less characteristic in the story which Lord Morley tells of his “Greats”
examination:
“The excitement,” Lord Morley writes, “reached its climax when
the examiner, after testing his knowledge of some point of
theology, said: ‘We will now leave that part of the subject,’
and the candidate, carried away by his interest in the subject,
answered: ‘No, sir; if you please, we will not leave it yet.’”
One could tell other stories, of course, if there were room for them;
but Gladstone’s life at Oxford was not, except for his success in the
schools, either sensational or eventful. His diary shows that he gave,
or went to, a wine-party nearly every night; that he was very pleased
with himself when he succeeded in making a speech of three-quarters of
an hour’s duration at the Union; and that he “haunted sermons,” as the
Consistory of Geneva ordered the Prisoner of Chillon to do. That is
practically all that there is to be said; but one may conclude by quoting
Gladstone’s mature opinion of his University. “Oxford,” he wrote, two
generations later, “had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that
liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human excellence
cannot grow up in a nation without it.”
Oxford, it is not to be denied, does sometimes tend thus to confound and
obscure the human spirit. That is one of the defects of the qualities
of its atmosphere. It not only clings to lost causes—it gets stuck to
them, as it were with glue; and it allows reactionary obscurantists like
Pusey—to take the first Christ Church instance that occurs—to have too
much to say. Gladstone evidently came to feel that, in later life, when
he had left the “weeds,” as he called them, of ecclesiasticism behind
him. But his deep love for his University was never affected by the
discovery. To say of any one, he once declared, that he was “a typically
Oxford man” was to pay him the highest possible compliment; and it will
readily be believed that that is not a proposition which this work is
written to dispute.
TRINITY COLLEGE
Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of
Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long
hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil
War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter
Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The Gentlemen
Adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.
Trinity was founded with the spoils of monasteries, in 1554; and the
property of the “buzzing monks” was thus put to better uses than ever
before. The founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was Princess Elizabeth’s guardian
at Hatfield, in Queen Mary’s reign; and he interested the Princess in his
educational enterprise. It is on record that our virgin ruler interceded
on behalf of two early Fellows of Trinity who had got out of the College
by night by climbing over the wall—for what purpose the chronicler does
not relate. They had been expelled; but—“at my Lady Elizabeth her Grace’s
desire”—they were readmitted on payment of a fine.
[Illustration: TRINITY COLLEGE.
[To face p. 226.]
The College, though a small one, and not very richly endowed, has always
had a claim to distinction. If one cannot say of it, as one can of some
of the other colleges, that, at a given moment, it stood for Oxford,
supplying the mind, or the energy, which set the mass in motion, one
can, at least, say that it preserved its intellectual activity in times
of sloth, and has an exceptionally long list of illustrious names on its
books—largely, perhaps, because it has been less hampered than some other
colleges by “close scholarships” and provisions for showing preference
to “founders’ kin.” It has educated statesmen like the Earl of Chatham
and Lord North; such prominent Parliament men as Ludlow and Ireton;
poets of varying degrees of merit from Elkanah Settle to Walter Savage
Landor; divines, of whom John Henry Newman is the most famous; a number
of gentlemen adventurers, of whom more presently; a number of men of
letters, among whom Mr. Quiller Couch must on no account be overlooked.
* * * * *
In the case of so small a College maintaining so high a standard, one
naturally looks for Presidents of commanding personality; and one finds
such a President in Dr. Kettell, who flourished in the reign of Charles
I., and whose memory is still preserved by Kettell Hall in the Broad.
Dr. Kettell, it is recorded, “had a very venerable person and was an
excellent governor”; and the chronicle of his governorship is happily
full of those picturesque details which make it interesting to realise
what the academic life of the past was like.
In his gown and surplice and hood, he had, says Aubrey, “a terrible,
gigantic aspect with his sharp grey eyes”; but the impressiveness of
his appearance must have been of a different order when he was seen on
horseback, on Sundays, riding out to preach at Garsington, “with his
boy Ralph before him, with a leg of mutton and some College bread.” He
loved his College, and lived for it, and, where deeds of charity were
concerned, let not his right hand know what his left hand did. One of
the happy deeds done by his left hand was to thrust money secretly in at
the windows of students whom he knew to be poor; and one of his modes
of promoting sobriety was to see that the Trinity beer was the best in
Oxford, so that no Trinity man should have any excuse for visiting a
tavern.
