TWO ROYAL FOUNDATIONS
"Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the architect who planned,
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed scholars only--this immense
And glorious work of fine intelligence!
Give all thou can'st: high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more;
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof,
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality."
--WORDSWORTH'S _Sonnet on King's College Chapel_.
Henry VI.--The most pitiful Character in all English History--His
devotion to Learning and his Saintly Spirit--His foundation of Eton
and King's College--The Building of King's College Chapel--Its
architect, Reginald of Ely, the Cathedral Master-Mason--Its
relation to the Ely Lady Chapel--Its stained glass Windows--Its
close Foundation--Queens' College--Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth
Wydville--The buildings of Queens'--Similarity to Haddon Hall--Its
most famous Resident, Erasmus--His _Novum Instrumentum_ edited
within its Walls.
On the 6th of December 1421, being S. Nicolas' Day, the unhappy Henry of
Windsor was born. On the 1st of September in the following year, as an
infant of less than a year old, he began his reign of forty miserable
years as Henry VI. There is no more pitiful character in all English
history than he. Henry V., his father, had been by far the greatest king
of Christendom, and England, under his rule, had rejoiced in a light
which was all the brighter for the gloom that preceded and followed it.
The dying energies of mediæval life sank into impotency with his death.
The long reign of his son is one unbroken record of divided counsels,
constitutional anarchy, civil war, national exhaustion; only too
faithfully fulfilling the prophecy which his father is said to have
uttered, when he was told in France of the birth of his son at Windsor:
"I, Henry of Monmouth, shall gain much in my short reign, but Henry of
Windsor will reign much longer and lose all; but God's will be done."
"Henry VI."--I quote the pathetic words of my kinsman, the historian of
the Constitution--
"Henry was perhaps the most unfortunate king who ever reigned; he
outlived power and wealth and friends; he saw all who had loved him
perish for his sake, and, to crown all, the son, the last and
dearest of the great house from which he sprang, the centre of all
his hopes, the depositary of the great Lancastrian traditions of
English polity, set aside and slain. And he was without doubt most
innocent of all the evils that befell England because of him.
Pious, pure, generous, patient, simple, true and just, humble,
merciful, fastidiously conscientious, modest and temperate, he
might have seemed made to rule a quiet people in quiet times.... It
is needless to say that for the throne of England in the midst of
the death struggle of nations, parties, and liberties, Henry had
not one single qualification."[50]
[Illustration: King's Parade]
And yet he did leave an impression on the hearts of Englishmen which
will not readily be erased. For setting aside the fabled visions and the
false miracle with which he is credited, and upon which Henry VII.
relied when he pressed the claims of his predecessor for formal
canonisation on Pope Julius II., it was certainly no mere
anti-Lancastrian loyalty or party spirit which led the rough yeomen
farmers of Yorkshire to worship before his statue on the rood-screen of
their Minster and to sing hymns in his honour, or caused the Latin
prayers which he had composed to be reverently handed down to the time
of the Reformation through many editions of the "Sarum Hours." One
enduring monument there is of his devotion to learning and of his
saintly spirit, which must long keep his memory green, namely, the royal
and religious foundation of the two great colleges which he projected at
Eton and at Cambridge.
Of Eton we need not speak. The fame of that college is written large on
the page of English history. And that fame and its founder's memory we
may safely leave to the "scholars of Henry" in its halls and playing
fields to-day.
"Christ and His Mother, heavenly maid,
Mary, in whose fair name was laid
Eton's corner, bless our youth
With truth, and purity, mother of truth!
O ye, 'neath breezy skies of June,
By silver Thames' lulling tune,
In shade of willow or oak, who try
The golden gates of poesy;
Or on the tabled sward all day
Match your strength in England's play,
Scholars of Henry giving grace
To toil and force in game or race;
Exceed the prayer and keep the fame
Of him, the sorrowful king who came
Here in his realm, a realm to found
Where he might stand for ever crowned."[51]
It was on the 12th of February 1441, when Henry of Windsor was only
nineteen years old, that the first charter for the foundation of King's
College, Cambridge, was signed. On the 2nd of April in the same year he
laid the first stone. It is difficult to say from whence the first
impulse to the patronage of learning came to the King. He had always
been a precocious scholar, too early forced to recognise his work as
successor to his father. Something of his uncle Duke Humfrey of
Gloucester's ardent love of letters he had imbibed at an early age. No
doubt, too, the Earl of Warwick, "the King's master" for eighteen years,
had faithfully discharged his duty to "teach him nurture, literature,
language, and other manner of cunning as his age shall suffer him to
comprehend such as it fitteth so great a prince to be learned of," and
had made his royal pupil a good scholar and accomplished gentleman:
though perhaps he had suffered the young king's mind to take somewhat
too ascetic and ecclesiastic a bent for the hard and perilous times
which he had to face: a feature of his character which Shakespeare
emphasises in the speech which he puts into the mouth of Margaret of
Anjou, his affianced bride, in the first act of the play in which he
draws the picture of the decay of England's power under the weak and
saintly Lancastrian king with so masterly a pencil:--
"I thought King Henry had resembled (Pole)
In courage, courtship, and proportion:
But all his mind is bent to holiness,
To number _Ave-Maries_ on his beads:
His champions are the Prophets and Apostles:
His weapons holy saws of sacred writ:
His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves
Are brazen images o' canonized saints.
