Cromwell’s tenure as Dean of Wells set a precedent for several such appointments of laymen as cathedral deans in the Tudor age: they were generally civil lawyers, such as the celebrated Crown servant and intellectual Sir Thomas Smith, who graced the Deanery of Carlisle Cathedral with his absence for much of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Through this opportunistic acquisitiveness at Wells, the Vice-Gerent may unwittingly have saved cathedrals from their logical extinction in a Reformed Protestant Church, by providing them with a number of powerful lay protectors in their most vulnerable decades.
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