Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 09.djvu/234

 revolution was effected in the constitution of the university which resulted from the introduction of the Elizabethan statutes. The powers thus given to the caput were more extensive, and less liable to be controlled by the general body; and by virtue of this increase in their authority, the heads, led by Whitgift (who had succeeded May as vice-chancellor), deprived Cartwright of his professorship (December 1570). Following up this step, Whitgift (who had now succeeded to the mastership of Trinity) deprived Cartwright of his fellowship (September 1571), his ostensible reason for the measure being that Cartwright was not, as required by the college statutes, in priest's orders, a pretext which the latter denounced as ‘a mere cavil.’

Cartwright now quitted England, and betook himself to Geneva, where Beza had succeeded Calvin as rector of the university. Beza is said to have pronounced Cartwright inferior in learning to no living scholar, but that the latter filled a chair of divinity at Geneva is a statement resting solely on the authority of Martin Marprelate (An Epitome, &c., p. 52). His Cambridge friends, among whom were men like Lever, Wyburn, Fulke, and Edward Dering, were extremely reluctant that such a scholar should be lost to the university, and at their pressing instance he returned to England in November 1572. Dering petitioned Lord Burghley that his friend might be appointed professor of Hebrew in succession to Cevallerius, and had it not been for his own impolitic conduct, Cartwright's return, both to the university and to office, would probably have been effected. In 1572, however, the famous ‘Admonition to the Parliament’ (the work of two London clergymen, John Field and Thomas Wilcox) appeared. It declared open warfare against all dignities, whether in the church or in the universities, and, together with the literature to which it gave rise, is generally considered to mark the point of departure of the puritan movement, its main object being to induce the legislature to assimilate the English church organisation to the presbyterian standard. The authors were both committed to prison; but their views and mode of enforcing them so closely coincided with Cartwright's, that he did not scruple to express his sympathy, to visit them in prison, and to support their arguments by writing ‘A Second Admonition to the Parliament.’ To both these ‘Admonitions’ Whitgift published a reply, to which Cartwright rejoined by writing ‘A Replye to an Answere made of M. Doctor Whitegifte, agaynst the Admonition to the Parliament. By T. C——’ (n. d.) This controversy, in itself sufficiently memorable, is rendered still more noteworthy by the fact that it was the proximate cause of the composition of Hooker's ‘Ecclesiastical Polity’ (see pref. to Eccl. Polity, sect. 2).

On 11 June 1573 a royal proclamation enjoined the suppression of both the ‘Admonition’ and its ‘Defence,’ and on 11 Dec. the court of high commission issued a warrant for Cartwright's arrest. He again left the country, resorting in the first instance to Heidelberg, then officiating as minister to the English church at Antwerp, and finally settling down in a like capacity in connection with the conformist church of ‘English merchants of the staple worshiping at the Gasthuis Kirk’ at Middelburg. His dissent from the Anglican discipline was, however, still further declared about this time in a letter prefixed to the ‘Disciplina Ecclesiastica’ of Walter Travers (which afterwards became the recognised text-book of puritanism), published at Rochelle in 1574. In the same year he issued a translation of Travers's book under the title, ‘A full and plaine Declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline owt of the Word off God, and off the declininge of the Churche off England from the same’ (also published at Geneva, 1580; Cambridge, 1584 and 1617). In 1576, in conjunction with Edward Snape, he visited the Channel Islands, for the purpose of assisting the Huguenot churches in those parts in their endeavours to establish a uniform discipline and organisation, and subsequently returned to Antwerp. In 1577 he married the sister of John Stubbe, the same who was convicted in 1579 of ‘seditious writing,’ and with whom he had probably become acquainted as a fellow-collegian. On the appearance of the Rhemish version of the New Testament in 1582, Cartwright was persuaded by the Earl of Leicester, Sir Francis Walsingham, and others (at the pressing instance, it is said, of Beza and some of the leading scholars of Cambridge), to prepare a criticism of the work. Walsingham subsidised his efforts by a gift of 100l., and he eventually carried his labours as far as the fifteenth chapter of Revelation. Whitgift, however, fearful of the controversies to which the publication of the work would probably give rise, persistently discouraged the undertaking, and the manuscript remained unprinted until after Cartwright's death. It was published in 1618 under the title of ‘A Confutation of the Rhemist's Translation.’ The archbishop's apprehensions can not be looked upon as groundless, when we consider that ‘to suffer Cartwright's “Answer to the Rhemish Testament”’ to be published is laid down by Marprelate as an indispensable condition of a satisfactory under-