The first great national movement in which the groups of scholars and teachers settled at Cambridge and Oxford could have taken part was the conflict with King John under the leadership of Stephen Langton, and the Barons’ war led by Simon de Montfort. Cambridge clerks were implicated in the former, for as soon as Henry III. came to the throne he ordered the expulsion of all those excommunicate scholars who had joined Louis the Dauphin, the Barons’ candidate for the throne of England; and it is surmised that Hugh de Balsham
Wars of the Roses.
later in the century favoured the side on which Simon de Montfort fought. It was at Cambridge too that the Dauphin held his council after the demise of John. Much had happened at the university between this struggle in the xiii century and the latter part of the
A.D. 1378-1381.
xivth when the peasants’ revolt again raised the standard of rebellion. The university was no longer a mere aggregate of poor scholars and unendowed teachers, it had long grown into a privileged corporation possessing fine buildings and a full treasury. As such, peasant and burgess bore to it no good will, and Wat Tyler’s riots were seized as the opportunity to burn the university charters, ransack the colleges, and mishandle the masters and scholars. At the neighbouring manor-house of Mildenhall (which had formed part of the historic dowry of Queen Emma the mother of the Confessor) Prior John of Cambridge who was acting at the time as abbot of Bury-St.-Edmund’s, was murdered by the mob. In 1381 Buckingham, after dispersing the revolted peasantry in Essex, held ‘oyer and terminer’ at Cambridge, and the town was among the few which was exempted from the general pardon.
Through the next great national crisis Cambridge was Lancastrian. The men of letters of this party, its poets and historians, were Cambridge men, members of Cambridge colleges—Warkworth, Skelton, the Pastons. The Lancastrian sympathies of the university dated indeed from the time of “the good duke” and of John of Gaunt, both of whom befriended it and became patrons of one of its important colleges; and the intimate connexion with the House of Beaufort, which began when Cardinal Beaufort studied at Peterhouse,[393] culminated when Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII., crowned by her singular benefactions the sympathies of the university for the House of Lancaster. Edward IV. had not loved Cambridge, had indeed robbed Henry VI.’s college of its revenues; but it was there that the royal houses laid down the sword to join in a work of scholarly peace, and few episodes in the annals of a university are more interesting than the building of Queens’ College by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville, and the labours of Lady Margaret in whose son were at length reconciled the rival claims of York and Lancaster.
The colonisation of the new world.
We have seen that a Washington lies buried in the ancient chapel of the first Cambridge college, and we are to see further on that the impulse which set the “Mayflower” on her course proceeded from a Cantabrigian. The oldest of the ‘pilgrim fathers’ was a Peterhouse man, persecuted in England for his ‘Brownist’ opinions. There were many university men among the first settlers, but they were chiefly from the one university; and ‘Cambridge’ was the name which rose to their lips when they christened the town in the great state of Massachusetts where they first set foot. Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of Connecticut, was a Cambridge graduate and exercised great influence among the New England settlers. John Eliot, “the Indian apostle,” had graduated at Cambridge in 1622; and Harvard, the ‘Cambridge’ of the new world, was founded by another of her sons.
The Parliament and the Stuarts.
No sooner had America been colonised by these exiles for their faith than the English revolution brought about the changes which would have kept them in this country. Both universities declared for the king. The loyalty of Oxford is a household word, and it certainly was not diminished by the fact that Charles had his headquarters in the university town: but Cambridge loyalty was not less; the university plate was sent to Charles at York in