thumb|250px|"Barnes and his Fellow-Prisoners Seeking Forgiveness", from an 1887 edition of [[Foxe's Book of Martyrs, illustrated by Kronheim.]]
Robert Barnes ( – 30 July 1540) was an English reformer and martyr.
Life
Barnes was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk in 1495, and was educated at Cambridge, where he was a 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 except it called out Cardinal Wolsey for worldliness. 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.
thumb|left|Barnes before Cardinal Wolsey, 1870 illustration
As a result, in 1526 Barnes was brought before the vice-chancellor for preaching an anti-clerical sermon on Christmas Eve based on a postil of Martin Luther, and was subsequently examined by Cardinal Wolsey's commission that included four bishops. He was ordered to abjure his sermon or be burnt; and, after choosing the former, carried faggots in a public procession in London. While at Wittenberg in the summer of 1531, Barnes was commissioned to ascertain the opinion of Luther and other continental divines on the divorce proceedings between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. That year he also published the first edition of A Supplication, which essentially outlined Lutheran theology in an appeal to Henry VIII. Stephen Vaughan, an agent of Thomas Cromwell in the Low Countries and an advanced reformer, came across a copy of Barnes's work and was so impressed by his description of Lutheran political philosophy that he pleaded with Cromwell to invite the exile home.