He argued that all the essential doctrinal points of Protestantism had been averred and defended constantly by certain theologians of the Roman Church throughout the preceding centuries, but that this fact had been increasingly overshadowed by the influence of the prevailing papist faction.
Although in his personality he was known as having an amiable and peaceable disposition, his writings against the papists, particularly Robert Bellarmine and Stapleton, rose to heights of implacable polemicism.
In September 1598 he received a letter from the Lord Chamberlain, George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, desiring him to come and preach a probationary sermon before Queen Elizabeth on the 23rd.
He was subsequently appointed one of the royal chaplains in ordinary, and received a grant of the next vacant prebend at Windsor.
He was joined in a special commission with William Paulet, 4th Marquess of Winchester, Thomas Bilson, and others, for ecclesiastical causes within the diocese of Winchester; and in another to exercise all spiritual jurisdiction in the said diocese with John Whitgift, Bilson and others, by James I, 1603, to whom he was also chaplain, and by whom he was invited to the Hampton Court conference of January 1604.
The king discussed theology with him, and once planned to send him to Germany to settle the differences between Lutherans and Calvinists; and made Field one of the fellows of the intended but ill-fated Chelsea College, and on hearing of his death, expressed his regret in the words, 'I should have done more for that man.'
A black marble slab was laid over his grave (no longer present), and an inscription in brass recording his death and that of his first wife, Elizabeth Harris.
Field's apologetic literature attacked what he saw as the elevation of Scholastic opinion into articles of necessary faith, and the emergence of an exalted view of the Roman primacy over the conciliar authority.
[4] At his death Field had apparently commenced a work entitled A View of the Controversies in Religion, which in these last times have caused the Lamentable Divisions in the Christian World.
From a copy of this life, interleaved with manuscript additions from the author's rough draft by the editor (Le Neve), and some notes by White Kennett, Richard Gough drew up the 'Life of Field,' which was printed in an edition of the Biographia Britannica.
His second wife was John Spencer's widow Dorothy, daughter of Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop's nephew, and Isaak Walton's aunt.