During this period the College enjoyed a considerable reputation as a training ground for medical men. Thomas Linacre, physician to Henry VIII., founded in 1534 a medical lectureship in the College, endowing it with some property in London. The stipend of the lecturer was to be £12 a year, no mean sum in these days—being, in fact, the same as the statutable stipend of the Master. In the Elizabethan statutes special and detailed provisions are made for the continuance of the lectureship. These lay down that the lecturer must be versed in the works of Aristotle, and that he should lecture on the works of Galen, which Linacre had translated. The effect of the foundation was to attract a number of medical students to the College, many of whom seem to have obtained fellowships, for we find the Fellows petitioning Queen Elizabeth, while her code of statutes was under consideration, that Divines should be preferred to Physicians in the election of Senior Fellows; otherwise, they submitted, an undue proportion of Physicians would get on the seniority and rule the College. Further, they asked that the medical Fellows, as some return for their privileges, should attend on poor students free of charge. That the College school of medicine was a noted one is confirmed by the fact that three successive Presidents of the Royal College of Physicians were Fellows of St. John's: Richard Smith (1585-1589), William Baronsdale (1589-1600), and William Gilbert (1600-1601). Smith and Gilbert were physicians to Queen Elizabeth; Baronsdale and Gilbert had been Senior Bursars of the College. Of these Gilbert is the most celebrated; his treatise, De Magnete, is a scientific classic. Galileo spoke of Gilbert as "great to a degree which might be envied." Francis Bacon mentions the book with applause, and Hallam describes Gilbert as "at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island, and by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after the lapse of ages, and are almost universally received into the creed of science." Gilbert, who always signs his name Gilberd or Gylberd in the College books, was Senior Bursar of the College in 1569, and President in the succeeding year.
Amongst others who have held the Linacre lectureship, and attained to scientific distinction, was Henry Briggs, who was appointed lecturer in 1592. He afterwards became Gresham Professor of Geometry and Savilian Professor at Oxford. He took up Napier's discovery of logarithms; the idea of tables of logarithms having 10 for their base, and the calculation of the first table of the kind, is due to him.
THE SECOND CENTURY
1612-1716
T
he second century of the College history opened quietly. Owen Gwyn was elected Master by the choice of the Fellows; John Williams, then a Fellow, afterwards Lord Keeper, Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Lincoln, and Archbishop of York, exerting himself on Gwyn's behalf. It appears that Williams in after years repented of the choice, and Thomas Baker, the historian of the College, speaks slightingly of Gwyn. Still, under his rule the College flourished, and Williams himself marked the period by providing the greater part of the funds for the new Library.
King James I. and Prince Charles (afterwards Charles I.) frequently visited the University; James holding his Court at Trinity, but being entertained at St. John's. On one of these occasions, comparing the great Court of Trinity with the two then existing Courts of St. John's, he is said to have remarked that there was no greater difference between the two Societies than between a shilling and two sixpences.
