examination previous to an election to a Lincoln county Fellowship
had been duly announced, and on 24th April, 1834, the candidates were
assembled in Hall waiting for the first paper. The opinion of his
contemporaries had singled out Henry Robert Harrison of Lincoln as the
favourite candidate, and it was, therefore, with some satisfaction
that the other candidates learned from one of their own number, that
the coach coming from Leicester had been overturned the day before,
and that Harrison, who was an outside passenger by it, had had his leg
broken, and would be unable to appear. The paper was now given out,
and they set to it with zest; but before they had finished it a Fellow
came in with a grave face, told them that a messenger had brought
word that the Rector had died that morning at Combe, and that, as the
College could not proceed to an election till after a new Rector had
been elected, the Fellows had decided to postpone the examination.
After Radford’s election the usual notice was given of the Fellowship
examination; Harrison was now able to come to it; and on 5th July,
1834, he was elected.
Mention may also be made of an undergraduate of Lincoln College at this
time who was famous beyond any undergraduate of his own or subsequent
years. Robert Montgomery, then in the full enjoyment of the reputation
of being the great poet of the century, a reputation evinced by the
sale of thousands of copies of his poems, and unassailed as yet by any
whisper of adverse criticism, entered the College as Commoner on 18th
Feb., 1830. Although he put himself down in the Bible-Clerk’s book
as son of “Robert Montgomery, esquire,” he was really of very poor
parentage, and was able to come to the University only by the profits
of his pen. His undergraduate contemporaries, whether because they
believed it or not, used to assert that he was the son of Gomerie, a
well-known clown of the day. He was mercilessly persecuted in College.
Some of the forms of this persecution were little creditable to the
persecutors, and had best be left unrecorded; but one instance of a
practical joke on the victim’s egregious vanity may be noted. When
about to enter for “Smalls” in his first term, he was persuaded to go
to the Vice-Chancellor and request that a special decree should be
proposed putting off his _vivâ-voce_ till late in the vacation, “to
avoid the inconveniences likely to be caused by the crowds which might
be expected to attend the examination of that distinguished poet.”
Montgomery took a fourth class in “Literæ Humaniores” in 1834, and was
afterwards minister of Percy Chapel in London, which members of the
College used occasionally to attend to listen to his florid but not
ineffective preaching.
John Radford, who had succeeded Tatham as Rector in 1834, was succeeded
in 1851 by James Thompson, and Thompson by Mark Pattison in 1861.
Both these elections were keenly, not to say bitterly, contested,
with a partizan spirit which has found its way into several pamphlets
and memoirs; but when the present Rector, W. W. Merry, the thirtieth
who has ruled over the College, was elected in 1884, the College
Register once more recorded an election made “_unanimi consensu omnium
suffragantium_.” He had been Fellow and Lecturer since 1859; and by his
editions of Homer and Aristophanes, had charmed wider circles of pupils
than that of the College lecture-room.
It will be the duty of the future historian of Lincoln College
to mention with all honour the persons by whom, in these later
Rectorships, the College has reasserted its good name, which in the
beginning of the century had been somewhat tarnished; but for the
present the gratitude of members of the Society to these must remain
unexpressed in words; most of them are still alive, and we must not
praise them to their face. Of Radford, however, this much may be said,
that though not a strong governor, his care for the College, and
his munificence to it, well earned his portrait its place among the
benefactors in the College hall, and the inscription on his stone in
All Saints Church, which says that he “dearly loved his College.”
One effect of Radford’s bounty must, however, be regretted. Under
his will the sum of £300 was expended in putting battlements on the
outer (and the earliest) quadrangle of the College, so destroying its
monastic appearance, and giving to it a castellated air foreign to the
time of its building and alien to its traditions. This was the last
step in a process of injudicious repair, which beginning about 1819
had robbed the buildings of their quaintness and individuality. Recent
work has been more reverent for the past. In 1889 the College removed
the lath-and-plaster wagon-roof in the hall and restored to view the
fine chestnut timbers of the original building. The liberality of
resident and non-resident members of the College has in the present
year provided a fund to complete this restoration of the hall, and to
recover in 1891 something of the grace which it possessed in 1435, but
lost in 1699.
