A history of the University of Oxford

by George C. Brodrick

The King, engrossed with the question of obtaining a divorce from Catharine of Aragon, was in no mood to indulge the sympathy which he really felt towards learned institutions, and was rather bent on obtaining a favourable award from Oxford and the other great Universities of Europe on the legality of his marriage. The compliance of the Oxford Convocation was not extorted without grievous pressure. The younger Masters of Arts, as Wood informs us, stood firm in refusing to sanction the divorce, and, notwithstanding a threatening letter from the King himself, the desired vote was only secured, after repeated failures, by the exclusion of the graduates in Arts from the Convocation. Soon after this memorable but somewhat disgraceful vote, in April 1530, the King again visited Oxford, and took back into his own hands the charters both of the University and of the city, which had again begun to challenge academical privileges. They were not restored until 1543, and during the interval the University was again invited to pronounce a solemn verdict—no longer upon a question of private right, but on the gravest issue of national policy ever submitted to its judgment. For by this time the preliminary events which ushered in the English Reformation were following each other in rapid succession. In July 1530, the replies of several Universities in favour of the divorce had been forwarded to the Pope by the hand of Cranmer, and in the following March they were laid before Parliament. In November 1530, Cardinal Wolsey, charged with treason, died at Leicester on his way to the Tower. At the beginning of 1531, the clergy, having bought off the penalties of præmunire, were induced, under strong pressure, to acknowledge Henry as ‘Head of the Church and Clergy, so far as the law of Christ will allow.’ In 1532, an Act was passed for restraining all appeals to Rome, Sir Thomas More resigned the Chancellorship, and Henry married Ann Boleyn. In 1533, Cranmer, having succeeded Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury, not only pronounced the King’s marriage with Catharine to be null and void, but that with Anne Boleyn to be good and lawful. In 1534, the clergy in Convocation were forbidden to make constitutions except by the royal assent, and the Act was passed forbidding the payment of annates to Rome. In the same year the formal separation of the English Church from Rome was consummated by the great Act 25 Hen. VIII. cap. 21, which left doctrine untouched, it is true, but abolished the authority of the Pope in England, while it also rendered the monasteries liable to visitation by commission under the Great Seal. In 1535, under the Act of Supremacy (26 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the King assumed the title of ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’; Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More were executed for denying the Royal supremacy, and Thomas Cromwell was appointed Vicar-General of England.

Compliance of the University rewarded by Royal favour

It was in 1534 that the University was invited to concur in the foregone conclusion in favour of separation from Rome, dictated by canonists and theologians in the King’s interest. It did so with little hesitation, and it is probable that an honest zeal for the independence of the National Church mingled with less worthy motives in eliciting the required consent. Moreover, Protestant doctrines, propagated by some of the scholars imported from Cambridge and the Continent, had already taken root in Oxford soil, and several members of Cardinal College had already undergone persecution. In the following year a visitation of the University was instituted, for the double purpose of establishing ecclesiastical conformity and supplanting the old scholastic culture by a large infusion of classical learning. The study of the Canon Law was suppressed, and Leighton, one of the visitors, joyfully reported that ‘Dunce’ (Duns Scotus) was ‘set in Bocardo,’ or relegated to an academical limbo, while the leaves of scholastic manuscripts, torn up by wholesale, might be seen fluttering about New College quadrangle. On the other hand, the study of Aristotle was enjoined, together with that of the Holy Scriptures, and an important concession was made to reward the loyalty of the University, which had cheerfully surrendered its rights and property into the King’s hands. It was now exempted from the payment of tenths, or first fruits, granted by statute to the Crown, on condition of such classical lectureships being founded there ‘as the Kynge’s majestie shall assigne or appoynte.’ The support of these lectureships was charged upon the five colleges supposed to be the richest, including Corpus, where classical lectureships already existed, and the students of the other seven colleges were directed to attend some of the courses daily. At the same time, following the example of his grandmother, the Countess Margaret of Richmond, the King founded and endowed with a yearly stipend of 40l. each five Regius Professorships of Divinity, Hebrew, Greek, Medicine, and Civil Law. The endowment was, of course, derived from the spoils of the Church, but Henry VIII. deserves credit for a sincere desire to promote learning. In 1532, three years after Wolsey’s fall, he took up his great minister’s design and refounded Cardinal College, though on a reduced scale, under the name of King Henry the Eighth’s College. In 1545 he dissolved it, and finally reconstituted it under the name of Christ Church, and in the following year transferred his new episcopal see of Oxford from Oseney Abbey to St. Frideswide’s, blending the collegiate with the cathedral establishment by placing it under the control of a dean and eight canons. We owe to Holinshed the memorable reply made by the King to some of his courtiers who fondly hoped that he would have dealt with University endowments, and especially with this infant college, as he had dealt with the monasteries. ‘Whereas wee had a regard onlie to pull down sin by defacing the monasteries, you have a desire also to overthrow all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sirs, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our Universities. For by their maintenance our realme shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten. I love not learning so ill that I will impair the revenewes of anie one House by a penie, whereby it may be upholden.’

