1921 ENGLISHMEN AT WITTENBERG 423 frailty ' Luther gave him the advice ' that if by no lawful means he could not live chast, that he should take a wif and lyve a meane lyfe '. Of this visit nothing else is known. 1 Luther's next English visitor was William Paget, afterwards Lord Paget, one of Henry VIII's diplomatic agents. Probably as early as 1531 he came to Wittenberg on the matter of the divorce. While there he told Luther of the death of the duke of Buckingham, whom the king had put to death in 1521. Paget blamed Wolsey for the execution, and told the reformer that the Emperor Charles V had said, with a pun on the duke's name, ' It is a pity so noble a buck should be slain by such a hound 2 Robert Barnes was the most constant friend of the reformers. Coming to Wittenberg first as a political refugee, he was later employed by Henry on several diplomatic errands. 3 Like other travellers he often went through Hamburg, where he apparently made good friends. The treasurers of that city sent money by Barnes to Wittenberg to pay for the graduation of Aepinus as a doctor. 4 Here also he became acquainted with some pious women, whose conversion to protestantism, perhaps through his agency, brought much joy to Luther. 5 At Wittenberg Barnes made friends with Peter Beskendorf, Luther's barber and friend, to whom the reformer dedicated a tract on prayer. The pious barber, who in a moment of aberration murdered his son-in-law, kept an autograph album in which many famous men entered their names. That of the Englishman appears there, with a German biblical quotation, as ' Doctor Antonius Anglus, Reg. Angl. Legatus '. 6 On 20 June 1533 Barnes matriculated at Wittenberg under the name ' D. Antonius Anglus Theologiae Doctor Oxoniensis ', Melanchthon later writing his true name in the margin. 7 ' Barnes must have been married at this time, though of this nothing seems to be known to any of his biographers. On 14 February 1533 Nicholas Hausmann of Zwickau, writing to George Helt of Wittenberg, sends greeting to Antonius Anglus and his wife. 8 This is the only reference to the lady 1 British Museum, Harleian MS. 419, fo. 125. This paper once belonged to John Foxe, but in his Actes and Monuments, v. 18, he departed widely from the original. On Dusgate see also Diet, of Nat. Biog., and Izacke, Antiquities of Exeter, 1734, p. 116. 2 Luther, Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Tischreden, i. no. 337. On Paget's visits, ante, xxv. 665 f., xxvii. 675 f. 3 On Barnes, Diet, of Nat. Biog. ; Gairdner, i. 529, n. 2 ; ante, xxv. 665 f. 4 Letter of the Hamburg Treasurers to Bugenhagen and his reply, 28 April and 8 May 1533, in 0. Vogt, Bugenhagen's Briefweehsel, 1888, pp. 127 f. 8 Letter of Luther to Abeleke Schelhoves and others, 30 June 1533 ; Luther s Briefweehsel, ed. Enders-Kawerau-Flemming, xvii. 319 f. 6 N. Miiller, ■ Peter Beskendorf ', in Aus Deutsehlands kirchlicher Vergangenheit, 1912, p. 67. 7 Album, i. 149. This fact is not noted in Gairdner's life of Barnes in the Diet, of Nat. Biog. 8 Georg Helts Briefweehsel, ed. O. Clemen, 1907, p. 44.
