and he knew, no man better, that Right is not of one party, nor Truth of a single creed. He must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford streets after Mistress Davenant had served his supper, on the three great Protestant Martyrs of whose suffering some of the elder folk with whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. The commemorative cross that may now be seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. Mary Magdalen whose tower was a familiar sight to Shakespeare's eyes, displays in richly fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cranmer, Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of all, his thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, that pathetic figure whose life was such a mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won the favour of Henry VIII by approving the divorce of Queen Catherine. He had beheld—and in some cases furthered—the downfalls of Sir Thomas More, of Anne Boleyn, of Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, of Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood godfather to Elizabeth and to Edward. He had watched over the death-bed of the tyrant; he had crowned that tyrant's frail young son as Edward VI. When by his adherence to the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had incurred sentence of treason, he was pardoned by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only amounted to a transfer from the Tower of London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that prison-house over the North Gate from whose stone cells used to come down the hoarse cry of cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds." There were those still living in Oxford who could have told the dramatist, as he gazed up through the moonlight (for who does not?) to the pinnacled spire of St. Mary-the-Virgin, all the detail of those April days, only ten years before his birth, when Cranmer, with Ridley and Latimer, was brought into the church and bidden, before a hostile assemblage of divines, to justify the heresies of the new prayer-book. On the Tuesday Cranmer pleaded from eight till two; Ridley was heard on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the aged Latimer, a quaint champion as he stood there "with a kerchief and two or three caps on his head, his spectacles hanging by a string at his breast, and a staff in his hand." On the Friday all three were condemned. After a year and a half of continued confinement, Archbishop Cranmer, whose irresolution was such that, from first to last, he wrote seven recantations, was made to look out from his prison window upon the tormented death of his friends. Then it was that the stanch old Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore years, but viewing the fagots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer's own end came six months later, on March 21, 1556. He was first brought to St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his heresies. But at that desperate pass, no longer tempted by the hope of life,—for hope there was none,—his manhood returned to him with atoning dignity and force. Prison-wasted, in ragged gown, a man of sixty-seven years, he clearly avowed his Protestant faith, declaring that he had penned his successive recantations in fear of the pains of death, and adding: "Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be first punished; for if I may come to the fire, it shall be the first burnt." And having so "flung down the burden of his shame," he put aside those who would still have argued with him and fairly ran to the stake,
"Outstretching flameward his upbraided hand."
The university church, this beautiful St. Mary's, has other memories. From its pulpit Wyclif proclaimed such daring doctrines that Lincoln College was founded to refute them,—Lincoln, which came to number among its Fellows John Wesley and to shelter those first Methodist meetings, the sessions of his "Holy Club." In St. Mary's choir rests the poor bruised body of Amy Robsart. The spiral-columned porch was erected by Laud's chaplain, and its statue of the Virgin and Child so scandalised the Puritans that they pressed it into service for one of their articles of impeachment directed against the doomed archbishop.
What could the thronging student life of Oxford have meant to the author of "Hamlet"? Of his careless young teachers in stage-craft—so soon his out-distanced rivals—Lyly and Peele and Lodge would have been at home beside the Isis and the Cherwell, as Greene and Nash and Marlowe by the Cam; but Shakespeare—did those fluttering gowns, those gaudy-hooded processions, stir in him more than a stranger's curiosity? The stern day of that all-learned Master of Balliol, Dr. Jowett, who stiffened examinations to a point that would have dismayed Shakespeare's contemporaries, save, perhaps, the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey, was still in the far future; the magnificent New Schools, with their dreaded viva voces, had not yet come; the Rhodes Scholarships were beyond the dream-reach of even a Raleigh or a Spenser; but academic tests and academic pomps there were. The Old Schools Quadrangle, not quite complete, had been building in a leisurely way since 1439 and was in regular use, though the Divinity School, whose arched, groined, boss-studded roof is one of the beauties of Oxford, had nearly suffered wreck, in the brief reign of Edward VI, at the hands of that class of theological reformers who have a peculiar aversion to stained glass. The exercises of the Encaenia Shakespeare would have heard, if he ever chanced to hear them, in St. Mary's, but half a century after his death they were transferred to the new Sheldonian Theatre. In St. Mary's, which was not only "Learning's receptacle" but also "Religion's parke," these exercises, the Acts, naturally took the form of disputations concerning "wingy mysteries in divinity." When they passed out from the church to an unconsecrated edifice, political and social themes, still treated in scholastic Latin, were added, but even so the entertainment was of the dullest. Professional fun-makers, successors of the mediæval minstrels, had to be called in to enliven the occasion with a peppering of jests, but these became so scurrilous that the use of hired buffoons was forbidden by Convocation. Then the resourceful undergraduates magnanimously came forward, volunteering to take this delicate duty upon themselves, and manfully have they discharged it to this day. These young Oxonians have developed the normal undergraduate gift for sauce into an art that even knows the laws of proportion and restraint. The limits allowed them are of the broadest, but only twice in living memory has their mischief gone so far as to break up the assemblage.
The threefold business of the annual Encaenia is to confer honorary degrees, to listen to the prize compositions, and to hear an address delivered by the Public Orator in commemoration of Founders and Benefactors, with comment on current events. On the one occasion when I was privileged to be present, the hour preceding the entrance of the academic procession was the liveliest of all. The lower galleries were reserved for guests, but the upper, the Undergraduates' Gallery, was packed with students in cap and gown, who promptly began to badger individuals chosen at whim from the throng of men standing on the floor.
"I don't like your bouquet, sir. It's too big for your buttonhole. If the lady wouldn't mind—"
The offending roses disappeared in a general acclaim of "Thank you, sir," and the cherubs aloft pounced on another victim. The unfortunates so thrust into universal notice usually complied with the request, whatever it might be, as quickly as possible, eager to escape into obscurity, but a certain square-jawed Saxon wearing a red tie put up a stubborn resistance until all the topmost gallery was shouting at him, and laughing faces were turned upon him from every quarter of the house.
"Take off that red tie, sir."
"Indeed, sir, you don't look pretty in it."
"It doesn't go well with your blushes."