On the arrival of the Puritan Visitors in 1647, no College gave so much trouble as New College. All but unanimously the members of the foundation declared that it was contrary to their oaths to submit to any Visitor who was an actual (i. e. resident) member of the University, which was the case with the most active Visitors. Only two unconditional, and one qualified submission, are recorded. Forty-nine out of the fifty-three members of the foundation (choir included) then in residence were sentenced to expulsion on March 15th, 1647-8. But it was not till June 6th that four of the worst offenders were ordered to move; on July 7th the order was extended to seventeen more. On August 1st, 1648, Dr. Stringer, the Warden whom the Fellows had elected in defiance of the Visitors, was removed by Parliament, and in 1649 nineteen more foundationers were “outed.”
It must not be assumed that the Fellows left by the Visitors, or even those put in the place of the ejected Fellows, conformed heartily to the Puritan régime. The bursars appointed by the Commission found the buttery and muniment-room shut against them. George Marshall, the Parliamentarian Warden appointed in 1649, had to complain to the Visitors that the College persisted in remitting the “sconces” imposed by him upon Fellows for absence from the no doubt lengthy Puritan prayers. Moreover, the Visitors, with scrupulous desire to minimize the breach of continuity, elected only Wykehamists into the vacant places, with, indeed, the notable exception of the intruded Warden; and these new Fellows were most of them no doubt either Royalists and Churchmen, or at least men whose Puritan republicanism was of no very bigoted type. Hence we find that Woodward, the Warden freely elected by the College on Marshall’s death in 1658, retained his place after the Restoration. Even in 1654 Evelyn found the chapel “in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times.” After the Restoration we are not surprised to find that the Royalist majority was strong enough to turn out many of the “godly” minority before the King’s Commissioners arrived in Oxford, and to reinstate “the Common Prayer before it was read in other churches.”
Two of “the Seven Bishops” were New College men, the saintly Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and Turner, Bishop of Ely. One of their Judges, Richard Holloway, the only one who charged boldly in their favour, had been Fellow of the College till ejected by the Parliamentary Visitors.
The annals of our University in the eighteenth century are of an inglorious order; and New College exhibits in an intensified form the characteristic tendencies of Oxford at large. The building of the “new common chamber” (one of the first in Oxford) and of the garden quadrangle, at the end of the seventeenth century (finished 1684), seem to herald the age in which the increase of ease, comfort, and luxury kept pace with the decay of study, education, and learning. The Vimen Quadrifidum of Winchester still indeed kept alive a tradition of classical scholarship which even the possession of an Academic sinecure at eighteen, with total exemption from University examinations and exercises, could not quite extinguish; but there was a significant proverb about New College men which ran, “golden Scholars, silver Bachelors, leaden Masters.” One of the last men of learning whom New College produced was John Ayliffe, D.C.L., the author of the Past and Present State of the University of Oxford (1714), who was expelled the University, deprived of his degree, and compelled to resign his Fellowship for certain “bold and necessary truths” contained in that book, partly of a personal, partly of a political (i. e. Whiggish) character. Perhaps the most respectable and yet characteristic product of New College during the ferrea aetas which succeeded were Robert Lowth, the scholarly antagonist of the slipshod Warburton, and author of the famous lectures On the Poetry of the Hebrews, successively Bishop of St. David’s, Oxford and London.
Towards the close of the century New College harboured a staunch defender of the Church (including some of its abuses), but a staunch assailant of much else in that old régime to which it belonged. Sydney Smith came up from Winchester in 1789, having been Prefect of Hall and third on the roll; but though in the College, he was little of it. It is curious that the most brilliant talker of the century does not seem to have left much reputation behind him in College society. Perhaps his extreme poverty may have something to do with it.
The other most notable Fellow of New College in the first half of the nineteenth century, Augustus Hare (joint-author of Guesses at Truth), was also an assailant of the abuses among which he was brought up. When acting as “Poser” in the Winchester election of 1829, he had the spirit to resist the claims of certain candidates to be admitted to one or other of the two Colleges without examination, as “Founder’s-kin.” At the time there were already twenty-four “Founders” at New College, and fourteen or fifteen at Winchester. His appeal was heard by the Bishop of Winchester as Visitor, with Mr. Justice Patteson and Dr. Lushington as Assessors; a New College man, Mr. Erle (afterwards Lord Chief Justice), was one of the petitioner’s counsel. The case was argued not upon the ground that the claimants’ demand was based on fictitious pedigrees (which was probably the fact), but upon the precarious contention that by the Civil and Canon Law the term “consanguineus” applies at most only to persons within the tenth generation of descent from a common ancestor, and the appeal was naturally dismissed.
The era of reform may be said to begin with the voluntary renunciation by New College, in 1834, of its exemption from University examinations. The College still retains, indeed, the right to obtain for its Fellows degrees without “supplication” in congregation; and when a Fellow of New College takes his M.A., the Proctor still says, “Postulat A.B., e Collegio Novo,” instead of the ordinary “Supplicat, etc.,” or (more correctly) omits the name altogether. In spite of the vehement opposition of the College, a more extensive reform was carried out on truly Conservative lines by an Ordinance of the University Commissioners in 1857. The Fellowships were reduced to forty (in 1870 to thirty); but the mystic seventy of the original foundation is maintained by the addition in 1866 of ten open scholarships to the thirty which were still reserved for Winchester men. Further, commoners[157] were made eligible for Fellowships as well as scholars. Half the Fellowships are still reserved for Wykehamists, that is, men educated either at Winchester or at New College. The chaplaincies are now reduced to three, and the number of lay choir-men increased.
Since that beneficent reform, ever since loyally accepted and vigorously carried forward by the Warden and Fellows, the history of the College has been one of continuous material expansion, numerical growth, and academic progress. In 1854 the society voluntarily opened its doors to non-Wykehamist commoners, whose increasing numbers soon called for the new buildings, the first block of which was opened in 1873.
We take our leave of the College with a glance at one or two of the quaint customs which have unfortunately, if inevitably, disappeared in the course of the process of modernization.
Down to 1830, or a little later, the College was summoned to dinner by two choir-boys[158] who, at a stated minute, started from the College gateway, shouting in unison and in lengthened syllables—“Tem-pus est vo-can-di à-manger, O Seigneurs.” It was their business to make this sentence last out till they reached with their final note the College kitchen.