John Aylmer had served as chaplain to…

John Aylmer had served as chaplain to Henry Grey (later the Duke of Suffolk) and as tutor to Grey's daughter Lady Jane Grey.

During Queen Mary's vigorous restoration of Roman Catholicism, Aylmer, who had been given an archdeaconate in 1553, lost his post because of his opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation.

While living in exile in Strassburg and then in Zürich in 1559, he had written a reply, entitled An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes, to John Knox's famous First blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women.

Knox has argued that by both natural law and revealed religion, women are unfit to rule.

After the accession of the Protestant queen Elizabeth, Aylmer had returned to England and become known for his vigorous enforcement of the Act of Uniformity of 1559 within his Church of England diocese.

Becoming archdeacon of Lincoln in 1562 and appointed a member of the convocation that reformed and settled the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, he had been consecrated in 1577 as bishop of London.

His harsh treatment of all (whether Puritan or Roman Catholic) who differ with him on ecclesiastical questions causes him to be characterized in 1579 as “Morrell,” the bad shepherd, in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, considered the first outstanding pastoral poem in English.

Thomas North in this same year translates Jacques Amyot's French version of Plutarch's Parallel Lives as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, which has been described as one of the earliest masterpieces of English prose.