But from Wolsey’s time the whole society became academic, as he had intended, rather than monastic, and its new architecture is henceforth secular. Unfortunately, it is not quite in that truest collegiate style, or rather scale, which is best represented by the quadrangles of Brasenose and Merton, St. John’s and Wadham Colleges; but its hall, gate-tower, and library have been chief sights of Oxford from their foundation. The principal quadrangles are too extensive and public-looking to wear the old Oxford air of slight seclusion and great comfort, of a life just as monastic as you please and no more.
Wolsey’s Hall[253] and Tower,[254] then, the stone kitchen, and the east, south and west sides of the great quadrangle belong to the same sixteenth century group of buildings as Magdalen Tower (1505), the Tower of St. Mary Magdalene Church at the end of Broad Street, and Brasenose Gate.
John Hygden was appointed by Wolsey the first Dean of his College. Already before the foundation of his College, and in preparation for it, Wolsey had instituted lectureships and appointed lecturers—the earliest of them in 1518, others at later dates. A few names of these may be added here. Thomas Brynknell, of Lincoln College, presided over Divinity; over Law, probably Ludovicus Vives, a Spaniard; and over Medicine, Thomas Musgrave of Merton College. Philosophy was committed to “one L. B.,” apparently Laurence Barber, M.A., Fellow of All Souls. In Mathematics the Lecturer was Kraske, or Kratcher, in fact, the well-known Kratzer, maker of the Corpus sun-dial and of that on the south side of St. Mary’s. The Greek lecture was held by Matthew Calphurne, a Greek. “Whether,” says Wood, “William Grocyn then taught it also I know not; sure it is that he, after he had been instructed in Italy by those exquisite masters, Demetrius Chalcondila, and Angelus Politianus, read the Greek tongue several years to the Oxonians.” The Rhetoric and Humanity Lecturer was John Clements of C. C. C., called “Clemens meus” by Sir Thomas More; his successor in the lecture was Thomas Lupset.
When King Henry VIII. reconstituted Wolsey’s College under his own name, he reconstituted also some of these lectures of Wolsey’s foundation, calling them “the King’s Lectures.” The King’s Lecturer in Divinity in 1535 was Richard Smyth of Merton College, who seems to have retired before the prospect of holding a disputation with Peter Martyr, who was made Canon of Christ Church in 1550. He lived to be restored to his chair in 1554; but was soon succeeded by Friar John de Villa Garcina, a young Spanish friar greatly regarded, who seems to have been the friar who tried to convert Cranmer at the last, and disappeared in 1558. Dr. Hygden was reappointed Dean by the King, but died within a few months, and was succeeded by Dr. Richard Oliver. Among the canons secular of the second foundation were Robert Wakefield, a famous Hebraist; John Leland, the learned antiquary; and Sir John Cheke, afterwards tutor to Edward VI.
The new see of Oxford remained at Oseney from 1542 to 1546; and the King transferred it to his College in Oxford by letters patent of November 4th in the latter year. He styles it in his foundation charter, “Ecclesia Christi Cathedralis Oxon ex fundatione Regis Henrici octavi;” combining the form of a Cathedral with that of an academic College. This foundation consisted of a bishop, a dean, eight canons, eight petty canons or chaplains, a gospeller and a postiller (Bible-clerk), eight singing-clerks, eight choristers and their master, a schoolmaster and usher, an organist, sixty scholars or students, and forty “children,” corresponding we presume to the junior students of later days. Perhaps the children, as in later days occasionally, proved too childish; at all events the whole scholastic part of the establishment, usher and all, was soon replaced by one hundred students, who, with the one “outcomer” of the Thurston foundation,[255] are still nightly told (or tolled) by a corresponding number of strokes on “the mighty Tom,” or great bell. Gates are closed all over Oxford five minutes after it is concluded.
A royal foundation by King or minister, “whose hand searches out all the land,” is more likely to come in contact with history than a private one; and Christ Church was soon involved in the early troubles of the Reformation. Wolsey had done more and other things than he knew of in inviting his Cambridge scholars to Cardinal College. One may say that the first Christ Church men had true martyrs among them; certainly that they were early made to face danger and death for the faith that was in them. Anthony Dalaber’s description of the scene in “Frideswide,” on the arrest of Garrett and discovery of his books, as given in Froude’s history, vol. ii. p. 48, sqq., is not to be omitted. He had just sent forth poor Garrett from his Gloucester Hall rooms, in such lay-clothes as he possessed, only to be taken at Bristol; and went himself to Frideswide or Cardinal College (he uses both terms), “to speak with that worthy martyr of God, Master Clark,” soon to perish in the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln; with the words “Crede et manducasti,” when Communion was refused him at the last. Dalaber takes Corpus on his way, having “faithful brethren” there, as might have been expected in Fox’s new foundation. He passes through Peckwater Inn, we presume, and through the half-finished buildings of the new quadrangle, and reaches the half-ruined Church, not yet Cathedral. “Evensong was begun,” he says; “the Dean (Hygden) and the Canons were there, in their gray amices; they were almost at Magnificat before I came thither. I stood in the choir door,[256] and heard Master Taverner play, and others of the chapel there sing, with and among whom I myself was wont to sing also; but now my singing and music were turned into sighing and musing. As I there stood, in cometh Dr. Cottisford,[257] the commissary, as fast as ever he could go, bareheaded, as pale as ashes (I knew his grief well enough); and to the dean he goeth into the choir, where he was sitting in his stall, and talked with him very sorrowfully; what, I know not, but whereof I might and did truly guess. I went aside from the choir door to see and hear more. The commissary and dean came out of the choir, wonderfully troubled as it seemed. About the middle of the church met them Dr. London,[258] puffing, blustering, and blowing, like a hungry and greedy lion seeking his prey. They talked together awhile; but the commissary was much blamed by them, insomuch that he wept for sorrow.”
Many men and women were to do the same for similar troubles in the years that were to follow; and the failure, as it seemed, of Wolsey’s best intentions as to his College must have been one of the griefs which were now beginning to accumulate round him; acting also, as it must have acted, on the perturbed spirit of his dread master.
Christ Church was founded in suffering and danger suited to the name it bears; though as yet, to do them justice, most of the persecutors seemed to have been heartily distressed at their new duties. A generation so wofully afraid of death and privation as our own should not think too harshly of the severities of men who feared neither. The sufferings of those times have certainly left their traces on the features of many of Holbein’s sitters. I remember observing this particularly in the lay portraits of his school at the late “Tudor Exhibition” in London. His faces of soldiers and country gentlemen are rather meditative than fierce; though almost always with a turn of recklessness, in reserve, as it were. They frequently express rather dubiety than doubt; as of men of conscience whom conscience might endanger.
Before passing to another crisis of history, it seems best to bring our account of the College buildings to the middle of the present century—for the later nineteenth century has done more than any other period in judicious repair and effective restoration.
In 1630, Brian Duppa being Dean, the choir suffered a sweeping restoration, when many gravestones and monuments were destroyed, and others removed to the aisles, having been duly deprived of their brasses. Some of them bore “Saxon” inscriptions (Gutch’s Wood’s Colleges and Halls, p. 462). There certainly were chapters in those days, with the average disregard for earlier dates than their own, and for the interesting heraldry of the cathedral, which extended, as Dr. Ingram says, “from the blazonry of Montacute, Monthermer, Mountfort, and Courtenay, to the pencase and inkhorn of Zouch in the north aisle of the transept.” However, the Parliament would have done it if the capitular body had refrained. They might also have cut away all the tracery of the windows north and south; but they would not have filled the two-light holes thus obtained with Van Linge’s queer Dutch glass, some of which was extant in our undergraduate days. Dean Duppa must have been a cultured and well-meaning man of taste in the lower English Renaissance, and he wrote a life of Michael Angelo; but we shall for life retain the impression of an immense yellow pumpkin in one of the north-west windows, illustrative of the history of Jonah, which always caught our eyes in going out of chapel, and while it lasts will preserve Duppa’s name from oblivion.