UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS
Men who owe nothing to a university--40 great Englishmen--Cambridge
men: the scientists, the poets, the dramatists, other literary men,
the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers and physicians, the
statesmen. (pp. 250-260.)
National movements: King John and the barons--the peasants’
revolt--York and Lancaster--the new world--Charles and the
Parliament--James II. and the University--the Declaration of
Indulgence--the Nonjurors--William and Mary and Cambridge
whiggery--Jacobitism and Toryism at Cambridge in the reign of
Anne--George I. and Cambridge--modern political movements. (pp.
260-269.)
Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question of
the divorce, Lutheranism at Cambridge, later reformers and the
Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge
martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the
Latitudinarians, the Deists, the evangelical movement, the
Tractarian movement, anti-calvinism. (pp. 269-281.)
Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of
Elizabeth--the Royal Society--the Cambridge Platonists--modern
science. (pp. 281-291.)
Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the
university: early Cambridge names--a group of great names in the
xiii and xiv centuries--Cambridge men in the historical plays of
Shakespeare--genealogical tables of founders--Cantabrigians from
the xv century to the present day--Cambridge men who have taken no
degree. (pp. 291-309.)
What part is played by a university in the life of a people? This can
only be gauged by its output of men, its influence on great movements,
the trend and character of the learning it fosters and the opinions it
encourages.
During the centuries in which the English universities have existed, the
first degree of excellence has been reached in every department of human
knowledge and activity by men whom no university can claim. Shakespeare,
Bunyan, Hawkins, Raleigh, Drake, the Hoods, Howard of Effingham, Clive,
Warren Hastings, Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington, Scott, Dickens, Keats,
Browning, were at no university; the same is true of Smollett,
Richardson, and Sheridan. It is noticeable, nevertheless, that the
literary names cited include none but poets and novelists. Among
scientific men and philosophers, Bishop Butler, Faraday, J. S. Mill,
Huxley, Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Spencer, G. H. Lewes, Buckle, and Grote
were not trained at universities--even among the great educationalists,
the founders of colleges in our universities and of great public
schools, few received an academic education. Some careers, again, are
entirely outside the sphere of university influence--admirals and great
captains, sailors and soldiers, do not go to universities, and among
inventors hardly one hails from a seat of learning. Art, also, is not
fostered by an academic atmosphere; painters, architects, and musicians
owe nothing to it; and although universities adorn themselves with
professorships of the fine arts, and of music, it is not to them that
we go for definitions of art, or for an output of artists. In Orlando
Gibbons, indeed, Cambridge possessed a native musician whose
compositions and unrivalled technique as an organist place him in the
first rank of musical Englishmen; but while nearly every English artist
owes something to a _wanderjahr_ in Italy, scarcely one ever resided at
a university.
Nevertheless if we were to take a short list of representative
Englishmen, of the men who have influenced and shaped the national life,
its religion, its politics, its thoughts, who have helped to realise the
English genius and to make England what it is, we should find that a
large proportion of those who could have been educated at Cambridge or
Oxford were in fact university men. In the following list those who have
had a preponderant influence on English education from the vii century
onwards, are included:--
vii-viii c. Bede.†
vii c. Hild.*†[380]
viii c. Alcuin.*†
ix c. Alfred.†
xii c. Stephen Langton (Paris).
“ Grosseteste* Oxford (and Paris).
xiii c. Roger Bacon (Paris) and Oxford.
“ Edward I.†
xiv c. Wyclif Oxford.
“ Chaucer Cambridge.
“ William of Wykeham*[381] none.
xiv-xv c. Lady Margaret.*†
xv-xvi c. Colet* Oxford.
“ Bishop Fisher* Cambridge.
“ Wolsey Oxford.
xvi c. Sir Thomas More Oxford.
“ Cranmer Cambridge.
“ Ascham* Cambridge.
“ Elizabeth†
“ Drake none.
“ Raleigh[382] none.
“ Sir Philip Sidney Oxford.
“ Lord Bacon Cambridge.
xvi-xvii c. Shakespeare none.
“ Harvey Cambridge.
“ Cromwell Cambridge.
“ Milton Cambridge.
“ Jeremy Taylor Cambridge.
“ Bunyan none.
“ Locke Oxford.
“ Newton Cambridge.
xvii-xviii c. Marlborough none.
xviii c. Wesley Oxford.
“ Clive none.
xviii-xix c. Nelson† none.
“ Pitt Cambridge.
xix c. John Stuart Mill none.
“ Darwin Cambridge.
“ Gladstone[383] Oxford.
“ Florence Nightingale†[384]
Of these, 9 could not have been at a university and are marked †,
but of the remaining 31, 23 were at a university; 12 at Cambridge, 10 at
Oxford. Two were at both Paris and Oxford, and one was at Paris.
In this chapter, however, our concern is with the great men produced by
the one university. There are two fields in which Cambridge is and
always has been _facile princeps_. She has nurtured all the great
scientists, and all the great poets. The discoveries of world-wide
importance have been the work of Cambridge men--such were the three
which revolutionised the science of the world, the laws of the
circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of evolution. From Bacon the
founder of experimental philosophy to Darwin and Kelvin, every great
name is a Cambridge name, if we except indeed the few who like Wallace,
Humphry Davy, Faraday, and the elder Herschell owe nothing to a
university.
[Sidenote: Literature.]
If the scientific pre-eminence of Cambridge is unquestioned, her
poetical pre-eminence is no less absolute. Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe,
Milton, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson called her mother. In
the long list of English poets every poet of first rank (excluding
Shakespeare and Keats who were at no university) was at Cambridge,
except Shelley who was expelled from Oxford.
The dramatist movement from Marlowe to Shirley is one of the most
important in our literature. Here for the first time in English history
a group of Englishmen set themselves, on leaving the university, to earn
an independence by literature--and the opportunity offered them was
writing for the players. The dramatists were, with but few exceptions of
which the greatest is Shakespeare himself, university men; and of these
all who were epoch-marking hail from Cambridge. The list is headed by
the first English tragic poet, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great
predecessor; and Ben Jonson the greatest of his younger contemporaries
was also a Cambridge man. Lyly who created the art tradition of English
comedy, went to Cambridge from Oxford and there graduated _M.A._ Lodge
after leaving Oxford went to Avignon, took his _M.D._ degree there, and
on returning to England went to Cambridge. Shirley, the last of the
dramatists, went from Oxford to Cambridge.[385]
The sonneteers had preceded the dramatists, and the first writer of an
English sonnet was another Cambridge man, Sir Thomas Wyatt.[386] Surrey
whose university, if he went to one, was certainly Cambridge, wrote the
first blank verse. The first English essayist was Bacon, and he takes
his place in literature by another tide, because he was the first to
adapt our language as the vehicle for a scientific literature. Of the
five men who in the great days of the flowering of English poesy wrote
about the art of verse Spenser, Webbe, Harvey, Sidney, and Puttenham,
the first three, whose contribution is also the most important, were
Cambridge men.
All literary initiative, indeed, between the xiv and xviii centuries
appears to have come from the one university; the epoch-making
representatives of our literature, that is, were Cambridge men: Chaucer,
Spenser, Marlowe and Ben Jonson (in defect of
[Illustration: THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM--EVENING
In the distance are seen the square tower of the Pitt Press and Pembroke
College. Behind the trees are Peterhouse and the Congregational
Church.]
Shakespeare), Bacon, Milton, Dryden.[389] The first history of English
literature also comes from the hand of a Cantabrigian, John Bale. There
are two other classes of English literature to which reference must be
made. The novelists as we have already seen have not been _alumni_ of
our universities, partly because this is a field in which women have
attained the highest rank, partly because there seems to be that
something more of the artistic afflatus in the novelist’s craft and that
something less of the academic, as compared with the other forms of
literature, which we should à priori have certainly predicated of poetry
also. A list of the novelists, from Mrs. Afra Behn to George Meredith
would however show how different is the case of the novelists to that of
the poets.
