“’Tis probable this venerable Dr. might have lived some yeares longer, and finish’t his century, had not the civill warres come on; wch much grieved him, that was absolute in the Colledge, to be affronted and disrespected by rude soldiers. I remember, being at the Rhetorique lecture in the hall, a foot-soldier came in and brake his hower-glasse. The Dr. indeed was just stept out, but Jack Dowch pointed at it. Our grove was the Daphne for the ladies and their gallants to walk in, and many times my Lady Isabella Thynne would make her entrys with a theorbo or lute played before her. … She was most beautiful, humble, charitable, &c., but she could not subdue one thing. I remember one time this Lady and fine Mris Fenshawe (she was wont, and my Lady Thynne, to come to our chapell, mornings, halfe dressed like angells) would have a frolick to make a visit to the President. The old Dr. quickly perceived that they came to abuse him; he addressed his discourse to Mris Fenshawe, saying, ‘Madam, your husband and father I bred up here, & I knew your grandfather; I know you to be a gentlewoman, I will not say you are a whore, but gett you gonne for a very woman.’ The dissoluteness of the times, as I have sayd, grieving the good old Dr., his days were shortned, & dyed” in July 1643.
About this time Trinity produced among Bishops, Glemham of St. Asaph’s, Lucy of St. David’s, Ironside of Bristol, Skinner of Bristol, Oxford, and Worcester, Gore of Waterford, Parker of Oxford, Stratford of Chester, and Sheldon of Canterbury; among authors, Sir John Denham, William Chillingworth, Ant. Faringdon, Arthur Wilson, Daniel Whitby, Sir Edw. Byshe, Francis Potter, Henry Gellibrand, George Roberts, M.D., and James Harrington; among Cavalier leaders, Thomas Lord Wentworth, created Earl of Cleveland, Sir Philip Musgrave of Edenhall, and Sir Hervey Bagot; on the other side, Henry Ireton and Edmund Ludlow; besides the chivalrous William Earl of Craven, and John Lord Craven of Ryton, founder of the Craven scholarships, Cecil Calvert second Lord Baltimore, Sir Henry Blount the traveller, Milton’s friend Charles Deodate, Dr. Nathaniel Highmore, and Chief Justice Newdigate.
The next president, Hannibal Potter, was elected during the disorders of the Civil War. The college buildings were occupied during the siege of Oxford by the courtiers and officers; many of the undergraduates enlisted; the register and accounts are defective; the elections were irregular, and the number of commoners admitted dropped from thirty-two in 1633 to four in 1643, none in 1644, and one in 1645, reviving to twenty-one in 1646. The tenants fell behind with their rents, and in 1647 the arrears from estates and battels amounted to £1385; in November 1642 the King “borrowed” £200, and in the following March Sir Wm. Parkhurst gave the College a receipt for 173 pounds of plate, which included everything given by the Founder and others, except the chalice, paten, and two flagons. In 1647 and 1648 the College sent £145 13s. 4d. and £45 to the Earl of Downe and his uncle Sir Thomas Pope. In 1647 a lessee of College property, Sir Robert Napier of Luton-Hoo, deposited £160 for emergencies.
In 1648 the members of the College were cited before the Puritan Visitors of the University; eventually twenty-six submitted and nineteen were ejected; some of them never appeared, e. g. the bursar Josias Howe, who had carried off many of the College documents into the country. Nine persons were intruded by the Visitors at different times. Potter, who, as acting Vice-Chancellor, had for some time baffled the commissioners, was turned out of his house by Lord Pembroke in person, to make room for one of the Visitors, Dr. Robert Harris, of Magdalen Hall. He was an old man, but still vigorous, a good scholar, an orthodox though popular preacher; and was fairly well received by the fellows, some of whom remained without having submitted. Under him things settled down, and the numbers rose again; some scandalous stories were afterwards current of the appropriation of a large sum left behind by Potter, and of the exaction from one of the tenants of an exorbitant fine; but on the whole Harris probably tolerated much of the old régime, e. g. he allowed payments to absent fellows and the Founder’s kinsmen, and the old saints’-days were still observed as gaudys.
