The chronicler Edward Hall records that in Parliament Pakington again revealed anti-clerical sentiments, "speaking somewhat against the covetousness and cruelty of the clergy".
On the morning of 13 November 1536, while crossing the street from his home in Cheapside to attend Mercers' Chapel located opposite, Pakington was shot with a gun and killed:[1][3]And one morning amongst all other, being a great misty morning such as hath seldom been seen, even as he was crossing the street from his house to the church, he was suddenly murdered with a gun, which of the neighbours was plainly heard and by a great number of labourers there standing at Soper's Lane end...but the deed doer was never espied nor known.His murder was likely the first committed with a handgun in London.
In 1559 Foxe claimed that John Stokesley, a former Bishop of London "had paid a priest sixty gold coins to carry out the murder".
However, in the 1563 edition of the Actes and Monuments Foxe stated that John Incent, a former Dean of St Paul's, had made a deathbed confession in which he admitted arranging for Pakington's murder.
[2] In their accounts of Pakington's death the chroniclers John Stow, Richard Grafton and Raphael Holinshed did not repeat Foxe's allegations,[2] and Holinshed put forward an entirely different version of events, claiming that a felon hanged at Banbury had confessed on the gallows to Pakington's murder.
[2] According to Marshall, the wording of the will, which Pakington drew up on 23 November 1535,[1] provides additional evidence of his sympathy for the Protestant Reformation.
At the time of the marriage, Katherine was the widow of her first husband, Richard Collier (d.1533), by whom she had a son and daughter, George and Dorothy.