The last branch of literature, the importance of which is much greater
than its literary merit, is journalism. Here, too, Cambridge led the
way, though here, as elsewhere, it has not maintained its position. It
was Roger Le Strange who as sole licenser and authorised printer and
publisher of news, printed the first number of the “London
Gazette”;[390] and Andrew
[Sidenote: A.D. 1658-78.]
Marvell’s newsletters to his constituents at Hull were among the
earliest attempts at parliamentary reporting.
[Sidenote: The learned professions.]
When we turn to philosophy, we find that Cambridge has been singularly
poor in metaphysicians, logicians, and political philosophers.
Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Oxford all precede her. Among eminent
representatives of the learned faculties Cambridge had, with the
exception of Segrave, Bateman, and Beaufort, no great churchmen in the
xiv century. In the xvth it can boast that it nurtured Thomas Langton,*
Fox,* Rotherham,* Alcock,* Tunstall, and Fisher.* In the next century
Cambridge has it all its own way, the succession of primates is hers,
and nearly every one of the prelates who took the leading parts in that
busy century were Cambridge _alumni_: Fox,* Gardiner,* Latimer,*
Ridley,* Cranmer,* Parker,* Grindal,* Whitgift,* Bancroft.[391] In the
xvii century Andrewes,* Cosin,* Williams* the opponent of Laud, Taylor,
Stillingfleet, and the primates Bancroft, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tenison,
represented the university.
Cambridge has also contributed her large share of the lawyers, lords
chancellors and chief justices of England, from Thorpe, Cavendish and
Beaufort in the reigns of Edward III. and his successors to Booth,
Rotherham, Alcock, Fox, Ruthall, Goodrich, Wriothesley, Gardiner, Heath,
Coke, the two Bacons, Williams, Guilford and Lyndhurst in later times.
The great physicians, Caius, “Butler of Cambridge,” Gilbert, Harvey,
Wharton, Sydenham,[392] Paris, Grew, Sir William Browne and Sir Samuel
Garth, were all Cambridge men, and illustrate the early history of
medicine from the xvi century to the xixth.
[Sidenote: Statesmen and diplomatists.]
The roll of Cambridge statesmen is not less distinguished: the two
Cecils, Walsingham, Boyle ‘the great earl’ of Cork, of whom Cromwell
said that had there been one like him in every province it would have
been impossible for the Irish to raise a rebellion; Cromwell himself,
Sir W. Temple, Halifax, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Castlereagh,
Wilberforce, Stratford de Redcliffe, Palmerston.
[Sidenote: National movements.]
The first great national movement in which the groups of scholars and
teachers settled at Cambridge and Oxford could have taken part was the
conflict with King John under the leadership of Stephen Langton, and the
Barons’ war led by Simon de Montfort. Cambridge clerks were implicated
in the former, for as soon as Henry III. came to the throne he ordered
the expulsion of all those excommunicate scholars who had joined Louis
the Dauphin, the Barons’ candidate for the throne of England; and it is
surmised that Hugh de Balsham
[Sidenote: Wars of the Roses.]
later in the century favoured the side on which Simon de Montfort
fought. It was at Cambridge too that the Dauphin held his council after
the demise of John. Much had happened at the university between this
struggle in the xiii century and the latter part of the
[Sidenote: A.D. 1378-1381.]
xivth when the peasants’ revolt again raised the standard of rebellion.
The university was no longer a mere aggregate of poor scholars and
unendowed teachers, it had long grown into a privileged corporation
possessing fine buildings and a full treasury. As such, peasant and
burgess bore to it no good will, and Wat Tyler’s riots were seized as
the opportunity to burn the university charters, ransack the colleges,
and mishandle the masters and scholars. At the neighbouring manor-house
of Mildenhall (which had formed part of the historic dowry of Queen Emma
the mother of the Confessor) Prior John of Cambridge who was acting at
the time as abbot of Bury-St.-Edmund’s, was murdered by the mob. In 1381
Buckingham, after dispersing the revolted peasantry in Essex, held ‘oyer
and terminer’ at Cambridge, and the town was among the few which was
exempted from the general pardon.
Through the next great national crisis Cambridge was Lancastrian. The
men of letters of this party, its poets and historians, were Cambridge
men, members of Cambridge colleges--Warkworth, Skelton, the Pastons. The
Lancastrian sympathies of the university dated indeed from the time of
“the good duke” and of John of Gaunt, both of whom befriended it and
became patrons of one of its important colleges; and the intimate
connexion with the House of Beaufort, which began when Cardinal Beaufort
studied at Peterhouse,[393] culminated when Lady Margaret Beaufort, the
mother of Henry VII., crowned by her singular benefactions the
sympathies of the university for the House of Lancaster. Edward IV. had
not loved Cambridge, had indeed robbed Henry VI.’s college of its
revenues; but it was there that the royal houses laid down the sword to
join in a work of scholarly peace, and few episodes in the annals of a
university are more interesting than the building of Queens’ College by
Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville, and the labours of Lady
Margaret in whose son were at length reconciled the rival claims of York
and Lancaster.
[Sidenote: The colonisation of the new world.]
We have seen that a Washington lies buried in the ancient chapel of the
first Cambridge college, and we are to see further on that the impulse
which set the “Mayflower” on her course proceeded from a Cantabrigian.
The oldest of the ‘pilgrim fathers’ was a Peterhouse man, persecuted in
England for his ‘Brownist’ opinions. There were many university men
among the first settlers, but they were chiefly from the one university;
and ‘Cambridge’ was the name which rose to their lips when they
christened the town in the great state of Massachusetts where they first
set foot. Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of Connecticut, was a
Cambridge graduate and exercised great influence among the New England
settlers. John Eliot, “the Indian apostle,” had graduated at Cambridge
in 1622; and Harvard, the ‘Cambridge’ of the new world, was founded by
another of her sons.
[Sidenote: The Parliament and the Stuarts.]
No sooner had America been colonised by these exiles for their faith
than the English revolution brought about the changes which would have
kept them in this country. Both universities declared for the king. The
loyalty of Oxford is a household word, and it certainly was not
diminished by the fact that Charles had his headquarters in the
university town: but Cambridge loyalty was not less; the university
plate was sent to Charles at York in
[Sidenote: A.D. 1642-4.]
1642, and among the chests which reached Oxford there were some which
arrived safely at the colleges and never arrived anywhere else.[394] The
royalist poet was a Cambridge man with a Devonshire cure, Robert
Herrick. Cambridge also supplied ‘the first cavalier poet’ John
Cleveland, who lost his fellowship for the king, Abraham Cowley, ejected
in the same way
[Sidenote: A.D. 1643.]
by the Puritans, and yet another poet and yet another fellow in Richard
Crashaw, a royalist born in the year that Shakespeare died, who on
refusing to sign the Covenant retired to Paris where he was employed on
royalist business by the exiled queen. Isaac Barrow, too, whose father
lost everything for the royal cause, and had been with Charles at Oxford
when Isaac went up to Trinity, refused the Covenant; and lived to find
himself in an increasing solitude amidst the growing Puritanism of the
university. A royalist
[Sidenote: A.D. 1645.]
sermon preached by Brownrigg (Bishop of Exeter) deprived him of the
Mastership of S. Catherine’s, and Queens’ College was entirely
depopulated by the Parliament men.
But contemporary with Herrick and Crashaw there were Cambridge men still
more famous, and they espoused the parliamentary cause. Chief of these
was the Cambridge poet on the parliament side, John Milton. Both
universities suffered severely from the Roundheads, yet together they
contributed the chief actors against the king. From Cambridge came
Cromwell, Milton, and Hutchinson, from Oxford Ireton, Hampden, and Pym.
Anti-monarchical and Puritan opinions were, however, only grafted on the
university as a result of the violent measures and the wholesale
ejectments carried out by Cromwell and his agents.[395]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1657.]
