“These two noble executors in the pursuance of the will of this testatrix, according to her desire and direction therein, presented Queen Elizabeth with a jewel, being like a star, of rubies and diamonds, with a ruby in the midst thereof, worth an hundred and forty pounds, having on the back side a hand delivering up a heart into a crown. At the delivery hereof they humbly requested of her Highness a mortmain to found a College, which she graciously granted unto them”—though the royal license did not actually come until five years later. “We usually observe infants born in the seventh month, though poor and pitiful creatures, are vital; and with great care and good attendance, in time prove proper persons. To such a partus septimestris may Sidney College well be resembled, so low, lean, and little at the birth thereof. Alas! what is five thousand pounds to buy the site, build and endow a College therewith?... Yet such was the worthy care of her honourable executors, that this Benjamin College—the least and last in time, and born after (as he at) the death of his mother—thrived in a short time to a competent strength and stature.”[92]
Some delay ensued, for it was not until 1593 that, at the motion of the executors, an Act of Parliament was passed enabling Trinity College to sell or let at fee farm rent the site of the Grey Friars. The College charter is dated February 14, 1596. The building was commenced in the following May, and completed, with the exception of the chapel, in 1598. In the same year the original statutes were framed by the executors. They are largely copied from those of Emmanuel, and are equally verbose, cumbrous, and ill-arranged. One clause in them which speaks of the Master as one who “Papismum, Hæreses, superstitiones, et errores omnes ex animo abhorret et detestatur,” testifies to the intentionally Protestant character of the College, a fact, however, which did not prevent James II., on a vacancy in the mastership, intruding on the society a Papist Master, Joshua Basset, of Caius, of whom the Fellows complained that he was “let loose upon them to do what he liked.” They had, however, their revenge, for, although later he was spoken of as “such a mongrel Papist, who had so many nostrums in his religion that no part of the Roman Church could own him,” in 1688 he was deposed.
The architect of the College buildings was Ralph Simons, who had built Emmanuel and “thoroughly reformed a great part of Trinity College.” It is interesting to note that more than half of the sum received from Lady Sidney’s estate to found and endow the College was expended in the erection of the hall, the Master’s lodge, and the hall court. These buildings formed the whole of the College when it was opened in 1598. How picturesque it must have been in those days, before the red brick of which it is built was covered with plaster, one can see by Loggan’s print of the College, made about 1688. The buildings are simple enough, but quite well designed. The “rose-red” of the brick, at least, seems to have struck the poet, Giles Fletcher, when he wrote of Sidney in 1633 in his Latin poem on the Cambridge colleges:—
Culminibus niveis roseisque nitentia muris;
Nobilis haec doctis sacrabit femina musis,
Conjugio felix, magno felicior ortu,
Insita Sussexo proles Sidneia trunco.”
The arrangement of the hall, kitchen, buttery, and Master’s lodge was much the same as at present. The hall had an open timber roof, with a fine oriel window at the dais end, but no music gallery. Fuller says that the College “continued without a chapel some years after the first founding thereof, until at last some good men’s charity supplied this defect.” In 1602, however, the old hall of the friars—Fuller calls it the dormitory, but there is little doubt that it was in reality the refectory—was fitted up as a chapel, and a second storey added to form a library. A few years later, about 1628, a range of buildings forming the south side of the chapel court was built. In 1747, the buildings having become ruinous, extensive repairs were carried out, and the hall was fitted up in the Italian manner. The picturesque gateway which had stood in the centre of the street wall of the hall court was removed, and a new one of more severe character was built in its place. This also at a later time was removed and re-erected as a garden entrance from Jesus Lane.
Between 1777 and 1780 the old chapel was destroyed, and replaced by a new building designed by Essex, in a style in which, to say the least, there is certainly nothing to remind the modern student of the old hall of the Grey Friars’ Monastery, where for three centuries of stirring national life the Franciscan monks had kept alive, let us hope, something of the mystic tenderness, the brotherly compassion, the fervour of missionary zeal, which they had learnt from their great founder, Saint Francis of Assisi.
Of the old Fellows’ garden, which in 1890 was partly sacrificed to provide a site for the new range of buildings and cloister—perhaps the most beautiful of modern collegiate buildings at either university—designed by Pearson, Dyer writes with enthusiasm:—
“Here is a good garden, an admirable bowling green, a beautiful summer house, at the back of which is a walk agreeably winding, with variety of trees and shrubs intertwining, and forming the whole length, a fine canopy overhead; with nothing but singing and fragrance and seclusion; a delightful summer retreat; the sweetest lovers’ or poets’ walk, perhaps in the University.”
