John Overall (bishop) - Church of England

Church of England

He was briefly, in 1591–1592, vicar of Trumpington, a college living just outside Cambridge. In 1592, Sir Thomas Heneage, on behalf of Elizabeth I, created him vicar of Epping, Essex. In October 1595 he was appointed to the Crown living of Henton by Elizabeth, and in December 1595 Overall was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. His election may have been a snub for Archbishop John Whitgift, who had adopted the Calvinistic Lambeth Articles. Overall, with Lancelot Andrews, Samuel Harsnett, and others, had rejected these articles in support of Peter Baro, the Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, when on 12 January 1596 he attacked them from the pulpit. This opposition cost Baro his chair, as he failed to be re-elected in 1596. John Overall was also a friend to the erratic mystic William Alabaster (1568–1640), even throughout his years of imprisonment, and was the tutor to Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex at Trinity College. Perhaps Overall brought these two acquaintances together. Essex became Alabaster’s patron. In Alabaster’s Conversion we read:

In 1599, Overall clashed with the authorities when he maintained that the perseverance of a truly justified man was conditional upon repentance. There followed a year-long campaign against Overall which ultimately had little effect. Through it all, he retained his chair until he resigned it in 1607.

As one of the chaplains-in-ordinary to the queen, Overall was appointed by Whitgift in 1598 to preach before her on the third Wednesday of Lent, 15 March, in place of Bishop Godfrey Goldsborough of Gloucester. Shortly afterwards, at Easter, his theological position was further endorsed in Cambridge when he was appointed Master of St Catharine's College, with the support of Whitgift. Thereafter he was occasionally chosen to give Lenten sermons before the queen, but he was not happy in the pulpit. He apparently found it “troublesome to speak English as a continued oration” after years of lecturing in Latin. John Manningham, a Magdalene graduate who would have heard Professor Overall in Cambridge, later complained that he "discoursed verry scholastically" when he preached a Whitehall sermon at the dead queen's court on 6 April 1603

In 1602, Overall was made rector of Algarkirk, Lincoln; he held the living for three years. With the support of Sir Fulke Greville he was nominated Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. On 6 June, Lawrence Barker, vicar of St Botolph Aldersgate, and a former colleague at Trinity, spoke at Paul's Cross of the "gravity & learning and life" of the new dean. The Deanery itself became a haven for scholars like Scultetus who shared the house with him. Overall himself, according to the radical preacher Thomas Scott, emerged as something of an Anglo-Catholic. Overall was also granted the Prebendary of Tottenhall.