unable to do his work: the frost had congealed his colours when he had barely completed one portrait, and the envoys saw good reason to return home without waiting for the other two. But the result nowise tended to diminish the influence of Beckington, who not only, as we have seen, continued to receive new marks of the king's favour, but had ere this made friends at the court of Rome as well; by whose means, in that same year 1443, he was rather too precipitately nominated by the pope to the see of Salisbury, which it was supposed Bishop Ascough would vacate in order to be promoted to the see of Canterbury. But, as Ascough declined to leave Salisbury, John Stafford, bishop of Bath and Wells, was elevated to the primacy, and Beckington was made bishop of Bath in Stafford's room. His agent at Rome meanwhile had unluckily paid into the papal treasury a considerable sum for the firstfruits of Salisbury, and Beckington obtained a letter from the king himself, directing him to get it, if possible, charged to the account of the see of Bath. How the matter was settled does not appear; but on 13 Oct. Beckington was consecrated bishop of Bath and Wells by William Alnwick, bishop of Lincoln. The rite was performed in the old collegiate church at Eton, and Beckington the same day celebrated mass in pontificalibus under a tent within the new church, then not half built, and held his inaugural banquet within the college buildings. As might be expected in one who was so greatly in the confidence of the royal founder, he had taken a strong interest in the new college from the first, and one of his latest acts as archdeacon of Buckinghamshire was to exempt the provost from his own jurisdiction, placing him directly under the bishop of Lincoln as visitor and ordinary.
As bishop of Bath he had in 1445 a controversy with Nicholas Frome, abbot of Glastonbury, an old man who, tenacious of the privileges of his monastery, resented episcopal visitation, and whom Beckington, with unseemly severity, taunted with the infirmities of age. He had a much more pleasing correspondence with Thomas Chandler, who was first warden of Winchester College, then warden of New College, Oxford, and afterwards chancellor of Wells, who looked up to him as a patron. But on the whole it may be said that his personal history, after he became bishop, is uninteresting. His name occurs as trier of petitions in parliament from 1444 to 1453, but no particular act is recorded of him. On 18 June 1452 he obtained an exemption from further attendance in parliament on account of his age and infirmities — a privilege which Edward IV confirmed to him in 1461. He died at Wells on 14 Jan. 1465, and was buried in a fine tomb, built by himself in his lifetime, in the south aisle of the choir. In our own day, during some repairs of the cathedral in 1850, this tomb was opened, and the remains of his skeleton were inspected. It was that of a tall man with a well-formed skull.
Active as his life was, and interesting also in a literary point of view, from his correspondence with learned men both in England and at Home, Beckington's chief claim upon the regard of posterity is the munificence with which he adorned with fine buildings his cathedral city of Wells. Besides rebuilding the episcopal palace, he supplied the town with a public conduit and fountain, and erected the close of the vicars choral and fifteen tenements in the market place. His curious rebus, a flaming beacon (commonly spelt bekyn in those days) and a tun or barrel, is seen carved in various quarters, not only at Wells, but at Winchester and in Lincoln College, Oxford. His bequests in his will were princely, and show his strong attachment, not only to the colleges and places of education, but to all the different churches with which he had been connected.
[Memoir by Nicolas, prefixed to Journal of an Embassy to the Count of Armagnac; Official Correspondence of Bekynton, edited by G. Williams, B.D., in Rolls Series, in the introduction to which are some important corrections of Nicolas; Chandler's Life of Waynflete.]
BECKINSALL, JOHN. [See Bekinsau.]
BECKLEY, WILLIAM (d. 1438), Carmelite, was born in Kent, probably in the
neighbourhood of Sandwich, where he appears to have entered the order of the Carmelites in early life. While still young he proceeded to Cambridge, where the Carmelites had had
a house since the year 1291. Here he seems
to have taken his doctor's degree in divinity,
and to have established a considerable reputation as a theologian. Bale praises his modesty of speech, and his firm proceedings
against evildoers in all the assemblies ('conventibus') over which he presided. This incidental remark would alone prove him to
have been a man of mark among the English
Carmelites, even without the next sentence,
in which we are told that while Beckley was
engaged in the king's business Thomas Walden used to protect his interests at Cambridge
against the complaints of his fellow-doctors
there. Tanner makes mention of a letter from
the chancellor and university of Cambridge
