Gabriel Donne or Dunne (died 1558) was an English Cistercian monk and was the last Abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Donne is said by some sources to be descended from the family anciently called "Downe", seated at the manor of "Doune Raph" or "Downe-Ralph", etc. later called "Rowsedown", today called Rousdon near Axminster in Devon. However the arms used by the family of "Doune of Doune Raph" given by the Devon historian Pole (d.1635) are: Paly of six argent and azure on a fesse gules three mullets or, not the same as the Wolf arms of Gabriel Donne visible on the roof of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
In 1524 his sister, Elizabeth, widow of Thomas Murfyn (d. 1523), married Sir Thomas Denys, whose stepdaughter, Donne's niece Frances Murfyn, married, by March 1534, Thomas Cromwell's nephew, Richard. Donne was a student, pretended or real, at Leuven in 1535, he went to Antwerp in the disguise of a servant to Henry Phillips, and there planned with the latter the arrest of William Tyndale, which took place in the city on 23 or 24 May in the same year. He assisted in preparing the case against Tyndale. On his return to England he obtained by the influence of Thomas Cromwell, then secretary of state, the abbacy of the house of his order at Buckfastleigh in his native Devon, at that time in the patronage of Vesey, bishop of Exeter, a bitter persecutor of the reformers. He appeared as abbot of that house in the convocation of June 1536, and subscribed the articles then agreed upon. Within two years of his election he alienated much of the monastic property, and on 25 Feb 1538-9, despite the solemn oaths he had taken, he, with nine others of his religious, surrendered his abbey into the hands of Henry VIII. On the following 26 April he was rewarded with the large pension of £120, which he enjoyed till his death. The site of the abbey was granted by the king to his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Dennis, of Holcombe Burnell in the same county. Donne became prebendary of Mapesbury in St. Paul's Cathedral on 16 March 1540-1 and was instituted to the sinecure rectory of Stepney, Middlesex, 25 October 1544. On the deprivation of Bonner, Bishop of London, in September 1549, Donne, then one of the canons residentiary of St. Paul's Cathedral, was appointed by Archbishop Cranmer to be his official and keeper of the spiritualities, to exercise all manner of episcopal jurisdiction in the City and Diocese of London, which office he continued to fill until Ridley became bishop in April 1550. In making such an appointment Cranmer was probably acting to his own advantage, for he had all along been kept well informed of the part Donne had taken in the betrayal of Tyndale (see letter of Thomas Tebolde to the archbishop, dated 31 July 1535, in 'Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII,' Cal. State Papers, viii. 1151).
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