c. 1610 – 1643 · English writer, MP and Royalist Secretary of State
Falkland gathered a circle of scholars and divines around his house at Great Tew, where — under the influence of William Chillingworth — he came to approach religious questions “rather by reason than by tradition or authority.” Elected to the Commons in 1640, he denied that bishops existed by divine right yet opposed abolishing episcopacy, fearing a Presbyterian settlement would prove just as tyrannical — the argument that produced this sentence. He became Secretary of State to Charles I in 1642 and, increasingly despairing of the Civil War, was killed at the First Battle of Newbury on 20 September 1643, aged 32 or 33 — his birth year is recorded only as 1609 or 1610.