William Boston (abbot)

William Benson (died 1549) was an English Benedictine, the last Abbot of Westminster and first Dean of Westminster. He was a friend of Thomas Cranmer, and belonged to the evangelical circle around Cranmer that included Thomas Goodrich, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Thirlby.

A native of Boston, Lincolnshire, Benson was apparently educated in some religious house belonging to the Benedictine order, of which he was a member. He took, according to custom in the order, the name of the town where he was born (i.e. Boston). He resumed the name Benson in later life. Until 1521, when he graduated B.D. at Cambridge University, little is known of him. He took the degree of D.D. in 1528.

Two years later he appears as one of the doctors to whom the university referred the question of the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII with Catharine of Aragon, when its opinion on the matter was sought by the king, and voted with the majority against the marriage. In the following year (27 March 1531) he was elected abbot of the Benedictine Burton Abbey, Burton-on-Trent. Around 1532 or 1533 Benson resigned this office to be elected abbot of Westminster Abbey, although not a previous member of the chapter, as every abbot had been since William Humez, who died in 1222.

Benson assisted John Stokesley, the Bishop of London at the christening of the Lady Elizabeth, which took place in September 1533 in the Church of the Friars Minors of the Order of St. Francis at Greenwich. In the following year he was appointed, jointly with Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Audley, and Cromwell, to administer the oath to accept, on pain of high treason, the statute defining the succession to the crown, in the preamble of which the marriage of Queen Catharine was declared void (25 Henry VIII, cap. 22).

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