Schools, School-Books and Schoolmasters / A Contribution to the History of Educational Development in Great Britain

by William Carew Hazlitt

A feeling in favour of a reform in these arrangements had, as has been mentioned, arisen when Hawkins wrote for the free school at Hadleigh in Suffolk his play entitled Apollo Shroving, 1627, where one of the characters desires the Prologue to speak what he has to say in honest English, for all their sakes, and describes the predilection for employing Latin as more appropriate to the University.

Occasionally, instead of plays, there were musical entertainments; and the custom of signalising the termination of the school-work seems to have been followed by the private academies.

But the antipathy to change and the temptation to a display of erudition have always proved too strong an obstacle to improvement; and when the writer was last present at this anniversary, the ancient precedent was still in force, and the Court of the Merchant Taylors and general company listened in respectful silence to interlocutions or monologues as mysterious to them as the Writing on the Wall.

III. William Dugard, head-master from 1646 to 1660, so far as his light and information were capable of carrying him, did, no doubt, good service to the Company and institution with which he was during so many years associated. But, on the ground of misconduct and negligence, his employers thought proper, on the 27th December 1660, to discharge him from the place of chief schoolmaster, giving him, however, till the following Midsummer to find another appointment.

Dugard states in An humble Remonstrance Presented to the Right Worshipfull Company of Merchant-Tailors, Maii 15, 1661, that the Company assigned no cause for their proceeding; but he says at the same time: “It is alleged in your Order, That many Complaints have been frequently from time to time made to the Master and Wardens of the Company, and to the Court, by the parents and friends of the young Scholars, of the neglect of the chief-Master’s dutie in that School, and of the breach of the Companie’s Orders and Ordinances thereof.”

To this Dugard replies that he had never heard of any complaints in all the seventeen years he had filled the post, and he declared his readiness to submit in silence if any parent could prove aught against him. He had been in the profession, he said, thirty-three years, and “in all places wherever I came, I have had ample testimonials of my faithfulness and diligence, and my scholars’ proficiency.”

The writer attributes his fall to the presence among the members of the Court of persons unjustly hostile to him, who had represented that the school was suffering from his administration, and would go down unless some timely remedy was adopted.

But Dugard averred that the decline of the school and the shrinkage of its numbers were due to the Company’s order of March 16, 1659, which forbad him to admit any scholar who had not a warrant from the Master and Wardens, and the consequence was that parents, not caring to go to the Court, took their sons elsewhere. As many as sixty boys had been lost in this way within a twelvemonth, he maintains. “True it is,” he pleads, “that an hundred years ago, when it was an hard matter to get a Scholar to read Greek, there was such an Order made, that no Scholar should be taught in the School, unless first admitted by the Company. But afterward there was found a necessity to dispense with that Order, and so it was with my Predecessors; which I can prove for above threescore years bygone. They (and my self too from them, untill the last year) had such an indulgence that did not limit or restrain them to admit quarterly-Scholars, who did not immediately depend on the Charity of the Company: and the Motto engraven on the School speaks as much; Nulli præcludor, Tibi pateo.”

The Remonstrance did not please the Merchant Taylors, and in a second document, dated June 12, 1661, Dugard tried to soften what he had said; for his language, it must be allowed, was rather energetic, considering that he was in the hands of those who had the power to act as they judged fit.

Whatever the precise result was, there are two or three curious points brought out in the course of the head-master’s vindication, and one can hardly avoid a conclusion that the main cause of the discontent of the Court was not even so much the application of a portion of his time to literary pursuits, as the abuse of the permission to set up a printing-press by employing the machinery, intended only for the production of school text-books, for political publications of a republican stamp. This fact does not transpire in the tract itself, but is ascertained from the imprints to books; and moreover, in 1650, at the end of a periodical publication, he had announced himself as Printer to the Council of State; so that altogether the Merchant Taylors might be naturally afraid of incurring the displeasure of the new masters of England by retaining the holder of opinions hostile to the Stuarts.