He was born about the year 1480; he took the degrees of B.A. and M.A. at Cambridge; he studied law at Bologna; he took Holy Orders and received many benefices, including the Mastership of the Maison Dieu at Dover. Since these preferments were scattered about in many counties, it is evident that he performed none of the duties. He was otherwise occupied. In 1519 he was sent by the King with a message to Louise of Savoy; he was made Archdeacon of Colchester, Dean of Windsor, Judge of the Court of the Star Chamber; and he was charged in 1521 with the presentation of King Henry’s work against Luther. He remained at Rome as the King’s Ambassador and the servant of Wolsey for four years; he was employed in an embassy to the Court of France, and was sent a second time to Rome. He returned with Cardinal Campeggio. By this time he had been promoted to the Bishopric of Bath and Wells.
He did not long enjoy his London residence. In the same year in which he received the gift, he was sent on an embassy to the Duke of Cleves, and, with his servants, was poisoned. He came back to die in January 1541, and was buried in the Chapel of the Clares.
The House was once more taken over by the Crown, being exchanged by Bishop Barber for other property in 1548. Edward granted it to the Duke of Suffolk in 1552. It does not appear, however, that Lady Jane Grey, his daughter, was ever resident at the House of the Clares. The Duke was executed on the 23rd of February 1554. We may believe that some of the old sanctity was still lingering about the Chapel of the vanished nuns. There is some reason to believe that the head of the Duke was brought to the Chapel and buried before the altar. In 1852 the then Earl of Dartmouth was inspecting the vaults under the modern church, where some of his ancestors are buried. He came upon something that might have been a basket full of sawdust. On examination there was found to be a head well preserved, with the marks of decapitation on the neck. The features resembled those of the beheaded Duke, and it seems probable that either by his own request, or by the pious care of a servant, the head was brought here to be laid in the Duke’s own Chapel, the former Chapel of the Sorores Minores Inclusæ.
After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the Precincts of the Abbey remained, like many other Precincts, a quiet place, in whose Close houses were built. The church was granted to the people of the place on the condition of their maintaining a minister for the parish, which occupied exactly the same site as the former Abbey.
It was a small parish, no more than 255 feet in length, facing the City Wall. The old buildings were gradually pulled down, and the materials used for the new houses, but enough remained, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, to form a picturesque collection of ruins. A fire in 1767 destroyed most of the buildings. As to the church, it became that of the Holy Trinity; it was repaired in 1618, in 1624, in 1636; it escaped the Fire of London. But most unfortunately it was taken down in 1740—with the exception of the north Wall—and rebuilt a mean and poor little church, which will remain standing as a Church House while the Parish, consisting of Haydon Green and little else, has been absorbed in that of St. Botolph, Aldgate. The new church contained something of the old chapel: the font, the reredos, the pavement before the altar, the monuments which were put up on the north wall. The church plate is also rich and curious. The charities are very small, amounting to no more than £13 a year in all.
The church was at one time—about the close of the seventeenth century— a favourite place for weddings. In 1697 there were 956; sometimes there were six, eight, or ten weddings in one day. The reason seems to have been that the church claimed to be a peculiar, and exempt from the visitation of the ordinary, therefore licenses were not required for this church any more than for St. James’s, Duke Place, or the Fleet, or May Fair.
A Roman sarcophagus, discovered within this parish, is now preserved in the British Museum.
The church is much richer in associations than would be expected from its outward appearance. There is a brass to Constance Lucy, one of the well-known Lucy family; there is the tomb of Sir John Pelham and his son; there are buried here the first Lord Dartmouth, son of Colonel William Legge, and thirty-two of his descendants; there is a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, with the tradition that he once lived in Haydon Square and worshipped in this church; Miles Coverdale preached here, as the historian of the church, Dr. Kinns found, on eleven occasions. The tomb of Colonel William Legge, who lived in the Abbey, bears his shield, on which are impaled the arms of the Washington family, with the stars and stripes which are the origin of the American flag. The connection of the Washingtons and the Legges is given by Dr. Kinns in the following pedigree:—
A tabular version is available [here].