I would the college or the cardinals
Would choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome,
And set the triple crown upon his head:
That were a state fit for his holiness."[52]
However, the first fruits of the royal "holiness" was a noble
conception. A visit to Winchester in the July of 1440, where Henry
studied carefully from personal observation the working of William of
Wykeham's system of education, seems to have fired him with the desire
to rival that great pioneer of schoolcraft's magnificent foundations at
Winchester and Oxford. The suppression of the alien priories, decreed by
Parliament in the preceding reign and carried out in his own, provided a
convenient means of carrying out the project. Henry V. had already
appropriated their revenues for the purposes of war in France. Henry VI.
proceeded to confiscate them permanently as an endowment for his
college foundations. It would appear, however, that the first intention
of the King had been that his two foundations should have been
independent of one another, and that the connection of Eton with King's,
after the manner of Winchester and New College, came rather as an
afterthought and as part of a later scheme. The determination, however,
that the Eton scholars should participate in the Cambridge foundation
forms part of the King's scheme in the second charter of his college
granted on 10th July 1443, in which he says:--
"It is our fixed and unalterable purpose, being moved thereto, as
we trust, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that our poor
scholars of our Royal foundation of S. Mary of Eton, after they
have been sufficiently taught the first rudiments of grammar, shall
be transferred thence to our aforesaid College of Cambridge, which
we will shall be henceforth denominated our College Royal of S.
Mary and S. Nicholas, there to be more thoroughly instructed in a
liberal course of study, in other branches of knowledge, and other
professions."
[Illustration: The West Doorway King's College Chapel]
The first site chosen for the College was a very cramped and
inconvenient one. It had Milne Street, then one of the principal
thoroughfares of the town, on the west, the University Library and
schools on the east, and School Street on the north. On the south side
only had it any outlet at all. A court was formed by placing buildings
on the three unoccupied sides, the University buildings forming a
fourth. These buildings, however, were never completely finished, except
in a temporary manner, and indeed so remained until the end of the last
century, when they were more or less incorporated in the new buildings
of the University Library facing Trinity Hall Lane, erected by Sir
Gilbert Scott in 1868. The old gateway facing Clare College, which
had been begun in 1444, was at last completed from the designs of Mr.
Pearson in 1890, and remains one of the most beautiful architectural
gates in Cambridge.
[Illustration: King's College Chapel]
It very soon, however, became evident that the selected site was much
too small for the projected college. Little time was lost by the
earliest provost and scholars in petitioning the King to provide an
ampler habitation for their needs.
"The task was beset with difficulties that would have daunted a
mind less firmly resolved on carrying out the end in view than the
king's; difficulties indeed that would have been insuperable except
by royal influence, backed by a royal purse. The ground on which
King's College now stands was then densely populated. It occupied
nearly the whole of the parish of S. John Baptist, whose church is
believed to have stood near the west end of the chapel. Milne
Street crossed the site from north to south, in a direction that
may be easily identified from the two ends of the street that still
remain, under the name of Trinity Hall Lane and Queen's Lane. The
space between Milne Street and Trumpington Street, then called High
Street, was occupied by the houses and gardens of different
proprietors, and was traversed by a narrow thoroughfare called
Piron Lane, leading from High Street to S. John's Church. At the
corner of Milne Street and this lane, occupying the ground on which
about half the ante-chapel now stands, was the small college called
_God's House_, founded in 1439 by William Byngham for the study of
grammar, which, as he observes in his petition to Henry VI. for
leave to found it, is "the rote and ground of all other sciences."
