Robert Barnes (1495 – 30 July 1540) was an English reformer and martyr.
Barnes was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk in 1495, and was educated at Cambridge, where he was an Augustinian priest of the Austin Friars. Sometime after 1514 he was sent to study in Leuven. Barnes returned to Cambridge in the early 1520s, where he graduated Doctor of Divinity in 1523, and, soon after, was made Prior of his Cambridge convent.
John Foxe says that Barnes was one of the Cambridge men who gathered at the White Horse Tavern for Bible-reading and theological discussion in the early 1530s. At the encouragement of Thomas Bilney, Barnes preached at the Christmas Day Midnight Mass in 1525 at St Edward's Church in Cambridge. Barnes' sermon, although against clerical pomp and ecclesiastical abuses, was neither particularly unorthodox nor surprising. However, after seeing a churchwarden whose civil suit resulted in the imprisonment of a local man, Fr. Barnes departed from his prepared text to denounce lawsuits by one Christian against another - inside the parish church of Cambridge University's College of Lawyers. At a time when King Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey were attempting to stop the smuggling of Martin Luther's books into England from the Continent, Barnes' remarks immediately drew suspicion.
As a result, in 1526 Barnes was brought before the vice-chancellor for preaching a heretical sermon, and was subsequently interrogated by Wolsey and four other bishops. He was ordered to abjure his sermon or be burnt; and, after choosing the former, was committed to the Fleet prison, but afterwards conditionally released to the Austin Friary in London. Although under house arrest in the Friary, Barnes was allowed visitors. It was subsequently discovered that while incarcerated there, Barnes was secretly a distributor of illegal copies of William Tyndale's Protestant Bible.
He escaped to Antwerp in 1528, and also visited Wittenberg, where he became good friends with Martin Luther.
