The story of the university's response to the Chantries Act of December 1545 has become a set-piece of the history of the University of Cambridge. The ‘Acte that all colleges, chauntries, frechapels &c shall be in the kynges maiestees disposicion’ empowered Henry viii to expropriate and suppress at will any religious foundation in the land apart from its parish churches.Footnote ¹ The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge realised that Henry's insatiable courtiers would soon be sniffing around for fresh prey, and Cambridge, in particular, leapt into action, lobbying vigorously at court to ward off the danger. As a result, the essential preliminary task of surveying the ecclesiastical institutions of Cambridge was put into the hands of three influential dons (Matthew Parker, John Redman and William May), and the report, which they duly presented to the king, left him with such a favourable sense of the ‘value for money’ which the colleges offered to his kingdom that he was moved not only to spare them but even to promise further endowments, a promise fulfilled within the year by the foundation of Trinity College.

In its various forms, the story has not only been recited in institutional histories but also explored in detailed academic enquiries.Footnote ² The only intimation of doubt thus far has come from Oxford, where Christopher Haigh, in arguing that the foundation of Christ Church, Oxford, at least, owed nothing to the intervention of Cambridge dons, quizzically characterised the traditional story as ‘a Cambridge version of events’.Footnote ³ Except for Haigh's hint of scepticism, however, the often-told tale has held the field unquestioned. Yet it rests on surprisingly insecure foundations and is not as venerable as might at first be imagined. It proves upon closer investigation to be of relatively late vintage, first appearing in the second volume of James Bass Mullinger's history of the University of Cambridge, published in 1884.Footnote ⁴ Mullinger's account is dependent on material first put into print earlier in the nineteenth century, and it is difficult to imagine the necessary inferences having been made before that material was thus made available.Footnote ⁵ It is worth noting that neither Thomas Fuller nor John Strype made much of the university's reaction to the Chantries Act. Strype, who casually misdated the entire episode to 1544, merely reported that Henry commissioned Parker, Redman and May to ‘make a View of the State and Condition of the University, and all the particular Colleges’.Footnote ⁶ Fuller's account was a little more expansive:

But he made no connection between this and the genesis of Trinity, which elsewhere he presented as a royal response to a lament from Cambridge about the decay of learning following the dissolution of the monasteries.Footnote ⁸ And this despite the fact that his authority was Herbert of Cherbury, whose rather matter-of-fact version of events at least implicitly connects the new royal foundations in Oxford and Cambridge with the Chantries Act, even as it casts cold water on the idea that there was any real threat to the universities. For Herbert concludes that, far from seeking to harm the universities, Henry ‘rather help'd to increase and augment them’, probably alluding to the founding of Christ Church and Trinity.Footnote ⁹

There is a good deal of evidence relating to the episode, and the aim of this investigation is to show how its interpretation has been plagued by chronological confusion, and to supplement it with new evidence that helps put what is already known in a sharper perspective. This article aims to clear away the confusions and to replace the gratifying myth with an account of a less romantic but still revealing course of events. It separates the story of the Chantries Act and of the response thereto from all but a tangential connection with the founding of Trinity and Christ Church, and confirms that, as Herbert of Cherbury pointed out, the universities were probably never in the danger they feared from the statute, because their friends at court were from the very start doing all they could to protect them from its admittedly devastating potential.

There are many reasons to doubt the now traditional story. The first is that right from the start the universities were singled out for special treatment in the implementation of the Chantries Act. The obvious first step for the crown was to secure an up-to-date valuation of all the ecclesiastical assets which were now liable to confiscation. Commissions for this purpose covering all the counties of England and Wales were therefore prepared and were passed under the Great Seal on 14 February 1546.Footnote ¹⁰ The statute was less than two months old, and those two months included the twelve days of Christmas. This was impressive haste – but the government desperately needed cash after the colossal outgoings incurred in Henry's final war with France.

