William Barlow (bishop, died 1568)

William Barlow (Barlowe; alias Finch) (died 1568) was an English Augustinian prior turned bishop of four dioceses, a complex figure of the Protestant Reformation. Aspects of his life await scholarly clarification. Labelled by some a "weathercock reformer", he was in fact a staunch evangelical, an anti-Catholic and collaborator in the Dissolution of the Monasteries and dismantling of church estates; and largely consistent in his approach, apart from an early anti-Lutheran tract and a supposed recantation under Mary I of England.

An Augustinian regular canon, he became prior of Bromehill Priory, Weeting, Norfolk in 1524, having headed some smaller houses. It was dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey in 1528.

Already by 1526 he was in contact with the literature of the Protestant reformers, having brought a work of Bugenhagen to Thomas More.

He certainly was closely associated with the Boleyn party at Court, and so with the anti-Wolsey faction, but the details are unclear. His brother John Barlow was a member of the household of Anne Boleyn. It is said that William was sent by Henry VIII as a courier to William Knight in Rome, on the divorce negotiations; but this is also doubted, as more likely his brother John, at the end of 1527. He was also chaplain to George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, and owed advancement to the Boleyn interest at court. There is a further confused story about presentation to the living of Sundridge, Kent, and a verbal muddle with Tonbridge.

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