Two years before the time at which we have now arrived, Wolsey, in pursuance of his scheme of converting the endowments of the religious houses to purposes of education, had obtained permission from the pope to suppress a number of the smaller monasteries.  He had added largely to the means thus placed at his disposal from his own resources, and had founded the great college at Oxford, which is now called Christchurch.[501] Desiring his magnificent institution to be as perfect as art could make it, he had sought his professors in Rome, in the Italian universities, wherever genius or ability could be found; and he had introduced into the foundation several students from Cambridge, who had been reported to him as being of unusual promise.  Frith, of whom we have heard, was one of these.  Of the rest, John Clark, Sumner, and Taverner are the most noticeable.  At the time at which they were invited to Oxford, they were tainted, or some of them were tainted, in the eyes of the Cambridge authorities, with suspicion of heterodoxy;[502] and it is creditable to Wolsey’s liberality, that he set aside these unsubstantiated rumours, not allowing them to weigh against ability, industry, and character.  The church authorities thought only of crushing what opposed them, especially of crushing talent, because talent was dangerous.  Wolsey’s noble anxiety was to court talent, and if possible to win it.

The young Cambridge students, however, ill repaid his confidence (so, at least, it must have appeared to him), and introduced into Oxford the rising epidemic.  Clark, as was at last discovered, was in the habit of reading St. Paul’s Epistles to young men in his rooms; and a gradually increasing circle of undergraduates, of three or four years’ standing,[503] from various colleges, formed themselves into a spiritual freemasonry, some of them passionately insisting on being admitted to the lectures, in spite of warnings from Clark himself, whose wiser foresight knew the risk which they were running, and shrank from allowing weak giddy spirits to thrust themselves into so fearful peril.[504]

This little party had been in the habit of meeting for about six months,[505] when at Easter, 1527, Thomas Garret, a fellow of Magdalen,[506] who had gone out of residence, and was curate at All Hallows church, in London, re-appeared in Oxford.  Garret was a secret member of the London Society, and had come down at Clark’s instigation, to feel his way in the university.  So excellent a beginning had already been made, that he had only to improve upon it.  He sought out all such young men as were given to Greek, Hebrew, and the polite Latin;[507] and in this visit met with so much encouragement, that the Christmas following he returned again, this time bringing with him treasures of forbidden books, imported by “the Christian Brothers;” New Testaments, tracts and volumes of German divinity, which he sold privately among the initiated.

He lay concealed, with his store, at “the house of one Radley,"[508] the position of which cannot now be identified; and there he remained for several weeks, unsuspected by the university authorities, till orders were sent by Wolsey to the Dean of Christchurch, for his arrest.  Precise information was furnished at the same time respecting himself, his mission in Oxford, and his place of concealment.[509]