Newton had one ambition, and that was a disinterested one. “Dr. Newton is commonly said to be Founder-mad,” wrote the malicious Hearne; “Dr. Newton is very fond of founding a College,” wrote another, in 1721. The patronage which he would not stoop to ask for himself, he sought to use for his College. But his grand friends did little for him; nearly all that he spent came out of his own pocket. He spent about £1500 on building a Chapel for the Hall (consecrated in 1716) and the adjoining corner of the present Quadrangle. He published an edition of Theophrastus by subscription for the benefit of his College, but it did not appear till after his death. His proposals for the foundation of a College were made public in 1734 in a Letter to the Vice-Chancellor, though he had already “made a noise” about it “many years.” Considering the slenderness of the means at his disposal, it is not surprising that the project encountered some ridicule. Hearne had at first been much impressed by the Doctor’s sermons, and styled him “an ingenious honest man,” but on the appearance of his pamphlet on migration pronounced him “quite mad with pride and conceit,” and the book a “very weak, silly performance.” Now he laments that “’tis pitty Charities and Benefactions should be discountenanced and obstructed; but it sometimes happens when the persons that make them are supposed to be mente capti and aim at things in the settlement which are ridiculous, which seems to be the case at Hart Hall, as ’tis represented to me. However, after all,” the charitable critic concludes, “’tis better not to publish the failings of persons, especially of clergymen, on such occasions, least mischief follow, the enemy being always ready to take advantage.” The grant of the charter was long opposed by Exeter College: but the opinion of the Attorney-General was unfavourable to the claim on the part of that College to anything but the accustomed rent. In 1740 Dr. Newton got his Charter of Incorporation, and his Statutes approved by George II.
Dr. Newton was not at all disposed to lose by his elevation to the Headship of a College the autocracy which he had so long enjoyed as Head of a Hall. Hence, although he styles the four Tutors of the new Foundation “Senior Fellows” and their eight “Assistants” “Junior Fellows,” the whole government of the College seems to be ultimately vested in the Principal, who was to be a Westminster student and Tutor of Christ Church nominated by the Dean of that House. There were to be no “idle fellowships” on Newton’s foundation: all were “official,” and lasted, the Senior Fellowships till the completion of eighteen years from Matriculation, the Junior only from B.A. to M.A. The College was designed for thirty-two “Students,” who enjoyed a modest endowment of £6 13s. 4d. for the first year and £13 6s. 8d. for four years more, with commons. There were also four “Scholars” who were to act as Servitors to the four Tutors, and to perform such functions as ringing the bell and keeping the gate. Commoners and Gentleman-Commoners were expressly excluded: but wealthier men might become honorary Scholars, with leave to wear a “tuft” as well as the Scholar’s gown. Each Tutor was to take charge of the freshmen of one year, who remained his pupils throughout their course. This division of the College into four classes must have been suggested by the Scotch University system, or by the arrangement of the French Colleges on which the Scotch system was based. It was, at all events, vastly superior to the old “Tutorial system,” under which every Tutor played the polymathic Professor to Undergraduates of every year simultaneously.
Dr. Newton’s Statutes are very curious reading. He aimed at perpetuating the “system of education” which he had himself introduced. They are full of wise provisions, some of them rather crotchety, and others excellent in themselves but perhaps hardly practicable even then. Each Tutor lived in a different “Angle” of the Quadrangle, and was responsible for its discipline. His post must have been no sinecure, if he was really to keep men out of each others’ rooms during the hours of work, from Chapel (6.30 or 7.30 a.m. according to season) till the 12 o’clock dinner, and from 2 to 6 p.m. Supper was at 7 instead of the usual 6 p.m., to limit the time available for compotations. The gate was shut at 9 p.m., and after 10 the key was to be taken to the Principal’s bed-room and no egress or ingress permitted. As an “educationist,” the Founder apparently believed in Disputations and insisted much on English composition, but disbelieved in verse-making except for “Undergraduates having a genius for Poetry.” The sumptuary regulations are somewhat severe, including the requirement that no bills shall be “contracted without their Tutor’s knowledge and consent.” Allowances from parents were to be sent to the Tutor, who was to pay his pupils’ debts before transmitting the remainder to their destination. “Dismission” was the penalty for contracting a debt of more than 5s. “with any person keeping a Coffee-house or Cook’s-shop or any other Public House whatsoever.”
Newton’s first two successors were men of mark in their day. William Sharp (1753-1757) was Regius Professor of Greek. David Durell (1757-1775) was eminent as a Hebraist. But the Principalship depended for its endowments entirely upon room-rent, and the Studentships could never have been really paid out of Newton’s slender endowment of less than £60 per annum. The existence of the College depended upon the reputation of its Tutors. During the Tutorship[352] of Newcome, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, the College was still prosperous. His “pupils were for the most part men of family,” says Sir George Trevelyan; among them, Charles James Fox (1764-1765). For a Gentleman-Commoner (Dr. Newton’s Statutes were defied) Fox read hard, and found Mathematics “entertaining.” “Application like yours,” the Tutor found it necessary to write to him, “requires some intermission, and you are the only person with whom I have ever had any connexion, in whom I could say this.” He read so hard in fact, that his father, Lord Holland, sent him abroad without taking his degree, to the no small injury of his mind and character. It appears, however, that Fox’s life had a lighter side even while at Oxford. In Lockhart’s story of Reginald Dalton, we read: “Although Hart Hall has disappeared, we trust the authorities have preserved the window from whence the illustrious C. J. Fox made the memorable leap when determined to join his companions in a Town and Gown row.” Alas! the window has disappeared not only from the world of reality but (what does not always follow) from that of tradition!
