By his example of conscientious perseverance, by his devotion to learning, and by his munificent building and endowment, Laud had brought both his College and the University to a high standard of culture and research. These were indeed the halcyon days of S. John’s, when Laud, its “second founder,” was Chancellor of the University and Primate of all England; Juxon his pious and sagacious successor as President was Bishop of London and Lord Treasurer; and Dr. Richard Baylie governed the College, whose annalist says that never was there more diligent scholar, more learned Fellow, or more prudent Head.[277] But the University soon fell on evil days; discipline was dissolved, teaching and learning were alike suspended, and the streets rang with the summons to arms. The city bore for several years the aspect at once of a camp, and of an exiled Court. In these troubles S. John’s had its full share. Scholars joined the King’s troops, Fellows were driven from their country livings, the College gave up its treasures to the Royal cause. In the College Register of 1642 is inserted the following letter—“Charles R. Trusty and well beloved, we greet you well. We are so well satisfied with your readiness and Affection to our service that we cannot doubt but you will take all occasions to express the same. And as we are ready to sell or engage any of our lands, so we have melted down our Plate for the payment of our Army raised for our defence and the preservation of the Kingdom. And having received several quantities of Plate from divers of our loving subjects we have removed our Mint hither to our City of Oxford for the coining thereof. And we do hereby desire you that you will send unto us all such plate of what kind soever which belongs to your College, promising you to see the same justly repaid unto you after the rate of 5s. the ounce for white, and 5s. 6d. for gilt plate as soon as God shall enable us. For assure yourselves we shall never let persons of whom we have so great a care to suffer for their affection unto us, but shall take special order for the repayment of what you have already lent to us according to our promise. … And we assure ourselves of the very great willingness to gratify us herein, since besides the more public considerations you cannot but know how much yourselves are concerned in our sufferings. And we shall always remember this particular service to your advantage. Given at our Court at Oxford this 6th day of Jan. 1642 (1643).”
“In answer to his Majesty’s letters,” says the Register, “it was consented and unanimously agreed by the President and Fellows of the College that the plate of the College should be delivered unto his Majesty’s use.” It was melted down, and the coin so struck was stamped with the initials of the President, Dr. Richard Baylie.
In June 1643 the King wrote again to the College, asking that some of its members should subscribe 4s. a week for a month for the support of soldiers: “we do assure you on the word of a king that this charge shall lie on you but one month.” Soon after this Laud resigned his Chancellorship in a touching letter from his prison, and in making his will showed the deepest attachment to the College where he “was bred.” Baylie, who was his executor, was not long suffered to remain in his post. The Parliamentary Commission which visited the University in January 1648 ordered that the President of S. John’s College, “being adjudged guilty of high contempt by denial of the authority of Parliament, be removed from” his office, “and accordingly the said Dr. Baylie is required forthwith to yield obedience hereunto, and to remove from the said College and quit the said place, and all emoluments, rights and appointments thereunto belonging.” They abolished the choral service, appropriating Sir William Paddy’s endowment to the increase of the President’s salary. These Commissioners, says Dr. Joseph Taylor, were men “in whom there was nothing lacking save religion, virtue, and learning,” and the oath which they required of the Fellows, for the sake of ejecting them when they refused it, was “as ridiculous as it was detestable.” In the place of the existing foundation they put as President Francis Cheynell, the zealot who had anathematized Chillingworth as he lay dying (a man, says Taylor, “non tantum fanaticus sed et furiosus”), and they filled the Fellowships with men collected anywhere and than the majority of whom “there could be nothing more ignorant or more abject.” Cheynell held the Presidency only two years, when he was obliged to make choice between it and a valuable living in Sussex. He was succeeded by one Thankful or Gracious Owen, a Fellow of Lincoln College, under whose rule the College languished in poverty and neglect until the Restoration, its property dissipated and its learning in decay.
The return of the King brought back Head and Fellows. A blank page in the College Register is followed by a lease signed by “R. Baylie,” without note or comment on his deprivation or return. The first results of the Restoration were works of piety. Before long the body of the aged Juxon was laid near the founder beneath the altar in the chapel. It was now possible to carry out the last wish of Laud himself, who in his will had desired “to be buried in the chapel of S. John Baptist College, under the altar or communion table there.” All was done privately, as he had himself directed. Yet the stillness of night, the torches and the flickering candles, the reverence of the restored foundation to the greatest and most loyal of its sons, must have given a unique solemnity to the scene. “The day then, or rather the night,” says Anthony Wood, “being appointed wherein he should come to Oxon, most of the Fellows, about sixteen or twenty in number, went to meet him towards Wheatley, and after they had met him, about seven of the clock on Friday, July 24th, 1663, they came to Oxon at ten at night, with the said number before him, and his corpse lying on a horse litter on four wheels drawn by four horses, following, and a coach after that. In the same way they went up to S. Mary’s Church, then up Cat’s Street, then to the back-door of S. John’s Grove; where, taking his coffin out, they conveyed [it] to the chapel; when Mr. Gisbey, Fellow of that house and Vice-President, had spoke a speech, they laid him inclosed in a wooden coffin in a little vault at the upper end of the chancel between the founder’s and Archbishop Juxon’s.”
