John White (chaplain)

John White (1570–1615) was an English clergyman, known as a royal chaplain and controversialist.

The son of Peter White, vicar of St. Neots, Huntingdonshire, and of the neighbouring parish of Eaton Socon in Bedfordshire, he was born at Eaton Socon; Francis White was his brother. White was educated at St. Neots grammar school. He was admitted a sizar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on 15 February 1586, was scholar from Lady-day 1588 to Michaelmas 1592, and graduated B.A. in 1590, M.A. in 1593, and D.D. in 1612.

White was appointed vicar of Leyland, then of Eccles, Lancashire, and fellow of the Collegiate Church, Manchester, in 1606. He resigned these offices in 1609 on being presented by Sir John Crofts to the rectory of Barsham in Suffolk. In 1614 or 1615 he was made chaplain in ordinary to James I.

White died, at the age of 45, in 1615, in Lombard Street, London. He was buried on 28 May 1615 at the church of St Mary Woolnoth. He left seven children. The eldest, John, entered Gonville and Caius College in 1611, aged 16, and became vicar of Eaton Socon; another son is mentioned by Thomas Fuller as a druggist in Lombard Street.

White wrote The Way to the True Church: wherein the principal Motives perswading to Romanisme are familiarly disputed and driven to their Issues, London, 1608. It was directed against the Treatise of Faith of the Jesuit John Percy. which was then being circulated in manuscript. The work set off a controversy, and further editions of this defence of Reformed theology came out in 1610, 1612, and 1616.Anthony Wotton also attacked Percy's work, and in so doing in A Trial of the Romish Clergies Title to the Church (1608) invoked Antichrist against the Catholic Church.

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