The end of the xv century found Cambridge very happily situated. It met the dawn of the religious awakening with a galaxy of men representing the noblest spirit of the time: Fisher, Fox, Thomas Langton, Alcock, Rotherham, even Lady Margaret herself and Erasmus, belonged to Cambridge in a sense which did not apply to Colet and More at Oxford. They constitute a group of Cambridge ‘reformers before the Reformation’ who were eager patrons of the New Learning; and the epoch was marked there by the rise of important college foundations. As a result, the university benefited to an extraordinary degree by gifts of religious lands made not by the hand of the despoiler but by the friends of the old faith.
Peterhouse had itself been one of the earliest known instances of the conversion of religious property to secular purposes;[399] but in the xv and early xvi century the instances crowd upon us. Henry VI. bestowed on King’s College and on God’s House land from the alienated priories; Alcock obtained from the Pope the dissolution of the Benedictine nunnery which he converted into Jesus College; Lady Margaret endowed Christ’s College with abbey lands; her stepson the Bishop of Ely dissolved the Canons’ House of S. John’s bestowing its property upon the new S. John’s College; and Mary gave monastic property to Trinity.
But the hopes raised in England by the spirit of catholic reform were defeated: and it is again to Cambridge that we must look for the next group of men in the march of events—Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer all drew their inspiration from Cambridge.
The divorce of Catherine.
Closely allied to the movement for reform was the question of the divorce, and Cranmer, less scrupulous than Wolsey, was the first to suggest a legal solution in the king’s favour. The Church and the universities were invited to emit a (favourable) judgment on the point; and as a result of the tactics to this end the junior leaders at Oxford pronounced in its favour, while the opinion elicited from Cambridge really left the matter where it was before. The university declared that Henry’s marriage with his brother’s wife was illegal if the previous union had been consummated, but no answer was given to the second question—whether the pope possessed the dispensing power. This was no answer at all, and undermined neither the king’s position nor the pope’s.