The first effects of the Reformation injurious to the University

The reason why college revenues were spared while monastic revenues were confiscated is not difficult to divine, without supposing that Henry VIII. was pacified by the mediation of Catherine Parr. The occupants of monasteries were regarded as mercenaries of a foreign power which had become the enemy of the monarchy; the colleges were nurseries of the secular clergy, who had never been obnoxious to the State, who shared to a great extent the national spirit, and most of whom adopted the new ecclesiastical order. The wise foresight of the founders had excluded monks and friars as aliens from collegiate societies; the constitution of these was mainly secular, and their dissolution was not demanded by popular opinion. Nevertheless, the general sense of insecurity and habit of servility which prevailed under the despotic rule of Henry could not but have a blighting effect on University life. Such acts as the execution of Sir Thomas More, one of the brightest stars of the English Renaissance, and the arbitrary restrictions imposed on Protestantism by the Six Articles, struck at the root of intellectual liberty, and the early stages of the Reformation went far to depress the academical enthusiasm kindled by the Catholic Renaissance.

Iconoclastic visitation under Edward VI.

The dissolution of the monasteries, instead of aggrandising the University, contributed to depopulate it, since many of the poorer students, formerly harboured in monastic houses or lodgings, or supported by monastic exhibitions, were now cast adrift. The Colleges and Chantries Act, though never strictly executed, shook public confidence in academical endowments, and at the beginning of Edward VI.’s reign the University was far less prosperous than it had been under Wolsey. The number of degrees continued to fall off, and the number of halls to dwindle, as religious controversy usurped the place of education, and the University was used as an instrument to advance the political or ecclesiastical aims of the Sovereign. Henry VIII. had obtained its sanction to his divorce and to his revolt against Rome; the Protector Somerset and Cranmer determined to reform it in the interests of the new Anglican Church. Several years before, Cranmer had appointed commissions to regulate internal discipline in two colleges of which he was Visitor, but the Injunctions which he issued upon their recommendation involved no change of religious faith or ordinances. Another royal commission or Visitation, with sweeping powers, was issued for this purpose in 1549. A like commission was appointed for the University of Cambridge, and the new statutes drawn up for both Universities were framed on like principles, ‘in order that each eye of the nation might be set in motion by similar muscles.’ The ‘Edwardine’ code, as it was afterwards called, was of course so framed as to eliminate everything which favoured Popery from the constitution of the University, but it was not otherwise revolutionary, and, though it soon fell into disuse, it remained nominally in force until it was abrogated by the ‘Caroline’ statutes under the chancellorship of Laud. But the commissioners were not equally forbearing in their treatment of individuals, for they proceeded to expel all academical dignitaries found guilty of upholding the old faith. In dealing with colleges, the spirit in which they acted was ruthlessly iconoclastic, and not only were the old services abolished, but altars, images, statues, ‘the things called organs,’ and everything else which seemed to savour of ‘superstition,’ were defaced or swept away. The demolition of the magnificent reredos in the chapel of All Souls’ was assuredly no isolated specimen of their handiwork, though we have no equally striking record of Vandalism in other colleges. The amount of destruction wrought by their orders among the libraries and chapels of colleges cannot now be estimated, but it was certainly enormous, and ‘cartloads’ of classical and scientific manuscripts were consigned to the flames, together with many an illuminated masterpiece of scholastic literature.

Leniency towards colleges

At the same time, while the study of canon law was virtually suppressed, that of civil law, ancient philosophy, Hebrew, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, and medicine was expressly encouraged by the Visitors. Eminent theologians were invited from the continent, and the lectures of Peter Martyr and others who accepted the invitation were crowded with eager students. It was even designed to reconstitute All Souls’ as a college for the special cultivation of civil law, while New College should be devoted exclusively to ‘artists.’ Many exhibitions for poor boys were suppressed, the Magdalen Grammar School was saved only by earnest remonstrances from the citizens, and some new dispositions were made of college revenues with little regard to founders’ intentions. But the spoliation does not seem to have been so indiscriminate as Anthony Wood represents it. The Protector Somerset, being pressed, like Henry VIII., to sanction the general disendowment of colleges, repelled the proposal with equal indignation; and indeed there is some reason to believe that colleges were now regarded with peculiar favour as seminaries of classical learning, and comparatively free from the scholastic and mediæval spirit which still animated the University system. Perhaps for this reason the Visitors forbore to exercise their power of consolidating several colleges into one, though they did not scruple to remove obnoxious Heads and fellows. Some of their injunctions exhibit much good sense, and even anticipate modern reforms, such as those which make fellowships terminable and tenable only on condition of six months’ residence, which insist on a matriculation-examination in grammar and Latin, and which require that lectures shall be followed by examinations. It is remarkable that at Magdalen and All Souls’ one fellowship was to be reserved for Irishmen. Others of their injunctions were purely disciplinary, such as those which prohibit undue expenditure on banquets after disputations, the practice of gambling, and the use of cards in term-time. Such regulations point to an increase of luxury consequent on the development of colleges, originally designed for the poor but now frequented by a wealthier class. Polemical divinity, stimulated by Peter Martyr’s discourses on the Eucharist, continued to flourish; but, with this exception, University studies were languishing, and while foreign divines were being imported into England, Oxford professors of civil law were emigrating to Louvain. The non-collegiate students became fewer and fewer; the most experienced teachers gradually disappeared; the impulse of the Renaissance died away; the new spirit of inquiry failed to supply the place of the old ecclesiastical order; the attractions of trade began to compete with those of learning, and the Universities no longer monopolised the most promising youths in the country who declined the profession of arms.

Reaction under Mary. Martyrdom of Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer