Robert Crowley (printer) - Early Life

Early Life

Crowley was born in about 1517 in Gloucestershire, possibly in Tetbury, although John Bale says that he was a native of Northamptonshire, and A. B. Emden's A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford says that Crowley was twenty on 25 July 1539. Crowley himself wrote in 1578 that he was then sixty-one years old.

Crowley began his studies at the University of Oxford in about 1534, and was listed as a demy1 of Magdalen College on 25 July 1539. He experienced an evangelical conversion about this time which entailed religious convictions more in line with continental Protestant reformers, but quite at odds with the Church of England under Henry VIII and the Act of Six Articles, known to those who chafed under it as "the whip with six strings". Magdalen was then "a hotbed of evangelicals," according to Brett Usher. Four of its members during this period became bishops under Elizabeth I, and with Crowley, Lawrence Humphrey was a key leader in the vestments controversy that took place during her reign. Most of the Magdalen evangelicals became exiles under Mary I, and their influence was purged from the college by Stephen Gardiner in 1554.

Crowley received his B.A. on 19 June 1540, and became Probationer Fellow on 26 July 1541 or 1542. In 1542 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, but he left the same year. Crowley's departure may have been due to a purge of evangelicals, or because, like John Foxe, he objected to the necessity of taking holy orders which entailed a vow of celibacy. It is known that Foxe, like many evangelicals, did not accept the rationale for mandatory clerical celibacy, and evidently Crowley did not either, as he married some years later. At this time Foxe also left the college, naming Crowley and the future bishop Thomas Cooper in a letter to Magdalen's president, Owen Oglethorpe, as being among his circle. Foxe described this group of his fellows as being persecuted by other members of the college, although – unlike Foxe and Crowley – Cooper did not leave the university, and while Oglethorpe himself was no evangelical, years later in Crowley's psalter's dedication letter to him, Crowley holds his former teacher in high regard.

From 1542 to about 1546 Crowley tutored for the Protestant household of Sir Nicholas Poyntz (1510–1556/7) in Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, his own home county. (Poyntz's aunt on his father's side, Lady Anne Walsh and wife of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, had taken in William Tyndale as a tutor for their sons from 1521 to 1522/1523.) At the same time as Crowley, Foxe found a similar arrangement, following a pattern whereby promising, young, university-educated men who sought greater changes in the church were supported by members of the lesser nobility until political circumstances were more favourable for public and institutional engagement.