Oxford and Its Story

by Cecil Headlam

The growth of the Puritan feeling in Oxford is shown by the formation of the first Baptist society under Vavasour Powell of Jesus College, whom John Bunyan once accompanied to this city. The growth of the Puritan tendency to preach is also indicated by the strange case of Richard Haydock, a physician of New College, who obtained some notoriety about this time by preaching at night in his bed. Sermons, he said, came to him by revelation in his sleep, and he would take a text in his slumbers and preach on it, “and though his auditory were willing to silence him by pulling, haling and pinching, yet would he pertinaciously persist to the end and sleep still.” He was not a married fellow evidently. King James sent for him, and he preached to the monarch in his sleep, but James made him confess that he was a fraud, who had adopted this curious means of advertising himself.

The King and Queen and Prince Henry visited Oxford in 1605, and were welcomed very much as Elizabeth had been. The King, we are told, showed himself to be of an admirable wit and judgment. The scholars welcomed him by clapping their hands and humming, which, it was explained to him, signified applause.

The presence of King James’ court, however, was responsible, if we may believe Wood, for a serious change in manners. For he traces the rise of that “damnable sin of drunkenness” to this time.

“For wheras in the days of Elizabeth it was little or nothing practiced, sack being then taken rather for a cordial than a usual liquor, sold also for that purpose in apothecaries’ shops, and a heinous crime it was to be overtaken with drink, or smoke tobacco, it now became in a manner common, and a laudable fashion.”

The vice in fact grew so prevalent in Oxford, as in the rest of England, that a statute was passed forbidding members of the University to visit any tavern and there “sit idly, drink, or use any unlawful play.” The use of the Latin tongue, attendance at lectures and the wearing of academical dress was also insisted on by the new Chancellor, Archbishop Bancroft, who added an injunction that long hair was not to be worn: long hair in those days being accounted a sign not of a poet but of a swaggerer and ruffian. A few years later it was provided, as a measure directed against the still increasing vice of drunkenness, that no scholar should lodge without his college or hall, and that no citizen should entertain a scholar in his house.

The Gunpowder Plot led to more stringent measures being taken to root out the Roman Catholics from the University. It is possibly to the deep impression made by that event that the foundation of Wadham College is due. The founder of that college (1609), Nicholas Wadham, is said to have intended to endow a Roman Catholic college at Venice, but to have decided to endow a number of non-clerical and terminable fellowships at Oxford instead. His widow, Dorothy, carried out his plans, and, after Gloucester Hall had refused the benefaction, purchased the site of the suppressed settlement of Augustinian Friars and built the front quadrangle with hall and chapel as, externally, we have them to-day. For the interior of the chapel was dealt with by the Gothic revivalists (1834). The Wadhams were West Country folk, and the majority of workmen engaged were Somersetshire men. It is suggested that the extraordinarily fine Perpendicular character of the chapel choir is due to this fact; and that the masons reproduced, in the seventeenth century, the style of their county churches. The choir is a copy of fifteenth-century work; the ante-chapel and the rest of the quadrangle, so charming in its unadorned simplicity, are beautiful examples of the survival in Oxford of the Gothic tradition. Quadrangles at Merton and Wadham are the most notable examples of this debased and nondescript style, redeemed by most excellent composition, proportioned like some Elizabethan manor.

James had been inclined at first to favour the Puritans, but when he finally cast in his lot with the High Church party, the University, which he, like Elizabeth, had done his best to conciliate as the educational centre of the national clergy, supported him loyally. In the year of his accession he had granted letters patent to both Universities, empowering them each to choose two grave and learned men, professing the civil law, to serve as burgesses in the House of Parliament; and the Universities were again indebted to him when they were called upon to furnish scholars for the great task of preparing the Authorised Version of the Bible.

Thus Oxford had its share in giving the Book to the people. From this time forward every Englishman was more than ever a theologian, and at the Universities, as at Westminster, theological controversy absorbed all energies. Literature, says Grotius (1613), has little reward. “Theologians rule, lawyers find profit, Casaubon alone has a fair success, but he himself thinks it uncertain, and not even he would have had any place as a literary man—he had to turn theologian.”

Oxford, in return, declared itself on the side of passive obedience. The Church embraced the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings; the University burned the books of Paræus in S. Mary’s Churchyard, and solemnly decreed that it was not lawful for the subject to resist his sovereign by force of arms, or to make war against him, either offensive or defensive (1622). Thus it is evident that the influence of Calvin had died away at Oxford, and that the University had adopted, by the end of James’ reign, the reactionary creed of Laud, and was ready to support the Stuart claim to absolutism. The Divine Right of Kings and the Divine Right of Bishops, as it was indicated by James’ own phrase, “No Bishop, no King,” was to be for more than a generation the official creed of Oxford schooled by Laud. For meanwhile one William Laud, B.D. of S. John’s College, had filled the office of proctor and had been censured by the Vice-Chancellor for letting fall in a sermon at S. Mary’s divers passages savouring of Popery. But he survived the reproof. President of S. John’s from 1611-1621, he set himself to reform the discipline of the University and to undo the work of Leicester.