[5] In April 1547 he advocated Catholic doctrines but recanted two months later, and his Protestant faith was strengthened during Edward VI's reign; he was appointed a royal chaplain and canon of Windsor.
[6] He preached the sermon in 1557 when the bodies of Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius were disinterred in Cambridge and burnt for heresy and also, remarkably, in 1560 when the proceedings were reversed and the dead heretics were rehabilitated.
In Elizabeth's reign, he subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles, denounced the pope and tried to convert Abbot Feckenham to Protestantism, and in 1584, Whitgift in vain recommended him for a bishopric.
[7] The historian Alice Hogge recounts an episode in which a close friend asked Perne "to tell her honestly and simply which was the holy religion that see her safe to heaven".
As Hogge notes wryly, he never had the chance to follow his own advice since he died suddenly on the way back to his room after dining and "in the headquarters of that faith [Anglicanism], Lambeth Palace itself".