Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library

by Goldwin Smith

Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious revolution, the monuments of which are traces of destruction and records of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate, though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College, while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious, rescued the remains, and guarded against a repetition of the outrage, in case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder recumbent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the prison over the neighbouring gate of the city, from the window of which Cranmer, then confined there, witnessed the burning of Latimer and Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly recanting his recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed it should burn first. College archives record the expulsion, readmission, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance. For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre of religious strife.

Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester, as Chancellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles to keep out Romanists; King James, that to the three articles of the Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the consciences of mere boys. The Universities were thus taken from the nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical with the nation.

In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins of the monastic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet old quadrangle is curiously mated with a fantastic Chapel of much later date, was founded out of the ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was one of that group of highly educated lay statesmen, eminent both in the councils of kings and among the patrons of learning, which succeeded the great Prelates of the Middle Ages. He was a Catholic, as his statutes show; but a liberal Catholic, not unfriendly to light, though little knowing perhaps whither it would lead him. Among his friends was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who bequeathed to him the splendid whistle, then used to call servants, which is seen round his neck in his portrait. Another of his friends was Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality by recommending him to enjoin in his statutes the study of Greek. St. John's College, again, rose out of the wreck of a Bernardine House. The Founder was not a statesman or a prelate, but a great citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed wealth in trade, and made a noble use of it. White also was of the olden faith. That the storm was not over when his College was founded is tragically shown by the fate of Campion, who, when White was laid in the College Chapel, preached the funeral sermon, and afterwards becoming a Jesuit and an emissary of his Order, was brought to the rack and to the scaffold. There was also a great secession of Fellows when the final rupture took place between Rome and Elizabeth. In the group of cultivated Knights and statesmen, who patronised learning and education, may be placed Sir William Petre, the second Founder of Exeter College, whose monument is its old quadrangle, and Sir Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the Bodleian Library. If Petre and Bodley were Protestants, while Pope and White were Catholics, the difference was rather political than religious. In religion the public men changed with the national government, little sharing the passions of either theological party.

ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE—GARDEN FRONT.

Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting and impressive it is not necessary to be mediæval. At the same time Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date. Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the mediæval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In the mediæval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her, forbade him by statute to marry any other woman.

WADHAM COLLEGE—GARDEN FRONT.

These foundations, followed by that of Pembroke and the building of the South quadrangle of Merton, of the South quadrangle of Lincoln, of the West front of St. John's, of the quadrangle and hall of Exeter, of part of the quadrangle of Oriel, of the West quadrangle of University College, as well as of the Bodleian Library, the Schools' quadrangle, the Convocation House, and of the gateway of the Botanic Garden, prove that, though the old University system, with its scholastic exercises, had become hollow, there was life in Oxford, and the interest of patrons of learning was attracted to it during the period between the Reformation and the Rebellion. It was also felt to be a centre of power. Elizabeth twice visited it, once in the heyday of her youthful glory, and again in her haggard decline. On the first occasion she exerted with effect those arts of popularity which were the best part of her statesmanship. On both occasions she was received with ecstatic flattery and entertained with academical exercises at tedious length, and plays, to our taste not less tedious, performed in College Halls. Her successor could not fail to exhibit himself in a seat of learning, where he felt supreme, and, to do him justice, was not unqualified, to shine. To his benignity the University owes the questionable privilege of sending two members to the House of Commons, whereby it became entangled in political as well as in theological frays.