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The Life and Times of John Wilkins
[Illustration: WARDEN WILKINS.]
Warden of Wadham College, Oxford; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge;
and Bishop of Chester
BY
P. A. WRIGHT HENDERSON
WARDEN OF WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD
William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
1910
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_
_DEDICATED TO THE MEMBERS OF WADHAM COLLEGE._
PREFACE.
This little book is written as an offering to the Members of Wadham
College for the Tercentenary of its foundation. The writer makes no
pretensions to learning or research: the title of the book would be
misleading and ridiculous if taken to imply a profound study of the
times of Bishop Wilkins, from his birth in 1614 to his death in 1672,
the most important, perhaps, certainly the most interesting, in the
history of Great Britain. It has been attempted only to touch on the
great questions and events which shaped the life and character of a
remarkable man. Use has been made freely and often, without due
acknowledgment, of the 'History of Wadham College,' written by Mr T. G.
Jackson, R.A., one of its Honorary Fellows and distinguished alumni; a
history of the building and architecture of the College, which no one
but he could have written,--a history also of its social and academical
life from its beginning to the present day.
Nor has less use been made of Mr J. Wells' History of the College, of
which he is a Fellow. He will, I am sure, pardon my impertinence in
saying that in his book are combined diligent research and a sense of
humour and of the picturesque, excellences rarely found together in
historians. Mr R. B. Gardiner, formerly Scholar of Wadham, has earned
its gratitude by his invaluable 'Registers of Admissions,' which, it is
to be hoped, he will bring down to 1910 or later: they will make easy
the work of some member of the College, who will doubtless arise to
write a _magnum opus_, the history of the College in every
aspect--architectural, social, and academical.
For it the writer will use, as I have done for this little book, the
notes and comments of Mr Andrew Clark on Wood's 'Life and Times,' and
other volumes published by the Oxford Historical Society.
My thanks are due also to Dr Butler, the Master of Trinity, Cambridge,
for his kindness in telling me what little there is to tell of Wilkins'
short tenure of the Mastership.
The Bishop of Chester, Dr Jayne, formerly a Scholar of Wadham, now
Bishop of the Diocese which Wilkins held, has helped me with information
about the short episcopate of his predecessor. For it I am grateful to
him, as well for the suggestion or command which led to my first
attempt, made four years ago, to write something about Wilkins.
The too short article in the 'Dictionary of National Biography' has been
of much service: it gives the bibliography of the subject, or an
equivalent, for no life of Wilkins has been written till now, and
indicates the sources of information about him: it also puts in clear
order the events of his varied life. Mr Sanders must know much which he
should be gently forced to tell.
Fain would I acknowledge to Wood and Aubrey the debt I owe to them,
especially to Wood, and ask his pardon for occasional ill-natured
remarks about him, as ill-natured nearly as his own about most of his
contemporaries.
The only merit claimed for this _libellus_ is its brevity--no small
recommendation in this age of "exhaustive treatment" when, in
bibliography especially, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees.
It is an inadequate expression of the writer's affection for the College
in which he has spent more than forty years of his life, and the
unvarying kindness and indulgence which he has received from pupils and
colleagues.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. HISTORY OF THE COLLEGE FROM ITS FOUNDATION TO
THE BEGINNING OF WILKINS' WARDENSHIP 1
II. WILKINS' LIFE TILL HIS APPOINTMENT TO THE WARDENSHIP 30
III. WILKINS' WARDENSHIP 54
IV. WILKINS AFTER HIS LIFE AT OXFORD 105
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
WARDEN WILKINS _Frontispiece_
NICHOLAS WADHAM 12
DOROTHY WADHAM 16
ADMIRAL BLAKE 28
WADHAM COLLEGE FROM THE WARDEN'S GARDEN 48
WADHAM COLLEGE FROM THE COLLEGE GARDEN 78
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN 100
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN WILKINS.
CHAPTER I.
HISTORY OF THE COLLEGE FROM ITS FOUNDATION TO THE BEGINNING OF WILKINS'
WARDENSHIP.