On the west side of Milne Street, between it and the river, were
the hostels of S. Austin, S. Nicholas, and S. Edmund, besides many
dwelling-houses. This district was traversed by several lanes,
affording to the townspeople ready access to the river, and to a
wharf on its bank called Salthithe. No detailed account has been
preserved of the negotiations necessary for the acquisition of this
ground, between six and seven acres in extent, and in the very
heart of Cambridge.... The greatest offence appears to have been
given by the closing of the lanes leading down to the river, which
was of primary importance to mediæval Cambridge as a highway. In
five years' time, however, the difficulties were all got over; the
town yielded up, though not with the best grace, the portion of
Milne Street required and all the other thoroughfares; the hostels
were suppressed, or transferred to other sites; the Church of S.
John was pulled down, and the parish united to that of S. Edward,
whose church bears evidence, by the spacious aisles attached to its
choir, of the extension rendered necessary at that time by the
addition of the members of Clare Hall and Trinity Hall to the
number of its parishioners."[53]
On this splendid site of many acres, where now the silent green expanse
of sunlit lawn has taken the place of the busy lanes and crowded
tenements, which in Henry's time hummed with the life of a mediæval
river-side city, there rises the wondrous building, the crown of
fifteenth century architecture, beautiful, unique--a cathedral church in
size, a college chapel in plan--seeming in its lofty majesty so solitary
and so aloof, and yet so instantaneously impressive.
Who was the architect of this masterpiece? The credit has commonly been
given to one of two men--Nicholas Close or John Langton. Close was a man
of Flemish family, and one of the original six Fellows of the College.
He had for a few years been the vicar of the demolished Church of S.
John Zachary. He afterwards became Bishop of Carlisle. Langton was
Master of Pembroke and Chancellor of the University, and was one of the
commissioners appointed by the King to superintend the scheme of the
works at their commencement. But both of these men were theologians and
divines. We have no evidence that they were architects. Mr. G. Gilbert
Scott, in his essay on "English Church Architecture," has, however,
given reasons, which seem to be almost conclusive, that the man who
should really have the credit of conceiving this great work was the
master-mason Reginald of Ely, who as early as 1443 was appointed by a
patent of Henry VI. "to press masons, carpenters, and other workmen" for
the new building. According to Mr. Scott's view, Nicholas Close and his
fellow surveyors merely did the work which in modern days would be done
by a building committee. It was the master-mason who planned the
building, and who continued to act as architect until the works came to
a standstill with the deposition of the King and the enthronement of his
successor Edward IV. in 1462. Moreover, the character of the general
design of King's Chapel and even its architectural details, such as the
setting out of its great windows, the plan of its vaulting shafts, and
the groining of the roofs of the small chapels between its buttresses,
lend force to Mr. Scott's contention. It is evident from the accuracy
and minuteness of the directions given in "the Will of King Henry VI."
(a document which was not in reality a testament, but an expression of
his deliberate purpose and design with regard to his proposed
foundation), that complete working plans had been prepared by an
architect. Whoever that architect may have been, he had evidently been
commissioned to design a chapel of magnificence worthy of a royal
foundation. And where more naturally could he look for his model for
such a building as the King desired than to that chapel, the largest
and the most splendid hitherto erected in England, that finest specimen
of decorated architecture in the kingdom, Alan de Walsingham's Lady
Chapel at Ely. The relationship between the two buildings is obvious to
even an uninstructed eye, but Mr. Scott has shown how closely the
original design of King's follows the Ely Lady Chapel lines.
"Any one," he truly says, "who will carry up his eye from the bases
of the vaulting shafts to the springing of the great vault will
perceive at once that the section of the shaft does not correspond
with the plan of the vault springers. There is a sort of cripple
here. The shaft is, in fact, set out with seven members, while the
design of the vault plan requires but five. Thus two members of the
pier have nothing to do, and disappear somewhat clumsily in the
capital. The section of these shafts was imposed by the first
architect, and does not agree with the requirement of a fan-groin
(designed by the architect of a later date).... The original
sections, and the peculiar distribution of their bases,
unmistakably indicate a ribbed vault, with transverse, diagonal,
and intermediate ribs. Now, if we apply to the plan of these
shaftings at Cambridge the plan of the vaulting at Ely, we find the
two to tally precisely. Each member of the pier has its
corresponding rib, in the direction of the sweep of which each
member of the base is laid down. This might serve as proof
sufficient, but it is not all. There exist in the church two
lierne-groins of the work of the first period, those namely of the
two easternmost chapels of the north range, and these are identical
in principle with the great vault at Ely, and with the plan that is
indicated by the distribution of the ante-chapel bases. We know
then that the first designer of the church did employ lierne and
not fan-vaulting, even in the small areas of the chapels, and that
these liernes resemble not the later form--such as we may observe
in the nave of Winchester Cathedral--but the earlier manner which
is exhibited at Ely. There can, therefore, as I conceive, be no
doubt that this great chapel was designed to be "chare-roofed" with
such a lierne-vault--it is practically a Welsh-groin--as adorns the
next grandest chapel in England only sixteen miles distant."[54]
There seems little doubt then that the architect of King's Chapel was
its first master-builder, Reginald of Ely, who, trained under the shadow
of the great Minster buildings in that city, probably in its mason's
yard, naturally took as his model for the King's new chapel at Cambridge
one of the most exquisite of the works of the great cathedral builder of
the previous century, Alan de Walsingham.
