University. As in former days the Halls had absorbed the Chamberdekyns,
so the Colleges had now almost absorbed the Halls. They did this, not by
any aggression, but by the natural advantages of wealth, their riches
always increasing with the value of land, and by their reputation. Most
of them, in addition to the members on the foundation, took students as
boarders, and they got the best and wealthiest. Universities, losing
their pristine character as marts of available knowledge, and becoming
places of general education, ceased, by a process equally natural, to be
the heritage of the poor and became the resort of the rich. The mediaeval
statutes of the Colleges still limited the foundations to the poor, but
even these in time, by cunning interpretation, were largely evaded.
Already in the later Middle Ages Oxford had received, and, it seems, too
complacently received, young scions of the aristocracy and gentry, the
precursors of the noblemen and the silk-gowned gentleman-commoners of a
later day. The Black Prince had been for a short time at Queen's
College. In the reign of Henry VI., George Neville, the brother of the
King-maker, had celebrated the taking of his degree, a process which was
probably made easy to him, with banquets which lasted through two days
on a prodigious scale. At the same time and for the same causes the
system of College instruction grew in importance and gradually ousted
the lectures of University Professors. Fellows of Colleges were not
unwilling to add to their Commons and Livery the Tutor's stipend. Thus
the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned,
and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of
the University. These Statutes were mediaeval and obsolete, but they
were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance,
and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only
interpret and enforce. Thus the mediaeval type of life and study was
stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships having been
originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the
Founders deemed themselves at liberty in regulating the elections to
give free play to their local and family partialities, and the
consequence was a mass of preferences to favoured counties or to kin.
With all these limitations, the teaching body of the University was now
practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools--as to
Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been
substituted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to
Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's--were noxious, though
in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by some
pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the
restrictions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle
Ages, when all intellectual callings were clerical, when at Oxford
gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham,
Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thorough laymen in their pursuits and
character, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if
they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from
bishoprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the
clerical and the other professions. The clergyman was henceforth a
pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Oxford
belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and
interests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained
to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and
controversy. This was the more deplorable as theology, in the mediaeval
sense, was a science almost as extinct as astrology or alchemy. Oxford
was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she
was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergymen
belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of
which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as
they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford,
though with some abatement, because there, owing to the vicinity of a
great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for
reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical.
Newton was near forfeiting his Fellowship and the means of prosecuting
his speculations because he was not in Holy Orders. Luckily, a Lay
Fellowship fell just in time. Let Founders, and all who have a passion
for regulating the lives of other people, for propagating their wills
beyond the reach of their foresight, and for grasping posterity, as it
were, with a dead hand, take warning by a disastrous example.
* * * * *
As the Colleges became the University, their Heads became the governors
of the University. They formed a Board called the Hebdomadal Council,
which initiated all legislation, while the executive was the
Vice-Chancellorship, which, though legally elective, was appropriated by
the Heads, and passed down their list in order. With a single exception,
the Headships were all clerical, and they were almost always filled by
men of temperament, to say the least, eminently conservative. Thus
academical liberty and progress slept.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH.]
On the eve of another great storm we have a pleasant glimpse of Oxford
life and study in Clarendon's picture of Falkland's circle, at Great
Tew, within ten miles of Oxford, whither, he says, "most polite and
accurate men of that University resorted, dwelling there as in a College
situated in a purer air, so that his was a University bound in a less
volume, whither his intellectual friends came not so much for repose as
study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which
laziness and consent made current in conversation." This indicates that,
while study was going on, liberal inquiry was also on foot. But clouds
again gathered, the storm again came, and once more from the
ecclesiastical quarter. The triumph of the Reformation, the accession of
a Protestant Queen, and the Chancellorship of Leicester, who, for
politic purposes, played the Puritan, had been attended by a general
expulsion or secession of the Romanising party, which left the
University for a time in the hands of the Calvinists and Low Churchmen.
Hooker, the real father of Anglicanism, had, for a time, studied Church
antiquity in the quiet quadrangle of Corpus, but he had come into
collision with Puritanism, and had, for a time, been driven away by it.
