title: William Covell
text: William Covell (died 1613) was an English clergyman and writer.
  
  Life
  
  He was born in Chadderton, Lancashire, England, and proceeded MA at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1588.
  
  In the 1590s Covell took part in the controversy about how far the newly reformed Church of England should abandon the liturgy and hierarchy of the past, to which debate he contributed several broadly anti-puritan works.  In his later career he allied himself with Archbishop John Whitgift and afterwards with his successor, Richard Bancroft, who, like Covell, was Lancashire-born.
  
  William Covell died in 1613 at Mersham, Kent, where he was rector.
  
  Works
  
  Covell's interest to modern scholars now largely depends on one polemical work published in 1595, Polimanteia.  In the course of this work, dedicated to the 2nd Earl of Essex, Covell briefly mentioned contemporary authors such as Thomas Nashe, Samuel Daniel and William Shakespeare.
  
  Covell published in 1603 a religious volume which weighed in on the then-contemporary tension in the Church of England between tradition and puritanism.
  
  References
  Stephen Wright, ‘Covell, William (d. 1613)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
  
  Notes
  
  People from Chadderton
  English Calvinist and Reformed ministers
  Alumni of Queens' College, Cambridge
  Year of birth unknown
  16th-century births
  1613 deaths
  17th-century English Anglican priests
  16th-century Anglican theologians
  17th-century Anglican theologians
  Clergy from Lancashire
  17th-century English male writers
  17th-century English writers
  People from Mersham