Thomas Bailey (priest)

Thomas Bailey or Bayly (died c. 1657) was a seventeenth-century English religious controversialist, a Royalist Church of England clergyman who converted to Catholicism.

Portrait of Thomas Bailey by David Loggan

Biography

Bailey's father was Lewis Bayly, Bishop of Bangor, and a brother was the scholar and clergyman John Bayly (1595/6–1633). Bailey was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge.^[1] He began as a priest within his father's diocese; in 1634 he became Rector of Holgate, Shropshire, and in 1638 the sub-dean of Wells. He served as a commissioned officer in defence of Raglan Castle in 1646, and was briefly imprisoned in Newgate gaol for writing against the Commonwealth after Charles I was executed in 1649.

In that year he also defended Charles against allegations that he had been a Catholic. In Certamen Religiosum he reported on religious discussions from 1646 between Charles and Henry Somerset, 1st Marquess of Worcester, at Raglan Castle. Bailey attended the Marquess, as his chaplain.^[2] The work proved controversial, and was attacked by Hamon L'Estrange,^[3] Christopher Cartwright, and Peter Heylyn.

However, Bailey then made his way to Europe, and had himself converted to Catholicism by the time of his 1654 End to Controversy. A Life of John Fisher was issued under Bailey's name in 1655, though it was in fact a re-publication of a much earlier text which Richard Hall (died 1604) had translated into Latin.^[4]

Works

• The royal charter granted unto kings, by God himself, 1649
• Certamen religiosum, 1649
• An End to Controversy between the Roman Catholique and the Protestant Religions Justified, 1654