A.D. 1642-4.
1642, and among the chests which reached Oxford there were some which arrived safely at the colleges and never arrived anywhere else.[394] The royalist poet was a Cambridge man with a Devonshire cure, Robert Herrick. Cambridge also supplied ‘the first cavalier poet’ John Cleveland, who lost his fellowship for the king, Abraham Cowley, ejected in the same way
A.D. 1643.
by the Puritans, and yet another poet and yet another fellow in Richard Crashaw, a royalist born in the year that Shakespeare died, who on refusing to sign the Covenant retired to Paris where he was employed on royalist business by the exiled queen. Isaac Barrow, too, whose father lost everything for the royal cause, and had been with Charles at Oxford when Isaac went up to Trinity, refused the Covenant; and lived to find himself in an increasing solitude amidst the growing Puritanism of the university. A royalist
A.D. 1645.
sermon preached by Brownrigg (Bishop of Exeter) deprived him of the Mastership of S. Catherine’s, and Queens’ College was entirely depopulated by the Parliament men.
But contemporary with Herrick and Crashaw there were Cambridge men still more famous, and they espoused the parliamentary cause. Chief of these was the Cambridge poet on the parliament side, John Milton. Both universities suffered severely from the Roundheads, yet together they contributed the chief actors against the king. From Cambridge came Cromwell, Milton, and Hutchinson, from Oxford Ireton, Hampden, and Pym. Anti-monarchical and Puritan opinions were, however, only grafted on the university as a result of the violent measures and the wholesale ejectments carried out by Cromwell and his agents.[395]
A.D. 1657.
By the middle of the xvii century Cambridge had become Puritan, though here she was outstripped by Oxford which had been Puritan fifty years earlier, before Elizabeth died. Among the “regicides” many were university men; Andrew Marvell and the young Dryden at Cambridge were friends to Oliver: but the Presbyterian Wallis, a member of Emmanuel College and later one of the founders of the Royal Society, protested against the king’s death warrant which met with the approval of such men as Milton, Hampden, and Hutchinson.
The university and James II.