Thomas Swynnerton

Thomas Swinnerton (or Swynnerton; died 1554) was an evangelical preacher and author during the English Reformation.

Swinnerton was one of the first Englishmen to study at Wittenberg University when he enrolled there in 1526. Later sources claim that he studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but this is unlikely and his contemporary, Bishop John Longland of Lincoln claimed in 1536 that he never attended an English university. By 1531, Swinnerton was back in England, where he was accused of abducting one Eleanor Wakefield, the servant of a wealthy London merchant. According to his own account, he was merely staying with the girl in the house of her uncle, William Wakefield, in Yorkshire. To avoid prosecution, Swinnerton adopted the alias Thomas Roberts and perhaps also John Roberts, as claimed by Bishop John Bale of Ossory, who claimed he was being persecuted by the Catholic lord chancellor, Thomas More. Neither was published under his name: A litel treatise ageynste the mutterynge of some papistis in corners was anonymous and A mustre of scismatyke bysshoppes of Rome was released under his alias Thomas Roberts. The former is "dull [and] brief". In labelling Papal discourse as the "mutterings of some papists in corners", Swinnerton discredits all speech or writing that lacks royal approval and takes place, so to speak, "in blind alleys". His Mustre, a "far superior" work to the Litel treatise, is a preface to his translation of the Gesta Romanae ecclesiae contra Hildebrandum of Cardinal Beno of Santi Martino e Silvestro.

Sometime before 1537 Swinnerton received a curacy in the parish of St Mary Elms in Ipswich. He remained there until 1541, having a distinct evangelical effect on the parish. In 1538, the will of the wealthy local merchant Robert Cutler commissioned him to preach three sermons in place of masses in memory of the deceased. He was at some point accused before Bishop William Rugg of Norwich of having a wife in Colchester, perhaps the Eleanor Wakefield he had allegedly "abducted" or merely "stayed with" in 1531. Summoned before the diocesan consistory to answer the charge, he never appeared, perhaps through the intervention of Cromwell, who appears to have protected him from Bishop Longland a couple years earlier. In 1541 he was transferred to the vicarage of St Clement's in Sandwich as part of the archbishop of Canterbury's effort to evangelise Kent for the Reformation. In St Clement's, he was presented by the archbishop's nephew, Edmund Cranmer. If indeed he was married to Eleanor Wakefield, whose father was the archbishop's chaplain, it would appear that Swinnerton enjoyed the protection of two of the most powerful men in England: Cranmer and Cromwell. Tropes and figures of Scripture (1537[?])