IX.
ALL SOULS COLLEGE.[192]
BY C. W. C. OMAN, M.A., FELLOW OF ALL SOULS.
Henry Chichele, the son of a merchant of Higham Ferrars, was one of
the first roll of scholars whom William of Wykeham nominated at the
opening of his great foundation of New College. He left Oxford with the
degree of Doctor of Laws, and soon found both ecclesiastical preferment
and a lucrative legal practice. He attached himself to the House of
Lancaster, and served Henry IV. so well that he was made Bishop of St.
Davids, and sent to represent England at the Council of Pisa. In such
favour did he stand at Court, that when Thomas Arundel, Archbishop
of Canterbury, died in the first year of Henry V., the young king
appointed Chichele to succeed him.
For the long term of thirty years Henry Chichele held the Primacy of
all England, and played no small part in the governance of the realm.
The two main characteristics of his policy, whatever may be urged in
his defence, were most unfortunate: he was a stout supporter of the
unhappy war with France, and he was a weak defender of the liberties of
the Church of England against Papal aggression. History remembers him
as the ambassador who urged so hotly the preposterous claims of Henry
V. on the French throne, and as the first Primate who refused to accept
the Archbishopric from the King and the Chapter, till he had obtained a
dispensation and a Bull of Provision from the Pope.
However great may have been his faults as a statesman, Chichele (like
his successor Laud) was throughout his life a liberal and consistent
patron of the University. He presented it with money and books, and,
mindful of what he owed to his training at New College, resolved to
copy his old master Wykeham in erecting one more well-ordered and
well-endowed house of learning, among the obscure and ill-managed halls
which still harboured the majority of the members of the University.
He first began to build a small College in St. Giles’; but this
institution--St. Bernard’s as it was called--he handed over unfinished
to the Cistercian monks, in whose possession it remained till the
Reformation, when it became the nucleus round which Sir Thomas White
built up his new foundation of St. John’s.
Chichele’s later and more serious scheme for establishing a College
was not taken up till 1437, when he had occupied the Archiepiscopal
see for twenty-three years, and was already past the age of seventy.
It was one of the darkest moments of the wretched French war; the
great Duke of Bedford had died two years before, and Paris had been
for twelve months in the hands of the French. The old Archbishop, all
whose heart had been in the struggle, and who knew that he himself was
more responsible for its commencement than any other subject of the
Crown, must have spent his last years in unceasing regrets. Perhaps
he may have felt some personal remorse when he reflected on his own
part in the furthering of the war, but certainly--whether he felt his
responsibility or not--the waste of English lives during the last
twenty years lay heavy on his soul. Hence it came that his new college
became a chantry as well as a place of education--the inmates were to
be devoted as well _ad orandum_ as _ad studendum_--hence also, we can
hardly doubt, came its name. For, as its charter drawn by Henry VI.
proceeds to recite--the prayers of the community were to be devoted,
“not only for our welfare and that of our godfather the Archbishop,
while alive, and for our souls when we shall have gone from this light,
but also for the souls of the most illustrious Prince Henry, late
King of England, of Thomas late Duke of Clarence our uncle, of the
Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and other noble subjects of
our father and ourself who fell in the wars for the Crown of France,
as also for the souls of all the faithful departed.” Not unwisely
therefore has the piety of the present generation filled the niches
of Chichele’s magnificent reredos with the statues of Clarence and
York, Salisbury and Talbot, Suffolk and Bedford, and others who struck
their last stroke on the fatal plains of France. Nor can we doubt that
the Archbishop’s meaning was well expressed in the name that he gave
to his foundation, which, copying the last words in the above-cited
foundation-charter, became known as the “Collegium Omnium Animarum
Fidelium Defunctorum in Oxonia.”
