attainments. Hooker graduated B.A. 14 Jan. 1573–4 and M.A. 8 July 1577, and in the latter year obtained a fellowship. An extant inventory of the furniture in his college rooms—on the second or third floor above the library—shows that his books included Hosius's ‘De Hæreticis,’ ‘Jewel's reply to Harding,’ 1564, and Lyra's ‘Commentaries’ (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xi. 221). As a young man Hooker's range of learning was very wide. He was well acquainted with Greek and Hebrew, and although theology was then, as afterwards, his special study, he was no stranger to music and poetry, ‘all which he had digested and made useful.’ Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Saville was one of his Oxford friends, and in July 1579 he was appointed deputy to Thomas Kingsmill [q. v.], the professor of Hebrew, on the recommendation of the Earl of Leicester, chancellor of the university. He read Hebrew lectures in the university until his final departure. In October 1579 he was expelled from the college for a month, with his friend and former tutor, Dr. John Rainolds or Reynolds, and other colleagues. The cause is not known, but it seems probable that Hooker and his friends' views had offended John Barfoot, the vice-president, who was an ardent puritan. On returning to Oxford he quietly continued his studies, and about 1581 took holy orders. Outside Oxford he made his first public appearance in the same year, when he preached at St. Paul's Cross in London.
On the occasion of this sermon Hooker lodged in the house of a draper in Watling Street named John Churchman, and Mrs. Churchman (according to Walton) straightway persuaded him to marry their daughter Joan, an ill-tempered woman, neither rich nor beautiful. Wood calls her ‘a clownish, silly woman, and withal a mere Xanthippe.’ That the marriage was ‘a mistaken and ill-asserted one’ seems undoubted, and Walton attributes Hooker's error in the choice of his wife to his bashfulness and dim sight. Walton's story was doubtless derived from friends of Hooker, who specially disliked his wife, and should not, perhaps, be taken quite seriously. That Hooker's relations with his wife were thoroughly unhappy is rendered improbable by his will, in which he makes ‘my wel-beloved wife’ sole executrix and residuary legatee, while ‘Mr. John Churchman, my wel-beloved father,’ is appointed an overseer along with Hooker's friend Sandys.
Hooker vacated his fellowship on his marriage, and on 9 Dec. 1584 was presented by John Cheney, the patron, to the living of Drayton-Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire. When his pupils Cranmer and Sandys visited him there they found him (according to Walton's well-known anecdote) in a field reading the odes of Horace while tending his sheep; were soon deprived of his ‘quiet company’ by his wife, who ordered him to rock the cradle, and left disgusted at the domestic tyranny to which Hooker submitted. Sandys is said to have told his father (now archbishop of York) of Hooker's condition, and at the archbishop's suggestion and by the influence of Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, Hooker was, on 17 March 1584–5, appointed master of the Temple. Walter Travers [q. v.], a well-known puritan, who was already afternoon-reader or lecturer at the Temple, was a candidate for the post, and was passed over in Hooker's favour.
As soon as Hooker was installed in office the Temple church became the scene of a violent theological controversy between the master and the afternoon-lecturer. The church was thenceforth crowded with judges and barristers, including Sir Edward Coke and Sir James Altham, who took ‘notes from the mouths of their ministers’ (Fuller, Church Hist. ed. Brewer, v. 184 sq.) It is noticeable that Hooker's Cambridge friends Jewel and Rainolds both belonged to the moderate puritan school among English churchmen, and he himself seems at first to have inclined to their views. He always adhered generally to Calvin's doctrine of election (cf. his sermon on Justification), carefully studied Calvin's ‘Institutes,’ and invariably spoke of Calvin with respect. But Travers's extravagant puritanism compelled him to emphasise his objections to Calvinistic theology in detail, and he proved himself in his sermons the ablest living advocate of the church of England as by law established. ‘The pulpit,’ wrote Fuller, ‘spake pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon.’ Travers's lectures proved more popular than his antagonist's, and soon became strenuous denunciations of Hooker's views, which he represented as latitudinarian and erroneous. Whitgift intervened, and silenced Travers on the ground that he had received ordination according to the presbyterian form in a foreign congregation. Travers, in an appeal to the council, charged Hooker with heresy, and Hooker answered the charge at length (printed in 1612). Although the controversy was keen it was conducted with much dignity, and Hooker and Travers never lost respect for each other. When the dispute was subsiding, Hooker resolved to investigate the general principles involved in the position of the church of England, and his great work on the ‘Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ was the result. So that he might the more peacefully pursue his studies he appealed to Whitgift in 1591 to give him a country benefice. The
