SPARROW, Anthony (1612-85)

In June 1637 Anthony Sparrow preached a sermon in Cambridge which strongly implied, if it did not explicitly state, a position on free will which placed Sparrow on a spectrum towards Roman Catholic doctrine even beyond the ceremonialist and clerical views of the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud^†, archbishop of Canterbury. Nevertheless, Sparrow, protected by Laud and William Juxon, then bishop of London, kept his place at Queens’ and even progressed further up the university ladder over the succeeding years. However, from 1640 Sparrow and his Laudian colleagues came under suspicion for their Arminian views. On 8 Apr. 1644, on the orders of Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester, he was ejected from his college fellowship for, officially, ‘non-residence and for not returning to college’ when summoned. On 30 Sept. 1647 he was instituted as rector of the parish of Hawkedon, near his home of Depden in Suffolk, but he was ejected within five weeks of his appointment for using the proscribed Book of Common Prayer. Walker Revised, 345. His movements over the next several years are unknown, but in 1655 he published (anonymously), A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, a strong defence of the scriptural and theological validity of the proscribed liturgy. The work became a standard Anglican text and went through a subsequent eight editions and multiple reprintings in Sparrow’s lifetime; the earliest extant copies are from its second edition in 1657.

At the Restoration he was quickly reinstated to his rectory at Hawkedon and was also elected to a preachership at Bury St Edmunds. On 7 Aug. 1660, helped by Gilbert Sheldon, then bishop of London, he was made archdeacon of Sudbury in Suffolk. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 111. Sparrow, with a number of other surviving Anglicans from the Interregnum, graduated Doctor of Divinty from Cambridge on 31 Aug. under a specific order of the king. New honours and responsibilities followed. On 15 Apr. 1661 he was placed in the second prebendal stall in Ely Cathedral and about this time he was also made a chaplain-in-ordinary to the king. Ibid. 1661-2, p. 355. Appointed coadjutor for the delegates representing the Church of England at the Savoy Conference, he, Peter Gunning, later bishop of Ely, and John Pearson, later bishop of Chester, were appointed to continue the negotiations with the Presbyterians when the conference ended in the summer of 1661. Cardwell, 257, 264. It seems unlikely that Sparrow would have had much sympathy for the nonconformists’ position, for in that year he produced a further resolute defence of the Church of England, its liturgy, government and right to impose conformity, in his A Collection of Articles, Injunctions and Canons, .... published to vindicate the Church of England and to promote Uniformity. This book too went through multiple reprintings and editions during Sparrow’s lifetime and thereafter and became a standard Anglican text.

In April 1662 the mastership of Sparrow’s old college of Queens’ at Cambridge became vacant by the death of the incumbent. The king sent a mandamus to the fellows of the college insisting on the election of Sparrow as the new president, but the majority of the fellows instead voted for another graduate Simon Patrick, later bishop of Ely. The court intruded Sparrow in the office and sought to punish with suspension ‘disobedient fellows ... until they promise dutifulness and gratitude’. Patrick went so far as to take the matter before King’s Bench, but so much pressure was put on him by the king and his chief minister Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, that he was eventually forced to withdraw. CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 355, 359, 365; S. Patrick, Works, ix. 436, 624-7. This matter was a clear indication of the court’s desire to shore up the position of the high churchmen in the previously ‘puritan’ university of Cambridge, and Sparrow followed these wishes himself while vice chancellor of the university in 1664-5. CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 554; 1664-5, p. 82; Bodl. Add. C 305, f. 236.

