[3] According to an eighteenth-century biographical dictionary, when Abbot's mother was pregnant with him she had a dream in which she was told that if she ate a pike her child would be a son and rise to great prominence.

Some time afterwards, she accidentally caught a pike while fetching water from the River Wey, and it "being reported to some gentlemen in the neighbourhood, they offered to stand sponsors for the child, and afterwards shewed him many marks of favour".

[11]Despite his defence of the catholic nature of the priesthood, his Puritan instincts frequently led him not only into harsh treatment of Roman Catholics but also into courageous resistance to the royal will, such as when he opposed the scandalous divorce suit of the Lady Frances Howard against Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, and again in 1618 when, at Croydon, he forbade the reading of the Declaration of Sports listing the permitted Sunday recreations.

He was naturally, therefore, a promoter of the match between the king's daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and a firm opponent of the projected marriage of the new Prince of Wales (later Charles I) and the Spanish Infanta, Maria Anna.

[2] In July 1621,[12] while hunting in Lord Zouch's park at Bramshill in Hampshire, a bolt from his cross-bow aimed at a deer happened to strike one of the keepers, who died within an hour, and Abbot was so greatly distressed by the event that he fell into a state of settled melancholia.

His enemies maintained that the fatal issue of this accident disqualified him for his office and argued that, though the homicide was involuntary, the sport of hunting that had led to it was one in which no clerical person could lawfully indulge.

His refusal to license the assize sermon preached by Robert Sibthorp at Northampton on 22 February 1627, in which cheerful obedience was urged to the king's demand for a general loan, and the duty proclaimed of absolute non-resistance even to the most arbitrary royal commands, led Charles to deprive him of his functions as primate, putting them in commission.

He died at Croydon on 4 August 1633 and was buried at Guildford, his native place, where he had endowed Abbot's Hospital with lands valued at £300 a year.