WADHAM COLLEGE FROM THE WARDEN'S GARDEN.
Oxford in his time at Wadham presented a curious spectacle. Huddled together were soldiers, courtiers, ladies beautiful, gay, and famous in many ways, severe Divines and College Heads, to whom such surroundings were unfamiliar and perhaps not uninteresting: masques and revels were frequent; Christ Church meadow and the grove at Trinity were the resort of a brilliant throng, more brilliant even than the gatherings which fill Oxford at Commemoration time in our more sober age. But beneath this merriment there were doubtless in the minds at least of those who thought, or stopped to think, terrible anxieties and the grimmest of forebodings. It was becoming clearer every month that Edgehill had not broken the rebellion; that the struggle would be long, and that the issue was uncertain; events soon justified these fears. On January 10, 1643, "the Kinges letters came to all the Colledges and Halls for their plates to be brought into the mint at Oxford, there to be coyned into money with promise of refunding it, or payeinge for it again after five shillings the ounce for silver, five and sixpence for silver and gilt." The fruitless sacrifice was made by no college with more unhesitating devotion than by Wadham, which preserves the letter addressed by Charles I. to "our trusty and well-beloved ye Warden and Fellows of Wadham College," and the receipt for 124 lb. of plate from the king's officers of the mint, a liberal contribution from a college only thirty years old. Few relics of the ancient Collegiate plate are now to be found in the University; in most instances pieces, either bestowed or given by special benefactors: the Communion vessels of the Colleges were not taken by the king—a loyal son of the Church. Six colleges, among them Wadham, retained theirs through all the confusion of the war, and still possess them.
In February 1643 warning came of fresh troubles from the north: three Commissioners representing the nobility, clergy, gentry, and commons of Scotland presented themselves to the king, "to press his Majestie that the Church of England might be made conformable in all points to the Church of Scotland." To Charles, himself a Scot, this request must have seemed an outrageous insult, inflicted on him by those of his own household, and an omen of his desertion by his warlike countrymen, whom, despite their resistance to the English Liturgy, he trusted to be faithful to a Stuart.
On June 24, 1646, the last fighting Royalist left Oxford. In the following Michaelmas, Wood returned "to the home of his nativitie." He found Oxford "empty as to scholars, but pretty well replenished with Parliamentarian soldiers." In his opinion the young men of the city and the University had reaped less benefit from the Royalist occupation than their seniors; the latter had gained "great store of wealth from the court and royalists that had for several years continued among them"; the former he "found many of them to have been debauched by bearing arms, and doing the duties belonging to soldiers, as watching, warding, and sitting in tipling houses for whole nights together." Nor were the spiritual teachers sent by Parliament to restore good manners and religion, in Wood's opinion, fitted for their mission: they were six Presbyterian Ministers, "two of them fooles, two knaves, two madmen."
With the history of Oxford for the next eighteen months, important and interesting though it is, we are not concerned. The scholars returned slowly to the half-empty colleges, where admissions had dwindled almost to vanishing point. At Wadham, for instance, the admissions in 1643 were only seven; in 1644, three; in 1645, none; in 1646, seven; in 1647, when the worst of the fighting was over, they rose to nineteen. The Independents and the Presbyterians were now in possession of Oxford. In spite of both oppressors the undergraduates, of Wood's College at least, enjoyed themselves, as undergraduates do in the darkest times, and played "high jinks" on Candlemas Day, compelling the freshmen "to speake some pretty apothegme or make a jest or bull," or take strange oaths "over an old shoe," and suffer indignities if they were shy or stupid. "Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurrit."
CHAPTER III.
WILKINS' WARDENSHIP.
In 1647 a Commission, as it would now be called, was appointed by Parliament to conduct the visitation of the University. 'Lord have mercy upon us; or, the Visitation at Oxford,' is the title of one of the numerous pamphlets relating to this Oxford revolution; Tragi-comœdia Oxonienses' is the title of another, and both suggest curious reflections to Oxonians at the present time. The visitors did their business effectually. They set to work in 1648, and purged the University by ejecting from the colleges all who did not by a certain day give in their assurance that they would submit to the visitors and their visitation appointed by Parliament. No party in our country can claim the monopoly of loyalty to conviction attested by self-sacrifice. In England, non-jurors and dissenters; in Scotland, Episcopalians, Covenanters, and Free Churchmen; in Ireland, Roman Catholics, have "gone out," or stayed out, for some lost cause. In Oxford, Royalists, from Heads to Servitors, stood by their colours manfully. It is uncertain how many submitted, how many were expelled. The estimates vary from Clarendon's statement that almost all the Heads and Fellows of Colleges were ejected, "scarce one submitting," to Wood's estimate of 334; it is probable that 400—that is, about half of the whole number of Heads, Fellows, and Scholars then resident in the University—"made the great refusal," not to accept office, but to retain it. Antony Wood did not show himself ambitious of martyrdom. On May 12, 1648, he, along with other members of his College, appeared before the Visitors. When asked by one of them, "Will you submit to the authority of Parliament in this visitation?" he wrote on a paper lying on the table, "I do not understand the business, and therefore I am not able to give a direct answer." "Afterwards his mother and brother, who advised him to submit in plaine terms, were exceedingly angry with him, and told him that he had ruined himself and must therefore go a-begging." Women, then as now, ready to sacrifice themselves, are less ready to permit those dear to them to be overscrupulous. Wood's mother made intercession for him to Sir Nathaniel Brent, President of the Visitors and Warden of Merton, and "he was connived at and kept in his Postmastership, otherwise he had infallibly gon to the pot."