From Resurrection: The Heresy of a Jesuit:
“England had been a Catholic state for almost a thousand years. It had obediently followed all the rites and customs of the See of Rome from St Augustine’s evangelisation of the Kingdom of Kent in 597 AD through to King Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534.
Catholicism was full of magic, saints and miracles. The congregations were awed by the magic and prayed to the saints, while learned scholars sought to understand the miracles.
As the religious reformation gained ground, the Protestants slowly removed the magic and eliminated the saints from church doctrine, to the despair of the Catholics.
In 1542, the fifteen-year-old John Dee entered St John’s College, Cambridge University. A trickle of leading Catholic humanists were already leaving St John’s to continue their studies in Leuven University, in the Hapsburg-controlled Netherlands. That trickle steadily increased in the subsequent years. Leuven was a bastion of Catholic theology, indeed its university had been the first institution to condemn statements contained in Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses back in 1519.
In 1546, after four years of study, Dee gained his bachelor’s degree. However, the dominant Protestant faction at St John’s refused to elect him as a Fellow of the college due to his Catholic magical beliefs, thus denying him the meagre stipend that came with Fellowship.”