LAMBERT, FRANCIS (c. 1486–1530), Protestant reformer, was the son of a papal official at Avignon, where he was born between 1485 and 1487. At the age of 15 he entered the Franciscan monastery at Avignon, and after 1517 he was an itinerant preacher, travelling through France, Italy and Switzerland. His study of the Scriptures shook his faith in Roman Catholic theology, and by 1522 he had abandoned his order, and became known to the leaders of the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany. He did not, however, identify himself either with Zwinglianism or Lutheranism; he disputed with Zwingli at Zürich in 1522, and then made his way to Eisenach and Wittenberg, where he married in 1523. He returned to Strassburg in 1524, being anxious to spread the doctrines of the Reformation among the French-speaking population of the neighbourhood. By the Germans he was distrusted, and in 1526 his activities were prohibited by the city of Strassburg. He was, however, befriended by Jacob Sturm, who recommended him to the Landgraf Philip of Hesse, the most liberal of the German
reforming princes. With Philip’s encouragement he drafted that scheme of ecclesiastical reform for which he is famous. Its basis was essentially democratic and congregational, though it provided for the government of the whole church by means of a synod. Pastors were to be elected by the congregation, and the whole system of canon-law was repudiated. This scheme was submitted by Philip to a synod at Homburg; but Luther intervened and persuaded the Landgraf to abandon it. It was far too democratic to commend itself to the Lutherans, who had
by this time bound the Lutheran cause to the support of princes rather than to that of the people. Philip continued to favour Lambert, who was appointed professor and head of the theological faculty in the Landgraf’s new university of Marburg. Patrick Hamilton (q.v.), the Scottish martyr, was one of his pupils; and it was at Lambert’s instigation that Hamilton composed his Loci communes, or Patrick’s Pleas as they were popularly
called in Scotland. Lambert was also one of the divines who took part in the great conference of Marburg in 1529; he had long wavered between the Lutheran and the Zwinglian view of the Lord’s Supper, but at this conference he definitely adopted the Zwinglian view. He died of the plague on the 18th of April 1530, and was buried at Marburg.
A catalogue of Lambert’s writings is given in Haag’s La France protestante. See also lives of Lambert by Baum (Strassburg, 1840); F. W. Hessencamp (Elberfeld, 1860), Stieve (Breslau, 1867) and Louis Ruffet (Paris, 1873); Lorimer, Life of Patrick Hamilton (1857); A. L. Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrh. (Weimar, 1846); Hessencamp, Hessische Kirchenordnungen im Zeitalter der Reformation; Philip of Hesse’s Correspondence with Bucer, ed. M. Lenz; Lindsay, Hist. Reformation; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. (A. F. P.)
LAMBERT, JOHANN HEINRICH (1728–1777), German physicist, mathematician and astronomer, was born at Mulhausen, Alsace, on the 26th of August 1728. He was the son of a tailor; and the slight elementary instruction he obtained at the free school of his native town was supplemented by his own private reading. He became book-keeper at Montbéliard ironworks, and subsequently (1745) secretary to Professor Iselin, the editor of a newspaper at Basel, who three years later recommended him as private tutor to the family of Count A. von Salis of Coire. Coming thus into virtual possession of a good library, Lambert had peculiar opportunities for improving himself in his literary and scientific studies. In 1759, after completing with his pupils a tour of two years’ duration through Göttingen, Utrecht, Paris, Marseilles and Turin, he resigned his tutorship and settled at Augsburg. Munich, Erlangen, Coire and Leipzig became for brief successive intervals his home. In 1764 he removed to Berlin, where he received many favours at the hand of Frederick the Great and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin, and in 1774 edited the Berlin Ephemeris. He died of consumption on the 25th of September 1777. His publications show him to have been a man of original and active mind with a singular facility in applying mathematics to practical questions.