Wadham College was founded in 1610, when on July 31st the
foundation-stone was laid; and opened in 1613, when, on April 20th, the
Warden and Fellows elected by the Foundress were admitted; the Warden,
by the Vice-Chancellor of the University in St Mary's Church; the
fifteen Fellows by the Warden in the College Hall; the fifteen Scholars
by the Warden and Fellows in the same place. All of them, from the
Warden to the Junior Scholars, were sworn to obey the Statutes of the
College, save three of the Scholars, who were supposed to be too young
to understand the nature of an oath.
A site had been found on the ground where had stood the Priory of the
Augustine Friars, founded in 1268--suppressed in 1540. It had been
gradually removed or destroyed by time and plunder of its materials: no
traces of it are left, except on the west side of the Warden's garden, a
postern-gate which he maintains was used by the friars for various
purposes. Another memorial of the Priory survived till 1800--the phrase
of "doing Austins." Up to that date, or near it, every Bachelor of Arts
was required once in each year to "dispute and answer ad Augustinenses,"
and the chapel or refectory of the Priory were convenient places in
which to hold the disputations. In the University no official title, no
name indeed of any kind, escapes abbreviation or worse indignity,
instances of which will readily suggest themselves to the mind of any
Oxford reader.
The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his wife, of Merrifield
and Edge in the county of Somerset. He was a squire of good estate and
high degree, the last male descendant of the main line of Wadhams. Born
in 1532, he was educated at Corpus or at Christ Church: there is a
conflict of testimony on this point, but Corpus was probably his
college. At the age of twenty-three he married Dorothy Petre. She was
two years younger than her husband, born in 1534, the daughter of Sir
William Petre of Writtle in Essex, near which much of the College
property now lies. For his zeal in suppressing the monasteries Sir
William had been rewarded by the grant of a large estate, and Wadham, so
long a Whig and Evangelical College, was by the vicissitudes of fortune
built both pecuniarily and materially on the ruins of the Roman Catholic
Church.
The young couple were wealthy and lived their lives in state at
Merrifield, where they kept an open house, "an inn at all times for
their friends, and a court at Christmas." Yet, owing probably to the
management of Dorothy, a notable and prudent wife, they saved money, and
the childless pair determined to devote their wealth to "the purposes of
religion, learning, and education." Their creed, like that of many
waverers in those days of transition, was by no means clear, possibly
even to themselves. The Wadhams were suspected of being Recusants, and
Dorothy was presented as such, even in the year 1613 when the College
was completed. This may have given rise to Antony Wood's story that
Nicholas was minded to found a College at Venice for Roman Catholic
students, but the balance of probabilities is against its truth.
It has been pointed out by Mr Jackson, on the suggestion of Mr Thorley,
the late Warden, that "the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 may
have weakened his (Wadham's) attachment, in common with that of many
liberal and loyal Catholics, to the cause of the old faith"; further,
that "the Venice scheme comes very near, if it does not amount to, an
offence which the law had anticipated and actually forbidden, and it
would have exposed its author to the direful penalties of Pramunire,
which by a Statute of 27 Elizabeth were denounced against any person
contributing to the support of any College of Jesuits, or Seminary,
erected, or hereafter to be erected, beyond the sea": and finally, Mr
Jackson dwells on many evidences from facts that the Founder was in his
later years strictly conformable to the Reformed Church. These are
weighty arguments, and to them may be added others worthy of
consideration. To a daughter of Sir William Petre her husband's design,
if he ever entertained it, would have been more than distasteful, for
its fulfilment would have meant a confession of sacrilege committed by
her father and acquiesced in by herself: it would have meant also the
establishment of a college beyond the sea, removed from the Founder's
supervision and control. No one who knows human nature, or daughters,
or Dorothy Wadham, can regard the story as more than an interesting
fiction. And yet, is there no foundation for Wood's circumstantial
narrative? Does the fact that the Foundress was presented as a Recusant
mean nothing? The problem is one worthy of the industry and ingenuity of
Mr Andrew Lang.
The Founder died at the age of seventy-seven years in 1609. He was
buried in "Myne Ile at Ilminster, where myne ancestors lye interred."
