Thomas Barlow (bishop)

Thomas Barlow (1608/9 – 8 October 1691) was an English academic and clergyman, who became Provost of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Bishop of Lincoln. He was considered, in his own times and by Edmund Venables writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, to have been a trimmer, a reputation mixed in with his academic and other writings on casuistry. His views were in fact Calvinist and strongly anti-Catholic, and he was one of the last English bishops to identify the Pope as the Antichrist. He worked in the 1660s for the 'comprehension' of nonconformists, but supported the crackdown of the mid-1680s; and declared loyalty to James II of England on his accession, having strongly supported the Exclusion Bill which would have denied the Catholic James the succession.

He was the son of Richard Barlow of Long-gill in the parish of Orton, Westmoreland, and was educated at the grammar school at Appleby. In his seventeenth year he entered Queen's College, Oxford, as a servitor, rising to be a tabarder, taking his degree of B.A. in 1630, and M.A. in 1633, in which year he was elected fellow of his college. In 1635 he was appointed metaphysical reader to the university, and was regarded as a master of casuistry, logic, and philosophy. One of his pupils was John Owen.

At Oxford he associated with Robert Sanderson, and particularly Robert Boyle, who made Oxford his chief residence from 1654 to 1668. Barlow was a learned Calvinist who opposed Jeremy Taylor and George Bull, and with Thomas Tully was one of the guardians in Interregnum Oxford of acceptable orthodoxy. On the death of John Rouse, Barlow was elected to the librarianship of the Bodleian on 6 April 1652, a post which he held until he succeeded to the Lady Margaret professorship in 1660. He favoured scholars (Anthony à Wood, Anthony Horneck whom he had appointed as chaplain in Queen's, Thomas Fuller) and was hospitable to Christopher Davenport. He spoke of infant baptism in a letter written to John Tombes, which later affected his prospect of preferment.

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