Closing Remarks II

This chapter looks at the minds of the first two presidents of Corpus Christi College, John Claymond and Robert Morwent, speculating on what might have been their most worrying moments. For Claymond, it is the death of Richard Fox in 1528, which brought the greatest predator of the decade into an uncomfortably intimate relationship with the College, because Fox’s successor at Winchester was none other than Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Indeed, the two or three years after 1528 would have remained anxious for Claymond. The chapter next looks into the mind of President Morwent, and shows how another perilous moment would have arrived in 1538. By 1538, Cardinal Reginald Pole headed King’s Henry’s list of people who required murdering. It was amid the political turmoil of this debacle that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer let Thomas Cromwell know of dangerously papalist sentiments currently being expressed among the Corpus Fellowship. In the end, Corpus sneaked past this crisis too.