The funeral was one befitting, in the estimation of those days, the
obsequies of an important country gentleman: it cost L500, equivalent
now to a sum sufficient for the public funeral of some great statesman.
It is easy to condemn our ancestors; but their modes of extravagance
were less frivolous than ours, if equally irrational.
The building accounts have been preserved in the account-book treasured
in the College archives: in it is recorded "every item of stone, wood,
or metal used, and every workman's name and weekly wages," an important
contribution to the history of prices. The architect was William
Arnold, who combined in himself, as did architects in the middle ages
and later, the functions of head workman, master mason, architect, and
clerk of works in one--a master builder. The stones came from the
quarries at Headington and Shotover; the slates from Stonesfield and
Burford. Part of the beauty of the College is due to the soft colouring
of the silver-grey stone, honeycombed and crumbled, on the south and
west especially, where sun and wind and rain beat on it, giving it the
appearance of indefinite antiquity; an appearance due, alas! also to the
fact that stone from Headington is very friable, and little able to
resist the Oxford air.
One of the true College stories runs to the effect that Warden Griffiths
used the account-book to refute the contention of a great historian of
British architecture that Wadham College must have been built at
different dates, because its architecture is of different styles--an
improper combination of Jacobean and Perpendicular. Dr Griffiths was the
kindliest of men, but the most accurate, and it gave him, for he was
human, great pleasure to correct mistakes. He listened silently to the
great man's argument: next morning, at a large breakfast party given in
the College Common Room to the members of the British Association which
met at Oxford in the year 1847, he quietly laid the Account-Book beside
the plate of the unhappy dogmatist. The fact that the Chapel is
Perpendicular while the Quadrangle is late Gothic has been explained by
the late Mr J. H. Parker's reasonable, perhaps fanciful, suggestion that
"the architect desired to emphasise by this variation of style the
religious and secular uses of the several structures."[1]
Wadham has been described by Ayliffe, and without much protest, as being
"in respect of beauty the most regular and uniform of any in the
University." It is the best specimen of that late Gothic style which
makes the charm of Oxford, and which Mr Jackson has helped to preserve
by his work there and elsewhere.
The beauty of Wadham is of a singularly quiet and simple kind, the
effect of proportion, of string-courses and straight lines, marred by
little decoration. Except for buildings annexed from time to time, so
plain that they are no disfigurement, the College stands as it stood
three centuries ago. Mr Andrew Lang has remarked that it is "the only
College in Oxford which has not been fiddled with"; this is high praise,
and gratefully accepted. One defect the College has: the resources of
the Founders sufficed to build only one quadrangle; they had not counted
the cost of the stately Chapel and Hall, and little was left for College
rooms. When will our benefactor come? But it would be ungracious in
Wadham men to criticise the Founders of their College, to whom they owe
the most beautiful of homes. It stood fifty years ago almost in the
country, with nothing north or east of it save the Museum and green
fields. It is still in a great measure what it was called, the Country
College; for though it has neighbours close to it in Mansfield and
Manchester Colleges, yet these and the cricket-grounds, which lie
between Wadham and the Cherwell, and further north, the Parks, make one
spacious region of almost country,--a region of grass and trees and
silence, broken only by the sounds of birds, and the shouts of Matthew
Arnold's "young barbarians all at play."
It is a quiet old College,--not old as age is reckoned in Oxford,--like
some great Elizabethan or Jacobean country-house turned into a College,
splendid yet homely, possessing that double charm which no palace or
castle or cathedral possesses in the same degree,--the charm of stately
beauty and the charm of human interest which belongs to the home of
generations who have spent there the happiest years of life, preparing
for themselves distinction and success, or obscurity and failure. As you
stand in the well-known College garden, one side of which is bounded by
the chapel and long line of wall and gables showing half-white half-grey
against the sward from which they rise, you might fancy, if you were a
Platonist, that here Plato might have realised the dream of his
Republic, and made a home for the chosen youths who were to rule and
defend his state; here amid things beautiful "from which come effluences
wholesome for the soul, like a breeze bringing health from blessed
regions."
