BISHOP ALCOCK AND THE NUNS OF S. RHADEGUND
"Yes, since his dayes a cocke was in the fen,
I knowe his voyce among a thousand men:
He taught, he preached, he mended every wrong:
But, Coridon, alas! no good thing abideth long.
He All was a Cocke, he wakened us from sleepe
And while we slumbered he did our foldes keep:
No cur, no foxes, nor butchers' dogges would
Coulde hurte our folds, his watching was so good;
The hungry wolves which did that time abounde,
What time he crowed abashed at the sounde.
This Cocke was no more abashed at the Foxe
Than is a Lion abashed at the Oxe."
--ALEXANDER BARCLAY, _Monk of Ely_, 1513
The New Learning in Italy and Germany--The English "Pilgrim
Scholars": Grey, Tiptoft, Linacre, Grocyn--The practical Genius of
England--Bishops Rotherham, Alcock, and Fisher--Alcock,
diplomatist, financier, architect--The Founder of Jesus College--He
takes as his model Jesus College, Rotherham--His Object the
Training of a Preaching Clergy--The Story of the Nunnery of S.
Rhadegund--Its Dissolution--Conversion of the Conventual Church
into a College Chapel--The Monastic Buildings, Gateway, Cloister,
Chapter House--The Founder a Better Architect than an Educational
Reformer--The Jesus Roll of eminent Men from Cranmer to Coleridge.
The historical importance of the New Learning depends ultimately on the
fact that its influence on the Western world broadened out into a new
capacity for culture in general, which took various forms according to
the different local or national conditions with which it came into
contact. In Italy, its land of origin, the Classical Revival was felt
mainly as an æsthetic ideal, an instrument for the self-culture of the
individual, expressing itself in delight for beauty of form and elegance
of literary style, bringing to the life of the cultured classes a social
charm and distinction of tone, which, however, it is difficult sometimes
to distinguish from a merely refined paganism. In France and Spain too,
where the basis of character was also Latin, the æsthetic spirit of
classical antiquity was readily assimilated. To a French or a Spanish
scholar sympathy with the pagan spirit was instinctive and innate. The
Teutonic genius, however, both on the side of Literature and of Art,
remained sturdily impervious to the more æsthetic side of the Italian
Renaissance. In Germany the æsthetic influence was evident enough--we
can trace it plainly in the writings of Erasmus and Melancthon, though
with them Italian humanism was always a secondary aim subservient to a
greater end--but it had a strongly marked character of its own, wholly
different from the Italian. The Renaissance in Germany indeed we rightly
know by the name of the Reformation, and the paramount task of the
German scholars of the New Learning we recognise to have been the
elucidation of the true meaning of the Bible. Similarly in England the
scholarly mind was at first little affected by the æsthetic
considerations which meant so much to a Frenchman or an Italian. A few
chosen Englishmen, it is true, "pilgrim scholars" they were
called--William Grey, Bishop of Ely, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester,
Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn stand out perhaps most
conspicuously--were drawn to Italy by the rumours of the marvellous
treasures rescued from monastic lumber rooms, or conveyed over seas by
fugitive Greeks, but they returned to England to find that there was
little they could do except to bequeath the books and manuscripts they
had collected to an Oxford or a Cambridge College, and hope for happier
times when scholars would be found to read them. It was not indeed until
the little group of Hellenists--Erasmus and Linacre and Grocyn and
Colet--had shown the value of Greek thought as an interpreter of the New
Testament, that any enthusiasm for the New Learning could be awakened in
England. An increase of a knowledge of the Bible was worth working for,
not the elegancies of an accurate Latin style. Englishmen in the
fifteenth century were busy in the task of developing trade and
commerce, and their intellectual tone took colour from their daily work.
It became eminently utilitarian and practical. An English scholar was
willing to accept the New Learning if you would prove to him that it was
useful or was true, that it was only beautiful did not at first much
affect him. It was only therefore with an eye to strictly practical
results that at the universities the New Learning was welcomed, and even
there tardily.