By the middle of the xvii century Cambridge had become Puritan, though
here she was outstripped by Oxford which had been Puritan fifty years
earlier, before Elizabeth died. Among the “regicides” many were
university men; Andrew Marvell and the young Dryden at Cambridge were
friends to Oliver: but the Presbyterian Wallis, a member of Emmanuel
College and later one of the founders of the Royal Society, protested
against the king’s death warrant which met with the approval of such men
as Milton, Hampden, and Hutchinson.
[Sidenote: The university and James II.]
The Restoration was welcomed at both universities. The scheme to secure
a Protestant succession and the attempt to exclude James now agitated
men’s minds. The ‘bill of exclusion’ was condemned both at Oxford and
Cambridge; and the earlier Rye House plot was met at the latter by the
deposition of Monmouth at that time chancellor of the university. To the
loyal addresses sent by both Cambridge and Oxford on the coronation of
James II., Cambridge added a condemnation of the attempt to alter the
succession. The attitude of the bench of bishops was not less
emphatic--only two prelates could be found to sign the invitation to
William of Orange.[396] It was with these facts before him that James
set to work to affront a loyal clergy and the two loyal seats of
learning; and thus gave to each a rare occasion of proving their
quality. The king first attempted to force the hand of the universities,
and began by ordering Cambridge to confer the _M.A._ degree on a
Catholic.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1687.]
This was refused. The vice-chancellor, and with him eight fellows (one
of whom was Isaac Newton) was cited to appear at Westminster before the
High Commission. Oxford was much more harshly treated, and there is
nothing in the history of either university to surpass the splendid
resistance of Magdalen College to tyranny, during which it was twice
depleted of its
[Sidenote: A.D. 1688.]
fellows. The Declaration of Indulgence, however admirable in itself,
struck a blow at constitutional principles, and introduced the dangerous
corollary that he who could loose _motu proprio_ could also bind. The
loyal archbishop of Canterbury, a graduate of Emmanuel, with six other
prelates refused to publish the Indulgence, and were sent to the Tower.
Lloyd of S. Asaph, Lake of Chichester, Turner of Ely, and White of
Peterborough were Cantabrigians; Ken of Bath and Wells and Trelawney of
Bristol, Oxonians.[397] Perhaps never since the primacy of Stephen
Langton had the Church in England been so popular, or shown itself so
ready to slough the servilism which attends on state Churches.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1689.]
[Sidenote: The nonjurors.]
In the following year five of the seven staunch prelates who had
withstood James, refused to take the oath of fealty to William and Mary.
The primate, with Turner, Lake, White, and Ken, to whom were joined
Lloyd of Norwich[398] and Frampton of Gloucester, headed some 400 of
the clergy as ‘Nonjurors.’ Under Bancroft the non-juring clergy
established a schism in the English Church which lasted till the xix
century. The Cambridge Sherlock had at first the greatest influence
among them, but neither he nor Ken followed them in the subsequent
schism. If another Cambridge man, Jeremy Collier, was the ablest of the
nonjurors, Dodwell, a Dublin man, and professor of Ancient History at
Oxford, was the most erudite.
[Sidenote: The House of Hanover.]
Although, as we have seen, the two bishops who signed the invitation to
William were Oxford men, Oxford had no love for the ‘Roman-nosed
Dutchman,’ and William had no love for Oxford. Halifax, William’s
henchman, and Nottingham, the leaders of the party which placed William
and Mary on the throne, hailed respectively from Cambridge and Oxford:
but it was the favour with which Cambridge greeted the accession of the
new sovereigns that became the seed of its whiggery. During the reign of
Anne, nevertheless, an anti-Hanoverian spirit spread among the younger
men. Not only were there Jacobites
[Sidenote: A.D. 1702-14.]
among the undergraduates and the junior dons, but a political party was
forming which represented the permanent elements in Toryism when
separated from Jacobitism. Amongst this party high churchmanship also
found refuge. The non-juring clergy still left at the university lived
there in close retirement, and helped to swell the ranks neither of the
nascent
[Sidenote: A.D. 1714.]
Jacobitism nor the new high churchism. A new
[Sidenote: A.D. 1715.]
vice-chancellor, favourable to the House of Hanover, followed a Jacobite
predecessor just in time to present a loyal address to George I. on his
accession. This was rewarded by the splendid gift of Bishop Moore’s
library; while at Oxford, where the Jacobites were more noisy and had
just made the anniversary of the Pretender’s birthday the occasion for a
disturbance, two Jacobite officers were placed under arrest, and a troop
of horse was quartered in the city. These events gave rise to the
following couplets:
(Oxford) The King observing with judicious eyes,
The state of both his Universities,
To one he sends a regiment; for why?
That _learned_ body wanted _loyalty_.
To th’ other books he gave, as well discerning
How much that _loyal_ body wanted _learning_.
* * * * *
(Sir Wm. Browne
for Cambridge)
The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse:
For Tories own no _argument_ but _force_.
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent:
For Whigs allow no _force_ but _argument_.
[Sidenote: Modern politics.]
When we come to modern politics, the parts are played on the political
stage at Westminster.
In the radical matter of parliamentary reform, the first step was made
by one of Cambridge’s great sons, the younger Pitt, fifty years before a
Whig ministry led by Earl Grey, another Cantabrigian, laid the Reform
Bill on the table of the House. The claims of America to self government
and freedom from taxation were upheld by both the Pitts, by Fox and by
Burke, and opposed by Samuel Johnson. The Whigs, as we know, were, as a
whole, of Johnson’s mind in the matter.
Cambridge opposed the Manchester school of Liberalism--and Catholic
emancipation, Free-trade, Reform bills, and Home Rule for Ireland were
all measures which received no support from the Whig-Conservative
university.
Philanthropy seems to be as far removed from the academic purview as art
or practical politics: none of the great humanitarian movements which
dignified the xix century took their rise in Cambridge; but Clarkson and
Wilberforce were Cambridge men, and Grey
[Sidenote: A.D. 1807-34.]
abolished slavery itself in 1834.
[Sidenote: Religious movements. The Lollards.]
In the century succeeding that which saw the historical birth of our two
national universities, the first breath of the early renascence was
wafted to our shores: but that dual aspect of the later movement which
haunted and shaped its whole course in England had been presaged in a
remarkable way, and in Wyclif Oxford gave a forerunner of the religious
renascence a hundred years before the advent of the humanistic. Even
when Henry IV. ascended the throne, Ralph Spalding, a Carmelite friar,
was the only person of note at Cambridge
[Sidenote: A.D. 1401.]
suspected of Lollardry; and when Archbishop Arundel set himself to crush
Wyclif’s movement at the two universities, the Cambridge harvest was of
the poorest.
[Sidenote: The Reformation.]
But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement passed from
Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as we have seen, are
seldom the consequence of an opinion of the Schools. The struggles of
the barons, the parliamentary wars, the restoration, the revolution
which placed William and Mary on the throne, were not prepared in any
university. But there is one exception--and the prime part in that
reawakening of the human mind which issued in the English Reformation,
must be assigned to the university of Cambridge. Here was laid the
intellectual and historical basis of the reformed religion, and
Cambridge produced the men and the minds which created the
ecclesiastical order, the liturgy, and the service books deemed suitable
to the reformed faith. The stones of Cambridge are indeed a monument to
the academic and intellectual form of Protestantism, as the cathedral at
Orvieto is a monument to the crudest form of eucharistic doctrine.
The end of the xv century found Cambridge very happily situated. It met
the dawn of the religious awakening with a galaxy of men representing
the noblest spirit of the time: Fisher, Fox, Thomas Langton, Alcock,
Rotherham, even Lady Margaret herself and Erasmus, belonged to Cambridge
in a sense which did not apply to Colet and More at Oxford. They
constitute a group of Cambridge ‘reformers before the Reformation’ who
were eager patrons of the New Learning; and the epoch was marked there
by the rise of important college foundations. As a result, the
university benefited to an extraordinary degree by gifts of religious
lands made not by the hand of the despoiler but by the friends of the
old faith.
