Tedious brief tales of Granta and Gramarye

by Arthur Gray

This is a story of Jesus College, and it relates to the year 1643. In that year Cambridge town was garrisoned for the Parliament by Colonel Cromwell and the troops of the Eastern Counties’ Association. Soldiers were billeted in all the colleges, and contemporary records testify to their violent behaviour and the damage which they committed in the chambers which they occupied. In the previous year the Master of Jesus College, Doctor Sterne, was arrested by Cromwell when he was leaving the chapel, conveyed to London, and there imprisoned in the Tower. Before the summer of 1643 fourteen of the sixteen Fellows were expelled, and during the whole of that year there were, besides the soldiers, only some ten or twelve occupants of the college. The names of the two Fellows who were not ejected were John Boyleston and Thomas Allen.

With Mr. Boyleston this history is only concerned for the part which he took on the occasion of the visit to the college of the notorious fanatic, William Dowsing. Dowsing came to Cambridge in December, 1642, armed with powers to put in execution the ordinance of Parliament for the reformation of churches and chapels. Among the devastations committed by this ignorant clown, and faithfully recorded by him in his diary, it stands on record that on December 28, in the presence and perhaps with the approval of John Boyleston, he “digg’d up the steps (i.e. of the altar) and brake down Superstitions and Angels, 120 at the least.” Dowsing’s account of his proceedings is supplemented by the Latin History of the college, written in the reign of Charles II. by one of the Fellows, a certain Doctor John Sherman. Sherman records, but Dowsing does not, that there was a second witness of the desecration—Thomas Allen. Of the two he somewhat enigmatically remarks: “The one (i.e. Boyleston) stood behind a curtain to witness the evil work: the other, afflicted to behold the exequies of his Alma Mater, made his life a filial offering at her grave, and, to escape the hands of wicked rebels, laid violent hands on himself.”

That Thomas Allen committed suicide seems a fairly certain fact: and that remorse for the part which he had unwillingly taken in the sacrilege of December 28 prompted his act we may accept on the testimony of Sherman. But there is something more to tell which Sherman either did not know or did not think fit to record. His book deals only with the college and its society. He had no occasion to remember Adoniram Byfield.

Byfield was a chaplain attached to the Parliamentary forces in Cambridge, and quarters were assigned to him in Jesus College, in the first floor room above the gate of entrance. Below his chamber was the Porter’s lodge, which at that time served as the armoury of the troopers who occupied the college. Above it, on the highest floor of the gate-tower “kept” Thomas Allen. These were the only rooms on the staircase. At the beginning of the Long Vacation of 1643 Allen was the only member of the college who continued to reside.

Some light is thrown on the character of Byfield and his connection with this story by a pudgy volume of old sermons of the Commonwealth period which is contained in the library of the college. Among the sermons which are bound up in it is one which bears the date 1643 and is designated on the title page:

A faithful admonicion of the Baalite sin of Enchanters & Stargazers, preacht to the Colonel Cromwell’s Souldiers in Saint Pulcher’s (i.e. Saint Sepulchre’s) church, in Cambridge, by the fruitfull Minister, Adoniram Byfield, late departed unto God, in the yeare 1643, touching that of Acts the seventh, verse 43, Ye took up the Tabernacle of Moloch, the Star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them; & I will carrie you away beyond Babylon.

The discourse, in its title as in its contents, reveals its author as one of the fanatics who wrought on the ignorance and prejudice against “carnal” learning which actuated the Cromwellian soldiers in their brutal usage of the University “scholars” in 1643. All Byfield’s learning was contained in one book—the Book. For him the revelation which gave it sufficed for its interpretation. What needed Greek to the man who spoke mysteries in unknown tongues, or the light of comment to him who was carried in the spirit into the radiance of the third heaven?

Now Allen, too, was an enthusiast, lost in mystic speculation. His speculation was in the then novel science of mathematics and astronomy. Even to minds not darkened by the religious mania that possessed Byfield that science was clouded with suspicion in the middle of the seventeenth century. Anglican, Puritan, and Catholic were agreed in regarding its great exponent, Descartes, as an atheist. Mathematicians were looked upon as necromancers, and Thomas Hobbes says that in his days at Oxford the study was considered to be “smutched with the black art,” and fathers, from an apprehension of its malign influence, refrained from sending their sons to that University. How deep the prejudice had sunk into the soul of Adoniram his sermon shows. The occasion which suggested it was this. A pious cornet, leaving a prayer-meeting at night, fell down one of the steep, unlighted staircases of the college and broke his neck. Two or three of the troopers were taken with a dangerous attack of dysentery. There was talk of these misadventures among the soldiers, who somehow connected them with Allen and his studies. The floating gossip gathered into a settled conviction in the mind of Adoniram.

For Allen was a mysterious person. Whether it was because he was engrossed in his studies, or that he shrank from exposing himself to the insults of the soldiers, he seldom showed himself outside his chamber. Perhaps he was tied to it by the melancholy to which Sherman ascribed his violent end. In his three months’ sojourn on Allen’s staircase Byfield had not seen him a dozen times, and the mystery of his closed door awakened the most fantastic speculations in the chaplain’s mind. For hours together, in the room above, he could hear the mumbled tones of Allen’s voice, rising and falling in ceaseless flow. No answer came, and no word that the listener could catch conveyed to his mind any intelligible sense. Once the voice was raised in a high key and Byfield distinctly heard the ominous ejaculation, “Avaunt, Sathanas, avaunt!” Once through his partly open door he had caught sight of him standing before a board chalked with figures and symbols which the imagination of Byfield interpreted as magical. At night, from the court below, he would watch the astrologer’s lighted window, and when Allen turned his perspective glass upon the stars the conviction became rooted in his watcher’s mind that he was living in perilous neighbourhood to one of the peeping and muttering wizards of whom the Holy Book spoke.