Andrew Willet

Joseph Hall (who knew him well) eulogised Willet in Noah's Dove, and Thomas Fuller modelled 'the Controversial Divine' of his Holy State on him.

He was born at Ely in 1562, son of Thomas Willet (1511?–1598), who began his career as a public notary, and later in life he took holy orders, becoming rector of Barley, Hertfordshire, fourteen miles from Cambridge and admitted to a prebendal of Ely by his patron, Bishop Richard Coxe, with whom he had been associated as sub-almoner to Edward VI.

He took holy orders in 1585, and was admitted on 22 July 1587, on the presentation of the queen, to the prebendal stall at Ely, which his father had resigned in his favour.

[1] In 1588 Willet left the university, and at Michaelmas, on his marriage with Jacobine, a daughter of his father's friend Roger Goad, provost of King's, gave up his fellowship.

He was admitted in 1597 to the rectory of Gransden Parva in Huntingdonshire, but almost immediately moved, by exchange to Barley, his father having died in April 1598 in his eighty-eighth year.

Under care of Sir John Higham of Bury St. Edmunds he sent letters and arguments to the justices of Norfolk and Suffolk, urging them to protest against the marriage.

Willet himself presented a copy of his arguments to the king, and, thereby incurring his high displeasure, was committed to prison under the custody of Dr. White.

The effigy showed a priest, full-length, dressed in his doctor's robes, with square cap, ruff, and scarf, and wearing a beard.

It was designed as a reply to Bellarmine, whom he seeks to confute the latter by an appeal to "scriptures, fathers, councils, imperial constitutions, pontifical decrees, their own writers and our martyrs, and the consent of all Christian churches in the world".

He affirms that the church of England approves the first four ecumenical councils, and possibly the fifth; and he maintains the position of John Jewel on episcopacy.