[Illustration: UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF GREAT ST. MARY
The original church dates back at least to the thirteenth century and
was partially rebuilt in 1351. The present edifice is Perpendicular
Gothic, and was begun in 1478 and not completely finished until 1608. It
is the largest Parish Church in Cambridge, and the University sermons
are preached in it.]
Peterhouse had itself been one of the earliest known instances of the
conversion of religious property to secular purposes;[399] but in the xv
and early xvi century the instances crowd upon us. Henry VI. bestowed on
King’s College and on God’s House land from the alienated priories;
Alcock obtained from the Pope the dissolution of the Benedictine nunnery
which he converted into Jesus College; Lady Margaret endowed Christ’s
College with abbey lands; her stepson the Bishop of Ely dissolved the
Canons’ House of S. John’s bestowing its property upon the new S. John’s
College; and Mary gave monastic property to Trinity.
But the hopes raised in England by the spirit of catholic reform were
defeated: and it is again to Cambridge that we must look for the next
group of men in the march of events--Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer all
drew their inspiration from Cambridge.
[Sidenote: The divorce of Catherine.]
Closely allied to the movement for reform was the question of the
divorce, and Cranmer, less scrupulous than Wolsey, was the first to
suggest a legal solution in the king’s favour. The Church and the
universities were invited to emit a (favourable) judgment on the point;
and as a result of the tactics to this end the junior leaders at Oxford
pronounced in its favour, while the opinion elicited from Cambridge
really left the matter where it was before. The university declared that
Henry’s marriage with his brother’s wife was illegal if the previous
union had been consummated, but no answer was given to the second
question--whether the pope possessed the dispensing power. This was no
answer at all, and undermined neither the king’s position nor the
pope’s.
[Sidenote: Lutheranism.]
Meanwhile, at the Austinfriars, a Lutheran movement had sprung up. Here,
as elsewhere, the community to which Luther himself belonged led the way
in the Protestant revolt. Barnes, the Augustinian prior, was the centre
of a group of reformers who met at the White Horse inn; and Miles
Coverdale, one of his friars, learnt his reforming principles at the
Cambridge friary. The meetings at the White Horse were to have
consequences which affected the other university. Clerke Cox and
Taverner were to form part of the little group of Cambridge scholars who
took possession, at Wolsey’s bidding, of Cardinal College, and to
provoke the cry of the warden of Wykeham’s house: “We were clear without
blot or suspicion till they came!” The famous “Oxford Brethren” were the
Cambridge nucleus of the Reform in the sister city.
[Sidenote: The English bible and service books.]
The travail of the times, indeed, passed through a series of men who
came from the one university--the laboratory of the Reformation was at
Cambridge. The English Bible comes from
[Sidenote: A.D. 1524-68.]
its hands: Tyndale was the earliest worker, and Coverdale produced the
first complete English bible in 1535-6. “Cranmer’s bible” appeared in
1540; “Matthew’s” bible (1537) was the work of the Cambridge martyr John
Rogers who had also assisted Tyndale. Amongst the latter’s assistants
had been Roy, a Cambridge Franciscan, and Scory, a Cambridge
Dominican.[400] The “Bishop’s bible” was published under the auspices of
the Cambridge primate, Parker; and other scholars associated in the work
of translation were Clerke and Dillingham of Christ’s, Layfield,
Harison, and Dakins of Trinity, Sir Thomas Smith, and Bishops Andrewes
and Heath.[401] Erasmus’ New Testament had appeared under the auspices
of Warham, and of three Cambridge men, Fisher, Fox, and Tunstall.[402]
The service books owe as much to the one university: it is the
‘Cambridge mind’ which sets its seal on these formularies. The Cambridge
scholars were the best prepared men: Cranmer knew more about liturgies
than any one among the reformers; no one but Andrewes was the equal of
the catholic divines in patristic knowledge. The prayer book as it
stands is in the main Cranmer’s work; Cox and Grindal were on the
Windsor Commission which compiled the Communion service in the first
Prayer-book of 1549. Nine years later Elizabeth entrusted the revision
of Edward VI.’s 1552 Prayer-book to Parker, and Cox and Sir Thomas Smith
were among the revisers. In the final revision of 1660 Cosin rendered
great services; and even when the still-born attempt was made to revise
the liturgy in the reign of William and Mary, the task was once more
assigned to Cambridge men, Tenison, and Patrick who was set to mutilate
the collects.
The Articles of Religion in their original form and number were the work
of Cranmer, their reduction to Thirty-nine was the work of another
Cambridge primate, Parker.[403] Whitgift drew up for Elizabeth the
famous “Lambeth Articles”; and when the vexed subject of the Athanasian
creed agitated the ecclesiastical commission of 1689 as it is agitating
the national Church now--then, as now, when Cambridge heads of houses,
professors of divinity, and deans and tutors of colleges have signed a
declaration in favour of its excision from the public services, two
Cambridge men protested--the one against its retention, the other
against its unqualified damnatory clauses.[404] Dryden had already made
a similar protest.
Long however before the reformers had a free hand, Burleigh in his
retirement in Lincolnshire had jotted down the names of the eight
learned men most fit to carry out the Reform and to settle its
formularies when a Protestant queen should succeed. Seven of these men
hailed from Cambridge.[405]
[Sidenote: The Cambridge martyrs.]
It was not only in what concerned scholarship that the travail of the
Reformation belonged to Cambridge. It gave, in the person of Fisher, the
only member of the episcopal bench who died for denying the royal
supremacy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII. the first group of
Cambridge Lutherans gave other martyrs: Bilney, like Barnes, had carried
his faggot and recanted Lutheran opinions before Wolsey, but afterwards
took new courage and went to the stake for them. The cause left
smouldering by the death of Barnes, Bilney, and George Stafford (a
fellow of Pembroke) was rekindled by Latimer. Henry himself had examined
another Cambridge reformer, John Nicholson (“Lambert”) who denied the
corporal presence in the eucharist, and that royal and rigid
sacramentarian had condemned him. “Pleasant Taylor” “making himself
merry with the stake” was another Cantabrigian.[406] The first man to
die for his faith when Mary’s reign opened was Rogers of Pembroke[407];
and “the hardiest” of the Marian Martyrs was another Cambridge man,
Bradford. As she had nurtured the only martyr-bishop on the Catholic
side, so Cambridge nurtured the Protestant group of prelates who died at
the stake: Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer are three Cambridge martyrs
whose only title to be known as “the Oxford martyrs” is that Oxford
burnt them. It must not be forgotten, also, that one of the fifteen
heroic London Carthusians, martyred at Tyburn in 1535, was William Exmew
of Christ’s.
The death of Fisher, chancellor of the university, was followed by a
wholesale ejection of the professors of the ancient learning, and the
man who died for his denial of that ‘anglican solecism’ the royal
supremacy was immediately succeeded by the man who first suggested it to
Henry--Thomas Cromwell.[408]
[Sidenote: The Puritan.]
The next religious movement in the country was the Puritan, against
which we know that Elizabeth fought as lustily as Henry had combated
Lutheranism. Despite the fact that there were Puritan nuclei, as there
had earlier been Lutheran nuclei, at Cambridge, Puritanism was
eventually imposed on the university only by the same violent means as
had banished the old religion--wholesale ejections. The Anglican heads
of colleges were turned out, under Oliver, to be replaced by Puritan
Masters, in precisely the same way as Thomas Cromwell had replaced the
Catholics by men who accepted the royal supremacy.
[Sidenote: Early Presbyterianism.]