One of the best known of his idiosyncrasies was his objection to long
hair; for the wearing of long hair was not, as is sometimes carelessly
assumed, first introduced into Oxford by the æsthetes. Whereas they
wore their hair long as a mark of the sensibility of their souls, the
imitators of the Cavaliers had done so, long before them, in vanity, and
for the purpose of proving themselves to be men of fashion. President
Kettell was “irreconcilable” to the habit. He went about with a pair
of scissors for the purpose of cutting men’s hair when he found it
offensively long; and when he happened not to have his scissors with him,
he used a knife.
“I remember,” says Aubrey, “he cut Mr. Radford’s hair with the knife that
chips the bread on the buttery hatch, and then he sang,
“‘And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d?
Tonedi, Tonedi.’”
That was at dinner in hall—a curious incident; but times have changed,
and many things happened at Oxford in the reign of Charles I. which
happen there no longer. Probably, too, when the Court came to Oxford
at the beginning of the Civil War, the President’s hostility to long
hair relaxed. His principal trouble then was with the Court ladies who
attended Divine services in the Trinity chapel, “half-dressed,” to the
great scandal of the undergraduates, and walked in the Trinity Grove
with their gallants. Some of them, it seems, used to play the lute
there—a disconcertingly unacademical proceeding, most disadvantageous
to discipline; and the climax was reached when two specially audacious
ladies—“my Lady Isabella Thynne and fine Mistress Fenshawe, her great
and intimate friend”—carried frivolity to the point of calling on the
President.
That, indeed, is a scene worth picturing: on the one hand the “Oxford
character,” neither accustomed to the society of ladies nor desirous of
it, a man of dignity and authority, though unpolished, very wroth at the
intrusion of “minxes” in the paths of academic peace; on the other hand
high-spirited and mischievous beauties, to whom great academic names
were nothing and great academic potentates were only so many “musty old
professors.” Their idea, apparently, was to ogle the President—to make
him flirt with them—and, failing that, to overwhelm him with satirical
reproaches as a cross-grained old gentleman. And, no doubt, the President
was cross-grained, and entirely indisposed to flirt; but he was a match
for his visitors none the less.
“Madam,” he said, addressing himself to Mistress Fenshawe, “your husband
and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather. I know you to be
a gentlewoman, and I will not say you are a baggage; but get you gone for
a very woman!”
And, so speaking, he drove the giggling intruders from his presence, as
summarily as Benjamin Jowett, at a later date, expelled a deputation
of the Balliol washerwomen from the Master’s lodge. He makes a
characteristic exit speech in that scene, and leaves us free to call up
ghosts of other men.
* * * * *
The ghost of Dr. Johnson would readily appear if called. He stayed at
Kettell Hall while working at his Dictionary; he said that he would
rather live at Trinity than anywhere else at Oxford; his young friends
Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk were both Trinity men. Dr. Johnson,
however, will be waiting for us when we come to speak of Pembroke; so
we may put him on one side, and recall the memory of the greatest of
the Trinity poets, Walter Savage Landor. He was one of the many Oxford
poets who, like Shelley and Swinburne, have left the University without a
degree; and his manner of leaving, like Shelley’s, was violent, and the
result of variance with the dons.
Landor of Trinity, be it observed, was the contemporary of Southey of
Balliol. Like Southey, he distinguished himself by refusing to have
his hair powdered, in the conventional style, for dinner; but Southey
only knew him by repute, as he told Humphry Davy on the publication of
“Gebir.” Landor, Southey then wrote, was “notorious as a mad Jacobin.”
He would have sought his acquaintance, he said, for the sake of the
Jacobinism, if the concomitant madness had not deterred him; and he
concludes, giving chapter and verse for the madness: “He was obliged
to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through
the window.” But that was not quite true. The story, after the way of
stories, had both gained and lost something on its short journey from
Trinity to Balliol; and Landor himself has left a record of the rights of
it in a letter written shortly after the occurrence.