This makes it all the more remarkable that the very first commissions under the terms of the Chantries Act were issued nearly a month earlier, on Friday 16 January 1546, on an entirely different basis. These were the commissions for the two universities. While the county commissioners appointed in February were to report direct to the Court of Augmentations (which handled all business relating to suppressions of ecclesiastical institutions and managed all crown lands acquired thereby), the university commissioners were instructed to report first to the king. Their commissions were issued under the personal authority of the king's signet, rather than under the more portentous but less personal authority of the Great Seal.Footnote ¹¹ At that point, the threat to the chantries and colleges was little more than rumour. The imperial ambassador in London, Francis van der Delft, wrote to Charles v on 9 January informing him that the acts of the recent parliament were still under embargo, but adding the report that all colleges and guilds had been granted to the king.Footnote ¹² Stephen Gardiner, Henry's ambassador to the emperor, had heard about the act at Utrecht by 17 January, and at once wrote to the court lobbying for the preservation of the two hospitals of Holy Cross and Mary Magdalene in his cathedral city of Winchester.Footnote ¹³ But Gardiner was one of the most powerful figures in English politics, with ready access to authoritative information. He must have been among the first people away from court to hear about it. It is scarcely credible that Oxford or Cambridge academics were sufficiently well informed at this point to be in any position to lobby for special treatment, even if they had perhaps caught wind of some rumours.

The widely repeated claim that Cambridge lobbying secured the appointment of Parker, Redman and May as commissioners to survey the Cambridge colleges turns out to rest on chronological errors. Thus Christopher Brooke, rightly noting that the university wrote to the king in February 1546, regards the appointment of the trio as ‘the outcome of this and similar requests’. But the appointment preceded that request by about a month, and no similar requests are recorded.Footnote ¹⁴ Mullinger misled several later historians by mistakenly identifying letters written by the university to Thomas Smith and John Cheke as the crucial interventions that secured the appointment of insiders as commissioners. This led Mullinger himself to exaggerate Smith's role by giving him chief credit for persuading Henry to found Trinity College.Footnote ¹⁵ Now the university did indeed write to Smith and Cheke: but not in 1546. The letters, which were written on behalf of the university by Roger Ascham in his capacity as University Orator, survive in the printed edition of Ascham's correspondence. They are undated, and have traditionally been assigned either to 1546 or, in the superior Giles edition, which was available to Mullinger, to 1547.Footnote ¹⁶ The earlier of these two possible dates makes no sense. When the university sought political support, it lobbied courtiers. But neither Smith nor Cheke was in any sense a courtier in 1546. John Cheke was already tutor to the king's young son, Prince Edward, but he would have been an unlikely recipient for a letter seeking support in court politics in early 1546. He spent that year in attendance not at court but on the young prince, whose household was at Hunsdon in winter, moved to Hertford in spring and then returned briefly to Hunsdon before proceeding to Hatfield for summer and autumn.Footnote ¹⁷ There was no reason at that time to see Cheke as a man with any influence at the heart of government. Thomas Smith, as is evident from the accounts of both the university and Queens’ College, was resident and busy in Cambridge most of that year. He was entrusted by the university with a number of tasks – one of which was to take letters from the university to the court – and he received commons from his college all year.Footnote ¹⁸ The college accounts for that year also record payments relating to Smith's expenses when he was sent to London on university business.Footnote ¹⁹

It was only in 1547 that both Cheke and Smith moved to the heart of affairs. With the accession of Edward vi at the end of January 1547, his household transferred to Westminster, and Cheke moved with it. His position as the king's tutor now made him a person of immense potential influence. Smith, likewise, moved to London early in 1547 to become chief secretary to Edward Seymour, who, as Lord Protector of the Realm, governed England in the boy king's name. The Queens’ College accounts note that Smith received commons at a much reduced rate for the academic year 1546–7, on account of absence, and it seems that he was in Seymour's service from about February.Footnote ²⁰ The university's letters to Cheke and Smith, unlike the letters sent to court in early 1546, make no reference to any perceived threat to collegiate property interests. Rather, they were the standard petitions that Cambridge routinely sent to those of its alumni who found themselves elevated to the political high ground, urging them to use their exalted position to the benefit of the alma mater. Defending traditional privileges, averting the recurrent threat of taxation and securing royal backing in the never-ending feud with the borough of Cambridge were priorities which required eternal vigilance, and the university was ever solicitous to maintain and manage relationships with its friends at court. The situation alone would be enough to show that Ascham's letters to Smith and Cheke were written in early 1547, not early 1546. But the university records offer incontrovertible, albeit indirect, corroboration. In a flurry of business early in 1546, evidently in response to the news from court regarding the commission to take a valuation of collegiate property, Parker and Ascham are authorised to ‘conceive and draft letters to the supreme councillors of the King and the barons of the Exchequer’, while shortly afterwards Drs Atkinson, Smith and Haddon are detailed to draft and deliver letters to the king himself and other prominent university patrons.Footnote ²¹ There was no need for Ascham to be writing to Smith as though he were a patron at court at the very time when he was actually a colleague at Cambridge engaged alongside him in formulating the university's response to the Chantries Act.