One of these early nuclei of Puritanism was fomented by Thomas
Cartwright, and Thomas Aldrich, Master of Corpus, became the leader of
the Cambridge Puritans. Cartwright was one of the first Presbyterians,
and canvassed the English counties in the interest of that form of
Church government. The movement was checked by Elizabeth, and
Cartwright was driven from his professorship. Later on the Puritan
Tuckney was Regius professor of Divinity as Cartwright had been Margaret
Professor. Presbyterianism was not congenial to the university: Hall
Bishop of Norwich, the satirist who was a contemporary of Shakespeare,
and Archbishop Williams the life-long opponent of Laud, both went to the
Tower for protesting against the acts of the Long Parliament, and Hall
though he was a noted ‘low-churchman’ remonstrated against the proposed
abolition of episcopacy. Among still more eminent Cantabrigians, Jeremy
Taylor was as much opposed to its abolition as Milton favoured it: but
when, in 1643-4, the Westminster Assembly met, Wallis the Cambridge
scientist acted as its secretary, the Oxonian Selden being another of
the thirty laymen present at its deliberations.
[Sidenote: The Brownists or Independents.]
Milton had no liking for the Westminster Assembly; with Cromwell he
sympathised with the rising Independent Congregations who took their
principles from the Brownists of Elizabeth’s time. Of the five movements
which were still to sweep over the face of religious England, two
originated in Cambridge. How inept the university is to the creation of
such schools of thought, how alien to its genius such creations are, may
be gauged by the comparatively puny character of these two movements.
The Brownists and the Cambridge Platonists do not suggest a world set
ablaze; but though ineffective as schools both of them represented
far-reaching principles, and have left a lasting impression on
Anglo-Saxon religion. It is easy to show this in the case of the
Brownists: for Browne was the spiritual father of the Pilgrim Fathers,
of the men who colonised a continent to obtain space to form those free
Church communities which many Englishmen regarded as the logical
completion of the principles of the Reformation. The English refugees at
Amsterdam were disciples and adherents of Robert Browne, and it was a
little company
[Sidenote: A.D. 1620.]
of Brownists which eventually set out in two ships for the new world,
one of which--the “Mayflower”--reached what is now the State of
Massachusetts. The Brownists were the first party of separatists from
the newly established Church in England, and the old and new worlds
recognise in them the true spiritual forbears of all Independent and
Congregational Churches; whose ecclesiastical polity requires that each
congregation should suffice to itself, be complete in itself.
[Sidenote: The Latitudinarians.]
In the next century arose the liberal church movement of Hales,
Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. Falkland, the great layman who
inspired it, had been educated at Dublin university, but was entered for
S. John’s College as early as 1621, and claimed in after life, in a
letter to the then Master, to have been a member of that society. Taylor
was a Cambridge man who had removed to Oxford; Hales and Chillingworth
were both distinguished Oxford scholars. The distinction made by Taylor
and Chillingworth between essential and non-essential articles of
belief was very far ahead of the theoretical and practical narrowness of
the German Protestantism around them. The problem at issue was stated by
Stillingfleet,[409] “fresh from the generous intellectual life of
Cambridge,” on the eve of the Restoration: Does there exist, in regard
to Church government, any such _jus divinum_ as would prevent men, under
the stress of circumstances, learning from each other, and arriving at
unity? The doctrine of _accommodation_ stated in his _Eirenicum_, though
it was not in advance of the earlier speculation of Ussher,
Chillingworth, Taylor, and Hales, anticipated later developments of
theological speculation with which we are all familiar.
[Sidenote: Deism.]
The xvii and xviii centuries saw the rise and progress of Deism. Lord
Herbert of Cherbury[410] “the father of deism” was educated at Oxford;
the great opponent of his doctrines was the Cambridge philosopher Samuel
Clarke. Nevertheless deism was not a university movement. Bolingbroke,
Morgan, and Blount (1654-93) were at no university; Shaftesbury (b.
1621) and Tindal had been at Oxford; Woolston and Anthony Collins (b.
1676) had been at Cambridge; and Toland after a residence at three other
universities, retired to Oxford. Conyers Middleton, librarian of
Trinity, was another opponent of the deists. Like unitarianism, deism
undoubtedly responds to a certain temper of English religious
speculation and sentiment, but apparently to no very wide-spread
temper; and the success of English deism was consummated not here but on
the continent.
[Sidenote: The Evangelical movement.]
The evangelical movement is entirely associated with the names of John
and Charles Wesley and Whitfield--with a group of Oxford men. There was
no principle of ecclesiastical polity and none of philosophy underlying
it: it was a fervent religious revival begun within the Church of
England and ending outside it, and as such the great influence it has
exerted would appear to have presented few attractions for the Cambridge
mind.
[Sidenote: The Tractarian movement, and the earlier Cambridge movement.]
The ‘Tractarian movement’ which also arose as a renewal of religious
life in the Church of England, was, like Wesleyanism, due exclusively to
Oxford men. A still earlier ‘High Church’ movement--a ritualistic
movement before ‘Tractarianism’--had however found its home in Cambridge
under the auspices of Andrewes, Wren, and Cosin. These three men, later
bishops of Winchester, Ely, and Durham respectively, established a type
of Reformed churchmanship not only more tolerant and scholarly than
Laud’s but one which was more genuinely a university movement; for it
was indigenous--its patrons were all heads of Cambridge houses--and it
did not meet, as did Laud’s efforts at Oxford, with dislike and
rejection at the university. Two hundred years passed before the
Tractarian movement at Oxford reproduced its likeness and tendered it to
Englishmen as the _vera effigies_ of the Church of England.[411] The
influence on religion of Charles Simeon and other Cambridge men in
ante-Tractarian days should also be remembered; neither should it be
forgotten that the liberal anti-Calvinistic churchmanship of Peter Baro
and Overall was first taught by Cambridge men.
[Sidenote: The age of Elizabeth and the New Learning.]
The pre-eminence of Cambridge during the age of Elizabeth would be in
itself sufficient proof of its relation to the New Learning--to the
revival of letters and of Greek, the rise of experimental science, and
the theological speculations of the century. Round Elizabeth there
gathered from the first to the last days of her reign a brilliant group
of men--scholars, poets, tutors, prelates, lawyers, statesmen,
philosophers, travellers, explorers. Every name we chance upon, every
man who influenced the court, the letters, the science of the day, hails
from Cambridge. The tutors of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary,
and Elizabeth had all been Cambridge men, and Cambridge men were
appointed as their physicians and chaplains. Names like those of
Skelton, Fisher, Erasmus, Croke, Tyndale, Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and
Cheke; of Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; of Bacon,
Gilbert, Harvey and Caius, conjure up a picture of the scholarship of
the age, of the new stir in thought, letters, and learning. Let us look
at two other well-defined groups of Elizabethans--the statesmen and the
churchmen. The two Cecils, Walsingham, Haddon and Fletcher (Masters of
the Requests), Bacon, Knollys, Sussex, Smith, and Mildmay were all
Cambridge men; and so were all Elizabeth’s great prelates: Lancelot
Andrewes, her chaplain, and dean of Westminster, and the primates
Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift: and they represented every party in the
country. Fulke Greville the most fortunate of the Queen’s favourites,
Sir John Harrington her godson, and Essex, were also Cambridge men.
Among the gallant little company of the first adventurers one only is
known to have studied at a university, and he was at Cambridge: Sir
Thomas Gresham conducted the expedition fitted out by Raleigh which
resulted in the discovery of Virginia--named after the virgin queen--and
in the introduction of the tobacco leaf. Cavendish, a Corpus man,
brought to England the tobacco called after him. Clifford, third earl of
Cumberland, a Trinity man, was one of the early privateers and
navigators; and young Roger Manners, of Queens’ and Corpus, went the
“Islands Voyage” with Robert Devereux who had studied at Trinity. Even
Drake, who was at no university, is known as a Cambridge benefactor, and
was as we have seen a large subscriber to the chapel of Corpus Christi
College.