His reward for his defence of the established Church of England came on 3 Nov. 1667 when he was consecrated bishop of Exeter. In this new role Sparrow first took his seat in the House on 20 Nov. 1667, arriving about a month into the session. Even after this late arrival he came to a little over two-fifths of this session. He was present at only 16 sittings of the first part of the session in the last weeks of 1667, during which he was placed on two committees on legislation, a private bill and the bill against atheism and swearing (established on 10 Dec. 1667). He almost certainly would have supported his patron Clarendon in the impeachment proceedings against him, but Sparrow left the House on 11 Dec. 1667 and thus did not take part in the debates on the bill for Clarendon’s banishment. Sparrow returned to the House on 30 Mar. 1668, almost two months after the session had resumed after the Christmas recess. He was named on 23 Apr. 1668 to a committee of 12 members of the House entrusted to join with a similar group from the Commons to present to the king the recent vote concerning the importance of promoting English manufacture by a prohibition on foreign apparel. That same day he was further appointed to six committees on legislation, all but one on private bills; these were his only committee nominations of this part of the session.

Sparrow’s real political strengths lay not in the Lords’ chamber in Westminster, which he attended infrequently, but in the local arena of diocesan politics. Sparrow became Archbishop Sheldon’s chief intelligencer and agent in the West Country, keeping up a constant stream of information about what he saw as a disturbing prevalence of nonconformity in the diocese, and especially in the cathedral city of Exeter. After his return from Westminster in the spring of 1668 he conducted his first visitation of the diocese in which he gave the diocesan clergy, who were (as he wrote to Sheldon in June) ‘too much strangers to the excellent litany’, strict instructions about catechizing. Bodl. Add. C305, f. 203. The visitation coincided with the choice of a mayor for Exeter who, Sparrow claimed, had pressed Dissenters into supporting his election. Despite the mayor’s obduracy, Sparrow claimed that both the cathedral chapter and the town’s corporation treated him well. In a series of undated letters to Sheldon he boasted of his progress against conventicles, and that he had been able to cajole magistrates into complying with and enforcing the penal laws, although he still found that part of Devonshire was ‘still infested because the justices of the peace love it [nonconformity] too well’ while too many other magistrates were reluctant to take action, feeling it was ‘no acceptable service to disturb our disturbers’. The bishop’s efforts were not helped by rumours circulating in 1668 and 1669 that the king favoured toleration. He insisted to the nonconformist leaders that ‘it was neither safe nor good manners to take the king’s pleasure from common report, but from his laws’ and that ‘if they were not satisfied with the legal assemblies, they should keep their faith to themselves’. Bodl. Add. C 305, ff. 205, 253, 255, 257, 263, 267, 273.

Sparrow’s attitude to Church ceremonial may have been disconcerting to some. Even Cosmo, duke of Tuscany, was surprised to observe Sparrow in his cathedral in the spring of 1669 clothed in vestments similar to those worn by Catholic bishops of the previous century, and conducting a liturgy that rang with organ music and Gregorian chant. Travels of Cosmo, Third Grand Duke of Tuscany (1821) 129-31. Sparrow also sought to maintain the dignity and prestige of the office of bishop and continued to seek additional revenue, both for himself and his see. Upon taking up the post he had been concerned that the impoverished diocese would not allow him ‘to support the dignity episcopal’ and had been granted the rectory of St Breock in Cornwall in commendam. This offer quickly involved Sparrow in a protracted dispute over who had the right of presentation to the rectory, which alternated between the Crown and a private patron. The case was not settled until 1672, when the archbishop gave the rectory to Sparrow’s rival, James Rossington, a decision Sparrow did not accept graciously. Bodl. Tanner 141, ff. 128, 160; Add. C 305, f. 261; CSP Dom. 1671-2, pp. 223, 423; CSP Dom. 1672, p. 385. Fearing he would lose this source of income, in June 1669 he turned towards the Cornish deanery of St Buryan after the death of its incumbent, and with the help of Sir Thomas Clifford, later Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, then one of the leading commissioners of the treasury, he was able to procure a grant annexing the deanery, and its income, to the bishopric. Bodl. Add. C305, f. 207; CSP Dom. 1668-9, p. 421; CSP Dom. 1670, p. 37; Tanner 141, f. 127.

