Chapter III - The Reformation

Summary

When Fox founded his College of Corpus Christi in Oxford, the statutes which he made for it showed him a patron of the New Learning of the Renaissance, and it may have been his reputation as such which caused Dean Colet to send to Pembroke from St Paul's his promising scholar, Thomas Lupset. Lupset, who was to become the friend of More and Erasmus and other leading spirits of the English Renaissance, made but a short stay at Pembroke and the College cannot claim any other leading scholar of the new movement; but under Robert Shorton, who succeeded Fox as Master, Pembroke became a nursery of the Reformers of the English Church.

Shorton, a Yorkshireman, was originally at Jesus College and was elected a Fellow of Pembroke in 1505; on the foundation of St John's College in 1511 he became its first Master. He was active in the supervision of the buildings and finance of that College, and in the contract which he signed for the chapel he stipulated that much of the work should be like that in the chapels of his two former Colleges, “or larger and better in every poynte”. After five years he resigned his Mastership of St John's, and soon after Cardinal Wolsey's visit to Cambridge in 1517 he became Dean of his private chapel. Wolsey's star was now almost at its zenith, and Fox was retiring from public life; doubtless the fact that Wolsey was Shorton's patron weighed with the Fellows of Pembroke when they chose him as Master.