The Educated Woman, with her unerring perception of the fitness of
things, has already, it is whispered, marked Wadham for her own when the
day of reckoning comes, and men will have to share with women not merely
degrees but buildings and endowments. She has chosen well, for Tennyson
could have imagined no fitter home for the Princess and her companions.
Four days before his death Nicholas Wadham told his nephew, Sir John
Wyndham, what were his objects in founding his College, and what were
the provisions he wished made to effect them. His "instructions," two of
which seemed strange to his nephew, and to need careful wording, ran as
follows: "The one was that he would have an especial Statute to be made
that neyther the head of the house, nor any of the fellowes should be
married; the other that he would not tye any man to any profession, as
eyther devinitie, lawe, or phisicke, but leave every man free to profess
what he liked, as it should please God to direct him. He then told me
that after they weare Masters of Arte of a competent number of yeares,
that then he would have them absolutely to departe the Colledge, and not
live there all theire lives like idle drones, but put themselves into
the world, whereby others might growe up under them, his intente being
chiefly to nourishe and trayne up men into Learninge. On the 19th of
October, when he sealed the deede, I told him howe necessary it was for
him to have a visitor of his Colledge, all the Colledges of Oxford
having some Bishoppe appointed by the Founder for seeinge of the
Statutes put in execution; and that in my opinion there was none fitter
than the Bishoppe of Bathe and Welles, which he much applauded, and
thanked me muche for putting him in minde of him; he also then sayd
he would have his Colledge to be called Wadham Colledge."
[Illustration: NICHOLAS WADHAM.]
Our ancestors knew what they meant and how to express it in good
English, though their spelling was irregular. In his instructions the
Founder anticipated reforms made by the Commissioners of 1853 and 1882.
They had the benefit of two and a half centuries' experience of national
and academical life to guide them: Nicholas Wadham foresaw things and
needs not foreseen or understood by his contemporaries or predecessors.
His Fellowships were to be, all of them, open to laymen, and terminable
after a tenure of years in which a young lawyer, of physician, might
maintain and prepare himself till he had made a practice: eighteen years
were allowed for that purpose, instead of the scanty seven with which a
Prize Fellow must now content himself. It may be that Nicholas gave too
much and the Commissioners gave too little; but that is a doubtful
question.
The Wardenship, as well as the Fellowships, could by the Founder's
intention, and in the first draft of the Statutes, be held without the
condition of Holy Orders. The Foundress, in this matter only, disobeyed
her husband, and at the wish of the Society altered the Statutes, and by
binding the Warden to take his Doctorate in Divinity made the office
clerical for two hundred and sixty years. In all other points she
followed the instructions which she may herself to some extent have
inspired. Her Visitor was to be the Bishop of the diocese in which she
had spent her life; her Warden was to be "a virtuous and honourable man
of stainless life, not a bishop, nor a foreigner but born in Britain":
the last word is significant. It was inserted in the Statutes by James
I. in place of "England": even Dr Griffiths is known to have spoken of
England as the kingdom in which he lived: further, the Warden was to be
"thirty years old at least, and unmarried."
There is nothing in Dorothy's grim features to suggest that she would
have approved of one of the reforms or perversions of her Statutes
ordained by the Commissioners, which gives a place in her College to a
married Warden and to married Fellows, much less that she would have
been willing to marry one of them herself. Thereby hangs a tale which
might suggest a new situation to our exhausted novelists. The Foundress,
so the story runs, chose for her first Warden a clergyman, Dr Robert
Wright, whose _beaux yeux_ touched the heart of the lone widow: she
loved him, and would fain have married him and reigned with him after
the necessary alteration of the Statutes; but he was cold and
irresponsive: the obligation of celibacy, save in the case of Warden
Wilkins, remained incumbent on a Warden of Wadham till 1806, when it was
removed by a special Act of Parliament. Modern criticism respects a
love-story no more than it respects the Pentateuch. A comparison of
dates shows that Dr Wright was fifty-four years old at the time of his
appointment in 1613, and the Foundress was then seventy-nine. The
difference of a quarter of a century makes the truth of the story not
indeed impossible but improbable; the coy Warden held his office only
for two months: the cause of his resignation or expulsion is not known,
but was probably not "spretae injuria formae": the hero of the story
wished to marry somebody else, and resigned his post because he was not
permitted to do so, as Mr Wells informs us, adding a prosaic explanation
of the lovers' quarrel, a disagreement about the appointment of an
under-cook. Therefore "Dorothy's Romance" must take its place among the
many College stories in which Oxford abounds, and become a forsaken
belief. Wright was the first on the long roll of Wadham bishops, and
played a not inconsiderable part at a crisis in English history. In
December 1641, as Bishop of Lichfield, he was one of the twelve bishops
who presented to Charles I. the famous protest against their exclusion
by mob violence from the House of Lords, declaring all proceedings in
their absence null and void: for this they were sent to the Tower as
guilty of high treason. Wright was soon released, and died two years
later defending his episcopal seat, Eccleshall Castle, against the
Parliamentarians,--a member of the Church militant like Ancktill.