There is good evidence that Henry viii's commission came to Parker, Redman and May out of the blue. Richard Taverner, a friend of Parker's and an alumnus of his college, Corpus Christi, wrote to him on 21 January 1546 with some vital background information about the commission. Given that Taverner was one of the Clerks of the Signet, he quite probably sealed the letter sent in the king's name, and his personal letter may even have accompanied it to its recipient in Cambridge. He reported that ‘on twesday last’ the Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations had summoned him to a meeting, told him what was going on and instructed him to pass on some helpful advice – namely that when the valuation of the colleges had been completed, Parker should be sure to come to court and present it to the king in person.Footnote ²² Now, as Taverner's letter was written and dated on a Wednesday, ‘twesday last’ probably refers to Tuesday 13 January rather than to 20 January (which he might more naturally have described as ‘yesterday’). This suggests that consideration of how the universities were to be treated under the Chantries Act was going on even before 16 January, which further strengthens the case for seeing this decision as emanating directly from the heart of government, and not in response to lobbying from the universities – for which there is no evidence at this time, and which indeed could scarcely have begun so early.

Working papers gathered for the production of the report on the net worth of the Cambridge colleges still survive among Parker's manuscripts in the library at Corpus Christi College. On one of them Parker himself subsequently penned a sketchy account of the origins of the commission and of the trip which he made with Dr May to present the final dossier to the king in person.Footnote ²³ His memorandum was evidently written at least a year later, some time between the death of Henry viii (January 1547) and the death of John Redman (November 1551). His reference to ‘certen officers in the court & others then in authorytie vnder the Kyng’ is evidently a comment about Henry viii's times made from the vantage point of the next reign, while his description of John Redman as ‘master of trynytie college’ shows both that it could not have been written earlier than December 1546, and that Redman was still alive.Footnote ²⁴ It should be noted that Parker makes no mention of the foundation of Trinity College, and makes no connection between the thwarting of the threat to collegiate Cambridge and the royal decision to found a new college. His retrospective memo does pose one or two interpretative problems, but it furnishes valuable information when read carefully. Most notably in this context, Parker explains the decision to appoint university insiders to conduct the survey as the outcome not of university lobbying but of the intercession of ‘certen frendes of thvniuersitye perceyuyng the sequel like to tourne to a myschefe’. Of course this turn of phrase does not necessarily exclude prior university lobbying. But it fits more easily with the alternative explanation offered here, namely that the decision was secured through the unsolicited intervention of the university's friends at court.

Sir Edward North, chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, emerges as a key figure in this story. His conversation with Richard Taverner seems to be the earliest evidence for the plan to set the universities apart for special treatment. That decision was then formally cleared with the king himself through the authorisation procedure that depended on the ‘dry stamp’, an instrument used to manufacture the king's personal signature in his declining years, when he was no longer able to manipulate a pen.Footnote ²⁵ This mighty instrument was used only under strict control, with a formal record kept of all actions authorised by it. According to that record, the commissions to Oxford and Cambridge were authorised by the king at Hampton Court on 16 January (a Friday), at the request of Sir Edward North and in the presence of the principal Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Sir Anthony Denny.Footnote ²⁶ The resulting Cambridge commission under the signet was dated the same day. Whether Taverner's letter to Parker accompanied or followed the commission, it cannot have been long before Parker knew what was expected. A couple of undated entries in the university account books shed further light on these events. A gratuity of 5s. was paid to one Bartholomew, who had brought to Cambridge the commission addressed to Parker, Redman and May. Still more significantly, the entry directly before it records a handsome 15s. 8d. spent on ‘a great pike, tench, swan, and wine’ sent as presents to Mr North and Mr Lee.Footnote ²⁷ The reason for the reward sent to Mr North is plain: his help and advice in this crisis in the university's affairs. Mr Lee is a more obscure figure, and there is nothing to clarify his role in this story. He is presumably William Lee, the receiver of the Court of Augmentations for the Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire district.Footnote ²⁸ William Lee would hardly have carried much weight in court politics. However, given the power that the Chantries Act conferred on the Court of Augmentations, the university presumably felt it wise to keep its local agent sweet at this delicate time.

