Abbot was nothing of a courtier, and, indeed, no very pleasant-natured man. He was sour of aspect and morose; gloomy and fanatic in religion, and no less swift to send religious opponents to the stake than the Catholic inquisitors of a generation before his time. He had a strong and militant affection for the reformed religion, and held a singularly lonely position between the levelling puritanical-democratic doctrines of the age and the High Church party. A Calvinistic narrowness distinguished this great man's public acts, and he was sufficiently Puritan in spirit to look with disfavour upon, and to absolutely forbid, Sunday sports. His truculent religious views appeared in a lurid light shortly after he became Archbishop, when he condemned two Arians to death for what he held to be "blasphemous heresy." These two unfortunate men, Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, were burnt in 1614, three years after their sentence, as the "recompence of their pride and impiety." Meanwhile, the mind of the Archbishop was liberal enough in other directions. He could send religious dissenters to a horrible death, and look back with satisfaction upon his handiwork, while, at the same time, he was maturing the plans and provisions for the noble almshouse that still stands in Guildford High Street and bears the honoured name of Abbot's Hospital. [Sidenote: _A SAD MISCHANCE_] In 1619 he laid the first stone of his "Hospital," and three years later had the satisfaction of seeing it incorporated by Royal Charter; a satisfaction clouded by an accident that embittered the remainder of his life. The story of this untoward event illustrates at once the morbid habit of his mind and the bitter passions of those times. It was in 1621, while with a hunting party in Bramshill Park, that this thing befell. A large party had assembled by the invitation of Lord Zouch, and chased the deer through the glades of that lovely park. The Archbishop drew his bow at a buck, and at the same time that the arrow sped, a gamekeeper, one Peter Hawkins, darted forward between the trees, and received the shaft in his heart. A coroner's jury returned a verdict by which the accident was attributed to the man's negligence in exposing himself to danger after having been warned; but Abbot was greatly distressed, and so heavily did the occurrence weigh upon him that, to the time of his death, in 1632, he kept a monthly fast on a Tuesday, the day of the gamekeeper's death. He also settled an annuity of £20 upon the man's widow.