Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library

by Goldwin Smith

Great changes, however, had by this time passed or were passing over the University. As in former days the Halls had absorbed the Chamberdekyns, so the Colleges had now almost absorbed the Halls. They did this, not by any aggression, but by the natural advantages of wealth, their riches always increasing with the value of land, and by their reputation. Most of them, in addition to the members on the foundation, took students as boarders, and they got the best and wealthiest. Universities, losing their pristine character as marts of available knowledge, and becoming places of general education, ceased, by a process equally natural, to be the heritage of the poor and became the resort of the rich. The mediæval statutes of the Colleges still limited the foundations to the poor, but even these in time, by cunning interpretation, were largely evaded. Already in the later Middle Ages Oxford had received, and, it seems, too complacently received, young scions of the aristocracy and gentry, the precursors of the noblemen and the silk-gowned gentleman-commoners of a later day. The Black Prince had been for a short time at Queen's College. In the reign of Henry VI., George Neville, the brother of the King-maker, had celebrated the taking of his degree, a process which was probably made easy to him, with banquets which lasted through two days on a prodigious scale. At the same time and for the same causes the system of College instruction grew in importance and gradually ousted the lectures of University Professors. Fellows of Colleges were not unwilling to add to their Commons and Livery the Tutor's stipend. Thus the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned, and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of the University. These Statutes were mediæval and obsolete, but they were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance, and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only interpret and enforce. Thus the mediæval type of life and study was stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships having been originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the Founders deemed themselves at liberty in regulating the elections to give free play to their local and family partialities, and the consequence was a mass of preferences to favoured counties or to kin. With all these limitations, the teaching body of the University was now practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools—as to Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been substituted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's—were noxious, though in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by some pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the restrictions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle Ages, when all intellectual callings were clerical, when at Oxford gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham, Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thorough laymen in their pursuits and character, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from bishoprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the clerical and the other professions. The clergyman was henceforth a pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Oxford belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and interests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and controversy. This was the more deplorable as theology, in the mediæval sense, was a science almost as extinct as astrology or alchemy. Oxford was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergymen belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford, though with some abatement, because there, owing to the vicinity of a great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical. Newton was near forfeiting his Fellowship and the means of prosecuting his speculations because he was not in Holy Orders. Luckily, a Lay Fellowship fell just in time. Let Founders, and all who have a passion for regulating the lives of other people, for propagating their wills beyond the reach of their foresight, and for grasping posterity, as it were, with a dead hand, take warning by a disastrous example.

As the Colleges became the University, their Heads became the governors of the University. They formed a Board called the Hebdomadal Council, which initiated all legislation, while the executive was the Vice-Chancellorship, which, though legally elective, was appropriated by the Heads, and passed down their list in order. With a single exception, the Headships were all clerical, and they were almost always filled by men of temperament, to say the least, eminently conservative. Thus academical liberty and progress slept.

On the eve of another great storm we have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford life and study in Clarendon's picture of Falkland's circle, at Great Tew, within ten miles of Oxford, whither, he says, "most polite and accurate men of that University resorted, dwelling there as in a College situated in a purer air, so that his was a University bound in a less volume, whither his intellectual friends came not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness and consent made current in conversation." This indicates that, while study was going on, liberal inquiry was also on foot. But clouds again gathered, the storm again came, and once more from the ecclesiastical quarter. The triumph of the Reformation, the accession of a Protestant Queen, and the Chancellorship of Leicester, who, for politic purposes, played the Puritan, had been attended by a general expulsion or secession of the Romanising party, which left the University for a time in the hands of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen. Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism, had, for a time, studied Church antiquity in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he had come into collision with Puritanism, and had, for a time, been driven away by it. Perhaps its prevalence may have ultimately inclined him to exchange the University for a far less congenial sphere. The clergy, however, of an Episcopal Church, and one which laid claim to Apostolical succession, was sure in time to come round to High Church doctrine. To High Church doctrine the clergy of Oxford did come round under the leadership of Laud, University Preacher, Proctor, President of St. John's College, and afterwards Chancellor of the University. Of Laud there are several memorials at Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of St. John's College, ornamented in the style of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and Chancellor, in the noontide of his career, received with ecstasies of delight, ecclesiastical, academical, and political, his doomed king and master with the fatal woman at Charles's side. Another is a fine collection of oriental books added to the Bodleian Library. A third and more important is the new code of statutes framed for the reformation of the University by its all-powerful Chancellor. A fourth is the statue of the Virgin and Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church, which, as proof of a Romanising tendency, formed one of the charges against the Archbishop, though it was really put up by his Chaplain. The fifth is the headless corpse which lies buried in the Chapel of St. John's College, whither pious hands conveyed it after the Restoration. Laud was a true friend of the University and of learned men, in whom, as in Hales, he respected the right of inquiry, and to whom he was willing to allow a freedom of opinion which he would not allow to the common herd. He was not so much a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing the martinet in ecclesiastical affairs that he was brought into mortal collision with the nation. In the code of statutes which by his characteristic use of autocratic power he imposed on Oxford the martinet is betrayed; so is the belief in the efficacy of regulation. We see the man who wrecked a kingdom for the sake of his forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver University education from the shackles of the Middle Ages and the scholastic system. But the code is dictated by a genuine spirit of reform, and might have worked improvement had it been sustained by a motive power.

