The Educated Woman, with her unerring perception of the fitness of things, has already, it is whispered, marked Wadham for her own when the day of reckoning comes, and men will have to share with women not merely degrees but buildings and endowments. She has chosen well, for Tennyson could have imagined no fitter home for the Princess and her companions.
Four days before his death Nicholas Wadham told his nephew, Sir John Wyndham, what were his objects in founding his College, and what were the provisions he wished made to effect them. His "instructions," two of which seemed strange to his nephew, and to need careful wording, ran as follows: "The one was that he would have an especial Statute to be made that neyther the head of the house, nor any of the fellowes should be married; the other that he would not tye any man to any profession, as eyther devinitie, lawe, or phisicke, but leave every man free to profess what he liked, as it should please God to direct him. He then told me that after they weare Masters of Arte of a competent number of yeares, that then he would have them absolutely to departe the Colledge, and not live there all theire lives like idle drones, but put themselves into the world, whereby others might growe up under them, his intente being chiefly to nourishe and trayne up men into Learninge. On the 19th of October, when he sealed the deede, I told him howe necessary it was for him to have a visitor of his Colledge, all the Colledges of Oxford having some Bishoppe appointed by the Founder for seeinge of the Statutes put in execution; and that in my opinion there was none fitter than the Bishoppe of Bathe and Welles, which he much applauded, and thanked me muche for putting him in minde of him; he also then sayd he would have his Colledge to be called Wadham Colledge."
NICHOLAS WADHAM.
Our ancestors knew what they meant and how to express it in good English, though their spelling was irregular. In his instructions the Founder anticipated reforms made by the Commissioners of 1853 and 1882. They had the benefit of two and a half centuries' experience of national and academical life to guide them: Nicholas Wadham foresaw things and needs not foreseen or understood by his contemporaries or predecessors. His Fellowships were to be, all of them, open to laymen, and terminable after a tenure of years in which a young lawyer, of physician, might maintain and prepare himself till he had made a practice: eighteen years were allowed for that purpose, instead of the scanty seven with which a Prize Fellow must now content himself. It may be that Nicholas gave too much and the Commissioners gave too little; but that is a doubtful question.
The Wardenship, as well as the Fellowships, could by the Founder's intention, and in the first draft of the Statutes, be held without the condition of Holy Orders. The Foundress, in this matter only, disobeyed her husband, and at the wish of the Society altered the Statutes, and by binding the Warden to take his Doctorate in Divinity made the office clerical for two hundred and sixty years. In all other points she followed the instructions which she may herself to some extent have inspired. Her Visitor was to be the Bishop of the diocese in which she had spent her life; her Warden was to be "a virtuous and honourable man of stainless life, not a bishop, nor a foreigner but born in Britain": the last word is significant. It was inserted in the Statutes by James I. in place of "England": even Dr Griffiths is known to have spoken of England as the kingdom in which he lived: further, the Warden was to be "thirty years old at least, and unmarried."
There is nothing in Dorothy's grim features to suggest that she would have approved of one of the reforms or perversions of her Statutes ordained by the Commissioners, which gives a place in her College to a married Warden and to married Fellows, much less that she would have been willing to marry one of them herself. Thereby hangs a tale which might suggest a new situation to our exhausted novelists. The Foundress, so the story runs, chose for her first Warden a clergyman, Dr Robert Wright, whose beaux yeux touched the heart of the lone widow: she loved him, and would fain have married him and reigned with him after the necessary alteration of the Statutes; but he was cold and irresponsive: the obligation of celibacy, save in the case of Warden Wilkins, remained incumbent on a Warden of Wadham till 1806, when it was removed by a special Act of Parliament. Modern criticism respects a love-story no more than it respects the Pentateuch. A comparison of dates shows that Dr Wright was fifty-four years old at the time of his appointment in 1613, and the Foundress was then seventy-nine. The difference of a quarter of a century makes the truth of the story not indeed impossible but improbable; the coy Warden held his office only for two months: the cause of his resignation or expulsion is not known, but was probably not "spretæ injuria formæ": the hero of the story wished to marry somebody else, and resigned his post because he was not permitted to do so, as Mr Wells informs us, adding a prosaic explanation of the lovers' quarrel, a disagreement about the appointment of an under-cook. Therefore "Dorothy's Romance" must take its place among the many College stories in which Oxford abounds, and become a forsaken belief. Wright was the first on the long roll of Wadham bishops, and played a not inconsiderable part at a crisis in English history. In December 1641, as Bishop of Lichfield, he was one of the twelve bishops who presented to Charles I. the famous protest against their exclusion by mob violence from the House of Lords, declaring all proceedings in their absence null and void: for this they were sent to the Tower as guilty of high treason. Wright was soon released, and died two years later defending his episcopal seat, Eccleshall Castle, against the Parliamentarians,—a member of the Church militant like Ancktill.
