royal supremacy in things ecclesiastical; covered with rags, and worn with neglect and ill-treatment, but consoled by a filial and courageous letter from his sons at S. John’s, he was led out to die on June 22, 1534, the New Testament in his hand open at the words: “This is eternal life, to know Thee the only true God.” He stands alone among the bishops of England to give his life for the principle for which the layman Thomas More laid down his. Pole in a letter to Charles V. narrates that Henry VIII. had said he supposed “that I” (Pole) “had never in all my travels met one who in letters and virtue could be compared to the Bishop of Rochester.”
S. John’s College, A.D. 1509.
We next come to the most splendid foundation hitherto realised at Cambridge. The site chosen for a college which held its place through the xvi century as the first and most brilliant society in the university, could not have been more appropriate. It was that of S. John’s Hospital, the first home of Cambridge students, the nucleus of the university, erected soon after the Conquest in the heart of the Norman town, and whence the first endowed scholars in christendom set forth to found a college.[208]
The whole history of the university is epitomised in the street which has S. John’s at one end of it and Peterhouse at the other: the bishops of Ely have firm hold of either end, and lying against S. John’s is that Pythagoras House which Merton bought from the Dunnings when he was planning his famous foundation in the xiii century. We have seen that it was at S. John’s Hospital that Balsham introduced secular scholars in the same century, who should become unum corpus et unum collegium with the canons. The experiment did not succeed, and the canons saw the scholars depart with great relief to the other end of what was to prove the great street of colleges, whose limits were determined by this early conflict between seculars and religious.
In what year the Ely scholars were settled at S. John’s remains uncertain, although there is no more important date in Cambridge history. Simon Montacute, Bishop of Ely, “who knew very well” as the historian of S. John’s observes, says that the scholars had continued there per longa tempora, and Baker