On his death in 1658, William Hawes was elected, and confirmed by a mandate from the Protector. In 1659 he resigned on his death-bed in order that no time might be lost in electing (illegally, since he was not a member of the College), Dr. Seth Ward, a deprived fellow of Sydney Sussex, Cambridge, who had settled at Wadham, where he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy, and one of the founders of the Royal Society. He was “very well acquainted and beloved in the College,” and less likely to be objected to by the Government than Dr. Bathurst, who was really the mainstay of the society. In 1660 Ward had to retire on the restoration of Potter (with Howe and perhaps a married fellow, Matthew Skinner), was made Dean and subsequently Bishop of Exeter, on the recommendation of the West country gentlemen in the Restoration Parliament, and died Bishop of Salisbury in 1689.
On Potter’s death in 1664 Ralph Bathurst naturally became president. Shortly afterwards “A. Wood and his mother and his eldest brother and his wife went to the lodgings of Dr. R. B., to welcome him to Oxon, who had then very lately brought to Oxon his new-married wife, Mary, the widdow of Dr. Jo. Palmer, late Warden of Alls. Coll. which Mary was of kin to the mother of A. Wood. They had before sent in sack, claret, cake, and sugar. Dr. Bathurst was then about forty-six years of age, so there was need of a wife.” He was the fifth son of George Bathurst (commoner 1605) and Elizabeth Villiers, Kettell’s step-daughter; many of his family before and after him were at Trinity, and six of his brothers are said to have died in the King’s service. He was ordained priest in 1644; but submitted to the Visitors, “neither owning their authority nor concurring in his principles with them, but rather acting separately from them,” as he said afterwards; studied medicine (M.D. 1654), and practised in Oxford and as a navy surgeon. During the persecution of the Church he assisted Bishop Skinner as archdeacon at the secret ordinations at Launton and in Trinity chapel. Skinner was the only prelate who ordained regularly, and claimed to have conferred orders on 400 to 500 persons. Bathurst was an original F.R.S., and P.R.S. in 1688; and also a classical scholar of some ability, as his remains show. In 1670 he became Dean of Wells, but refused the bishopric of Bristol, for which Lord Somers recommended him in 1691.
Bathurst was well known in the best society of his day; and his reputation, together with the traditions of the families mentioned above, attracted to Trinity in his time a large number of gentlemen-commoners of high rank. John Evelyn, for instance, whose elder brother George was a commoner in 1633, took pains to place his eldest son under his care. The University was sinking into the intellectual torpor of the eighteenth century, and we find few men of learning educated at Trinity for 100 years; the best known were Arthur Charlett the antiquarian, and William Derham, an ingenious writer on natural religion. Among the commoners were Lord Chancellor Somers, Wm. Pierrepoint Earl of Kingston, the second Earl of Shaftesbury, Sir Chas. O’Hara Lord Tyrawley, Commander-in-chief in Ireland, Spencer Compton Earl of Wilmington (the Prime Minister faute de mieux), Allen Earl Bathurst, Cobbe Archbishop of Dublin, and the heads of the families of Abdy, Broughton, Wallop, Reade, Gresley, Trollope, Shelley, Knollys, Hall, Clopton, Topham, Lennard, Dormer, Napier (of Luton-Hoo), Curzon, Shirley (Ferrers), Herbert (Herbert of Cherbury), Cobb, Bridgeman, Jodrell, Boothby, Jenkinson, and Shaw of Eltham, and many others long connected with Trinity.
In 1685, some undergraduates, under the command of Philip Bertie, volunteered against Monmouth; they drilled in the Grove, and the College paid for the keep of some horses (“Pro avenis in usū Coll. pro equo Mri. Praesidis ad militiā mutuato, 12s.” Comp. 1685). In Bathurst’s time there appears to have been some connection with the West of England, Guernsey, Wales, and South Ireland, and in the next century a large number of entries from the West Indies are found; but on the whole Trinity continued to draw mainly on the southern Midlands, especially Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.
To receive the increased numbers Bathurst almost rebuilt the college, partly from the revenues increased by the rise in the value of land, partly from contributions skilfully extracted from his old pupils and friends, and partly from his private means, on which he drew with great liberality. His chief works were the north wing of the garden quadrangle (nearly the first Palladian work in Oxford) in 1665; the west side in 1682, both from Wren’s designs; the Bathurst building, now replaced by the new president’s house; the new kitchens, &c.; and the present chapel, with the tower and gateway, from Aldrich’s plans corrected by Wren, in 1691-4. He spent £2000 on the shell, and the fittings with the carving by Gibbons were supplied by subscriptions. In his time a Fellows’ Common-room, one of the earliest, was instituted, in the room now the Bursary. Anthony à Wood used to visit it, till his passion for gossip made him objectionable to the fellows.