The pre-eminence of Cambridge during the age of Elizabeth would be in itself sufficient proof of its relation to the New Learning—to the revival of letters and of Greek, the rise of experimental science, and the theological speculations of the century. Round Elizabeth there gathered from the first to the last days of her reign a brilliant group of men—scholars, poets, tutors, prelates, lawyers, statesmen, philosophers, travellers, explorers. Every name we chance upon, every man who influenced the court, the letters, the science of the day, hails from Cambridge. The tutors of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth had all been Cambridge men, and Cambridge men were appointed as their physicians and chaplains. Names like those of Skelton, Fisher, Erasmus, Croke, Tyndale, Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and Cheke; of Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey and Caius, conjure up a picture of the scholarship of the age, of the new stir in thought, letters, and learning. Let us look at two other well-defined groups of Elizabethans—the statesmen and the churchmen. The two Cecils, Walsingham, Haddon and Fletcher (Masters of the Requests), Bacon, Knollys, Sussex, Smith, and Mildmay were all Cambridge men; and so were all Elizabeth’s great prelates: Lancelot Andrewes, her chaplain, and dean of Westminster, and the primates Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift: and they represented every party in the country. Fulke Greville the most fortunate of the Queen’s favourites, Sir John Harrington her godson, and Essex, were also Cambridge men. Among the gallant little company of the first adventurers one only is known to have studied at a university, and he was at Cambridge: Sir Thomas Gresham conducted the expedition fitted out by Raleigh which resulted in the discovery of Virginia—named after the virgin queen—and in the introduction of the tobacco leaf. Cavendish, a Corpus man, brought to England the tobacco called after him. Clifford, third earl of Cumberland, a Trinity man, was one of the early privateers and navigators; and young Roger Manners, of Queens’ and Corpus, went the “Islands Voyage” with Robert Devereux who had studied at Trinity. Even Drake, who was at no university, is known as a Cambridge benefactor, and was as we have seen a large subscriber to the chapel of Corpus Christi College.
In the last place the New Learning of the Tudor age was carried from Cambridge to the sister university. It was so well understood that Cambridge represented this new learning that Wolsey went there for the men who, by colonising Cardinal College, were to introduce it at Oxford; and Fox of Pembroke founded a belated Corpus Christi College with the express purpose of erecting a monument in Oxford to the Renaissance.
The schoolmasters.
The last half of the xv century brought with it the great schoolmasters. Mulcaster of Eton and King’s was master of Merchant-Taylors’ on its foundation; Colet’s school, S. Paul’s, sent to Cambridge for its second head, and five of its first eight head masters were Cambridge and King’s men. King’s College has supplied a large proportion of the Provosts and head masters of Eton, many of the famous masters of Harrow, and a King’s man counts as the creator of Rugby “as it now is.” Ascham’s “Schoolmaster” was epoch-making, and his connexion with his university was much closer than William Lily’s with Oxford.
The Royal Society A.D. 1660-62.
The brilliant epoch of Elizabeth spent, intellectual life smouldered during the reigns of the first two Stuarts and the Protectorate, to be renewed and rekindled not by fresh literary activity but by the inquisitive temper which invaded the nation as it emerged, with the Restoration, from civil conflict and the slough of doctrinal wrangling. This inquisitiveness took shape in the institution of the Royal Society. The foyer of the Royal Society was London, although some of its most distinguished members migrated later with Wilkins to Oxford. Of the eminent men who formed the first Royal Society Wallis, Wilkins, Foster, Jonathan Goddard, Sir William Ball, Lawrence Rooke, Sir William Petty, Ward the mathematician, Ray, Woodward the mineralogist, Flamsteed, Sloane, Boyle, Halley, Chief-Justice Hale, Lord Keeper Guilford, with Sprat the Bishop of Rochester (its historian), Cowley and Dryden (its poets), and Sir Robert Moray—Wallis, Foster, Rooke, Ray, Woodward, Flamsteed, Guilford, Cowley, and Dryden, were Cantabrigians. Four of the most prominent, Ward, Boyle, Sloane and Ball, were at no university; Goddard went from Oxford to Cambridge where he graduated; Petty though he became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford was educated at foreign universities; Moray was at S. Andrews and Paris; Wilkins, Halley, Hale, and Sprat were at Oxford. Among the first fellows there came from Oxford Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Hook of the microscope, Sydenham: More the Platonist, Sir William Temple, Willughby the ornithologist, and Grew, came from Cambridge. Two more of Charles’s courtiers joined Moray, Kenelm Digby from Oxford, and Villiers Duke of Buckingham from Cambridge.
