A Scholar of Magdalen
John Foxe was born in 1516 or 1517 at Boston in Lincolnshire. His father died when he was young, and his mother remarried. Around the age of sixteen he went up to Oxford, where he became a fellow of Magdalen College and earned a reputation for learning. At Oxford, through his study of Scripture and the early Christian writers, he embraced the Protestant faith.
In 1545 he resigned his fellowship rather than submit to college rules that would have required him to take holy orders and remain unmarried. He worked as a tutor, first in a Warwickshire household and then, from 1548, to the children of the Earl of Surrey, who had been executed the year before. One of his pupils, Thomas Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, remained his patron for years. Foxe married Agnes Randall in 1547 and was ordained a deacon in 1550.
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