Immediately after the death of archbishop Arundel he was nominated by the king to the archbishopric, elected on the 4th of March, translated by papal bull on the 28th of April, and received the pall without going to Rome for it on the 24th of July.
A papal bull having also been obtained, on the 28th of August 1425, the archbishop, in the course of a visitation of Lincoln diocese, executed his letters patent founding the college, dedicating it to the Virgin, St Thomas Becket and St Edward the Confessor, and handed over the buildings to its members, the vicar of Higham Ferrers being made the first master or warden.
On the 12th of April he was given the custody of the temporalities, on the 15th of April he was elected, and on the 10th of May provided to the see by a papal bull.
In 1188 William secured a papal bull which declared that the Church of Scotland was directly subject only to the see of Rome, thus rejecting the claims to supremacy put forward by the English archbishop. This step was followed by the temporal independence of Scotland, which was one result of the continual poverty of Richard I.
He afterwards reckoned the Leipzig disputation (June-July 1519) and the burning of the papal bull (December 1520) as the beginning of the Reformation.