ST. MARY'S CHURCH.

The period of the Civil War is a gap in academical history. Its monuments are only traces of destruction, such as the defacement of Papistical images and window paintings by the Puritan soldiery, and the sad absence of the old College plate, of which two thousand five hundred ounces went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall, only a few most sacred pieces, such as the Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and the covered cup, reputed that of the Founder, at Corpus, being left to console us for the irreparable loss. Exeter College alone seems to have shown compunction; perhaps there had remained in her something of the free spirit for which in the days of Wycliffe she had been noted. Art and taste may mourn, but the University, as a centre of Episcopalianism, had little cause to complain; for the war was justly called the Bishops' war, and by the Episcopal Church and the Queen, between them, Charles was brought to the block. Oxford was bound by her ecclesiasticism to the Royal cause, and she had the ill luck to be highly available as a place of arms from her position between the two rivers, while she formed an advanced post to the Western country in which the strength of the King's cause lay. During those years the University was in buff and bandolier, on the drill ground instead of in the Schools, while the Colleges were filled with the exiled Court and its ghost of a Parliament. Traces of works connecting the two rivers were not long ago to be seen, and tradition points to the angle in the old city wall under Merton College as the spot where Windebank, a Royalist officer, was shot for surrendering his post. There was a reign of garrison manners as well as of garrison duties, and to the few who still cared for the objects of the University, even if they were Royalists, the surrender of the city to the Parliament may well have been a relief.

Then came Parliamentary visitation and the purge, with the inevitable violence and inhumanity. Heads and Fellows, who refused submission to the new order of things, were turned out. Mrs. Fell, the wife of the Dean of Christ Church, deposed for Royalism, refused to quit the Deanery, and at last had to be carried out of the quadrangle, venting her wrath in strong language as she went, by a squad of Parliamentary musketeers. But the Puritans put in good men: such as Owen, who was made Dean of Christ Church; Conant, who was made Rector of Exeter; Wilkins, who was made Warden of Wadham; and Seth Ward, the mathematician, who was made President of Trinity College. Owen and Conant appear to have been model Heads. The number of students increased. Evelyn, the Anglican and Royalist, visiting Oxford, seems to find the academical exercises, and the state of the University generally, satisfactory to his mind. He liked even the sermon, barring some Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he find much change in College Chapels. New College was "in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times." The Chapel of Magdalen College, likewise, was "in pontifical order," and the organ remained undemolished. The Protectorate was tolerant as far as the age allowed. Evelyn was cordially received by the Puritan authorities and hospitably entertained. Puritanism does not seem to have been so very grim, whatever the satirist in "The Spectator" may say. Tavern-haunting and swearing were suppressed. So were May-poles and some innocent amusements. But instrumental music was much cultivated, as we learn from the Royalist and High Church antiquary Anthony Wood, from whom, also, we gather that dress, though less donnish, was not more austere. Cromwell, having saved the Universities from fanatics who would have laid low all institutions of worldly learning, made himself Chancellor of Oxford, and sought to draw thence, as well as from Cambridge, promising youths for the service of the State. Even Clarendon admits that the Restoration found the University "abounding in excellent learning," notwithstanding "the wild and barbarous depopulation" which it had undergone; a miraculous result, which he ascribes, under God's blessing, to "the goodness and richness of the soil, which could not be made barren by all the stupidity and negligence, but choked the weeds, and would not suffer the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring up." Puritanism might be narrow and bibliolatrous, but it was not obscurantist nor the enemy of science. We see this in Puritan Oxford as well as in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan Oxford the scientific circle which afterwards gave birth to the Royal Society was formed. Its chief was Warden Wilkins, and it included Boyle, Wallis, Seth Ward, and Wren. It met either in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham, or in those of Boyle. Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is ravished with the scientific inventions and experiments which he sees. On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left no trace; there was hardly any building during those years. There were benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library.

Upon the Restoration followed a Royalist proscription, more cruel, and certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good Heads of the Commonwealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably been estranged from academical pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse. "Some Cavaliers that were restored," he says, "were good scholars, but the majority were dunces." "Before the War," he says in another place, "we had scholars who made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical divinity, in humane learning and natural philosophy, but now scholars study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the University. Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, temperate, abstemious, and plain in their apparel, but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says, "Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor; whereas, before, in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted a civil house, it is now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, generous, and a good scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior Fellows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinking, idling, and tavern-haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion. Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London, there to become the germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at Oxford of a race of "young men provided against the next age, whose minds, receiving the first impressions of sober and generous knowledge, should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm." The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals. Oxford sank into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by servile manifestos in favour of government by prerogative. Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of which was more stringent than ever since the passing of the Act of Uniformity. The love of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled from Christ Church; not, however, by the act of the College or of the University, but by Royal warrant, though Fell, Dean of Christ Church, bowed slavishly to the tyrant's pleasure; so that Christ Church may look with little shame on the portrait of the philosopher, which now hangs triumphant in her Hall. The Cavaliers did not much, even in the way of building. The Sheldonian Theatre was given them by the Archbishop, to whom subscriptions had been promised, but did not come in, so that he had to bear the whole expense himself. He was so deeply disgusted that he refused ever to look upon the building.

