The romance of the Oxford colleges

The present Hertford College is the heir and successor of an earlier Hertford College, and also of Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall; and one must begin with a word on the strange vicissitudes of these various foundations.

Hart Hall came first, dating from some time in the thirteenth century; but the founders of the halls of those days are no more to be confounded with the benefactors of learning than are the keepers of the boarding-houses in which the majority of University students reside on the Continent. They were merely landlords who desired a particular class of tenant; and the so-called Principal of the Hall was not a person set in authority over the students, but a student reputed to be solvent and elected by his fellow students, for that reason, to make himself responsible to the landlord for the rent. It was not until a later date that he was nominated from outside and charged to direct the studies and control the conduct of the inmates.

That was the first stage. The second began with the appointment to the principalship of Dr. Richard Newton. He was a man of ambition and energy; and he made it the object of his life to get Hart Hall incorporated as a College. There was considerable opposition; but, after a long fight, he got his way; and Hart Hall became Hertford College in 1737.

The College was a success as long as Newton was at the head of it. He had a reputation as a disciplinarian. Parents heard of him as a Head who could compel even rich young men to work and to behave themselves. Hence the College attracted a good many gentlemen-commoners, whose high fees kept the place going. Two of those gentlemen-commoners were George Selwyn and Charles James Fox.

By degrees, however, after Newton’s death, the fashion changed, and gentlemen-commoners went elsewhere. The endowments of the College were scanty, and it could not stand the stress of evil times. The fellowships were only worth £15 a year, and nobody wanted them. The headship itself was only worth about £60 a year, and the day came when no fit and qualified person would be satisfied with so small a stipend. So matriculations ceased, and the men who had already matriculated finished their course and left; and presently there remained nothing but an empty college building, devoid alike of Principal, tutors, and undergraduates—devoid of everything except an obstinate elderly gentleman named Hewitt, who had elected himself to the vice-principalship, and clamoured to be allowed to die in the enjoyment of that office. And then a strange thing happened.

A certain solicitor named Roberson, having no house of his own, but wanting one, boldly, without asking any man’s leave, moved, with his goods and chattels, into the late Principal’s vacant apartments. To those who questioned him as to his doings, he said that he had assumed the office of caretaker of an ancient building which seemed in danger of falling into ruins. He had, of course, no shadow of a right to be there; but he knew as a solicitor—a master of useful knowledge—that, unless and until the extinct corporation was reconstituted, no one would have the right either to turn him out or to compel him to pay rent.

His example was quickly followed by other people, who argued that a legal position which was good enough for a solicitor was good enough for them. Any man who desired to live rent-free proceeded to appoint himself caretaker of one of the vacant sets of rooms in Hertford College. Before very long, the whole college was filled with self-appointed caretakers, who took so little care that, at last, one of the buildings—a lath and plaster affair containing at least a dozen sets of rooms—collapsed “with a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.” Then, and not before it was time, the University took it upon itself to interfere.

A Commission was appointed to envisage the extraordinary situation. It reported that Hertford College, on a certain date, “became and was dissolved” and its property escheated to the Crown; and an Act of Parliament was then obtained, enabling the Crown to grant the escheated property to the University in trust for Magdalen Hall.

The memory of Magdalen Hall is now principally kept alive by scraps of humorous rhyme. There is the rhyme which speaks of

There is also the rhyme which celebrates

The rhymes obviously suggest a Hall populated by the intellectual tagrag and bobtail of the University—men for whom the obtaining of a pass degree was the protracted labour of a lifetime; and that was the condition to which Magdalen Hall tended to lapse as the nineteenth century ran its course.

It had had, indeed, a distinguished past. Among the great men who took their degrees, at a much earlier age than fifty-three, from Magdalen Hall were included Jonathan Swift, William Waller, the poet, Sir Matthew Hale, the distinguished judge, and Thomas Hobbes, the illustrious philosopher. But that is ancient—or at all events it is not modern—history. Towards the end of the eighteenth century Halls went out of fashion. They ceased to attract in virtue either of the luxury of the life or of the laxity of the discipline. Men of rank came to prefer Christ Church. Men of brains were attracted to the Colleges by the scholarships and exhibitions. The Halls tended more and more to become the refuges of the intellectually destitute—establishments whose chief claim on the loyalty and gratitude of their members was that they allowed them to remain in residence as long as they liked, whether they succeeded in passing their examinations or not. Their position, therefore, became precarious; and the question of either merging them in colleges or transforming them into colleges gradually arose. Thanks to the munificence of Mr. T. C. Baring, M.P., who provided an ample endowment, Magdalen Hall was transformed into Hertford College, and so entered upon a new lease of life in 1874.

Such is the story; and it only remains to glance at a select few of the distinguished names which illustrate it. Two of them have been already mentioned—George Selwyn and Charles James Fox. A third—the Principal’s private pupil—was Henry Pelham, the future Prime Minister.

These three young men were young men of pretty much the same sort. If they had been contemporaries they would doubtless have been found in the same set. For a picture of the kind of life they lived—a typical picture of the life of fellow-commoners of the period—we may turn to the record of the first Lord Malmesbury, who was up at the same time as Fox, though not at the same college, being, in fact, a Merton man.

“The men,” Lord Malmesbury says, “with whom I lived were very pleasant, but very idle, fellows. Our life was an imitation of high life in London. Luckily drinking was not the fashion; but what we did drink was claret, and we had our regular round of evening card-parties, to the great annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of surprise to me how so many of us made our way so well in the world and so creditably.”

