John Cottisford, the eighth Rector of the College (elected in March 1518-19), resigned on 7th Jan., 1538-9, probably[180] in dismay at the course of events in the nation. His successor, Hugh Weston, elected on 8th Jan., was possibly supposed to be on the reforming side; for he was undisturbed by Edward VI.’s Commissioners; but had to resign in 1555 to the Visitors appointed by Cardinal Pole. Christopher Hargreaves, elected on 24th Aug., 1555, and confirmed in his place by Cardinal Pole’s Visitors, died on 15th Oct., 1558. His successor, Henry Henshaw or Heronshaw, was hardly elected on 24th Oct., when the hopes of the Romanist party were shattered. The College register, in the greatness of its anxiety, breaks, on this one occasion, the silence it observes as to affairs outside the College.[181] “In the year of our Lord 1558, in November, died the lady of most holy memory, Mary, Queen of England, and Reginald Poole, Cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury; the body of the former was buried in Westminster, the body of the latter in his cathedral church of Canterbury, both on the same day, namely 14th December. At this date the following were Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College,” and then follows a list of them. Clearly the writer of this note did not look forward to remaining long in College. Nor did he; within two years Henshaw had to resign to Queen Elizabeth’s Visitors. Francis Babington, who had just been made Master of Balliol by these Visitors, was transferred to the Rectorship of Lincoln. In this appointment we can detect the sinister influence which was to direct elections at Lincoln for some time to come; Babington was chaplain to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Chancellor of the University after 1564. The election was in flagrant violation of the Statutes which required that the Rector should be chosen from the Fellows or ex-Fellows of the College. But it was the policy of the Court to break College traditions, by thrusting outsiders into the chief government: the same thing was done in other Colleges, the case of Lincoln being peculiar only in the frequency of the intrusion. Doubts began to be cast on Babington’s sincerity; he was accused of secretly favouring Romanism; and in 1563 he found it advisable to betake himself beyond sea.[182] Leicester was ready with another of his chaplains, John Bridgwater, who had been Fellow of Brasenose, and was not statutably eligible for the Rectorship of Lincoln. Again the Court was mistaken in its man. Under Bridgwater the College became a Romanist seminary, and continued so for eleven years; and then Bridgwater had to follow his predecessor across the seas, retiring to Douay, where, Latinising his name into “Aquapontanus,” he became famous as a theologian. He is still held in honour among his co-religionists, and I remember several visits paid to the College in recent years by admirers of his, in hopes of seeing a portrait of him (but the College has none) or his handwriting (which we have). Still another of his chaplains was thrust into Lincoln College by the over-powerful Leicester; this time John Tatham, Fellow of Merton. But Tatham’s Rectorship was destined to be a brief one: elected in July 1574, he was buried in All Saints’ Church on 20th Nov., 1576.
Then there took place a very remarkable contest, six candidates seeking the Rectorship. Only one, John Gibson, Fellow since 1571, was statutably qualified; although of only six years’ standing as a Fellow he was still senior Fellow, a fact eloquent as to the removal of the older Fellows from the College. Edmund Lilly, of Magd. Coll., another candidate, relied apparently on his popularity in the University. The other four candidates relied on compulsion from outside, William Wilson, of Mert. Coll., being recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury, while the Chancellor (Lord Leicester) and the Bishops of Lincoln and Rochester tried to secure the election of their respective Chaplains. Leicester’s candidate, John Underhill, was specially unacceptable to the College, having been removed from his Fellowship at New College by the Bishop of Winchester (the Visitor there), because of some malpractices with the College moneys. The Fellows elected John Gibson; the Bishop of Lincoln refused to admit him. Leicester wrote threatening letters to the College; summoned several of the Fellows to London, and browbeat them there. Then, thinking he had now gained his point, he proceeded to frighten off the other candidates, in order to leave a clear field for Underhill. The Fellows again elected Gibson; and the Bishop of Lincoln again refused to admit him. Then the Fellows elected Wilson; but the Bishop refused to admit him. So that, there being no help for it, they met again on 22nd June, 1577, and elected Underhill.
