Dissolution of the Monasteries—Schemes for Collegiate Spoliation checked by Henry VIII.—Monks’ or Buckingham College—Refounded by Sir Thomas Audley as Magdalene College—Conversion of the Old Buildings—The Pepysian Library—Foundation of Trinity College—Michaelhouse and the King’s Hall—King Edward’s Gate—The Queen’s Gate—The Great Gate—Dr. Thomas Neville—The Great Court—The Hall—Neville’s Court—New Court—Dr. Bentley—“A House of all Kinds of Good Letters.”
THE dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. and the confiscation of their great estates naturally created a sense of foreboding in the universities that it would not be long before the College estates shared the same fate. There were not wanting, we may be sure, greedy courtiers prepared with schemes of collegiate spoliation. If we may trust, however, the testimony of Harrison in his “Description of England,”[80] the hopes of the despoiler were effectually checked by the King himself. “Ah, sirha,” he is reported to have said to some who had ventured to make proposals for such despoilment, “I perceive the abbey lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge to ask also those colleges. And whereas we had a regard only to pull down sin by defacing the monasteries, you have a desire also to overthrow all goodness by a dispersion of colleges. I tell you, sirs, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our universities; for by their maintenance our realm shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten.” These are brave words, and we may hope that they were sincere. They may seem, perhaps, to receive some confirmation of sincerity from the fact that that munificent donor of other people’s property did himself erect upon the ruins of more than one earlier foundation that great college, whose predominance in the University has from that time onwards been so marked a feature of Cambridge life. It is the opinion of Huber,[81] that the uncertainty and depression caused in the universities by these fears of confiscation did not subside until well on in the reign of Elizabeth.
In the year 1542, however, four years before the foundation of Trinity College by Henry VIII., the spoliation of the monasteries was turned to the advantage of the University in a somewhat remarkable manner. On the further side of the river Cam, “cut off,” as Fuller describes it, “from the continent of Cambridge,” there stood an ancient religious house known at this time as Buckingham College.
“Formerly it was a place where many monks lived, on the charge of their respective convent, being very fit for solitary persons by the situation thereof. For it stood on the transcantine side, an anchoret in itself, severed by the river from the rest of the University. Here the monks some seven years since had once and again lodged and feasted Edward Stafford, the last Duke of Buckingham of that family. Great men best may, good men always will, be grateful guests to such as entertain them. Both qualifications met in this Duke and then no wonder if he largely requited his welcome. He changed the name of the house into Buckingham College, began to build, and purposed to endow the same, no doubt in some proportion to his own high and rich estate.”[82]
The foundation of this Monks’ College had dated as far back as the year 1428, when the Benedictines of Croyland erected a building for the accommodation of those monks belonging to their house who wished to repair to Cambridge, “to study the Canon Law and the Holy Scriptures,” and yet to reside under their own monastic rule. From time to time other Benedictines of the neighbourhood—Ely, Ramsey, Walden—added additional chambers to the hostel—Croyland Abbey, however, remaining the superior house.
The Library, Chapel and Hall, Magdalene College
A hall was built in connection with the College in 1519 by Edward, Duke of Buckingham, son of the former benefactor, and it is probably to this date that we may refer the secular or semi-secular foundation of the College. Certainly at this period the secular element of the College must have been considerable, for we find Cranmer, on his resignation of his Fellowship at Jesus on account of his marriage, supporting himself by giving lectures at Buckingham College. Sir Robert Rede, the founder of the Rede Lectureship in the University, and Thomas Audley, the future Lord Chancellor, are also said to have received their education in this College. At any rate there can be little doubt that it was this semi-secular character of the College at this period which saved it from the operations of the successive acts for the dissolution of the monastic bodies. In the year 1542 Buckingham College was converted by Sir Thomas Audley into Magdalene College. “Thomas, Lord Audley of Walden,” says Fuller, “Chancellor of England, by licence obtained from King Henry VIII., changed Buckingham into Magdalene (vulgarly Maudlin) College, because, as some[83] will have it, his surname is therein contained betwixt the initial and final letters thereof—M’audley’n. This may well be indulged to his fancy, whilst more solid considerations moved him to the work itself.” What those “more solid considerations” may have been it is difficult, in relation to such a founder, to divine. He was a man who had gradually amassed considerable wealth by a singular combination of talent, audacity, and craft, one who, in the language of Lloyd in his “State Worthies,” was “well seen in the flexures and windings of affairs at the depths whereof other heads not so steady turned giddy.” He was Speaker of the House of Commons in that Parliament by whose aid Henry VIII. had finally separated himself and his kingdom from all allegiance to the See of Rome, and of whose further measures for ecclesiastical reform at home Bishop Fisher had exclaimed in the House of Lords: “My lords, you see daily what bills come hither from the Common House, and all is to the destruction of the Church. For God’s sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Bohemia was, and when the Church went down, then fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but ‘Down with the Church!’ and all this meseemeth is for lack of faith only.” Sir Thomas Audley had been one of the first to profit by the plunder of the monasteries. “He had had,” as Fuller terms it, “the first cut in the feast of abbey lands.” He was also one of those who shared in its final distribution. As a reward for his services as Lord Chancellor—and what those services must have been as “the keeper of the conscience” of such a king as Henry VIII. we need not trouble to inquire—a few more of the suppressed monasteries were granted to him at the general dissolution, among which, at his own earnest suit, was the Abbey of Walden in Essex. Walden was one of the Benedictine houses that had been associated in the early days with Monks’, now Buckingham College. Whether the newly-created Lord of Walden regarded himself as inheriting also the Monks’ rights and responsibilities in connection with the Cambridge college or not, or whether, being an old man now and infirm and with no male heir, he thought to find some solace for his conscience in the thought of himself as the benefactor and founder of a permanent college, I cannot say. Certain, however, it is that the original statutes of Magdalene College, unlike those of Christ’s and John’s, exhibit no regard for the New Learning, and are indeed mainly noteworthy for the large powers and discretion which they assign to the Master, and the almost entire freedom of that official from any responsibility to the governing body of Fellows. It was evidently the founder’s design to place the College practically under the control of the successive owners of Audley End.