Sparrow did not attend the brief parliamentary session of 19 Oct.-11 Dec. 1669, although a call of the House on 26 Oct. had noted that he was sick but would be attending. He arrived on 14 Feb. 1670 for the first day of the 1670-1 session, but attended for slightly less than one fifth of the sittings, all of which occurred in spring 1670. He was named to seven committees on legislation, the majority on private bills, as well as those on the bills for the sale of fee farm rents (established on 18 Mar. 1670) and for preventing the malicious burning of houses (24 March). He was present on 14 and 15 Mar. 1670 for debates on the second conventicle bill and joined the majority of the bishops in entering his dissent on 17 Mar. against the second reading of the bill for the remarriage of the divorced John Manners, styled Lord Roos (later duke of Rutland). On 26 Mar. 1670 Sparrow registered his proxy with Seth Ward, his predecessor at Exeter and now bishop of Salisbury, but this was cancelled on 31 Mar. when Sparrow returned to the House for the brief period before the adjournment. His last sitting in the session was on 11 Apr. 1670, when Parliament was adjourned for the summer.

He was obviously pleased to leave the capital and return to Exeter, for he wrote to Sheldon on 22 Apr. that ‘as soon as I was dismissed my attendance I hastened home as fast as I could, but by that time I had finished my journey I had almost ended my life’. Bodl. Add. C305, f. 247. Before he left he had been able to witness the royal assent to the second Conventicle Act. Back in Exeter he quickly called on the mayors and magistrates of the most ‘factious’ towns to implement its provisions and was happy to report to Sheldon that the churches were beginning to fill and the conventicles ‘bound to wither’. Fearing another ‘tedious’ journey to Westminster, and complaining of faintness and the need for fresh air, in September he asked Sheldon for a further leave of absence from the House. Ibid. ff. 213, 215, 217. This was granted and he renewed his proxy with Ward on 14 Oct. 1670, ten days before the commencement of the second part of the session which eventually was prorogued on 22 Apr. 1671.

In April 1671 Sparrow was happy to report that the ‘loyal party’ had been heartened by the failure of the ‘factious’ in the confused Devonshire by-election which saw the election of Sir Coplestone Bampfylde^‡. The opposition candidate, Thomas Reynell^‡, whom Sparrow denounced as ‘a cunning busy Fifth Monarchy man’, was forced to withdraw before the poll. Ibid. ff. 225, 229; HP Commons, 1660-1690, i. 190. That autumn he completed a tour of 400 miles throughout his diocese during which, as he assured the archbishop, the gentry ‘received the poor bishop as if he had been a prince’, and Richard Arundell, Baron Arundell of Trerice, had extended to him warm hospitality at his castle. The Exeter corporation also delighted him with its vote that its members should regularly attend cathedral worship ‘in their formalities ... as a way of expressing conformity to the Church’. In the first half of the 1670s Sparrow became increasingly concerned in managing appointments to the commission of the peace in order to enforce religious conformity. Bodl. Add. C 305, ff. 229, 231, 232, 234, 238; Tanner 42, f. 110. The problem of uncooperative justices in parts of Devon was now compounded by more explicit opposition, as ‘the factions grow bold and threaten high those who oppose them’, but he was sure that the few factious corporations there would back down if tackled by the lay magistrates. Bodl. Add. C 305, ff. 231, 244; Tanner 42, ff. 112, 137; Tanner 141, f. 150. Central to this project were his allies on the magistrates bench in Devon including Thomas Carew^‡ ‘the chief man in this country for skill and courage and diligence, and who is the oracle of the county, by whom this city [Exeter], is kept in good order’ and John Beare^‡. Beare’s inclusion on the Devon justices’ bench was controversial, as he was deemed ‘unqualified as he was both in regard to personal property, character, or judicial knowledge’, but before his appointment Beare had assured Sparrow that he would use his power as a magistrate to outlaw ‘the enemies of the Church’. By 1675 Sparrow could tell Sheldon that Beare had ‘done service beyond expectation and reduced the worst part of the county. He was much opposed at his coming in and threatened by the factious to be removed; but if he be, I am sure the Church will suffer for it’. HP Commons, 1660-1690, i. 612; ii. 15-16; Bodl. Add. C 305, f. 240.

