Daniel Featley
He fell into difficulties with Parliament due to his loyalty to Charles I of England in the 1640s, and he was harshly treated and imprisoned at the end of his life.
[3] In 1610 and for the two following years he was chaplain to Sir Thomas Edmondes, the English ambassador at Paris, and was noticed for his attacks on Catholic doctrine and his disputations with Jesuits.
In 1610 he had preached the rehearsal sermon at Oxford, and by the Bishop of London's appointment he discharged the same duty at St Paul's Cross in 1618.
Featley had been refused admission to the palace, because an illness from which he was suffering was supposed to be the plague; it proved to be a sharp attack of ague, and he abruptly resigned.
A devotional manual entitled Ancilla Pietatis was published in 1626 and proved very popular; a sixth edition appeared in 1639, translations into French and other languages were made, and it was a special favourite with Charles I in his troubles.
[3] While Featley and William Laud, Abbot's successor, were not on good terms, he strongly defended the Church of England and episcopacy in the 1640s.
Laud, two years later, ordered many passages reflecting on the Roman Catholics in Featley's Clavis Mystica to be obliterated, before allowing the book to be printed.
He wrote animadversions on a Catholic tract called A Safegard from Shipwracke to a prudent Catholike, to which he gave the title of Vertumnus Romanus (1642); and began marginal annotations on St Paul's Epistles, which were printed in the Bible issued by the Westminster Assembly in 1645.
After the Battle of Brentford, 13 November 1642, some of the Earl of Essex's troops, who were quartered at Acton, set fire to his barns and stables, broke open the church, pulled down the font, smashed the windows and burnt the communion rails in the street.
Soon afterwards he was detected in a correspondence with Archbishop James Ussher, then with the King at Oxford, and he was imprisoned as a spy, in Lord Petre's house in Aldersgate Street.
In January 1644 he published as the third section of The Gentle Lash his 'Challenge' against the puritan divines of the day, in which he offered to vindicate the articles, discipline, and liturgy of the Church of England.
[3] Featley was in bad health before his imprisonment, and after eighteen months' confinement he was permitted out on bail to move to Chelsea College for change of air.
[9] His works include: Featley also published, London, 1638, Sir Humphrey Lynde's posthumous reply to the Jesuit Robert Jenison, entitled A Case for the Spectacle, or a Defence of Via Tuta, together with a treatise of his own called Strictura in Lyndomasttigem, by way of supplement to the Knight's Answer, and a Sermon [on Numb.
xxiii, 10] preached at his Funerall at Cobham, June the 14th, 1636 reprinted in the supplement to Edmund Gibson's Preservative from Popery (vol.
A set of Latin verses, written by him in 1606, giving an exposition of Jesuitical amphibology, was prefixed to Henry Mason's New Art of Lying, London, 1634.
