In his brief account of James Pilkington, bishop of Durham, F. O. White created an enduring myth. Citing only two documents from the state papers, he proposed the following scenario:

“Though Bishop Pilkington was a great iconoclast, he was a vigorous maintainer of the rights and property of his see. Shortly after his consecration he had received a partial restitution of his temporalities, but the restitution of the remainder was long delayed, it being felt by the queen and her ministers that the spiritual and temporal power of the Bishops of Durham was excessive.

Pilkington appears to have so pertinaciously insisted on his rights, and so strenuously refused to allow the bishopric to be spoliated, that the queen made him a prisoner in his own house, for we find him, in a letter to Sir W. Cecil, written just before the warrant for the restitution of his temporalities was issued (May 23, 1566), stating that then he was ‘at liberty to walk’, and ‘dared to go abroad into gardens’. At last the matter was arranged, and on June 13, 1566, the warrant was issued for the complete restitution of his temporalities, on the condition of his paying to the Crown £1000 a year during his life.”

This portrait of a Pilkington both combative and disgraced is entirely absent from the biographical account of him which prefaces the Parker Society edition of his Works. A few years later, however, the Coopers asserted that it was only ‘in consequence of his spirited remonstrances’ that his lands were fully restored. C. W. Sutton, writing a few years before White, rehearsed Henry Machyn's account of a sermon during which, in March 1560, Pilkington had demanded ‘better living’ for the bishops and clergy and went on to observe that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and emoluments of his see’.