The romance of the Oxford colleges

Corpus Christi College was founded in 1516, by Bishop Foxe; and it may be necessary to anticipate the questions of some strangers by stating at once that he was not the author of the “Book of Martyrs” but the predecessor of Cardinal Wolsey in the counsels of Henry VIII. He spoke of the College as his “hive” and of the scholars as his “bees” whom he expected to be “busy bees” and to “make honey.”

They have made plenty of it. The output of Corpus in the way of scholarship has been out of all proportion to the small size of the College. If it has never, like University, had an opportunity of expelling a man of genius, it has trained innumerable men of talent; and if the distinction of the most distinguished of its sons has not been, with rare exceptions, of the sort that makes a magnetic appeal to the imagination of mankind, there is, at least, no breach in the continuity of its long list of alumni illustrious through their services to humane letters; a list which begins with the Hooker whom it is customary to call “judicious” and is by no means ended when we come to Professor Case, who alone, when Oxford seemed to be given over to the Hegelians, maintained, with the robust vigour of a true sportsman, his belief in the reality of the external world.

The original note of Corpus was an insistence upon compulsory Greek.

Modern reformers appear to think that, in demanding that the study of Greek should be optional at Oxford, they are marching forward—“moving with the times.” As a matter of fact, they are proposing to revert to a condition of things which prevailed at Oxford in the ignorant times prior to the Revival of Learning. Greek was, in those times, in the noble language of school prospectuses, an “extra”; and men could only learn it at their own expense from private tutors. Bishop Foxe put it into the curriculum, endowing a Reader in Greek, and required all Corpus men to attend his classes on pain of “loss of commons”—the loss, that is to say, of their dinner—if they should fail to do so.

That was one of his severe regulations; and there were many others which show him to have had a keen eye for discipline and detail.

Every Fellow of Corpus, it was ordained, was to share his bedroom with a Scholar; the Fellow sleeping in a high bed, and the Scholar in a truckle bed. One also gathers, since the Statutes contain no provision for scouts, that it was by the Scholars that the beds were to be made and the slops emptied. Dinner was to be eaten in hall, and the diners were only to converse in Greek or Latin. Those who went for walks were to go in parties of three, carrying no weapons except bows and arrows; and the only games permitted were “games of ball” in the College gardens. Certain prayers, private as well as public, were obligatory. It was expressly forbidden to any Scholar or Fellow—to any one, in fact, under the grade of President—to carry his own washing to the laundress; and violations of this, or any other rule, were to be punished in various ways. The junior members of the society might, for sufficient cause, be whipped; or they might be compelled to sit at separate tables in hall, consuming dry bread and water, while the well-conducted dined.

Such were the sanctions of industry and virtue; and the archives of the College are full of records of their application. One of the Scholars was once deprived of commons for a fortnight for “attempted murder”—a light sentence which suggests that the Senior Common-room had but an imperfect sympathy with the victim. Another, bearing the unusual name of Anne, was castigated for writing a satirical poem on the Mass. As he was condemned to receive a stripe for every line of his composition, he doubtless rose from the block with a sincere conviction that brevity is the soul of wit and crystallised epigram the best form in which to exhibit poetry.

Save for incidents of that sort, however, Corpus has not had a specially exciting history; and the first really animated scene in its annals occurs when Oxford, so to say, changed hands, and Charles I. being a prisoner, and the city having surrendered to Fairfax, the Lords and Commons resolved upon the Visitation and Reformation of Oxford with a View to “the due correction of offences, abuses, and disorders, especially of late times, committed there.”

Corpus, curiously enough, is a College which preserved its plate at a time when the plate of most of the colleges was melted down into money to reinforce the royal treasury. The story goes that it was preserved—exactly how, the story does not say—through the devotion of a butler to the College interests. The exploration of a secret cellar, or of an old drain, according to the legend, discovered the skeleton of a butler with the grip of his bony fingers clenched upon a precious punch-bowl. That is not the sort of story that one would willingly give up; but the evidence for it does not appear to be very solid; and the conjecture of Dr. Fowler that the bowl was first surrendered and afterwards redeemed with a money payment has more of the ingredients of plausibility.

