Robert Barnes (martyr)

Robert Barnes (c. 1495 – 30 July 1540) was an English reformer and martyr.

Barnes was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk in 1495, and was educated at Cambridge, where he was a member of the Austin Friars. Sometime after 1514 he was sent to study in Leuven. Barnes returned to Cambridge in the early 1520s, where he graduated Doctor of Divinity in 1523, and, soon after, was made Prior of his Cambridge convent.

John Foxe says that Barnes was one of the Cambridge men who gathered at the White Horse Tavern for Bible-reading and theological discussion in the early 1530s. At the encouragement of Thomas Bilney, Barnes preached at the Christmas Midnight Mass in 1525 at St Edward's Church in Cambridge. Barnes' sermon, although against clerical pomp and ecclesiastical abuses, was neither particularly unorthodox nor surprising. However, seeing a churchwarden whose civil suit resulted in the imprisonment of a local man, Barnes departed from his prepared text to denounce lawsuits by one Christian against another—and this in a church traditionally associated with the lawyers' college. Coming at a time when Cardinal Wolsey was attempting to stop the infiltration from the continent of copies of Luther's works, Barnes' remarks appeared suspect.

As a result, in 1526 he was brought before the vice-chancellor for preaching a heterodox sermon, and was subsequently examined by Wolsey and four other bishops. He was condemned to abjure or be burnt; and preferring the former alternative, was committed to the Fleet prison and afterwards to the Austin Friars in London. Although confined to the house, he was allowed visitors. It was subsequently discovered that while there, Barnes became a known distributor of contraband copies of the Bible in the vernacular.

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