To found his College, Chichele purchased a large block of small
tenements, among them several halls, forming the angle between Catte
Street and the High Street. The longer face was toward the former
street, the frontage to “the High” being less than half that which
lay along the narrower thoroughfare. The ground lay for the most
part within the parish of St. Mary’s, with a small corner projecting
into that of St. Peter in the East. The buildings which Chichele
proceeded to erect were very simple in plan. They consisted of a single
quadrangle with a cloister behind it, and did not occupy more than half
the ground which had been purchased: the rest, where Hawkesmore’s twin
towers and Codrington’s library now stand, formed, in the founder’s
time, and for 250 years after, a small orchard and garden. Chichele’s
main building, the present “front quadrangle,” remains more entirely as
the founder left it than does any similar quadrangle in Oxford. Except
that some seventeenth century hand has cut square the cusped tops of
its windows, it still bears its original aspect unchanged. The north
side is formed by the chapel; the south contains the gate-tower with
its muniment-room above, and had the Warden’s lodgings in its eastern
angle; the west side was devoted entirely to the Fellows’ rooms, as
was also the whole of the east side, save the central part of its
first floor, where the original library was situate. Into space which
now furnishes seventeen small sets of rooms, the forty Fellows of the
original foundation were packed, together with their two chaplains,
their porter, and their small establishment of servants.
To the north of this quadrangle lay the cloister, a small square,
two of whose sides were formed by an arcade with open perpendicular
windows, much like New College cloister; the third by the chapel; while
the fourth was occupied by the College hall, an unpretentious building
standing exactly at right angles to the site of the modern hall. The
cloister-quadrangle’s size may be judged from the fact that the chapel
formed one entire side of it. It took up not more than a quarter of
the present back-quadrangle, and was surrounded to north and east
by the garden and orchard of which we have already spoken. For many
generations it formed the burial-ground of the Fellows, and on several
occasions of late years, when trenches have been dug across the turf
of the new quadrangle, the bones of fifteenth and sixteenth century
members of the College have been found lying there undisturbed. To
conclude the account of Chichele’s buildings, it must be added that on
the east side of the hall the kitchen and storehouses of the College
made a small irregular excrescence into the garden; their situation is
now occupied by that part of the present hall which lies nearest the
door.
All Chichele’s work was on a small scale save his chapel, on which he
lavished special care. His reredos, preserved for two centuries behind
a coat of plaster, still remains to witness to his good taste; but its
original aspect, blazing with scarlet, gold, and blue, must have been
strangely different from that which the nineteenth century knows. Of
the figures which adorned it a part only can be identified: at the
top was the Last Judgment, of which a considerable fragment was found
_in situ_ when the plaster was cleared away, with its inscription,
“Surgite mortui, venite ad judicium” still plainly legible. Immediately
above the altar was the Crucifixion; the cross and the wings of the
small ministering angels of the modern reproduction being actually
parts of the old sculpture. The carver, Richard Tillott, who executed
the work, mentions, in his account of expenses sent in for payment
to Chichele, “two great stone images over the altar”; these may very
probably have been the founder and King Henry VI.; and the restorers of
our own generation ventured to fill the two largest niches with their
representations. How the central and side portions of the reredos were
occupied is unknown; but it would seem that the founder did not leave
every niche full, as fifty years after his death, Robert Este, a Fellow
of the College, left £21 18_s._ 4_d._ for the completing of the images
over the high altar.
In addition to the high altar, the chapel contained no less than seven
side altars; where they were placed it is a little difficult to see,
as the stalls bear every mark of being contemporary with the founder,
and extend all along the sides of the chapel from the altar-steps to
the screen. Probably then the smaller altars--of which we know that
one was dedicated to the four Latin Fathers--must have been all, or
nearly all, placed in the ante-chapel. The windows, both in the chapel
and ante-chapel, were filled with excellent glass; all that of the
chapel has disappeared, but in the ante-chapel there is much good
work remaining. The most interesting window contains an admirable set
of historical figures; the founder, his masters Henry V. and Henry
VI., John of Gaunt, and several more being in excellent preservation;
but this was not originally placed in the chapel, and seems to have
belonged to the old library. The other windows are filled with saints.
