Robert Crowley (printer)

Robert Crowley also Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole, and Crule (c. 1517 – 18 June 1588), was a stationer, poet, polemicist and Protestant clergyman who was among the Marian exiles at Frankfurt. Crowley appears to have been a Henrician Evangelical who favoured a more reformed Protestantism than was sanctioned at that time by the king and the Church of England.

Under Edward VI, Crowley took part in a London network of evangelical stationers to argue for the reforms he sought. He shared a vision of his contemporaries Hugh Latimer, Thomas Lever, Thomas Beccon, and others, of England as a reformed Christian commonwealth. He attacked what he perceived as corruption and uncharitable self-interest among the clergy and wealthy, inhibiting the progress of reform. It was during this time that Crowley participated in the production of the first printed editions of Piers Plowman, the first translation of the gospels into Welsh, and the first complete metrical psalter in English, which was also the first English psalter with harmonised music.

Toward the end of Edward's reign and later, Crowley criticised the Edwardian Reformation as being compromised and he came to regard the Dissolution of the Monasteries as the replacement of one form of corruption by another. Upon his return to England following the reign of Mary I, Crowley produced a revised chronicle in which he represented the Edwardian Reformation as a substantial failure because of figures such as Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley; Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset; and John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. In Crowley's account of the Marian martyrs he represented them as a cost then mostly paid by commoners. This work became a source for John Foxe's account of the Marian period in his Actes and Monuments.

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