To the extremely eclectic character of the College in its early days the Master’s admission register testifies. Among its members were some of the stoutest Royalists and also some of the stoutest Republicans in the country. Among the former we find such names as those of Edward Montagu (afterwards first Baron Montagu of Boughton), brother of the first Master, a great benefactor of the College; of Sir Roger Lestrange, of Hunstanton Hall, in Norfolk, celebrated as the editor of the first English newspaper, “a man of good wit, and a fancy very luxuriant and of an enterprising nature,” in early youth—his attempt to recover the port of Lynn for the King in 1644 is one of the funniest episodes in English history—a very Don Quixote of the Royalist party; and of Seth Ward, a Fellow of the college, who was ejected in Commonwealth times, but had not to live long, before he was able to write back to his old College that he had been elected to the See of Exeter, and that “the old bishops were exceeding disgruntled at it, to see a brisk young bishop, but forty years old, not come in at the right door, but leap over the pale.” Among the Republican members of the College it is enough, perhaps, to name the name of Oliver Cromwell. And of him, at least, whatever our final verdict on his career may be, whatever dreams of personal ambition we may think mingled with his aim, we cannot surely deny, if at least we have ever read his letters, that his aim was, in the main, a high and unselfish one, and that in the career, which to our modern minds may seem so strange and complex, he had seen the leading of a divine hand that drew him from the sheepfolds to mould England into a people of God. And to some, surely, he seems the most human-hearted sovereign and most imperial man in all English annals since the days of Alfred. And no one, I trust, would in these days endorse the verdict of the words interpolated in the College books between the entry of his name and the next on the list:—
“Hic fuit grandis ille impostor, carnifex perditissimus, qui, pientissimo rege Carolo primo nefaria cæde sublato, ipsum usurpavit thronum, et tria regna per quinque ferme annorum spatium sub protectoris nomine indomita tyrannide vexavit,”
which may be Englished thus—
“This was that arch hypocrite, that most abandoned murderer, who having by shameful slaughter put out of the way the most pious King, Charles the First, grasped the very throne, and for the space of nearly five years under the title of Protector harassed three kingdoms with inflexible tyranny.”
Rather, as we stand in the College Hall and gaze up at the stern features, as depicted by Cooper,[93] in that best of all the Cromwell portraits, shall we not commemorate this greatest of Sidney men, in Lowell’s words, as—
With the true makers: for his spirit wrought
Order from chaos; proved that Right divine
Dwelt only in the excellence of Truth:
And far within old darkness’ hostile lines
Advanced and pitched the shining tents of Light.
Nor shall the grateful Muse forget to tell
That—not the least among his many claims
To deathless honour—he was Milton’s friend.”
Thomas Fuller, too, who was neither Republican nor Royalist, but loyal to the good men of both parties in the State, is a name of which Sidney College may well be proud. No one can read any of his books, full as they are of imagination, pathos, and an exuberant, often extravagant, but never ineffective wit, without heartily endorsing Coleridge’s saying: “God bless thee, dear old man!” and recognising the truth of his panegyric, “Next to Shakespeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emulation of the marvellous.... He was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced great man in an age that boasted of a galaxy of great men.”
And with Fuller’s name, indeed with Fuller’s own words, in that benediction which, after eight years of residence, he gave to Sidney College, and which he himself calls his “Child’s Prayer to His Mother,” I may appropriately end this chapter.
“Now though it be only the place of the parent, and proper to him (as the greater) to bless his child, yet it is of the duty of the child to pray for his parent, in which relation my best desires are due to this foundation, my mother (for the last eight years) in this University. May her lamp never lack light for oil, or oil for the light thereof. Zoar, is it not a little one? Yet who shall despise the day of small things? May the foot of sacrilege, if once offering to enter the gates thereof, stumble and rise no more. The Lord bless the labours of all the students therein, that they may tend and end at his glory, their own salvation, the profit and honour of the Church and Commonwealth.”
And not less appropriately, perhaps, may I end, not only this chapter, but this whole sketch of the story of Cambridge and its colleges—for to the memory of what more kindly, more sound-hearted, more pious soul could any Sidney man more fitly dedicate his book than to his—with the prayer in which, in closing his own History, he gracefully connects the name of Cambridge with that of the sister university, and commends them both to the charitable devotion of all good men.
“O God! who in the creating of the lower world didst first make light (confusedly diffused, as yet, through the imperfect universe) and afterwards didst collect the same into two great lights, to illuminate all creatures therein; O Lord, who art a God of knowledge and dost lighten every man that cometh into the world; O Lord, who in our nation hast moved the hearts of Founders and Benefactors to erect and endow two famous luminaries of learning and religion, bless them with the assistance of Thy Holy Spirit. Let neither of them contest (as once Thy disciples on earth) which should be the greatest, but both contend which shall approve themselves the best in Thy presence.... And as Thou didst appoint those two great lights in the firmament to last till Thy servants shall have no need of the sun, nor of the moon to shine therein, for Thy glory doth lighten them; so grant these old lights may continue until all acquired and infused knowledge be swallowed up with the vision and the fruition of Thy blessed-making Majesty.—Amen.”
INDEX
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, U, V, W.