As regards Erasmus' official position at Cambridge there is some room for doubt. He appears in the lists of university officers as the "Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity," but precisely what this means is not clear. The Lady Margaret was the Countess of Richmond, mother of King Henry VII., never queen herself, but claiming the doubtful honour of blood-relationship to sixty or seventy persons of royal lineage. This benevolent lady, influenced undoubtedly by the advice of John Fisher, afterward Bishop of Rochester, had founded in 1503 a readership in divinity at each of the great English universities. The endowment had been intrusted to the abbey of Westminster with instructions to pay over the salary to the holder. The election to the office was to be biennial, and besides the chancellor all doctors, bachelors, and inceptors in divinity were to have the right to vote. The place was to be no sinecure. The reader must read _libere_, _sollenniter_, and _aperte_. He was to have no fees beyond his salary, and must read such works in divinity as the chancellor with the "college of doctors" should judge necessary. He must "read every accustomed day in each term, and in the long vacation up to the eighth of September, but might cease in Lent, if the chancellor should think fit, in order that during that season he and his auditors might be occupied in preaching." Evidently it was contemplated that the reader of the Lady Margaret should devote himself wholly to this work. The salary was the very respectable sum of sixty-five dollars a year, enough to provide a modest living for a man of quiet habits. We are almost wholly without information as to Erasmus' performance of the duties of this office. Everything points toward the belief that in the sense described by the act of foundation he never filled it at all. The only references he makes are to his attempts to teach Greek, certainly not one of the functions of the Lady Margaret Professor. It has often been assumed that[91] Erasmus' complaints about his Cambridge life were caused by a sense of failure in his work as a teacher. We are prepared to believe from all his previous experience that he never cared to succeed as a teacher, and, further, we may be tolerably sure that, for this quite sufficient reason, he was not a very good teacher. He held his readership, we may believe, for two terms of two years each--if indeed he held it at all--and meanwhile tried to give Greek lessons, but could get neither pupils nor pay. Mr. Mullinger says, "Disappointed in his class-room, he took refuge in his study," as if his literary work were a kind of last resort on the failure of his true profession. [91] For example, by Mr. Mullinger in his History of the University of Cambridge, p. 50 & _ff._ [Illustration: JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. FROM THE DRAWING BY HOLBEIN, IN WINDSOR CASTLE.]