In the last place the New Learning of the Tudor age was carried from
Cambridge to the sister university. It was so well understood that
Cambridge represented this new learning that Wolsey went there for the
men who, by colonising Cardinal College, were to introduce it at
Oxford; and Fox of Pembroke founded a belated _Corpus Christi College_
with the express purpose of erecting a monument in Oxford to the
Renaissance.
[Sidenote: The schoolmasters.]
The last half of the xv century brought with it the great schoolmasters.
Mulcaster of Eton and King’s was master of Merchant-Taylors’ on its
foundation; Colet’s school, S. Paul’s, sent to Cambridge for its second
head, and five of its first eight head masters were Cambridge and King’s
men. King’s College has supplied a large proportion of the Provosts and
head masters of Eton, many of the famous masters of Harrow, and a King’s
man counts as the creator of Rugby “as it now is.” Ascham’s
“Schoolmaster” was epoch-making, and his connexion with his university
was much closer than William Lily’s with Oxford.
[Sidenote: The Royal Society A.D. 1660-62.]
The brilliant epoch of Elizabeth spent, intellectual life smouldered
during the reigns of the first two Stuarts and the Protectorate, to be
renewed and rekindled not by fresh literary activity but by the
inquisitive temper which invaded the nation as it emerged, with the
Restoration, from civil conflict and the slough of doctrinal wrangling.
This inquisitiveness took shape in the institution of the Royal Society.
The _foyer_ of the Royal Society was London, although some of its most
distinguished members migrated later with Wilkins to Oxford. Of the
eminent men who formed the first Royal Society Wallis, Wilkins, Foster,
Jonathan Goddard, Sir William Ball, Lawrence Rooke, Sir William Petty,
Ward the mathematician, Ray, Woodward the mineralogist, Flamsteed,
Sloane, Boyle, Halley, Chief-Justice Hale, Lord Keeper Guilford, with
Sprat the Bishop of Rochester (its historian), Cowley and Dryden (its
poets), and Sir Robert Moray--Wallis, Foster, Rooke, Ray, Woodward,
Flamsteed, Guilford, Cowley, and Dryden, were Cantabrigians. Four of the
most prominent, Ward, Boyle, Sloane and Ball, were at no university;
Goddard went from Oxford to Cambridge where he graduated; Petty though
he became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford was educated at foreign
universities; Moray was at S. Andrews and Paris; Wilkins, Halley, Hale,
and Sprat were at Oxford. Among the first fellows there came from Oxford
Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Hook of the microscope, Sydenham: More
the Platonist, Sir William Temple, Willughby the ornithologist, and
Grew, came from Cambridge. Two more of Charles’s courtiers joined Moray,
Kenelm Digby from Oxford, and Villiers Duke of Buckingham from
Cambridge.
[Sidenote: The Cambridge Platonists.]
The next movement in English thought was both religious and
philosophical. When Latitudinarianism ceased to be ecclesiastical it
passed from Oxford and became identified with the sister
university.[412] Here it was handled by a group of men, from the two
colleges Emmanuel and Christ’s, so as to embrace a moral and political
philosophy, to which the term _Platonist_ is only aptly ascribed if it
be meant to stand for the “mass of transcendental thought”; that
traditional Platonism of the speculative schools which had succeeded one
another down the centuries, always at war with nominalism and constantly
asserting the transcendent character of moral ideas and the reality of
free will. Hobbism came to assail this position; for Hobbes applied
Bacon’s method to the moral and social order, and found the basis for
them in certain obvious facts of human nature. The spirit of enquiry set
afoot by the Cambridge Platonists was none the less real because it was
opposed to such tenets. They set themselves, in fact, to enquire whether
authority and tradition should guide men in matters of faith. They
asserted that reason was supreme, and they sought to place Christianity
again--to place Protestantism for the first time--under the protection
of that noble spiritual idealism which the great thinkers of the early
Church had chosen for the new faith; to penetrate Christianity with
philosophy.[413]
The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal
ecclesiastical polity. The new movement was something more, something
finer. Cambridge now gathered up the floating philosophical speculation
which existed in the xvii century side by side with the intense
absorption in dogmatic wranglings, the rapid growth of sects--of
Anabaptists, Antinomians, anti-Trinitarians, Arians. “A kind of moral
divinity,” as Whichcote’s tutor, the Puritan Tuckney, cried out in
alarm, was to be substituted for theological polemic. The movement
indeed was due to the combination of a higher spirituality than the
Puritan with the new spirit of bold enquiry in moral and speculative
fields[414]--it constituted a Cambridge reaction against the trammels of
Puritanism. It was the first of all English religious movements (not
excepting Wycliffism) to ally a growth of the religious sentiment with
the demand for a wide and liberal theoretical basis to theology. At the
head of this theological movement stands Benjamin Whichcote (_b._ 1609)
tutor of Emmanuel, who numbered among his pupils Wallis, Smith, and
Culverwell, and who was afterwards Provost of King’s. Ralph Cudworth
(_b._ in Somersetshire 1617) is perhaps the central figure: he is great
as a moral philosopher, great in his impartial statement of an
opponent’s case, great even in his freedom from the party and political
heat which consumed his contemporaries.[415] In John Smith (_b._ 1616)
of Emmanuel[416] the movement becomes more speculative, his was the
finest and most richly stored mind, and his “Select Discourses” perhaps
mark the culminating point of the Cambridge school. There remains Henry
More (_b._ 1614) the better known name, of Christ’s College, the
exponent of Descartes, the ardent follower of Plato, from whom he learnt
“that something better and higher than the knowledge of human things
constitutes the supreme happiness of man.” His _Enchiridion ethicum_ and
_Enchiridion metaphysicum_ were the text books of the school.
This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only “one of the
most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical
thought in England,” but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote’s
aphorism “There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions
about it” sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order
and Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of
ecclesiastical parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into
the relation of philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan
nor Presbyterian had brought any such liberating attitude towards
theology, for which indeed the early Protestantism cared not one jot,
but which has never entirely died out of England since the speculations
of the Cambridge Platonists.[417] The Englishman--fed with the crude
dogmatism of Luther, the arid ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of
the Puritan, and the intolerance of all three--now for the first time
was called dispassionately to consider the claims of the philosophical
reason, the eternal distinction between essential and non-essential--a
distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant--fundamental and
non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the claims, in
fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed
verities ultimately depends. A “rational Christian eclecticism” was for
the first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the
principle upon which the problems of the present day attend for
solution. The values to be assigned to the notions of “orthodoxy,” of
dogma--who around them had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford
it has always been a question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge
a question of substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the
credentials of theories.
Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were ineffective. Their
philosophy lacked a touchstone, concentration; and they allied its fate
to a ridiculous bibliology. For More, who taught at the university which
gave us our school of biblical critics--Erasmus, Colenso, Westcott,
Lightfoot, Hort--the wisdom of the Hebrew had been transmitted to
Pythagoras, and from Pythagoras to Plato, who thus becomes the heir of
divine (the Hebrew) philosophy. Such a doctrine was a serious
embarrassment to a cause in the age of Hobbes; it meant that the
rational and critical _criteria_ of the day went unutilised, and no
doctrine can withstand such a charge. There was, too, a certain lack of
the spirit of adventure, that gallant spirit which is not out of place
even in philosophy, and of the courage which belongs to enthusiasm. The
appeal to reason made by Hooker had debouched as Latitudinarianism; Laud
and George Herbert had both opposed it; but Puritan England was stronger
than both and would have none of either. The Platonists stood between
them--called upon the Laudian to modify his conception of authority,
upon the Puritan to admit the claims of reason, enriched Latitudinism
with a philosophy. They were not listened to. None the less the _via
media_ they offered has penetrated English thought. The Englishman
favours reason but is no Hobbist, he must have his God behind the
machine; he likes the supremacy of reason with a nebulous Plato behind
it--not the real Plato, but a Plato to hurl as a weapon in the face of
the materialist, without understanding too much about it. The ‘Cambridge
mind’ hit on a middle term, a resting place for speculation and for
faith, which suits the Englishman in the long run better than either
Laud or Hobbes. In Cudworth we have that mind typified--that union of
toleration with half lights which triumphs in England. Very bold
speculation is not the Englishman’s _forte_. His intellect in such
_gesta_ is not clear-cut, and his practical sense is always compatible
with unturned-out-corners of mysticism, prejudices, reverences false and
true--all the haziness made by those useful half lights loved by a
people who do not like to be mystified, but do not wish to be too much
enlightened.
