The students, indeed, had shown themselves so unruly that the affrays and riots of the Middle Ages seemed to have been revived. The times were unsettled. Not only were the Roman Catholics and the Calvinists at feud alike with each other and the moderate party of the Reformed Church, whom the Queen favoured, but the old quarrels between North and South and the Welsh broke out again. And the old disputes between the town and the University had been reopened by a series of orders put forth by the Privy Council in 1575 which were intended to settle them for ever.
The lack of discipline resulting from these causes is vividly brought before us by the attack made on the retinue of Lord Norreys by some scholars of Magdalen who wished to revenge themselves for the punishment inflicted on one of their number for stealing deer in Shotover forest. They were repulsed and “beaten down as far as S. Mary’s”; but when Lord Norreys was leaving the town, the scholars
“went up privately to the top of their tower and sent down a shower of stones that they had picked up, upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of their lives. It is said that upon the foresight of this storm, divers had got boards, others tables on their heads, to keep them from it, and that if the Lord had not been in his coach or chariot he would certainly have been killed.”
Some progress, one hopes, had been made in the restoration of order when Elizabeth paid her final visit “to behold the change and amendment of learning and manners that had been in her long absence made.” She was received with the same ceremonies as before, but this time, at the Divinity Disputations in S. Mary’s, she did not hesitate to send twice to a prosy bishop and bid him “cut it short.” The fact was that she was anxious to make a Latin speech herself. But the bishop either could not or would not sacrifice his beloved periods, and the Queen was obliged to keep her speech for the Heads of Houses next morning. In the middle of her oration she noticed the old Lord Treasurer, Burleigh (Cecil), standing on his lame feet for want of a stool. “Whereupon she called in all haste for a stool for him, nor would she proceed in her speech till she saw him provided with one. Then fell she to it, as if there had been no interruption. Upon which one that knew he might be bold with her, told her, that she did it on purpose to show that she could interrupt her speech, unlike the Bishop, and not be put out.” In her speech she, “the only great man in her kingdom,” gave some very good advice to the University, and took the opportunity of rebuking the Romanising and the Puritan factions of the Church, counselling moderation on all sides.
On her departure she again expressed her love for the place. “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford,” she exclaimed as she viewed its towers and spires from the heights of Shotover. “God bless thee and increase thy sons in number, holiness and virtue!”
Some outward and visible signs there certainly were that the Queen’s encouragement of learning and her policy of selecting for her service “eminent and hopeful students” had borne fruit. In 1571 Jesus College, the first of the Protestant colleges, had been founded by Hugh ap Rees, a Welsh Oxonian, at a time when the increase of grammar schools in Wales was likely to produce an influx of Welsh students into the University. The statutes were free from any local or national restriction, but Welshmen always predominated, and Jesus soon came to be regarded, in Wales, as the National College. Elizabeth figured as a nominal foundress; and the college, the front of which in Turl Street dates from her time, the rest being mainly seventeenth-century Gothic, possesses a famous portrait of her by Zucchero.