Thomas Bilson (1547 – 18 June 1616) was an Anglican Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of Winchester. With Miles Smith, he oversaw the final edit and printing of the King James Bible.
Life
Years under the Tudors (1547–1603) Thomas Bilson's father, Harmann Bilson, is said to have been a descendant of the Duke of Bavaria through his own grandmother, the wife of Arnold Bilson, a citizen of "High Germany". Harmann became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford in 1537 and graduated B.A. on 27 March 1538/39. Thomas was one of his six children (three sons and three daughters), and was born in the city of Winchester. Other sources highlight the fact that the celebrated William Twisse was a nephew of Thomas Bilson's.
Bilson was educated at William of Wykeham's twin foundations of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He was a fellow of New College from 1563-1572, graduating B.A. in 1566 and M.A. in 1570. He began to distinguish himself as a poet until, on receiving ordination, he gave himself wholly to theological studies, in which he was awarded B.D. in 1579 and D.D. in 1580/81. He was soon made prebendary of Winchester, and headmaster of the college there until 1579 and warden from 1581 to 1596. His pupils there included John Owen, and Thomas James, whom he influenced in the direction of patristics. In 1596, he was made Bishop of Worcester, where he found Warwick uncomfortably full of recusant Roman Catholics. For appointment in 1597 to the wealthy see of Winchester, he paid a £400 annuity to Elizabeth I.
The True Difference
Thomas engaged in most of the polemical contests of his day, as a stiff partisan of the Church of England. In 1585, he published his The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth. (A pirated edition appeared in London in the following year.) This work took aim at the Jesuits and replied to Cardinal William Allen's Defence of the English Catholics (Ingoldstadt, 1584). It was also a theoretical work on the "Christian commonwealth" and it enjoyed publishing success.
Anthony à Wood remarked that Queen Elizabeth employed Bilson to write the book (which gave "strange liberty" for subjects to cast off their religious obedience to the state), as a convenience to shelter, with the Dutch Protestants, from the influence of king Philip II of Spain, as much as to counter the Jesuits' attacks on Elizabeth I. Glenn Burgess considered that, in The True Difference, Bilson showed a sense of the diversity of legitimate political systems. Bilson conceded nothing to popular sovereignty, but wrote that there were occasions when a king might forfeit his powers. James Shapiro observed that Bilson "does his best to walk a fine line", in discussing 'political icons', i.e. pictures of the monarch, echoing Lamont's verdict, "a judicious piece of tightrope walking on behalf of an embarrassed queen".
Theological controversy
A theological argument over the Harrowing of Hell led to several attacks on Bilson personally in what is now called the Descensus controversy. Bilson's literal views on the descent of Christ into Hell were orthodox for "conformist" Anglicans of the time, while the Puritan wing of the church preferred a metaphorical or spiritual reading. He maintained that Christ went to hell, not to suffer, but to wrest the keys of hell out of the Devil's hands. For this doctrine he was severely handled by Henry Jacob and also by other Puritans. Hugh Broughton, a noted Hebraist, was excluded from the translators of the King James Bible, and became a vehement early critic.
The origin of Broughton's published attack on Bilson as a scholar and theologian, from 1604, is thought to lie in a sermon Bilson gave in 1597, which Broughton, at first and wrongly, thought supported his own view that hell and paradise coincided in place. From another direction the Roman Catholic controversialist Richard Broughton also attacked Anglican conformists through Bilson's views, writing in 1607. Much feeling was excited by the controversy, and Queen Elizabeth, in her ire, commanded Bilson "neither to desert the doctrine, nor let the calling which he bore in the Church of God, be trampled under foot, by such unquiet refusers of truth and authority."
Bilson's most famous work was entitled The Perpetual Government of Christ's Church and was published in 1593. It was a systematic attack on Presbyterian polity and an able defence of Episcopal polity. Following on from John Bridges, the work is still regarded as one of the strongest books ever written in behalf of episcopacy.