Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

"And thunder-music, rolling, shakes
The prophets blazoned on the panes,"

we can understand how the inspiration of the scene has thrilled poet after poet, not Tennyson only, as above quoted, but Wordsworth, and even Milton, Puritan as he was, yet more. To the former King's College Chapel suggested one of the most exquisite of his sonnets:

"Tax not the Royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the architect, who planned,
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed scholars only, this immense
And glorious work of fine intelligence.
'Give all thou canst! High Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less and more.'
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof,
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where Music dwells,
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."

And Milton, when he came under the spell of this most glorious sanctuary, forwent all his conscientious objections to the Laudian revival of ornate services, "the scrannel pipes of wretched straw," and all the rest of his denunciations, and was, in spite of himself, carried away into forgetfulness of all save the glory and the beauty around him. Hear him in "Il Penseroso":

"But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister's pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below,
In Service high and Anthem clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies
And bring all Heaven before mine eyes."

Clare College from King's.

This passage is memorable, not only for its own intrinsic loveliness, but because we, very probably, have in it a key to the great historical puzzle connected with King's College Chapel. How came these "storied windows," with their hundreds of pictured prophets, saints, and angels, to escape the ruthless destruction which was meted out to all such "idolatrous" representations, throughout the length and breadth of the county, by the Parliamentary authorities at Cambridge? William Dowsing, their authorised agent, went from church to church, in town and village, shattering and defacing, and has left us a minute record of his proceedings, in which he evidently took a keen personal delight. Thus, amongst the colleges we have already noticed, he tells us that, at Peterhouse, "we pulled down two mighty great Angells with wings, and diverse other Angells, and the four Evangelists, and Peter with his Keies over the Chappell Dore, and about 100 Chirubims." At Queens' "we beat down a 110 superstitious pictures, besides Chirubims"; and so on, with monotonous repetition, entry after entry. The account also records the sums which each college had to pay him for his trouble, and such a sum (of extra amount in consideration of the magnitude of the task) was actually paid him by the Bursar of King's. Yet here are the windows before our eyes to-day in unbroken, unblemished dignity.

No contemporary explanation is forthcoming, and the true facts of the case seem to have been kept so close, and to have been known to so few, that no tradition, even, of them was handed down to posterity. As time went on, the wildest and most impossible theories were evolved to account for the marvel. It was gravely said that the windows had been taken down by the Fellows themselves in a single night, and securely buried from the baffled spite of the Roundheads before morning, till better times; the place of each being known to one Fellow only! That the west window alone remained plain till the latter part of the nineteenth century (a peculiarity really not explained by history), was held proof positive that the Fellow in charge of that particular burial was done to death by the Puritans without betraying his secret; which equally defied the researches of later generations. Such searches were actually made. A more sentimental variant of the story made the hider a pious little chorister, shot down by Cromwell in the chapel itself for refusing to reveal where lay his precious charge! Through the empty casement a white dove flew in, and hovered over the heroic innocent! It need scarcely be pointed out that to remove the glass from a single one of these huge windows would be a work of days for a fully equipped band of professional glaziers supplied with scaffolding; yet these absurd tales were gravely repeated, and the missing window was actually sought for. The truth of the matter will, probably, now never be known. But it is certain that the windows could not have been spared without the connivance, at least, of Oliver Cromwell, whose influence was at that time paramount in Cambridge; and it is a plausible conjecture that his protection of them was due to the intercession of his friend John Milton, to whom, as we have seen, the Chapel and its "dim religious light" meant so much.