At Magdalen, men were planting the elms of the grove and laying out the walks round the meadow. Bishop Fell was completing the west front of Christ Church, which the Civil War had interrupted, and planting those elms in the Broad Walk that look on the Cathedral and Corpus and Merton, and, farther off, Magdalen tower. In 1680 Wren’s tower over Wolsey’s gateway at Christ Church was finished. One of the Osney bells was recast to hang therein.
The resistance of James II. fell in this coarse, frivolous, self-satisfied age. He was welcomed to Oxford by music and ceremony. The conduit “ran claret for the vulgar.” But when he adventured to force his nominee into the presidentship of Magdalen, he could not even procure a blacksmith to burst a resisting door. Again, the University stood to arms to oppose Monmouth’s rebellion, and clothed its members in scarlet coats, with scarves, and white-plumed hats; but had to be contented with the bonfires in celebration of the victory at Sedgemoor, and a full-dress parade. Not long afterwards many yards of orange ribbon made[Pg 164] the High Street gaudy with a pretence at honouring William III. But the colleges were vigorously Jacobite, and proved it by drinking the healths of the Stuarts as long as they could. Merton, Exeter, All Souls’, and Wadham were the exceptions. One example of the lighter occupations of the period is to be found in a story of somewhat earlier date, told of Dr. Bathurst, Vice-Chancellor and President of Trinity. “A striking instance of zeal for his college, in the dotage of old age, is yet remembered. Balliol College had suffered so much in the outrages of the grand rebellion, that it remained almost in a state of desolation for some years after the Restoration, a circumstance not to be suspected from its flourishing condition ever since. Dr. Bathurst was perhaps secretly pleased to see a neighbouring and once rival society reduced to this condition, while his flourished beyond all others. Accordingly, one afternoon, he was found in his garden, which then ran almost continuous to the east side of Balliol College, throwing stones at the windows with much satisfaction, as if happy to contribute his share in completing the appearance of its ruin.” I seem to find an echo of the sentiment of very different men, with a love of the old time amidst the politics and wine of the day, in Aubrey’s ejaculation: he wished that monasteries had not entirely been suppressed; for if but a few had been left, “what a pleasure ’twould have been to have travelled from monastery to monastery!” Nevertheless, the Oxford output of bishops was not decreased, and the number of quiet scholars—men like[Pg 166][Pg 165]
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE
In the centre of the quadrangle rises a cylindrical dial, surmounted by a “pelican in her piety,” the badge of the Founder of the College. Behind, to the right, is the great entrance gateway and tower.
The College cat gives scale.
Hody of Wadham—was larger than one might conclude from the pages of honest Thomas Hearne, of St. Edmund Hall.
It was upon an old monastic foundation—once Gloucester College, then Gloucester Hall—that the one new eighteenth-century college was established. Gloucester Hall had numbered among its inhabitants several famous, rather odd men, like Tom Coryat and Thomas Allen, but had fallen away after the Restoration. It was, in short, almost a possession of nettles. The buildings were only kept on the edge of desolation by the Principal and two or three families in residence. The seventeenth century had made one fantastic attempt to retrieve the Hall. A colony of twenty students from the four Patriarchates of the Eastern Church was to be regularly established there. But the dreamy plan was soon parched and destroyed in the odour of scandal. After much trifling procrastination, the Greeks were succeeded by Worcester College, and a lucky poverty left the worn old buildings for a little longer untroubled. A library, a hall, and a chapel were prepared for the new society. Wide spaces of land on every side of it were retained or acquired, which afterwards gave the college a fat rent and its incomparable bosky and watered garden.