Finch had nothing to recommend him save this military exploit, his good birth, and his notorious looseness of life and conscience. He was thought by the King capable of anything in the way of submission—perhaps even of conversion to Papacy—and on the death of Jeames the College, to its horror, learned that Finch had been nominated as Warden. Less courageous than the Fellows of Magdalen, the All Souls men, though they refused to elect Finch in due form, refrained from choosing any other head, and allowed the intruder to take possession of the Warden’s house and prerogatives. Finch, though a man of some learning, made as disreputable a head of the College as might have been expected: he jobbed, he drank, he ran into debt, and finally he was found to have embezzled College money. But when William of Orange landed, his Toryism disappeared, and he saved his place by suddenly becoming a hot Whig. All the punishment that he ever got for his usurpation, was that he was compelled to acknowledge himself as only “pseudo-custos,” and to submit to be re-appointed to his Wardenship in a more legal way. He presided for sixteen years over the College with much disrepute, and died in 1702—with the bailiffs in his house.
Finch was succeeded by Bernard Gardiner, a very different character. Gardiner was a good scholar and a good man, but decidedly testy and choleric; in politics he was that somewhat abnormal creature, a Hanoverian Tory, and succeeded in earning the dislike of both parties. He was the Vice-Chancellor who deprived Hearne of his place in the Bodleian for Jacobitism, yet he also fought a furious battle with Wake, the Whig Archbishop, who was his Visitor. With a large faction of the Fellows he had equally numerous passages of arms, yet still the College flourished under him. It was in his time that the great back quadrangle, the new Hall, and the new Warden’s lodgings, were built.
These spacious buildings were erected not with College money, but by generous and long-continued benefactions from the Fellows. Dr. Clarke, the Secretary of War, was the chief donor: “God send us many such ample benefactors” wrote his grateful Warden in the College book. He built the Warden’s lodgings out of his own pocket, besides paying for the “restoration” of the east end of the chapel. This consisted in painting over Streater’s bad fresco[195] a much better production by Sir James Thornhill—the somewhat heathenish but spirited Apotheosis of Chichele—which was taken down in our own generation. Below the fresco were placed two marble pillars, supporting an entablature, which framed Raphael Mengs’ pleasing “Noli me tangere,” the picture which now adorns the ante-chapel. After Clarke the most generous donors were Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, who gave £1350 in all; Mr. Greville, who built the new cloister; and General Stuart. Hawkesmoor, Wren’s favourite pupil, was their architect; it is to him that we owe the strange but not ineffective twin-towers, the classic cloister, the vaulted buttery, and the lofty hall with its bare mullionless windows.
But there was one Fellow in the reign of Anne who was even a greater benefactor than Clarke and Lloyd. It was to Christopher Codrington that the College owes the magnificent library, which so far surpasses all its rivals in the University, save the Bodleian alone. Codrington was a kind of Admirable Creighton, poet and soldier, bibliophile and statesman. In the same year he gained military promotion for his gallantry at the siege of Namur, welcomed William III. to Oxford in a speech whose elegant Latinity softened even Jacobite critics, and undertook the government of the English West India Islands. He died at Barbadoes in 1710, and left to his well-loved College 12,000 books, valued at £6000, with a legacy of £10,000 to build a fit edifice to hold them, and a fund to maintain it. The Codrington Library, commenced in 1716, took many years to build, but at last stood completed, a far more successful work than the hall which faces it across the quadrangle. It is 200 feet long, and holds with ease the 70,000 books to which the College library has now swollen. A public reading-room was added to it in 1867, and it is for students of law and history as much of an institution as the Bodleian itself.
The eighteenth century gave All Souls many brilliant Fellows, but it destroyed the original purpose of the foundation, and ended by making it an abuse and a byword. It is only necessary to mention the names of a few of its members, to show how large a share of the great men of the time passed through the College. It claims the great Blackstone—for many years an indefatigable bursar—the second name to Wren among the list of Fellows. Two Lord Chancellors came from it, Lord Talbot of Hensoll, and Lord Northington; Young the poet was a resident for many years; one Archbishop, Vernon Harcourt of York, and eight Bishops had been Fellows. With them, though elected in the opening years of the present century, must be mentioned Reginald Heber, the first and greatest of our missionary prelates.
But in spite of these great names, the College—like the whole University—was in a bad way. Two abuses destroyed its usefulness. The first was the introduction of non-residence. Down to the reign of Anne, a Fellow who left Oxford without the animus revertendi, forfeited his Fellowship. Every one quitting the College, even for a few months, had to obtain a temporary leave of absence, and to state his intention to return. Gradually Fellows began to devise ingenious excuses for prolonged non-residence; the favourite ones were that they were about to study physic, and must therefore travel; or that they were in the service of the Crown, and must be excused on public grounds. The test case on which the battle was finally fought out was that of Blencowe, a Fellow who had become “Decypherer to the Queen” (interpreter of the cyphers so much used in despatches at that time). Warden Gardiner strove to make him resign, but Blencowe moved Sunderland, the Secretary of State, to interfere in his behalf with the Visitor, and it was formally ruled that his service with the Crown excused him from residence, as well as from his obligation under the statutes to take orders. For the future the Fellows all found some excuse—taking out a commission in the militia was the favourite one—for saying that they were in the royal service, and thereby excused from residence. From about 1720 the number of residents goes down gradually from twenty or thirty to six or seven. The remainder of the Fellows, like Gibbon’s enemies at Magdalen, remembered to draw their emoluments, but forgot their statutory obligations.
Almost as injurious as the exemption from residence was the introduction of a new theory that Founder’s-kin candidates had an absolute preference over all others. Archbishop Wake is responsible for its recognition: a certain Robert Wood, in 1718, claimed to be elected simply on account of his birth, and the Visitor ruled that he must be admitted, in spite of the custom of the College, which had never before taken account of such a right. At first the Founder’s-kin appeared in small numbers—there are only twelve between 1700 and 1750—but about the middle of the century they appear to have suddenly woken up to the advantages of obtaining a Fellowship without condition or examination. Between 1757 and 1777 thirty-nine Fellows out of fifty-eight elected are set down as cons. fund. in the College books. Archbishop Cornwallis in 1777 ruled that it was not obligatory upon the College that more than ten of the Fellows should be of Founder’s kin, and from this time forth the claim of Founder’s kin had no direct influence upon the elections. But the doctrine had done its work. It brought the Fellowships within a charmed circle of county families, outside of which the College rarely looked when the morrow of All Souls Day came round.
The effect of this was to create a society of an abnormal sort in the midst of a group of Colleges which, whatever their shortcomings may have been, continued to make a profession of study and teaching. The Fellows were men of good birth, and usually of good private means. Hence came the well-known joke that they were required to be “bene nati, bene vestiti, et moderate docti,” a saying formed, as Professor Burrows has pointed out, by ingeniously twisting the three clauses in the statutes which bade them be “de legitimo matrimonio nati,” “vestiti sicut eorum honestati convenit clericali,” and “in plano cantu competenter docti.”