Sir Edward North and Sir Anthony Denny were the two men most closely and most clearly associated with the decision about the universities. It is therefore likely that they were at least partly responsible for it. Denny's favour towards learning in general has long been noted. Edward North's is less celebrated.Footnote ²⁹ The interest of both men in protecting Cambridge would be easily explicable if, as has often been suggested, they had themselves studied there. North is thought to have studied at Peterhouse, while Denny is thought to have studied at St John's.Footnote ³⁰ Unfortunately, neither of these thoughts is likely to be correct. Both men had studied alongside John Leland at St Paul's School in the 1510s, as we know from the elegant Latin epigrams he later addressed to them. But while Leland himself went on to study at Cambridge (as a member of Christ's College), nothing he writes indicates that either Denny or North accompanied him, something he would surely have mentioned had it been so. On the contrary, in the case of North he speaks explicitly of a parting of the ways as his friend turned to the law while he himself proceeded to Cambridge.Footnote ³¹ And after Leland's comment that he and Denny were close friends in their tender youth at St Paul's, his silence on the subject of Cambridge implies that Denny did not accompany him there either. Moreover, neither man is claimed as an alumnus by their putative colleges, nor by any other college, in the personalised handbook to the colleges of Cambridge which was presented to Queen Elizabeth i on her visit to the university in 1564. In this text, each college listed its eminent alumni, with a particular emphasis on recent eminence. Sir Anthony Denny's position as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Henry viii, and North's ennoblement as the first Baron North, made both of them more worthy of note than many now obscure names brought to the queen's attention.Footnote ³² Lord North, indeed, was still living at the time of the queen's visit, though he died later that year. Moreover, after acquiring a Cambridgeshire manor in the mid-1530s, he thereafter became in quick succession JP (from 1536) and Sheriff (1542–3) for the county, as well as serving as its MP in 1542, 1547 and 1553. If he had studied at Cambridge, this would not have been overlooked in 1564. However, even if neither man can plausibly be reckoned a Cambridge alumnus, it may be inferred that both were favourably inclined towards the university.

Several other highly placed councillors in the 1540s were Cambridge alumni or graduates. The Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, had studied at Trinity Hall, as had Sir William Paget, the Principal Secretary of State, and perhaps the nearest thing to a chief minister that Henry had in his last years. The Master of Trinity Hall during their time was Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, who was after Cranmer the most influential churchman in England, and had been Chancellor of the University of Cambridge since the execution of Thomas Cromwell back in 1540. (It is worth noting that Leland's epigrams specifically note that all three of these men attended Cambridge.Footnote ³³) It is no surprise therefore that the first thought of the university at the onset of this crisis was to lobby those three men, though it is remarkable that Cranmer was not thought worth approaching. Matthew Parker, together with Dr John Taylor (Master of St John's) and Dr Richard Atkynson (Vice-Provost of King's) were commissioned to write to them ‘for the defence of our privileges’.Footnote ³⁴ Gardiner was out of England on diplomatic business until late March 1546,Footnote ³⁵ when the university wrote to congratulate him on his safe return and beg him to bring his influence to bear. By then they had heard a rumour that a new set of royal commissioners had been empowered to inquire into ecclesiastical property throughout the county of Cambridgeshire, which had given fresh cause for anxiety.Footnote ³⁶ That rumour was presumably occasioned by the county commissions that had been issued under the Great Seal on 14 February, so their anxiety was entirely understandable.

