THIS CELEBRATED CONTROVERSY
Had its origin in 1564, when Queen Elizabeth visited the University of Cambridge, and “the Public Orator, addressing Her Majesty, embraced the opportunity of extolling the antiquity of the University to which he belonged above that of Oxford. This occasioned Thomas Key, Master of University, College, Oxford, to compose a small treatise on the antiquity of his own University, which he referred to the fabulous period when the Greek professors accompanied Brute to England; and to the less ambiguous era of 870, when Science was invited to the banks of the Isis, under the auspices of the great Alfred. A MS. copy of this production of Thomas Key accidentally came into the hands of the Earl of Leicester, from whom it passed into those of Dr. John Caius (master and founder of Gonvile and Caius Colleges, Cambridge,) who, resolving not to be vanquished in asserting the chronological claims of his own University, undertook to prove the foundation of Cambridge by Cantaber, nearly four hundred years before the Christian era. He thus assigned the birth of Cambridge to more than 1200 anterior to that which had been secondarily ascribed to Oxford by the champion of that seat of learning; and yet it can be hardly maintained that he had the best of the argument, since the primary foundation by the son of Æneas, it is evident, remains unimpeached, and the name of Brute, to say the least of it, is quite as creditable as that of Cantaber. The work which Dr. John Caius published, though under a feigned name, along with that which it was written to refute, was entitled, ‘De Antiquitate Catabrigiensis Academiæ, libri ii. in quorum 2do. de Oxoniensis quoque gymnasii antiquitate disseritur, et Cantabrigiense longe eo antiquius esse definitur, Londinense Authore: adjunximus assertionem antiquitatis Oxoniensis Academiæ ab Oxoniensi quodam annis jam elapsis duobus ad reginam conscriptam in qua docere conatur, Oxoniense gymnasium Cantabrigiensi antiquius esse: ut ex collatione facile intelligas, utra sit antequior. Excusum Londini, A. D. 1568, Mense Augusto, per Henricum Bynnenum, 12mo.’” and is extant in the British Museum. As may well be supposed by those who are acquainted with the progress of literary warfare, this work of Dr. John Caius drew from his namesake, Thomas Caius, a vindication of that which it was intended to refute; and this work he entitled “Thomæ Caii Vindiciæ Antiquitatis Academiæ Oxoniensis contra Joannem Caium Cantabrigiensem.” These two singular productions were subsequently published together by Hearne, the Oxford antiquary, who, with a prejudice natural enough, boasts that the forcible logic of the Oxford advocate “broke the heart and precipitated the death of his Cambridge antagonist.” In other words, Dr. John Caius, it is said,
DIED OF LITERARY MORTIFICATION,
On learning that his Oxford opponent had prepared a new edition of his work, to be published after his death, in which he was told were some arguments thought to bear hard on his own. “But this appears to have as little foundation as other stories of the kind,” says the editor of the History just quoted; “since it is not probable that Dr. John Caius ever saw the strictures which are said to have occasioned his death: for, as Thomas Caius died in 1572, they remained in MS. till they were published by Hearne in 1730;”—a conclusion, however, to which our learned historian seems to have jumped rather hastily, as it was just as possible that a MS. copy reached Dr. John Caius in the second as in the first case; and it is natural to suppose that the Oxford champion would desire it should be so. As a specimen of the manner in which such controversies are conducted, I conclude with the brief notice, that Tony Wood, as the author of Terræ-Fillius calls him, has largely treated of the subject in his Annals of Oxford, where he states, that
SIR SIMON D’EWES,
When compiling his work on the antiquity of the University of Cambridge, “thought he should be able to set abroad a new matter, that was never heard of before, for the advancement of his own town and University of Cambridge above Oxford;” but “hath done very little or nothing else but renewed the old Crambe, and taken up Dr. Cay’s old song, running with him in his opinions and tenets, whom he before condemning of dotage, makes himself by consequence a dotard.” According to Sir Simon, “Valence College (i. e. Pembroke Hall) was the first endowed college in England;” “his avouching which,” says Wood, “is of no force;” and he, as might be expected, puts in a claim for his own college (Merton, of Oxford,) “which,” he adds, “Sir Simon might have easily known, had he been conversant with histories, was the oldest foundation in either University.” Therefore, “if the antiquity of Cambridge depends upon Valence College (or rather, upon Peter House,) and that house upon this distich, which stood for a public inscription in the parlour window thereof, it signifies nothing:—
“Qua præit Oxoniam Cancestria longa vetustas
Primatus a Petri dicitur orsa Domo.”
He finally overwhelms his opponent by adding, that Oxford became a public University in 1264, and that a bull for the purpose was obtained the previous year, Cambridge then “being but an obscure place of learning, if any at all.” Thus I have cracked Nut the First. Those who would add “sweets to the sweets” may find them in abundance in the writers I have named already; and the subject is treated of very learnedly by Dyer, in his Dedication to his “Privileges of the University of Cambridge.”