This was in 1440. He at once put hand to the work, and that same year signed the Charters for both Colleges; the Head of each being called "Provost," in order, as he said, "to weld the two Colleges together in a bond of everlasting brotherhood,"—a bond which actually lasted in its entirety till 1870, and of which traces even yet remain.
The acquisition of the sites involved complicated legal transactions which occupied several years; but by 1444 Eton was sufficiently advanced to receive its first Scholars, a colony brought by William of Waynflete from Winchester; and by 1446 Henry was able to dedicate the first stone of his Cambridge chapel. Every dimension of this glorious edifice he himself worked out with the utmost minuteness, and set down, as he would have it completed, in that notable record of his purposes still preserved in the College Library, and known as his "Will." The word had not in those days its present purely posthumous signification, but was used of any formal disposition of a man's estate, or any part of it, to some given purpose.
In this document, "one of the most remarkable works in the English language," as Mr. J. W. Clark styles it, the King describes his future College so accurately that a complete plan and elevation of the whole can be drawn from it. We thus learn that Gibbs' Building represents what was meant to be the western side of an enclosed court, with a fountain in the midst of it. The Chapel was to form the northern side of this court; the entrance, with its turreted gate-tower, the eastern; the Hall and Library, the western. The great lawn before us was not to be, as now, an empty space, but was to be occupied, partly by a small "kitchen court" containing the various offices (bake-house, brew-house, etc.), partly by a cloistered cemetery between the Chapel and the river, from the western side of which was to rise a pinnacled tower, 220 feet high, the rival to that at Magdalen, Oxford, which was already being planned by William of Waynflete. Another turreted gate-tower, on the very bank of the river, was to give access to the College Bridge (further north than the present one). Had this plan been carried out in its entirety, King's would indeed have been, as the historian Stow puts it, "such that the like colledge could scarce have been found again in any Christian land."
Queens' College Gateway.
Unhappily its splendid design was brought to nought by the great tragedy of the Wars of the Roses, which broke out almost immediately. The singular mildness with which that conflict was waged (except on the actual field of battle), with no wasting of lands, with no burning of towns or villages, with no slaughter (and scarcely any plunder) of non-combatants, permitted the work on the Chapel, which, as we have seen, was already begun, to proceed, though slowly, and did not even stop the conveyance of stone from the chosen quarry at Huddleston in Yorkshire. The payment of the workmen was a harder matter, for Henry was far from being a wealthy monarch. He and his wife between them had less than the equivalent of £50,000 per annum, all too little for the expenses of their position, even in days of peace. Still the pay was found, in a certain measure, and the workmen came and went till dispersed by the appalling tidings that their Royal Saint had been deposed and murdered in the Tower. Then in panic horror they flung down their tools and fled, with such haste that they did not even complete the job on a block of stone, already half sawn through, which lay, as Logan's print of 1680 shows it, in the south-east corner of the present Great Court, Henry's intended quadrangle, a testimony to their despair, for upwards of three centuries. Then, when the idea of carrying out his intention was at last revived, this stone was appropriately used as the first to be employed for that purpose, the Foundation Stone of Gibbs' Building.
The work on the Chapel thus abruptly stopped by the Founder's death remained in abeyance for the remainder of the century. Not till 1508 was it resumed. The shell of the building was finished 1515; the glass and woodwork being added under Henry the Eighth. But in the end it was completed substantially in accordance with the Founder's Will, and is the only part of his design that has been so completed. His huge campanile, his cloisters, his gate towers, never came into being; and though the Great Court is now where he meant it to be, it is built in a fashion very different from his design.
This we see at a glance as we enter it round the southern end of Gibbs' Building. For it is not an enclosed quadrangle, but formed of two detached blocks to south and west, while the east side is only a stone screen, erected in 1825, and of a sadly inferior style. But the "goodly conduit" of the Founder's Will does rise in the midst,[18] and the north side is actually formed, as he decreed, by his glorious Chapel, the most magnificent in the world, which now rises before us in all its grandeur as we behold it across the Court.
And if the outside view is impressive, that which greets us when we enter is absolutely overpowering in its majesty. The sense of space and repose; the up-running lines of the shafting catching the eye whithersoever it turns, and leading it up to the myriad-celled spans of the vault; the subdued light through the pictured windows staining the venerable masonry; the great organ, upborne by the rich oaken screen, dominating the whole vista, combine to form, as has been well said, "a Sursum Corda done into stone," uplifting indeed to heart and sense alike. And when to this feast of visual harmony is added the feast of aural harmony, when the clear and mellow voices of the Choir blend with the majestic tones of the organ,