Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol. 1 of 2 (Classic Reprint)

Middle A ges of whom we know less. The story of Richard Hooker slife is soon told. He was born in 1554 in Exeter of burgess stock, his grandfather having been mayor. His uncle John Hooker had been an editor of Holinshed s Chronicles. The family was Protestant and also poor; but Richard showed promise at the local grammar-school and his uncle secured for him the patronage of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, who got the boy into Corpus Christi College, Oxford, at the age of fourteen, first as a chorister and later as a clerk. At nineteen he became a scholar and at twenty-three a fellow of the college. His academic career was not outstanding but he acquired enough fame to become deputy Professor of Hebrew for a few days, and to be asked to preach at Paul s Cross in London in 1581, just after he had taken orders. In 1588 he married Joan Churchman, daughter of a future Master of the Merchant Taylors Company. Modern research has disposed of Izaak Walton sstory that the Churchman family was in low financial water; but there may be truth in Walton sstatement that Hooker was a henpecked husband it would not be inconsistent with his known humility of character. Before his marriage Hooker became Rector of Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire, in 1584 and, a year later, Master of the Temple. He was appointed over the head of the well-known Puritan Walter Travers, who, however, stayed on as a lecturer. The Master and the Lecturer were soon engaged in a public theological controversy for, in spite of a Puritanical background in his home and in his college, Hooker had already formed strongly Anglican views. The controversy, although it gave him personal pain, brought him into the limelight and attracted the interest both of Archbishop Whitgift and of Burghley. They soon saw in Hooker the champion for whom the Established Church was looking. In 1591 he ceased to be Master of
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)