Sancroft, WILLIAM, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Fressingfield in Suffolk on 30th January 1616–17, and from Bury St Edmunds grammar-school passed in 1634 to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, of which in 1642 he was elected a Fellow. In 1651 he was expelled from his fellowship for refusing to take the 'Engagement;' and in 1657 he crossed over to Holland, whence, after a year and a half at Utrecht, he visited Geneva, Venice, and Rome. In 1660, the Restoration accomplished, his friend Bishop Cosin of Durham appointed him his chaplain, and his subsequent advancement was rapid, to be a king's chaplain and rector of Houghton-le-Spring (1661); prebendary of Durham and master of Emmanuel (1662); Dean first of York and next of St Paul's (1664), as such having a principal hand in the rebuilding of the burnt cathedral; Archdeacon of Canterbury (1668); and Archbishop (1678). A Tory and High Churchman, he is of course belittled by Burnet and Macaulay; but the manner in which he discharged his high duties deserves the warmest commendation—the one flaw, perhaps, in his conduct that he employed an Italian spy in Holland who dared propose to him the assassination of Sir William Waller. Sancroft attended Charles II. on his deathbed, and used great freedom of speech to him on the nature of his past life. He refused to sit in James II.'s Ecclesiastical Commission (1686); and in 1688 was sent to the Tower for presenting the petition of the Seven Bishops (q.v.) against the reading of the second Declaration of Indulgence, but on their trial in Westminster Hall he and his six brethren were acquitted. In the events that immediately preceded and attended the Revolution he preserved on the whole a position of non-intervention; still, having taken the oath of allegiance to James, he would not take it to William and Mary. Accordingly, he was suspended by act of parliament (1st August 1689), though he did not quit Lambeth until his ejectment on 23d June 1691. He then retired to his native village, where he died on 24th November 1693. Of eight works ascribed to him one only retains much interest—Fur Prædestinatus (1651), a dialogue between a Calvinist minister and a thief condemned to the gallows; and this seems to be really a translation from a Dutch pamphlet.
See NONJURORS, with works there cited; the Life of Archbishop Sancroft, by George D'Oyly, D.D. (2 vols. 1821); and Miss Strickland's Lives of the Seven Bishops (1866).