Born about 1550, he was the second son of John Sutcliffe of Mayroyd in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, by his wife, Margaret Owlsworth of Ashley in the same county.
Sutcliffe was early interested in the settlement of New England, and John Smith of Jamestown mentions, in his Generall Historie (1624), that the dean assisted and encouraged him in his schemes.
[3] Erstwhile Sutcliffe invested in the Plymouth Adventurer's Colony and a failed attempt at settlement in Sagadahoc in present-day Maine.
He fell into disfavour in consequence of his opposition to the Spanish match, at the same time as Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford, and was later vindicated and continued to receive appointments of the highest order until his death.
E.' They cover a range of religious issues from the 1590s to 1620s: on the Anglican front concerned with John Udall, Job Throckmorton, Thomas Cartwright, and a defence of the government version of the treason of Edward Squire; and anti-Catholic replies to Cardinal Bellarmine, Robert Parsons, Henry Garnet, George Blackwell, Matthew Kellison and Tobie Mathew.
[3] Sutcliffe's style of rhetoric against Catholicism, along with that of Sir Francis Hastings and Thomas Morton, is judged to depend ultimately on scaremongering about Catholic priests and laypeople.
He was more thematic than Hastings, and supplied better arguments based on a "true" and "false" Catholic Church, but still fell back on ad hominem invective.
[6] Nicholas W. S. Cranfield, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, notes that Sutcliffe denounced papists as worse than Turks, that he took a harder line than James I against the proposition that the Church of Rome had only recently defaulted in its role as mother church, and that his works "rarely progress beyond xenophobia and violent anti-Catholicism" and "display a neurotic fear of the power of Rome to subvert".
This was in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before the word was used in this way in Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1605).