Had the original design of Reginald been completed, several of the
defects of the building, as we see it to-day, would have been avoided.
The chapel vault would have been arched, and the great space which is
now left between the top of the windows and the spring of the vaulting
would have been avoided. Much of the heaviness of effect also, which is
felt by any one studying the exterior of the chapel, and which is due to
the low pitch of the window arches, rendered necessary by the alteration
in the design of the great vault, would have been avoided.
[Illustration: KING'S COLLEGE CHAPEL
_To face p. 150_]
Reginald of Ely's work, however, indeed all work on the new chapel,
ceased in 1461, when the battle of Towton gave the crown to the young
Duke of York, and the Lancastrian colleges of his rival fell upon barren
days. On the accession of Richard III. in 1483, the new king not only
showed his goodwill to the College by the gift of lands, but ordered the
building to go on with all despatch. In 1485, however, there commenced
another period of twenty years' stagnation. Then in 1506, Henry VII.,
paying a visit with his mother to Cambridge, attended service in the
unfinished chapel, and determined to become its patron. In the summer of
1508 more than a hundred masons and carpenters were again at work, and
henceforth the building suffered no interruption. By July 1515 the
fabric of the church was finished, and had cost in all, according to the
present value of money, some £160,000.
In November of the same year a payment of £100 is made to Barnard
Flower, the King's glazier, and a similar sum in February 1517. It would
seem that the same artist completed four windows, that over the north
door of the ante-chapel being the earliest. Upon his death agreements
were made in 1526 for the erection of the whole of the remaining
twenty-two windows. They were to represent "the story of the old lawe
and of the new lawe." Above and below the transome in each window are
two separate pictures, each pair being divided by a "messenger," who
bears a scroll with a legend giving the subject represented. In the
lower tier the windows from north-west to south-west represent the Life
of the Blessed Virgin, the Life of Christ, and the History of the Church
as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The upper tier has scenes from
the Old Testament or from apocryphal sources which prefigure the events
recorded below. The whole of the east window is devoted to the Passion
and Crucifixion of our Lord. The west window, containing a
representation of the Last Judgment, is entirely modern. It was executed
by Messrs. Clayton and Bell, and was erected in 1879.
"A bare enumeration of the subjects, however, can give but a poor
idea of these glorious paintings. What first arrests the attention
is the singularly happy blending of colours, produced by a most
ingenious juxta-position of pure tints. The half-tones so dear to
the present generation were fortunately unknown when they were set
up. Thus though there is a profusion of brilliant scarlet, and
light blue, and golden yellow, there is no gaudiness. Again, all
the glass admits light without let or hindrance, the shading being
laid on with sparing hand, so that the greatest amount of
brilliancy is insured. This is further enhanced by a very copious
use of white or slightly yellow glass. It must not, however, be
supposed that a grand effect of colour is all that has been aimed
at. The pictures bear a close study as works of art. The figures
are rather larger than life, and boldly drawn, so as to be well
seen from a great distance; but the faces are full of expression
and individuality, and each scene is beautiful as a composition.
