parish registers testifying to the cost.^25 Yet while Jewel took an active
hand in the destruction of images, he cannot be faulted with the destruc-
tion of the cathedral’s stained glass, seeing rather to its restoration and
glazing.
Nonetheless, despite the supine nature of the diocesan clergy he
inherited, Jewel did not lack distraction at Salisbury, for while his
chapter and clergy generally conformed to the new faith, this hardly
meant that they were above giving their bishop grief.^26 Nor should it be
assumed that Jewel’s relations with the town were all that cordial either.
The chapter Act book only infrequently mentions Jewel, though what is
there does provide rather interesting reading, the most amusing
surrounding the exploits of the organists Richard Chamberlayne and
Thomas Smythe. In Dora Robertson’s chronicle of the cathedral
choristers, Smythe repeatedly appears the rogue and rascal, Robertson
noting of Smythe that his ‘exploits ... fill the Chapter Registers ... [and]
only go to prove into what a sad state the Church of Sarum had fallen.
The mere fact that this man was tolerated for 25 years in a responsible
position casts very grave aspersions on the integrity of the Chapter’.^27
Smythe, first hired as the teacher of the boy choristers, first appears in
the cathedral records in December 1563 when he got into a shouting
match with Robert Chamberlayne, then the organist, during the
Communion service. Smythe was vindicated, and Chamberlayne cited
for having slandered Smythe.^28 Three years later Chamberlayne’s wife
Agnes appeared in the drama: both she and Smythe were cited to the
Dean’s court where Agnes testified that she confronted Smythe about his
verbally abusing her husband. Smythe fled, said Agnes, and she gave
chase; but once Smythe got to his house he turned and threw two rocks
at her. Agnes, not to be outdone, returned the favor, and according to her
that was the end of it. Smythe’s version, bolstered by the testimony of
one Thomas Tynckler, was that Agnes Chamberlayne had been the one
who cast the first stone (though apparently not without sin). The verdict
was not preserved, but within the year Smythe was the organist, and
Chamberlayne was gone.^29
While Smythe emerged from his confrontations with the
Chamberlaynes still employed by the chapter, thus having obtained some
LIFE AS A BISHOP IN SALISBURY 211
(^25) T.H. Baker, ‘The Churchwardens Accounts of Mere’,W.A.&N.H.M.,37 (1907), p.
31.
(^26) Southgate, who records only the confrontation between Jewel and the chapter over
Parker’s grant to Jewel of jure metropolicostatus, argues that lack of evidence affirms
Jewel’s amiable relation with the chapter. Cf. Jewel, p. 72.
(^27) Robertson,Sarum Close, p. 136.
(^28) D. & C. Sarum, Act Book ‘Blacker’, p. 8.
(^29) Dean’s Act book. Cited in Robertson, Sarum Close, pp. 137–38.