[1] After leaving school, he entered King's College, Cambridge as a sizar on 8 September 1576[1] and removed into Pembroke Hall[4] where he gained a BA in 1580/1[5] and was elected a Fellow on 27 November 1583.

[1] As David Hughson notes, "he was one of those divines who opposed the decrees of the synod of Dort and he wrote a very learned treatise against absolute predestination".

[1] In 1592 he served the office of Junior Proctor[1] and five years later became chaplain to Richard Bancroft,[4] then Bishop of London and shortly to become Archbishop of Canterbury by whose favour he quickly rose through the ranks.

[1] He spent most of his time when absent from his city at the bishop's palace in Ludham, which he rebuilt after a fire and consecrated a chapel for divine worship.

[7][8] In May 1624 he was charged before Parliament with high-handedness by the citizens of Norwich and in that same year he also persecuted the Puritans in Great Yarmouth, leading to a complaint by them to King Charles I in 1627.

[1] Darrell, curate at St Mary's Church, Nottingham was a puritan minister who performed a series of public exorcisms in the English Midlands.

In 1603, he wrote another book, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published by order of the Privy Council,[1] which condemned exorcisms performed by Roman Catholic priests in the 1580s.

As a member of England's religious authority, Harsnett's sceptical attitudes, divided equally between puritanism and popery,[4] set important precedents for English policy.

For example, by coming close "to denying the reality of witchcraft" he may have contributed to the relative lack of witch hunts in England, compared to other countries.