On 30 Jan. 1565–6 he granted a charter of incorporation to the citizens of Durham to be governed by an alderman and twelve burgesses. He also incorporated several of the trade companies of the city. Stimulated, it is said, by the example of his friend Bernard Gilpin, he founded and endowed a free grammar school at Rivington, which was opened in 1566, and he encouraged the foundation of a free school at Darlington. The church at Rivington was founded by his father.
Pilkington died at Bishop Auckland on 23 Jan. 1575–6, aged 55, leaving a wife and two daughters, Deborah and Ruth. He was buried at Auckland, but his remains were removed to Durham Cathedral and interred before the high altar on 24 May 1576. His tomb, now destroyed, contained a very long Latin inscription. In his will, dated 4 Feb. 1571–2, he desired to be buried with ‘as few popish ceremonies as may be, or vain cost,’ and he left his library at Auckland to ‘the school at Rivington and to poor collegers and others.’ None of his books remain at Rivington.
The church at Rivington contains a curious painting representing the bishop's parents and their twelve children. The only known portrait of the bishop is given in this picture, which was damaged by fire in 1834, but has been restored from a copy taken in 1821.
Among his recorded writings are several which were perhaps never printed. Those that survive are: 1. ‘Disputation on the Sacrament with W. Glynn, D.D.’ (in Foxe's ‘Actes and Monuments’). 2. ‘Sermon before the University of Cambridge on the Restitution of Bucer and Fagius’ (in Foxe's ‘Actes and Monuments,’ and in Latin in Bucer's ‘Scripta Anglicana’). 3. ‘Aggeus the Prophete declared by a large Commentary,’ London, 1560, 8vo. 4. ‘Aggeus and Abdias, Prophetes; the one corrected, the other newly added,’ &c., London, 1562, 8vo. 5. ‘A Confutacion of an Addicion, with an Apologye written and cast in the Stretes of West Chester, against the causes of burning Paules Church,’ &c., 1563, 8vo. 6. ‘A Godlie Exposition upon certaine Chapters of Nehemiah,’ Cambridge, 1585, 4to; edited by John Foxe. The above, with extracts from the statutes of Rivington School, and a ‘Tractatus de Predestinatione,’ from the manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, were collected as Pilkington's works for the Parker Society (ed. Scholefield) in 1842. He wrote the homilies against gluttony, drunkenness, and excess of apparel.
The bishop's younger brother, John (1529?–1603), matriculated as a sizar of St. John's College, Cambridge, in May 1544, obtained a scholarship there, and is commemorated for his learning in Ascham's account of the college (Strype, Cheke, p. 49). He graduated B.A. in 1546, M.A. 1549, B.D. 1561, and was elected a fellow of Pembroke Hall in 1547. He was prebendary (of Mapesbury) in St. Paul's Cathedral from 20 Nov. 1559 to 1562, was ordained priest by Bishop Grindal in January 1560, was collated next year by his brother James, whose chaplain he was, to a Durham prebend, and from 1562 until his death in the autumn of 1603 was archdeacon of Durham and rector of Easington. He was buried at St. Oswald's, Durham, on 31 Oct. 1603. He appears to have married Ann Forde of London in November 1564.
[Strype's Works (see references in general index, 1828); Scholefield's Memoirs in Pilkington's Works (Parker Soc.), 1842; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. i. 344; Cooper's Annals of Cambridge, ii. 31, 151, 154, 161; Baker's St. John's, Cambridge (ed. Mayor); Harland and Axon's Genealogy of the Pilkingtons, 1875; Pilkington's Lancashire Family of Pilkington, 1894 (with portrait, also in Trans. Historic Soc. of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1893); Durham Wills (Surtees Soc.), ii. 8; Machyn's Diary (Camden Soc.), 1847; Foxe's Actes and Monuments; Surtees's Durham; Gent. Mag. November 1860, p. 484; Fuller's Worthies and Church History; Milman's St. Paul's Cathedral; 1868, p. 277; Longman's St. Paul's Cathedral, 1873, p. 57; Gilpin's Bernard Gilpin, 1830, p. 147; Mullinger's Univ. of Cambridge, ii. 1884.]
PILKINGTON, LÆTITIA (1712–1750), adventuress, born at Dublin in 1712, was second child of Dr. Van Lewen, a man-midwife of Dutch origin, who was educated at Leyden under Boerhaave, and settled in Dublin about 1710. Her grandmother, Elizabeth, who married a Roman catholic officer in James II's army, was one of the twenty-one children of a Colonel Mead by a daughter of the Earl of Kilmallock. A precocious child, Lætitia was greatly indulged by her father, whom, in 1729, she persuaded to allow her to marry a penniless Irish parson named Matthew Pilkington [see below], the son of a watchmaker. They lived upon the bounty of Van Lewen, until Pilkington obtained the post of chaplain to Lady Charlemont. Shortly after this event, about 1730, with the help of Dr. Delany's influence [see Delany, Patrick] Pilkington and his wife pushed themselves into Swift's favour. Swift was then in residence at Dublin as dean of St. Patrick's, and he seems to have been taken by Lætitia's wit, docility, and free-
