2 - ‘Lightes to shine’: Evangelical reform in Edwardian Cambridge

Summary

‘Now I wonder less at that saying of yours which you repeated to me so often at court: “Cambridge men are behind in many things”.’ Thus wrote Roger Ascham to his friend John Cheke, sometime around the end of 1547. His letter was despondent. Cheke, who was no longer in Cambridge but at the court, serving as a tutor to the young king, would, Ascham wrote, ‘scarcely believe true … how completely that old vigour of the genuine doctrine has dried up, which flourished most in the last year’. Edwardian reformation in Cambridge was stumbling to a halt just a year after the new king had ascended the throne.

Ascham was perhaps experiencing inevitable disappointment following very inflated hopes. The accession of Edward vi, a minor, and the leadership of first Edward Seymour and then John Dudley offered prospects of advancing the evangelical agenda which had had been partially denied under the old king. Diarmaid MacCulloch's study of the Edwardian Church has suggested that these opportunities were very much seized. In his account, a group of dedicated and powerful evangelicals sought to form a godly nation, fit to engage with continental Protestantism. Catharine Davies sounds a more cautious note, arguing that disillusion began to set in after 1549, but concurs that Somerset's government had ‘high ideas’, if not practice, of reform and renewal. This new religious climate had an inevitable impact upon the policies pursued within the universities. Stephen Alford has written of this regime's belief that Oxford and Cambridge ‘were, ideally, flagships of Reformation’, and of the close connections between leading reformers within and outside the universities.

Edwardian Cambridge was an important centre for the godly renewal, even revolution, that men like Cheke and Ascham hoped for from this new regime.

This then raises the more vexed issue of how far such policies were actually implemented and accepted. For the University of Cambridge, a narrative of Edwardian Protestant progress has long remained powerful. For instance, H. C. Porter, while acknowledging that conservatives posed some challenges within the university, states that, ultimately, reformers ‘won through’. Such historical judgements are often accompanied by an implied or explicit comparison to the strength of Catholicism in Oxford. MacCulloch states that ‘conservatives were much stronger in Oxford than in Cambridge’, though he does acknowledge that estimated numbers of evangelicals produced by each university do not reflect this assessment.