In 1559, five years before Shakespeare's birth, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement finally severed the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. The bishop then remitted the outstanding sum to Shakespeare's former parish "as a matter of convenience". Shakespeare failed twice to pay his taxes for St Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, London, where he is listed by name for the year 1596/7, and he is not among those “in any of the annual lists of residents of the Clink parish (St Saviour's) compiled by the officers who made the rounds to collect tokens purchased by churchgoers for Easter Communion, which was compulsory.” An explanation is offered by historian Walter Godfrey, who suggests that the playwright's default at Bishopsgate was simply because he had moved to the Clink parish at the end of that year, where taxes were collected by the landowner (the bishop of Winchester) and not parish officials. He and his wife were buried in the church chancel, and a monument that included a half-figure bust of the poet was set into the north wall of the chancel. As leaser of the parish tithes in Stratford, he was a lay rector of the church. His brother Edmund, who followed him to London as an actor and died there, was buried in St Saviour's in Southwark "with a forenoone knell of the great bell", most likely paid for by the poet. Shakespeare's baptism and those of his siblings were entered into the parish church register, as were the births of his three children and the burials of family members. When Shakespeare was young, his father, John Shakespeare, was elected to several municipal offices, serving as an alderman and culminating in a term as bailiff, the chief magistrate of the town council, all of which required being a church member in good standing, and he participated in whitewashing over the Catholic images in the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross and taking down the rood screen some time in the 1560s or 1570s. Shakespeare and his immediate family were conforming members of the established Church of England. Shakespeare's known religious affiliation However, many scholars have speculated about his personal religious beliefs, based on analysis of the historical record and of his published work, with claims that Shakespeare's family may have had Catholic sympathies and that he himself was a secret Catholic. The general assumption about William Shakespeare's religious affiliation is that he was a conforming member of the established Church of England. The religious views of William Shakespeare are the subject of an ongoing scholarly debate dating back more than 150 years. William Shakespeare ( National Portrait Gallery), in the famous Chandos portrait
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