They would well bear reduction within the narrow limits of an easel
picture.... There is no doubt that a German or Flemish influence is
discernible in some of the subjects; but that is no more than might
have been expected, when we consider the number of sets of pictures
illustrating the life and passion of Christ that had appeared in
Germany and Flanders during the half century preceding their
execution.... That these windows should (at the time of the Puritan
destruction of such things) have been saved is a marvel; and how it
came to pass is not exactly known. The story that they were taken
out and hidden, or, as one version of it says, buried, may be
dismissed as an idle fabrication. More likely the Puritan
sentiments of the then provost, Dr. Whichcote, were regarded with
such favour by the Earl of Manchester during his occupation of
Cambridge, that he interfered to save the chapel and the college
from molestation."[55]
[Illustration: Gateway to Old Court of King's College]
The magnificent screen and rood-loft are carved with the arms, badge,
and initials (H. A.) of Henry and Anne Boleyn, and with the rose,
fleur-de-lis, and portcullis. Doubtless, therefore, they were erected
between 1532 and 1535. The doors to the screen were renewed in 1636, and
bear the arms of Charles I. The stalls were set up by Henry VIII., but
they were without canopies, the wall above them being probably covered
with hangings, the hooks for which may still be seen under the
string-course below the windows. The stalls are in the Renaissance
manner, and are the first example of that style at Cambridge. They
appear to differ somewhat in character from Torregiano's works at
Westminster, and to be rather French than Italian in feeling, although
some portions of the figure-carving recalls in its vigour the style of
Michael Angelo. The stall canopies and the panelling to the east of the
stalls were the work of Cornelius Austin, and were put up about 1675.
The north and south entrance doors leading to the quire and the side
chapel are probably of the same date as the screen. The lectern dates
from the first quarter of the sixteenth century, having been given by
Robert Hacombleyn, provost, whose name it bears.
As to the remaining buildings of King's College it is sufficient to say
that the great quadrangle projected by the founder was never built. The
old buildings at the back of the schools, hastily finished in a slight
and temporary manner, continued in use until the last century. In 1723
a plan was furnished by James Gibbs for a new quadrangle, of which the
chapel was to form the north side. The western range--the Gibbs
building--was the only part actually built. The hall, library, provost's
lodge, and several sets of rooms at each end of the hall, as well as the
stone screen and the porter's lodge, were erected in 1824-28, at a cost
of rather more than £100,000, from the designs of William Wilkins. A
range of rooms facing Trumpington Street were added by Sir Gilbert Scott
in 1870. The new court, which when completed will form a court with
buildings on three sides and the river on the fourth, was commenced by
Mr. Bodley in 1891. At present this third side of the court is still
left open.
[Illustration: King's College Quadrangle]
To return, however, to the history of the foundation. It is an
illustration of the way in which at this time ultramontanist theories
were contending for supremacy in England, in the universities as
elsewhere, that the King should have applied to the pope for a bull
granting him power to make his new college not only independent of the
bishop of the diocese, but also of the University authorities. Such a
bull was granted, and in 1448 the University itself consented, by an
instrument given under its common seal, that the College, in the matter
of discipline as distinguished from instruction, should be entirely
independent of the University. By the limitation also of the benefits of
this foundation to scholars only of Eton, the founder, perhaps
unconsciously, certainly disastrously, created an exclusive class of
students endowed with exclusive privileges, an anomaly which for more
than four centuries marred the full efficiency of Henry's splendid
foundation. This _imperium in imperio_ was happily abolished by a new
code of statutes which became law in 1861.
"A little flock they were in Henry's hall
* * * * *
Hardly the circle widened, till one day
The guarded gate swung open wide to all."
It may certainly be hoped that there is truth in the present provost's
gentle prophecy, that "it is hardly possible that the College should
relapse into what was sometimes its old condition, that of a family
party, comfortable, indeed, but inclined to be sleepy and
self-indulgent, and not wholly free from family quarrels."
And yet at the same time it should not be forgotten, as good master
Fuller reminds us, that "the honour of Athens lieth not in her walls,
but in the worth of her citizens," and that during the lengthened period
in which the society was a close foundation only open to scholars of
Eton, with a yearly entry therefore of new members seldom exceeding
half-a-dozen, it could still point to a long list of distinguished
scholars and of men otherwise eminent--mathematicians like Oughtred,
moralists like Whichcote, theologians like Pearson, antiquarians like
Cole, poets like Waller--who had been educated within its walls. In
Cooper's "Memorials of Cambridge," the list of eminent King's men down
to 1860 occupies twenty pages, a similar list of Trinity men, the
largest college in the university, only ten pages more. This hardly
seems to justify Dean Peacock's well-known epigram on the unreformed
King's as "a splendid _Cenotaph_ of learning."
