet, Grocyu, and Linacre—but had no stomach for fundamental reform. He listened to the ravings of the Maid of Kent, but had no pity for heretics and translators of the Scriptures. With regard to the divorce he passively supported the king, and he agreed to recognise the king's supremacy. He died 22d August 1532. See vol. vi. of Hook's Lives of the Archbishops (1868).