Saravia was born in Hesdin, then part of Flanders, to Protestant Spanish and Flemish parents, Christopher de Saravia and Elisabeth Boulengier. He entered the ministry at Antwerp, reviewed a draft of the Belgic Confession and gathered a Walloon congregation in Brussels. Saravia continued to move between London and Europe. In 1561, he married Catherine d'Allez of St Omer. The marriage would last 45 years, and the couple had one son and an unknown number of daughters. Following the death of Catherine, Saravia married Marguerite Wiits in 1608.
By late 1580 he was living in Ghent and was an inspector of the theological school and active in religious affairs. With Ghent under threat by the Spanish, he moved to Leiden in November 1582. He was appointed a professor of theology at Leiden University on 13 August 1584. From Leiden he wrote to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley advising the assumption of the protectorate of the Low Countries by Elizabeth. He left the United Provinces when his complicity in a political plot was discovered.
Return to England
He published several treatises defending the Episcopacy against Presbyterianism. He was appointed, in 1588, rector of Tatenhill, Staffordshire. His first work, De diversis gradibus ministrorum Evangelii, was an argument for episcopacy, which led to a controversy with Theodore Beza and gained him incorporation as DD at Oxford, and a prebend at Gloucester. On 6 December 1595 he was admitted to a canonry at Canterbury, and in the same year to the vicarage of Lewisham, Kent, where he became an intimate friend of Richard Hooker, his near neighbour, whom he absolved on his deathbed. He was made prebendary of Worcester in 1601 and of Westminster. In 1604, or early in 1605, he presented to James I of England his Latin treatise on the Eucharist, which remained in the Royal Library unprinted, until in 1885 it was published by Archdeacon G. A. Denison. In 1607 he was nominated one of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible of 1611, his part being Genesis to the end of Kings II. He is said to have been the only translator who was not English. On 23 March 1610 he exchanged Lewisham for the rectory of Great Chart, Kent. He died at Canterbury on 15 January 1612, and was buried in the cathedral. His second wife, Margaret Wiits, erected a memorial to him at the Cathedral.
