Cambridge (England) -- Pictorial works; University of Cambridge -- Pictorial works
It was not only in what concerned scholarship that the travail of the
Reformation belonged to Cambridge. It gave, in the person of Fisher, the
only member of the episcopal bench who died for denying the royal
supremacy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII. the first group of
Cambridge Lutherans gave other martyrs: Bilney, like Barnes, had carried
his faggot and recanted Lutheran opinions before Wolsey, but afterwards
took new courage and went to the stake for them. The cause left
smouldering by the death of Barnes, Bilney, and George Stafford (a
fellow of Pembroke) was rekindled by Latimer. Henry himself had examined
another Cambridge reformer, John Nicholson (“Lambert”) who denied the
corporal presence in the eucharist, and that royal and rigid
sacramentarian had condemned him. “Pleasant Taylor” “making himself
merry with the stake” was another Cantabrigian.[406] The first man to
die for his faith when Mary’s reign opened was Rogers of Pembroke[407];
and “the hardiest” of the Marian Martyrs was another Cambridge man,
Bradford. As she had nurtured the only martyr-bishop on the Catholic
side, so Cambridge nurtured the Protestant group of prelates who died at
the stake: Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer are three Cambridge martyrs
whose only title to be known as “the Oxford martyrs” is that Oxford
burnt them. It must not be forgotten, also, that one of the fifteen
heroic London Carthusians, martyred at Tyburn in 1535, was William Exmew
of Christ’s.
The death of Fisher, chancellor of the university, was followed by a
wholesale ejection of the professors of the ancient learning, and the
man who died for his denial of that ‘anglican solecism’ the royal
supremacy was immediately succeeded by the man who first suggested it to
Henry--Thomas Cromwell.[408]
[Sidenote: The Puritan.]
The next religious movement in the country was the Puritan, against
which we know that Elizabeth fought as lustily as Henry had combated
Lutheranism. Despite the fact that there were Puritan nuclei, as there
had earlier been Lutheran nuclei, at Cambridge, Puritanism was
eventually imposed on the university only by the same violent means as
had banished the old religion--wholesale ejections. The Anglican heads
of colleges were turned out, under Oliver, to be replaced by Puritan
Masters, in precisely the same way as Thomas Cromwell had replaced the
Catholics by men who accepted the royal supremacy.
[Sidenote: Early Presbyterianism.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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