Nowhere perhaps is this practical tendency of English scholarship at
this period more characteristically shown than in the Cambridge work of
Thomas Alcock and John Fisher, the founders respectively of Jesus
College and of the twin colleges of Christ's and John's. Alcock and
Fisher were both of them Yorkshiremen, born and educated at Beverley in
the Grammar School connected with the Minster there, and both proceeding
from thence to Cambridge: Alcock in all likelihood, though there is some
doubt about this, to Pembroke, where he took his LL.D. degree in or
before 1461; Fisher to Michaelhouse, of which he became a Fellow in
1491.
Of Alcock, the historian Bale has said that "no one in England had a
greater reputation for sanctity." He was equally remarkable for his
practical qualities, as a diplomatist, as a financier, as an architect.
He had twice been a Royal Commissioner, under Richard III. and under
Henry VII., to arrange treaties with Scotland. By an arrangement, of
which no similar instance is known, he had conjointly held the office of
Lord Chancellor with Bishop Rotherham of Lincoln, he himself at that
time ruling the diocese of Rochester. As early as 1462 he had been made
Master of the Rolls. In 1476 he was translated to Worcester, and at the
same time became Lord President of Wales. On the accession of Henry
VII., he was made Comptroller of the Royal Works and Buildings, an
office for which he was especially fitted, it is said, by his skill as
an architect. In 1486 he was translated to the See of Ely and again made
Lord Chancellor.
It was as Bishop of Ely that he undertook the foundation of Jesus
College. There can, I think, be little doubt that for the idea of his
projected college he was indebted to his old Cambridge friend and
co-chancellor, Thomas Rotherham, at this time Archbishop of York. At any
rate, it is noteworthy that each of the friends founded in his
Diocese--the Archbishop at his native place of Rotherham, the Bishop of
Ely at Cambridge--a college dedicated to the name of Jesus. Jesus
College, Rotherham, was founded in 1481; Jesus College, Cambridge,
followed fifteen years later. The main object of the two prelates was
probably the same. In the license for the foundation of Rotherham's
college its objects are stated to be twofold: "To preach the Word of God
in the Parish of Rotherham and in other places in the Diocese of York;
and to instruct gratuitously, in the rules of grammar and song, scholars
from all parts of England, and especially from the Diocese of York."
There is no reason to suppose that the needs of the Diocese of Ely, even
fifteen years later, were any different. For the fact that Jesus
College, Rotherham, should consist of _ten_ persons--a provost, six
choristers, and three masters--who can teach respectively grammar,
music, and writing, the Archbishop gave the fanciful reason, that as he,
its founder, had offended God in His ten commandments, so he desired the
benefit of the prayers of ten persons on his behalf. Alcock's motive for
fixing the number of his new Society of Jesus at Cambridge at thirteen
seems to have been no less characteristic. Thirteen, the number of the
original Christian Society of Our Lord and His Apostles, was the common
complement of the professed members of a monastic society, and may in
all likelihood have been the original number of the nuns of St.
Rhadegund, whose house the Bishop was about to suppress to found his new
college.
"Rotherham's College, according to its measure, was intended to
meet two pressing needs of his time, and especially of northern
England--a preaching clergy, and boys trained for the service of
the church. At the end of the fifteenth century 'both theology and
the art of preaching seemed in danger of general neglect. At the
English universities, and consequently throughout the whole
country, the sermon was falling into almost complete disuse.' The
disfavour with which it was regarded by the heads of the Church was
largely due to fear of the activity of the Lollards, which had
brought all popular harangues and discourses under suspicion. When
the embers of heresy had been extinguished, here and there a
reforming churchman sought to restore among the parish clergy the
old preaching activity. In the wide unmanageable dioceses of the
north the lack of an educated, preaching priesthood was most
apparent. Bishop Stanley is probably only echoing the language of
Alcock when he begins and closes his statutes with an exhortation
to the society, whom he addresses as 'scholars of Jesus,' so to
conduct themselves 'that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be
honoured, the clergy multiplied, and the people called to the
praise of God.' He enacts that of the five Foundation Fellows (one
of Alcock's having been suppressed) four shall be devoted to the
study of theology, and he requires that they shall be chosen from
natives of five counties, which, owing to the imperfections of the
single existing copy of his statutes, are unspecified. If, as is
likely, this county restriction was re-introduced by Stanley from
the provisions made by Alcock, it is natural to surmise that the
founder's native county was one of those preferred. Certain it is
that his small society had a Yorkshireman, Chubbes of Whitby, for
its first master. He had been a Fellow of Pembroke, and probably
from the same society and county came one of the original Fellows
of Jesus, William Atkynson.