The Cambridge Platonists.
The next movement in English thought was both religious and philosophical. When Latitudinarianism ceased to be ecclesiastical it passed from Oxford and became identified with the sister university.[412] Here it was handled by a group of men, from the two colleges Emmanuel and Christ’s, so as to embrace a moral and political philosophy, to which the term Platonist is only aptly ascribed if it be meant to stand for the “mass of transcendental thought”; that traditional Platonism of the speculative schools which had succeeded one another down the centuries, always at war with nominalism and constantly asserting the transcendent character of moral ideas and the reality of free will. Hobbism came to assail this position; for Hobbes applied Bacon’s method to the moral and social order, and found the basis for them in certain obvious facts of human nature. The spirit of enquiry set afoot by the Cambridge Platonists was none the less real because it was opposed to such tenets. They set themselves, in fact, to enquire whether authority and tradition should guide men in matters of faith. They asserted that reason was supreme, and they sought to place Christianity again—to place Protestantism for the first time—under the protection of that noble spiritual idealism which the great thinkers of the early Church had chosen for the new faith; to penetrate Christianity with philosophy.[413]
The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal ecclesiastical polity. The new movement was something more, something finer. Cambridge now gathered up the floating philosophical speculation which existed in the xvii century side by side with the intense absorption in dogmatic wranglings, the rapid growth of sects—of Anabaptists, Antinomians, anti-Trinitarians, Arians. “A kind of moral divinity,” as Whichcote’s tutor, the Puritan Tuckney, cried out in alarm, was to be substituted for theological polemic. The movement indeed was due to the combination of a higher spirituality than the Puritan with the new spirit of bold enquiry in moral and speculative fields[414]—it constituted a Cambridge reaction against the trammels of Puritanism. It was the first of all English religious movements (not excepting Wycliffism) to ally a growth of the religious sentiment with the demand for a wide and liberal theoretical basis to theology. At the head of this theological movement stands Benjamin Whichcote (b. 1609) tutor of Emmanuel, who numbered among his pupils Wallis, Smith, and Culverwell, and who was afterwards Provost of King’s. Ralph Cudworth (b. in Somersetshire 1617) is perhaps the central figure: he is great as a moral philosopher, great in his impartial statement of an opponent’s case, great even in his freedom from the party and political heat which consumed his contemporaries.[415] In John Smith (b. 1616) of Emmanuel[416] the movement becomes more speculative, his was the finest and most richly stored mind, and his “Select Discourses” perhaps mark the culminating point of the Cambridge school. There remains Henry More (b. 1614) the better known name, of Christ’s College, the exponent of Descartes, the ardent follower of Plato, from whom he learnt “that something better and higher than the knowledge of human things constitutes the supreme happiness of man.” His Enchiridion ethicum and Enchiridion metaphysicum were the text books of the school.
This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only “one of the most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical thought in England,” but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote’s aphorism “There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it” sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order and Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of ecclesiastical parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into the relation of philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan nor Presbyterian had brought any such liberating attitude towards theology, for which indeed the early Protestantism cared not one jot, but which has never entirely died out of England since the speculations of the Cambridge Platonists.[417] The Englishman—fed with the crude dogmatism of Luther, the arid ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of the Puritan, and the intolerance of all three—now for the first time was called dispassionately to consider the claims of the philosophical reason, the eternal distinction between essential and non-essential—a distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant—fundamental and non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the claims, in fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed verities ultimately depends. A “rational Christian eclecticism” was for the first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the principle upon which the problems of the present day attend for solution. The values to be assigned to the notions of “orthodoxy,” of dogma—who around them had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford it has always been a question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge a question of substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the credentials of theories.