Perhaps its prevalence may have ultimately inclined him to exchange the
University for a far less congenial sphere. The clergy, however, of an
Episcopal Church, and one which laid claim to Apostolical succession,
was sure in time to come round to High Church doctrine. To High Church
doctrine the clergy of Oxford did come round under the leadership of
Laud, University Preacher, Proctor, President of St. John's College, and
afterwards Chancellor of the University. Of Laud there are several
memorials at Oxford. One is the inner quadrangle of St. John's College,
ornamented in the style of Inigo Jones, where the Archbishop and
Chancellor, in the noontide of his career, received with ecstasies of
delight, ecclesiastical, academical, and political, his doomed king and
master with the fatal woman at Charles's side. Another is a fine
collection of oriental books added to the Bodleian Library. A third and
more important is the new code of statutes framed for the reformation of
the University by its all-powerful Chancellor. A fourth is the statue of
the Virgin and Child over the porch of St. Mary's Church, which, as
proof of a Romanising tendency, formed one of the charges against the
Archbishop, though it was really put up by his Chaplain. The fifth is
the headless corpse which lies buried in the Chapel of St. John's
College, whither pious hands conveyed it after the Restoration. Laud was
a true friend of the University and of learned men, in whom, as in
Hales, he respected the right of inquiry, and to whom he was willing to
allow a freedom of opinion which he would not allow to the common herd.
He was not so much a bigot as a martinet. It was by playing the martinet
in ecclesiastical affairs that he was brought into mortal collision with
the nation. In the code of statutes which by his characteristic use of
autocratic power he imposed on Oxford the martinet is betrayed; so is
the belief in the efficacy of regulation. We see the man who wrecked a
kingdom for the sake of his forms. Nor had Laud the force to deliver
University education from the shackles of the Middle Ages and the
scholastic system. But the code is dictated by a genuine spirit of
reform, and might have worked improvement had it been sustained by a
motive power.
* * * * *
The period of the Civil War is a gap in academical history. Its
monuments are only traces of destruction, such as the defacement of
Papistical images and window paintings by the Puritan soldiery, and the
sad absence of the old College plate, of which two thousand five hundred
ounces went to the Royal mint in New Inn Hall, only a few most sacred
pieces, such as the Founder's drinking-horn at Queen's, and the covered
cup, reputed that of the Founder, at Corpus, being left to console us
for the irreparable loss. Exeter College alone seems to have shown
compunction; perhaps there had remained in her something of the free
spirit for which in the days of Wycliffe she had been noted. Art and
taste may mourn, but the University, as a centre of Episcopalianism, had
little cause to complain; for the war was justly called the Bishops'
war, and by the Episcopal Church and the Queen, between them, Charles
was brought to the block. Oxford was bound by her ecclesiasticism to
the Royal cause, and she had the ill luck to be highly available as a
place of arms from her position between the two rivers, while she formed
an advanced post to the Western country in which the strength of the
King's cause lay. During those years the University was in buff and
bandolier, on the drill ground instead of in the Schools, while the
Colleges were filled with the exiled Court and its ghost of a
Parliament. Traces of works connecting the two rivers were not long ago
to be seen, and tradition points to the angle in the old city wall under
Merton College as the spot where Windebank, a Royalist officer, was shot
for surrendering his post. There was a reign of garrison manners as
well as of garrison duties, and to the few who still cared for the
objects of the University, even if they were Royalists, the surrender of
the city to the Parliament may well have been a relief.