"The same fear of Lollardism which had stifled preaching had caused
the teaching profession to be regarded with jealousy by the
authorities of the Church. In a limited part of north-eastern
England, William Byngham, about the year 1439, found seventy
schools void for 'grete scarstie of Maistres of Gramar' which fifty
years previously had been in active use. His foundation of God's
House at Cambridge was designed to supply trained masters to these
derelict schools. The boys' schools attached to Rotherham's and
Alcock's Foundations were intended to meet the same deficiency.
Presumably Alcock meant that one or other of his Fellows should
supply the teaching, for his foundation did not include a
schoolmaster. The linking of a grammar school with a house of
university students was of course no novelty; the connection of
Winchester with New College had been copied by Henry VI. in the
association of Eton and King's. But Alcock's plan of including boys
and 'dons' within the same walls, and making them mix in the common
life and discipline of hall and chapel, if not absolutely a new
thing, had no nearer prototype in an English university than Walter
de Merton's provisions in the statutes of his College for a
_Grammaticus_ and _Pueri_. Though the school was meant to supply a
practical need, the pattern of it seems to have been suggested by
Alcock's mediæval sentiment. There is indeed no evidence or
likelihood that S. Rhadegund's Nunnery maintained a school, but the
same monastic precedent which Alcock apparently followed in fixing
the number of his society prescribed the type of his school. It
stood in the quarter where monastic schools were always placed,
next the gate, in the old building which had served the nuns as
their almonry."[64]
The story of the nunnery of S. Rhadegund, which, under the auspices of
Bishop Alcock, became Jesus College, is an interesting one. Luckily, the
material for that history is fairly complete. The nuns bequeathed a
large mass of miscellaneous documents--charters, wills, account
rolls--to the College, and the scrupulous care with which they were
originally housed, and not less, perhaps, the wholesome neglect which
has since respected their repose in the College muniment room, have
fortunately preserved them intact to the present time, and have enabled
the present tutor of the College, Mr. Arthur Gray, to reconstruct a
fairly complete picture of this isolated woman's community in an alien
world of men in pre-Academic Cambridge, and of the depravation and decay
which came of that isolation, and which ended in the first suppression
in England of an independent House of Religion. I am indebted for the
following particulars to Mr. Gray's monograph on the priory of S.
Rhadegund, published a year or two ago by the Cambridge Antiquarian
Society, and to the first chapter of his lately published College
History.
Who the nuns were that first settled on the Green-Croft by the river
bank below Cambridge, and whence they came thither, and by what title
they became possessed of their original site, the documents they have
handed down to us across the centuries apparently do not record. It is
true that in the letters patent of Henry VII. for the dissolution of the
nunnery and the erection of a college in its room it is
asserted--evidently on the representation of Bishop Alcock--that S.