[Illustration: DOROTHY WADHAM.]
The history of the College from its foundation to the beginning of the
Civil War is uneventful, one of great prosperity. Among the Fellows
admitted in 1613, three, Smyth, Estcott, and Pitt, became Wardens: four
of the Fellows were drawn from Exeter, then, as now, a west-country
College like Wadham, though it has, more than Wadham, maintained its
connection with the West of England. The Foundress showed her resolve
that her husband's countryside should be well represented among the
first members of the foundation: of the fifteen Fellows, eleven--of the
fifteen Scholars, ten, came from western counties, especially from
Somerset; the Commoners also were many of them western men. The value to
a College of a local connection, not with a village or a small school,
but with a county or a large town, was not understood by the
Commissioners of 1853: they were under the tyranny of the formulae
current in their day, when "open competition" was supposed to be the
solution of all the difficulties of life.
In the first year of the College now opened for work, fifty-one
undergraduates, including the Scholars, were admitted. The number of its
inmates, from the Warden to the latest freshman, was therefore
sixty-nine, including the two chaplains. The rooms were larger than most
of the rooms in the older colleges, but fewer, and those available for
undergraduates were not more than about forty: the freshmen of 1613 must
have been closely packed, the Scholars especially, who had rooms three
together, sleeping in the large chamber and working in the _muscoelae_
or small studies attached, now used as bedrooms, or as scouts' pantries.
In the nine years following the admissions were necessarily
fewer--averaging twenty-seven. It is probable that till the depletion of
Oxford, when the Civil War began--_i.e._, during the first thirty years
of its life--Wadham numbered on an average between eighty and ninety
undergraduates, all of them resident in College, as was then required by
the Statutes of the University. This estimate is based on imperfect
data, and Mr Gardiner has pronounced that materials for any accurate
calculation are not to be found. We do not know what was the usual
length of undergraduates' residence at that time; some resided only for
a year, some proceeded to a degree. Nor is it clear whether the Warden
used all the rooms, eight in number, assigned to him, or gave, perhaps
rented, some of them to undergraduates. The estimate, which can neither
be confirmed nor disproved, is worth making only as helping us to
imagine the condition of the College in its early days. One thing is
certain, that Wadham was popular and fashionable, to use a modern
curious name, as is shown by the record of admissions.
Life, both for graduates and undergraduates, was harder then than it is
now. The Fellows were required to reside for forty-six weeks, the
Scholars, and probably the Commoners, for forty-eight weeks in each
year. All undergraduates had to attend lectures or disputations for
twenty-four hours in every week. These tasks were arranged with careful
malignity to begin at 6 A.M., and resumed at 2 P.M. and 6 P.M. Nor were
examinations wanting. The Bible was to be read during dinner in Hall by
a Bible Clerk or Scholar, and heard attentively and reverently. Latin
was to be spoken in Hall, and English only when the presence of an
unlearned person or of a member of another college justified its use.
