The romance of the Oxford colleges

William of Wykeham, the founder of New College, was perhaps the greatest pluralist in the history of the Church. Ecclesiastical benefices were heaped upon him in unexampled profusion as the reward for services in no sense of an ecclesiastical character. He served his King chiefly as a Clerk of the Works—or perhaps one should say as a Chief Commissioner of the Works—at Windsor and elsewhere; and the King, instead of paying him an adequate salary, bestowed upon him prebends, canonries, deaneries, and archdeaconries. No fewer than nine prebends were given to him in a single year; he received three more prebends a year or two afterwards. While holding them, he also held at least one deanery and two archdeaconries, as well as several livings; and in the end he became Bishop of Winchester. The story that he established himself in the royal esteem by persuading his niece to become the King’s mistress may be the calumnious invention of a later age; but it is evident, at any rate, that he was more a man of the world than a Churchman, and only found that godliness was great gain because he combined it with other qualities.

He was not himself a University man, but had left school early and entered a notary’s office. Perhaps he was the more deeply impressed with the value of “educational advantages” because he had enjoyed so few of them. There are men who admire learning for that reason, just as there are those who despise it on the ground that it unfits a youth for walking in the wily paths of commerce; and William of Wykeham admired it sufficiently to endow it in the grand style and on a great scale, like the Rockefellers and the Johns Hopkinses of a later age and a newer continent. He endowed Winchester School as well as New College—the former to feed the latter, and “Manners makyth man” to be the motto of both; and he gave his foundation both more elaborate buildings and more elaborate Statutes than any previous college had had, with the result that Wiclif sneered at him as a man “wise of building castles or worldly doing, though he cannot read well his psalter.”

While the Warden of Merton lived in a “lodging” and kept only four horses, the Warden of New College was to keep six horses and have a house to himself. That was one of the founder’s splendid provisions. He also provided that there should be no fewer than five Deans and three Bursars; and he made many minor stipulations which have had an enduring influence upon University development. His sense that his soul stood in sore need of the prayers of the faithful impelled him to prescribe that daily attendance at the chapel services—Masses, of course, in those days—should be compulsory. He believed in a simple and serious life, and therefore forbade his scholars to play games. Not only “wrestlings, dances, jigs,” &c., were forbidden by his regulations, but the prohibition extended to games of “ball” and games of chess; while the interests of morality were safeguarded by the direction that the College laundress should be “of such age and condition that no sinister suspicion can, or ought to, fall on her.” Finally, by enacting that there should be special teaching in the College in addition to the teaching provided by the University, he foreshadowed what is known as the “tutorial system.”

The Statutes, it must be admitted, were, on the whole, in advance of the times in which they were drafted. The founder had clear and, in the main, sound ideas on the subject of educational reform. He understood, for one thing, that classical Latin was better than monkish Latin; and he understood that, in order to shape students as he wished, it was necessary to catch them young. That was the significance of the linked endowment of the College and the School; and no doubt it seemed to William of Wykeham only an act of common justice that, in the selection of recipients of his bounty, a preference should be shown to “founders’ kin.”

But he did not foresee. Or perhaps it would be juster to say that he foresaw, and provided for, too much. The world moved, and New College could not move with it because it was tied up and entangled. The restrictions on the diversions of the students did not, of course, matter much. They could be, and were, ignored, when it was recognised that they were obsolete and unprofitable. The limitation of the choice of students to a narrow field, and the provision of an income for them for life whether they worked or were idle, had more pernicious consequences. It condemned New College, in spite of the magnificence of its buildings, to insignificance in the life of the University; and it now makes the task of the historian in search of interesting alumni an extremely hard one.

Nowadays, let it be ungrudgingly admitted, New College is prosperous and successful. Its scholars, and also its Fellows, have distinguished themselves in many ways, and have won particular distinction in the highest walks of journalism. Mr. Buckle, the editor of the Times, was a scholar of New College, and so was Mr. E. T. Cook, who successively edited the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily News. Mr. W. L. Courtney, whose signature is familiar to every reader of the Daily Telegraph, was a Fellow; as was also Viscount Milner, a journalist before he became a pro-consul. In literature, too, the College has been represented by Lionel Johnson—one of the most subtle and delicate poets of our generation, though one whose course was brief like that of Young Marcellus.

But all those names are modern names, occurring subsequently to the cutting of the entanglement by the University Commissioners. To plunge into the past is to plunge into a very different state of things. We quickly get back to a time when it was justly said of New College that it had “golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden masters”—a time when the College was famous, not for its output of learning, but for its consumption of negus. There was once a dispute as to the comparative merits of the negus of New College and of All Souls; and a jury of Queen’s and Brasenose men who were invited to decide the question gave a unanimous verdict in favour of the New College recipe. Balliol, where Southey drank so much negus, was not in the competition.

The notable New College names in this dark age, and in the ages hardly less dark which preceded it, are names which mean little to the University and less to the community at large. There are the names of some respectable divines among them, and even the names of some more than respectable bishops—two, for instance, of the seven who stood up against James II; but there is hardly a single name which burns like a beacon; as does, say, the name of Shelley at University, or the name of Dr. Johnson at Pembroke.