In 1564 the young Duke of Norfolk, who had married Lord Audley’s daughter and sole heir, and who was, moreover, descended from the early benefactor of the College, the Duke of Buckingham, contributed liberally towards both the revenues of Magdalene and its buildings. On the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge, it is recorded that “the Duke of Norfolk accompanied Her Majesty out of the town, and, then returning, entered Magdalene College, and gave much money to the same; promising £40 by year till they had builded the quadrant of the College.”[84] From this statement it is plain that the quadrangle of Magdalene was not complete so late as 1654. The chapel and old library which form the west side of this court, and also the frontage to the street, had been built in 1475. The roof of the present chapel, uncovered in 1847, shows that Buckingham College had a chapel on the same site. The doorway in the north-west corner of the court retained a carving of the three keys, the arms of the prior and convent of Ely, so late as 1777, and thus probably indicated the chambers which were added to Monks’ College for the accommodation of the Ely Convent scholars. The similar rooms assigned to the scholar-monks of Walden and Ramsey appear to have been in the range of buildings forming the south side of the College, parallel with the river, originally built in 1465, but reconstructed in 1585. The new gateway in the street-front belongs also to this late date. The chapel was thoroughly “Italianised” in 1733, and again restored and enlarged in 1851.
The extremely beautiful building now known as the Pepysian Library, beyond the old quadrangle to the east, which belongs to Restoration times, although its exact date and the name of its architect are not known, is the chief glory of Magdalene. It was probably approaching completion in 1703, when Samuel Pepys, the diarist, who had been a sizar of the College in 1650, and had lately contributed towards the cost of the building, bequeathed his library to the College, and directed that it should be housed in the new building. There, accordingly, it is now deposited, and the inscription, “Bibliotheca Pepysiana, 1724,” with his arms and motto, “Mens cujusque is est quisque,” is carved in the pediment of the central window. The collection of books is a specially interesting one, invaluable to the historian or antiquary. Most of the books are in the bindings of the time, and are still in the mahogany-glazed bookcases in which they were placed by Pepys himself in 1666, and of which he speaks in his Diary under date August 24 of that year:—
Tower & Gateway to Trinity College. To face p. 252
“Up and dispatched several businesses at home in the morning, and then comes Simpson to set up my other new presses for my books; and so he and I fell to the furnishing of my new closett, and taking out the things out of my old; and I kept him with me all day, and he dined with me, and so all the afternoone, till it was quite darke hanging things—that is my maps and pictures and draughts—and setting up my books, and as much as we could do, to my most extraordinary satisfaction; so that I think it will be as noble a closett as any man hath, and light enough—though, indeed, it would be better to have had a little more light.”
Of the many Magdalene men of eminence, from the days of Sir Robert Rede and Archbishop Cranmer down to those of Charles Parnell and Charles Kingsley, there is no need to speak in any other words than those of Fuller: “Every year this house produced some eminent scholars, as living cheaper and privater, freer from town temptations by their remote situation.”
