No doubt it was the royal connection which brought to Queen's, if tradition may be trusted, two famous warrior princes, the Black Prince and Henry V; though it is at least doubtful whether the Queen's poet, Thomas Tickell, Addison's flattering friend, had any authority for the picture he gives of their college life. He describes them as:
"Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' Court,
Their meals were frugal and their sleeps were short;
To couch at curfew time they thought no scorn,
And froze at matins every winters morn."
The College has an interesting portrait of the great Henry, which may be authentic; but that of the Black Prince, which adorns the college hall, is known to have been painted from a handsome Oxford butcher's boy, in the eighteenth century. While we condemn the lack of historic sense in the Provost and Fellows of that day, we may at least acquit them of any intention of pacificist irony in their choice of a model.
Queen's has had better poets than Tickell on its rolls, but, by a curious chance, the two most eminent—Joseph Addison and William Collins—were both tempted away from their first college by the superior wealth and attractions of Magdalen.
The old local connections which were such a marked feature in the statutes of founders, and which so profoundly influenced Oxford down to the Commission of 1854, have been almost swept away at other colleges; but at Queen's they have always been strongly maintained. It has been, and is, emphatically, a north-country college. Not the least important factor in maintaining this tradition has been the great benefaction of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, fondly and familiarly known to all Queen's men as "Lady Betty." Steele wrote of her when young, that to "love her was a liberal education"; this may have been flattery, but her bounty, at any rate, has given a "liberal education" to hundreds of north-country men, who come up from the twelve schools of her foundation to her college at Oxford.
It is interesting to note in Modern Oxford, attempts to re-establish those local connections, which the wisdom of our ancestors established, and which the self-complacency of Victorian reformers "vilely cast away."
[NEW COLLEGE (1) FOUNDER AND BUILDINGS]
"There the kindly fates allowed
Me too room, and made me proud,
Prouder name I have not wist,
With the name of Wykehamist."
L. JOHNSON.
