The romance of the Oxford colleges

Saint John’s College was founded in the reign of Queen Mary, a year after the foundation of Trinity, by Sir Thomas White, a City merchant of the Dick Whittington type, and one of the originators of the Muscovy Company. Its connection with the Merchant Tailors’ School was early established; and merchants generally recognised it as the most fitting college for them to send their sons to. It blossomed into glory under its second founder, Archbishop Laud, who added, among other things, that “garden front” which is one of the architectural gems of Oxford.

Laud’s, in fact, is the chief name to be reckoned with in the College annals. He occupied almost every position there, from the humblest to the highest. He was, successively, commoner, Scholar, Fellow, Tutor, President. While Tutor, he was also, for a time, Proctor. After being President, he became Visitor of the College and Chancellor of the University. One associates his name, in politics, with reaction; but he was, in University matters, a reformer. He and his successor Juxon—the Juxon who attended Charles I. on the scaffold—raised the College to its highest pinnacle of honour. It led the van in education, and gave the country two successive Primates.

Born in 1573, Laud matriculated in 1589, won his scholarship in 1590, was elected to his fellowship in 1593, took deacon’s orders in 1600 and priest’s orders in 1601, became a Doctor of Divinity in 1608, and was chosen President in 1611. He held that office until he became Bishop of St. David’s in 1621; but his interest in the College did not cease with his preferment, as the new Statutes which Oxford owed to him bear witness.

His period, as the dates show, was chiefly that of the first two Stuart Kings; and the Stuarts, whatever their defects, were always full of regard for the most ancient of the English seats of learning. They valued its loyalty and liked to visit it in state; and Oxford repaid the attention which it received from them by modifying its theological point of view. Laud was the moving spirit of the transformation. The Oxford to which he went was a Calvinistic Oxford. The Oxford which he left was a High Church Oxford; and the change was more due to his influence than to that of any other man. He got his way there by firmness and tact, wearing down opposition, and making his enemies his friends.

The records of his early Oxford days are scanty; but we know him always to have been on the side of ceremony, alike in academic and in religious observances. Of the former kind of ceremony we find a quotable example in the account preserved of the reception of James I., on his visit to Oxford, at the gate of Saint John’s:

“Three young youths” (we read) “in habit and attire like nymphs confronted him, representing England, Scotland, and Ireland, and talking dialogue-wise each to other of their state, at last concluding yielding themselves up to his gracious government. The scholars stood all on one side of the street, and the strangers of all sorts on the other. The Scholars stood first, then the Bachelors, and at last the Masters of Arts.”

Laud, we cannot doubt, had a hand in that performance; and we may also presume him to have had something to do with the management of the comedy which was played before the King, two days later—not, it is true, with such unqualified success as the company might have desired:

“It was acted” (we are told) “much better than either of the others that he had seen before, yet the King was so over-wearied that after a while he distasted it and fell asleep. When he awaked, he would have been gone, saying, ‘I marvel what they think me to be,’ with such other like speeches, showing his dislike thereof. Yet he did tarry till they had ended it, which was after one of the clock.”

It was in connection with religion, however, that Laud’s appreciation of splendid ceremony was most important. There is a legend to the effect that he kept a set of Roman vestments in his rooms, and dressed up in them and admired himself before the looking-glass when he thought that he was alone and unobserved; but that story is probably untrue. Certainly the fact that the College treasures include Roman vestments is no proof of it. Personally, Laud was a man of very simple tastes. Fuller says so, and illustrates the statement with an anecdote.

“Once” (Fuller writes) “at a visitation in Essex, one in orders (of good estate and extraction) appeared before him very gallant in habit, whom Dr. Laud (then Bishop of London) publickly reproved, showing to him the plainness of his own apparel. ‘My Lord’ (said the minister), ‘you have better cloaths at home and I have worse,’ whereat the Bishop rested very well contented.”

That is not the language of a man who desired priests to simulate birds of paradise; and Laud’s chief anxiety was that the conduct of public worship should be decent, decorous, and dignified. He found the administration of the Holy Communion conducted in a slovenly manner. The table was kept in the middle of the Church, and communicants had acquired a habit of putting their hats and sticks on it. Laud railed it off, at the East end, so that it could no longer be used as a hat-rack and umbrella-stand; and he also preached sermons before the University in favour of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and of the divine origin of the episcopacy.

