The Life and Times of John Wilkins / Warden of Wadham College, Oxford; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; and Bishop of Chester

by P. A. Wright Henderson

DOROTHY WADHAM.

The history of the College from its foundation to the beginning of the Civil War is uneventful, one of great prosperity. Among the Fellows admitted in 1613, three, Smyth, Estcott, and Pitt, became Wardens: four of the Fellows were drawn from Exeter, then, as now, a west-country College like Wadham, though it has, more than Wadham, maintained its connection with the West of England. The Foundress showed her resolve that her husband's countryside should be well represented among the first members of the foundation: of the fifteen Fellows, eleven—of the fifteen Scholars, ten, came from western counties, especially from Somerset; the Commoners also were many of them western men. The value to a College of a local connection, not with a village or a small school, but with a county or a large town, was not understood by the Commissioners of 1853: they were under the tyranny of the formulæ current in their day, when "open competition" was supposed to be the solution of all the difficulties of life.

In the first year of the College now opened for work, fifty-one undergraduates, including the Scholars, were admitted. The number of its inmates, from the Warden to the latest freshman, was therefore sixty-nine, including the two chaplains. The rooms were larger than most of the rooms in the older colleges, but fewer, and those available for undergraduates were not more than about forty: the freshmen of 1613 must have been closely packed, the Scholars especially, who had rooms three together, sleeping in the large chamber and working in the muscœlæ or small studies attached, now used as bedrooms, or as scouts' pantries. In the nine years following the admissions were necessarily fewer—averaging twenty-seven. It is probable that till the depletion of Oxford, when the Civil War began—i.e., during the first thirty years of its life—Wadham numbered on an average between eighty and ninety undergraduates, all of them resident in College, as was then required by the Statutes of the University. This estimate is based on imperfect data, and Mr Gardiner has pronounced that materials for any accurate calculation are not to be found. We do not know what was the usual length of undergraduates' residence at that time; some resided only for a year, some proceeded to a degree. Nor is it clear whether the Warden used all the rooms, eight in number, assigned to him, or gave, perhaps rented, some of them to undergraduates. The estimate, which can neither be confirmed nor disproved, is worth making only as helping us to imagine the condition of the College in its early days. One thing is certain, that Wadham was popular and fashionable, to use a modern curious name, as is shown by the record of admissions.

Life, both for graduates and undergraduates, was harder then than it is now. The Fellows were required to reside for forty-six weeks, the Scholars, and probably the Commoners, for forty-eight weeks in each year. All undergraduates had to attend lectures or disputations for twenty-four hours in every week. These tasks were arranged with careful malignity to begin at 6 A.M., and resumed at 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Nor were examinations wanting. The Bible was to be read during dinner in Hall by a Bible Clerk or Scholar, and heard attentively and reverently. Latin was to be spoken in Hall, and English only when the presence of an unlearned person or of a member of another college justified its use. The Chapel Service was held between 5 and 6 A.M. and between 8 and 9 P.M.; and attendance twice a-day was required from bachelors and undergraduates, and rigidly enforced. Attendance at roll-call as a substitute for chapel was unheard of in those days, when all members of the colleges were, or were presumed to be, members also of the Church of England, nor would conscientious scruples have been treated with much courtesy. In other matters discipline was no less strict; clothes and boots were to be black, and gowns were to be long. No undergraduate was allowed to go out of College unaccompanied by a "discrete senior" of mature age as a witness to his good behaviour, unless to attend a lecture or a disputation: nor might he keep dogs, or guns, or ferrets, or any bird, within the precincts of the College, nor play any games with dice or cards or of any unseemly kind. Yet the Foundress showed a tenderness for human weakness by permitting the Fellows and Scholars to play cards in Hall on some of the Gaudy days for "moderate stakes and at timeous hours." Moreover, she ordained that £30 from the College revenues should be spent on College banquets to be held on Gaudy days, by which were meant the great Church festivals, the election days of Fellows and College officers, All Saints' Day, and, on what at first sight seems strange, the anniversary of her husband's death; but the strangeness disappears if it be remembered that October 20th comes close to All Saints' Day.

