During his brief career Henry Smith enjoyed the greatest popularity of any Elizabethan preacher. After his death the plain but eloquent style of his prose proved as compelling in print as it had been from the pulpit. His career is distinguished not only by his skill as a preacher and as a prose stylist, but also by the precarious position he occupied in the contentious world of Elizabethan Protestantism.

The date of Smith's birth remains uncertain, as does almost every detail of his short life. The eldest son of Erasmus Smith and his first wife, Anne, he was born about 1560, probably at Withcote, his grandfather's manor in Leicestershire. His home during most of his childhood was Husbands Bosworth, the manor that Desiderius Erasmus purchased in 1565, also in Leicestershire.

The young man was admitted as fellow commoner of Queen's College, Cambridge, in July 1573 but apparently matriculated on 15 March 1576 at...