Thanks to the help of readers I was able last
week to identify the author of the prayer used regularly at the beginning of each day's proceedings in the Lords and Commons as Mr. Speaker Yelverton, who held office in 1597-8. On the evening of the day in which the paragraph appeared I happened to be dining at Queens' College, Cambridge. The President of the College, who had seen the reference to Yelverton asked if he was a Cambridge man. I said that I thought not ; that he had probably gone direct to one of the Inns of Court. " We can soon see," said the President, who is the compiler of Alumni Cantabrigienses, a monumental work which forms a kind of succinct Who's Who of Cambridge graduates of any
distinction from the earliest days ; and reaching for the volume which would contain a Yelverton, if any, came on Sir Christopher at once. He was therefore definitely proved to be a Cambridge man, but what is more interesting, he turned out to be a member of the very college, Queens', in whose Combination Room we were talking— the college, incidentally, of Bishop Fisher and Erasmus. Association with a prayer that is in daily use in Parliament before the Authorised Version of the Bible was produced should be a matter of some satisfaction to Queens'.
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