The knottiest interpretative problem in Parker's memo is his statement that, after carrying out the valuation of the colleges, he and Dr May presented the fruits of their work to Henry viii at Hampton Court. As Jane Dawson has pointed out, Henry and his entourage had relocated from Hampton Court to Westminster by 28 January 1546. She therefore concludes that Parker and May reported within two weeks of the issuing of the commission. Alert to the fact that this would have represented extremely swift work, she suggests that what they presented was an ‘interim report’.Footnote ³⁷ Yet on closer examination this hypothesis is very difficult to credit. On the narrowest assumption of the available time-window, this would have given them barely a day or two to gather the data and have it summarised on the ‘fayr shete of vellem’ that, Parker says, he and May showed the king. If Taverner's letter to Parker (21 January) was actually the covering letter for the royal commission, they could scarcely have received it earlier than 22 January. The very latest day imaginable on which they could have found the king at Hampton Court is 27 January.Footnote ³⁸ Travelling fast, they might have left Cambridge for this meeting early on 26 January. So the work would have to have been done in four days, which beggars belief. The most generous time-window would be based on the commission leaving the court on 16 January, in which case Parker might have received it on 17 January. But even that leaves an absolute maximum of nine days if the report really reached the king at Hampton Court. This still seems implausible for a large and complex task: there were fifteen colleges besides a handful of hostels. And there is one decisive piece of evidence to show that the task was not completed in time for Parker and May to present the results of their work to Henry at Hampton Court. Their brief included chantries in the churches of Cambridge, and to secure or verify this information they consulted the local ordinary, the bishop of Ely, Thomas Goodrich. His reply to their enquiries, sent from his residence at Little Downham, was dated 1 February 1546.Footnote ³⁹ No doubt some of the colleges of Cambridge responded before him, but surely not all. And in any case, Parker and his colleagues could not have compiled their report before receiving replies to all their enquiries. It begins to look, in short, as if Parker must have been mistaken in his recollection of where he had his audience with the king.

Parker's memo offers two reasons to think he was indeed mistaken. It reports that the commissioners were assisted by a pair of ‘clarks of the augmentation court’ who ‘ingrossed’ the details of the possessions of the colleges. The memo then continues, ‘In the ende the sayd commyssioners resorted vp ^to hampton court^ to present to the kyng a brief sum wryten in a fayr shete of vellem.’ The whole tenor of the phrase ‘in the end’ seems inconsistent with the frenetic haste of a massive task putatively completed in less than ten days, and Parker's account at least implies that the ‘sum’ presented to the king was distilled from the commission's completed work. The vellum volume that the clerks engrossed, the ‘certifycate fayer wrytten in parchement subscybed with your handes’ that the king had required of them, which survives among the Exchequer records in the Public Record Office, is quite simply enormous.Footnote ⁴⁰ The gathering, collation and fair copying of that information represents weeks of work, not days. It was very likely written in Westminster, not in Cambridge. Every individual college's report is signed off by all three commissioners, and it is far more likely that the three of them could meet in London than in Cambridge, given their multiple responsibilities.

Secondly, as indicated in the transcript just provided, the detail about where the commissioners met the king is given in an interlinear insertion. It seems to be in Parker's hand, but it was evidently an afterthought, added to a document itself written, as we noted above, a year or more after the events it describes. It would have been strange indeed if Parker had confused an audience with the king at Hampton Court with one at Westminster. However, Westminster was only a staging post. By 2 February Henry was at Greenwich, where he remained – except for occasional brief visits to Westminster – until the middle of August. That Parker, looking back a year or more later, might have mistaken a visit to Greenwich for a visit to Hampton Court is at least plausible. In each case, travel to London would have been followed by a boat trip to a royal palace. And the name of Hampton Court might have been suggested to a perhaps uncertain memory by the signet letter, which is included in this cache of documents.

That the survey was completed within the month of February can be inferred from the engrossed copy, in which the heading for every individual college's financial statement follows the same formula, describing the commissioners as carrying out their task ‘mensis Februarij’ in the thirty-seventh year of Henry's reign.Footnote ⁴¹ The date is not precise, but it is difficult to believe that documents thus dated were first presented in January, as would have to be the case if they had been presented at Hampton Court. Nor, as we have seen, is it easy to believe that the information could have been collected in time to be presented even in summary form in January. But it is entirely credible that the work was completed within five or six weeks, enabling Parker and May to report to the king before the end of February. This would arguably fit better with a note in the statement for St John's College which observes that the Fellowship was four short, but that elections were due soon (‘mox’). Fellowship elections at St John's took place annually on the fifth Monday in Lent (the Monday before Palm Sunday). In 1546, that fell upon 12 April.Footnote ⁴² Mid-April would hardly be thought ‘soon’ in late January.

