During this period also the roll of the Fellows received some of its more famous names. The two eminent non-jurors, George Hickes and John Kettlewell; the celebrated physician, John Radcliffe; John Potter, whose Greek scholarship promoted him to the see of Canterbury; and John Wesley,[188] by and by to win a name only less famous than that of Wycliffe in the history of religion in England, may be cited.
The long period of prosperity which Lincoln College had enjoyed during the later part of the seventeenth and the earlier part of the eighteenth centuries was followed in the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries by a period of decline, during which the College had its full share in the general stagnation of the University, and was chiefly notable for the grotesque eccentricities of its rector, Edward Tatham (Rector 1792-1834). Tatham, an M.A. of Queen’s College, had been elected into a Yorkshire Fellowship at Lincoln in 1782. Shortly after his election he came into conflict with the Rector (John Horner) over a number of points in the interpretation of the statutes; and after several appeals to the Visitor, was successful in his contention. In 1790 he distinguished himself by the ponderous learning, and the vigorous, if coarse, style of his Bampton Lectures, The Chart and Scale of Truth by which to find the cause of Error (published in 1790 in two volumes; a copy in the College library has additional MS. notes by the author). In March 1792 he was elected Rector, and one of his first achievements was the use he made of his old practice in controversy over the statutes to obtain from the Visitor an unstatutable augmentation of the stipend of the Rector. In the old obits, the Rector, being celebrant, had been assigned double the allowance of any Fellow; and in elections, according to an almost universal custom in Oxford Colleges, his vote counted for two. By emphasizing these points and suppressing contradictory evidence, Tatham persuaded the Visitor to decree that for the future the Rector’s Fellowship should receive double of all the allowances of an ordinary Fellowship. Tatham was known as a forcible but most unconventional preacher; and one phrase of his, used in the University pulpit,[189] has become almost proverbial, that namely in which he wished that “all the Jarman[190] philosophers were at the bottom of the Jarman ocean,” forgetting in the heat of his rhetoric to make it plain to his audience whether he meant the writers or their writings. In University business Tatham was at war with the Hebdomadal Board, and used to brow-beat its members, accusing them of “intrigues, cabals, and subterfuges.” He was therefore well-hated by many of his contemporaries, and a great subject of those pasquils and lampoons which, orally and in writing, circulated freely in the University. In several of these Tatham had been compared in features and disposition to the “devil,” who, after the fashion of the similar grotesque at Lincoln Cathedral, “looked over Lincoln” from his niche on the quadrangle-side of the gate-tower. Irritated at this, Tatham ordered the leaden figure to be taken down.[191] Then came out a lampoon, longer and more bitter than any before, in which the wit consists in making the word “devil” occur as often as possible in every quatrain, and the point is to suggest that when Tatham was returning from dining out (“full of politics, learning, and port was his pate”) the devil, tired of standing so long inactive, had flown off with him into space; where leaving him, the devil returned to establish himself in person in the Rectorship and to govern the College with the help of “two imps, called tutors.” During the later years of his life Tatham availed himself of the large liberty of non-residence allowed the Rector by the then statutes, and lived chiefly in the rectory-house at Combe. There he enjoyed the pleasures of a rough country life, farming the glebe, and devoting himself with marked success to the rearing of his special breed of pigs. He rarely visited Oxford; and when he did, always brought with him in his dog-cart a pair of his pigs to be exposed for sale in the pig-market, which was then held in High Street beside All Saints Church. On these occasions his dress is described by a contemporary to have been so strictly in keeping with his favourite pursuit that he ran no risk of being mistaken for a Doctor of Divinity or the head of a College. There was, however, one occasion on which Tatham came out in his “scarlet,” with great effect. The College had some rights in the naming of the master of Skipton Grammar School, Yorkshire. On occasion of a vacancy the local governors were disposed to dispute the claim. Tatham went north, at the previous stage put on his Doctor’s robes, drove into Skipton attired in their splendour, and dazzled the opposition into acknowledging the College claim. He died on 24th April, 1834, aged 84.
As might be expected, Lincoln College did not prosper during Tatham’s rectorship. A scholarship was lost. Sir George Wheler, a Commoner of the College, had left in 1719 a yearly rent-charge of £10 on a house in St. Margaret’s parish, Westminster, to certain trustees “to pay to a poor scholar in Lincoln College that shall have been bred up in the grammar school at Wye.” From 1735 to 1759 no payment was made; and then the Rev. Granville Wheler, in recognition of arrears, increased the rent-charge to £20, and directed that if no boy was sent from Wye, the scholarship should be open to any grammar school in England. In Horner’s and Tatham’s time the matter was neglected; and the benefaction is now for ever lost to the College. Again, part of the money received from the city in payment for the grand old College garden, which by Act of Parliament was taken to form the present Market, was invested in Government securities; but the books were so carelessly kept that the exact details required by the Exchequer could not afterwards be collected from them: so that part of the property of Lincoln College is amongst those “unclaimed” dividends out of which the new Law Courts were built. It is surely unjust that the nation should thus make a College suffer for the negligence of one generation of its officers. There was also great degeneracy in the personnel of the College. Oxford was then passing through that phase of hard-drinking which within living memory still afflicted society in country places; and from this vice Lincoln College was not exempt. Several of the Fellows had curacies or small livings in the neighbourhood of Oxford, to which they rode out, as represented in a well-known cartoon of the time, on Saturday morning, returning to the College on Monday. On Monday evening, therefore, they were all met together, and preparations were made for a “wet night.” When the Fellows entered Common-room after Hall, a bottle of port was standing on the side-board for each of their number. These finished there would be a second (and as liberal) supply, and very probably after that several of them would slip out to bring an extra bottle from their private stores. Two instances of the corruptio optimi of the times—the degradation of men who had received a University education—may be cited. A Fellow of Lincoln College got into debt, and his Fellowship was sequestrated by his creditors, who allowed him a small pittance out of its proceeds, and applied the rest to the liquidation of his debts; he became an ordinary tramp, and died in the casual ward at Northampton, after holding his Fellowship for twenty-five years. An ex-Fellow, incumbent of one of the more distant and valuable College livings, got, by his own extravagance, into the clutches of the money-lenders, who sequestrated his living and confined him in Oxford Debtors’ prison, where he remained year after year till his death. When, in 1854, the new incumbent went to the living, he found that the parishioners, unable to get anything out of their Rector, had helped themselves from the Rectory-house; windows, doors, staircases, floors, slates, stones had been taken away, and the ruins, sold at auction, fetched less than £10.
