The manuscript of Adam’s life that so much absorbed me as a boy seemed to echo with the man himself – a resonant, somewhat daunting brogue – as he told his story in ways that brooked no contradiction. Even now, this is true. When I read that he was sent to Cambridge with an unusually generous allowance from his father, which he used to procure ‘the love and esteem of his contemporaries in the University’ and the ‘friendship with those who were most distinguished there for their virtue, learning and family interests,’10 it sounds like the old Archbishop, re-inventing his youth as a tale of earnest endeavour. The facts were otherwise. Adam’s father had died when he was a child, and the friends that he made at Cambridge included dangerous fundamentalists, intent on religious revolution.
It was a drastic break with his past, for the Yorkshire of Adam’s childhood was a stronghold of recusancy, and the tradition in which he was raised was Catholic in all but name. When his father died I think it likely that he was sent to Richmond, to lodge with his relatives Gabriel and William Lofthouse and be taught by their friend John Moore, who was master of the school that had long been associated with the Chantry of Our Lady. All three of them were priests – Gabriel had also been a monk – and they clung to traditional Catholic ways, despite the introduction of new forms of worship. They believed in the saints, prayed for the dead, sang God’s praise.11
So the youth who set off for Cambridge, a year or two after the founding of Trinity College, was moving from the heartland of the old faith to a place in ferment, seething with radical ideas. King Henry was dead – succeeded by his clever but sickly son, Edward VI – and the Council of Regency was packed with men committed to reform on the continental model. This meant that Court and university were briefly in accord as to the future of the English Church, for Cambridge had long been a centre of Protestant debate and a magnet for reformers from Germany and Geneva. ‘Germany’ had even become a nickname for the White Horse Inn, where they gathered to discuss the teachings of Luther and Melancthon, Zwingli, Calvin and Martin Bucer. Those debates shaped the views of a brilliant generation – including a future archbishop, Adam Loftus, and his future friend Thomas Cartwright.12
For men such as these, educated in the bracing air of Cambridge radicalism, reading the Bible in English and discovering the primitive force of scripture, Puritanism was the breath of belief. ‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.’13 That sense of the Word, of the purifying flame, is hard to capture in the subsequent tangle of Adam’s life but it was, I feel sure, the spark that fired him14, when he was young.
Those exciting days ended quite suddenly, in 1553, with the death of King Edward at the age of fifteen. Edward’s half-sister Mary (whose mother and husband were Spanish) reversed his radical changes with Catholic vengeance, and burned those who refused to recant their heresy. Adam left Cambridge without taking his degree, was ordained as a priest and hid himself in the country. He was appointed to the parish of Outwell in Norfolk – thirty miles north of Cambridge – and then moved again to Gedney, in the fens of Lincolnshire. He stayed there, in quiet obscurity, while more notable dissenters were torched at the stake.15 It took five years of apparent conformity before the accession of Protestant Elizabeth ended this reign of terror.
Yet somehow in these years of dangerous upheaval the young Adam Loftus came to the notice of a gre
