Laurence, a learned English divine, was born at Newport-Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, about the year 1527. He received his school education at Cambridge, and afterwards became a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took his degree as master of arts in 1552. In 1555 he retired, with other Protestant refugees, to Zurich, in Switzerland, where he resided for some time; but after the death of Queen Mary he returned to England, where he was restored to his fellowship in Magdalen College, from which he had been expelled, and, in 1560, appointed queen's professor of divinity at Oxford. In 1570 he was made dean of Gloucester; in 1580 he was removed to the deanery of Winchester; and, if he had not been disaffected towards the church of England, in other words, a moderate and conscientious nonconformist, he would probably have been raised to the episcopal bench. Humphrey was considered as a great and general scholar, an able linguist, a profound theologian, and, for his time, an excellent writer. He died early in 1590, leaving a wife who had brought him twelve children. His works are, 1. Epistolae de Graecis literis, et Homeri lectione et imitatione, Basil, 1558; 2. De Religionis conservazione et reformatione, quae primum Regum, Basil, 1559; 3. De Ratione interpretandi auctores, Basil, 1559; 4. Optimates, sive de Nobilitate, ejusque antiqua origine, Basil, 1560; 5. Joannis Juelli Angli, Episcopi Sarisburiensis, Vita et Mors, London, 1573; 6. Two Latin Orations spoken before Queen Elizabeth, one in 1572, and the other in 1575; 7. Sermons; 8. Some Latin pieces against the Papists, particularly Campian.