completed at the time of his attainder two years afterwards (1521) and the property escheated in due course as a cell of Crowland Abbey to the crown.[220]
How soon Monks’ hostel became “the monks’ hostel of Buckingham” is by no means clear. That the Dukes of Buckingham were early patrons must be admitted on the evidence; for even if the house was not known as Buckingham College in 1465, it was known as “the hostel called Bokyngham college” in 1483 while it was still Crowland property, and both hall and chapel were probably the gift of “deep revolving, witty Buckingham” the second Duke Henry.
“I have in this world sustained great damage and injury in serving the king’s highness, which this grant shall recompense.” So wrote Lord Chancellor Audley in a letter begging for a share of the plunder when Henry had determined on the suppression of the monasteries. The share he wanted and got was Walden Abbey in Essex on the borders of Cambridgeshire, and here he established himself on the site which his son was to transform into the mansion of Audley-End. He did more; he proposed to himself, apparently, some sort of expiation to balance the “recompense,” and in 1542 changed Buckingham into Magdalene College which he re-endowed. We have seen that Walden Abbey was itself one of the builders of Monks’ hostel.
The mastership of the college is in the gift of the owner of Audley-End (now Lord Braybrooke). Nothing of the xv century building remains. A window of Pugin’s adorns the chapel[221] replacing the old altar-piece which is now in the library. The combination room leads from the musicians’ gallery of the pleasant hall, the only instance of this arrangement in Cambridge.[222] In the time of Fuller, Magdalene was a college of reading men: “The scholars of this college, though farthest from the schools, were in my time the first to be observed there, and to as good purpose as any.”[223] Twenty years ago it was the fashionable college, and its members lived in private lodgings, attending neither hall nor chapel. Magdalene is in the parish of S. Giles, and it has been conjectured that it occupies the site of the house of the canons of S. Giles before they removed to Barnwell. There is however no evidence for this, and there are no documents at Magdalene earlier than Stafford’s time.[224]
Archbishop Grindal,[225] Robert Rede chief justice in 1509, Cumberland Bishop of Peterborough, and Kingsley were educated here. So was Pepys, the diarist, who bequeathed to the college his extraordinary collection
