Robert Crowley (Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole or Crule, c. 1517 – 18 June 1588), was a stationer, poet, polemicist and Protestant clergyman among Marian exiles at Frankfurt. He seems to have been a Henrician Evangelical in favour of a more reformed Protestantism than the king and the Church of England sanctioned.
Under Edward VI, he joined a London network of evangelical stationers to argue for reforms, sharing a vision of his contemporaries Hugh Latimer, Thomas Lever, Thomas Beccon and others of England as a reformed Christian commonwealth. He attacked as inhibiting reform what he saw as corruption and uncharitable self-interest among the clergy and wealthy. Meanwhile, Crowley took part in making the first printed editions of Piers Plowman, the first translation of the Gospels into Welsh, and the first complete metrical psalter in English, which was also the first to include harmonised music. Towards the end of Edward's reign and later, Crowley criticised the Edwardian Reformation as compromised and saw the dissolution of the monasteries as replacing one form of corruption by another.
On his return to England after the reign of Mary I, Crowley revised his chronicle to represent the Edwardian Reformation as a failure, due to figures like Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset and John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. Crowley's account of the Marian martyrs represented them as a cost mostly paid by commoners. The work became a source for John Foxe's account of the period in his Actes and Monuments. Crowley held church positions in the early to mid-1560s and sought change from the pulpit and within the church hierarchy.
Against the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, Crowley was a leader in the renewed vestments controversy, which eventually lost him his clerical posts. During the dispute he and other London clergy produced a "first Puritan manifesto". Late in life Crowley was restored to several church posts and appears to have charted a more moderate course in defending it from Roman Catholicism and from nonconformist factions that espoused a Presbyterian church polity.
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 demy 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.Alumni Oxonienses 1500-1714, Covert-Cutts 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.
London publishing career under Edward VI Political circumstances changed greatly with the death of the king. Reformist hopes for the church were high under the boy king, Edward VI, whose uncle, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, held the real reins of power as Lord Protector during Edward's minority. Both were sympathetic to the reformist cause.
Perhaps anticipating the death of Henry VIII, Crowley had moved to London by the end of 1546, and according to William Herbert's Typographical Antiquities he was possibly working as a proof-reader for an evangelical printer, John Day, and perhaps later William Seres as well. Seres and Day became partners in late 1547, and remained together until 1550. In 1547 they were working in Holborn Conduit in St Sepulchre's parish at the sign of the Resurrection, but as William Cecil's servant, Seres was able to acquire Peter College for his printing operation. This was a former chantry at St Paul's Cathedral, part of which became Stationers' Hall in 1554. Between 1549, when he became a member of the Stationers' Company, and 1551, when he was ordained, Crowley wrote eleven or twelve books, and edited, translated, or acted as printer or publisher of seven others (see below, Crowley's status as a printer).
Crowley may have been involved in the preparation and publication of several books between 1546 and 1548; he certainly participated in the production of some of them. There were two editions of A Supplication of the Poor Commons c. 1546, which may have been written by Henry Brinkelow alone or possibly in association with Crowley. One of these editions included a reprint of Simon Fish's A Supplication of Beggars (c. 1529), which famously attacked the doctrine of purgatory as a politically and economically disabling deception inflicted on the English people. Both "supplications" presented socioeconomic and religious reform as two integral aspects of a single response to the major problems of the day. The other early imprint with some connection to Crowley was a treatise on the true, biblical meaning of the Lord's supper, with a rebuttal of Thomas More's arguments in favour of the Catholic doctrines on that subject. This tract was printed in three editions, and is attributed to William Tyndale (it is also sometimes attributed to George Joye). It includes an introductory epistle, "To all the studious readers", that is signed by Crowley.
The first books that are unambiguously Crowley's issued from Day and Seres' press in 1548, when Seres became a freeman of the Stationers' Company. These were a refutation of Nicholas Shaxton's sermon at Anne Askew's burning in 1546, in which Shaxton recanted his evangelical beliefs, a refutation of Miles Huggarde's arguments for transubstantiation in a lost ballad called , and , which must have been written before December 1547, since it refers to the Act of Six Articles as being unrepeated. Crowley's response to Hogarde contains the only source for Huggarde's original poem, since Crowley quotes it in full in order to refute it passage by passage. addresses parliament on behalf of economically distressed commoners, and follows an established tradition of social complaint regarding the abuses of wealthy landlords, such as rack-renting, engrossing (the consolidation of several smaller strips into one hedged farm, separated from the rest of the common land), and enclosure. Appearing in two English editions and two Latin editions translated from the English by J. Heron and possibly published by Stephen Mierdman, the full title is . If the wealthy fail to reform themselves, Crowley warns that divine retribution will follow, and he looks to the crown to make things right. This is the pattern of a number of Crowley's subsequent Edwardian publications, and for that reason he has been associated with other social critics of the day, such as Thomas Lever, Thomas Beccon, and Hugh Latimer. Some influential 20th-century historians have referred to these men as constituting a "commonwealth party", but G.R. Elton succeeded in sweeping away this romantic designation. The existence of a "commonwealth party" is now widely rejected, and its supposed members are unlikely to be described in terms of a collective movement.
In 1549 Richard Grafton and Mierdman published Crowley's . There is an introduction in English, and a dedicatory epistle to Owen Oglethorpe, president of Magdalen College, Oxford at that time and when Crowley had been a student and fellow there. (Crowley's psalter is discussed in greater detail under the entry for metrical psalters.)
Crowley's next publications included a large number of polemical social works, often poems, some of which appeared in several editions:
(1549) (1549) (1550) (1550) (1550)
There are also two books of uncertain authorship published during this period which may have been Crowley's work:
(1550?) (c. 1550)
Authorship of is speculatively attributed to Crowley by Barbara Johnson in Reading Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim's Progress: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). Vita fratrum medicantium is a lost medieval text that was printed around 1550, perhaps with Crowley's involvement. In his catalogue John Bale names Peter Pateshull as its author and R. Kylington as the translator. Pateshull was an Augustinian divine at Oxford c.1387, whom Wycliffe had persuaded to preach against the Augustinian friars. His text is a commentary on Hildegard of Bingen's prophecy against friars, which was enshrined as proto-Protestant lore in Foxe's Actes and Monuments.
Next came Crowley's three editions of Piers Plowman in 1550, as well as an edition of the prologue to John Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, which was written by John Purvey and wrongly attributed to Wycliff by Crowley on John Bale's authority. A 1540 recension of this text had been printed as: The dore of holy scripture. Crowley's version contains a signed note "To the reader". A running head reads: "The pathwaye to perfect knowledg", and Crowley's title page for the book reads: "The true copye of a prolog wrytten about two C. yeres paste by Iohn Wycklife (as maye iustly be gatherid bi that, that Iohn Bale hath writte[n] of him in his boke entitlid the Summarie of famous writers of the Ile of great Brita[n]) the originall whereof is founde written in an olde English Bible bitwixt the olde Testament and the Newe. Whych Bible remaynith now in ye Kyng hys maiesties chamber". Also in 1550 Crowley printed three books by the Welsh scholar William Salesbury (or Salisbury) concerning the Welsh language, some anti-Roman Catholic polemics, and an ancient Welsh precedent for clerical marriage. In 1551 Crowley published a fourth Salesbury text, a Welsh translation of the epistle and gospel readings from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.