Meanwhile, Crowley took part in making the first printed editions of Piers Plowman, the first translation of the Gospels into Welsh, and the first complete metrical psalter in English, which was also the first to include harmonised music.
He experienced an evangelical conversion about this time which entailed religious convictions more in line with continental Protestant reformers, but quite at odds with the Church of England under Henry VIII and the Act of Six Articles, known to those who chafed under it as "the whip with six strings".
[1] Four of its members during this period became bishops under Elizabeth I, and with Crowley, Lawrence Humphrey was a key leader in the vestments controversy that took place during her reign.
[2] Crowley's departure may have been due to a purge of evangelicals, or because, like John Foxe, he objected to the necessity of taking holy orders which entailed a vow of celibacy.
At this time Foxe also left the college, naming Crowley and the future bishop Thomas Cooper in a letter to Magdalen's president, Owen Oglethorpe, as being among his circle.
From 1542 to about 1546 Crowley tutored for the Protestant household of Sir Nicholas Poyntz (1510–1556/7) in Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, his own home county.
At the same time as Crowley, Foxe found a similar arrangement, following a pattern whereby promising, young, university-educated men who sought greater changes in the church were supported by members of the lesser nobility until political circumstances were more favourable for public and institutional engagement.
In 1547 they were working in Holborn Conduit in St Sepulchre's parish at the sign of the Resurrection, but as William Cecil's servant, Seres was able to acquire Peter College for his printing operation.
One of these editions included a reprint of Simon Fish's A Supplication of Beggars (c. 1529), which famously attacked the doctrine of purgatory as a politically and economically disabling deception inflicted on the English people.
The other early imprint with some connection to Crowley was a treatise on the true, biblical meaning of the Lord's supper, with a rebuttal of Thomas More's arguments in favour of the Catholic doctrines on that subject.
These were a refutation of Nicholas Shaxton's sermon at Anne Askew's burning in 1546, in which Shaxton recanted his evangelical beliefs, a refutation of Miles Huggarde's arguments for transubstantiation in a lost ballad called The Abuse of ye blessed sacrament of the aultare, and An information and peticion, which must have been written before December 1547, since it refers to the Act of Six Articles as being unrepeated.
Appearing in two English editions and two Latin editions translated from the English by J. Heron and possibly published by Stephen Mierdman, the full title is An informacion and peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore commons of this real me, compiled and imprinted for this only purpose that amongst them that haue to doe in the Parliamente, some godlye mynded men, may hereat take occasion to speak more in the matter then the authoure was able to write.
In 1549 Richard Grafton and Mierdman published Crowley's The Psalter of Dauid newly translated into English metre in such sort that it maye the more decently, and with more delete of the mynde, be reade and songe of all men.
There is an introduction in English, and a dedicatory epistle to Owen Oglethorpe, president of Magdalen College, Oxford at that time and when Crowley had been a student and fellow there.
A running head reads: "The pathwaye to perfect knowledg", and Crowley's title page for the book reads: "The true copye of a prolog wrytten about two C. yeres paste by Iohn Wycklife (as maye iustly be gatherid bi that, that Iohn Bale hath writte[n] of him in his boke entitlid the Summarie of famous writers of the Ile of great Brita[n]) the originall whereof is founde written in an olde English Bible bitwixt the olde Testament and the Newe.
In 1551 Crowley published a fourth Salesbury text, a Welsh translation of the epistle and gospel readings from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
In 1551 Crowley printed a poetic work "for John Case dwelling in Peter Coledge rentes"; its title is: The knoledge of good and iuyle, other wyse calyd Ecclesiastes, ryght excelente and worthy, of all men to be had in mynde now a newe set fourth in meter.
Two original long poems by Crowley were also printed by him that year: Philargyrie of Greate Britayne (a political-religious allegory) and Pleasure and payne, heauen and hell: Remembre these foure, and all shall be well.
Prior to Crowley's arrival in London, Grafton had been imprisoned three times for printing-related offences: twice in 1541 (for a "sedicious [sic] epistle of Melanctons" and ballads defending Thomas Cromwell), and then in 1543, for the Great Bible.
Jennifer Loach, in Edward VI (Yale University Press, 1999): 62, notes that Lady Fane is Crowley's "only possible link, and a tenuous one, with Somerset".
Not for that I thyncke I have herein done any thyng worthy so liberall a Patrones, but for the worthynes of the matter..." The rest of the dedication appears to be an oblique admonishment and exhortation to the Somerset circle that is in line with Crowley's other publications at this time and in the late 1540s.
Since Pleasure and Pain was printed during the latter stages of Somerset's fall and shortly before his and Sir Ralph Fane's executions, it appears as less a bid for financial support than a plea for a changing of minds and policies.
It is notable that Crowley's 1559 continuation of the Lanquet-Cooper chronicle looks back on this period—Somerset's fall, then Dudley's, and the accession of Mary—as precisely a time of judgement that befell England due to the failings principally of the secular leaders such as Somerset.
Other sources suggest a link between Crowley and key aristocratic backers of reformism, such as William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester under Elizabeth.
Earlier, under Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Merchant Adventurers included Thomas Poyntz, brother of Lady Anne Walsh in whose house Crowley had served as tutor.
John Rogers, the first martyr under Mary I, whose "Matthew's Bible" later combined translations by Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, served as chaplain to the English merchants in Antwerp.
On 24 June the previous year, John Foxe had been ordained deacon by Ridley, after having taken up residence with the Duchess of Suffolk in the Barbican in order to be eligible.
The anticipated reforms that would follow from the spreading influence of men like these were deferred by the death of the king and the accession of Mary I after the ill-fated attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne.
According to A Briefe Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankeford in Germany (1575), which covers events from 1554 onward, in 1557 Crowley's signature appeared with those endorsing "the new discipline" at Frankfurt (i.e., the Genevan church order), which limited the pastoral authority of Robert Horne over the congregation.
However, it must be remembered that this framing of events comes from the Briefe Discourse of the Troubles which was first published eighteen years later, evidently in support of the Elizabethan presbyterian faction.