The 1672 Declaration of Indulgence threatened to undermine the situation. Sparrow told Sheldon that by its provisions he had to witness ‘the poor sheep committed to [his] trust snatched out of the fold by cunning wolves’. Tanner 44, f. 183. It was in this context that Sparrow arrived for the first day of the new session of Parliament on 4 Feb. 1673. He attended two-thirds of the session’s sitting days and left the House on 24 Mar., five days before the long adjournment to 20 October. During the session he was named to seven committees on legislation, all of them private estate or naturalization bills. Sparrow did not depart for Exeter immediately after the adjournment; he preached before the king on Easter Day, 30 Mar., but could barely make himself heard above the clamour of a congregation anxious to see whether James Stuart, duke of York would refuse communion for a second year in succession – and just one day after the king’s assent to the Test Act. Evelyn Diary, iv. 7. He was back in the capital by 30 Oct. 1673 to take his seat in the new session which began on 27 October. He came to three of the four sittings of this abortive session and was named on 30 Oct. to the committee for the bill to encourage English manufactures. He attended 79 per cent of the sittings of the following session and was there on both its opening day, 7 Jan. 1674, and its prorogation on 24 February. He was named to four committees on legislation, including those on the bills to encourage manufactures in England (8 Jan. 1674) and to prevent illegal imprisonment (17 February).

It is not clear to what extent Sparrow was integrated in the consultations of the lord treasurer, Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds), with the bishops to build a court and Church party, but he surely would have approved of the order-in-council which sought to enforce a more vigorous prosecution of nonconformists and recusants. Sparrow attended a little less than two-thirds of the sittings of the session of 13 Apr.-9 June 1675, during which Danby introduced the bill to impose on all office-holders the contentious oath not to seek any alteration in Church or state. During the session Sparrow was named to six committees on legislation. On 15 Apr. 1675 he was placed on the committee for the bill to prevent frauds and perjuries, and then near the end of the session, on 31 May, he was named to five more, mostly private estate bills as well as the bill to preserve fishing. He did not attend the session of autumn 1675, and on 2 Oct. 1675, almost two weeks before the scheduled start of the session, his proxy was registered with his former colleague from the Savoy Conference, Peter Gunning, now bishop of Ely. Gunning was recorded as using this proxy to vote against the proposed address for the dissolution of Parliament. HEHL, EL 8418.

As early as April 1676 Danby was planning that Sparrow should replace Edward Reynolds, the ‘Presbyterian’ bishop of Norwich, whose death was expected imminently. Browning, Danby, ii. 45. Reynolds had frequently turned a blind eye to the widespread nonconformity in his diocese. Reynolds passed away on 28 July 1676 and Sparrow was formally translated on 27 August. Sparrow was clearly indebted to Danby for this appointment and it is impossible to detach it from Danby’s own larger political agenda in Norfolk, and indeed in the country at large. By 1676 Norfolk was descending into bitter political and partisan conflict. In 1675 the lord lieutenant of the county, Horatio Townshend, Baron (later Viscount) Townshend, had angered Danby in particular by his strenuous opposition to the election of Danby’s son-in-law, Robert Coke^‡ of Holkham, for King’s Lynn in April 1675 and by his heavy-handed (not to say underhanded) support, in tandem with the country Members Sir John Hobart^‡, and Sir John Holland^‡, for Sir Robert Kemp^‡, in an election the following month to replace a deceased knight of the shire. HMC 6th Rep. 371-2; Add. 27477, ff. 344-5, 350-2; HP Commons 1660-90, i. 327-8, 320-1; J.M. Rosenheim, Townshends of Raynham, 39-43. Danby in turn oversaw the appointment of one his court dependents and a Bertie kinsman, Robert Paston, Viscount (later earl of) Yarmouth, as lord lieutenant and vice admiral of Norfolk in place of Townshend in the spring of 1676. Sainty, Lords Lieutenant; CSP Dom. 1675-6, p. 577; HMC 6th Rep. 375; HMC 7th Rep. 468; Eg. 3338, ff. 74-75. Townshend’s followers saw Yarmouth as a firm member of the ‘popish’ and clericalist conspiracy, especially as he and his wife had been patrons for several years of the high Anglican churchmen in the county. Add. 36988, ff. 109-10; HMC 7th Rep. 532. The rigorously conformist Sparrow was hand-picked by the lord treasurer to act with Yarmouth against the growing influence of the ‘country’ opposition in a county, and diocese, infamous for its strong pockets of nonconformity. Yarmouth thought highly of the new bishop from the start, commenting approvingly to his wife that Sparrow ‘carries himself like a bishop’, while the ‘right’ clergy in Norfolk, who had become increasingly alienated by Reynolds’s eirenic approach towards Dissent, were also delighted with the translation. Add. 27447, ff. 370-1; Norf. RO, BL/Y 2/35. For his part Sparrow always spoke highly of Yarmouth in his correspondence. Tanner 36, ff. 52v, 228; Tanner 138, f. 34. Together, the lay and clerical governor of the county spearheaded an increasingly draconian campaign in Norfolk against both Dissent and the ‘country’ opposition, a campaign made all the more vicious by the personal feud between Yarmouth and his former patron, Townshend, who tried to appoint himself leader of the country movement in the county. J.T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich, 255-6.

