secular or ecclesiastical policy. On Mary's death Heath as chancellor at once proclaimed Elizabeth. Like Sir Thomas More he held that it was entirely within the competence of the national state, represented by parliament, to determine questions of the succession to the throne; and although Elizabeth did not renew his commission as lord chancellor, he continued to sit in the privy council for two months until the government had determined to complete the breach with the Roman Catholic Church; and as late as April 1559 he assisted the government by helping to arrange the Westminster Conference, and attempting to establish some common ground between his co-religionists and the emerging Elizabethan settlement. He refused to crown Elizabeth, however, because she would not have the coronation service accompanied with the elevation of the Host; and ecclesiastical ceremonies and doctrine could not, in Heath's view, be altered or abrogated by any mere national authority. Hence he steadily resisted Elizabeth's acts of supremacy and uniformity, although he had acquiesced in the acts of 1534 and 1549. Like others of Henry's bishops, he had been convinced by the events of Edward VI's reign that Sir Thomas More was right and Henry VIII was wrong in their attitude towards the claims of the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church. He was therefore necessarily deprived of his archbishopric in 1559, but he remained loyal to Elizabeth; and after a temporary confinement he was suffered to pass the remaining nineteen years of his life in peace and quiet, never attending public worship and sometimes hearing mass in private. The queen visited him more than once at his house at Chobham, Surrey; he died and was buried there at the end of 1578. References Authorities Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.; Acts of the Privy Council; Cal. State Papers, Domestic, Addenda, Spanish and Venetian; Kemp, Loseley Manuscripts; James Anthony Froude, History; Burnet, Collier, Dixon and Frere's Church Histories; John Strype, Works (General Index); Parker Soc. Publications (Gough's Index); Archbishops of York Lord chancellors of England 16th-century English Roman Catholic archbishops Archdeacons of Stafford People from Chobham, Surrey Anglican clergy from London Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Year of birth uncertain 1578 deaths