Gilbert Bourne

Template:Infobox bishopbiog Gilbert Bourne (date of birth unknown; d. 10 September, 1569 at Silverton, Devon) was the last Roman Catholic Bishop of Bath and Wells, England.

Life to the death of Mary I

He was son of Philip Bourne of Worcestershire. Entering the University of Oxford in 1524, he became Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 1531, proceeded in Arts in 1532, and was admitted a B.D. degree in 1543, having in 1541 been named prebendary of Worcester, on the suppression of the old monastic chapter.

Moving to London in 1545 he became a prebendary of St. Paul's, and in 1549 Archdeacon of Bedford with the position of rector of High Ongar in Essex. At the time the holding of such preferments involved acceptance of the Church of England as effected under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Soon after Mary I accession, while preaching at St. Paul's Cross, he narrowly escaped a dagger which a fanatic hurled on hearing him allude to Bishop Bonner's recent sufferings under the late regime. On being appointed to the Bishopric of Bath and Wells, Bourne received absolution from Cardinal Pole, the papal legate, by letters dated 17 March 1554, from all censures incurred in the time of schism, and on 1 April was consecrated with five others by Bishop Bonner, assisted by Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Bishop Tunstall.

Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and an ally of Bourne.

During his brief episcopate, he was not involved with Marian Persecutions, as Francis Godwin admits, he always used kindness rather than severity. Nobody seem to have been executed in his diocese. Queen Mary showed her high esteem for him by naming him Lord President of the Council of Wales. Elizabeth I, however, whilst expressing herself contented with his service, relieved him quickly of his office in pursuance of her policy to remove those who would not take the Oath of Supremacy.

Under Elizabeth

At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign Bourne was kept away from London by illness and official duties, and he is only mentioned once as present in the Parliament. For this reason he was one of the last bishops to be deposed, and he was even named amongst those first commissioned to consecrate Matthew Parker, appointed primate of the queen's new hierarchy. On his refusal, and on his rejection of the supremacy oath, which four Somerset justices were commissioned on 18 October 1559, to administer, his deprivation followed.

Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, removed Bourne from his office.

For a little time he still was left in Somerset, apparently a prisoner on parole; but on 31 May 1560, he received a summons to appear within twelve days before Parker and the Commissioners in London. He set out, as his reply to Parker shows, well knowing what to expect, and was committed on 18 June a close prisoner to the Tower of London, where already five other bishops were locked. There in solitary confinement, for the most part, he remained three years, when an outbreak of the plague in September, 1563, caused him and his companions to be for a time transferred into the keeping of certain of their Church of England successors; Bourne himself being committed to that apparently of Bishop Bullingham of Lincoln.

There began that continual "tossing and shifting" of the deposed prelates "from one keeper to another, from one prison to another", which William Cardinal Allen describes as one part of their "martyrdom". The Council, in June, 1565, sent them all back to the Tower, although a little later in a letter of Parker (January 1566), Bullingham is mentioned as though again for a time Bishop Bourne's actual or intended keeper, while all the captive prelates continue during the next two years to be referred to as then in the public prisons. After nearly ten years of this, Bishop Bourne died, at Silverton in Devonshire, having been there committed (apparently not long) to the custody of Carew, Archdeacon of Exeter and Dean of Windsor. There he was buried in the church.

He is one of the "Eleven Bishops", a picture of whose prison was allowed by Pope Gregory XIII to be erected in the English College church at Rome, amongst pictures of the English Saints and Martyrs, with an inscription declaring that they "died for their confession of the Roman See and Catholic faith, worn out by the miseries of their long imprisonment".

Further reading

• Allen, Defence of Catholics (Ingolstadt, 1584)
• Bridgett, Queen Elizabeth and the Catholic Hierarchy (London, 1889)
• Bridgewater, Concertatio (August, Trev. 1588)
• Gairnder, English Historical Review (April, 1906) 377
• Godwin, Francis Catalogus Episcoporum Bathon. Et Wellen, (1594), in MS. Trin. Coll. Camb.
• Phillips, Extinction of the Ancient Hierarchy (London, 1905)
• Sanders, Report to Card. Morone, 1561 (Cath. Record society, 1905), I
• Sanders, De visibili Monarchia (Louvain, 1571)
• Rishton-Sanders, Rise of Anglican Schism Continued, tr. Lewis (London, 1877)