This, at first, made him very unpopular. His election to the office of President was only effected in the face of strenuous opposition—one vehement antagonist presuming to seize the voting papers and tear them up, in the vain hope of invalidating the election; and he was preached at by the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University Church. “What!” exclaimed the preacher, pointing at the future Archbishop. “Do you think there be two heavens? If there be, get yourself to the other, and place yourself there, for into this where I am ye shall not come.”

To that sort of abuse Laud had to listen for hours together. It is said that he listened patiently. Perhaps he listened with a smile. At any rate he was in a position to smile, for he could see that he was winning.

Probably other people did not see it; for Laud was neither overbearing in manner nor formidable in appearance. Fuller describes him as “low in stature, little in bulk.” When he was Proctor, a citizen of Oxford, whom he discovered drunk on a bench and accosted with the voice of authority, addressed him as “thou little morsel of justice” and bade him go away. Apparently he went away. The Proctor’s Black Book contains no record of punishment in his time, and in his college he had a reputation for lenity. One can only in short, infer him to have been a disciplinarian from the fact that he did, somehow or other, enforce discipline.

He not only enforced discipline, indeed, but conciliated the recalcitrant. The very man who had tried to invalidate his election to the Presidency by destroying the voting papers became one of his most loyal supporters, served as Vice-Chancellor during his Chancellorship, and sent him regular reports of the progress of University affairs. In the end, therefore, he was able to carry matters with a high hand, informing the Heads of the other colleges that, if they did not institute the reforms suggested to them, “his Majesty’s commissions will reform whatsoever you do not,” and “this breach once made upon your privileges might lay open a wider gap in many other particulars,” and “it will be ordered in a sourer way not so agreeable to your liberties.”

Laud, in short, was, like Lord Curzon, a Chancellor who took his Chancellorship seriously; and no matter was too great or too little to receive attention from him. He enriched the University with gifts of rare and precious manuscripts; he procured fresh privileges for the University Press; he revised the relation of the colleges to the University; and, in addition to all that, he drafted regulations as to the conduct of junior members of the University which we may assume to have been as necessary in his time as they would be out of place in ours.

He forbade, for instance, long hair, top boots, and slashed doublets, and all garments of “light and garish colours.” He also forbade “the hunting of beasts with any sort of dogs, ferrets, nets or toils,” and any use or carrying of “muskets, crossbows or falcons,” and prescribed that “neither rope-dancers, actors, nor shows of gladiators” should perform in the precincts of the University without special leave. His schedule of prohibited games included football and knuckle-bones; and the sanction of his Draconian rules was to be “corporal punishment if, by reason of age, it be becoming, fines, postponement of the degree, expulsion for a time or for ever”; and though it is difficult for us to picture the state of things which required to be amended by this drastic code, there is testimony that the change which it introduced was for the better. Sir John Coke may be our witness.

“Scholars” (writes Sir John in 1636) “are no more to be found in taverns nor seen loitering in the streets or other places of idleness or ill-example, but all contain themselves within the walls of their colleges and in the schools and public libraries.”

It is a picture of an Oxford very different from the Oxford which we know—a picture of an Oxford of old heads on young shoulders. Let Laud be given all the credit that is due to him for creating such an Oxford, even though the elements of permanence were lacking to his creation. He did not altogether ignore the need for recreation, though he thought rough games undignified, and would have been appalled by the spectacle of an undergraduate in a blazer. He admitted plays and pageants; and as our account of him began with a pageant, so it may end with one. Only three years before his arraignment and execution, he organised a pageant of triumphant splendour for the entertainment of the King and Queen, the Elector Palatine, and Prince Rupert.

There was first a dinner of a unique description, with “baked meats” disguised by the cook to look like Archbishops, Bishops, and Doctors of Divinity. Then there was a play—“very merry,” Laud writes, “and without offence.” He was very proud to think that Saint John’s was able to stage the piece without needing to borrow a single actor from any other college; and the costumes were so tasteful that the Queen borrowed them for a subsequent performance by her own players at Hampton Court. All things, in short, were in such very good order that “no man went out at the gates, courtier or other, but content,” and all passed off “to the great satisfaction of the King and the honour of that place.”

It was a great day for Saint John’s, and a great day for Laud. He proceeded to Oxford for the occasion with a retinue of from forty to fifty horsemen, and he defrayed the whole cost of the entertainment—£2,666—out of his own pocket. But the glory was like the glory of the sunset which precedes the dark. Laud’s further progress was to be to the prison and the block; and the College was presently to be called upon, like the other colleges, to yield up its plate to the King, and to devote a portion of its revenues to the payment of the King’s soldiers. The King promised “on the word of a king” to repay the money advanced within a month; but he did not keep his promise; and presently the Parliamentarians began bombarding, and a cannon ball which lodged in the gateway tower is still preserved.