No Cambridge foundation, probably no academic institution in Europe, furnishes so striking an example as does Trinity College of the change from the mediæval to the modern conception of education and of learning. If, indeed, we may take the words of the Preamble to his Charter of Foundation, dated the thirty-eighth year of his reign (1546) as a statement of his own personal aims, King Henry had conceived a very noble ideal of liberal education. After referring to his special reasons for thankfulness to Almighty God for peace at home and successful wars abroad—peace had just been declared with France after the brief campaign conducted by Henry himself, which had been signalised by the capture of Boulogne—and above all for the introduction of the pure truth of Christianity into his kingdom, he sets forth his intention of founding a college “to the glory and honour of Almighty God, and the Holy and undivided Trinity, for the amplification and establishment of the Christian and true religion, the extirpation of heresy and false opinion, the increase and continuance of divine learning and all kinds of good letters, the knowledge of the tongues, the education of the youth in piety, virtue, learning, and science, the relief of the poor and destitute, the prosperity of the Church of Christ, and the common good and happiness of his kingdom and subjects.”[85]
Gateway & Dial, Trinity College
The site upon which King Henry VIII. had decided to place his college is also mentioned in this preamble to the Charter of Foundation. It was to be “on the soil, ground, sites, and precincts of the late hall and college, commonly called the King’s Hall, and of a certain late college of S. Michael, commonly called Michaelhouse, and also of a certain house and hostel called Fyswicke or Fysecke hostel and of another house and hostel, commonly called Hovinge Inn.” In addition to the hostels here named there were, however, several others which occupied, or had occupied, the site previous to 1548—for one or two previous to this time had been absorbed by their neighbours—whose names have been preserved, and whose position has been put beyond doubt by recent researches. These other hostels were S. Catharine’s, S. Margaret’s, Crouched Hostel, Tyler or Tyler’s, S. Gregory’s, Garet or Saint Gerard’s Hostel, and Oving’s Inn.
We may indicate roughly, perhaps, the position of these various halls and hostels in relation to the present college buildings, if we imagine ourselves to have entered the great gate of Trinity from the High Street, from Trinity Street, and to be standing on the steps leading into the Great Court, and facing across towards the Master’s lodge. Immediately in front of us, on what is now the vacant green sward between the gateway steps and the sun-dial, there stood in the fifteenth century King’s Hall, or that block of it which a century earlier had been built to take the place of the thatched and timbered house which Edward III. had bought from Robert de Croyland, and had made into his “King’s Hall of Scholars.” The entrance to this house, however, was not on the side which would have been immediately facing the point where we stand on the steps. It was entered by a doorway on its south side, opening into a lane—King’s Childers’ Lane it was called—which, starting from the High Street, from a point slightly to the south of the Great Gate, crossed the Great Court directly east and west, and then bending slightly to the north, reached the river at Dame Nichol’s Hythe, at a point just beyond the bend in the river by the end of the present library. Returning to our point of view we should find on our right, occupying the easternmost part of the existing chapel, the old chapel of King’s Hall, built in 1465, and beyond it, westwards, other buildings,—the buttery, the kitchen, the hall,—forming four sides of a little cloistered court, partly occupying the site of the present ante-chapel, and partly on its northern side facing across the Cornhithe Lane to the gardens of the old Hospital of S. John.
Turning to our left to the southern half of the great court, to that part which in the old days was south of King’s Childers’ Lane, south, that is, of the present fountain, we should find the site intersected by a lane running directly north and south, from a point at the south-west corner of the King’s Hall about where the sun-dial now stands, to a point in Trinity Lane, or S. Michael’s Lane as it was then called, where now stands the Queen’s Gate. This was Le Foule Lane, and was practically a continuation of that Milne Street of which we have spoken in an earlier chapter as running parallel with the river past the front of Trinity Hall, Clare, and Queens’ to the King’s Mills. To the east of Foule Lane, occupying the site of the present range of buildings on the east and south-east of the great court, stood the Hostel of S. Catharine, with Fyswicke Hostel on its western side. Michaelhouse occupied practically the whole of the south-western quarter of the great court, with its gardens stretching down to the river. S. Catharine’s, Fyswicke Hostel, and Michaelhouse all had entrances into S. Michael’s or Flaxhithe, now Trinity Lane. Beyond and across Flaxhithe Lane was Oving’s Inn, on the site of the present Bishop’s Hostel, with Garett Hostel still further south, on land adjoining Trinity Hall. S. Gregory’s and the Crouched Hostel stood north of Michaelhouse, side by side, on a space now occupied for the most part by the great dining-hall. The Tyled or Tyler’s Hostel was on the High Street adjoining the north-east corner of S. Catharine’s. S. Margaret’s Hall, which had adjoined the house of William Fyswicke, had been at an early date absorbed in the Fyswicke Hostel.