Rhadegund's Priory was "of the foundation and patronage of the Bishop,
as in right of his Cathedral Church of Ely." The nun's "original cell"
was no doubt of the Benedictine Order, and the great Priory of Ely,
fifteen miles away down the river, was also Benedictine, and the good
Bishop may have been right in his assertion of the connection between
the two, but it is a little doubtful whether he could have given chapter
and verse for his assertion. What is certain is this, that Nigel, the
second Bishop of Ely, in the opening years of Stephen's reign, gave to
the nuns their earliest charter. It is addressed with Norman
magnificence "to all barons and men of S. Etheldrytha, cleric or lay,
French or English," and it grants for a rent of twelve pence, "to the
nuns of the cell lately established without the vill of Cantebruge,"
certain land lying near to other land belonging to the same cell. To the
friendly interest of the same Bishop it seems probable that the nuns
owed their first considerable benefaction. This was a parcel of ground,
consisting of two virgates and six acres of meadow and four cottars with
their tenure in the neighbouring village of Shelford, granted to them by
a certain William the Monk. The fact that after seven centuries and a
half the successors of the nuns of S. Rhadegund, the Master and Fellow
of Jesus College, still hold possession of the same property is not only
a remarkable instance of continuity of title, but also, let us hope, is
sufficient proof that the original donor had come by his title
honestly--a fact about which there might otherwise have been some
suspicion, when we read such a record as this of this same William the
Monk in the _Historia Eliensis_ of Thomas of Ely: "With axes and
hammers, and every implement of masonry, he profanely assailed the
shrine (of S. Etheldreda, the Foundress Saint in the Church of Ely), and
with his own hand robbed it of its metal." However, it is something that
further on in the same record we may read: "He lived to repent it
bitterly. He, who had once been extraordinarily rich and had lacked for
nothing, was reduced to such extreme poverty as not even to have the
necessaries of life. At last when he had lost all and knew not whither
to turn himself, by urgent entreaty he prevailed on the Ely brethren to
receive him into their order, and there with unceasing lamentation,
tears, vigils, and prayers deploring his guilt, he ended his days in
sincere penitence."
* * * * *
Other benefactions followed that of William the Monk, lands, customs,
tithes, fishing rights, advowsons of churches. At some time in the reign
of Henry II. the nuns acquired the advowson of All Saints Church--All
Saints in the Jewry--a living which still belongs to the Masters and
Fellows of Jesus, although the old church standing in the open space
opposite the gate of John's was removed in the middle of the last
century, and is now represented by the memorial cross placed on the
vacant spot and by the fine new church of All Saints facing Jesus
College. The advowson of S. Clements followed in the year 1215, given to
the nuns by an Alderman of the Cambridge Guild Merchants. Altogether the
nunnery, though never a large house, seems to have acquired a
comfortable patrimony.
[Illustration: ST. JOHN'S AND DIVINITY SCHOOLS]
"The Account Rolls which the departing sisters left behind them in
1496 reveal pretty fully the routine of their lives. Books--save
for the casual mention of the binding of the lives of the
saints--were none of their business, and works of charity,
excepting the customary dole to the poor on Maundy Thursday, and
occasional relief to 'poor soldiers disabled in the wars of Our
Lord the King,' scarcely concerned them more. The duties of
hospitality in the Guest House make the Cellaress a busy woman.
They cost a good deal, but are not unprofitable; the nuns take in
'paying guests,' daughters of tradesmen and others. Being ladies,
the sisters neither toil nor spin; but the Prioress and the
Grangeress have an army of servants, whose daily duties have to be
assigned to them; carters and ploughmen have to be sent out to the
scattered plots owned by the Nunnery in the open fields about
Cambridge; the neatherd has to drive the cattle to distant
Willingham fen; the brewer has instructions for malting and brewing
the 'peny-ale' which serves the nuns for 'bevers'; and the women
servants are dispatched to work in the dairy, to weed the garden,
or to weave and to make candles in the hospice. Once in a while a
party of the nuns, accompanied by their maid-servants, takes boat
as far as to Lynn, there to buy stock-fish and Norway timber, and
to fetch a letter for the Prioress."[65]
There is not much sign, alas! in all the record of any great devotion to
religion, such as we might have expected to find in regard to such a
House. Indeed, it would seem that there was seldom a time in the history
of the Nunnery when a visit from the Bishop of the Diocese or from one
of his commissioners on a round of inspection was other than a much
resented occurrence. Discipline, indeed, appears to have been generally
lax in the Nunnery, and the sisters or some of them easily got
permission to gad outside the cloister. Scandal is a key which generally
