Cecil (afterwards Lord Burghley) [q. v.], then the duke's secretary, declaring that he was destitute, and expressing his wish for some clerical preferment which would not take him far from the court (Jackson). He received a promise of a prebend at York, and while expressing his thanks for this in another letter to Cecil of 11 June 1549, says that he hopes that he shall soon get it, for ‘my childer haue bene fed so long with hope that they are uery lene, i would fayne haue them fatter’ (ib.) The prebend came to him on 12 Feb. 1550 (Le Neve, iii. 176). In July the privy council directed that he should be elected provost of Oriel College, Oxford, but an election had already been made to the office. He wrote to Cecil in September, asking for the presidentship of Magdalen College, Oxford, and he also applied for an archdeaconry, but failed in both requests. Deeply disappointed, he wrote a despondent letter to Cecil, saying that, if he could have his health, he could get his living in Holland and many places in Germany, and asking for license to go to Germany, carrying ‘ii litle horses’ with him, for he was ‘every day more and more vexed with the stone;’ he desired to drink ‘only rhenish wine’ at small cost, for he believed that would relieve him; and he promised that if he was allowed to retain his ‘poor prebend’ while abroad, he would correct the English translation of the Bible, giving reasons for his corrections, would finish his ‘great herball,’ and write a book on fishes, stones, and metals (Jackson). In November, however, he was appointed to the deanery of Wells, vacant by the deprivation of Dean Goodman. He found some difficulty in establishing himself in his office, for when Somerset got hold of the episcopal palace he made the dean's house over to the bishop, and Goodman had therefore lived in a prebendal house, which he was not willing to resign to his successor (Tytler, Edward VI, i. 372). Turner complained in 1551 that he had neither house nor a foot of land, and that he was in uncomfortable quarters, and could not go to his book ‘for the crying of childer.’ An order was issued by the crown for his installation on 24 March, and on 10 April he received a dispensation from residence without loss of emoluments while preaching the gospel within the kingdom (ib.; Wells Cathedral Manuscripts, p. 237). About this time, while acting as lecturer at Isleworth, Middlesex, he had a controversy with Robert Cooke, a man of heretical opinions, who held a subordinate office at court. In answer to Cooke, he wrote his ‘Preservative or Triacle agaynst the Poyson of Pelagius’ (Strype,, Memorials, ii. i. 111; Wood, Athenæ, i. 362). On 21 Dec. 1552 he was ordained priest by Bishop Ridley (Cooper). In 1553 he was deprived of his deanery, in which Goodman was reinstated. He left England and remained abroad during Mary's reign, staying at Bonn, Strasburg, Spires, Worms, Frankfort, Mayence, Cologne, and Weissenberg, at both which last-named places he had gardens, at Chur and at Basle. He was one of the many writers whose books were prohibited as heretical by a proclamation of the council in 1555 (Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vii. 127–8).
He returned to England on the accession of Elizabeth, and on 10 Sept. 1559 preached at St. Paul's Cross before the lord mayor and a great audience (Machyn, p. 210). He brought a suit against Goodman for his restitution to the deanery of Wells, which was decided in his favour by a commission, and he was restored by royal order on 18 June 1560 (Wells Cathedral Manuscripts, p. 240). Moreover, he received possession of the dean's house and the prebend and rectory of Wedmore, which anciently pertained to the deanery, and had been restored to it by Mary (ib. p. 271; Reynolds, Wells Cathedral, Pref. p. v). Although he was neither present at the debate in convocation for altering certain rites and ceremonies of the church on 13 Feb. 1562, nor voted by proxy, he was violently opposed to all ceremonial observance, contemned episcopal authority, and was a conspicuous member of the party that endeavoured to bring the church into conformity with the reformed churches of Germany and Switzerland; indeed, one of his books that had been printed abroad and was at this time largely read in England is said to have animated the strife on these matters (Strype, Grindal, p. 145). He used to call the bishops ‘white coats’ and ‘tippet gentlemen’ in ridicule of their robes, and maintained that they had no more authority over him than he over them, unless it were given them ‘by their holy father the pope.’ The use of the square cap was particularly obnoxious to him, and he is said to have ordered an adulterer to wear one while doing his open penance, and to have so trained his dog that at a word from him it plucked off the square cap of a bishop who was dining with him (Strype,, Parker, i. 301). His bishop, Gilbert Berkeley [q. v.], was so ‘encumbered’ with his unbecoming behaviour and his indiscreet language in the pulpit that in March 1564 he wrote to Cecil and to the archbishop complaining of him, and he was suspended for nonconformity.
After his suspension he appears to have resided in Crutched Friars, London, where he