It is plain that these various halls and hostels would sufficiently supply all the early needs of King Henry’s new college. There was the chapel of King’s Hall, the halls of King’s Hall, Michaelhouse and Fyswicke’s Hostel, and the chambers in each of these and the smaller hostels. During the first three years or so, from 1546 to 1549, the existing buildings seem to have been occupied without alteration. In 1550 and 1551 parts of Michaelhouse and Fyswicke’s Hostel were pulled down, and their gates walled up. The Foule Lane, which separated them, was closed, and the new Queen’s gate built at the point where that lane had joined Michael’s Lane. The south ranges of both Fyswicke’s Hostel and Michaelhouse on each side of this gate were retained. The hall, butteries, and kitchen of Michael House on the west were also retained, and continued northwards to form a lodge for the Master, and this range was returned easterwards at right angles to join the King Edward’s gateway at the south-west corner of King’s Hall. A little later the hall, butteries, and chapel of King’s Hall were removed to make way for the new chapel, which was begun in 1555 and completed about ten years later.
An early map of Cambridge, made by order of Archbishop Parker in 1574, and preserved in one of the early copies of Caius’ “History of the University” in the British Museum, shows the College in the state which we have thus described, the outline of the Great Court, that is to say, practically defined as it is to-day, but broken at two points, one by the projection from its western side joining the Master’s lodge with the old gateway of King Edward, still standing in its ancient position, more or less on the site of the present sun-dial; the other by a set of chambers, built in 1490, projecting from the eastern range of buildings, and ending at a point somewhat east of the site of the present fountain.
The transformation of the Great Court into the shape in which we now know it is due entirely to the energy and skill of Dr. Thomas Neville, at that time Dean of Peterborough, who was appointed Master of Trinity in 1573. “Dr. Thomas Neville,” says Fuller, “the eighth master of this College, answering his anagram ‘most heavenly,’ and practising his own allusive motto, ‘ne vile velis,’ being by the rules of the philosopher himself to be accounted μεγἁλοπρεπης, as of great performances, for the general good, expended £3000 of his own in altering and enlarging the old and adding a new court thereunto, being at this day the stateliest and most uniform college in Christendom, out of which may be carved three Dutch universities.”[86]
Neville’s first work was the completion of the ranges of chambers on the east and south sides of the great court, including the Queen’s gateway tower. On the completion of these in 1599 the projecting range of buildings on the east side were pulled down. In 1601 he pulled down the corresponding projection on the western side, removing the venerable pile known as King Edward the Third’s Gate. This was rebuilt at the west end of the chapel as we now see it. The Master’s lodge was prolonged northwards, and a library with chambers below it was built eastwards to meet the old gate. The great quadrangle was thus complete, the largest in either university,[87] having an area of over 90,000 square feet. To Dr. Neville also in the Great Court is owing the additional storey to the Great Gate, with the statue of Henry VIII. in a niche on its eastern front, and the statue of King James, his Queen, and Prince Charles on its western side, the beautiful fountain erected in 1602, and the hall in 1604. The building of this hall, which with certain variations is copied from the hall of the Middle Temple, is thus described in the “Memoriale” of the College.
“When he had completed the great quadrangle and brought it to a tasteful and decorous aspect, for fear that the deformity of the Hall, which through extreme old age had become almost ruinous, should cast, as it were, a shadow over its splendour, he advanced £3000 for seven years out of his own purse, in order that a great hall might be erected answerable to the beauty of the new buildings. Lastly, as in the erection of these buildings he had been promoter rather than author, and had brought these results to pass more by labour and assiduity than by expenditure of his own money, he erected at a vast cost, the whole of which was defrayed by himself, a building in the second court adorned with beautiful columns, and elaborated with the most exquisite workmanship, so that he might connect his own name for ever with the extension of the College.”
Unfortunately, much of the original beauty of Neville’s Court was spoilt by the alterations of Mr. Essex in 1755, “a local architect whose life,” as Mr. J. G. Clark has truly said, “was spent in destroying that which ought to have been preserved.”
The building of the library which forms the western side of Neville’s Court was due mainly to the energy of Dr. Isaac Barrow, who was master from 1673 to 1677. The architect was Sir Christopher Wren, who himself thus describes his scheme:—
“I haue given the appearance of arches as the order required, fair and lofty; but I haue layd the floor of the Library upon the impostes, which answer to the pillars in the cloister and levells of the old floores, and haue filled the arches with relieus stone, of which I haue seen the effect abroad in good building, and I assure you where porches are low with flat ceelings is infinitely more gracefull than lowe arches would be, and is much more open and pleasant, nor need the mason feare the performance because the arch discharges the weight, and I shall direct him in a firme manner of executing the designe. By this contrivance the windowes of the Library rise high and give place for the deskes against the walls.... The disposition of the shelves both along the walls and breaking out from the walls must needes proue very convenient and gracefull, and the best way for the students will be to haue a little square table in each celle with 2 chaires.”
Neville’s Court Trinity College
The table and the chairs, as well as the book-shelves, were designed by Wren, who was also at pains to give full-sized sections of all the mouldings, because “we are scrupulous in small matters, and you must pardon us. Architects are as great pedants as criticks or heralds.”