unlocks the cloister gate and permits a glance into the interior
shadows. _Bene vixit quæ bene latuit._
"Not such was Margaret Cailly, whose sad story was the gossip of
the nuns' parlour in 1389. She came of an old and reputable family
which had furnished mayors and bailiffs to Cambridge and had
endowed the nuns with land at Trumpington. For reasons sufficiently
moving her, which we may only surmise, she escaped from the
cloister, discarded her religious garb, and sought hiding in the
alien diocese of Lincoln. But it so happened that Archbishop
Courtenay that year was making metropolitical visitation of that
diocese, and it was the ill-fortune of Margaret, 'a sheep wandering
from the fold among thorns,' to come under his notice. The
Archbishop, solicitous that 'her blood be not required at our
hands,' handed her over to the keeping of our brother of Ely. The
Bishop in turn passed her on to the custody of her own Prioress,
with injunctions that she should be kept in close confinement,
under exercise of salutary penance, until she showed signs of
contrition for her 'excesses'; and further that when the said
Margaret first entered the chapter-house she should humbly implore
pardon of the Prioress and her sisters for her offences. The story
ends for us at Margaret's prison-door."[66]
[Illustration: Norman Work in Church of Jesus College]
Such a story, more or less typical, I fear, of much and long continued
lax discipline, prepares us for the end. When Bishop Alcock visited the
House in 1497, we are not surprised perhaps at the evidence which is set
forth in the Letters Patent authorising the foundation of his College in
the place of the Nunnery. The buildings and properties of the house are
said to be dilapidated and wasted "owing to the improvidence,
extravagance, and incontinence of the nuns resulting from their
proximity to the University." Two nuns only remain; one of them is
professed elsewhere, the other is _infamis_. They are in abject want,
utterly unable to maintain Divine service or the works of mercy and
piety required of them, and are ready to depart, leaving the home
desolate.
* * * * *
From the nuns of S. Rhadegund then Jesus College received no heritage of
noble ideal. Two things only they have left behind them for which they
merit gratitude. Firstly, a bundle of deeds and manuscripts,
inconsiderable to them, very valuable to the scholars and historians of
the future; and secondly, their fine old church and monastic buildings.
In writing in a previous chapter of the buildings of Queens' we drew
attention to the fact that the general plan of the College followed in
the main the lines of a large country house such as Haddon Hall. And in
degree this is true of the other college buildings in Cambridge. A mere
glance at a ground-plan of Jesus will show at once that the arrangement
of the buildings is entirely different from that of any other college at
Cambridge, and it is clearly derived from that of a monastery. This
accords with what we know of its history. However dilapidated the old
nunnery may have become through the poverty and neglect of the nuns, the
outward walls of solid clunch, which under a facing of later brick,
still testify to the durability of the Nunnery builders, were still
practically intact, and Bishop Alcock had too much practical skill as an
architect to destroy buildings which he could so easily adapt to the
needs of his college, and harmonise to fifteenth century fashions in
architecture.
In his conversion of the Nunnery buildings to the purposes of his
college, Bishop Alcock grouped the buildings he required round the
original cloister of the nuns, increasing the size of that cloister by
the breadth of the north aisle of the Conventual Church which he pulled
down. The hall was placed on the north side, the library on the west.
The kitchens and offices were in the angle of the cloister between the
hall and library. The master's lodge at the south-west corner was partly
constructed out of the altered nave of the church, and partly out of new
buildings connecting this south-western corner of the cloister with the
gate of entrance. This gateway, approached by a long gravelled path
between high walls, known popularly as "the chimney," is one of the most
picturesque features of the College. It is usually ascribed to Bishop
Alcock, but on architectural evidence only. It is thus described by
Professor Willis:--
"The picturesque red-brick gateway tower of Jesus College (1497),
although destitute of angle-turrets, is yet distinguished from the
ground upwards by a slight relief, by stone quoins, and by having
its string courses designedly placed at different levels from those
of the chambers on each side of it. The general disposition of the
ornamentation of its arch and of the wall above it furnished the
model for the more elaborate gate-houses at Christ's College and
St. John's College. The ogee hood-mould rises upwards, and the stem
of its finial terminates under the base of a handsome tabernacle
which occupies the centre of the upper stage, with a window on each
side of it. Each of the spandrel spaces contains a shield, and a
larger shield is to be found in the triangular field between the
hood-mould and the arch."