Let us now turn from King Henry's College to the other royal foundation
of his reign which claims his consort, the Lady Margaret of Anjou, as
its foundress. The poet Gray in his "Installation Ode," speaking of
Queen Margaret in relation to Queens' College, calls her "Anjou's
heroine." But those Shakespearean readers who have been accustomed to
think of his representation of the Queen, in _The Second Part of King
Henry VI._, as a dramatic portrait of considerable truth and historic
consistency, will hardly recognise the "heroic" qualities of Margaret's
character. Certainly she is not one of Shakespeare's "heroines." She has
none of the womanly grace or lovableness of his ideal women. A woman of
hard indomitable will, mistaking too often cruelty for firmness, using
the pliancy and simplicity of her husband for mere party ends, outraging
the national conscience by stirring up the Irish, the French, the Scots,
against the peace of England, finally pitting the north against the
south in a cruel and futile civil war, with nothing left of womanhood
but the almost tigress heart of a baffled mother, this is the Queen
Margaret as we know her in Shakespeare and in history. But "Our Lady the
Queen Margaret," who was a "nursing mother" to Queens' College, seems a
quite different figure. She has but just come to England, a wife and
queen when little more than a child, "good-looking and well-grown"
(_specie et forma præstans_), precocious, romantic, a "devout pilgrim to
the shrine of Boccaccio," delighting in the ballads of the troubadour,
a lover of the chase, inheriting all the literary tastes of her father,
King René of Anjou. The motives which led her to become the patroness of
a college are thus given by Thomas Fuller:--
"As Miltiades' trophy in Athens would not suffer Themistocles to
sleep, so this queen, beholding her husband's bounty in building
King's College, was restless in herself with holy emulation until
she had produced something of the like nature, a strife wherein
wives without breach of duty may contend with their husbands which
should exceed in pious performances."[56]
Accordingly we read that in 1447 Queen Margaret, being then but fifteen
years old, sent to the King the following petition:--
"Margaret,--To the king my souverain lord. Besechith mekely
Margaret, quene of England, youre humble wif. Forasmuche as youre
moost noble grace hath newely ordeined and stablisshed a Collage of
Seint Bernard, in the Universite of Cambrigge, with multitude of
grete and faire privilages perpetuelly apparteynyng unto the same,
as in your lettres patentes therupon made more plainly hit
appereth. In the whiche Universite is no Collage founded by eny
quene of England hidertoward. Plese hit therfore unto your
highnesse to geve and graunte unto your seide humble wif the
fondacon and determinacon of the seid collage to be called and
named the Quene's Collage of Sainte Margarete and Saint Bernard, or
ellis of Sainte Margarete, vergine and martir, and Saint Bernard
Confessour, and thereupon for ful evidence therof to hav licence
and pouoir to ley the furst stone in her own persone or ellis by
other depute of her assignement, so that beside the mooste noble
and glorieus collage roial of our Lady and Saint Nicholas, founded
by your highnesse may be founded and stablisshed the seid so
called Quenes Collage to conservacon of oure feithe and augmentacon
of pure clergie, namly of the imparesse of alle sciences and
facultees theologie ... to the ende there accustumed of plain
lecture and exposicon botraced with docteurs sentence autentiq
performed daily twyse by two docteurs notable and well avised upon
the bible aforenone and maistre of the sentences afternone to the
publique audience of alle men frely, bothe seculiers and religieus
to the magnificence of denominacon of suche a Queen's Collage, and
to laud and honneure of sexe feminine, like as two noble and
devoute contesses of Pembroke and of Clare, founded two collages in
the same Universite called Pembroke hall and Clare hall, the wiche
are of grete reputacon for good and worshipful clerkis that by
grete multitude have be bredde and brought forth in theym. And of
your more ample grace to graunte that alle privileges immunitees,
profites and comoditees conteyned in the lettres patentes above
reherced may stonde in their strength and pouoir after forme and
effect of the conteine in theym.
"And she shal ever preye God for you."
The College of S. Bernard, mentioned in the first paragraph of the
Queen's petition, was a hostel, established by Andrew Dokett, the rector
of S. Botolph's Church, situated on the north side of the churchyard in
Trumpington Street, adjoining Benet College. For this hostel, Dokett had
obtained from the King in 1446 a charter of incorporation as a college,
but a year later procured another charter, refounding the College of S.