In 1669 Bishop’s Hostel—so called after Bishop Hacket of Lichfield, who gave £1200 towards the cost—took the place of the two minor halls, Oving’s Inn and Garett Hostel. No further addition to the College buildings was made until the nineteenth century, when the new court was built from the designs of Wilkins in the mastership of Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, and at a later time the two courts opposite the Great Gate across Trinity Street, by the benefaction of a sum approaching £100,000, by Dr. Whewell. To Dr. Whewell also belongs the merit of the restoration of the front of the Master’s lodge, by the removal of the classical façade which had been so foolishly and tastelessly imposed upon the old work built by Dr. Bentley during his memorable tenure of the mastership from 1700 to 1742.
The mention of the name of that most masterful of Yorkshiremen and most brilliant of Cambridge scholars and critics inevitably suggests the picture of that long feud between the Fellows of Trinity and their Master which lasted for nearly half a century, for a year at any rate longer than the Peloponnesian war, and was almost as full of exciting incidents. Those who care to read the miserable and yet amusing story can do so for themselves in the pages of Bishop Monk’s “Life of Richard Bentley.” It is more to the purpose here, I think, to recall the kindly and judicious verdict of the great scholar’s life at Trinity by the greatest Cambridge scholar of to-day.
“It must never be forgotten,” writes Sir Richard Jebb, “that Bentley’s mastership of Trinity is memorable for other things than its troubles. He was the first Master who established a proper competition for the great prizes of that illustrious college. The scholarships and fellowships had previously been given by a purely oral examination. Bentley introduced written papers; he also made the award of scholarships to be annual instead of biennial, and admitted students of the first year to compete for them. He made Trinity College the earliest home for a Newtonian school, by providing in it an observatory, under the direction of Newton’s disciple and friend—destined to an early death—Roger Cotes. He fitted up a chemical laboratory in Trinity for Vigani of Verona, the professor of chemistry. He brought to Trinity the eminent orientalist, Sike of Bremen, afterwards professor of Hebrew. True to the spirit of the royal founder, Bentley wished Trinity College to be indeed a house ‘of all kinds of good letters,’ and at a time when England’s academic ideals were far from high he did much to render it not only a great college, but also a miniature university.”[88]
And “a house of all kinds of good letters” Trinity has remained, and will surely always remain. As we walk lingeringly through its halls and courts what thronging historic memories crowd upon us! We may not forget the failures as well as the successes; the defeats as well as the triumphs; “the lost causes and impossible loyalties” as well as the persistent faith and the grand achievement; but what an inspiration we feel must such a place be to the young souls who, year by year, enter its gates. How can the flame of ideal sympathy with the great personalities of their country’s history fail to be kindled or kept alive in such a place? Here by the Great Gate, on the first floor to the north, are the rooms where Isaac Newton lived. It was to these rooms that in 1666 he brought back the glass prism which he had bought in the Stourbridge Fair, and commenced the studies which eventually made it possible for Pope to write the epitaph:—
It was in these rooms that he had entertained his friends, John Locke, Richard Bentley, Isaac Barrow, Edmund Halley, Gilbert Burnett, who afterwards wrote of him, “the whitest soul I ever knew.” It was here that he wrote his “Principia.” It is in the ante-chapel close by that there stands that beautiful statue of him by Roubiliac, which Chantrey called “the noblest of our English statues,” and of which Wordsworth has recorded how he used to lie awake at night to think of that “silent face” shining in the moonlight:—
And in the chapel beyond, with its double range of “windows richly dight” with the figures of saints and worthies and benefactors of the College—Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Edward Coke, Sir Harry Spelman, Lord Craven, Roger Cotes, Archbishop Whitgift, Bishop Pearson, Bishop Barrow, Bishop Hacket, the poets Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Cowley and Dryden—is it possible for the youthful worshipper not sometimes to be aroused and uplifted above the thoughts of sordid vulgarity, of moral isolation, of mean ambition, to “see visions and dream dreams,” visions of coming greatness for city, or country, or empire, visions of great principles struggling in mean days of competitive scrambling, dreams of opportunity of some future service for the common good, which shall not be unworthy of his present heritage in these saints and heroes of the past, who may—
“Nec modo seminarium augustum et conclusum nimis, verum in se amplissimum campum collegium esse cupimus: ubi juvenes, apum more, de omnigenis flosculis pro libita libent, modo mel legant, quo et eorum procudantur linguæ et pectora, tanquam crura, thymo compleantur: ita ut tandem ex collegio quasi ex alveari evolantes, novas in quibus se exonerent ecclesiæ sedes appetant.”—Statutes of Sidney College.
Queen Elizabeth and the Founder of Emmanuel—The Puritan Age—Sir Walter Mildmay—The Building of Emmanuel—The Tenure of Fellowships—Puritan Worthies—The Founder of Harvard—Lady Frances Sidney—The Sidney College Charter—The Buildings—The Chapel the old Franciscan Refectory—Royalists and Puritans—Oliver Cromwell—Thomas Fuller—A Child’s Prayer for his Mother.