These proceedings caused great indignation in the University; and a petition was drawn up, worded in very strong terms, entreating the Archbishop of Canterbury to undertake the defence of the University against the “iniquity, wrong, and violence” which had been done. This was signed by resident B.D.’s and M.A.’s, and presented to his Grace, who passed it on to Leicester. Leicester thereupon wrote a long letter to Convocation, trying to justify his action, and threatening to resign his Chancellorship of the University if further attacked in this matter.
Underhill’s first step after his election was to begin a new register, and to tear out of the old register all records of the proceedings since the death of Tatham; so that the only entry in the College books concerning this controversy is that Underhill was “unanimously elected.” Leicester visited the College in 1585, and the Latin congratulatory verses on that occasion are among the earliest printed of Oxford contributions to that particularly dull form of literature. Underhill remained rector till 1590. By that time the see of Oxford had been vacant twenty years; and, as the leases of the episcopal estates were running out, Sir Francis Walsingham required a bishop who would make new leases and give him a share of the fines. He selected Underhill for this purpose, who was consecrated Bishop of Oxford in December 1589, and resigned the Rectorship of the College in 1590. His patron, having no further use for him after the renewal of the leases, neglected him; and Underhill died in poverty and disgrace in May 1592.
Leicester being now dead, the College at this vacancy was left to choose its own head; and Richard Kilby, Fellow since 1578, was elected sixteenth rector on 10th December, 1590. Kilby’s Rectorship proved one continuous domestic struggle, which has left its mark in the College register in scored-out pages and blotted entries, as plainly as an actual battle leaves its mark in fields of grain trampled down by contending armies. The question was about the number of Fellows. In Underhill’s Rectorship the College appears to have been impoverished, and unable to pay the full body of Fellows their allowances. Kilby’s policy was to leave the Fellowships vacant, in order to keep up the income of the present holders; the opposition in College desired to fill up the Fellowships and to submit to a reduction of stipend all round.
In April 1592 the number of Fellows had fallen to nine. On 24th April three Fellows were elected; this election was quashed by the Visitor on 8th December of the same year. But the Fellows returned to the charge, and elected three Fellows on 15th December, and five others on 16th December, 1592; so that in 1593 the College consists of the Rector and the full number of Fellows (i. e. fifteen). Vacancies occur rapidly, the Fellowships being so small in value. In 1596, and again in 1599, elections of one Fellow are made, are appealed against, but confirmed by the Visitor. In 1600 the number of Fellows had again fallen as low as ten, and the Fellows wished to proceed to an election; but the Rector (Kilby) tried to prevent their doing so by retiring to the country. The Subrector, (Edmund Underhill) called a meeting, and on 3rd November, 1600, the Fellows, in the Rector’s absence, elected into two vacancies. Kilby induced the Visitor to quash these elections; Edmund Underhill appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury as primate of the southern province. This was against the statutes, which directed that no Fellow should invoke any other judge than the Visitor; and on this ground, on 4th May, 1602, Kilby procured Underhill’s expulsion. At the end of 1605 there were only five Fellows remaining; by 2nd May, 1606, two more had resigned. On the next day the Rector and the three Fellows remaining elected eight new Fellows, the last of the eight being certainly not the least, but the most illustrious Lincoln name of the century, Robert Sanderson, the prince of casuists.