This seems, in some of its provisions, Draconian legislation, but it was made for the government of boys, many of them only fourteen or fifteen years of age: how far it was, even in early days, unflinchingly enforced, we cannot tell. It began to fall into abeyance after the Restoration, if we are to believe Antony Wood. His statements are always to be received with caution; but they are on this point confirmed by other testimonies, and by the antecedent probability of a strong reaction against the Puritan régime. Eighteen months after the King's Restoration, he writes of the decay of learning and discipline in the University. "Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as students ought to do—viz., temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave in the apparel; but to live like gentlemen, to keep dogs and horses, to turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to swash it in apparell, to wear long periwigs, &c., and the theologists to ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides: the masters have lost their respect by being themselves scandalous, and keeping company with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be interesting—but lack of space forbids—to compare the discipline prescribed with that administered in Wadham now. Sufficient to say—what indeed might go without saying—that the lapse of three hundred years has made changes desirable and necessary.

The Foundress died on May 16, 1618, aged eighty-four. For five years she had watched over the infancy of her College, and had seen it grow into a vigorous child, with the promise of a robust manhood. The mythopœic faculty is strong in all of us, and in Wadham has grown up a tradition that Dorothy was a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man without character and will. The myth rests only on the science of physiognomy working on portraits,—a most insecure foundation. The Founders' portraits depict him as a gentle, placid person with melancholy eyes; her as a hard-featured woman with a long upper lip and an almost cruel mouth. Against the testimony, always dubious, of portraits, must be set the known facts of her loyal devotion in carrying out his wishes with scrupulous fidelity, and the sacrifices she made in doing so, of money and of laborious supervision in the last years of her long life.

The College may do well to remember the closing of one of her last letters to the Warden and Fellows: "Above all things, I would have you to avoid contentions among yourselves, for without true charity there cannot be a true Society."—(Wells' 'History of Wadham,' p. 44.) She was buried beside her husband in the Wadham aisle at Ilminster.

Only a few months after her death a question arose in which she would have taken a keen interest, and have supported her College to the uttermost. In October 1618 James I. set an example, which his grandson, James II., followed, of that contempt for law which proved fatal to the Stuarts. He wrote to his "trusty and well beloved, the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, bidding them elect Walter Durham of St Andrews a Fellow, notwithstanding anything in their statutes to the contrary." Durham had not been a scholar, and the vacancy had been filled up by the Foundress, for whose death "their eyes were still wet." It is possible that Durham's being a Scotchman was another objection to his reception as a Fellow in those days when his aggressive countrymen had found the high-road to England: this objection the Society did not put before the King, but pleaded only the obligations of the statutes. Supported by the Earl of Pembroke, the Chancellor of the University, their resistance was successful. To Wadham belongs the honour of being the earliest Oxford champion of legality in the struggle of seventy years: as to Magdalen belongs the honour of the resistance which brought that struggle nearly to its close. From 1618 onward till—who can say when? the College has been on the popular or constitutional side, save in 1648. The portrait of James I., who gave the College its Charter, hangs in the Hall; there are no portraits there of Charles I., Charles II., James II.

Among the admissions of this time the most illustrious name is that of Robert Blake, who matriculated at Alban Hall, but took his B.A. from Wadham in 1618, a few months before the Durham incident. The great admiral and soldier may therefore have learnt in Wadham the opinions which determined his choice of sides in the Parliamentary wars. The College possesses his portrait, and four gold medals struck to commemorate his victory over Van Tromp in 1653. It has never left the custody of the Warden, save when it was sent, concealed on the person of Professor and Commander Burroughs, to the Naval Exhibition some years ago; and last year, when after an interesting correspondence between the College and Colonel Maxse commanding the Coldstream Guards, leave was cordially given to that distinguished regiment to have an electrotype made of the Blake medal for its own exclusive use, and to be kept in perpetuum among the memorials of its long history. It is the oldest regiment in the service, the only survivor of Cromwell's New Model; it was commanded by Monk, afterwards Duke of Albemarle, when he crossed the border to march to London, perhaps with no definite intention to restore the Monarchy—perhaps also prompted by his brother Nicholas, a Wadham man, to solve the great problem in that simple way. The rest of the New Model were disbanded after the Restoration, but, doubtless in deference to Monk, the Coldstreams were reformed, and became the King's Bodyguard. To Monk, who like Blake was half soldier, half sailor, one of the four medals had been awarded for his services against the Dutch. It was lost, and the replica will take its place. The other three medals are preserved—one in the possession of the representatives of the Penn family, one in the British Museum, one in Wadham: the last was sent to the British Museum for reproduction: it was carried by our historian Mr Wells, returned by him, and it now lies in the Warden's lodgings, in the cabinet of treasures bequeathed by Dr Griffiths, our benefactor in many ways unknown but to his friends. This tie of courtesy and history between a regiment and a college, arms and the gown, is worth recording and probably unique.