“I HEAR, Sir Walter,” said Queen Elizabeth to the founder of Emmanuel College, “you have been erecting a Puritan foundation.” “No, madam,” he replied, “far be it from me to countenance anything contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit therefrom.” And Sir Walter Mildmay expressed no doubt truthfully what was his own intention as a founder, for although it is customary to speak of both Emmanuel and Sidney Colleges as Puritan foundations, and although it admits of no question that the prevailing tone of Emmanuel College was from the first intensely Puritan in tone, yet it cannot certainly be said that either Emmanuel College or the college established by the Lady Frances Sidney two years later, were specially designed by their founders to strengthen the Puritan movement in the University. They synchronised with it no doubt, and many of their earliest members gave ample proof of their sympathy with it. But as foundations they sprang rather from the impulse traceable on the one hand to the literary spirit of the Renaissance, and on the other to the desire of promoting that union of rational religion with sound knowledge, which the friends of the New Learning, the disciples of Colet, Erasmus, and More had at heart. The two colleges were born, in fact, at the meeting-point of two great epochs of history. The age of the Renaissance was passing into the age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognised the grandeur of the people as a whole.
Hall & Chapel, Emmanuel College.
As great a change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of man; a sterner Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, by its seriousness, and by its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The obstinate questionings which haunted the finer souls of the Renaissance were being stereotyped in the theological formulas of the Puritan. The sense of divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which turned England into a people of adventurers, the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which inspired Sidney and Marlowe and Drake, was passing away before the consciousness of evil and the craving to order man’s life aright before God.
Emmanuel and Sidney Colleges were the children of this transition period. Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reign of Elizabeth, known and trusted by the Queen from her girlhood—she exchanged regularly New Year’s gifts with him—a tried friend and discreet diplomatist, who had especially been distinguished in the negotiations in connection with the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. He had been educated at Christ’s College, though apparently he had taken no degree. He was a man, however, of some learning, and retained throughout life a love for classical literature. Sir John Harrington, in his “Orlando Furioso,” quotes a Latin stanza, which he says he derived from the Latin poems of Sir Walter Mildmay. These poems, however, are not otherwise known. He is also spoken of as the writer of a book entitled “A Note to Know a Good Man.” His interest in his old university and sympathy with letters is attested by the fact that he contributed a gift of stone to complete the tower of Great S. Mary’s, and established a Greek lectureship and six scholarships at Christ’s College. He had acquired considerable wealth in his service of the State, having also inherited a large fortune from his father, who had been one of Henry VIII.’s commissioners for receiving the surrender of the dissolved monasteries. It was fitting, perhaps, he felt, that some portion of this wealth should be devoted to the service of religion and sound learning. Anyhow, in the month of January 1584, we find the Queen granting to her old friend, “his heirs, executors, and assigns,” a charter empowering them “to erect, found, and establish for all time to endure a certain college of sacred theology, the sciences, philosophy and good arts, of one master and thirty fellows and scholars, graduate or non-graduate, or more or fewer according to the ordinances and statutes of the same college.” On the 23rd of the previous November, Sir Walter had purchased for £550 the land and buildings of the Dominican or Black Friars, which had been established at Cambridge in 1279 and dissolved in 1538. During the fifty years that had elapsed since the dissolution the property had passed through various hands. Upon passing into the hands of Sir Walter it is thus described:—
“All that the scite, circuit, ambulance and precinct of the late Priory of Fryers prechers, commonly called the black fryers within the Towne of Cambrigge ... and all mesuages, houses, buildinges, barnes, stables, dovehouses, orchards, gardens, pondes, stewes, waters, land and soyle within the said scite.... And all the walles of stone, brick or other thinge compassinge and enclosinge the said scite.”
The present buildings stand upon nearly the same sites as those occupied by the original buildings, which were adapted to the requirements of the new college by Ralph Symons, the architect, who had already been employed at Trinity and S. John’s. The hall, parlour, and butteries were constructed out of the Church of the Friars. It is recorded that “in repairing the Combination Room about the year 1762, traces of the high altar were very apparent near the present fireplace.” The Master’s lodge was formed at the east end of the same range, either by the conversion of the east part of the church, or by the erection of a new building. A new chapel, running north and south—the non-orientation, it is said, being due to Puritan feeling—was built to the north of the Master’s lodge. The other new buildings consisted of a kitchen on the north side of the hall and a long range of chambers enclosing the court on the south. Towards the east there were no buildings, the court on that side being enclosed by a low wall. The entrance to the College was in Emmanuel Lane, through a small outer court, having the old chapel as its southern range and the kitchen as the northern. From this the principal court was reached by passages at either end of the hall. The range known as the Brick Building was added in 1632, extending southwards from the east end of the Founder’s Chambers. In 1668 the present chapel was built facing east and west, in the centre of the southern side of the principal court. By this time, it is said, the old chapel had become ruinous. Moreover, it had never been consecrated, and the Puritanical observances alleged to have been practised in it were giving some offence to the Restoration authorities. The following statement, drawn up in 1603,[89] is interesting, not only as giving a graphic picture of the disorders complained of at Emmanuel, but also incidentally of the customs of other colleges:—
“1. First for a prognostication of disorder, whereas all the chappells in ye University are built with the chancell eastward, according to ye uniform order of all Christendome. The chancell in ye colledge standeth north, and their kitchen eastward.
