Rarely was a Cambridge lecture hall as packed as when Thomas Cartwright took the podium to comment on the book of Acts. Students crowded the hallways to hear a professor who seemed to say, in no uncertain terms, that the Church of England needed to return to the model of the apostles.
Born around 1535, probably in Royston, Hertfordshire, Cartwright grew up amid the religious upheavals of the reigns of Mary I and Elizabeth I. He entered Cambridge young, first at Clare Hall, then at St John’s College and Trinity, where he became one of the most admired scholars of his generation.
In 1569 he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, the most coveted post at the university. His lectures argued that bishops and archbishops had no basis in Scripture, and that the church should be governed by presbyters, in the manner of the earliest Christian communities.
The boldness came at a high price. In 1570 the vice-chancellor himself, John Whitgift, later Archbishop of Canterbury, stripped him of his professorship; the following year he also lost his place at Trinity. Cartwright left for the continent, spent a season with the reformer Theodore Beza in Geneva, and, upon returning to England in 1572, became involved in the public defense of a pamphlet calling for reform of church discipline.
A long written dispute with Whitgift followed, the Admonition Controversy, which made Cartwright the best-known name in English Presbyterianism. Persecuted, he spent much of thirteen years outside England, pastoring communities of English merchants in Antwerp, in present-day Belgium, and in Middelburg, in the present-day Netherlands.
Contemporaries recognized his erudition in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also noted an impulsive temperament: in debates he let himself be carried away by his own vehemence, and at least one critic described him as a contentious disputant of ungentle manners. Cartwright never hid his convictions behind moderation.
Back in England in 1585, he became master of the Earl of Leicester’s hospital in Warwick, a post he held until his death. Even so, he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison between 1590 and 1592 for refusing to give, under oath, the testimony demanded by the ecclesiastical high commission against his fellow Puritans.
Cartwright died in Warwick on December 27, 1603, two days after preaching for the last time, on Christmas Day, on the very text of Ecclesiastes 12:7. He left unfinished the work that had cost him the most, a refutation of the Catholic Rheims New Testament, published only fifteen years after his death. His vision of a church governed by Scripture, not tradition, remains alive wherever Christians discuss how the Bible should shape the life of the community.