The bulk of the commission's work probably fell to Matthew Parker. Although the commission was issued in the names of three men, Edward North's advisory message was sent to Parker alone. Redman and May, though both (like Parker) college heads, were very much absentees. Dr Redman was a King's Chaplain who seems actually to have been at court in attendance on the king at this very time. Early in January, Henry viii authorised an offer of a Fellowship at King's Hall to an MA of Cambridge named Richard Rudd. This instruction was explicitly noted as a response to a petition made by Dr Redman and a court official called the Clerk of the Closet (one John Rudd, no doubt a relative of Richard's). The petition was presented to the king in his privy chamber by Sir Thomas Heneage, one of his closest attendants.Footnote ⁴³ Redman's presence at court may itself have contributed to securing special treatment for the universities. William May was also, perhaps, not as active in this business as he might have been. Although he was the President of Queens’ College, he was also a canon of Ely and, more significantly, dean of St Paul's Cathedral. The presidency of Queens’ in the early sixteenth century was an essentially absentee position, bestowed upon some dignitary with responsibilities elsewhere and an income of at least £20 a year from other sources. This enabled the college to pay their President a mere £3 6s. 8d. a year, only half the stipend of a Fellow. It also protected the Fellows from unwelcome interference.Footnote ⁴⁴ May fitted the bill perfectly, and presumably spent most of his time in London. Such working papers relating to the commission as survive are all found among Parker's manuscripts in Corpus Christi College library, which again suggests that his was the guiding hand.Footnote ⁴⁵

The university's corporate response to the Chantries Act has left clear traces in the historical record which show that it was itself triggered by the royal commission, rather than forming part of the process which led to the issuing of it. An entry in the university's Grace Books shows that Dr Thomas Smith (Vice-President of Queens’) and Dr Richard Atkynson (Vice-Provost of King's) were commissioned to draft letters to the king ‘and other patrons of the university’ and to arrange for them to be delivered by a deputation of ‘one or more college heads’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Some of the letters they drafted survive. A letter to Henry viii, dated 13 February, avows undying loyalty and grovellingly offers to surrender everything into his hands, even as a letter of the same date to William Paget implores him to do everything he can to prevent that offer being accepted.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thomas Smith was certainly chosen to head the delegation that delivered these letters. It seems likely, indeed, that he might have travelled to court along with Parker and the report on collegiate property. Smith also took a letter addressed to Henry's last wife, Katherine Parr, for her reply survives, dated 26 February 1546. In that reply the queen thanked the university for the letter that Smith, as their ‘discrete and lernyd aduocate’, had presented to her, and assured them that she had ‘attemptyd my lorde the kynges majestie for the stablysschment of your lyvelyhod and possessions’. This was moreover the occasion of her further assurance that the king, ‘beyng shuche a patrone to good lernyng dothe tender [i.e. favour] you so muche that he woll rather aduance, lernyng and erecte new occasion thereof then to confownd those your ancyent, and godly instytutions’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Even after this reassurance, as we have noted, the university continued its lobbying, for fear that they might yet fall within the scope of the commission for Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. Hence the university's letter to Gardiner on his return to England. Yet they do not seem to have expected wholesale dissolution. What Parker sought, and received, from the king in his audience was an assurance that the colleges would be protected from unfavourable land exchanges forced upon them by courtiers under the king's authority: ‘that no man bi his gracys letters shuld require to permute with vs to gyue vs worse’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was no idle fear. At much the same time as the commissions were being drawn up, Sir William Paget was deploying royal authority to induce the dean and chapter of St Paul's cathedral to surrender to him a lucrative manor in exchange for a bundle of less attractive properties.Footnote ⁵⁰ As dean, William May knew all about that.

The university's response to the Chantries Act has traditionally been connected with Henry viii's decision to found Trinity College in Cambridge. But there is no explicit evidence connecting the two, nor is the tradition concerning the connection of any great antiquity. That tale was first told by J. B. Mullinger in 1884, and has been copied and embroidered ever since. The only fragment of evidence that might connect the founding of Trinity with the Chantries Act is Katherine Parr's remark, in her aforementioned reply to Cambridge, that her husband was more inclined to ‘aduance lernyng and erecte new occasion thereof then to confownd those your ancyent, and godly instytutions’.Footnote ⁵¹ We can infer that this rather vague comment does allude to the new foundations that came to pass later that year, because they were explicitly mentioned in a letter sent to Oxford at much the same time. But none of this gives any reason to conclude that these royal plans had been suddenly formed in response either to Catherine's intervention or to lobbying about the Chantries Act.