“2. All other colledges in Cambridge do strictly observe, according to ye laws and ordinances of ye Church of Englande, the form of publick prayer, prescribed in ye Communion Booke. In Emmanuel Colledge they do follow a private course of publick prayer, after yr own fashion, both Sondaies, Holydaies and workie daies.
“3. In all other colledges, the Mrs and Scholers of all sorts do wear surplisses and hoods, if they be graduates, upon ye Sondaies and Holydaies in ye time of Divine Service. But they of Emmanuel Colledge have not worn that attier, either at ye ordinary Divine Service, or celebration of ye Lord’s Supper, since it was first erected.
“4. All other colledges do wear, according to ye order of ye University, and many directions given from the late Queen, gowns of a sett fashion, and square capps. But they of Eman. Colledge are therein altogether irregular, and hold themselves not to be tied to any such orders.
“5. Every other Colledge according to the laws in that behalf provided, and to the custome of the King’s Householde, do refrayne their suppers upone Frydaies and other Fasting and Ember daies. But they of Eman. Coll. have suppers every such nights throughout ye year, publickly in the gr. Hall, yea upon good Fridaye itself.
“6. All other Colledges do use one manner of forme in celebratinge the Holy Communion, according to the order of the Communion Booke, as particularlye the Communicants do receive kneelinge, with the particular application of these words, viz., The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, etc.; The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, etc.; as the sd Booke prescribeth. But in Eman. Coll. they receive that Holy Sacrament, sittinge upon forms about the Communion Table, and doe pulle the loafe one from the other, after the minister hath begon. And soe ye cuppe one drinking as it were to another, like good Fellows without any particular application of ye sd wordes, more than once for all.
“7. In other Colledges and Churches, generally none are admitted to attend att the Communion Table, in the celebration of the Holy Mystery, but Ministers and Deacons. But in Eman. Coll. the wine is filled and the table is attended by the Fellows’ subsizers.”
There is one interesting feature in connection with the foundation of Emmanuel College which calls for special notice, as showing that the Puritan founder was fully conscious of the dangers attaching to a perpetual tenure of Fellowships, as affording undue facilities for evading those practical duties of learning and teaching, the efficient discharge of which he rightly considered it should be the main object of the University to demand, and the interest of the nation to secure. “We have founded the College,” says Sir Walter, “with the design that it should be, by the grace of God, a seminary of learned men for the supply of the Church, and for the sending forth of as large a number as possible of those who shall instruct the people in the Christian faith. We would not have any Fellow suppose that we have given him, in this College, a perpetual abode, a warning which we deem the more necessary, in that we have ofttimes been present when many experienced and wise men have taken occasion to lament, and have supported their complaints by past and present utterances, that in other colleges a too protracted stay of Fellows has been no slight bane to the common weal and to the interests of the Church.”[90]
In the sequel, however, the wise forethought of Sir Walter Mildmay was to a great extent frustrated. The clause of the College statutes which embodied his design was set aside in the re-action towards conservative university tradition, which followed upon the re-establishment of the Stuart dynasty. A similar clause in the statutes of Sidney College, which had been simply transcribed from the original Emmanuel statutes, was about the same time rescinded, on the ground that it was a deviation from the customary practice of other societies, both at Oxford and Cambridge. It was not, in fact, until the close of the nineteenth century that university reformers were able to secure such a revision of the terms of Fellowship tenure as should obviate, on the one hand, the dangers which the wisdom of the Puritan founder foresaw, and, on the other, make adequate provision, under stringent and safe conditions, for the endowment of research. The old traditionary system is thus summarised by Mr. Mullinger:—
“The assumption of priests’ orders was indeed made, in most instances, an indispensable condition for a permanent tenure of a Fellowship, but it too often only served as a pretext under which all obligation to studious research was ignored, while the Fellowship itself again too often enabled the holder to evade with equal success the responsibilities of parish work. Down to a comparatively recent date, it has accordingly been the accepted theory with respect to nearly all College Fellowships that they are designed to assist clergymen to prepare for active pastoral work, and not to aid the cause of learned or scientific research. Occasionally, it is true, the bestowal of a lay fellowship has fallen upon fruitful ground. The Plumian Professorship fostered the bright promise of a Cotes: the Lucasian sustained the splendid achievements of Newton. But for the most part those labours to which Cambridge can point with greatest pride and in whose fame she can rightly claim to share—the untiring scientific investigations which have established on a new and truer basis the classification of organic existence or the succession of extinct forms—or the long patience and profound calculations which have wrested from the abysmal depths of space the secrets of stupendous agencies and undreamed of laws—or the scholarship which has restored, with a skill and a success that have moved the envy of united Germany, some of the most elaborate creations of the Latin muse—have been the achievements of men who have yielded indeed to the traditional theory a formal assent but have treated it with a virtual disregard.”[91]