Having had its day, Saint John’s was never again to be so pre-eminent a college as under Laud’s administration. Intellectually, it was to be surpassed by Balliol; socially it was to be surpassed by Christ Church. The Methodism of the eighteenth century was to have no repercussion within its walls. Ecclesiastically—though Mark Pattison speaks of it as “corroded with ecclesiasticism”—it was never to attain to the interest of Oriel. It fell, in short, with the fall of Charles I., into that place in “the ruck” from which it is given to few colleges to emerge for more than a little while.

One distinction which may be claimed for the days of its obscurity is that, once, it had a soldier for its President. President Mews had attained the rank of captain during the Civil War, and it is related that, while President, he lent the horses from his stable to draw the royal artillery at the Battle of Sedgmoor, and himself not only watched the engagement from the top of a hill, but gave advice as to the tactics—an example which we may expect to see followed by Professor Spenser Wilkinson (whose college was Merton) if ever the necessity should arise.

Another incident which diversified the annals of the College in the latter part of the seventeenth century was a visit from the Dutch Admiral Tromp. He is described by a contemporary as “a drunken greasy Dutchman”; but he did not get drunk alone. A drinking match was arranged by Dr. John Speed of Saint John’s, and five or six others, “as able men as himself.” It is recorded that, though the contest was a severe one, the Oxonians triumphed, and at the close of a merry evening, the ancient mariner was conveyed to his lodgings in a wheelbarrow.

And so forth, there being no other name on which it is necessary to pause until we come to that of Dean Mansel.

Mansel is the divine whom Herbert Spencer claimed for his philosophical ancestor. He had, he said, carried the speculations of Mansel a step further—that was how he had arrived at the agnosticism expounded in “First Principles.” Whether the one philosopher’s conclusions are really deducible from the other philosopher’s premises is a thorny question about which the mere historian may be contented to leave theologians and metaphysicians wrangling. For him it is enough that Mansel was a notable figure—a philosopher whom the average undergraduate of his period forgave freely for being incomprehensible because he was so unmistakably pugnacious.

In his examination for his degree, Mansel distinguished himself by arguing with his examiner, before an admiring audience, and putting him to shame; and Dean Burgon’s “Twelve Good Men” contains a delightful description of the delivery of his controversial Bampton Lectures. He was much too deep, Burgon tells us, for his congregation—not one in a hundred of them understood a word of what he was saying. But they understood, in a general way, what he was about.

“He was, single-handed, contunding a host of unbelievers—some with unpronounceable names and unintelligible theories; and sending them flying before him like dust before the wind. And that was quite enough for them. It was a kind of gladiatorial exhibition which they were invited to witness: the unequal odds against the British lion adding greatly to the zest of the entertainment; especially as the noble animal was always observed to remain master of the field in the end. But, for the space of an hour, there was sure to be some desperate hard fighting, during which they knew that Mansel would have to hit both straight and hard: and that they liked. It was only necessary to look at their Champion to be sure that he also sincerely relished his occupation; and this completed their satisfaction. So long as he was encountering his opponents’ reasoning, his massive brow, expressive features, and earnest manner suggested the image of nothing so much as resolute intellectual conflict, combined with conscious intellectual superiority. But the turning-point was reached at last. He would suddenly erect his forefinger. This was the signal for the decisive final charge. Resistance from that moment was hopeless. Already were the enemy’s ranks broken. It only remained to pursue the routed foe into some remote corner of Germany and to pronounce the Benediction.”

Truly there must have been theological giants in the land in those days; and the spectacle must have been even more sublime than that of Tatham of Lincoln contributing to Christian apologetics his famous wish that he might see “all the German critics at the bottom of the German Ocean.” And the curious thing is that, when Mansel was not confounding the Teuton metaphysicians, he was engaged in building himself up a second reputation as the most brilliant punster in the English language. Burgon credits him with the delightful saying—sometimes attributed to Douglas Jerrold—that “dogmatism is the maturity of puppyism”; and Burgon, in fact, fills several pages with Mansel’s puns, setting them forth with a gusto which may partially explain and justify the criticism once passed on Burgon himself, to the effect that “buffoonery was his forte and piety his foible.”