In June 1562 William Cecil, arguably the single most important man in the Elizabethan regime, had been chancellor of the University of Cambridge for over three years but, he claimed, he was no longer able to carry on. He wrote to the vice-chancellor and Heads of Houses offering them his resignation, claiming that ‘cawsys daylye more and more’ led him to despair of his ability to bring the university to order. He spoke both of a breakdown of discipline – of a university full of ‘factions and contention and … licke to encrease’ – and of religious problems. There were those within the university, he claimed, that ‘maligne and deprave thecclesiasticall orders stablysshyd by Lawe in this realme’. He placed the blame for this on the Heads of Houses; such problems were growing, he claimed, because they refused to ‘joyne earnestlie togyther to over rule the Licensiouse partes of youthe’. This offer of resignation was surely a gambit to bring the university heads to heel – it was a tactic which he may have already used with the queen herself two years earlier– and, if so, it worked. The heads desperately tried to persuade Cecil to retain the chancellorship, enlisting both Walter Haddon and Matthew Parker in their efforts, and were successful.

To the small degree that this episode has been addressed it is as part of a longer narrative of ‘Puritan problems’ within the university. Perhaps, though, Cecil was concerned about a wider range of nonconformity. His concern about the Heads of Houses may confirm this. The vice-chancellor in the year of this complaint was Philip Baker, a man hardly likely to be suspected of Puritanism. Indeed, perhaps the most telling phrase is the suggestion that the heads refused to ‘join together’. Perhaps the problem arose from trying to force co-operation between conservatives such as Baker and John Caius and former exiles such as Robert Beaumont and Roger Kelke, rather than simply from those with too ardent desires for reform. In 1562 the Protestant reforms within the university were still unclear, still incomplete.

It is exactly this uncertainty that concerns this chapter, which examines just the first six years of Elizabeth's long reign. This period of Cambridge's history has received little attention when compared to the dramatic disputes of the later 1560s and ‘70s.