revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reformation,
were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All
Souls', and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to what was the
centre of academical life. Magdalen we recognise in the distance by the
most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in
being connected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members
served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endowment. Its
Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at
Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became
Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too
freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Reaction, burned
Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true
students in theology, who would "defend the mysteries of the sacred page
against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most
holy pearls." His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind,
carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the
expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private
heretical tenets, and in particular the tenets of "that heretical sect
lately sprung up which assails the sacraments, diverse orders and
dignities, and properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen
and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the
Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates
would have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that their little
College of true theologians would one day number among its Fellows John
Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would
not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief
of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history
of these foundations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that
they can impress their will upon posterity.
All Souls' was designed by its Founder, Archbishop Chicheley, _ad
orandum_ as well as _ad studendum_; it was to serve the purpose of a
chantry not less than of a College. The sculptured group of souls over
the gateway in High Street denotes that the Warden and Fellows were to
pray for the souls of all Christian people. But particularly were they
to pray for the souls of "the illustrious Prince Henry, late King of
England, of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls,
Barons, Knights, Esquires, and others who fell in the war for the Crown
of France." Of that unhappy war Chicheley had been the adviser; and
seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by
Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated
Establishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have
felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new
reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S PULPIT.
Magdalen College, First Quadrangle.]
Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor
of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political
storm to found a house of learning. Of all the houses of learning in
England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the
loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled
quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the
winter's moon. Some American architect, captivated by the graces of
Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University
in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the
presence of Richard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king;
and this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those
fierce times of dynastic change, Richard, before the murder of his
nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a
usurper at all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him, as still more
notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the
Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the University, was something
like an English counterpart of the mixture in the Italian Renaissance of
culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete
in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent attention to the exercises,
Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among the
architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white.
It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white
rose. A new relation between College and University is inaugurated by
the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the
University at large.
* * * * *
The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its
co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special
historic interest, and its importance belongs to later times. It
absorbed several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen
nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch.
* * * * *
The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by
the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the
real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a
very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic
countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of
truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of
literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age
of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of
Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried
culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims
the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way,
as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry
VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of
books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and
which was the germ of the University Library. Soon Erasmus will visit
Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and
cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the
humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its
opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and
who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in
identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in
the original was subversive of the mediaeval faith. Again, as in the
cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in
old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning.
Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of
Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and
trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul
that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young
monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford.
He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College
instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented
as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods
for a company of bussing monks whose end and fall we ourselves may live
to see? No, no. It is more meet, a great deal, that we should have care
to provide for the increase of learning and for such as by their
learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the
prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an
enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable.
The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the
highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a
bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual
honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of
the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects
of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is
to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin
authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in
the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is
not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional,
tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a
Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the
mediaeval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but
the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine
the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College
only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the
College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent
times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis
Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the
humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder
with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in
imagination did he see his literary bees at work.
* * * * *
Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which,
"swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It
was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of
Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but
of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the
lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of
the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St.
Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the
grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan
taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have
been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power
as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the
Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained
relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample
and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the
great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and
filled with those portraits of _Alumni_, which, notwithstanding the
frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall
was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had
Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of
scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and
Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X.
in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church
but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a
refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of
care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to
the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into
it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst
of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with
clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been
gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he
had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity
he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had
set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for
mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused
endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with
him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but
ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with
confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete
condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to
the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of
obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where
the portrait of the Cardinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the
outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the
College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the
Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a
symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall.
* * * * *
Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious
revolution, the monuments of which are traces of destruction and records
of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices
were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate,
though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to
rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed
because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least
to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes
of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College,
while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to
be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious
revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of
Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with
that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of
triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and
buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious,
rescued the remains, and guarded against a repetition of the outrage, in
case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the
Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder
recumbent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of
the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the
prison over the neighbouring gate of the city, from the window of which
Cranmer, then confined there, witnessed the burning of Latimer and
Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity
School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed
different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in
which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly
recanting his recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed
it should burn first. College archives record the expulsion,
readmission, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined
to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance.
For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre
of religious strife.
* * * * *
Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester,
as Chancellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles to
keep out Romanists; King James, that to the three articles of the
Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores
of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the
consciences of mere boys. The Universities were thus taken from the
nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as
dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical
with the nation.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE--GARDEN FRONT.]
In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins
of the monastic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet
old quadrangle is curiously mated with a fantastic Chapel of much later
date, was founded out of the ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine
House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was one of that group of highly
educated lay statesmen, eminent both in the councils of kings and among
the patrons of learning, which succeeded the great Prelates of the
Middle Ages. He was a Catholic, as his statutes show; but a liberal
Catholic, not unfriendly to light, though little knowing perhaps whither
it would lead him. Among his friends was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who
bequeathed to him the splendid whistle, then used to call servants,
which is seen round his neck in his portrait. Another of his friends was
Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality by recommending him to
enjoin in his statutes the study of Greek. St. John's College, again,
rose out of the wreck of a Bernardine House. The Founder was not a
statesman or a prelate, but a great citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime
Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed wealth in trade, and made a noble
use of it. White also was of the olden faith. That the storm was not
over when his College was founded is tragically shown by the fate of
Campion, who, when White was laid in the College Chapel, preached the
funeral sermon, and afterwards becoming a Jesuit and an emissary of
his Order, was brought to the rack and to the scaffold. There was also a
great secession of Fellows when the final rupture took place between
Rome and Elizabeth. In the group of cultivated Knights and statesmen,
who patronised learning and education, may be placed Sir William Petre,
the second Founder of Exeter College, whose monument is its old
quadrangle, and Sir Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the Bodleian
Library. If Petre and Bodley were Protestants, while Pope and White were
Catholics, the difference was rather political than religious. In
religion the public men changed with the national government, little
sharing the passions of either theological party.
* * * * *
Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart
times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in
contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second
Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their
pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the
special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting
and impressive it is not necessary to be mediaeval. At the same time
Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for
the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date.
Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to
recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western
land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to
found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to
found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the
prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of
the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the
mediaeval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after
about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a
school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as
an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In
the mediaeval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to
the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations
of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy
generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly
extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it
is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her
husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels
opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she
was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her,
forbade him by statute to marry any other woman.
[Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE--GARDEN FRONT.]
* * * * *
These foundations, followed by that of Pembroke and the building of the
South quadrangle of Merton, of the South quadrangle of Lincoln, of the
West front of St. John's, of the quadrangle and hall of Exeter, of part
of the quadrangle of Oriel, of the West quadrangle of University
College, as well as of the Bodleian Library, the Schools' quadrangle,
the Convocation House, and of the gateway of the Botanic Garden, prove
that, though the old University system, with its scholastic exercises,
had become hollow, there was life in Oxford, and the interest of patrons
of learning was attracted to it during the period between the
Reformation and the Rebellion. It was also felt to be a centre of power.
Elizabeth twice visited it, once in the heyday of her youthful glory,
and again in her haggard decline. On the first occasion she exerted with
effect those arts of popularity which were the best part of her
statesmanship. On both occasions she was received with ecstatic flattery
and entertained with academical exercises at tedious length, and plays,
to our taste not less tedious, performed in College Halls. Her successor
could not fail to exhibit himself in a seat of learning, where he felt
supreme, and, to do him justice, was not unqualified, to shine. To his
benignity the University owes the questionable privilege of sending two
members to the House of Commons, whereby it became entangled in
political as well as in theological frays.
* * * * *