This was not the only occasion when Pole exerted himself to give a more decidedly Christian direction to his friend’s studies. Sadolet had two works on hand; one a treatise in praise of philosophy, the other a Commentary on St. Paul. He was doubting which to finish first, and Bembo of course advised the preference to be given to philosophy. Pole was as great a lover of classical antiquity as either of them, but at that grievous juncture, when a swarm of heretics were in the field, it seemed to him a kind of infidelity for the children of the Church to waste their time and genius on elegant trifling. His arguments decided Sadolet in favour of St. Paul, and he afterwards received his friend’s hearty thanks for having thus determined his choice. “There were not wanting plenty,” writes Sadolet, “who were ready to give me very different advice, but you counselled me to embrace studies, the emoluments of which extend to the other life, and your words have decided me henceforth to devote myself to sacred literature.”
There was, however, nothing of the narrowness of a zealot in Pole’s character; he and Contarini were advocates for a mild policy even with heretics; and his gentle persuasion had a happy success in recalling many who had been seduced by the new opinions, among others, the Latin poet Mark Anthony Flaminius. This celebrated man had been one of his early friends, but had suffered himself to be won over by the specious arguments of Valdes. Pole invited him to Viterbo, and, by dint of patience and kindness, restored him to a better mind, and it was in his house that he afterwards expired, as Beccadelli expresses it, “like a good Christian.”[354] In the same spirit he received into his family Lazarus Bonamico, professor of humanity at Padua, saying that he was worth something better than the occupation of explaining Virgil, and that the study of theology which he wished him to embrace, required the whole man. He assisted Bembo also in his last moments, and his house was the refuge of all those English Catholics, who, like himself, preferred exile to apostasy.
Among these, one is glad to reckon George, the son of our old friend William Lily, whom he took under his protection, and who, alter writing some learned works, and contributing to the history of Paulus Jovius, returned with Pole to England in Queen Mary’s days, and died a prebendary of Canterbury. And so we will leave our great countryman for a time doing the work of an apostle among the scholars of his day, to find him again at the head of that momentous council, which owed to his influence not a few of its most important measures of reform. Before following him there, we have to take our farewell of the English schools, whose destinies from this time form a page in the history of sacrilege. The first royal visitation of the universities, held in virtue of King Henry’s newly-claimed supremacy, took place in 1535, when the further study of scholastic philosophy and canon law were prohibited. For a brief space the attempt was made to fill up the hiatus with an extra quantity of Greek and profane studies, and then it was that Sir John Cheke achieved that celebrity at Cambridge which Milton has commemorated in a sonnet. All the Humanists indeed were not men of equally solid learning, for Saunders tells us the universities were filled with a multitude of young orators and poets, who, after celebrating the mock obsequies of Scotus and St. Thomas, tried, by means of unbecoming comedies, songs, and verses, to decoy the unwary into the errors of the sects, and immorality of life. On the whole, the attempt was a failure; English scholars were nor yet sufficiently familiarised with the new learning to give it a very warm reception, and the exotic Greek studies, like plants that had been overforced, soon drooped and perished.[355] Canon law and theology, and, above all, the despised scholastic logic, were precisely the studies in which Catholic Oxford had most excelled; and their abolition was tantamount to the formal closing of her schools. And during the reign of Edward VI. the divinity school was actually closed, and in spite of every effort on the part of the Humanists, the decay became so universal that all the other schools, except two, were shut up, or let out to laundresses and glovers. “There, where Minerva formerly sat as regent,” says Wood, “was nothing during all the reign of King Edward but wretched solitariness; nothing but a dead silence prevailed.” The dissolution of the monasteries, moreover, had ruined upwards of a hundred flourishing academies, which served as feeders to the universities, the place of which was very imperfectly filled by King Edward’s grammar-schools. Thus, a large proportion of those who had formerly followed the pursuit of learning, now betook themselves to mechanical trades, and the schools literally died out for want of scholars. In 1550 we find Roger Ascham, a strenuous adherent of the new worship, lamenting over the decay of the old grammar-schools, and predicting in consequence the speedy extinction of the universities: whilst Latimer about the same time is found declaring that there were at least ten thousand fewer students in the kingdom than might have been found twenty years previously.
The ruin of learning at the universities was completed by the bigotry of those foreign Protestant divines, who, in King Edward’s time, were brought over from Germany and Switzerland to fill up the professorships which no English scholar could be found to accept under the new ecclesiastical régime. Among these the celebrated Peter Vermigli, better known by the name of Peter Martyr, was indeed a good scholar, but the greater number of his colleagues were not only without learning, but, following in the footsteps of Luther, they proclaimed war against it as “a human thing.” They voted the academical degrees “Antichristian,” and showed their horror of all the vain things fondly invented by Popery, not only by the breaking of images, but by the burning of libraries. Duke Humphrey’s precious collection of classical authors was condemned to the flames; the exquisite illuminations of his costly volumes possibly suggesting the notion that they must be of the nature of Roman service books. When Sir Thomas Bodley took up his residence at Oxford, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, he informs us that he found the libraries “in every part wasted and ruined,” and it is well known that the splendid foundation which we owe to his munificence, was but a collection of such poor fragments as had accidentally escaped destruction.
Of the material sacrileges committed by King Edward’s visitors it is unnecessary here to speak, and without necessity one would not willingly enter on the sorrowful tale. The shell of the universities was left, to be gradually informed with a new spirit, a new learning, a new life; which, as years rolled on, became no longer new, and so gradually grew to be regarded by Englishmen as venerable. Oxford, with her thousand Catholic memories, became in process of time the stronghold of Anglican Church Toryism; a pigmy destiny, indeed, for her who had been founded by the hands of saints, yet one with which, on the whole, she has showed herself amply satisfied. The Royal Supremacy, which had first cut down her fair proportions, clung to her like the poisoned garment of Nessus, but though it sometimes galled her, she made the most (as was fitting) of her solitary dogma, and, in a memorable moment of her history, proclaimed fidelity to it in its extremest form to be “the badge of the Church of England.”
Here, then, we will bid farewell to Oxford; to those venerable walls round which there still hang shadows of the past, out of which alas! too many build up an unsubstantial cloudland, with the gorgeous beauty of which they rest content. The Catholic, while he feels the power which even such phantoms of the old faith exercise over the heart, knows well enough that he does but gaze on
The loveliness of death
That parts not quite with parting breath.
He reads her ancient motto, and can but pray that a beam of the True Light may one day again illuminate her, and that she, over whose beautiful places the fire has passed, may once more sing, according to the days of her youth, “Dominus Illuminatio mea.”