MALVERN Civic Society’s April talk to a large audience in the Eden Centre focused on John Whitgift.

The Bishop of Worcester and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury tried to steer a middle course between Catholics and Protestants in a turbulent and often violent 16th century.

The talk was given by Dr Christopher Barnett MBE, a local historian who for 26 years was head of Whitgift, one of the country’s leading schools which was founded by the Archbishop in 1596.

Dr Barnett used extensive material and illustrations from his biography of the famous clergyman to give a picture of a highly-influential figure in church and state.

He explained how Whitgift rose up through Cambridge University to the top of the tree in the church, becoming a close friend of Elizabeth I who often stayed with him.

Whitgift even had a grandstand constructed and garlanded with flowers for the Queen and her ladies to watch the horse races near his Mansion House in Croydon.

At the end of her final illness Elizabeth died in his arms.

William Shakespeare attacked the Archbishop, chief censor in London, in the Ghost’s speech in Hamlet, saying ‘with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, O wicked wit and gifts’.

And Whitgift’s clashes with Christopher Marlowe led to rumours he might have been involved in the writer’s murder.

By contrast, another leading playwright of the time, Edmund Spenser, made Whitgift a very positive character in his masterpiece The Faerie Queene.