THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
highest terms Cropper's merits in saving Romanism within the archdiocese of Cologne. When the victory was won, and in place of Hermann the previous coadjutor, Adolf von Schaumburg, had been enthroned with his assistance, Gropper received the provostship in Bonn formerly held by a brother of Hermann. Under the new archbishop, Gropper worked by word and pen against the Protestants; he likewise acted as imperial commissioner for the carrying out of the Interim in his native city of Soest.
How little in accordance with his wishes, however, ecclesiastical affairs developed in the next years, he himself states in a letter of 1556, in which he sets forth the reasons why he did Disappoint- not wish to accept the dignity of the ment of cardinalate which had been offered to his Later him. A letter of the following year Years. betrays a still gloomier mood; he begged Canisius not to be suspicious of him if he held aloof from the religious colloquy soon to be held in Worms. In 1558 he saw new dangers arise for those near him, when Johann Gebhard von Mansfeld was chosen archbishop of Cologne. In order to prevent his confirmation by the pope, Gropper decided to make the journey to Rome, whither Paul IV had formerly invited him in vain. The pope received him with honor and demanded his opinion in weighty matters; nevertheless not only did he not accomplish that which he wished in the Cologne affair, but he was denounced to the Inquisition by the Venetian Delfino. On Mar. 13, 1559, he died in poverty, and was buried in the church of Maria dell' Anima. The pope, probably convinced by Gropper's defense that he was innocent, spoke before a consistory on Mar. 15 in praise of the services of the deceased and transferred his benefices to his brother Kaspar. As a papal nuncio Kaspar was later the zealous servant of the Counterreformation, which directed its efforts against the Erasmian tendency which Gropper had once represented; with the result that in 1596 Gropper's Enchiridion, "the most detailed and most important pre-Tridentine dogmatic of the Reformation period," was put upon the Index. K. Varrentrapp.
Bibliography: The writings of Gropper and the literature on him are recorded in a careful article in Ersch and Gruber, Encyclopiidie, section I., vol. xcii., 1872. For later investigations consult ZKG, xx (1899), 37 sqq.; KL, v. 1239 sqq. Consult also: F. H. Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Biichtr, i. 318, 468 et passim, Bonn, 1883; A. Hasenclever, Die Politik der Schmalkaldenervor Ausbruch des schmalkaldischen Kriegs, pp. 25 sqq., Berlin, 1901.
GROSSETESTE, gros'test, ROBERT: Bishop of Lincoln; b. in Suffolk c. 1175; d. at Buckden (4 m. s.w. of Huntingdon), Huntingdonshire, Oct. 9, 1253. He was of humble birth, but studied at Oxford and Paris. On his return to England he entered the service of William de Vere, bishop of Hereford, on whose death in 1199 he went to Oxford as teacher, becoming later rector scolarum, and in 1224 the first rector of the Franciscans at Oxford. During the Oxford period he held several preferments, including two prebends in Lincoln, and the archdeaconries of Wilts., Northampton, and Leicester.
In 1235 he became bishop of Lincoln, then the
most extensive see in England. His episcopal administration was marked by zeal in advancing its spiritual interests, and not seldom by the use of arbitrary and high-handed measures. He attacked the corruption and condemned the incompetency of the clergy, and instituted a systematic visitation of his diocese. With the monastic institutions he was especially severe, removing in the first year seven abbots and four priors. His vigorous course aroused such opposition that in 1237 an attempt was made to poison him. In 1239 began his long quarrel with the Lincoln chapter, which denied him the right of visitation. Finally he suspended the dean, excommunicated the prior, and went to Lyons to secure a papal decision of the case, which was decided entirely in his favor by a bull of Innocent IV., Aug. 25, 1245. Grosseteste returned to England as an obedient agent of the pope; but his attitude toward papal claims soon underwent a complete change. In 1250 he again visited the pope at Lyons. Here on May 13 he delivered a celebrated sermon, in which he declared that the papal court was the origin of all the evils in the Church, and urged the necessity of appointing competent pastors. On his return to his diocese he assailed the Italian ecclesiastics who were fleecing English parishes. He found by computation that the annual incomes of the foreign clerks in England appointed by Innocent amounted to seventy thousand marks, more than three times the clear revenue of the king. For refusing to admit an Italian ignorant of English to a rich benefice in his diocese he was suspended temporarily in 1251. Early in 1253 he refused pointblank to induct Frederick of Lavagna into a canonry at Lincoln, to which he had been appointed by his uncle, Innocent IV. In a plain but respectful letter the bishop told the pontiff that it was his duty to make appointments for the edification, not for the destruction, of the Church (Epist., cxxviii.). This letter has done more to perpetuate Grosseteste's fame than any of his other works.
Grosseteste 's relation to the state was one of independence. He rebuked ecclesiastics for holding civil offices, and asserted that to St. Peter belonged both swords, and that a bishop did not in any sense derive his authority from the civil power. He not only dared to refuse to execute the royal commands in his diocese, as the one regarding the legitimization of children born before wedlock, but told the king the plainest truths, and on more than one occasion refused to install his appointees in office, threatening even to excommunicate the royal offender.
Like Luther, previous to the Diet of Worms, Grosseteste had trusted in the pope, and hoped for relief from Rome for the ecclesiastical corruption of England. Once undeceived, he was drifting rapidly away from all veneration for the pontiff, when death overtook him. In a conversation on his death-bed with the scholarly cleric and physician, John of St. Giles, he gave a definition of heresy. and asked whether the pope did not fulfil it. "He was the open rebuker of both the pope and the king, censor of prelates, corrector of monks, instructor of clerks, and unwearied examiner of the books of Scrip-