e was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke
College, Oxford, graduating bachelor of civil and canon law in June
1519. He was ordained about the same time, and admitted D.C.L. in 1525.
In 1529 he was Wolsey's chaplain, and he was with the cardinal at Cawood
at the time of his arrest. Subsequently he was transferred, perhaps
through Cromwell's influence, to the service of the king, and in January
1532 he was sent to Rome to obstruct the judicial proceedings against
Henry in the papal curia. In October 1533 he was entrusted with the
unmannerly task of intimating to Clement VII., while he was the guest of
Francis I. at Marseilles, Henry's appeal from the pope to a general
council; but there seems to be no good authority for Burnet's story that
Clement threatened to have him burnt alive. For these and other services
Bonner had been rewarded by the grant of several livings, and in 1535 he
was made archdeacon of Leicester.

Towards the end of that year he was sent to further what he called "the
cause of the Gospel" (_Letters and Papers_, 1536, No. 469) in North
Germany; and in 1536 he wrote a preface to Gardiner's _De vera
Obedientia_, which asserted the royal, denied the papal, supremacy, and
was received with delight by the Lutherans. After a brief embassy to the
emperor in the spring of 1538, Bonner superseded Gardiner at Paris, and
began his mission by sending Cromwell a long list of accusations against
his predecessor (_ib_. 1538, ii. 144). He was almost as bitter against
Wyatt and Mason, whom he denounced as a "papist," and the violence of
his conduct led Francis I. to threaten him with a hundred strokes of the
halberd. He seems, however, to have pleased his patron, Cromwell, and
perhaps Henry, by his energy in seeing the king's "Great" Bible in
English through the press in Paris. He was already king's chaplain; his
appointment at Paris had been accompanied by promotion to the see of
Hereford, and before he returned to take possession he was translated to
the bishopric of London (October 1539).

Hitherto Bonner had been known as a somewhat coarse and unscrupulous
tool of Cromwell, a sort of ecclesiastical Wriothesley, He is not known
to have protested against any of the changes effected by his masters; he
professed to be no theologian, and was wont, when asked theological
questions, to refer his interrogators to the divines. He had graduated
in law, and not in theology. There was nothing in the Reformation to
appeal