William Downham, D.D., was born in Norfolk, elected Fellow of Magdalene College, Oxford, in 1544, and appointed chaplain to the Lady Elizabeth, who, when queen, nominated him to a Canonry in Westminster in 1560; and on the 4th May, 1561, he was consecrated Bishop of Chester. He died in November, 1577, aged 72, and was buried in the Cathedral of Chester, with a monumental inscription, preserved by Webb, but the monument itself has long since perished. His sons were eminent theologians, and had the merit suitably rewarded. George Downham became Bishop of Derry, and John Downham, B.D., a learned writer, had various preferments. William Chadderton, D.D., was born at Nuthurst, near Manchester. He was educated at the Grammar School of Manchester, and afterwards became Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1567 he was appointed Regius and Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, and the following year President of Queen’s College. Shortly afterwards he became a Canon of Westminster, and was fortunate in being appointed chaplain to the royal favourite, Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to whom he was chiefly indebted for his subsequent promotion. In 1568 he became Archdeacon of York, and held the dignity for ten years. In 1579 he was nominated to the see of Chester, which had been for some time vacant, and in the same year he accepted the Wardenship of Manchester, where he chiefly resided. He was a member of the Ecclesiastical Commission for the North; and it must be admitted that he used considerable severity towards the Papists, fines and imprisonments being amongst the strongest arguments he employed to induce that body to acknowledge the queen’s supremacy. One of the priests executed at Lancaster, in 1584, as a traitor and rebel, complained of Chadderton as “a Calvinist, and a false and cruel Bishop,” charges which lose much of their severity when proceeding from the friend of Campian and Parsons. Antony á Wood says, that “the Bishop showed more respect to a cloak than a cassock,” and there is no doubt that he was a successful preacher, and a zealous puritan; although by a reference to the Act Books of the Bishop of Chester it will be found that he was strict in enforcing the use of clerical vestments, and both suspended and deprived some of his clergy for their disregard of the Rubric. On the 5th April, 1595, he was translated to Lincoln, when he resigned the Wardenship of Manchester. He died at Southoe, in Huntingdonshire, April 11th, 1608.