Professor Willis thus describes also the Conventual Church and the
changes which were made by the Bishop in his conversion of it into a
college chapel.
[Illustration: Norman Work in N. Transept Jesus College Chapel]
"The church ... presented an arrangement totally different from
that of the chapel of Jesus College at the present day. It was
planned in the form of a cross, with a tower in the centre, and had
in addition to a north and south transept, aisles on the north and
south sides of the eastern limb, flanking it along half the extent
of its walls, and forming chapels which opened to the chancel by
two pier arches in each wall. The structure was completed by a nave
of seven piers with two side aisles.... (The church) was an
admirable specimen of the architecture of its period, and two of
the best preserved remaining portions, the series of lancet windows
on the north and south aisles of the eastern limb, and the arcade
that ornaments the inner surface of the tower walls, will always
attract attention and admiration for the beauty of their
composition.
"Under the direction of Bishop Alcock the side aisles, both of the
chancel and of the nave, were entirely removed, the pier arches by
which they had communicated with the remaining centre portion of
the building were walled up, and the place of each arch was
occupied by a perpendicular window of the plainest description. The
walls were raised, a flat roof was substituted for the high-pitched
roof of the original structure, large perpendicular windows were
inserted in the gables of the chancel and south transept, and
lastly, two-thirds of the nave were cut off from the church by a
wall, and fitted up partly as a lodge for the master, partly as
chambers for students.
"As for the portion set apart for the chapel of the college, the
changes were so skilfully effected and so completely concealed by
plaster within and without, that all trace and even knowledge of
the old aisles was lost; but in the course of preparations for
repairs in 1846 the removal of some of the plaster made known the
fact that the present two south windows of the chancel were
inserted in walls which were themselves merely the filling-up of a
pair of pier-arches, and that these arches, together with the piers
upon which they rested, and the responds whence they sprang, still
existed in the walls. When this key to the secret of the church had
been supplied, it was resolved to push the enquiry to the
uttermost; all the plaster was stripped off the inner face of the
walls; piers and arches were brought to light again in all
directions; old foundations were sought for on the outside of
the building, and a complete and systematic examination of the plan
and structure of the original Church was set on foot, which led to
very satisfactory results."[67]
[Illustration: Entrance to Chapter-House Priory of S. Radegund now Jesus
College
Herbert Railton]
To-day the completely restored church, the work at varying intervals
from 1849 to 1869 of Salvin and Pugin and Bodley, forms one of the most
beautiful and interesting college chapels in Cambridge. An important
series of stained glass windows were executed by Mr. William Morris from
the designs of Burne-Jones between 1873-77. In 1893 the Rev. Osmund
Fisher, a former Dean of the College, at this time elected an Honorary
Fellow, remembering to have seen in his undergraduate days of fifty
years before indications of old Gothic work in the wall of the cloister,
during some repair of the plaster work, obtained leave of the Master to
investigate the wall. This led to the discovery of the beautiful triple
group of early English arches and doorway which formed the original
entrance to the chapter house of the Nunnery, one of the most charming
bits of thirteenth century architectural grouping in all Cambridge.
Bishop Alcock was probably a better architect than he was an educational
reformer. He was successful enough in converting the fabric of the
dissolved Nunnery into college buildings. It may be doubted whether he
was equally successful in translating his friend Archbishop Rotherham's
ideal of a grammar school college into a working institution. In the
constitution which he gave to his college there were to be places found
for both Fellows and boys--_Scholares and Pueri_--but the _Scholares_
were obviously to be men, and the _Pueri_ simply schoolboys, for they
were to be under fourteen years of age on admission; and _Juvenes_,
undergraduate scholars, did not enter into his plan. The amended
statutes of his successors, Bishops Stanley and West, gave some
definition to the founder's scheme, but they did not materially modify
it. Within fifty years, in fact, from its foundation, Jesus College, as
Alcock had conceived it, had become an anachronism, and the claustral
community of student priests with their schoolboy acolytes, not
seriously concerned with true education, and unvivified by contact with
the real student scholar, came near to perishing, as a thing born out of
due season. The dawn of what might seem to be a better state of things
only began with the endowment of scholarships--scholarships, that is to
say, in the modern sense--in the reign of Edward VI. It was only,
however, with the university reforms of the nineteenth century that the
proportion of college revenue allotted to such endowment fund was
reasonably assessed.
