are unknown; it is believed that he was born either in late 1612 or in January 1613. His mother, William Crashaw's first wife, may have died while he was an infant. William Crashaw's second wife, Elizabeth Skinner, whom he married in 1619, died in 1620 in childbirth. Richard Crashaw may have been baptised by James Ussher, later the Archbishop of Armagh. William Crashaw was a Cambridge-educated clergyman who served as a preacher at London's Inner Temple. He was born in or near Handsworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and came from a wealthy family. William Crashaw wrote and published many pamphlets advocating Puritan theology that were sharply critical of Catholicism. Despite his opposition to Catholic thought, William Crashaw was attracted by Catholic devotion; he translated many verses by Catholic poets from Latin to English. According to Cornelius Clifford, William Crashaw was "a man of unchallenged repute for learning in his day, an argumentative but eloquent preacher, strong in his Protestantism, and fierce in his denunciation of 'Romish falsifications' and 'besotted Jesuitries'". Childhood Scholars believe that as a child, Richard Crashaw read extensively from his father's private library. It contained many Catholic works and was described as "one of the finest private theological libraries of the time". The Crashaw library included works such as Bernard of Clairvauxs Sermons on the Song of Songs, the life of Catherine of Siena, the Revelations of Saint Bridget, and the writings of Richard Rolle. With the death of William Crashaw in 1626, Richard Crashaw became an orphan at 13 or 14 years old. English attorney general, Sir Henry Yelverton and Sir Ranulph Crewe, a prominent judge, were appointed as Crashaw's legal guardians. Education Charterhouse School Crashaw's guardians sent him to the Charterhouse School in 1629. At Charterhouse, Crashaw was a pupil of the school's headmaster, Robert Brooke. He required his students to write epigrams and verse in Greek and Latin based on the Epistle and Gospel readings from the day's chapel services. Crashaw later continued this exercise as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Several years later, he assembled many these epigrams for his first collection of poems, Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (trans. "A Book of Sacred Epigrams"), published in 1634. After finishing at Charterhouse, Crashaw entered Pembroke Hall at the University of Cambridge Pembroke Hall According to clergyman and editor Alexander Grosart, Crashaw was "as thoroughly Protestant, in all probability, as his father could have desired"