[2] In May 1533 he was prior of the Dominican house at Bristol, and wrote a letter to Thomas Cromwell, whom he apparently regarded as his patron, and with whom he seems to have had earlier dealings.
The commissioners were to administer to the friars the oath of allegiance to Henry, Anne Boleyn and their issue, to obtain from them an acknowledgment of the King as head of the national church, and to make inventories of their property.
[1] In 1535, on the martyrdom of Saint John Fisher, Hilsey succeeded him as Bishop of Rochester, consecrated on 18 September by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer at Winchester.
In January 1536, Hilsey preached at Catherine of Aragon's funeral, alleging that, in the hour of death, she had acknowledged that she had never been Queen of England.
Less radical than the 1535 Prymer of William Marshall,[9] it was also evangelical with anti-Catholic polemics incorporated and integrated in the text with devotional material,[10] and ultimately was more influential; Hilsey's arrangement of the Epistles and Gospels is substantially the same as in the later prayer books.
The book was republished in great part as The Prymer both in Englyshe and Latin in 1540; there was an edition in Edward Burton's Three Primers Put Forth in the Reign of Henry VIII (1834).
Hilsey also prepared a juvenile version of his primer,[11] and wrote De veri Corporis Esu in Sacramento which was dedicated to Cromwell and was mentioned in John White's Discosio-Martyrion (1553), on the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist.