Gabriel Donne

Gabriel Donne or Dunne (died 1558) was an English Cistercian monk and was the last Abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

[9][10] Donne was a student, pretended or real, at Leuven in 1535, he went to Antwerp in the disguise of a servant to Henry Phillips, and there planned with the latter the arrest of William Tyndale, which took place in the city on 23 or 24 May in the same year.

On his return to England he obtained by the influence of Cromwell, then secretary of state, the abbacy of the house of his order at Buckfastleigh in his native Devon,[11] at that time in the patronage of Vesey, bishop of Exeter, a bitter persecutor of the reformers.

Within two years of his election he alienated much of the monastic property, and on 25 Feb 1538-9, despite the solemn oaths he had taken, he, with nine others of his religious, surrendered his abbey into the hands of Henry VIII.

In making such an appointment Cranmer was probably acting to his own advantage, for he had all along been kept well informed of the part Donne had taken in the betrayal of Tyndale (see letter of Thomas Tebolde to the archbishop, dated 31 July 1535, in 'Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII,' Cal.

'The residue of my goodds and chattells (yf any shalbe) I require myne executors to bestowe at theire discretions to the advauncemente of poore maidens marriages, releef of scolleres and students, specially to soche as myne executors shall thinke metest as shal be towarde lerninge disposed to be preestes and ministers of Christis Churche.'

The "Gabriel Downe Scholarship" still exists, and his arms, Azure, a wolf rampant argent a chief of the last, are visible as one of 15 oval escutcheons[18][19] of various benefactors of the college on the coffered ceiling of Trinity Hall Chapel.