Note 230 — Chapter VIII · 1578-1584

If we are to believe Camden, who was a fellow-student of Parsons’ at Balliol, this guise was not altogether strange to him. “He was,” he says, “a violent, fierce-natured man of rough behaviour.... When he was young the fellow was much noted for his singular impudency and disorder in apparel, going in great barrel hose, as was the fashion of hacksters in those days, and drawing also deep in a barrel of ale.” Another contemporary of his, Archbishop Abbot, who was a Fellow of Balliol, describes him as being “a man wonderfully given to scoffing, and with that bitterness which was the cause that none of the company loved him.” He was Bursar of Balliol—and of course a Protestant—until 1573, when he got into trouble over his accounts, and for this and other reasons he resigned his Fellowship. He lived abroad thenceforward until he returned, as here described, as Provincial of the Jesuits for England, having entered the Society in 1575.