The years which follow, from this election to the breaking out of the Civil War, present two aspects. Externally tokens of prosperity are not wanting. The buildings were considerably increased. In 1610 Sir Thomas Rotheram, probably the same who had been Fellow from 1586 to 1593 and Bursar[183] in 1592, and apparently of kin to the second Founder,[184] built the west side of the chapel quadrangle. The chapel itself, with its beautiful glass (said to be the work of an artist Abbott, brother of the Archbishop), was the gift of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and Visitor of the College. Bishop Williams at the same time (1628-1631) built the east side of the chapel quadrangle. The work cost more than he had promised to give, and the College had to complete it at its own charges; £90 being spent on this work in 1629, “as being all the sum that my lord our benefactor did require or the College could spare.” It is curious to find[185] the same benefactor doing exactly the same thing in the fixed sum he gave (and would not increase) for building the library at St. John’s College in Cambridge. If we turn, however, to the domestic annals of the College during this period we find an unlovely picture of turbulence and disorder. Fellows and Commoners alike are accused of boorish insolence, of swinish intemperance, of quarrelling and fighting. Bursars mismanage their trust and fail to render account of the College moneys they have received. Fellows try to defraud the College by marrying in secret and retaining their Fellowships. Two or three of the less scandalous scenes will be sufficient to indicate the violence of the times. On 20th November, 1634, Thomas Goldsmith, B.A., had to read a public apology in chapel for “a most cruel and barbarous assault” on William Carminow, an undergraduate. In December 1634 Thomas Smith, an M.A. commoner, made “a desperate and barbarous assault” on Nicholas North, another M.A. commoner, in the room of the latter. The same Thomas Smith a month before had been ordered by the Rector “to take his dogs[186] out of the College,” which order he had treated with contempt. In October 1636 Richard Kilby and John Webberley, two Fellows, fell out and fought; and “Mr. Kilbye’s face was sore bruised and beaten.” The College ordered Webberley “to pay the charge of the surgeon for healing of Mr. Kilbye’s face.”
We must pass very hastily over the period from 1641 to the Restoration, not because the annals of Lincoln are lacking in interest during these years, but because space presses and the chief incidents have been noted in Wood’s History of the University and in Burrows’ Register of the Parliamentary Visitation. Paul Hood, the Rector, being a Puritan, kept his place under the Commonwealth, and having been constitutionally elected before the Civil War, retained it at the Restoration. Ten Fellows were ejected by the Parliamentary Visitors, and ten put into their place, at least six of them being persons of unsatisfactory character. At the Restoration Hood got the King’s Commissioners to eject those of the ten who remained, and seven Fellows were elected in their place, the only name of interest among these being that of Henry Foulis, famous in his own age for his violent and bulky invectives against Presbyterianism and Romanism.
Lincoln College was singularly fortunate during the latter half of the seventeenth and for the greater part of the eighteenth centuries. Hood, at the Restoration, was in extreme old age, and left the whole management of the College to Nathaniel Crewe (Subrector 1664-1668), so that it fairly escaped the break-down in manners, morals, and studies which the Restoration brought to many Colleges. Crewe, after a short Rectorship of four years (1668-1672), was raised to the Episcopal Bench; and at the close of his long life proved our greatest benefactor. When he resigned Crewe used his influence to get Thomas Marshall elected Rector, a good scholar and a good governor; who, on his death in 1685, left his estate to the College. His successor, Fitz-herbert Adams, was also a considerable benefactor. Of John Morley and Euseby Isham, who followed, John Wesley speaks in the highest terms. Richard Hutchins, twenty-third Rector (1755-1781), was a model disciplinarian and an excellent man of business; and, following Marshall’s example, left his estate for the endowment of scholarships.
During this happy period much was done to improve the College, which can only be touched on in the briefest outline here. In 1662 John Lord Crewe of Steane (father of Nathaniel) converted the old chapel—which since the consecration of the new chapel on 15th September, 1631, had lain empty—into a library, which it still remains, and changed the library into a set of rooms. In 1662 the room under the library westwards was set aside as a room where the Fellows might have their common fires and hold their College meetings;[187] it is still the Fellows’ morning-room. In 1684 the common-room was wainscotted at a cost of £90, Dr. John Radcliffe subscribing £10, and George Hickes and John Kettlewell each £5. In 1686 Fitz-herbert Adams spent £470 on repairing and beautifying the chapel. In 1697-1700 the hall was wainscotted at a cost of £270, to which Lord Crewe gave £100. Rector Hutchins bought from Magdalen College some of the houses between the College and All Saints’ Church, and left money to purchase the others, so as to form the present College garden.