No doubt the description is faithful enough in a general way—no statement which connects Fox with cards or with claret is incredible; but, as a matter of fact, nearly all our detailed information points to him as having been considerably less idle than his associates. In later life, as we know, when a friend remarked to him that it would be agreeable to lie on the grass with a book, he replied that it would be still more agreeable to lie on the grass without a book; but, in his Oxford days, his indolence was so coloured by curiosity as to be hardly recognisable as such.

There is a story to the effect that he once took a “memorable leap” from an upper window into the street in order to play his part in a town and gown row; but that story rests upon doubtful evidence. His letters, and those of his correspondents, show him to have read hard enough—especially in mathematics, which, strange as it may seem, he found “entertaining”—to make both his father and his tutor anxious. The former removed him, and took him abroad; the latter urged him not to trouble about mathematics until his return.

“As to trigonometry,” he wrote, “it is a matter of entire indifference to the other geometricians of the college whether they proceed to the other branches of mathematics immediately, or wait a term or two longer. You need not, therefore, interrupt your amusements by severe studies, for it is wholly unnecessary to take a step onwards without you, and there we shall stop until we have the pleasure of your company.”

And Fox’s own letters from Oxford indicate that he did indeed regard the University, not as a haunt of dissipation, but as a seat of learning.

“I did not,” he says, “expect my life here could be so pleasant as I find it; but I really think, to a man who reads a great deal, there cannot be a more agreeable place.”

If Fox was a credit to the college, however, the same could by no means be said of George Selwyn, who got into trouble with the Proctors.

George Selwyn, indeed, took Oxford seriously enough to read at the Bodleian, and to seek the degree of B.C.L.; but the claret which he drank went to his head, and he behaved unbecomingly in his cups.

He was a leading spirit in a Wine Club—such a society, no doubt, as that which one remembers at Exeter, roaring out the jovial refrain, with “the eternal note of sadness” at the end of it:

One day it came to the ears of the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors that, at a meeting of this club in the house of a certain Deverelle, an “unlicensed seller of wines,” the rite of the administration of the Holy Communion had been parodied. An actual eucharistic chalice, it was said, had been procured; Rhine wine had been handed round in it; and George “did ludicrously and profanely apply the words used by our Saviour at the said Institution to the intemperate purposes of the said club.”

Deverelle and the waiter were summoned to give evidence; and so were several of George Selwyn’s boon companions—Lord Harley, and the sons of Earl Gower and the Earl of Mansfield among them. Drunkenness was the only possible defence; but the plea was not presented in the shape in which it might have carried conviction. Instead of deposing that they had themselves been too drunk to remember what had happened, the revellers deposed that George Selwyn had been too drunk to know what he was doing; and one of them even went so far as to try to secure his acquittal by deposing that he was normally to be found in that condition after dinner.

Whether inebriety is an extenuation or an aggravation of the offence of blasphemy is a question which might be argued; so also is the question whether private blasphemy is an offence of which public cognisance should be taken. Neither of the questions need be argued here, however, for neither of them was argued at the time. The fact having been established, the punishment followed as a matter of course; and George Selwyn was sentenced, in the noble language of the official decree, “to be utterly expelled and banished from our said University, and never henceforward to be permitted to enter and reside within the precincts of our said University.”

So much, then, for the Hertford men of the first foundation. Of the Hertford men of the second foundation, since it only dates from 1874, it would be premature to speak, though one of them, Mr. G. H. Thring, is the Secretary of the Incorporated Society of Authors. But there is just one of the Magdalen Hall men of the intervening half century of whom one cannot choose but speak. If Magdalen Hall had done nothing but afford a shelter to Robert Stephen Hawker, the parson poet of Morwenstow, on the northern coast of Cornwall, its existence would be amply justified.

His case was curious. In the midst of his career at Oxford, his father one day informed him that he could not afford to keep him at the University any longer; but the quick instinct of genius showed the young man a way out of the difficulty,—he would marry his godmother, a lady twenty-one years his senior, who had an income of £200 a year. Jumping on his horse, he rode in hot haste from Stratton to Bude, where the lady lived, proposed to her, and was accepted. Then he returned to Oxford, and, as they did not want married undergraduates at Pembroke, which was his original college, he migrated to Magdalen Hall, where he won the Newdigate with a poem on “Pompeii.”

That is all that there is to be said of his Oxford days; and of his marriage there is nothing to be related except that it turned out happily, and that it was not out of disrespect for his excellent wife’s memory that he wore a pink hat without a brim at her funeral. He was always eccentric in his dress; and a pink hat without a brim was, at that period of his life, his usual headgear. There was precedent for it, he said, in the Eastern Church, of the ceremonies of which he was always an earnest student.

For the rest, he became Vicar of Morwenstow, on the rock-bound shore of the Atlantic, and lived there in complete isolation, five miles from the nearest butcher’s shop, and more than twenty miles from the nearest railway station—the hero of many good stories which this is not the place to relate—the author of much true poetry, composed, it is said, under the influence of opium, which may be praised here, because praise of it is nowhere out of place. And, if any reader demands that the praise should be supported by quotation, then let him read this:

That settles it, and we have no need of further evidence. It was a great poet, and no mere versifier, who wrote those lines; and, in “The Quest of the Sangraal,” the Newdigate prize-man from Magdalen Hall, who drank opium and dreamt in the hut of driftwood which he had built himself on the face of the black cliff looking out across the Atlantic to Labrador, competed with Tennyson on his own ground and beat him.