The most interesting period of the College history was during the reigns of the Stuarts. The same spirit of devotion to the Church and loyalty to the throne which had animated Laud and Juxon still breathed in their successors. Tobias Rustat, Esquire, Yeoman of the Robes to Charles II., and Under Housekeeper of Hampton Court, left a large sum to endow loyal lectures—two on “the day of the horrid and most execrable murder of that most glorious Prince and Martyr”; one to be read by the Dean of Divinity, and the other by “some one of the most ingenious Scholars or Fellows whom the President shall appoint,” setting forth the “barbarous cruelty of that unparalleled parricide”; one by the Dean of Law on October 23rd, “which was the day wherein Rebellion did appear solemnly armed against Majesty”; and a fourth on the 29th of May, “setting forth the glory and happiness of that day,” which saw the birth of Charles II. and his “triumphant return.” There is in the College library a curious portrait of Charles I., over which in a minute hand several Psalms are written. Tradition has it that when the “merry monarch” visited Oxford he asked for this eccentric piece of work, and that when, on leaving, in recognition of his loyal welcome he offered to give the Fellows anything they should ask, they declared that no gift could be so precious as the restoration to them of the portrait of his father. The story, true or not, could only be told of a College which was famous as the home of devoted loyalty to the Stuarts. It was Dr. Peter Mews (or Meaux), Baylie’s successor as President, who lent his carriage horses to draw the royal cannon to Sedgmoor. When Nicholas Amherst (the author of a collection of scurrilous essays which he called after the name of the licensed buffoon at the Encænia, Terræ Filius) was expelled the College for his irregularities, he made up a plausible tale that the reason for his expulsion was that he was the only man loyal to the Hanoverian line in a nest of Jacobites. He lost no opportunity of attacking the College, with no regard for truth or consistency. Dr. Delaune (President 1698-1728) was his most prominent victim. Once, says he, that learned President was affronted in the theatre by Terrae Filius, who called out to him by name as he came in, shaking a box and dice, and crying “Jacta est alea, doctor, seven’s the main,” in allusion to “a scandalous report handed about by the doctor’s enemies, that he had lost great sums of other people’s money at dice.” But Jacobitism was an accusation much more plausible, and we are inclined not altogether to disbelieve him when he says that the Latitudinarian Hoadly was abused in a Latin oration in chapel as “iste malus logicus, pejor politicus, pessimus theologus; a bad logician, a worse statesman, and the worst of all divines.” Dr. Richard Rawlinson, who had been a gentleman commoner of the College, and left to it on his death in 1755 the bulk of his estate, was a typical antiquary and worshipper of the exiled House. His collection of letters and MSS., the researches which he made into the early history of the Foundation, are among the most cherished possessions of the College. “Ubi thesaurus ibi cor” is the motto of the urn in chapel which contains his heart. His “treasure” was divided between S. John’s and the Bodleian; his heart, which had beaten with an equal affection for the Stuarts and for the College, remained among those who shared his semi-sentimental attachment. It was said of Dr. Holmes (President 1728-48) that he was probably the first Fellow, and certainly the first Head, of the College who was loyal to the Hanoverian Succession. Almost within living memory the Fellows of S. John’s in their Common Room, “a large handsome room, the scene of a great deal of learning and a great many puns,”[278] toasted the king “over the water.” Up till the middle of the present century, indeed, it was a college of survivals. The old loyal lectures were read, the old “gaudies” held, the old rules maintained. Throughout the eighteenth century the founder’s order against absence from College was strictly observed: all permissions to be away from Oxford were carefully recorded in the Register. Leave was at first only granted on the business of the College, or the king, or a bishop; and it is said of one Dr. Sherard that he had to give up his Fellowship when he had exhausted the list of the Episcopal bench. Even Doctors of Divinity were obliged to get license to “go down.” Dr. Smith, though Master of Merchant Taylors’ School (died 1730), could not teach his boys without the College leave to be absent from Oxford. Only in recent years has iconoclastic modernism destroyed the old progresses round the College estates, formal fishing of the College waters, and festive commemoration of days of ecclesiastical or royalist note. The history of the last and of the present century lies outside the scope of this sketch, and the share that S. John’s has had in the important movements of the last seventy years is left untold. Much has undergone change, at the hands of Time and of Parliamentary Commissions; but there still lingers one feature of the old life of the University which elsewhere has passed away. S. John’s alone of all the Colleges has (1891) no married Fellows; thus here as it can scarcely be elsewhere, the College life is most closely centered within the College walls.
XVI.
JESUS COLLEGE.
By the Rev. Ll. Thomas, M.A., Vice-Principal of Jesus College.
Jesus College was the first Protestant Society established in Oxford, and its appearance marks an epoch in the history of the University; for “if Christ Church was the last and grandest effort of expiring Mediævalism, if Trinity and St. John’s commemorated the re-action under Philip and Mary, Jesus, by its very name, took its stand as the first Protestant College.”[279]