He was a Rugby man, of the days before Rugby had gone in for “moral
seriousness.” He exhibited the roughness of Rugby, together with a
spasmodic uncertainty of temper which was all his own; and, though he
was an excellent Grecian, he did not imitate the Greeks in mixing water
with his wine. In the rooms opposite to his there lived a man named
Leeds whom he did not like—a man of whom he writes that “with a figure
extremely disgusting, he was more so in his behaviour,” and that “he was
continually intruding himself where his company was not wanted.”
One evening it happened that Leeds and Landor were both giving wines;
Leeds’s party consisting, according to Landor, of “servitors and other
raffs of every description.” The weather was warm, and both parties
had their windows open. Neither party, one suspects, was more than
relatively sober; and so, feelings running high, the two parties began to
express their opinions of each other in a slanging match, until presently
Leeds’s party, tired of the wordy war, closed the window, and fastened
the shutters. Then Landor, as a final expression of his contempt,
discharged a shot-gun at the shutters.
Nobody was hurt—nobody could have been hurt; but Leeds complained and the
President sent for Landor; and Landor’s awkward temper was his undoing.
Availing himself of the fact that the shot had proceeded, not from the
sitting-room, but from the bedroom, he told the President that no gun
had been fired from the room in which his company were assembled; and he
added that, as no definite person was accused of the offence, he did not
feel called upon to reply to this vague charge. The President, however,
as it happened, was not the sort of man to be fooled or bluffed.
“Have you got a gun, Mr. Landor?” he asked; and Landor admitted that he
had.
“Will you show it to me?”
“Certainly.”
“Has it been fired lately?”
“Yes.”
“In that case, Mr. Landor, and as I have also taken occasion to question
your guests——”
So the dialogue ran; and the cross-examination established, if not the
legal proof, at least the moral certainty of Landor’s guilt. But he still
tried to bluff.
“Mr. President,” he said, “it is against the law of England to require a
prisoner to incriminate himself”; but the President retired to consult
the Senior Common-room, and returned to pronounce sentence.
“Mr. Landor,” he said, “it is the opinion of the Fellows that you be
rusticated for two terms.” And so it happened; and Oxford lost another
of her poets—more through the poet’s fault, it must be admitted, than
through her own.
* * * * *
The link of poetry, though there is no other, may couple Landor’s name
with Newman’s. The most momentous events of Newman’s Oxford career have
been spoken of in the Oriel chapter; but he was a Trinity undergraduate,
and Trinity’s claim to him must be recognised. “Trinity,” he has written,
“has never been unkind to me”; and in 1885 he presented the College
library with a set of his works, expressing the hope that the yearly
festival of the College might be “as happy a day to you all as in 1818 it
was to me.”
Yet there are indications that Newman’s happiness at Trinity was
diversified by spiritual distress, and by pained disapproval of the
frivolity of others. He had but lately been “converted”; and his
conversion made him a wet blanket in merry company. His thoughts, apart
from his studies, were not confined to the “snapdragon growing on the
walls opposite my freshman’s rooms” of which he afterwards spoke with
a poet’s grateful recollection. His Evangelicalism (for he was then
an Evangelical) was shocked by the too bibulous propensities of his
fellow-men. He could not share in such jollities, like Landor; and at the
approach of the College Gaudy, his letters take the tone of a Commination
Service:
“To-morrow is our Gaudy. If there be one time of the year in
which the glory of our College is humbled, and all appearance
of goodness fades away, it is on Trinity Monday. Oh, how the
angels must lament over a whole society throwing off the
allegiance and service of their Maker, which they have pledged
the day before at His table, and showing themselves the sons of
Belial!”
Is it really well, one wonders, for a young man to be quite so good as
that at quite such an early age? Probably not. The sentences seem to echo
the artificial ring of the Evangelicalism of the decadence, which is a
displeasing sound; and one turns, not without relief, from Newman to the
Gentlemen Adventurers.