It was in the time of the fourth Principal, Dr. Bernard Hodgson, that the College collapsed. On his death in 1805 no one would accept the almost honorary headship; but at last in 1814 the one surviving Fellow,[353] who was (we are told) considered “half-cracked,” announced that he had “nominated, constituted, and admitted himself Principal”! At this time the place was all but deserted. It became a sort of no man’s land in which a score of “strange characters” (“as if being ‘half-cracked’ were a qualification for admission”) squatted rent free. Eventually the University took upon itself to close the building. In 1820 the building adjoining Cat Street actually fell down “with a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.”
Magdalen Hall (on this site), 1820-1874.
On January 9th, 1820, a fire deprived Magdalen Hall of its local habitation.[354] The old Hall stood upon the site of the existing S. Swithin’s buildings, and belonged to the College from which it took its name. In 1816 the President and Fellows had procured an Act of Parliament transferring the site and buildings of Hertford Society to Magdalen Hall, i. e. technically, to the University in trust for the Hall. With part of the small property of the College, the Hertford Scholarship was founded: the rest passed to the Society of Magdalen Hall, which in 1822 took possession of its new home. A word must be said as to the traditions of which Hertford College thus became the inheritor.
About the year 1480 the Founder of Magdalen College built some rooms near the gate of his College for the accommodation of the officers of his Grammar School. To these other rooms were added, and the building occupied by students and called S. Mary Magdalen Hall. This Society had at first the closest connection with the College, the Principal being always a Fellow. It was not till 1694 that the Chancellor of the University finally established his right to nominate the Principal of Magdalen Hall.
It was in this Hall that the Ultra-Protestant traditions of Magdalen lingered after they had died out in the College itself. It had been within the walls of Magdalen Hall that the English Reformation had its true beginning in certain meetings for Bible-reading started by William Tyndale, afterwards the translator of the Bible; and in the seventeenth century, when the Laudian movement had got the upper hand in the Colleges at large, it became a refuge for the oppressed Puritans. At one time it boasted three hundred members. In 1631 its Principal John Wilkinson, and Prideaux, Rector of Exeter, were summoned before the King in Council at Woodstock and received “a publick and sharp reprehension for their misgoverning and countenancing the factious partie!” Soon after, Oxenbridge, one of its Tutors,[355] was convicted of a “strange, singular, and superstitious way of dealing with his Scholars by perswading and causing some of them to subscribe as votaries to several articles framed by himself (as he pretends, for their better government),” for which presumption he was “distutored.” In 1640 Henry Wilkinson (also of the Hall) was suspended for preaching in a very bitter way against some of the ceremonies of the Church.[356] But the day of vengeance came. When the Parliamentary Visitors came to Oxford the suspended Tutor, Henry Wilkinson, senior, commonly known as “Long Harry,” was the most prominent and zealous of the Visitors. The students of Magdalen Hall and New Inn submitted to a man, and the places of the ejected Fellows and Scholars were largely recruited from their numbers. A very large proportion of the eminent Puritans of the seventeenth century came from these two Halls. A few of the distinguished Magdalen Hall men, whom Hertford College now claims as a sort of step-mother, may be added. John L’Isle, President of the High Court of Justice; John Glynne, Lord Chief Justice of England under Cromwell; William Waller, the Cromwellian Poet (afterwards at Hart Hall); Sir Matthew Hale, the most famous of English Judges; Sydenham, “the English Hippocrates”; Sir Henry Vane; Pococke, the Orientalist; and Dr. John Wilkins, the Mathematician, afterwards Warden of Wadham, then Master of Trin. Coll. Cambr., and later Bishop of Chester. Few Colleges in the University ever sent out so many distinguished men within so short a time. But the greatest name that Magdalen Hall can boast figures oddly in this list of Puritan Worthies. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury entered when not quite fifteen in 1603, and went down in 1607 with the B.A. degree. It is curious that it should have been by the Puritan Principal, John Wilkinson, that the Philosopher of Erastian Absolutism was introduced as tutor or companion into the Devonshire family with which he remained connected for the rest of his life. In spite of the Puritan régime, which was, however, hardly established in his day, Hobbes describes the place of his education as one “where the young were addicted to drunkenness, wantonness, gaming, and other vices.” Clarendon was also a member of the Hall for a short time while waiting for a Demyship at Magdalen College. Swift, whose Undergraduate life was passed at Dublin, took his Oxford B.A. from Magdalen Hall in 1692, and proceeded M.A. a few weeks later, during which interval we may perhaps assume that he resided in the Hall.