Italian universities, wherever
genius or ability could be found; and he had introduced into the foundation
several students from Cambridge, who had been reported to him as being of
unusual promise. Frith, of whom we have heard, was one of these. Of the
rest, John Clark, Sumner, and Taverner are the most noticeable. At the time
at which they were invited to Oxford, they were tainted, or some of them
were tainted, in the eyes of the Cambridge authorities, with suspicion of
heterodoxy;[502] and it is creditable to Wolsey's liberality, that he set
aside these unsubstantiated rumours, not allowing them to weigh against
ability, industry, and character. The church authorities thought only of
crushing what opposed them, especially of crushing talent, because talent
was dangerous. Wolsey's noble anxiety was to court talent, and if possible
to win it.

The young Cambridge students, however, ill repaid his confidence (so, at
least, it must have appeared to him), and introduced into Oxford the rising
epidemic. Clark, as was at last discovered, was in the habit of reading St.
Paul's Epistles to young men in his rooms; and a gradually increasing
circle of undergraduates, of three or four years' standing,[503] from
various colleges, formed themselves into a spiritual freemasonry, some of
them passionately insisting on being admitted to the lectures, in spite of
warnings from Clark himself, whose wiser foresight knew the risk which they
were running, and shrank from allowing weak giddy spirits to thrust
themselves into so fearful peril.[504]

This little party had been in the habit of meeting for about six
months,[505] when at Easter, 1527, Thomas Garret, a fellow of
Magdalen,[506] who had gone out of residence, and was curate at All Hallows
church, in London, re-appeared in Oxford. Garret was a secret member of the
London Society, and had come down at Clark's instigation, to feel his way
in the university. So excellent a beginning had already been made, that he
had only to improve upon it. He sought out all such young men as were given
to Greek, Hebrew, and the polite Latin;[507] and in this visit met with so
much encouragement, that the Christmas following he returned again, this
time bringing with him treasures of forbidden books, imported by "the
Christian Brothers;" New Testaments, tracts and volumes of German divinity,
which he sold privately among the initiated.

He lay concealed, with his store, at "the house of one Radley,"