The influence of Leicester and the interest which as Chancellor he took in the University, is marked by various Acts which had an important effect upon the course of its development. In 1571 the Chancellor, masters and scholars received the right of perpetual succession, and were thus relieved of the necessity of obtaining a new charter from each succeeding king. In this year too an Act was passed, supplemented by further enactments in 1575, by which one-third part at least of the rents to be reserved in college leases is required to be payable in corn or in malt. The continual rise in prices which has resulted ever since from the increase, and therefore depreciation, of the precious metals, has thus only impoverished the colleges so far as rents were fixed in money, but corn having more or less kept its value, the one-third of the rents so wisely reserved came to exceed the remainder by far.
Leicester revived the practice of nominating the Vice-Chancellor, and by an Act of the University passed at his instigation (1569) a great step was taken in the direction of establishing the monopoly
of the colleges in the government of the University. The preliminary deliberations of the Black Congregation, consisting of resident masters, were henceforth to be conducted by the Vice-Chancellor, Doctors, Heads of Houses and Proctors.
Leicester earned the reputation of being meddlesome, and he certainly used his position as Chancellor in the dispensing of patronage. But many of his reforms were statesmanlike, and his endeavours to raise the standard of discipline and learning were evidently genuine. One of his chief aims was to prevent the possibility of Romanising priests obtaining a foothold once more in the University. With this object he introduced among other provisions a test which was destined to have the most potent influence on the history of the place. Every student above sixteen years of age was now required to subscribe on his matriculation to the Thirty-nine Articles and the royal supremacy. Intended to exclude the Romanising party only, this rule affected in the future mainly the descendants of the Puritans who enacted it. Thenceforth, Mr Brodrick remarks, the University, once open to all Christendom, was narrowed into an exclusively Church of England institution and became the favourite arena of Anglican controversy, developing more and more that special character, at once worldly and clerical, which it shares with Cambridge alone among the Universities of Europe.
The country, meanwhile, was filled with the Jesuits’ propaganda. There was Robert Parsons, for instance, who had been compelled to resign his fellowship at Balliol and had since joined the Society of Jesus. Disguised as a soldier and armed with a secret printing press, he wandered about the country disseminating Romanist literature. He finally brought off an extraordinary coup at Oxford. In a wood near Henley he printed copies of a tract by Campian, a fellow Jesuit, and on Commemoration Day (1580) every member of the University found a copy of it in his seat at S. Mary’s when he came there to listen to the University sermon.
Proceedings against the Roman Catholics became more severe as the struggle continued. Fellows were ejected from colleges; priests were hung, drawn and quartered. In the reign of James I. George Napier of Corpus, a seminary priest convicted of high treason, was so treated, parts of his quartered body being set over the gates of the city and over the great gate of Christ Church. Puritan Oxford, however, was not distinguished for learning or discipline, in spite of Leicester’s fatherly exhortations. For the Chancellor rated the University for its deficiency in sermonising and lecturing, its lack of religious instruction and education of youth. And as to discipline, he finds fault with the prevailing excess in apparel “as silk and velvet, and cut doublets, hose, deep ruffs and such like, like unto or rather exceeding both Inns of Court men and Courtiers.” The streets, he complains, are more full of scholars than of townsmen, and the ordinary tables and ale-houses, grown to great number, are overcrowded day and night with scholars tippling, dicing, carding, tabling and perhaps worse. Ministers and deacons were presently solemnly forbidden to go into the field to play at football or to wear weapons to maintain any quarrel under penalty of expulsion. Plays acted by common stage players were forbidden, and scholars were not allowed, under pain of imprisonment, to sit on bulks or penniless bench or other open places, or to gad up and down the streets. Leicester, however, made a reservation in favour of the “Tragedies and Comedies used to be set forth by University men,” and he himself was entertained (1585) at Christ Church and at Magdalen with pleasant comedies.