the following day removed Robert Stratford, the archbishop's brother, from his office as chancellor, and had a number of prominent judges and merchants arrested. The archbishop himself was at Charing, and on receipt of the news took refuge with the monks of Christchurch at Canterbury. On 2 Dec. the king summoned him to attend at court; the archbishop excused himself from compliance, and made his defence in a series of sermons and letters. On 29 Dec. he preached on the text ‘In diebus suis non timuit principem’ (Ecclesiasticus, xlviii. 12), comparing himself to St. Thomas of Canterbury, and denouncing all who broke the great charter. On 1 Jan. 1341 he addressed a long letter of remonstrance to the king. On 28 Jan. he wrote to the new chancellor, begging him to stay execution of the collection of the clerical grant, and on the following day directed the bishops to forbid it. Edward and his advisers replied on 10 Feb. in a long letter of violent abuse, called a ‘libellus famosus;’ Stratford had kept him without funds and so caused the failure of the late expedition, and was responsible for all the rash policy of the last eight years. On 18 Feb. William Kildesby, keeper of the privy seal, and certain Brabant merchants appeared at Canterbury, summoning Stratford to go to Flanders as security for the king's debts. Stratford replied in a sermon on Ash Wednesday and in a long letter to the king, in which he claimed to be tried before his peers. On 23 April parliament met. Stratford was ordered to appear in the court of exchequer and hear the charges against him. The king refused to meet the archbishop, and Stratford on his part insisted on taking his place in parliament. On 27 April the chamberlain refused him admission to the Painted Chamber, where the bishops were sitting, but Stratford, with a conscious imitation of Thomas Becket, forced his way in. On 1 May he offered to clear himself before parliament, and on 3 May a committee of lords was appointed to advise the king whether the peers were liable to be tried out of parliament. The committee reported adversely, and Edward, finding himself compelled to yield, consented on 7 May to a formal reconciliation (see principally Birchington, pp. 22–41; Hemingburgh, ii. 363–88).
Though Stratford never resumed his old position in politics, his friendly relations with the king were after a time restored. In October 1341, while Stratford was holding a provincial synod at St. Paul's, a more complete reconciliation was effected between him and the king (Murimuth, p. 122). He was the king's adviser in refusing to receive the two cardinals whom the pope sent to negotiate for peace in August 1342 (ib. p. 125), and in the parliament of April 1343 his full restoration to favour was marked by the annulment of the proceedings against him as contrary to reason and truth (Fœdera, ii. 1141–54).
During the last years of his life Stratford, though occasionally consulted by the king, was occupied mainly with ecclesiastical affairs. In October 1343 he proposed to visit the diocese of Norwich, and, being resisted by the bishop and clergy, laid both bishop and prior under excommunication. Edward acted under Stratford's advice in his negotiations with the pope as to papal privileges in England during 1344 and 1345, and the legates who came to England in the latter year were long entertained by Stratford (Murimuth, pp. 157–62, 176–7). Stratford was head of the council during the king's absence abroad in July 1345 and during the campaign of Crécy in 1346 (Fœdera, iii. 50, 85). Perhaps his last public appearance of note was on 16 Aug. 1346, when he read the convention of the French king for a Norman invasion of England at St. Paul's (Murimuth, p. 211). In 1348 he fell ill at Maidstone. Thence he was taken to Mayfield in Sussex, where he died on 23 Aug. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral near the high altar. His tomb bears a sculptured effigy (engraved in Longman's ‘Edward III,’ i. 179).
Stratford is described as a man of great wisdom and a notable doctor of canon and civil law (Baker, p. 55). He was rather a politician than an ecclesiastic, and Birchington speaks of him as being in the early years of his archiepiscopate too much absorbed in worldly affairs (Anglia Sacra, i. 20). But he was more than a capable administrator, and was ‘somewhat of a statesman’ (Stubbs). He was ‘the most powerful adviser of the constitutional party’ (ib.), and his sympathies kept him from supporting Isabella and Mortimer, and governed his administration of affairs for the ten years that followed their fall. By his resistance to Edward III in 1341 he established the great principle that peers should only be tried before their own order in full parliament.
Stratford spent much money on the parish church of his native town; he widened the north aisle and built the south aisle, in which he established a chantry in honour of Thomas Becket. He endowed a college of priests in connection with the chantry, and purchased the advowson of the church
