Cambridge opposed the Manchester school of Liberalism—and Catholic emancipation, Free-trade, Reform bills, and Home Rule for Ireland were all measures which received no support from the Whig-Conservative university.
Philanthropy seems to be as far removed from the academic purview as art or practical politics: none of the great humanitarian movements which dignified the xix century took their rise in Cambridge; but Clarkson and Wilberforce were Cambridge men, and Grey
A.D. 1807-34.
abolished slavery itself in 1834.
Religious movements. The Lollards.
In the century succeeding that which saw the historical birth of our two national universities, the first breath of the early renascence was wafted to our shores: but that dual aspect of the later movement which haunted and shaped its whole course in England had been presaged in a remarkable way, and in Wyclif Oxford gave a forerunner of the religious renascence a hundred years before the advent of the humanistic. Even when Henry IV. ascended the throne, Ralph Spalding, a Carmelite friar, was the only person of note at Cambridge
A.D. 1401.
suspected of Lollardry; and when Archbishop Arundel set himself to crush Wyclif’s movement at the two universities, the Cambridge harvest was of the poorest.
The Reformation.
But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement passed from Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as we have seen, are seldom the consequence of an opinion of the Schools. The struggles of the barons, the parliamentary wars, the restoration, the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne, were not prepared in any university. But there is one exception—and the prime part in that reawakening of the human mind which issued in the English Reformation, must be assigned to the university of Cambridge. Here was laid the intellectual and historical basis of the reformed religion, and Cambridge produced the men and the minds which created the ecclesiastical order, the liturgy, and the service books deemed suitable to the reformed faith. The stones of Cambridge are indeed a monument to the academic and intellectual form of Protestantism, as the cathedral at Orvieto is a monument to the crudest form of eucharistic doctrine.