The Chapel Service was held between 5 and 6 A.M. and between 8 and 9
P.M.; and attendance twice a-day was required from bachelors and
undergraduates, and rigidly enforced. Attendance at roll-call as a
substitute for chapel was unheard of in those days, when all members of
the colleges were, or were presumed to be, members also of the Church of
England, nor would conscientious scruples have been treated with much
courtesy. In other matters discipline was no less strict; clothes and
boots were to be black, and gowns were to be long. No undergraduate was
allowed to go out of College unaccompanied by a "discrete senior" of
mature age as a witness to his good behaviour, unless to attend a
lecture or a disputation: nor might he keep dogs, or guns, or ferrets,
or any bird, within the precincts of the College, nor play any games
with dice or cards or of any unseemly kind. Yet the Foundress showed a
tenderness for human weakness by permitting the Fellows and Scholars to
play cards in Hall on some of the Gaudy days for "moderate stakes and at
timeous hours." Moreover, she ordained that L30 from the College
revenues should be spent on College banquets to be held on Gaudy days,
by which were meant the great Church festivals, the election days of
Fellows and College officers, All Saints' Day, and, on what at first
sight seems strange, the anniversary of her husband's death; but the
strangeness disappears if it be remembered that October 20th comes close
to All Saints' Day.
This seems, in some of its provisions, Draconian legislation, but it was
made for the government of boys, many of them only fourteen or fifteen
years of age: how far it was, even in early days, unflinchingly
enforced, we cannot tell. It began to fall into abeyance after the
Restoration, if we are to believe Antony Wood. His statements are
always to be received with caution; but they are on this point confirmed
by other testimonies, and by the antecedent probability of a strong
reaction against the Puritan _regime_. Eighteen months after the King's
Restoration, he writes of the decay of learning and discipline in the
University. "Before the warr wee had scholars that made a thorough
search in scholasticall and polemicall divinity, in humane authors, and
naturall philosophy. But now scholars studie these things not more than
what is just necessary to carry them through the exercises of their
respective Colleges and the Universitie. Their aime is not to live as
students ought to do--viz., temperat, abstemious, and plaine and grave
in the apparel; but to live like gentlemen, to keep dogs and horses, to
turne their studies and coleholes into places to receive bottles, to
swash it in apparell, to wear long periwigs, &c., and the theologists to
ride abroad in grey coats with swords by their sides: the masters have
lost their respect by being themselves scandalous, and keeping company
with undergraduates." We cannot believe that Wadham escaped the
contagion, and remained what its Foundress meant it to be. It would be
interesting--but lack of space forbids--to compare the discipline
prescribed with that administered in Wadham now. Sufficient to say--what
indeed might go without saying--that the lapse of three hundred years
has made changes desirable and necessary.
The Foundress died on May 16, 1618, aged eighty-four. For five years she
had watched over the infancy of her College, and had seen it grow into a
vigorous child, with the promise of a robust manhood. The mythopoeic
faculty is strong in all of us, and in Wadham has grown up a tradition
that Dorothy was a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man
without character and will. The myth rests only on the science of
physiognomy working on portraits,--a most insecure foundation. The
Founders' portraits depict him as a gentle, placid person with
melancholy eyes; her as a hard-featured woman with a long upper lip and
an almost cruel mouth. Against the testimony, always dubious, of
portraits, must be set the known facts of her loyal devotion in carrying
out his wishes with scrupulous fidelity, and the sacrifices she made in
doing so, of money and of laborious supervision in the last years of her
long life.
The College may do well to remember the closing of one of her last
letters to the Warden and Fellows: "Above all things, I would have you
to avoid contentions among yourselves, for without true charity there
cannot be a true Society."--(Wells' 'History of Wadham,' p. 44.) She was
buried beside her husband in the Wadham aisle at Ilminster.
Only a few months after her death a question arose in which she would
have taken a keen interest, and have supported her College to the
uttermost. In October 1618 James I. set an example, which his grandson,
James II., followed, of that contempt for law which proved fatal to the
Stuarts. He wrote to his "trusty and well beloved, the Warden and
Fellows of Wadham College, bidding them elect Walter Durham of St
Andrews a Fellow, notwithstanding anything in their statutes to the
contrary." Durham had not been a scholar, and the vacancy had been
filled up by the Foundress, for whose death "their eyes were still wet."
It is possible that Durham's being a Scotchman was another objection to
his reception as a Fellow in those days when his aggressive countrymen
had found the high-road to England: this objection the Society did not
put before the King, but pleaded only the obligations of the statutes.