And yet with this somewhat meagre scholarship equipment the roll of
eminent men belonging to Jesus College is a worthy one. On the very
first page of that roll we are confronted with the name of Cranmer. We
do not know the name of any student whose admission to the College
preceded his. Wary and sagacious then, as in later life, he had resisted
the tempting offer of a Fellowship at Wolsey's new college of Christ
Church at Oxford to come to Cambridge, there, it is true at first, "to
be nursed in the grossest kind of sophistry, logic, philosophy, moral
and natural (not in the text of the old philosophers, but chiefly in
the dark riddles of Duns and other subtle questionists), to his age of
22 years," but shortly, having taken his B.A. degree in 1511, to receive
from Erasmus, who in that year began to lecture at Cambridge as Lady
Margaret Reader, his first bent towards those studies which led
eventually to the publication of his "Short Instruction into Christian
Religion," which it had been better had he himself more closely
followed, and possibly towards that opportunist policy, which in the
event ended so sadly for himself, and meant so much, both of evil and of
good, to the future of both Church and State in England. Closely
associated with Cranmer were other Jesus men, noted theologians of the
reforming party;--John Bale, afterwards Bishop of Ossory, called
"bilious Bale" by Fuller because of the rancour of his attacks on his
papal opponents, Geoffry Downs, Thomas Goodrich, afterwards Bishop of
Ely, John Edmunds, Robert Okyng, and others. In the list of succeeding
archbishops claimed by the College as Jesus men occur the names of
Herring, Hutton, Sterne. The Sterne family indeed contribute not a few
members through several generations to the College, not the least
eminent being the author of "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental
Journey." The portraits of both Laurence Sterne and his great
grandfather the Archbishop hang on the walls of the dining-hall, the
severe eyes of the Caroline divine looking across as if with much
disfavour at the trim and smiling figure of his descendant, the young
cleric so unlike his idea of what a priest and scholar should be. Other
than "Shandean" influence in the College is, however, suggested by the
name of Henry Venn among the admissions of 1742, when he migrated to
Jesus after three months' residence at S. John's, and exercised an
influence prophetic of the great movement of Cambridge evangelicalism,
prolonged far into the next century by Venn's pupil and friend, Charles
Simeon. It is probable, however, that there is no more brilliant page in
the history of Jesus College than that which tells the story of the last
decade of the seventeenth century, and which contains the names of
William Otter, E. D. Clarke, Robert Malthus, and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Coleridge was elected a Rustat Scholar in 1791 and a
Foundation Scholar in 1793, but he gained no academic distinction. There
was no classical tripos in those days, and to obtain a Chancellor's
medal it was necessary that a candidate should have obtained honours in
mathematics for which Coleridge had all a poet's abhorrence. Among the
poems of his college days may be remembered, "A Wish written in Jesus
Wood, Feb. 10, 1792," and the well-known "Monologue to a Young Jackass
in Jesus Piece." Another poem more worthy of record perhaps, though he
scribbled it in one of the College chapel prayer-books, is one of
regretful pathos on the neglected "hours of youth," which finds a later
echo in his "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," where he alludes to his
undergraduate days at Jesus:--
"When from the Muses' calm abode
I came, with learning's meed not unbestowed;
Whereas she twined a laurel round my brow,
And met my kiss, and half returned my vow."
And with that quotation from the Jesus poet we may perhaps close this
chapter, only adding one word of hearty agreement with that encomium
which was passed upon the College by King James, who, because of the
picturesqueness of its old buildings and the beauty and charm of its
surroundings, spoke of Jesus College as _Musarum Cantabrigiensium
Museum_, and also with that decision which on a second visit to
Cambridge His Majesty wisely gave, that "Were he to choose, he would
pray at King's, dine at Trinity, and study and sleep at Jesus."