Humphrey Ely

brother to Will. Ely sometimes president of S. Johns coll. was born in Herefordshire, and from being a Student in Brasnose, was chose Scholar of S. Johns coll. before mention’d, in 1566. But before he took a degree, or (as I think) was made Fellow, he left that place, and giving a farewel to his friends, country, and religion, he crossed the Seas, settled at Doway, studied the Civil Law and became Licentiat therein. Afterwards he went to Rome, with his great friend Dr. Will. Allen, where being made Doctor of his faculty, he returned into France, and settling at Rheimes, was wholly taken up for a time in the correcting and printing the said Allens books. At length upon the breaking out of the civil dissentions in that country, he was called into Loraine in 1588. About which time he was made the publick and the Dukes professor of the Civil Law in the University of Pont à Mousson, where he continued till the day of his death. He was by those of his religion esteemed a wise and learned Priest, of sincere honesty, void of dissimulation, full of zeal to the truth, and equity, &c. But that which is mostly to be noted of him, is that upon a controversie that (k)(k) Jo. Pits. De illustr. Angl. Script. Aet. 17. nu. 1053. arose among the English popish Clergy concerning the receiving of an Archpriest into England, and the power that was to be allotted to him, he wrote, with a long preface to it,

Certain brief notes upon a brief apology set out under the name of the priests, united to the Archpriest. Paris about 1602—3. in tw. and oct. which book (written against Fa. Persons) I once saw among many other rarities of the like nature in Balliol coll. Library, given thereunto by that curious collector of choice books Sir Tho. Wendy of Haselingfield in Cambridgeshire, Knight of the Bath, sometimes Gentleman commoner of the said House. Our author Ely hath written other books, as ’tis said, but such I have not yet seen, nor can I say any more of him at this time,1603-4. only that he dying at Pont à Mousson on the Ides of of March in sixteen hundred and three, was buried there in the church of the Nuns called Clarissae, that is of the order of S. Clare. Over his grave was soon after a monument put, with a large inscription thereon, which for brevity sake I shall now omit.