In 1582 Cambridge's vice-chancellor, William Fulke, wrote to his superior, William Cecil, reporting that ‘the whole bodye of the Universitye is oute of frame’. Among the many problematic matters that he described to the chancellor was a ‘new practise’ which, he claimed, various Heads of Houses had noted and reported to him. Men, including those ‘not preachers or ever lyke to be reteyned as Chapleines, but of the most dissolute and disobedient sorte, have procured them selves to be admitted as Reteyners to diverse honorable personages, and some of them have openly worne their Masters cloths’. This behaviour, Fulke claimed, had first been spotted in Gonville and Caius, a college which in the same letter he described as so far from religious orthodoxy that it risked becoming a ‘an Asylum Papisticum or Seminarium hominium Neutrorum’. Fulke's letter suggested that the way to settle these problems both in this college and across the University as a whole was for Cecil to initiate a ‘generall commissione or Visitatione’.

Fulke's letter neatly demonstrates some of the contradictions surrounding the role of interactions between the university and outside authorities – men associated, in one form another, with the government of the Church or State – in its wider processes of religious change. External authority is seen as a key, perhaps as the only, way to bring Cambridge to religious orthodoxy. Yet outside influence could also protect and encourage the dissolute and disobedient. To reconcile this contradiction distinctions have to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate authority, between Cecil's official role as chancellor and the more amorphous and informal, perhaps insidious, influence of various court patrons over university men. In reality, no such sharp dividing line existed and a diversity of external influences shaped and complicated the reformation of Elizabethan Cambridge. The university had, of course, never been closed off from outside forces. But by the later sixteenth century old channels of influence had been deepened and new ones formed by a confluence of factors both within and outside the universities. Wider changes in the Tudor Church and State made lay elites increasingly attractive patrons for university men. At the same time, these elites themselves became – or at least were felt to become – a growing and perhaps distorting presence among Cambridge's undergraduates.