There is Sydney Smith; but of his Oxford career hardly anything is known except that he had to get through it on an allowance of £100 a year, and consequently could not afford to play his part in the dissipations of the day. He took his degree a year before Southey came into residence at Balliol, “got into debt to buy books,” and formed such a poor opinion of his alma mater that he never, throughout the remainder of his life, ceased to sneer at her. When, for example, the Honours Schools were instituted, he wrote:

“If Oxford is become at last sensible of the miserable state to which it was reduced, as everybody else was out of Oxford, and if it is making serious efforts to recover from the degradation into which it was plunged a few years past, the good wishes of every respectable man must go with it.”

And when he heard that a lady of his acquaintance was sending her son to Oxford, his comment was:

“I feel for her about her son at Oxford, knowing, as I do, that the only consequences of a University education are the growth of vice and the waste of money.”

On which the only reasonable comment is that, if Sydney Smith had been at another college, he might have written less vituperatively.

Another name which arouses some, though only a mild, interest is that of Sir Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, who ended by becoming Provost of Eton. He was not on the foundation, but was a gentleman commoner—though few gentlemen commoners were permitted to enter at New College—and it may be hoped that he behaved better there than he did afterwards, when he lived, for a while, in the house of Isaac Casaubon, at Geneva. He was the great scholar’s “paying guest”; and he not only went away without paying, but pledged his host’s credit for the horse on which he took his departure. Casaubon ultimately got the money, but not until he had written to nearly every classical scholar in Europe to expose Wotton’s outrageous behaviour.

For the rest the stories which centre around New College are mainly about celebrities whose celebrity is purely local. It would be possible, of course, if reverence did not forbid, to speak at some length on the alleged Spoonerisms of Canon Spooner; but most of those stories are probably untrue. It cannot be true, for instance, that Canon Spooner, at a dinner-party inadvertently stuck his fork into the white hand of the lady sitting next to him, murmuring, “Excuse me, I think that is my bread.” It is still less credible that Canon Spooner, when a lady of his family was seeing him off at the railway-station, gave the lady sixpence in mistake for the porter, and kissed the porter in mistake for the lady. And who believes that Canon Spooner, setting out to propose the health of “our dear old Queen,” found himself proposing the health of “our queer old Dean” instead? The trail of the mythmaker is over all these anecdotes; and indeed it is said that the fabrication of “Spoonerisms” is a favourite undergraduate diversion on Sunday afternoons.

An earlier Warden, Dr. Shuttleworth, is famous for a remarkable poem which he composed while a Winchester boy—an Address to Learning, which ends with the often-quoted lines:

His prayer was answered, and he became Bishop of Chichester, and, in that capacity, made Manning an Archdeacon. He was, however, an opponent of the Ritualists, and so formidable a one that his death was saluted by Pusey as “a visible token of God’s presence in the Church of England”; whence it appears that Pusey worshipped a God whom he believed to be capable of killing off Broad Churchmen in order that High Churchmen might be spared the embarrassment of meeting them in controversy.

A few stories of Shuttleworth, and a few other stories of other New College notables of the same generation, may be found in Mr. Tuckwell’s entertaining “Reminiscences of Oxford.” There is the story, for instance, of Lancelot Lee, the incumbent of the College living of Wootton, near Woodstock.

“Coming out of church one day, he found two disreputable vagabonds in the churchyard.

“‘What are you doing here?’

“‘Oh, sir, we are seeking the Lord.’

“‘Seeking the Lord, are you? Do you see those stocks? That is where the Lord will find you if you stay here another minute.’”

Then there is the story of Christopher Erle, who held a living in Buckinghamshire, in the immediate vicinity of Lord Rothschild’s estate. It seemed to Erle, as it has since seemed to Mr. Lloyd George, that it was possible to have “too much of Lord Rothschild,” and he suppressed him:

“It was Erle’s whim to dress carelessly; and the plutocrat, walking one day with a large party and meeting his Rector in the parish, had the bad taste to handle his sleeve and say, ‘Rather a shabby coat, Parson, isn’t it?’ Erle held it up to him—‘Will you buysh? Will you buysh?’ There ensued an exitus Israel, and Erle walked on, chuckling and victorious.”

But perhaps the most characteristic of the stories is that of the highway robbery:

“Some men were going to the Abingdon ball; and in the common-room the conversation turned on a highway robbery recently perpetrated near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked valiantly of their own courage, contemptuously of brigand dangers; their fly was announced, and off they drove. Coming home, they were stopped in a dark part of Bagley Wood by two masked men, one of whom held the horses’ heads, while his mate pointed a pistol into the fly with the conventional highwayman’s demand. Meekly our gallant travellers surrendered money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded for a ring which had belonged to his old mother; the deceased lady was consigned to Tartarus, the ring was taken, and the marauders rode away. Great commiseration was shown to the victims when they told their tale, great activity displayed by the police; until on going into Hall the next afternoon, they saw lying in a heap on the centre of the high table the abstracted valuables, including the maternal ring, while mounting guard over them was a broken candle-stick which had done duty as a pistol. The two practical jokers had ridden to the wood, tied their horses to the trees, waited for the travellers, and played the wild Prince Poins.”

And so forth; for all the best New College stories are stories of that sort—stories of which the heroes are jesters or eccentrics rather than men of light and leading. The future, no doubt, will be much richer in intellectual glory; but the College has had but a short time in which to assert itself since the University Commissioners released it from William of Wykeham’s Statutes.