As Christopher Haigh has shown, the decision to found Christ Church, Oxford, seems to have been taken in the middle of 1545.Footnote ⁵² The formal process of foundation was authorised by Henry at Hampton Court on 26 January 1546, but that was no more the beginning than it was the end. The letters patent founding Christ Church did not go under the Great Seal until 4 November, and its charter of endowment followed only on 11 December.Footnote ⁵³ The foundation charter for Trinity went under the Great Seal on 19 December, and the endowment followed on 24 December, both having been authorised under the dry stamp in October.Footnote ⁵⁴ But the processes for the founding of Trinity and Christ Church strongly suggest that they were always envisaged as a pair. When the University of Oxford was informed by Richard Cox about the king's intention to found a college there, Cox also informed them of the plan for a college at Cambridge. In a letter to the king of 19 February 1546 the university voiced its heartfelt gratitude for this wonderful news.Footnote ⁵⁵ And at the end of the year, the chosen heads of both colleges were compensated for the delays that had held up the process of foundation. In December 1546, a warrant instructed the Treasurer of the Court of Augmentations to issue £2,000 to Dr Redman, the first Master of Trinity, because the rents on Trinity's lands for the year ending Michaelmas 1546 had already been paid over to the crown's receivers before the charter of endowment had been issued. A similar warrant instructed the Treasurer to pay £2,400 in cash to Dr Richard Cox, the first Dean of Christ Church, for exactly the same reason.Footnote ⁵⁶ It seems fair to conclude from this similarity of treatment that the two colleges had been linked in the king's mind from the start. And it is equally clear that the start was before either university had had time to respond to the potential threat posed by the Chantries Act.

Since the break with Rome, Henry viii had treated the two universities with deliberate even-handedness. Both universities were subjected to royal visitation in 1535. In the wake of that visitation, both universities were in 1536 granted exemption from the ‘first fruits and tenths’ that had been recently begun to be levied, and the ‘king's readers’ were established in both universities. From 1540, that scheme was expanded and embedded with the foundation of the Regius Professorships.Footnote ⁵⁷ From June 1545, as Christopher Haigh has shown, Henry set up a sort of ‘block grant’, paid from the Court of Augmentations, for the support of needy scholars at Oxford. This grant directly replaced an obligation which had been laid upon the eleven newly founded or refounded cathedrals that Henry had set up from 1540, by which they had all been bound to support scholars at the universities. These scholars were housed in the intermediate institution at St Frideswide's which bridged the gap between the suppression of King Henry viii's college (formerly Wolsey's Cardinal College) and the foundation of Christ Church. Once Christ Church was founded, over half of the remaining Frideswide scholars joined the new foundation, and the block grants ceased as Christ Church itself took over the responsibility for supporting sixty students in their studies. Haigh briefly notes that something similar happened at Cambridge, where Trinity College took on responsibility for students who had been supported by a similar block grant at that university.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the single fact which suggests most strongly that Henry intended from the start to found a college in each university is that responsibility for paying these block grants to both universities was transferred to the Court of Augmentations at the same time – late in 1545. The first warrants authorising these payments were issued in late November and early December that year – comfortably before the Chantries Act had even been passed.Footnote ⁵⁹ The plans for Oxford proceeded faster than those for Cambridge, at least initially, because it was obvious from the start that the Oxford college would be on the site of Wolsey's foundation.

Henry's decision to make new foundations at Oxford and Cambridge, then, is difficult to credit as the outcome of deft politicking by Cambridge academics in early 1546 in response to the threat posed by the Chantries Act. On the contrary, the fact that the two universities were, from the start, set apart from the rest of the country in the implementation of the act is just one among several indications that the king already had something special in mind for them. Henry viii's plan to establish lasting memorials to himself in both universities was almost certainly already in his mind, and had probably been there since at the latest mid-1545. The ‘Cambridge version’ of the events that led to the foundation of Trinity (and by implication Christ Church) looks a little like an academic flight of fancy.