Over the gateway of University College stands the statue of James II. That it should have been left there is a proof both of the ingrained Toryism of old Oxford, and of the mildness of the Revolution of 1688. Obadiah Walker, the Master of the Colleges, was one of the political converts to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridicule of him that "Old Obadiah, Ave Maria," was sung by the Oxford populace. A set of rooms in the same quadrangle bears the trace of its conversion into a Roman Catholic Chapel for the king. It faces the rooms of Shelley. Reference was made the other day, in an ecclesiastical lawsuit, to the singular practice which prevails in this College, of filing out into the ante-chapel after the sacrament to consume the remains of the bread and wine, instead of consuming them at the altar or communion table. This probably is a trace of the Protestant reaction which followed the transitory reign of Roman Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All are familiar with the Magdalen College case, and with the train of events by which the most devoutly royalist of Universities was brought, by its connection with the Anglican Church and in defence of the Church's possessions, into collision with the Crown, and arrayed for the moment on the side of constitutional liberty. After the Revolution the recoil quickly followed. Oxford became the stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene of treasonable talk over the wine in the Common Room, of riotous demonstrations by pot-valiant undergraduates in the streets, of Jacobite orations at academical festivals, amid frantic cheers of the assembled University, of futile plotting and puerile conspiracies which never put a man in the field. "The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse." But the troop of horse was not called upon to act. There was a small Hanoverian and constitutional party, and now and then it scored a point against its adversaries, who dared not avow their disloyalty to the reigning dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having intruded into a convivial meeting of Whigs, they tendered him the health of King George, which, for fear of the treason law, he was fain to drink upon his knees.

In the early part of the eighteenth century there was some intellectual life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars, and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soaring monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church, though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of the University. The very portraits on the College walls disclose the void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which, as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of endowments, fell upon Oxford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by the increase in value of their estates, become rich, some of them very rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth thirty thousand pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now. Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing among themselves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no share in the administration. The statutes of mediæval Founders had become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, notwithstanding the oath taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the interest of sinecurists against the public. Nor were any other duties assumed. A few of the Fellows in each College added to their income by holding the tutorships, the functions of which they usually performed in the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects, while most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trulliberian luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by their deep but dull potations excusing the brisk intemperance of youth. Even the obligation to residence was relaxed, and at last practically annulled, so that a great part of the Fellowships became sinecure stipends held by men unconnected with the University. About the only restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth downwards there had been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony Wood and other academical precisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to have afforded some grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the Fellows, the statute, being not constructive, but express, could not be evaded except by stealth, and by an application of the aphorism then current, that he might hold anything who would hold his tongue. The effect of this, celibacy being no longer the rule, was to make all the Fellows look forward to the benefices, of a number of which each College was the patron, and upon which they could marry. Thus devotion to a life of study or education in College, had a Fellow been inclined to it, was impossible, under the ordinary conditions of modern life. Idleness, intemperance, and riot were rife among the students, as we learn from the novels and memoirs of the day. Especially were they the rule among the noblemen and gentlemen-commoners, who were privileged by their birth and wealth, and to whom by the servility of the Dons every license was allowed. Some Colleges took only gentlemen-commoners, who paid high fees and did what they pleased. All Souls' took no students at all, and became a mere club which, by a strange perversion of a clause in their statutes, was limited to men of high family. The University as a teaching and examining body had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the Professors even went through the form of lecturing, and the statutory obligation of attendance was wholly disregarded by the students. The form of mediæval disputations was kept up by the farcical repetition of strings of senseless syllogisms, which were handed down from generation to generation of students. The very nomenclature of the system had become unmeaning. Candidates for the theological degree paced the Divinity School for an hour, nominally challenging opponents to disputation, but the door was locked by the Bedel, that no opponent might appear. Examinations were held, but the candidates, by feeing the University officer, were allowed to choose their own examiners, and they treated the examiner after the ordeal. The two questions, "What is the meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" comprised the examination upon which Lord Eldon took his degree. A little of that elegant scholarship, with the power of writing Latin verses, of which Addison was the cynosure, was the most of which Oxford could boast. Even this there could hardly have been had not the learned languages happened to have formed an official part of the equipment of the clerical profession. Of science, or the mental habit which science forms, there was none. Such opportunities for study, such libraries, such groves, a livelihood so free from care could scarcely fail, now and then, to give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a Lowth, a Thomas Warton, an Elmsley, a Martin Routh.