OVERALL, JOHN, an English bishop of some celebrity during his day, was born in 1559. He was elected a scholar of St John's College, Cambridge, but afterwards removed to Trinity, of which he became a fellow. In 1596 he was made regius professor of divinity, when he took his degree of Doctor, and about the same time was elected master of Catherine Hall. In 1601 he was promoted to the deanery of St Paul's, London, by the recommendation of his patron, Sir Fulke Greville, and Queen Elizabeth; and in the beginning of King James's reign he was chosen prolocutor of the lower House of Convocation. In 1612 he was appointed one of the first governors of the Charter-House Hospital, then just founded by Mr Thomas Sutton. In April 1614 he was made bishop of Litchfield and Coventry; and in 1618 he was translated to Norwich, where he died in May 1619, at the age of about sixty. He was buried in that cathedral, where he lay unnoticed and forgotten till some years after the restoration of Charles II., when Cosin, Bishop of Durham, who had been his secretary, erected a monument, with a Latin inscription in which he is said to be "Vir undequaque doctissimus, et omni encomio major."
Wood observes, that he had the character of being the best scholastic divine in England; and Cosin, who perhaps may be thought to rival him in that sort of learning, calls himself his scholar, and declares that he derived all his knowledge from the good bishop. Overall cultivated a particular friendship with Gerard Vossius and Grotius, and some of his letters to those learned men are printed in the Epistolae Præstantium Virorum. The bishop is known in England chiefly by his Convocation Book, 1606, Concerning the Government of God's Catholic Church and the Kingdoms of the Whole World, 4to, London, 1630; reprinted at Oxford in 1844; in which the author discusses the rights of civil and ecclesiastical governors. This work was solemnly approved by the convocations of Canterbury and York, and was afterwards published by Archbishop Sancroft, but it led to a stir he did not contemplate. (See Macaulay's History of England, vol. iv.)