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‘An Honourable and Elect Lady’: The Faith of Isabel, Lady Bowes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2016
Extract
The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 12: Life and Thought in the Northern Church , 1999 , pp. 407 - 419
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999
References
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