* * * * *
Then came Parliamentary visitation and the purge, with the inevitable
violence and inhumanity. Heads and Fellows, who refused submission to
the new order of things, were turned out. Mrs. Fell, the wife of the
Dean of Christ Church, deposed for Royalism, refused to quit the
Deanery, and at last had to be carried out of the quadrangle, venting
her wrath in strong language as she went, by a squad of Parliamentary
musketeers. But the Puritans put in good men: such as Owen, who was
made Dean of Christ Church; Conant, who was made Rector of Exeter;
Wilkins, who was made Warden of Wadham; and Seth Ward, the
mathematician, who was made President of Trinity College. Owen and
Conant appear to have been model Heads. The number of students
increased. Evelyn, the Anglican and Royalist, visiting Oxford, seems to
find the academical exercises, and the state of the University
generally, satisfactory to his mind. He liked even the sermon, barring
some Presbyterian animosities. Nor did he find much change in College
Chapels. New College was "in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the
scrupulosity of the times." The Chapel of Magdalen College, likewise,
was "in pontifical order," and the organ remained undemolished. The
Protectorate was tolerant as far as the age allowed. Evelyn was
cordially received by the Puritan authorities and hospitably
entertained. Puritanism does not seem to have been so very grim,
whatever the satirist in "The Spectator" may say. Tavern-haunting and
swearing were suppressed. So were May-poles and some innocent
amusements. But instrumental music was much cultivated, as we learn from
the Royalist and High Church antiquary Anthony Wood, from whom, also, we
gather that dress, though less donnish, was not more austere. Cromwell,
having saved the Universities from fanatics who would have laid low all
institutions of worldly learning, made himself Chancellor of Oxford, and
sought to draw thence, as well as from Cambridge, promising youths for
the service of the State. Even Clarendon admits that the Restoration
found the University "abounding in excellent learning," notwithstanding
"the wild and barbarous depopulation" which it had undergone; a
miraculous result, which he ascribes, under God's blessing, to "the
goodness and richness of the soil, which could not be made barren by all
the stupidity and negligence, but choked the weeds, and would not suffer
the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring
up." Puritanism might be narrow and bibliolatrous, but it was not
obscurantist nor the enemy of science. We see this in Puritan Oxford as
well as in Puritan Harvard and Yale. In Puritan Oxford the scientific
circle which afterwards gave birth to the Royal Society was formed. Its
chief was Warden Wilkins, and it included Boyle, Wallis, Seth Ward, and
Wren. It met either in Wilkins's rooms at Wadham, or in those of Boyle.
Evelyn, visiting Wilkins, is ravished with the scientific inventions and
experiments which he sees. On the stones of Oxford, Puritanism has left
no trace; there was hardly any building during those years. There were
benefactions not a few, among which was the gift of Selden's Library.
Upon the Restoration followed a Royalist proscription, more cruel, and
certainly more lawless, than that of the Puritans had been. All the good
Heads of the Commonwealth era were ejected, and the Colleges received
back a crowd of Royalists, who, during their exclusion, had probably
been estranged from academical pursuits. Anthony Wood himself is an
unwilling witness to the fact that the change was much for the worse.
"Some Cavaliers that were restored," he says, "were good scholars, but
the majority were dunces." "Before the War," he says in another place,
"we had scholars who made a thorough search in scholastic and polemical
divinity, in humane learning and natural philosophy, but now scholars
study these things not more than what is just necessary to carry them
through the exercises of their respective Colleges and the University.
Their aim is not to live as students ought to do, temperate, abstemious,
and plain in their apparel, but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and
horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in
gay apparel and long periwigs." Into the Rectorship of Exeter, in place
of the excellent Conant, was put Joseph Maynard, of whom Wood says,
"Exeter College is now much debauched by a drunken Governor; whereas,
before, in Doctor Conant's time, it was accounted a civil house, it is
now rude and uncivil. The Rector is good-natured, generous, and a good
scholar, but he has forgot the way of College life, and the decorum of a
scholar. He is much given to bibbing, and when there is a music meeting
in one of the Fellow's chambers, he will sit there, smoke, and drink
till he is drunk, and has to be led to his lodgings by the junior
Fellows." This is not the only evidence of the fact that drinking,
idling, and tavern-haunting were in the ascendant. Study as well as
morality, having been the badge of the Puritan, was out of fashion.
Wilkins's scientific circle took its departure from Oxford to London,
there to become the germ of the Royal Society. The hope was gone at
Oxford of a race of "young men provided against the next age, whose
minds, receiving the first impressions of sober and generous knowledge,
should be invincibly armed against all the encroachments of enthusiasm."
The presence of the merry monarch, with his concubines, at Oxford, when
his Parliament met there, was not likely to improve morals. Oxford sank
into an organ of the High Church and Tory party, and debased herself by
servile manifestos in favour of government by prerogative.