The demands of the political context and his worsening health again affected Sparrow’s attendance at the House. He took his seat for the first time as bishop of Norwich on the first day of the 1677-8 session (15 Feb. 1677), but he only attended 30 per cent of the sittings, all of them in 1677. He was reasonably diligent in his attendance throughout February and March, during which period he was named to 13 committees on legislation. He left the House for a period on 28 Mar., returning only on 16 Apr. when the House was adjourned to 21 May. He sat on three further occasions, the last time on 26 May, two days before the adjournment. It was the last time he attended the Lords, although he survived until the reign of James II. He did not neglect his parliamentary duties entirely and throughout 1678 registered his proxy with Peter Mews, bishop of Bath and Wells, on three occasions: 1 Jan. 1678 (before the resumption of the 1677-8 session on 28 Jan. after its long adjournment); 22 May 1678 (one day before the session of May-July 1678); and 14 Oct. 1678 (one week before the last session of the Cavalier Parliament, of October-December 1678). Sparrow’s absence from the House is primarily explained by worsening health. On 23 Dec. 1678 two of his servants deposed before the bar that ‘the Lord Bishop of Norwich is so afflicted with the strangury, that, upon riding in a coach, he makes bloody water, and so not able to come to London without danger’.

Sparrow resumed in his new diocese his crusade, so effective in Exeter, for the appointment of justices who would implement the penal laws in the secular courts. Bodl. Add. C305, f. 245; HP Commons, 1660-1690, iii. 354. The county town of Norwich, however, presented numerous problems, divided between the large Church interest represented by the cathedral and its officials at its heart, and the strong Dissenting tradition in the city. The bishop thought that the town and its corporation were the ‘worst’ he had ever encountered. Tanner 39, f. 36. Yarmouth used the by-election of spring 1678, held to replace the deceased Christopher Jay^‡, to install his son, William Paston, later 2nd earl of Yarmouth, as a knight of the shire, and he received Sparrow’s assurances that he would ‘show his power’ in the ecclesiastical courts as soon as the by-election was out of the way. HMC 6th Rep. 385. After Paston’s electoral victory, Yarmouth sought Danby’s permission to assist Sparrow in purging the magistrates’ bench of ‘goats’ and removing ‘a most seditious infuser of ill principles’, John Collins, man of business to Townshend’s ally Sir John Hobart and chaplain to Lady Hobart. Norf. RO, BL/IC/2/63; HMC 6th Rep. 385; HP Commons, 1660-1690, ii. 552. This affair led to the bishop receiving a death threat: ‘I will kill you ... the day is fixed ... it is not traditions and ceremonies ... will save you ... you are grown a viper not fit to live, you limb of Satan.’ Tanner 39, f. 39. The threat gave Yarmouth the perfect excuse to apprehend nonconformists and to begin his campaign to revoke the city charter. CSP Dom. 1678, p. 306; HMC 6th Rep. 386. Sparrow claimed that the subsequent ‘regulation’ of the city heartened the ‘loyal party’ and that the Church would benefit. By October 1678 he trumpeted that the corporation, directed by the mayor’s court, came as a body to receive communion ‘to express their affections to the Church’. Tanner 39, ff. 64, 117; Tanner 137, f. 29.