Bernard on a new site, between Milne Street and the river, adjoining the
house of the Carmelite Friars. The true founder, therefore, of Queens'
College was Andrew Dokett, but he was foresighted enough to seek the
Queen's patronage for his foundation, and no doubt welcomed the
absorption of S. Bernard's hostel in the royal foundation of Queens'
College. Anyhow, the foundation stone of the new building was laid on
the 15th April 1448. The outbreak of the Civil War stopped the works
when the first court of the College was almost finished. Andrew Dokett,
the first master, was still alive when Edward IV. came to the throne,
and about the year 1465, he was fortunate to secure for his College the
patronage of the new queen, Elizabeth Wydville. Elizabeth had been in
earlier days a lady-in-waiting to Margaret of Anjou, and had herself
strongly sympathised with the Lancastrian party. It is probable,
therefore, that in accepting the patronage of the College she did so,
not in her character as Yorkist queen, but rather as desirous of
completing the work of the old mistress whom she had faithfully served
before the strange chances of destiny had brought her as a rival to the
throne. At any rate, from this period onwards the position of the
apostrophe after and not before the "s" in "Queens'" adequately
corresponds to the fact that the College commemorates not one, but two
queens in its title.
The earliest extant statutes appear to be those of the second foundress,
the Queen Consort of Edward IV., revised at a later time under the
authority of Henry VIII. It seems indeed likely that the absence of
canon law from the subjects required by statute from all fellows after
regency in arts, and the provision of Bible lectures in College, and
divers English sermons to be preached in chapel by the fellows,
indicates a somewhat remarkable reforming spirit for the end of the
fifteenth century, and rather points to the conclusion that these
provisions belong to the later revised code of Henry VIII. At the time
of the foundation of Queen's College the plan of a collegiate building
had been completely developed. It followed the lines not so much of a
monastery, though it had, of course, some features in common with the
monastic houses, but of the normal type of the large country houses or
mansions of the fifteenth century. The late Professor Willis, in his
archæological lectures on Cambridge, was accustomed, we are told, to
exhibit in support of this view a ground plan of Haddon Hall and Queens'
College side by side. And certainly it is surprising to notice how
striking is the similarity of the two plans. The east and west position
of the chapel at Haddon Hall happens to be the reverse of that of
Queens' College, but with that exception, and the position of the
entrance gateway to the first quadrangle, the arrangement of the
buildings in the two mansions is practically identical. The hall,
buttery, and kitchen occupy in both the range of buildings between the
two courts; the private dining-room beyond the hall at Haddon is
represented at Queens' College by the fellows' combination room; the
long gallery in the upper court of Haddon has more or less its
counterpart at Queens' in the masters' gallery in the cloister court;
the upper entrance at Haddon is similarly placed to the passage to the
old wooden bridge at Queens'.
[Illustration: Cloister Court, Queen's College]
The principal court of Queens' was almost completed before the Wars of
the Roses broke out. "It is," says Mr. J. W. Clark, "the earliest
remaining quadrangle in Cambridge that can claim attention for real
architectural beauty and fitness of design." It is built in red brick,
and has a noble gateway flanked by octagonal turrets, and there are
square towers at each external angle of the court. The employment of
these towers is a peculiarity which perhaps offers presumptive evidence
that the architect of the other two royal colleges of Eton and King's
may also have been employed at Queens'. This court probably retains more
of the aspect of ancient Cambridge than any other collegiate building in
the town. The turret at the south-west angle of the great court,
overlooking Silver Street and the town bridge and mill pond, adjoins the
rooms which, according to tradition, were occupied by Erasmus, and whose
top storey was used by him as a study. It is commonly known as The Tower
of Erasmus. "Queens' College," says Fuller, "accounteth it no small
credit thereunto that Erasmus (who no doubt might have pickt and chose
what house he pleased) preferred this for the place of his study for
some years in Cambridge. Either invited thither with the fame of the
learning and love of his friend Bishop Fisher, then master thereof, or
allured with the situation of this colledge so near the river (as
Rotterdam, his native place, to the sea) with pleasant walks
thereabouts." An interesting account of Erasmus' residence in Queens' is
quoted by Mr. Searle[57] from a letter written by a fellow of the
College, Andrew Paschal, Rector of Chedsey, in the year 1680, which
pleasantly describes at least the traditional belief.
"The staires which rise up to his studie at Queens' College in
Cambr. doe bring into two of the fairest chambers in the ancient
building; in one of them which lookes into the hall and chief
court, the Vice-President kept in my time; in that adjoyning it was
my fortune to be, when fellow. The chambers over are good lodgeing
roomes; and to one of them is a square turret adjoyning, in the
upper part of which is the study of Erasmus and over it leads. To
that belongs the best prospect about the Colledge, viz. upon the
river, into the corne fields, and country adjoyning. So y^{t} it
might very well consist with the civility of the house to that
great man (who was no fellow, and I think stayed not long there) to
let him have that study. His sleeping roome might be either the
President's, or to be neer to him the next. The roome for his
servitor that above it, and through it he might goe to that studie,
which for the height and neatnesse and prospect might easily take
his phancy."