The total cost of the foundation of the College to Chichele was about
£10,000; that sum covered not only the erection and fitting up of the
buildings, but the purchase of some of the lands for its endowment. The
two largest pieces of property which the Archbishop devoted to his new
institution were situated respectively in Middlesex and Kent. The first
estate lay around Edgeware, of which the College became lord of the
manor, and extended in the direction of Hendon and Willesden. It was
mainly under wood in the founder’s day, and formed part of the tract of
forest which covered so much of Middlesex down to the last century. The
second property consisted of a large stretch of land in Romney Marsh,
already noted as a great grazing district in the fifteenth century.
Many lesser estates lay scattered about the Midlands; they consisted in
no small part of land belonging to the alien priories, which Chichele
had assisted Henry V. to abolish, and included at least one of the
suppressed houses--Black Abbey in Shropshire. For these confiscated
estates the Archbishop paid £1000 to the Crown.
The College as designed by Chichele contained forty Fellows; he
nominated twenty himself, and these with their Warden, Richard Andrew,
chose twenty more. By the Charter sixteen of the forty were to be
jurists--the founder remembered that he himself had taken his degree in
Laws--and twenty-four artists. As Wykeham had done before him, Chichele
took pains to obtain a Bull from the Pope to sanction and confirm his
new foundation: in this document, dated from Florence in 1439, Eugenius
IV. grants numerous spiritual privileges to the _pauperes scholares_
of All Souls. They are excused certain fasts, freed from any parochial
control of the Vicar of St. Mary’s, permitted to bury their dead in the
precincts of the College, and even granted leave to celebrate the Mass
in their chapel in time of interdict, “but with hushed bells and closed
doors.” Chichele was such a confirmed Papalist that he took the unusual
step of sending the first Warden to Italy in person, to receive the
Bull from the Pope’s own hands.
Nor was it only his spiritual superior that Chichele resolved to
interest in the College. When all was complete he went through the form
of handing over the foundation to his young god-son Henry VI., and of
receiving it back from the King’s hands as co-founder. Hence comes the
constant juxtaposition of their names in the prayers of the College.
Chichele lived to see his College completely finished; in 1442 he
presided at the solemn entry of the Fellows into their new abode, and
formally delivered the statutes to Warden Andrew. Next year he died,
at the end of his eightieth year, an age almost unparalleled among the
short-lived men of the fifteenth century. His successor, Archbishop
Stafford, on taking up the office of Visitor, was pleased to grant an
indulgence of forty days to any Christian of the province of Canterbury
who should visit the chapel and there say a _Pater_ and an _Ave_ for
the souls of the faithful departed. This grant made the College a
place of not unfrequent resort for pilgrims. If a passage cited by
Professor Burrows[193] is correct, as many as 9000 wafers were consumed
in the chapel on one day in 1557.
For the first century of the College’s existence the succession of
Wardens and Fellows was very rapid. Richard Andrew, the first head
of the foundation, resigned his post in the same year that the new
buildings were opened, on receiving ecclesiastical preferment outside
Oxford. He became Dean of York, and survived his resignation for
many years. His successor, Warden Keyes, had been the architect of
the College; he presided for three years only, and then gave place
to William Kele. Altogether in the first century of its existence
1437-1537 the College knew no less than eleven Wardens, of whom seven
resigned and only four died in harness. The Fellows were as rapid in
their succession; not unfrequently seven or eight--a full fifth of the
whole number--vacated their Fellowships in a single year; the average
annual election was about five. The shortness of their tenure of office
is easily explained; a Fellowship was not a very valuable possession,
for beyond food and lodging it only supplied its holder with the
“livery” decreed by the founder, an actual provision of cloth for his
raiment. A Fellow’s commons were fixed on the modest scale of “one
shilling a week when wheat is cheap, and sixteenpence when it is dear.”