Non-conformists were excluded by the religious tests, the operation of
which was more stringent than ever since the passing of the Act of
Uniformity. The love of liberty and truth embodied in Locke was expelled
from Christ Church; not, however, by the act of the College or of the
University, but by Royal warrant, though Fell, Dean of Christ Church,
bowed slavishly to the tyrant's pleasure; so that Christ Church may look
with little shame on the portrait of the philosopher, which now hangs
triumphant in her Hall. The Cavaliers did not much, even in the way of
building. The Sheldonian Theatre was given them by the Archbishop, to
whom subscriptions had been promised, but did not come in, so that he
had to bear the whole expense himself. He was so deeply disgusted that
he refused ever to look upon the building.
* * * * *
Over the gateway of University College stands the statue of James II.
That it should have been left there is a proof both of the ingrained
Toryism of old Oxford, and of the mildness of the Revolution of 1688.
Obadiah Walker, the Master of the Colleges, was one of the political
converts to Roman Catholicism, and it was in ridicule of him that "Old
Obadiah, Ave Maria," was sung by the Oxford populace. A set of rooms in
the same quadrangle bears the trace of its conversion into a Roman
Catholic Chapel for the king. It faces the rooms of Shelley. Reference
was made the other day, in an ecclesiastical lawsuit, to the singular
practice which prevails in this College, of filing out into the
ante-chapel after the sacrament to consume the remains of the bread and
wine, instead of consuming them at the altar or communion table. This
probably is a trace of the Protestant reaction which followed the
transitory reign of Roman Catholicism under Obadiah Walker. All are
familiar with the Magdalen College case, and with the train of events by
which the most devoutly royalist of Universities was brought, by its
connection with the Anglican Church and in defence of the Church's
possessions, into collision with the Crown, and arrayed for the moment
on the side of constitutional liberty. After the Revolution the recoil
quickly followed. Oxford became the stronghold of Jacobitism, the scene
of treasonable talk over the wine in the Common Room, of riotous
demonstrations by pot-valiant undergraduates in the streets, of Jacobite
orations at academical festivals, amid frantic cheers of the assembled
University, of futile plotting and puerile conspiracies which never put
a man in the field. "The king to Oxford sent a troop of horse." But the
troop of horse was not called upon to act. There was a small Hanoverian
and constitutional party, and now and then it scored a point against its
adversaries, who dared not avow their disloyalty to the reigning
dynasty. A Jacobite Proctor, having intruded into a convivial meeting of
Whigs, they tendered him the health of King George, which, for fear of
the treason law, he was fain to drink upon his knees.
* * * * *
[Illustration: STAIRCASE, CHRIST CHURCH.]
In the early part of the eighteenth century there was some intellectual
life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars,
and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and
desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political
homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar
and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soaring
monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the
controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church,
though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some
learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the
eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of
the University. The very portraits on the College walls disclose the
void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which,
as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of
endowments, fell upon Oxford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by
the increase in value of their estates, become rich, some of them very
rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth
thirty thousand pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now.
Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the
Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing
among themselves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase
in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no
share in the administration. The statutes of mediaeval Founders had
become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, notwithstanding the oath
taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the
interest of sinecurists against the public. Nor were any other duties
assumed. A few of the Fellows in each College added to their income by
holding the tutorships, the functions of which they usually performed in
the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects,
while most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the
Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trulliberian
luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by
their deep but dull potations excusing the brisk intemperance of youth.
