It is not, however, to be supposed that this noble college was at any time without its worthies. Sir William Temple was educated here. Although his name is doubtless an ornament to the college, he must have been an insufferable thorn in the side of his pastors and masters, for he was the last man in the world to have an ill conceit of himself. Two more genial names appear later. In the absence of a portrait of the Founder, a painting of Sir Robert Walpole hangs at the end of the hall. He was always a loving son of the college, and his son, the even more famous Horace,* was here as well. Charles Pratt, Earl Camden* and Lord Chancellor of England, is another name connected with the college; and Townshend, a third statesman of the Georgian era, was likewise brought up at Eton and King’s. To turn aside from politics to the path of pure learning, we find a very prodigy in the person of Thomas Hyde, afterwards Archdeacon of Gloucester. At the age of eighteen he performed the almost incredible task, which till then had been deemed impossible, of transcribing the Persian Pentateuch out of its Hebrew characters. It is scarcely surprising to find that this precocious divine did not shine in ordinary conversation. But his learning met its recompense in a Canonry at Christ Church, and Hebraists of his own age did not scruple to reckon him equal as an Orientalist to Bochert and Pococke.
The name of Sumner occurs twice in the list of provosts, once in 1756 and again in 1797, and, among others of the name, John Bird Sumner,* the famous Archbishop of Canterbury, was a King’s man. Earlier in the century lived the painfully erudite William Coxe,* who, as Archdeacon of Wiltshire, devoted his attention to the Duke of Marlborough and the Hapsburg family. His researches, although their method is antiquated and their style is hopelessly dull, are yet invaluable to the student, and his name is not by any means the least among those of the historians whom Cambridge has produced. But to the majority of persons, the ecclesiastical celebrities of King’s are overshadowed by the fame of Charles Simeon, who was a fellow of the college for considerably more than half a century and, during that time, was a parish priest of the town. He was the chief of those men who roused the Church of England from her last-century apathy and revived her ancient fervour. Although his position was, owing to circumstances, somewhat more restricted, he was to Cambridge of his day what Cosin and Andrewes had been to the Cambridge of theirs, and the influence which he exercised from Cambridge over the length and breadth of England was almost unbounded. He is buried in the antechapel of King’s beneath a stone on which his initials are engraved, and there is a bust of him in the University Library. The traditions which he left to King’s have never been entirely lost. The Church of England has had few more devoted sons than the late George Williams, who, as fellow of King’s, advocated warmly the establishment of friendly relations with the churches of the East. Older members of the university still remember him as “Jerusalem” Williams. And, although his life was very retired and he was seldom absent for any length of time from Cambridge, the late William Ralph Churton, Canon of St Alban’s, was for the last forty years of his life probably the most active of all the English clergy in promoting missionary work and extending the Church in the colonies.
In mentioning these names, there are others which have been necessarily omitted. The episcopal list of the college is a long one, and includes, among many more prelates, the famous names of Edmund Gheast, Bishop of Rochester and Jewel’s successor at Salisbury; William Wickham, Bishop of Lincoln and afterwards the second Bishop of that name at Winchester; and John Pearson, Bishop of Chester, who, first a fellow here, was subsequently Master of Trinity. Among noblemen, the great ambassador, Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (* Herkomer), occupies a conspicuous place. Among ordinary laymen, we find Roger Lupton, a Jacobean worthy, founder of Sedbergh School; and, much later, the poet, Thomas Lisle Bowles. In the antechapel, a plain stone covers the remains of Dr Richard Okes, provost from 1850 to 1889. And close by, under a similar stone, is buried Henry Bradshaw (* Herkomer), University Librarian, one of the finest scholars of the century, who opened a new epoch in the history of liturgical study. By the side of the south door will be found a tablet in memory of the late James Kenneth Stephen, an incomparable orator, whose little volumes of verse proved him the successor of Calverley among Cambridge poets.
Within the last twenty years the college has undergone a complete change. It is no longer the exclusively Etonian college which it was. Its scholarships, with the exception of a very few, have been thrown open to all competitors, and the large majority of undergraduates now at King’s have never been at Eton. Although, from the standpoint of the lover of antiquity, this departure from the Founder’s scheme is to be seriously regretted, yet it cannot but be admitted that, in the present century, the exclusive scheme is impracticable, and newer methods have to be followed. At all events, the plan works very well, and in no generation is King’s likely to lose its prestige, nor is that esprit de corps which “Henry’s holy shade” seems to inspire, at all likely to diminish.
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QUEENS’ COLLEGE
Queens’