Thomas Pecocke

Thomas Pecocke (died in or after 1581) was a catholic theologian and the President of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1557 until 1559.^[1]

Life

Son of Thomas Peacock, burgess of Cambridge (d. 1541), and his wife, Alice (d. 1546/7), and was born in Holy Trinity parish, Cambridge.

He was elected to a fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1533. Of conservative religious opinions, he was among the ‘appellants’ at St John's who unsuccessfully objected to the managerial regime of the college's evangelical master John Taylor in 1542. In 1547 he took up a fellowship at the newly founded Trinity College (joining several other refugees from St John's). Trinity, then under the mastership of John Redman, was still loyal to the conservative traditions of the institutions it had swallowed up, King's Hall and Michaelhouse.

During the royal visitation of the university in 1549, Peacock was identified by the protestant visitors as one of a group of hardline papists at Trinity. Peacock appears to have remained at Trinity throughout Edward VI's reign, notwithstanding the increasingly uncongenial doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England.

The accession of Queen Mary in 1553 must have come as a great relief to Peacock, and certainly did his career no harm. It was only now that he entered holy orders. He also found considerable preferment at the hands of the bishop of Norwich, Thomas Thirlby, who made him his chaplain and gave him a canonry at Norwich in 1554. When Thirlby was translated to Ely later that year, he took Peacock with him, collating him to the rectory of Little Downham in 1555 and to a canonry at Ely in 1556. In his capacity as Thirlby's chaplain, Peacock assisted at the trial for heresy of William Wolsey and Robert Pygot at Ely, preaching at their burning on 16 October 1555. Peacock clearly had continuing links with Cambridge University: on 1 April 1555 he signed the articles which bound the university to Roman Catholic doctrine; and during Cardinal Pole's visitation of the university, he preached before the visitors at Great St Mary's on 11 January 1557, ‘inveighing against heresies and heretics as Bilney, Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, etc’.

President of Queens'

In the autumn of 1557, Peacock was elected president of Queens' College, Cambridge, where his tenure was brief and controversial.

In March 1559 a dispute over fellowship elections became so embittered that both parties wrote to the university's chancellor, Sir William Cecil, in an attempt to have their position vindicated. Although the quarrel was over the interpretation of the statutes regarding elections, the underlying issues seem to have been both personal and religious.Those appealing against Peacock suggested that he and his supporters were rushing through improper elections in order to get people into the college ahead of the imminent restoration of protestantism. Refusing to subscribe to the royal supremacy, which was restored by Elizabeth I in 1559, Peacock was stripped of his ecclesiastical preferments, although by resigning the presidency of Queens' in May he avoided the indignity of expulsion.

He lived out his life obscurely in Cambridge. However, he makes one remarkable appearance out of the shadows. A letter written in 1567 by Nicholas Sander, a leading Catholic refugee on the continent, indicates that Thomas Peacock was one of four English priests who met the grand inquisitor in Rome in 1564 and personally received from him faculties to reconcile schismatics to the Roman Catholic church.

References

• Richard Rex, ‘Peacock, Thomas (d. in or after 1581)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 7 Nov 2014