Even the obligation to residence was relaxed, and at last practically
annulled, so that a great part of the Fellowships became sinecure
stipends held by men unconnected with the University. About the only
restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads
had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth
downwards there had been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony
Wood and other academical precisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at
least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to have afforded some
grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the
Fellows, the statute, being not constructive, but express, could not be
evaded except by stealth, and by an application of the aphorism then
current, that he might hold anything who would hold his tongue. The
effect of this, celibacy being no longer the rule, was to make all the
Fellows look forward to the benefices, of a number of which each College
was the patron, and upon which they could marry. Thus devotion to a life
of study or education in College, had a Fellow been inclined to it, was
impossible, under the ordinary conditions of modern life. Idleness,
intemperance, and riot were rife among the students, as we learn from
the novels and memoirs of the day. Especially were they the rule among
the noblemen and gentlemen-commoners, who were privileged by their birth
and wealth, and to whom by the servility of the Dons every license was
allowed. Some Colleges took only gentlemen-commoners, who paid high
fees and did what they pleased. All Souls' took no students at all, and
became a mere club which, by a strange perversion of a clause in their
statutes, was limited to men of high family. The University as a
teaching and examining body had fallen into a dead swoon. Few of the
Professors even went through the form of lecturing, and the statutory
obligation of attendance was wholly disregarded by the students. The
form of mediaeval disputations was kept up by the farcical repetition of
strings of senseless syllogisms, which were handed down from generation
to generation of students. The very nomenclature of the system had
become unmeaning. Candidates for the theological degree paced the
Divinity School for an hour, nominally challenging opponents to
disputation, but the door was locked by the Bedel, that no opponent
might appear. Examinations were held, but the candidates, by feeing the
University officer, were allowed to choose their own examiners, and they
treated the examiner after the ordeal. The two questions, "What is the
meaning of Golgotha?" and "Who founded University College?" comprised
the examination upon which Lord Eldon took his degree. A little of that
elegant scholarship, with the power of writing Latin verses, of which
Addison was the cynosure, was the most of which Oxford could boast.
Even this there could hardly have been had not the learned languages
happened to have formed an official part of the equipment of the
clerical profession. Of science, or the mental habit which science
forms, there was none. Such opportunities for study, such libraries,
such groves, a livelihood so free from care could scarcely fail, now and
then, to give birth to a learned man, an Addison, a Lowth, a Thomas
Warton, an Elmsley, a Martin Routh.
* * * * *
The Universities being the regular finishing schools of the gentry and
the professions, men who had passed through them became eminent in after
life, but they owed little or nothing to the University. Only in this
way can Oxford lay claim to the eminence of Bishop Butler, Jeremy
Bentham, or Adam Smith, while Gibbon is her reproach. The figures of
Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose ponderous twin statues sit side by
side in the Library of University College, were more academical,
especially that of Lord Stowell, who was Tutor of his College, and held
a lectureship of Ancient History. Here and there a Tutor of the better
stamp, no doubt, would try to do his duty by his pupils. A rather
pathetic interest attaches to Richard Newton, who tried to turn Hart
Hall into a real place of education, and had some distinguished pupils,
among them Charles Fox. But the little lamp which he had kindled went
out in the uncongenial air. On the site, thanks to the munificence of
Mr. Baring, now stands Hertford College. Johnson's residence at Pembroke
College was short, and his narrative shows that it was unprofitable,
though his High Church principles afterwards made him a loyal son and
eulogist of the University. One good effect the interdiction of marriage
had. It kept up a sort of brotherhood, and saved corporate munificence
from extinction by the private interest of fathers of families. As the
College revenues increased, building went on, though after the false
classical fashion of the times and mostly for the purpose of College
luxury. Now rose the new quadrangle of Queen's, totally supplanting the
mediaeval College, and the new buildings at Magdalen and Corpus. A plan
is extant, horrible to relate, for the total demolition of the old
quadrangle of Magdalen, and its replacement by a modern palace of
idleness in the Italian style. To this century belong Peckwater and
Canterbury quadrangles, also in the classical style, the first redeemed
by the Library which fills one side of the square, and which has a heavy
architectural grandeur as well as a noble purpose. To the eighteenth
century we also mainly owe the College gardens and walks as we see them;
and the gardens of St. John's, New College, Wadham, Worcester, and
Exeter, with the lime walk at Trinity and the Broadwalk--now unhappily
but a wreck--at Christ Church, may plead to a student's heart for some
mitigation of the sentence on the race of clerical idlers and
wine-bibbers, who, for a century, made the University a place, not of
education and learning, but of dull sybaritism, and a source, not of
light, but of darkness, to the nation. It is sad to think how different
the history of England might have been had Oxford and Cambridge done
their duty, like Harvard and Yale, during the last century.
* * * * *
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH--FRONT.]