Lutheranism.
Meanwhile, at the Austinfriars, a Lutheran movement had sprung up. Here, as elsewhere, the community to which Luther himself belonged led the way in the Protestant revolt. Barnes, the Augustinian prior, was the centre of a group of reformers who met at the White Horse inn; and Miles Coverdale, one of his friars, learnt his reforming principles at the Cambridge friary. The meetings at the White Horse were to have consequences which affected the other university. Clerke Cox and Taverner were to form part of the little group of Cambridge scholars who took possession, at Wolsey’s bidding, of Cardinal College, and to provoke the cry of the warden of Wykeham’s house: “We were clear without blot or suspicion till they came!” The famous “Oxford Brethren” were the Cambridge nucleus of the Reform in the sister city.
The English bible and service books.
The travail of the times, indeed, passed through a series of men who came from the one university—the laboratory of the Reformation was at Cambridge. The English Bible comes from
A.D. 1524-68.
its hands: Tyndale was the earliest worker, and Coverdale produced the first complete English bible in 1535-6. “Cranmer’s bible” appeared in 1540; “Matthew’s” bible (1537) was the work of the Cambridge martyr John Rogers who had also assisted Tyndale. Amongst the latter’s assistants had been Roy, a Cambridge Franciscan, and Scory, a Cambridge Dominican.[400] The “Bishop’s bible” was published under the auspices of the Cambridge primate, Parker; and other scholars associated in the work of translation were Clerke and Dillingham of Christ’s, Layfield, Harison, and Dakins of Trinity, Sir Thomas Smith, and Bishops Andrewes and Heath.[401] Erasmus’ New Testament had appeared under the auspices of Warham, and of three Cambridge men, Fisher, Fox, and Tunstall.[402]
The service books owe as much to the one university: it is the ‘Cambridge mind’ which sets its seal on these formularies. The Cambridge scholars were the best prepared men: Cranmer knew more about liturgies than any one among the reformers; no one but Andrewes was the equal of the catholic divines in patristic knowledge. The prayer book as it stands is in the main Cranmer’s work; Cox and Grindal were on the Windsor Commission which compiled the Communion service in the first Prayer-book of 1549. Nine years later Elizabeth entrusted the revision of Edward VI.’s 1552 Prayer-book to Parker, and Cox and Sir Thomas Smith were among the revisers. In the final revision of 1660 Cosin rendered great services; and even when the still-born attempt was made to revise the liturgy in the reign of William and Mary, the task was once more assigned to Cambridge men, Tenison, and Patrick who was set to mutilate the collects.
The Articles of Religion in their original form and number were the work of Cranmer, their reduction to Thirty-nine was the work of another Cambridge primate, Parker.[403] Whitgift drew up for Elizabeth the famous “Lambeth Articles”; and when the vexed subject of the Athanasian creed agitated the ecclesiastical commission of 1689 as it is agitating the national Church now—then, as now, when Cambridge heads of houses, professors of divinity, and deans and tutors of colleges have signed a declaration in favour of its excision from the public services, two Cambridge men protested—the one against its retention, the other against its unqualified damnatory clauses.[404] Dryden had already made a similar protest.
Long however before the reformers had a free hand, Burleigh in his retirement in Lincolnshire had jotted down the names of the eight learned men most fit to carry out the Reform and to settle its formularies when a Protestant queen should succeed. Seven of these men hailed from Cambridge.[405]