David Whitehead (priest)

Whitehead was in the smaller vessel which reached Copenhagen on 3 November; there the exiles were taken for Anabaptists, and soon expelled by order of the king on their refusing to subscribe to the Lutheran confession.

They then made their way to Rostock, where Whitehead pleaded their cause before the magistrates, whose Lutheran requirements they failed to satisfy, and they were compelled to leave in January.

Whitehead was one of those who wished to retain the use of the English Prayer Book of 1552, and in the debates at Frankfurt he took the side of Richard Cox against Knox.

In February 1555–6 Whitehead resigned his pastorate, being succeeded on 1 March by Robert Horne; the cause is said to have been his disappointment at not being made lecturer in divinity in succession to Bartholomew Traheron.

[2] On Elizabeth I's accession Whitehead returned to England, preaching before the queen on 15 February 1559, taking part in the Westminster disputation with the Roman Catholic bishops on 3 April, and serving as a visitor of Oxford University, and on the commission for revising the liturgy.

Francis Bacon stated that he opposed episcopacy, and related the anecdote that the queen once said to him "I like thee better because thou livest unmarried", to which Whitehead replied "In troth, madame, I like you the worse for the same cause".

[2] Whitehead's writings, with the exception of discourses printed in William Whittingham's Brieff Discours of Troubles at Frankfort (1575), have not been traced.