Edward Lee (bishop)
|
The Most Reverend Edward Lee |
|
|---|---|
| Archbishop of York | |
| Installed | 1531 |
| Term ended | 1544 |
| Predecessor | Thomas Wolsey |
| Successor | Robert Holgate |
| Personal details | |
| Born | c. 1482 |
| Died | 13 September 1544 |
Edward Lee (c. 1482 – 13 September 1544) was archbishop of York from 1531 until his death.
He was son of Richard Lee of Lee Magna, Kent, who was the son of Sir Richard Lee, lord mayor of London in 1461 and 1470. He was born in Kent in or about 1482. Thomas More was a family friend, and dedicated an early work, Life of John Picus, to Lee's sister Joyce, a Poor Clare.
Lee was elected fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1500. Having graduated BA, he was incorporated at Cambridge early in 1503, moving from Oxford, it is supposed, on account of some outbreak of plague. At Cambridge he proceeded MA in 1504, being ordained deacon in that year, with title to the church of Wells, Norfolk. In 1512 he was collated to a prebend at Lincoln, and had his grace for degree of BD, but was not admitted until 1515, in which year he was chosen proctor in convocation.Thomas Cranmer took his MA in 1515, an early chance of contact with his future fellow-archbishop; Lee was later (1526) to give him his first court employment, as a junior member attached to a diplomatic mission to Spain.
He spent time in 1518 at the University of Louvain, studying Greek, where he encountered Erasmus, at that time reshaping the humanist views in particular on the New Testament. From an initially friendly disagreement, there evolved a series of polemics between Erasmus and Lee, with Lee emerging as the advocate of a traditionalist position.
Erasmus wrote to Lee explaining that he had not been able to make use of certain annotations which Lee had written. By 1519 Lee was a prominent opponent of Erasmus. Erasmus declared that Lee was a young man desirous of fame, and that he spread about reports to his disadvantage; he further said that Lee had circulated among religious houses an unfavourable criticism of his New Testament without having sent it to him, and he threatened Lee with punishment at the hands of German scholars. During 1520 the dispute was carried on with bitterness on both sides. Erasmus said that Lee's chief supporter was Henry Standish. Lee put forth sundry attacks on Erasmus, who retaliated by the Epistolæ aliquot Eruditorum Virorum, and sent an Apologia to Henry VIII defending himself against Lee. Thomas More, who said that he had loved Lee from boyhood, regretted the dispute, and set up a formal reconciliation at Calais in 1520, where diplomatic negotiations were taking place; but the meeting of Erasmus and Lee had little immediate effect, and the quarrel was not made up until 1522.
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