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Thomas Lever (1521–1577), the English preacher and former master of St John’s College, Cambridge, wrote this letter to Heinrich Bullinger in 1554 as a Protestant exile under Queen Mary. He thanks Bullinger for letters of recommendation that had won him kindness from strangers on his travels. He reports that recent rumours that the queen had been killed were false, and that she continued alive and growing in impiety. He also mentions English exiles who had come to Zurich with Richard Chambers, a devout man who spent himself and his means supporting ministers during the persecution.
Lever was one of many English Protestants who fled to the Continent after Mary’s accession in 1553. He later took part in the disputes among the exiles at Frankfurt and, returning under Elizabeth, became archdeacon of Coventry and an advocate of further reform. His letter shows the role of Zurich and of Bullinger’s recommendations in sheltering the Marian exiles, and names Richard Chambers, who organised financial help for them. It is edited in the Heinrich Bullinger Briefwechsel.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Institut für Computerlinguistik, Universität Zürich. The online edition is based on the cited book…), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.