Be that as it may, however, the Corpus men suffered more than the members of most colleges from the heavy hands of the Parliamentary Commissioners; and we have to picture “a Drum with a guard of musketeers” marching through the gate into the quadrangle—the drum beaten as a call for silence—the affixing of the Visitors’ Orders in the porter’s lodge—and the reading of a long list of Fellows and Scholars who were to be expelled.

It was a longer list than at some of the other colleges because the Visitors had been received in a contumacious spirit. They had no sooner entered the name of the new President of their choice, Dr. Staunton, in the College Register than two Scholars of the College—Will Fulman and Tim Parker—first erased the entry, and then tore out the sheet on which it had been made. When they proceeded to break open the College Treasury, which the Bursar would not unlock for them, they found that its valuable contents had already been removed. Whence resulted wholesale evictions of a brutally precipitate character.

The proclamation, according to one of its victims, was to the effect that “whosoever named in the Order should remain in Oxon, or within five miles of it, after sunset, should be taken and prosecuted as a spy.” This, it is added, was taken to mean that they would be hanged, “though many knew not whither to go on so short warning, nor could they have time to dispose their books and such goods as they had”; while, as an additional affront, “some were searched for letters only to pick their pockets.” It must have been a shocking scene, though the relation of it can be relieved by an anecdote which has the merit of exhibiting Oliver Cromwell in a more human light than usual.

One of the ejected, it appears, a certain James Quin, was presented to the Lord Protector; and the Lord Protector, having been told that he had a good voice, called upon him for a song. He sang so well that the Lord Protector “liquor’d him with sack,” and bade him ask a favour. He asked that his place on the foundation of the College might be restored to him, and his request was granted: a quaint incident, judged by our modern notions, but one for which there is a parallel in the later annals of the College, during the genial period of the Restoration.

Dr. Staunton had, by that time, been turned out; and his predecessor, Dr. Newlyn, had been brought back. This Dr. Newlyn was a shocking nepotist. He filled all the profitable places on the foundation with relatives of his own, and was only moderately shocked by the fact that one of them broke into the rooms of one of the Fellows and tried to murder him in his sleep; but there were some offences at which he drew the line, as the occurrence of a gross scandal was presently to prove.

This time there was a lady in the case. The offender was Matthew Curtois, a Probationer Fellow, a Master of Arts, and a Clerk in Holy Orders; and the offence was committed within the College walls. The punishment was a refusal to confirm Matthew Curtois in his Fellowship; but Matthew Curtois, instead of submitting and slinking away, made bold to appeal to the King. His weakness, he judged, was one with which the lover of Nell Gwynne and so many others was likely to sympathise; and his judgment was correct. The King, acting through the Visitor, George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, not only decreed his fellow-sinner’s restitution to his honours and emoluments, but also ordered him to be paid a pecuniary indemnity for his suspension: an act of royal interference with academical affairs which marks, as well as any other, the difference between those times and these.

But now, before going farther, we must turn back, and glance at the careers of a few of the representative men of whom Corpus is most justly proud.

Bishop Jewell should properly come first; but he is less interesting than Bishop Hooker, who comes next, and was introduced to Corpus through Jewell’s patronage. First a Scholar, he afterwards became a Fellow and a Lecturer in Hebrew; and we read of him, in the Life by Izaak Walton, that “in four years he was but twice absent from the chapel prayers.” Evidently he was just such a man as good Bishop Foxe would have wished to inhabit his “bee-hive”; and the tragedy of his life, which Walton relates in sympathetic detail, was his removal from it. The story must be told, if only to show that it was not in the conduct of his private life that the illustrious author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” earned the fixed epithet of “judicious.”

He was, in fact, a pious don of the old-fashioned, simple-minded sort; and, of course, he was a bachelor, and in Holy Orders. Appointed to preach certain endowed sermons at Paul’s Cross, and coming up to London from Corpus for that purpose, he lodged in the house of John Churchman, sometime a draper in Watling Street. He caught a chill on the way; but Mrs. Churchman gave him “drink proper for a cold,” and then proceeded to admonish him in a motherly manner.

“Mr. Hooker,” she said—so Walton tells us—“you are a man of tender constitution. It would be best for you to have a wife that might prove a nurse to you—such a one as might both prolong your life and make it more comfortable, such a one as I can and will provide for you if you see fit to marry.”

