Artware Fineart has dated this 17th Century Oil Portrait to the 17th Century.
oil on oak panel
50.80 x 30.48 cm. (20 x 12 in.)
Bancroft, Richard (bap. 1544, d.
He was the second son of John Bancroft, gentleman, and his wife, Mary, daughter of James Curwen and niece of Hugh Curwen (c.1500–1568), archbishop of Dublin (1555–67) and bishop of Oxford (1567–8).
Bancroft was educated locally at the grammar school in Farnworth. He was older than was usual for his generation when admitted to Cambridge, where he was elected scholar at Christ's College, graduating BA in 1567. Although his reputation was said to be higher on the sports field in boxing, wrestling, and quarterstaff, he was nevertheless chosen to greet Elizabeth during her first visit to Cambridge in 1564. He delivered an overweening encomium, lauding her shining example and praising her as a judge against the raging bulls of the pope.
Financial uncertainty may have delayed Bancroft's initial entry to university. In his final undergraduate year Archbishop Curwen granted him the prebendal stall of Malhidert in St Patrick's, Dublin. As he was not yet ordained this would assist him financially. With it came a royal licence to be absent from the university for six months. It is also possible that education in a newly reformed university may not have been an altogether appealing option for someone from a traditionalist background in the north-west. A fellow Lancastrian student, Laurence Chaderton, some eight years senior to Bancroft, came from a financially more secure background and yet did not enter Christ's until he was almost thirty.
For a time Bancroft may have been a close member of Chaderton's wide-flung network of patronage and acquaintance. The two remained lifelong, if unlikely, friends even when Bancroft removed to Jesus College as a tutor (he was never a fellow there). Later Bancroft regarded men like John Rainolds, William Whitaker, and Chaderton as respectable moderates, and in his Daungerous Positions (1593) he deliberately omitted any mention of Chaderton's leading role in the conference movement. He retained broad sympathies for the moderate puritan position and with them opposed the Elizabethan university statutes of 1572.
Bancroft proceeded MA from Jesus in 1572, and two years later, at the age of thirty, he was ordained priest in the diocese of Ely by Bishop Richard Cox. Cox, who had supported the university statutes of 1572, was also visitor of Jesus. He made Bancroft one of his chaplains, in which post he probably served until Cox died in 1581. He later offered him a prebend at Ely (21 December 1575) and collated him to the rectory of Teversham, near Cambridge (24 March 1576). Later that year he was licensed as one of the twelve preachers in the university. ‘By the appointment of Archbishop [Edmund] Grindal, he did once visite the Diocese of Peterborough’, in the wake of the ‘disorders’ involving preachers in Northamptonshire in 1576 (CUL, Mm.1.47, fol. 332). This would appear to be the first time that he had acted as the bishop's proxy in matters of discipline. In 1580 or 1581 Bancroft entered the service of the lord chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton, as a chaplain, ‘for the most part in her Majesties Court, & was in good Reputation with him, & often employed in sundry maters of great Importance, for her Highnes service’ (ibid.).
It was as one of the university select preachers, and not as an episcopal visitor, that Bancroft was sent to preach at the Bury St Edmunds assize in July 1583. Bury had recently become troubled by the sermons of Robert Browne, a kinsman of Lord Burghley, who had been released from his imprisonment for unauthorized preaching in Cambridge and had moved his centre of operati
Artware Fineart has dated this 17th Century Oil Portrait to the 17th Century.
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English School 17th Century, Portrait of Richard Bancroft, Dd, Ma, Ba, Archbishop of Canterbury 1544 - 1610