Supported by the Earl of Pembroke, the Chancellor of the University,
their resistance was successful. To Wadham belongs the honour of being
the earliest Oxford champion of legality in the struggle of seventy
years: as to Magdalen belongs the honour of the resistance which brought
that struggle nearly to its close. From 1618 onward till--who can say
when? the College has been on the popular or constitutional side, save
in 1648. The portrait of James I., who gave the College its Charter,
hangs in the Hall; there are no portraits there of Charles I., Charles
II., James II.
Among the admissions of this time the most illustrious name is that of
Robert Blake, who matriculated at Alban Hall, but took his B.A. from
Wadham in 1618, a few months before the Durham incident. The great
admiral and soldier may therefore have learnt in Wadham the opinions
which determined his choice of sides in the Parliamentary wars. The
College possesses his portrait, and four gold medals struck to
commemorate his victory over Van Tromp in 1653. It has never left the
custody of the Warden, save when it was sent, concealed on the person of
Professor and Commander Burroughs, to the Naval Exhibition some years
ago; and last year, when after an interesting correspondence between the
College and Colonel Maxse commanding the Coldstream Guards, leave was
cordially given to that distinguished regiment to have an electrotype
made of the Blake medal for its own exclusive use, and to be kept _in
perpetuum_ among the memorials of its long history. It is the oldest
regiment in the service, the only survivor of Cromwell's New Model; it
was commanded by Monk, afterwards Duke of Albemarle, when he crossed the
border to march to London, perhaps with no definite intention to restore
the Monarchy--perhaps also prompted by his brother Nicholas, a Wadham
man, to solve the great problem in that simple way. The rest of the New
Model were disbanded after the Restoration, but, doubtless in deference
to Monk, the Coldstreams were reformed, and became the King's Bodyguard.
To Monk, who like Blake was half soldier, half sailor, one of the four
medals had been awarded for his services against the Dutch. It was lost,
and the replica will take its place. The other three medals are
preserved--one in the possession of the representatives of the Penn
family, one in the British Museum, one in Wadham: the last was sent to
the British Museum for reproduction: it was carried by our historian Mr
Wells, returned by him, and it now lies in the Warden's lodgings, in the
cabinet of treasures bequeathed by Dr Griffiths, our benefactor in many
ways unknown but to his friends. This tie of courtesy and history
between a regiment and a college, arms and the gown, is worth recording
and probably unique.
No other name of real distinction than Blake's occurs in the registers
of 1613 to 1648. But Colonel Henry Ancktill, "the priest and malignant
doctor," as he was known among the Roundheads, one of the first Fellows,
ought to be remembered, partly on his own account, for he was a vigorous
and devoted Royalist, a fighting man when his cause was hopeless; partly
because he may have been the original of Dr Rochcliffe in 'Woodstock.'
Sir Walter Scott read the 'Athenae Oxonienses,' and the resemblance
between Ancktill and Rochcliffe is striking; but who can say what a
great writer finds or creates in fiction or in history!
[Illustration: ADMIRAL BLAKE.]
A perusal of the register shows that in Wadham both of the great parties
in Church and State were represented. There were represented also all
classes of society, from Dymokes, Herberts, Russells, Portmans,
Strangways, to the humblest _plebeiorum filii_, a fact which proves the
falsity of the assertion made forty years ago, that Oxford was once a
place for "gentlemen only."
The history of the College at this time was not one of unbroken peace:
occasional quarrels between members of the governing body are
recorded,--evidences of the unrest of a time when greater questions than
the interpretation of a Statute or the disputed election of a College
officer were already in the air. The only dissension of any interest was
one which led to an appeal to the Visitor: the Visitor was Laud, the
Bishop of Bath and Wells, who showed great gentleness and patience in
dealing with a person even more provoking than he found the worst of
Scotch Presbyterians.
We have now reached, "longas per ambages," the times of Wilkins'
manhood: he was born a year later than the opening of the College which
he was to rule.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] See Messrs Peel and Minchin's 'Oxford,' p. 130.