It was, no doubt, in the abstract, good advice. It seemed very good advice indeed to Hooker as he sat by the roaring fire and sipped the comforting possets which Mrs. Churchman prepared for him. And he knew too, as an earnest student of the Bible, that a busy man might find good precedents for entrusting the choice of his wife to another. As Eleazar had been trusted to seek a wife for Isaac, so Mrs. Churchman should be trusted to choose a wife for him. But Mrs. Churchman had a daughter; and her chief anxiety was not to make Mr. Hooker happy, but to get her daughter off her hands. So she brought Joan Churchman forward and presented her.

“Take her—she is yours,” she said; and the simple-minded don forgot to be judicious, but married Joan Churchman, as Mrs. Churchman had meant him to do from the beginning, and lived unhappily with her ever afterwards.

“By this marriage,” Walton continues, “the good man was drawn from the tranquillity of his College, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of peace, and a sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy world.” And he draws a pathetic picture of a visit paid to the good man by two of his old pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, in the country parsonage to which he retired together with the lady described by another biographer as “a clownish, silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe.”

The pupils found their tutor in a field attached to the parsonage, looking after the sheep; Mrs. Hooker having told him to do so, as she wished to employ the shepherd as a man-servant in the house. They went up to the parsonage with him, hoping to enjoy his conversation; but Mrs. Hooker immediately called him away to rock the cradle. They fled, driven out by Mrs. Hooker’s inhospitable proceedings; and one of them condoled with him, saying that his wife evidently was not a very “comfortable companion.” Whereupon Mr. Hooker made answer:

“My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me: but labour—as, indeed, I do daily—to submit myself to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.”

The story, of course, is full of morals for bachelor dons; only one imagines that the dons of our own day do not need the moral, but are much better able than was Hooker of Corpus to take care of themselves in the matters of the heart and the bonds of holy matrimony.

Another Corpus man of a very different character was the Duke of Monmouth, the favourite, and reputed natural son, of Charles II. He entered his name when the Court was driven to Oxford by the plague in 1665; but little is known about his term of residence except that he gave the College a piece of plate which the College is believed to have melted down in order to express its disapproval of the Monmouth rebellion. Dr. Pocock, the Oriental traveller, should also be mentioned, for he was the first of a long list of Oxford men who have distinguished themselves in the exploration of the Alps. He and William Windham, meeting at Geneva, in 1741, made up a party to explore the glaciers of Chamonix—a place till then unknown to tourists. General Oglethorpe, the associate of the Wesleys, and the founder of the State of Georgia, is a third who must not be overlooked. And a passing word may be given to Edward Young, afterwards Fellow of All Souls, the pious author of “Night Thoughts,” and the originator of the sentiment that “Procrastination is the thief of time.” “There are those,” we read, in a biographical account of the doings of this divine at Oxford, “who say that Young at this time was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became”; and that is credible enough, for we all know many ornaments of religion and morality whose proceedings while in statu pupillari invite a similar remark.

The remark, however, is, on the whole, less applicable to the divines who have come from Corpus than to the divines who have come from a good many of the other colleges; so we need not insist, but may pass on to the period when the occurrence of more widely popular names gives Corpus a blaze of glory perceptible from afar. That period was in the early days of the nineteenth century, when Keble and Thomas Arnold—Arnold of Rugby—were contemporaries. A third member of the society at that time was John Taylor Coleridge—Mr. Justice Coleridge—who defeated them in some competitions for University and College prizes, and lived to write Keble’s Life, and to contribute a chapter of Corpus reminiscences to the Life of Arnold written by Dean Stanley.

Most of the time of the little company, when they were not reading for their examinations, appears to have been given to argument; most of Coleridge’s recollections are recollections of dialectical affrays. Oxford, at this date, was beginning to think of other matters besides political and academical affairs. The old wrangles between Jacobites and Hanoverians had ceased; and no one any longer thought it worth while to provoke authority by calling for cheers for the Young Pretender. Though the older men could remember such things, the younger men regarded them as belonging to history. The thing which was beginning to interest them was religion—or in some cases irreligion; and it interested them as an end in itself, and not merely in its relation to preferment and emolument.