The annual surplus from the estates was not divided up, but placed in
the College strong-box within the entrance-tower, against the day of
need. Moreover, as the Fellows were lodged two, or even in some cases
three, in each room, the accommodation can hardly have been such as to
tempt to long residence. The acceptance of preferment outside Oxford,
or even an absence of more than six months without the express leave
of the College, sufficed to vacate the Fellowship; and since every
member of the foundation was in orders, it naturally resulted that
the “jurists” drifted up to London to practice, while the “artists”
accepted country livings. Only those Fellows who were actually studying
or teaching in the University held their places for any length of time.
There is little to tell about the first fifty years of the history
of All Souls; but it is worthy of notice that its connection--merely
nominal though it was--with its co-founder, Henry VI., brought on
trouble when the House of York came to the throne. Edward IV. pretended
to regard the endowments of the College as wrongly-alienated royal
property, and had to be appeased, not only by the insertion of his name
and that of his mother Cecily in the prayers of the College, but by
payment of a considerable fine. However, the College might congratulate
itself on an easy escape, and its pardon was ratified when, some years
later, its head, Warden Poteman, was made envoy to Scotland, and
afterwards promoted to be Archdeacon of Cleveland.
In the reign of Henry VII., when the Renaissance began to make itself
felt in Oxford, All Souls had the good fortune to produce two of the
first English Greek scholars, Linacre and Latimer. The name of the
latter is forgotten--the present age remembers no Latimer save the
martyr-bishop; but Linacre’s memory is yet green. With Grocyn and
Colet he stands at the head of the roll of Oxford scholars, but in
his medical fame he is unrivalled. His contemporaries “questioned
whether he was a better Latinist or Grecian, a better grammarian or
physician”; but it is in the last capacity that he is now remembered.
He was elected to his Fellowship at All Souls in 1484, resided four
or five years, and then went to Italy, where he tarried long, taught
medicine at Padua, and then returned to England to found and preside
over the College of Physicians. The two Linacre professorships were
both endowed by him. The example of his career was not soon forgotten,
and for two centuries All Souls continued to produce men of mark in the
realm of medicine. To this day it excites the surprise of the visitor
to the College library to see the large proportion of books on medical
subjects contained in its shelves. Among the manuscripts there are many
such, which Linacre’s own hands must have thumbed; while throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the purchases of medical books are
only exceeded by those of works on theology. But with the incoming of
the reign of the Founder’s-kin Fellows in the early eighteenth century
the physicians ceased out of the land, and at last, “holding a physic
place” became a convenient fiction by which lay members of the College
succeeded in excusing themselves from taking orders, though they might
be in reality anything rather than medical men.
The reign of Henry VII. saw the beginning of two sources of trouble
to All Souls, which were not to cease for many generations. The first
was the interference of the Archbishop as Visitor, to determine the
conditions of the tenure of Fellowships. William of Warham is found
writing to the College to denounce a growing practice of endeavouring
to keep a Fellowship in conjunction with a benefice outside Oxford. He
strictly forbade it, and his commands seem to have been more effectual
than Visitor’s injunctions have usually proved. The other interference
with the College from without, was an attempt made by Arthur Prince
of Wales to influence the annual elections of Fellows. He writes from
Sunninghill in 1500 to recommend the election of a young lawyer named
Pickering to a Fellowship, “because that his father is in the right
tender favour of our dearest mother the Queen.” Pickering’s name does
not appear in the register of Fellows, so it is evident that the
College found some excuse for evading compliance with the Prince’s
request.
All Souls seems to have passed through the storms of the Reformation
with singularly little friction from within or without. One single
Warden, John Warner--the first Regius professor of Medicine in the
University--continued to steer the course of the College from 1536 to
1556, complying with all the various commands of Henry VIII., making
himself acceptable both to Somerset and Northumberland, and even
holding on for two years into Mary’s reactionary time. It is true that
he then resigned his post, but he was evidently no less complying
under the Papalist Queen than under her Protestant predecessor, as no
harm came to him though he continued to reside in Oxford. Warden Pope,
his successor, having died in the first year of Elizabeth, Warner was
immediately restored to his old post, and held it till he was made Dean
of Winchester in 1565.