Yarmouth’s purges had their effect. Norwich returned Paston and Augustine Briggs^‡, both opponents of Exclusion, for all the Exclusion Parliaments, but Yarmouth’s and Sparrow’s actions exacerbated tensions within the county. Throughout 1679-81 uncontested elections were a rarity in the county and boroughs, with the lord lieutenant and bishop at the centre of the court’s efforts to defeat the strong Presbyterian and country electoral interest represented by Townshend, Hobart and Holland. The Norfolk county election for the first Exclusion Parliament, held on 10 Feb. 1679, was particularly contentious with the ‘fanatic party ... a bawling and ... the cry for Hobart ... very rife’. Norf. RO, BL/IC/2/81. Sparrow boasted that he and Yarmouth had ‘overcome all the crafty attempts of the parties’ and secured the election of two ‘loyal and pious’ candidates, Sir Christopher Calthorpe^‡ and Sir Neveille Catelyn^‡. Tanner 39, f. 179. Nevertheless, the defeated country candidate Hobart petitioned the elections committee, alleging that the under-sheriff of the county had snatched away the poll-book before all of Hobart’s supporters had been counted, and the matter swiftly became a partisan cause célèbre in the Commons. Townshend marshalled the witnesses for Hobart, while Yarmouth’s letter to the Commons in support of Calthorpe and Catelyn was deemed to be threatening. HMC 7th Rep. 532; Add. 36988, ff. 139-40; Norf. RO, BL/IC/2/88; WKC/7/6/22; HP Commons 1660-1690, i. 320-21; Tanner 38, f. 121. The Commons ruled that improper pressure and electioneering tactics had been used and fresh elections were ordered, at which Hobart was returned. The result, from Sparrow’s perspective, merely ‘raised the spirits of the disaffected populacy’. He again excused himself from the journey to London to attend Parliament; in May 1679 he provided written proof of his kidney and bladder problems and at a call of the House on 9 May 1679 he was excused attendance. Tanner 38, ff. 22, 23; Tanner 314, f. 28.

For the elections of summer 1679, for the second Exclusion Parliament, Yarmouth’s son and the moderate alderman Briggs won without too much trouble at the poll for Norwich. The court interest represented by Yarmouth (now made an earl) and Sparrow was less successful for the county, where the sitting Member Hobart joined with a moderate, Sir Peter Gleane^‡, to see off another challenge from Catelyn and Calthorpe, neither of whom by this time had much stomach for the fight. This result impelled Sparrow to deliver to William Sancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, one of his optimistic assurances that loyalty was standing firm despite the bad result. Tanner 314, f. 34; HP Commons, 1660-1690, i. 330-31. Sparrow himself did not attend the second Exclusion Parliament. In his absence complaints were made to the Commons that he had not taken the Test, leading Sparrow to ask Sancroft if he could take the Test anywhere but London. The House itself expressed scepticism about Sparrow’s extended absences and on 22 Oct. 1680 physician Peter Parham, Sparrow’s son-in-law, attested to his illness. Tanner 37, ff. 181, 182, 184; Tanner 22, f. 37. At a call of the House on 30 Oct. Sparrow was formally excused attendance because he was ‘sick’. He now appeared vulnerable, exposed to the wave of anticlericalism ranged at the episcopate in general, but perhaps suffering as well for his association with Danby and with Yarmouth’s electoral tactics. These were too heavy-handed even for the lord chancellor, Heneage Finch, Baron Finch (later earl of Nottingham), who reprimanded Yarmouth for trying to delay the summer 1679 election for his own advantage by purposely withholding the writ from the sheriff. Add. 27447, ff. 421-2. Finch forwarded a similar rebuke to Sparrow for neglecting his parliamentary duties and summoned him to attend the House, which prompted another letter to Sancroft in late November begging to be excused. Tanner 37, f. 205.