And if we ask why Cambridge should be Platonist, the answer is because
it always resisted the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Reaction against
scholasticism had brought Plato to Florence in the xv century, it made
Plato at home in Cambridge in the xviith. We have called Cambridge the
laboratory of the Reformation; there too, we see, was made the first
attempt to reconcile Protestantism with philosophy: in undoing the
servitude of the latter to religion, which had been the mark of the
middle ages, the Cambridge Platonists did away with medievalism, joined
hands, behind its back, with that Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrine
schools which had influenced the early Church, defied, of course,
scholasticism, and prepared the place for our modern moral sciences
tripos.
[Sidenote: Modern science.]
We have already seen that Cambridge is the representative in England of
the scientific movement which has changed the face of the modern world.
It may perhaps be pretended that the stages of its development in Europe
have been marked by the great men emanating from this one university.
The names of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, Flamsteed, Newton, Darwin, are
signposts of the direction which science was to take and landmarks of
its achievements.
[Illustration: ADDENBROKE’S HOSPITAL IN TRUMPINGTON STREET
This building, as we now see it, was remodelled by Sir M. Digby Wyatt
1864-65.]
William Gilbert the discoverer of terrestrial magnetism and of the
affinity of magnetic and electric action, was praised by Galileo, while
Erasmus called him “great to a degree which is enviable.” Flamsteed
began that series of observations which initiated modern astronomy,
Horrox came still earlier, and they have been followed by such
Cantabrigians as Newton, Nevil Maskelyne, Herschell, Airy and Adams.
Newton and Darwin are two of the greatest names in the history of the
physical and physiological sciences--they stand out as creators of
epochs in the march of human knowledge: on Newton’s statue in Trinity
chapel are inscribed the words _qui genus humanum ingenio superavit_--of
whom else could they be spoken?--Darwin has revolutionised our thoughts
in spheres far removed from those directly affected by his great
hypothesis.
When we turn to consider the relation of these distinguished sons to the
university which bred them, it is interesting to find how close this has
always been. From the first makers of Cambridge to the last, from its
earliest distinguished sons to its latest, the individual’s relation to
the university has been a close one and the same names come down the
centuries and create a homogeneity in Cambridge history which has
certainly not received its due meed of recognition. A group of
persons--of families--is already assembled in this remote eastern corner
of England in the xiii and xiv centuries which contains the elements of
our university history: Stantons, de Burghs, Walsinghams, Beauforts,
Clares, Greys, Pembrokes are there--and Gaunt and Mortimer the roots of
Lancaster and York. If we had looked in upon the town earlier still, in
the xi and xii centuries, we should have found Picot--the ancestor of
the Pigotts whose name is recorded in Abingdon Pigotts hard by--who
succeeded to the honours of Hereward the Wake[418] and who founded the
church dedicated to the Norman saint Giles; Peverel who brought the
Austin canons to Cambridge, Clare, de Burgh, Fitz-Eustace (or Dunning)
and, by the side of these companions of the Conqueror, the sons of the
soil--the Frosts and Lightfoots. In the xiii century there were the
Dunnings assisting the Merton scholars to establish themselves, Mortimer
endowing the Carmelites, the Veres[419] establishing the Dominicans, de
Burghs, Walsinghams, Walpoles, and Bassetts,[420] the Greys, and
Manfields,[421] and “Cecil at the Castle”--all of whom appear in Edward
I.’s Hundred Rolls.
The name of Clare figures on every page of the history of the
Plantagenets. The first Gilbert de Clare had been employed to terrorise
the East Anglians who held out against William; another Gilbert is at
the head of the barons, his son is the guardian of Magna Charta, and
_his_ granddaughter founded Clare College. She also built the Greyfriars
house at Walsingham in 1346, was, with her kinsmen the Monthermers a
great benefactor to the first Augustinian priory founded a hundred years
earlier at Stoke Clare[422] and found time
[Sidenote: A.D. 1248.]
to send timber from her estates towards the building of the king’s Hall,
as Queen Elizabeth sent a similar gift just two hundred years afterwards
to the king’s college of Trinity. The Clares had received 95 lordships
in Suffolk, which formed “the honour of Clare,” and they gave their name
to the county in Ireland. Through Ralph de Monthermer the founders of
Clare and Pembroke were allied, for he was Elizabeth de Clare’s
stepfather, and afterwards brother-in-law to Aymer de Valence (see
Tables I, II).
[Sidenote: A.D. 1198.]
We first hear of the de Burghs in 1198 when Thomas, brother to Hubert
the king’s chamberlain,
[Sidenote: A.D. 1225.]
became guardian to a Bury ward. In 1225 a de Burgh was bishop of Ely,
and a hundred years later John de Burgh the 4th earl of Connaught and
2nd earl of Ulster married with Elizabeth de Clare. Towards
[Sidenote: A.D. 1385]
the end of the xiv century another de Burgh, author of the “_Pupilla
oculi_” was chancellor of the university, and it is he who purchased the
land of S. Margaret’s hostel in 1368.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1291.]
The connexion of the Mortimers with Cambridge also dates from the xiii
century: Guy de Mortimer figures in the Cambridge Hundred Rolls as the
benefactor of the Carmelite friars, and sixty years later Thomas, son of
Sir Constantine de Mortimer, ceded land for King’s Hall.
The name of Walsingham occurs as that of a prior of Ely in 1353. The
Walsinghams held two manors
[Sidenote: A.D. 1344.]
in Suffolk, besides land in Cambridge part of which was sold to the king
for the site of King’s Hall.
[Sidenote: A.D. 1290-1299.]
There was a Ralph Walpole bishop of Ely, and subsequently of Norwich in
the time of Edward I., who gave a messuage to Peterhouse as early as
1290. The Walpoles continued to figure on the roll of this college till
in the xvi century the Walpole of that day fled with the Jesuit Parsons
to Spain after the trial of Campian; he became vice-rector at Valladolid
but was eventually martyred at York five years before the close of the
century. Robert and Horace Walpole continued the Cambridge traditions of
their family.
With the xiv century other names appear: the Scropes, Gonvilles,
Stantons,[423] the families of Cambridge and of Croyland, Haddon,[424]
Zouche,[425] and Cavendish, and last but not least Valence, and the
house of Gaunt and Beaufort.
The connexion of the Scropes with Cambridge probably dates from the
earlier half of the xiv century. Scropes, as we have seen, figure among
the chancellors of the university in that century, and were allied not
only to the Mortimers but to the Gonvilles: when therefore we find the
representative of the house of Valence who is also a grandson of Roger
Mortimer, and whose son married a descendant of the founder of Clare,
engaged in a political intrigue with Gaunt,
[Sidenote: A.D. 1371.]
Scrope, and the Master of Pembroke in 1371, and the Scropes[426] Greys
and Mortimers conspiring with
[Sidenote: A.D. 1414.]
Richard Earl of Cambridge[426a] early in the next century, we gain a
very definite impression of a Cambridge _coterie_.
“---- Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, in their dear care,
And tender preservation of our person”----
are the words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Henry V. before
his discovery of their treachery.
[Sidenote: Shakespeare and Cambridge men.]