The tuition in College became of the meanest and poorest stamp. The public lectures consisted in the lecturer hearing the men translate without comment a few lines of Virgil or Homer in the morning; and the informal instruction was equally paltry. One story of a Lincoln tutor of the time may be set down here, though it is probably exceptional and not typical. The narrator, an Archdeacon, “Venerable” not only by title but by years, said—“I was pupil to Mr. ——, and I did not altogether approve of his method of tuition. His method, sir, was this: I read through with him the greater part of the second extant decade of Livy, in which, as you are aware, the name of Hannibal not infrequently occurs. There was a bottle of port on the table; and whenever we came to the name of that Carthaginian general, my tutor would replenish his glass, saying, ‘Here’s that old fellow again; we must drink his health,’ never failing to suit the action to the word.”
An odd incident has to be told in connection with Tatham’s death. An examination previous to an election to a Lincoln county Fellowship had been duly announced, and on 24th April, 1834, the candidates were assembled in Hall waiting for the first paper. The opinion of his contemporaries had singled out Henry Robert Harrison of Lincoln as the favourite candidate, and it was, therefore, with some satisfaction that the other candidates learned from one of their own number, that the coach coming from Leicester had been overturned the day before, and that Harrison, who was an outside passenger by it, had had his leg broken, and would be unable to appear. The paper was now given out, and they set to it with zest; but before they had finished it a Fellow came in with a grave face, told them that a messenger had brought word that the Rector had died that morning at Combe, and that, as the College could not proceed to an election till after a new Rector had been elected, the Fellows had decided to postpone the examination. After Radford’s election the usual notice was given of the Fellowship examination; Harrison was now able to come to it; and on 5th July, 1834, he was elected.
Mention may also be made of an undergraduate of Lincoln College at this time who was famous beyond any undergraduate of his own or subsequent years. Robert Montgomery, then in the full enjoyment of the reputation of being the great poet of the century, a reputation evinced by the sale of thousands of copies of his poems, and unassailed as yet by any whisper of adverse criticism, entered the College as Commoner on 18th Feb., 1830. Although he put himself down in the Bible-Clerk’s book as son of “Robert Montgomery, esquire,” he was really of very poor parentage, and was able to come to the University only by the profits of his pen. His undergraduate contemporaries, whether because they believed it or not, used to assert that he was the son of Gomerie, a well-known clown of the day. He was mercilessly persecuted in College. Some of the forms of this persecution were little creditable to the persecutors, and had best be left unrecorded; but one instance of a practical joke on the victim’s egregious vanity may be noted. When about to enter for “Smalls” in his first term, he was persuaded to go to the Vice-Chancellor and request that a special decree should be proposed putting off his vivâ-voce till late in the vacation, “to avoid the inconveniences likely to be caused by the crowds which might be expected to attend the examination of that distinguished poet.” Montgomery took a fourth class in “Literæ Humaniores” in 1834, and was afterwards minister of Percy Chapel in London, which members of the College used occasionally to attend to listen to his florid but not ineffective preaching.
John Radford, who had succeeded Tatham as Rector in 1834, was succeeded in 1851 by James Thompson, and Thompson by Mark Pattison in 1861. Both these elections were keenly, not to say bitterly, contested, with a partizan spirit which has found its way into several pamphlets and memoirs; but when the present Rector, W. W. Merry, the thirtieth who has ruled over the College, was elected in 1884, the College Register once more recorded an election made “unanimi consensu omnium suffragantium.” He had been Fellow and Lecturer since 1859; and by his editions of Homer and Aristophanes, had charmed wider circles of pupils than that of the College lecture-room.
It will be the duty of the future historian of Lincoln College to mention with all honour the persons by whom, in these later Rectorships, the College has reasserted its good name, which in the beginning of the century had been somewhat tarnished; but for the present the gratitude of members of the Society to these must remain unexpressed in words; most of them are still alive, and we must not praise them to their face. Of Radford, however, this much may be said, that though not a strong governor, his care for the College, and his munificence to it, well earned his portrait its place among the benefactors in the College hall, and the inscription on his stone in All Saints Church, which says that he “dearly loved his College.”
One effect of Radford’s bounty must, however, be regretted. Under his will the sum of £300 was expended in putting battlements on the outer (and the earliest) quadrangle of the College, so destroying its monastic appearance, and giving to it a castellated air foreign to the time of its building and alien to its traditions. This was the last step in a process of injudicious repair, which beginning about 1819 had robbed the buildings of their quaintness and individuality. Recent work has been more reverent for the past. In 1889 the College removed the lath-and-plaster wagon-roof in the hall and restored to view the fine chestnut timbers of the original building. The liberality of resident and non-resident members of the College has in the present year provided a fund to complete this restoration of the hall, and to recover in 1891 something of the grace which it possessed in 1435, but lost in 1699.