At this point the country opposition was in a strong position throughout Norfolk. The county election of February 1681 was won by Exclusionists, though only, according to Sparrow, through corruption, ‘the favour of an ill undersheriff and some arts of splitting votes and a cunning way of swearing’. Tanner 36, ff. 6, 230. Dejected by constant pain, he did not attend the week-long Oxford Parliament in March 1681 but asked Sancroft to intervene with the House and secure a further leave of absence. The archbishop obliged, and Sparrow’s son-in-law and chaplain, Thomas Long, was dispatched to Oxford to wait on Sancroft in person. Ibid. ff. 246, 252. In June 1681, after the dissolution of Parliament, Sancroft lost patience with Sparrow when the matter of the disposal of the vacant Norwich deanery put the archbishop on a collision course with lord chancellor Finch. Finch succeeded in placing his own chaplain, John Sharp, the future archbishop of York, in the post. Ibid. f. 52. In August 1681 Sparrow was working on a bill for the maintenance of Norwich livings in the hope that it could be prepared for the next session. At the same time he lent his support to Yarmouth as he attacked the validity of the city charters of both Norwich and Great Yarmouth and remodelled the commission of the peace and the militia along Tory lines. Tanner 141, f. 133; HMC 6th Rep. 386; P. Gauci, Pols. and Soc. in Great Yarmouth, 155. Sparrow commended Yarmouth for being ‘heartily true to the king’s and Church’s interest’ and was encouraged by Yarmouth’s ‘great interest in this county’ which eventually enabled him in October 1682 to persuade the corporation of Norwich to surrender its charter. Tanner 35, f. 107; Tanner 36, f. 228.

By 1682 Norfolk political parties were clearly identifiable as ‘violent Tories’, ‘violent Whigs’, and ‘the moderate, who ... go soberly to work’; and although in Norwich, Sparrow’s son-in-law, Peter Parham, joined the ‘chief leaders’ of the Tories, even Sparrow was starting to look restrained and old-fashioned to some of the new breed of ‘violent Tory’. CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 54-55. As the bishop complained to Sancroft there were many Whigs ‘clamouring loud against me for prosecuting schismatics’, while on the other hand there were ‘hot and eager’ Tories, ‘some who profess great loyalty and zeal for the church’, who were ‘as loud complaining because we do not proceed [against Dissenters], violently beyond the rule of law’. Tanner 36, f. 228. For denouncing such extremists, he was accused of libel by Philip Stebbing, a high Tory sheriff whose campaign against Dissent, and against Quakers in particular, involved particularly harsh penalties. Ibid. 35, f. 170. Little is known of Sparrow’s political activity for these years of Tory reaction in the remainder of Charles II’s reign. He was presumably hampered by deteriorating health and was often confined to the bishop’s palace and cathedral. When Sparrow received a summons to attend the coronation of James II in spring 1685, his son-in-law replied that the bishop was severely ill. Ibid. 31, f. 28.

The first Parliament of the new reign assembled on 19 May 1685 but Sparrow died that very evening at the episcopal palace. Ibid. 31, f. 58. In his will he left £100 for the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral, £100 to Queens’ College and additional bequests to Norwich Cathedral and the widows and orphans of diocesan clergy. His positions in the Church hierarchy had helped him to secure husbands for at least three of his daughters: Joan married Edward Drewe, archdeacon of Cornwall, and they were the parents of Francis Drewe^‡ who became Member for Exeter in 1713; Elizabeth married Nicholas Hall, the treasurer of Exeter Cathedral; and Bridget married Thomas Long, prebend of Exeter. Ibid. 32, f. 25. Another daughter Susan married the Norwich physician Peter Parham. Sparrow was buried in Norwich Cathedral and was succeeded by William Lloyd, who was deprived in 1691 as a nonjuror.