The provision that the Provost should be in Holy Orders seems only once to have been violated. Roger Whelpdale (1404), indeed, seems only to have received priest’s orders after his election; but in the person of Thomas Francis all precedents were violated. He was a Doctor of Medicine, of Christ Church, a native of Chester, and Regius Professor of Medicine; and was in 1561, it would seem by Royal influence, intruded into the Provostship. Serious disturbances seem to have taken place at his inauguration,[139] and in two years he had had enough of it. The irregularity prevailing at the time is evidenced by his offering in an extant letter to nominate Bernard Gilpin, the Apostle of the North, as his successor.[140] The Tudor sovereigns seem in this, as in other matters, to have found it difficult to set limits to their prerogative. Later in Elizabeth’s reign, on Henry Robinson’s promotion from the Provostship to the Bishopric of Carlisle, his chancellor had to write to the College, 8th Oct., 1598, signifying the Queen’s pleasure that the election of a Provost in his room “be respited till her Majesty be informed whether it belongs to her by prerogative, or to the Fellows, to chuse a successor.” No fault can be found with the Provosts of the College, as a rule, for want of care of its interests. The names of six occur in the Thanksgiving for the Founder and Benefactors of the College; and others could prefer a claim to the same distinction. Thomas Langton (1487), the first of the six, who was also Fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where his “Anathema” cup is still to be seen, died Bishop of Winchester, having been nominated just before his death to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He left memorial legacies both directly to the College, and indirectly to it through a benefaction to God’s House at Southampton. Christopher Bainbridge (1506), the next of the Benefactor Provosts, was Cardinal and Archbishop of York, poisoned at Rome by his steward, and buried under a magnificent renaissance monument which now adorns the Church of St. Thomas à Becket in that city. A chantry priest was till the Reformation paid £5 6_s._ 8_d._ for celebrating for the souls of these two benefactors in the Church of St. Michael in Bongate near Appleby, the capital of the county in which they were both born. Henry Robinson (1581), the third on the list, had been Principal of St. Edmund Hall, and died Bishop of Carlisle. His brass in Carlisle Cathedral, of which the College possesses a duplicate, says of his relations with the College, “invenit destructum, reliquit exstructum et instructum.” The College spent, 15th July, 1615, £23 3_s._ 3_d._ in celebrating his obsequies, and provided Chr. Potter with a funeral gown and hood to preach his funeral sermon; £10 was paid in 1617 for engraving his monument on copper, and 31_s._ 6_d._ for some impressions from the plate.