Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Inge, Hugh
INGE or YNGE, HUGH, D.D. (d. 1528), archbishop of Dublin and lord chancellor of Ireland, born at Shepton Mallet, Somersetshire, became a scholar of Winchester College in 1480 (Kirby, Winchester Scholars, p. 86), and in 1484 became scholar, and in 1488 fellow, of New College, Oxford, where he graduated in arts and resided until 1496. He travelled in foreign parts, and received the degree of D.D. from a continental university, being incorporated in the same degree at Oxford on 3 April 1511 (Oxf. Univ. Reg., Oxf. Hist. Soc., i. 75). On his return home he was successively prebendary of East Harptree in the diocese of Bath and Wells, subchantor of Wells, guardian of Wapulham in the diocese of Lincoln, prebendary of Aust in the collegiate church of Westbury and diocese of Worcester, with the vicarage of Wellow in Bath and Wells annexed, vicar of Oldeston in Lincoln, and of Doulting (which he held from 1509 to 1512) and Weston Zoyland (in 1508), both on the presentation of the abbot and convent of Glastonbury. He was at Rome in 1504, when Cardinal Adrian de Castello [see Adrian] was elected to the see of Bath and Wells. On 13 Oct. of that year Henry VII directed Inge, with Silvestro Gigli [q. v.], bishop of Worcester, and Robert Shirborne, dean of St. Paul's, then the king's orators at the papal court, to administer to the cardinal the oaths of fealty and allegiance to the English king, and to receive from him a renunciation of all prejudicial clauses in the apostolic bulls connected with his translation.
Inge soon attracted the favourable notice of Wolsey, and to that minister he owed, he tells us, his promotion in 1512 to the Irish bishopric of Meath. At the suggestion of Campeggio, the official payments due from the new bishop were reduced from sixteen hundred florins to a thousand, in consideration of the diminished extent of the diocesan lands. While bishop of Meath Inge caused the ancient rolls of proxies, synodals, &c., to be transcribed, and the copy is extant. In 1521 he was appointed to the archbishopric of Dublin. In 1527 he was made lord chancellor of Ireland, and held the office until his death, being 'accounted a person of great probity and justice' (Wood, Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, ii. 732). He strongly sympathised with Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth earl of Kildare [q. v.], and his party, and protested in a letter written to Wolsey Jointly with Chief-justice Bermingham, against Kildare's imprisonment in 1528, and against the accusation of treason brought against him. Polydore Vergil gives Inge, whom he miscalls Hugo Hynk, the character of 'an honest man, and one who by many good offices had got a great share of intimacy and familiarity with the Earl of Kildare.' Vergil adds that `he had put the kingdom in as good a condition as the untowardness of the wild Irish would suffer him' (Hist. Angl. ed. 1578, p.677). He restored the palace of St. Sepulchre, Dublin, where a memorial of him remains. He died in Dublin on 3 Aug. 1528, of the English sweat,'and was buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral.
[Sir James Ware's Works, ed. Harris, i. 153, 346; Weaver's Somerset Incumbents; Cotton's Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ, ii. 18, iii. 115, v. 221; Cogan's Diocese of Meath, i. 83; D'Alton's Archbishops of Dublin, p. 182; Smyth's Law Officers of Ireland, p. 18; Book of Obits and Martyrology of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, ed. 1844, p. 35; Leeper's Historical Handbook of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, 2nd edit. p. 89; Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1509-73; Letters and Papers, For. and Dom., Hen. VIII, i. 1509-14, iv. pt. ii. 1526-8; Bagwell's Ireland under the Tudors, i. 150, 290-1.]