His mathematical discoveries were extended and overshadowed by his contemporaries. His development of the equation xm + px = q in an infinite series was extended by Leonhard Euler, and particularly by Joseph Louis Lagrange. In 1761 he proved the irrationality of π; a simpler proof was given somewhat later by Legendre. The introduction of hyperbolic functions into trigonometry was also due to him. His geometrical discoveries are of great value, his Die freie Perspective (1759–1774) being a work of great merit. Astronomy was also enriched by his investigations, and he was led to several remarkable theorems on conics which bear his name. The most important are: (1) To express the time of describing an elliptic arc under the Newtonian law of gravitation in terms of the focal distances of the initial and final points, and the length of the chord joining them. (2) A theorem relating to the apparent curvature of the geocentric path of a comet.
Lambert’s most important work, Pyrometrie (Berlin, 1779), is a systematic treatise on heat, containing the records and full discussion of many of his own experiments. Worthy of special notice also are Photometria (Augsburg, 1760), Insigniores orbitae cometarum proprietates (Augsburg, 1761), and Beiträge zum Gebrauche der Mathematik und deren Anwendung (4 vols., Berlin, 1765–1772).
The Memoirs of the Berlin Academy from 1761 to 1784 contain many of his papers, which treat of such subjects as resistance of fluids, magnetism, comets, probabilities, the problem of three bodies, meteorology, &c. In the Acta Helvetica (1752–1760) and in the Nova acta erudita (1763–1769) several of his contributions appear. In Bode’s Jahrbuch (1776–1780) he discusses nutation, aberration of light, Saturn’s rings and comets; in the Nova acta Helvetica (1787) he has a long paper “Sur le son des corps élastiques,” in Bernoulli and Hindenburg’s Magazin (1787–1788) he treats of the roots of equation and of parallel lines; and in Hindenburg’s Archiv (1798–1799) he writes on optics and perspective. Many of these pieces were published posthumously. Recognized as among the first mathematicians of his day, he was also widely known for the universality and depth of his philological and philosophical knowledge. The most valuable of his logical and philosophical memoirs were published collectively in 2 vols. (1782).
See Huber’s Lambert nach seinem Leben und Wirken; M. Chasles, Geschichte der Geometrie; and Baensch, Lamberts Philosophie und seine Stellung zu Kant (1902).
LAMBERT [alias Nicholson], JOHN (d. 1538), English Protestant martyr, was born at Norwich and educated at Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. and was admitted in 1521 a fellow of Queen’s College on the nomination of Catherine of Aragon. After acting for some years as a “mass-priest,” his views were unsettled by the arguments of Bilney and Arthur; and episcopal persecution compelled him, according to his own account, to assume the name Lambert instead of Nicholson. He likewise removed to Antwerp, where he became chaplain to the English factory, and formed a friendship with Frith and Tyndale. Returning to England in 1531, he came under the notice of Archbishop Warham, who questioned him closely on his religious beliefs. Warham’s death in August 1532 relieved Lambert from immediate danger, and he earned a living for some years by teaching Latin and Greek near the Stocks Market in London. The duke of Norfolk and other reactionaries accused him of heresy in 1536, but reforming tendencies were still in the ascendant, and Lambert escaped. In 1538, however, the reaction had begun, and Lambert was its first victim. He singled himself out for persecution by denying the Real Presence: and Henry VIII., who had just rejected the Lutheran proposals for a theological union, was in no mood to tolerate worse heresies. Lambert had challenged some views expressed by Dr John Taylor, afterwards bishop of Lincoln; and Cranmer as archbishop condemned Lambert’s opinions. He appealed to the king as supreme head of the Church, and on the 16th of November Henry heard the case in person before a large assembly of spiritual and temporal peers. For five hours Lambert disputed with the king and ten bishops; and then, as he boldly denied that the Eucharist was the body of Christ, he was condemned to death by Cromwell as vicegerent. Henry’s condescension and patience produced a great impression on his Catholic subjects; but Cromwell is said by Foxe to have asked Lambert’s pardon before his execution, and Cranmer eventually adopted the views he condemned in Lambert. Lambert was burnt at Smithfield on the 22nd of November.
