[In the following essay, Kastan conjectures that Baldwin probably died in the autumn of 1563.]

The date of William Baldwin's death has eluded scholars. Anthony Wood writes, ‘As for Baldewyn he lived, as 'tis said, some years after Qu. Eliz. came to the Crown, but when he died it appears not.’¹ Facts concerning Baldwin's death have, however, slowly begun to appear. In spite of Arthur Freeman's claim that Baldwin lived well into the 1580s,² Paul Gaudet has recently endorsed Eveline I. Feasey's suggestion that Baldwin died in 1563.³ Thomas Churchyard's references to Baldwin in the 1587 Mirror for Magistrates as ‘a Minister and a Preacher’ make probable the identification of the writer Baldwin with the Baldwin ordained a deacon in 1559 (the year Baldwin, in the 1563 Mirror, claims that he was ‘called to an other trade of lyfe’) and appointed Rector of St. Michael le Querne in 1561; and Gaudet discovers in the Churchwarden's accounts evidence that the incumbent of St. Michael le Querne died sometime before 1 November 1563. ‘This document’, Gaudet writes, ‘offers the only clear evidence to date which can explain why Baptist Willoughby was appointed Rector in Baldwin's place on 20 December 1563 and why no new edition or revised work of Baldwin appeared in print after the 1564 edition of the Treatise [of Moral Philosophy].’⁴ Even with this evidence, however, Gaudet finds that ‘it is impossible on the basis of current information to say exactly when Baldwin died, but the autumn of 1563 is a reasonable conjecture.’⁵

Gaudet's conjecture is indeed ‘reasonable’, and one additional piece of evidence offers support that may not only allow us ‘to say exactly when he died’ but also how. In his Historical Memoranda, John Stowe writes:

Anno 1563, in Septembre, the old byshops and dyver doctors wer removyed owt of y^e Towre in to the newe byshopes howssys, ther to remayn prysonars undar theyr custody (the plage then beynge in y^e citie was thowght to be y^e caws), but theyr delyveraunce (or rather chaunge of prison) dyd so myche offend y^e people that y^e prechars at Poulls Crosse and on othar placis bothe of y^e citie and cuntrie prechyd (as it was thowght of many wysse men) verie sedyssyowsly, as Baldwyn at Powlls Cros wyshyng a galows set up in Smythefyld and y^e old byshops othar papestis to be hangyd theron. Hym selfe died of y^e plague the next weke aftar.⁶

Though Stowe's ‘Baldwyn’ cannot with absolute certainty be identified as William Baldwin, the facts of Baldwin's career and existing parish registers make the identification likely.⁷ In Stowe's account of anti-Marian sentiment in the first years of Elizabeth's rule, perhaps we have evidence to establish both the date and the cause of the death of William Baldwin.

Notes

1. Athenae Oxoniensis (1691-2), sig. I, col. 114. A. H. Bullen writes in the DNB (I, 959): ‘Of Baldwin's closing years we have no record; he is supposed to have died early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth’.

2. ‘William Baldwin: The Last Years’, N&Q, ccvi (1961), 300-1.

3. Paul Gaudet, ‘William Baldwin and the “Silence” of his Last Years’, N&Q, ccxxiii (1978), 417-20. Feasey's article, ‘William Baldwin’, appeared in MLR, xx (1925), 407-18.

4. Gaudet, 420.

5. Gaudet, 420, n. 18.

6. Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed. James Gairdner (Camden Society, 1880), 126. Millar Maclure summarizes this account in the Register of Sermons Preached in his Paul's Cross Sermons (Toronto, 1958), 204. He identified ‘Baldwyn’ as [William?].

7. No Baldwin other than the one who became Rector of St. Michael le Querne appears for the relevant years in Rev. George Hennessy's Novum Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, or London Diocesan Succession from the Earliest Time to the Year 1898 (1898). In John Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford, 1822) there is mention of a ‘Baldwyn’ who served as the Rector of Allesley, but he was ‘deprived for marriage’ in 1553.