[Illustration: Oriel Window, Queen's College]
It was in this study no doubt that much of the work was done for his
edition of the New Testament in the original Greek, that epoch-making
book which he published at Basle in 1516; and from hence also he must
have written those amusing letters to his friends, Ammonius, Dean Colet,
Sir Thomas More, in which comments on the progress of his work alternate
with humorous grumblings about the Cambridge climate, the plague, the
wine, the food: "Here I live like a cockle shut up in his shell, stowing
myself away in college, and perfectly mum over my books.... I cannot go
out of doors because of the plague.... I am beset with thieves, and the
wine is no better than vinegar.... I do not like the ale of this place
at all ... if you could manage to send me a cask of Greek wine, the very
best that can be bought, you would be doing your friend a great
kindness, but mind that it is not too sweet.... I am sending you back
your cask, which I have kept by me longer than I otherwise should have
done, that I might enjoy the perfume at least of Greek wine.... My
expenses here are enormous; the profits not a brass farthing. Believe me
as though I were on my oath, I have been here not quite five months, and
yet have spent sixty nobles: while certain members of my (Greek) class
have presented me with just a single one, which they had much difficulty
in persuading me to accept. I have decided not to leave a stone unturned
this winter, and in fact to throw out my sheet anchor. If this succeeds
I will build my nest here; if otherwise, I shall wing my flight--whither
I know not." Perhaps there is some playful exaggeration in all this.
Anyhow Erasmus stayed at Cambridge seven years in all. He may have been
justly disappointed in his Greek class-room: "I shall have perhaps a
larger gathering when I begin the grammar of Theodorus," he writes
plaintively; but disappointed there, he took refuge in his college
study, and there, high up in the south-west tower of Queens', we may
picture him, "outwatching the Bear" over the pages of S. Jerome, as
Jerome himself in his time had outwatched it writing those same pages,
eleven hundred years before, in his cell at Bethlehem; or pouring over
the text of his Greek Testament and its translation, the boldest work of
criticism and interpretation that had been conceived by any scholar for
many a century, a _Novum Instrumentum_ indeed, by which the scholars of
the new learning were to restore to the centuries which followed, the
old true theology which had been so long obscured by the subtleties of
the schoolmen, the new and truer theology which while based on a
foundation of sound method and historical apparatus rests also in the
joyous and refreshing story of the Son of God, in that unique figure of
a Divine Personality, round whom centre the love, the hopes, the fears,
the joys of the coming ages.
[Illustration: The Bridge & Gables. Queen's College]
Queens' College has many claims upon the gratitude of English scholars
and English churchmen--it would have been sufficient that she had been
the "nursing mother" of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester--"vere
Episcopus, vere Theologus"--under whose cautious supervision Cambridge
first tasted of the fruits of the Renascence, who "sat here governor of
the schools not only for his learning's sake, but for his divine
life"--but she can lay no claim to greater honour than this, that
within her walls three hundred years ago, these words were written--they
form part of the noble "Paraclesis" of the _Novum Testamentum_ of
Erasmus:--
"If the footprints of Christ are anywhere shown to us, we kneel
down and adore. Why do we not rather venerate the living and
breathing picture of him in these books? If the vesture of Christ
be exhibited, where will we not go to kiss it? Yet were his whole
wardrobe exhibited, nothing could exhibit Christ more vividly and
truly than these Evangelical writings. Statues of wood and stone we
decorate with gold and gems for the love of Christ. They only
profess to give us the form of his body; these books present us
with a living image of his most holy mind. Were we to have seen him
with our own eyes, we should not have so intimate a knowledge as
they give of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising again, as it
were, in our actual presence.
* * * * *
"The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the
teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are
unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the
unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had
taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by
a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian
Religion consisted in men's ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings
it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished his mysteries to be
published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman
should read the Gospel--should read the Epistles of Paul. And I
wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might
be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by
Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first
step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some
would take them to heart. I long that the husbandman should sing
portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, that the
weaver should hum them to the tune of his shuttle, that the
traveller should beguile with their stories the tedium of his
journey."[58]
[Illustration: A Bit from Sidney Street]