That Wilkins possessed great administrative abilities and vigour is shown by his work in the University and in his College. He had seen much of the world, and was in the prime of life, and already a man of eminence—a combination of qualities as rare in Heads of Houses as in Cabinet Ministers. He persuaded the Visitors that Wadham and Trinity were fitted, specially and immediately, in 1651 for freedom to elect their Fellows—a privilege of which all the Colleges had been deprived in 1648. The administration of the College estates and finances was carefully revised, and the Statutes were amended. Wilkins' life was varied and full of activities outside as well as within his College. He was selected to deal with problems more difficult and pressing than Compulsory Pass Greek, or degrees for women. Was Oxford to be dismantled? Its security had been threatened by a rising of the "Levellers"; and in 1649 Wilkins, along with the Proctor and a Canon of Christ Church, was appointed to confer with the mayor and the citizens on this important question, not then decided.
Two years later he served on a Commission appointed to consider how to suppress troubles caused by sturdy beggars, "poore soldiers, cashiered or maimed, and Irish people with petitions, that pretended to be undon by the late rebellion there,"—the miserable sequel of the civil war. He helped in the revision of the College and University Statutes, and on the nomination of Cromwell was made one of the Commissioners for executing the office of Chancellor, proving himself a man of affairs as well as of learning. For ten years, as critical as any in the history of Oxford, he took a leading part in its academical and municipal administration.
Yet he found time to avail himself of the privilege to marry given to the Warden of Wadham: it was accorded to him by a dispensation of the Visitors, who doubtless thought that enforced celibacy savoured of Popery. The privilege was withdrawn after the Restoration, as being a concession made by Puritans, whose views on the marriage of the clergy were not the views of the High Church party. Leave to marry was given to all Wardens of Wadham by a special Act of Parliament in 1806, and not, as the College story goes, by a clause tacked on to a Canal or Turnpike Bill.
Pope's account of Wilkins' marriage is a strange solution of an always interesting question, and not altogether complimentary to the lady of his choice. "Dr Ward," he says, "rid out of this storm,"—the storm of obloquy which broke out on him and Wilkins as being "mere moral men." Wilkins "put into the port of matrimony," apparently as a harbour of refuge in distress. He married Robina, the Protector's sister, widow of Dr Peter French, Canon of Christ Church. Her first husband was "a pious, humble, and learned person, and an excellent preacher," the best, in Pope's opinion, of the censorious party. Ward did not imitate his friend, though, if we believe Pope, he had many opportunities for doing so. "He was never destitute of friends of the Fair Sex, never without proffers of Wives," which became increasingly frequent as he rose in the world. Pope professes to have known "several persons of great quality and estates who found ways to make it known to Ward, that if he would address himself to them in the honourable way of marriage, he should not want a kind entertainment." But he, then Bishop of Salisbury, had before his eyes the fate of one of his predecessors who married after he became a bishop, and "upon that had received so severe a reprimand from his brother, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and laid it so much to heart that it accelerated his death." This story may be apocryphal; it is certainly startling. Do ladies of quality still give such hints to bishops? Do bishops die of a rebuke from the archbishop of their province?
Wilkins' marriage "gained him a strong interest and authority in the University, and set him at safety, and out of the reach of his Adversaries." We may trust that it was for his happiness in other ways.
Of his wife little is known, nor is there a portrait of her in the College. She had a son by her second marriage, Joshua Wilkins, who became Dean of Down: by her first marriage she had a daughter, Elizabeth French, the wife of Tillotson. The writer once amused himself with the fancy that the Archbishop to-be met and courted Miss French in the Warden's Lodgings at Wadham, which have few romantic associations; but chronology proves that Tillotson, a Cambridge man, born in 1630, would probably not have made acquaintance with Wilkins before 1659, when he became Master of Trinity. The romance had therefore to be transferred to the Master's Lodge. Even there it could not stay, for Tillotson's first meeting with his future wife in all likelihood took place in London, when he was appointed Tuesday Lecturer at St Lawrence Jewry, the vicarage of which was one of Wilkins' earliest preferments after his ejection from the Mastership of Trinity. When Tillotson made suit for the hand of his stepdaughter, Wilkins, upon her desiring to be excused, said, "Betty, you shall have him, for he is the best polemical Divine this day in England." Though excellence in polemical divinity has not an attraction for most women, she consented, and they were married in 1664. The stories both of Dorothy and Betty are myths, which fade away at the first touch of criticism.
