Robert Crowley (printer) - Ordination and Marian Exile

Ordination and Marian Exile

Crowley was ordained deacon on 28 September or 29 September 1551 by Bishop Ridley, and referred to as "stationer of the Parish of St Andrew, Holborn". On 24 June the previous year, John Foxe had been ordained deacon by Ridley, after having taken up residence with the Duchess of Suffolk in the Barbican in order to be eligible. The anticipated reforms that would follow from the spreading influence of men like these were deferred by the death of the king and the accession of Mary I after the ill-fated attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne.

Around 1553–1554, or 1555 at the latest, Crowley had left England. In 1557 records state he was a member of the Frankfurt congregation of English exiles and living in very crowded quarters with a wife and child. Local tax lists registered him as a "student", and expelled him at the same time as a poor and possessionless man.

According to A Briefe Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankeford in Germany (1575), which covers events from 1554 onward, in 1557 Crowley's signature appeared with those endorsing "the new discipline" at Frankfurt (i.e., the Genevan church order), which limited the pastoral authority of Robert Horne over the congregation. Horne objected stridently as he was pushing for a more hierarchical system, and Crowley was among those who supported the presbyterian system. However, it must be remembered that this framing of events comes from the Briefe Discourse of the Troubles which was first published eighteen years later, evidently in support of the Elizabethan presbyterian faction. (For further discussion of the significance of these events to later Elizabethan church politics, see the entry on the Marian exiles.)