How essentially Puritan was the prevailing tone of Emmanuel during the early days we may surmise from the fact, that in the time of the Commonwealth no less than eleven masters of other colleges in the University came from this Foundation—Seaman of Peterhouse, Dillingham of Clare Hall, Whichcote of King’s, Horton of Queens’, Spurston of S. Catharine’s, Worthington of Jesus, Tuckney of John’s, Cudworth of Christ’s, Sadler of Magdalene, Hill of Trinity. Among some of the earliest students to receive their education within its walls were many of the Puritan leaders of America. Cotton Mather, in his “Ecclesiastical History of New England,” gives a conspicuous place in its pages to the names of Emmanuel men—Thomas Hooker, John Cotton, Thomas Shephard. “If New England,” he says, “hath been in some respect Immanuel’s Land, it is well; but this I am sure of, Immanuel College contributed more than a little to make it so.” Few patriotic Americans of the present day, visiting England, omit to make pilgrimage to Emmanuel, for was not the founder of their University, Harvard College, an Emmanuel man, graduating from that college in 1631, and proceeding to his M.A. degree in 1635? John Harvard, “the ever memorable benefactor of learning and religion in America,” as Edward Everett justly styles him—“a godly gentleman and lover of learning,” as he is called by his contemporaries, “a scholar, and pious in life, and enlarged towards the country and the good of it in life and death,” seems indeed to have been a worthy son of both Emmanuel and of Cambridge, a Puritan indeed, but of that fuller and manlier type which was characteristic of the Elizabethan age rather than of the narrower, more contentious, more pedantic order which set in with and was hardened and intensified by the arbitrary provocations of the Stuart regime.
The last in date of foundation of the Cambridge Colleges with which we have to deal—for Downing College, unique as it is in many ways, and attractive (its precincts, “a park in the heart of a city”), is not yet a century old, and its history although in some respects of national importance, lies beyond our limit of time—was the “Ancient and Protestant Foundation of Sidney Sussex College.”
The foundress of Sydney Sussex College was the Lady Frances Sidney, one of the learned ladies of the court of Elizabeth. She was the aunt both of Sir Philip Sidney and of the Earl of Leicester; the wife of Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, known at least to all readers of “Kenilworth” as the rival of Leicester. To-day the noble families of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Sidney all claim her as a common ancestress. A few years ago, in conjunction with the authorities of the college, they restored her tomb, which occupies the place of the altar in the chapel of S. Paul in Westminster Abbey. It was the Dean of Westminster, her friend Dr. Goodman, who gave to the college that portrait of the foundress which hangs above the high table in the college hall.
It is a characteristic of the period which may be worth noting here—of the middle, that is, of the sixteenth century—when the destinies of Europe were woven by the hands of three extraordinary queens, who ruled the fortunes of England, France, and Scotland—that, as the fruits of the Renaissance and of the outgrowth of the New Learning, and perhaps also of the independent spirit of the coming Puritanism, learned women should in some degree be leading the van of English civilisation.
How long the Lady Frances had had the intention of founding a college, and what was the prompting motive, we do not know. In her will, however, which is dated December 6, 1588, the intention is clearly stated. After giving instructions as to her burial and making certain bequests, she proceeds to state “that since the decease of her late lord”—he had died five years previously—“she had yearly gathered out of her revenues so much as she conveniently could, purposing to erect some goodly and godly monument for the maintenance of good learning.” In performance of the same, her charitable pretence, she directs her executors to employ the sum of £5000 (made up from her ready-money yearly reserved, a certain portion of plate, and other things which she had purposely left) together with all her unbequeathed goods, for the erection of a new college in the University of Cambridge, to be called the “Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College, and for the purchasing some competent lands for the maintaining of a Master, ten Fellows, and twenty Scholars, if the said £5000 and unbequeathed goods would thereunto extend.”
On her death in the following year her executors, the Earl of Kent and Sir John Harrington, at once attempted to carry out her wishes. Of them and their endeavour, Fuller, himself a Sidney man, has thus, as always, quaintly written:—