* * * * *
It has been mentioned that the first Earl of Chatham was once Pitt of
Trinity; and it was under his direction that England conquered the
Empire “in a fit of absence of mind”—an Empire which, by the way, Lord
North of Trinity went the right way to lose. His name, therefore, though
no stories of his Oxford adventures have been preserved, fittingly
introduces our list.
The first name on the list is that of Sir Francis Verney, of whom many
interesting stories may be read in the “Memoirs of the Verney Family”;
he was, in turn, a galley-slave, a common soldier, and a pirate on the
Barbary coast, and died miserably in the hospital at Messina in 1615. The
second name is that of Calvert, of Trinity, who became Lord Baltimore,
and founded the colony of Maryland. The third—to pass over minor names—is
that of Richard Burton.
“Readers must be prepared,” says Lady Burton, writing of her husband’s
Oxford curriculum, “not to hear the recital of the College course of a
goody-goody boy of yesterday”; and though Burton did row in the Trinity
torpid, and compete for two scholarships, which he failed to win, his
proceedings were, on the whole, irregular. He had lived much abroad, and
came to Oxford with ideas somewhat different from those of the ordinary
public school boy.
The first thing that happened to him on his arrival was that the College
authorities requested him to shave off his moustache. He declined to do
so unless they put their request in the shape of a formal written order.
Some undergraduates then laughed at his moustache; and he handed them
his card, and called them out, though the threatened duel was prevented
from taking place. He was next advised to sport his oak, lest he should
be ragged; but instead of doing that, he left the door wide open, and
thrust the poker in the fire, prepared to give his persecutors a warm
reception if they came. The opinion gained ground that he was a desperate
character, and he was left unmolested.
His studies were as unconventional as his behaviour—he began to learn
Arabic—and so also were his recreations. Those were the days of
rowdyism—the days in which, as has just been related, the Marquis of
Waterford painted the door of the Dean and Canons of Christ Church red;
and Burton thoroughly enjoyed diversions of that order. He once caused
himself to be let down with a rope into the garden of the Master of
Balliol, pulled up that old gentleman’s choicest flowers, and planted
staring marigolds in their place. He also, when the Master of Balliol
was watering his flowers, shot at the watering-pot with an air-gun.
But, taking one consideration with another, nothing was quite so
characteristic of his life at Oxford as his leaving of it.
He had told his father, during the vacation, that he would like to take
his name off the books; but his father had insisted on his returning. He
returned with the firm resolve of overreaching the parental authority by
doing something that would bring about his expulsion; and a race-meeting
in the neighbourhood gave him his opportunity.
Undergraduates were not only forbidden to attend that race-meeting; they
were ordered to be present without fail at lectures, at the hour at which
the races took place. “Tyranny! Unjustifiable interference with the
liberty of the subject!” exclaimed Burton and a few other of the wilder
spirits; and they ordered tandems to be in waiting for them, behind
Worcester, and drove out of Oxford at a spanking pace at the very hour at
which the roll was being called.
Of course they were missed; and of course they were sent for, and asked
for explanations. The explanations of the others were of a humble
character; but Burton’s explanations made matters worse. He blurted out
that he saw no harm in attending a race-meeting, and was aware of no
reason why undergraduates should be treated like babies in arms; and he
not only said that, but went on to moralise.
“Trust begets trust,” he solemnly said, “and they who trust us elevate
us”; and it was not to be expected that the dons would put up with that.
Nor did they. They expelled Burton, while contenting themselves with
rusticating his companions; and he received the sentence with the same
imperturbably high moral tone. He hoped, he said, “that the caution money
deposited by his father would be honestly returned to him.” At that there
was “movement.” It seemed, for the moment, as if the dons proposed to
expel Burton not only from the College, but from the room. He brought his
heels together, bowed to them in the courtly Austrian fashion, wished
them happiness and prosperity, and withdrew. Then he went down.