Keble and Arnold of Corpus, it is instructive to remember, were the contemporaries at Oxford of Shelley of University; but Shelley does not seem to have been known to the others. Being orderly persons, scrupulous observers of the regulations, well-conducted reading men, they would probably have regarded him, if they had known him, as a dangerous and disreputable associate. Keble’s business in life was to be to preach at, and Arnold’s to summon to his study and flog, those who were, like Shelley, “tameless and swift and proud.” And yet he and they had more in common than they knew. They all represented, in their several ways, the new spirit of the dawning century; they were all, in their several ways, revolutionists, or at least men definitely related to revolution. Shelley was the revolutionist pur sang; Keble was the counter-revolutionist; Arnold was the practical man—the reformer with a reformer’s turn for compromise and opportunism—who knew how to make a little revolution go a long way.

Keble may perhaps be classed as an English analogue of Chateaubriand. Personally, it is true, he bore not the faintest resemblance to the religious reactionary who “took up religion as a subject,” and has been described as the Catholic Don Juan; but he resembled Chateaubriand in being a literary artist, with an artist’s feeling for the “beauty of holiness,” and he launched the English Movement which corresponds to the return of the æsthetes and aristocrats to their Catholic allegiance in France. The principal story told of him at Corpus is that he damaged the sun-dial in the quadrangle by throwing a bottle at it; and we may permit ourselves to discover a certain symbolism in that performance. The great sermon on National Apostasy—preached because reformers proposed to curtail the scandalous superfluity of Irish bishoprics—may similarly be described as a weak man’s heroic attempt to stop the clock.

The story of that attempt, however, and of the consequences which ensued from it, belongs more properly to the annals of Oriel than of Corpus. Arnold as well as Keble went on from Corpus to Oriel as a Fellow; but what there is to be said about him may best be said in the present chapter.

He and Keble became estranged in later years; but they continued to respect each other’s characters while examining each other’s propositions. To Arnold it seemed that Keble’s piety was no excuse for the narrowness of his mind, and he would have nothing to say to Keble’s view that a man could only achieve salvation by running in a groove. He believed in earnestness, indeed—perhaps there never was a man in more deadly earnest; but what he desired was an earnest conduct of the common affairs of life, not an earnest adherence to a complicated series of ecclesiastical propositions.

Hence his success, and his fame, as a schoolmaster. It was predicted of him, by the Provost of Oriel, when he stood for the Headmastership of Rugby, that he would, if elected, “change the face of public school education throughout England.” He was elected, and he did change it. Many of the changes which he introduced at Rugby were, indeed, based upon a system of school government already in force at Winchester; but Arnold breathed a new spirit into the institutions which he adopted. Members of the Sixth Form, under his inspiration, held up their heads with a new kind of pride. Rugbeians were distinguished—and boasted that they were distinguished—from other schoolboys by their “moral seriousness.”

The other schoolboys, of course, have not accepted the Rugbeian example without cavil or criticism. It has even been remarked—most notably by Etonians—that the difference between the “moral seriousness” of Rugby and the thing which is elsewhere called “priggishness” is not always visible to the naked eye. Possibly it is not. Possibly Arnold “overdid it,” like many another valuable innovator. But the thing which he did needed doing. It was better to overdo it than not to do it at all; and the pride which Corpus takes in Arnold is amply justified.

And so, of course, is the pride which Corpus takes in many alumni of a later date, distinguished in a great variety of fields—in Henry Nettleship, Professor of Latin; in Professor Fowler, the historian of the College, whose lectures on Logic used to be as good as a play; in Professor Case, to whose robust faith in the external world a reference has already been made; in Mr. F. T. Dalton, who, as an editor, has struck out many purple passages from the compositions of the present writer; in Mr. Horace Hutchinson, the greatest living authority on the game of golf; in Mr. Henry Newbolt, the author of “Admirals All”; in Mr. Herbert Paul; and in Mr. A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic who thrusts Aristotle down the throats of the vulgar, and concerning whom it was deposed by Mr. Zangwill, before a Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship, that to him “nothing is sacred except the dancing of Adeline Genée.”