Fairfax and Cromwell visited Oxford to see how the reformation was progressing (17th May 1649), and lodged at All Souls’. They dined at Magdalen, where they had “good cheer and bad speeches, and afterwards played at bowls in the College Green.” They both received a D.C.L. degree, and Cromwell assured the University that he meant to encourage learning. Next year he became Chancellor, and besides presenting some MSS. he resisted the proposal to reduce the academical endowments which Milton supported.
Learning and discipline were never popular; long sermons, compulsory attendance at innumerable religious exercises, and catechisms in the tutors’ rooms were not more so. As the sands of the Commonwealth ran out the approaching Restoration found a welcome at Oxford. It was a sign of the times that, when Richard Cromwell was proclaimed Protector, the mayor and the troopers were pelted with turnip-tops by the scholars in front of S. Mary’s. Without waiting for a formal proclamation of the new order, men reverted to it by a kind of spontaneous instinct. Six weeks or more before the Restoration, a bold man read the Common Prayer in S. Mary Magdalen Church in surplice and hood, and that church was always “full of young people purposely to hear and see the novelty.”
At the news of the Restoration all England “went mad with joy”; at Oxford the rejoicing “lasted till the morning.” And when Coronation Day came, “Conduit ran a hogshead of wine.” Common Prayer was restored and surplices; Puritan preaching went out of fashion; the organs of Magdalen, New College and Christ Church sounded once more; plays were performed and the Solemn League and Covenant was burnt.
Yet the prejudice against surplice and organ was deep. Many still denounced organ-music as the whining of pigs. At Magdalen men clad in surplices, with hands and faces blackened, paraded the cloisters at twilight to encourage the story that Satan himself had appeared and adopted the surplice. Filthy insults and ribald abuse were heaped upon the innocent garment.
A Royal Commission visited the University to eject the intruders and restore those whom Parliament had expelled. The Presbyterians took the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy, and were allowed to hold their places unless some ejected fellow or scholar appeared to claim them. But at Lincoln, where the Independent faction was strong, several fellows were turned out, George Hitchcock among them. He defied the bedel who was sent to arrest him when he refused to go. With a drawn sword and a sported oak Hitchcock remained master of the situation until the arrival of the military who, undaunted, stormed the Independent’s castle and marched him off to jail.
Life at Oxford resolved itself at last to peace and quiet study.
“The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart”—
and the groves and quadrangles that had echoed with the clash of arms, the loud laugh of roystering Cavaliers, or the gentle rustle of sweeping trains, or the whining of a Puritan, now resounded with the noise of the bowling-green and tennis-court, or the chamber music of such scholarly enthusiasts as Anthony Wood with his fiddle, and Edmund Gregory with his bass viol.
With the Restoration a new kind of student came into prominence. Very different from his mediæval brother was the new type of rich “young gentleman” so wittily satirised by Dr Earle, as one who came to Oxford to wear a gown and to say hereafter that he had been at the University. “His father sent him thither because he heard that there were the best fencing and dancing schools.... Of all things he endures not to be mistaken for a scholar.” For it was now the fashion for students to live like men of the world, to keep dogs and horses, to swash it in apparel, to wear long periwigs. They discussed public affairs and read the newsletters in the coffee-houses. For Canopus, the Cretan, had set the example of drinking coffee, and in 1651 Jacob the Jew opened a coffee-house at the Angel. Four years later Arthur Tillyard, “an apothecary and great Royalist, sold coffee publicly in his house against All Souls’ College. He was encouraged to do so,” says Wood, “by some royalists and by the company of ‘Vertuosi,’ chiefly All Souls’ men, amongst whom was numbered Christopher Wren.”
With the Restoration, too, the study of mere Divinity began to go out of fashion, and a humane interest in letters began to manifest itself. Plays, poems and drollery, the old-fashioned scholars complained, were in request. Science, too, suddenly became fashionable. Charles and the Duke of Buckingham took a keen interest in chemistry; Prince Rupert solaced his old age with the glass drops which are called after his name. At Oxford many scholars already had private laboratories. Robert Boyle and Peter Sthael had for some time been lecturing on chemistry at the Ram Inn (113 High Street) to the curious, John Locke included. The King now gave its title to the Royal Society, which had its origin in the inquiries of a little group of scientific students in London before the end of the Civil War. It was now divided into two by the removal of its foremost members, Dr Wilkins, Warden of Wadham, and Dr Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry, to Oxford. The Oxford branch of the