But not immediately, and not without a demonstration; and the description
of the final scene may be taken from the Life by Mr. Francis Hitchman:
“One of his rusticated friends—Anderson of Oriel,” writes
Mr. Hitchman, “had proposed that they should leave with a
splurge—‘go up from the land with a soar.’ There was now
no need for the furtive tandem behind Worcester College: it
was driven boldly up to the College doors. Richard’s bag and
baggage were stowed away in it, and, with a cantering leader
and a high-trotting horse in the shafts, carefully driven
over the beds of the best flowers, they started for the High
Street and the Queen’s highway to London, Richard energetically
performing upon a yard of tin, waving adieux to his friends,
and kissing his hand to the pretty shop-girls.”
SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE
Founded by Sir Thomas White—Raised to fame by Archbishop
Laud—Calvinistic opposition to Laud—He triumphs over it and
makes Oxford a High Church University—His disciplinarian
regulations—His magnificent entertainment of royalty—The
entertainment of Admiral Tromp—He gets drunk and is taken home
in a wheelbarrow—Dean Mansel—His pugnacious Bampton Lectures
and his excruciating puns.
Saint John’s College was founded in the reign of Queen Mary, a year after
the foundation of Trinity, by Sir Thomas White, a City merchant of the
Dick Whittington type, and one of the originators of the Muscovy Company.
Its connection with the Merchant Tailors’ School was early established;
and merchants generally recognised it as the most fitting college for
them to send their sons to. It blossomed into glory under its second
founder, Archbishop Laud, who added, among other things, that “garden
front” which is one of the architectural gems of Oxford.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE.
[To face p. 241.]
Laud’s, in fact, is the chief name to be reckoned with in the College
annals. He occupied almost every position there, from the humblest to
the highest. He was, successively, commoner, Scholar, Fellow, Tutor,
President. While Tutor, he was also, for a time, Proctor. After being
President, he became Visitor of the College and Chancellor of the
University. One associates his name, in politics, with reaction; but he
was, in University matters, a reformer. He and his successor Juxon—the
Juxon who attended Charles I. on the scaffold—raised the College to its
highest pinnacle of honour. It led the van in education, and gave the
country two successive Primates.
* * * * *
Born in 1573, Laud matriculated in 1589, won his scholarship in 1590,
was elected to his fellowship in 1593, took deacon’s orders in 1600 and
priest’s orders in 1601, became a Doctor of Divinity in 1608, and was
chosen President in 1611. He held that office until he became Bishop of
St. David’s in 1621; but his interest in the College did not cease with
his preferment, as the new Statutes which Oxford owed to him bear witness.
His period, as the dates show, was chiefly that of the first two Stuart
Kings; and the Stuarts, whatever their defects, were always full of
regard for the most ancient of the English seats of learning. They
valued its loyalty and liked to visit it in state; and Oxford repaid the
attention which it received from them by modifying its theological point
of view. Laud was the moving spirit of the transformation. The Oxford to
which he went was a Calvinistic Oxford. The Oxford which he left was a
High Church Oxford; and the change was more due to his influence than to
that of any other man. He got his way there by firmness and tact, wearing
down opposition, and making his enemies his friends.
The records of his early Oxford days are scanty; but we know him always
to have been on the side of ceremony, alike in academic and in religious
observances. Of the former kind of ceremony we find a quotable example
in the account preserved of the reception of James I., on his visit to
Oxford, at the gate of Saint John’s:
“Three young youths” (we read) “in habit and attire like nymphs
confronted him, representing England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and talking dialogue-wise each to other of their state, at last
concluding yielding themselves up to his gracious government.
The scholars stood all on one side of the street, and the
strangers of all sorts on the other. The Scholars stood first,
then the Bachelors, and at last the Masters of Arts.”
Laud, we cannot doubt, had a hand in that performance; and we may also
presume him to have had something to do with the management of the
comedy which was played before the King, two days later—not, it is true,
with such unqualified success as the company might have desired:
“It was acted” (we are told) “much better than either of
the others that he had seen before, yet the King was so
over-wearied that after a while he distasted it and fell
asleep. When he awaked, he would have been gone, saying,
‘I marvel what they think me to be,’ with such other like
speeches, showing his dislike thereof. Yet he did tarry till
they had ended it, which was after one of the clock.”