Richard Smyth

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Richard Smyth (or Smith) was the first person to hold the office of Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford.

Richard Smyth was born in Worcestershire in 1499/1500 and died at Douai on 9 July 1563. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford and incepted as a Master of Arts in 1530, becoming Registrar of the University of Oxford in 1532. He supplicated for the degree of Doctor of Divinity on 10 July 1536. In the same year Henry VIII appointed him as the first Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford.

Under Edward VI he is said by his opponents to have abjured the pope's authority at St Paul's Cross (in London) on 15 May 1547, and also at Oxford, but the accounts of the proceedings are obscure and unreliable. If he yielded at all, he soon recovered and accordingly suffered the loss of the Regius Professorship, being succeeded in 1548 by Peter Martyr Vermigli, with whom he held a public disputation in 1549. Shortly afterwards he was arrested, but was soon liberated. Going to Leuven, he became Professor of Divinity there.

During Mary's Catholic restoration he regained most of his offices and was made Royal Chaplain and Canon of Christ Church, holding office as Regius Professor from 1554 until 1556, when he was replaced by Joannes Fraterculus. He took a prominent part in the proceedings against Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer. He held office as Regius Professor for a final term from 1559 until 1560, when he was succeeded by Lawrence Humphrey.

He again lost all his benefices at the change of religion under Elizabeth, and after a short imprisonment in Matthew Parker's house he escaped to Douai, where he was appointed by Philip II Dean of St Peter's. When the University of Douai was founded on 5 October 1562, he was installed as Chancellor and Professor of Theology, but only lived a few months to fill these offices.

Smyth also served terms as Master of Whittington College, London; Rector of St Dunstan-in-the-East; Rector of Cuxham, Oxfordshire; Principal of St Alban Hall; and Divinity Reader at Magdalen.

[edit] Works

Smyth wrote many works, the chief of which are:

Assertion and Defence of the Sacrament of the Altar (1546)
Defence of the Sacrifice of the Mass (1547)
Defensio cœlibatus sacerdotum (1550)
Diatriba de hominis justificatione (1550)
Buckler of the Catholic Faith (1555-56)
De Missæ Sacrificio (1562)
Refutations of Calvin, Melanchthon, Jewell, and Beza (1562)

[edit] Bibliography

J. Andreas Löwe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy: Re-imagining Tudor Catholic Polemicism (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions: History, Culture, Religion, Ideas, 96; Leiden: Brill, 2003)