Walter Travers 1548?-1635

Walter TRAVERS 1548?-1635

Biographical Note

Born in Nottingham, son of Walter Travers, goldsmith. BA Trinity College, Cambridge 1566, junior fellow 1567, MA and senior fellow 1569. In 1570 he was forced to leave for his strongly puritan views, and moved to Geneva, where he wrote Ecclesiasticae disciplinae (1574), expounding a Calvinist system of church government. He became chaplain to the English Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp in 1578 before returning to England in 1580 as chaplain to Lord Burghley, and in 1581 as deputy minister at the Temple Church. He became established as a leading voice in the puritan/presbyterian movement in London, and drafted the Book of Discipline for an English presbyterian church in 1587. He escaped imprisonment when a major crackdown on puritans took place in 1590 and in 1594 Burghley secured for him the post of Provost at Trinity College, Dublin. He returned to England in 1598 and spent the rest of his life without a post, occasionally preaching or making interventions for the presbyterian cause.

Books

Travers bequeathed to Sion College in London "as much of my whole library as two of them orderly appointed by the rest to survey the same shall think fit ... for their use both books and all other things belonging to them such as harps and globes compasses and such like"; any remaining, unselected books were to be given to the children of his nephews. He also left money to Sion to pay for preaching, and founded studentships at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin. Ca.150 books were selected for Sion College, including bibles, patristics, rabbinics, dictionaries, medicine, alchemy and one medieval manuscript. Examples:

Sources

Ford, Alan. "Travers, Walter (1548?–1635), religious activist and college head." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; E. Pearce, Sion College and Library, 1913, 243-4. Sears Jayne, Library catalogues of the English renaissance. Godalming, 1983. 168.