Indeed the historical plays of Shakespeare, from the dawn of our
university history in the reign of John to its zenith in that of Henry
VIII., place prominently before us our Cambridge protagonists. In “King
John” the names of Louis the Dauphin, Chatillon, and de Burgh recall the
Cambridge history of two centuries. Chatillon is here the ambassador of
Philip of France who calls upon John to surrender his “borrowed majesty”
into Prince Arthur’s hands; and in the next century Marie de Chatillon
and Elizabeth de Burgh are building colleges. Sir Stephen Scrope figures
in “Richard II.” In “Henry IV.” Scroop Archbishop of York and Edward
Mortimer, and in “Henry V.” the Earl of Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey,
appear. In “Henry VI.,” with Beaufort, Mortimer, Suffolk, Somerset,
Buckingham and Stafford, Stanley, Woodville, and Margaret of Anjou--all
of whom were to play a part in Cambridge history--we have Bassett of the
Lancastrian faction, and Vernon representing the Yorkists. The _dramatis
personae_ of this play thus include the _dramatis personae_ of King’s
and Queens’ Colleges, of Haddon Hall, of Magdalene, and Christ’s. In
“Richard III.” Rotherham of York appears, with many others who belong to
Cambridge in the xv century; while in “Henry VIII.” even Dr. Butts of
Gonville, Henry’s physician, is not omitted.
[Sidenote: xv c.]
[Sidenote: xvi c.]
In the xv century we have some new names. Zouche is there still, and
Scrope, and Bassett, and Beaufort, but there are also Langton, Stafford,
Pole, Brandon, Stanley, and Babington. In the xvi century Stanley,
Brandon, Stafford, Sidney, Audley, Bacon and Cecil, are all prominent
names.
These various groups are not independent. The annexed pedigrees will
show us that the Clares, Mortimers, de Burghs, Audleys, and Staffords
had intermarried: that Valence and Chatillon, Mortimer, Grey, and
Hastings, formed one family; that the Beauforts, through John of Gaunt,
joined the house of Edward III. to the house of Tudor, and were allied
to the Staffords, Nevilles, and Stanleys; that the Scropes were allied
to the Mortimers, the Staffords again to the family of Chatillon and to
the Woodvilles: the Sidneys to the Brandons, the Brandons to the Greys,
the Greys to the Woodvilles;[427] and that the xvi century Audleys
intermarried with the Greys as the xiv century Clares had wedded with
the Audleys; that through Mortimer, Stafford, Hastings, and Grey, the
founders--Clare, de Burgh, Chatillon, Valence, Beaufort, Stafford,
Woodville, Audley, and Sidney--form one clan. Before we proceed with the
list of well-known Cambridge names from the xvi century onwards, let us
notice in passing that certain titles have always clung to Cambridge, no
matter who bore them: such are Pembroke, Huntingdon, Buckingham,
Suffolk, Leicester.[428]
TABLE I.
PEDIGREE OF CLARE
Gilbert de Clare, ob. 1229 = Isabella, daughter of William Mareschall,
Earl of Hertford and Gloucester, | Earl of Pembroke in right of his wife
descended from Richard, founder | Isabella de Clare, and granddaughter of
of the House of Clare (whose | Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke,
4th son was abbot of Ely) and | surnamed “Strongbow” (who married
great-grandson of Richard the | a dau. of the Irish prince Dermot).
Fearless, Duke of Normandy. |
The family settled in Wales |
in the xii c. Gilbert (ob. 1148) |
being created Earl of Pembroke |
by Stephen in 1138. Attests, |
with Hubert de Burgh, John’s |
charters to the town of |
Cambridge. |
+--------+
|
Richard, ob. 1262 = Matilda de Lacy, dau. of the
Earl of Gloucester and Lord of | Earl of Lincoln.
the Honour of Clare. He |
and his father were |
the acknowledged heads of the |
baronage and guardians of |
Magna Charta. |
|
Gilbert, 1243-1295 = in 1290 Joan,
Earl of Gloucester, Clare and | dau. of Edw. I.
Hertford, called ‘the red.’ The | = 2ndly Ralph de
greatest of the barons in the | Monthermer.
reign of Edw. I. Supported de |
Montfort till after the battle of |
Lewes. Endowed Merton scholars. |
|
|
+-----------+--------------------+-------------+----+
| | | |
| Eleanor = Hugh le Margaret = 1st Piers Elizabeth Lady of the
| Despenser. Gaveston Honour of Clare, b. at
| = 2nd Hugh Acre during the crusade
| | Audley. _c._ 1291-2.
| FOUNDER OF CLARE COLLEGE
Gilbert killed at |
Bannockburn June 24 | married = 1st John de Burgh
1314, one of the | 3rd Earl of Ulster
“ordainers.” | and 4th Earl of
| Connaught.
+-------------------------+ = 2nd Lord Verdon.
| = 3rd Roger d’Amory.
| |
Margaret = Ralph Earl of Stafford, |
ob. 1372. |
|
+---------------+
|
William = Matilda, dau. of Henry
last Earl of | Earl of Lancaster. She
Ulster. | = 2ndly Ralph Stafford.
|
+-----------------+
|
Elizabeth de Burgh = in 1352 Lionel Duke
Lady of the | of Clarence second
Honour of Clare.[429]| son and heir of Edw.
+---------------------------------+ III. The title
| _de Clarentia_ is taken
| from his wife, Lady of the Honour
| of Clare, and is also recorded in
| that of _Clarenceux_, or Clarence,
| king-of-Arms, an heraldic title
| derived from the duke’s.
|
Philippa de Clarentia = Edmund Mortimer
| Earl of March.
|
Philippa = John Hastings
Earl of Pembroke.
The descendant of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence became Edward IV.,
and the ‘honour of Clare’ was thenceforth merged in the crown, and now
forms part of the duchy of Lancaster.
TABLE II.
PEDIGREE OF VALENCE
Guy de Chatillon = Mary of Brittany,
Comte de | dau. of Beatrice,
Saint-Paul. | sister of Edw. I.
+----------------------------------+ |
| | |
Isabel = John Lord Hastings, | |
= 2ndly | ob. 1312. | |
Ralph de | | |
Monthermer. | Aymer de Valence = 3rdly Marie de Chatillon,
| Earl of Pembroke, FOUNDER OF PEMBROKE
| youngest son of William de COLLEGE.
| Valence, half-brother of
| Hen. III. Slain June 23 1324.
| He supported Edw. II., and
| was his minister and chief
| counsellor and one of the
| ‘ordainers.’ _Great-grandson_
| _of Wm. Mareschall and Isabella de Clare._
|
+---------------------------------------+
| |
John Hastings, Elizabeth = Roger
ob. 1326. | 1st Lord Grey de Ruthyn,
| | ob. 1353.
| |
Laurence Hastings = Agnes, dau. of 2nd Lord Grey, ob. 1441.
Earl of Pembroke, | Roger Mortimer |
ob. 1339. | Earl of March. |
| |
John Hastings = Margaret, dau. of Reginald 3rd Lord Grey, heir
2nd earl, | Edw. III. to John Lord Hastings Earl of
ob. 1375. | Pembroke, whose grandson John
| (killed in the battle of S. Albans
| 1460) married Elizabeth Woodville,
| afterwards wife to Edw. IV.
|
John Hastings = Philippa Mortimer,
3rd Earl of dau. of Edmund
Pembroke, Earl of March.
ob. 1390, s.p.
PEDIGREE OF LADY MARGARET
John of Gaunt = Catherine Swynford
|
John Beaufort, = Margaret Holland, dau.
ob. 1410 | of Thomas Earl of Kent.
+--------------------------------------------+
| |
John Duke of = Margaret Beauchamp Edmund = Eleanor Beauchamp, dau. of
Somerset, | of Bletsoe. ob. 1467. | Richard Earl of Warwick.
ob. 1444 | |_________
| |
Lady Margaret = 1st Edmund Tudor Margaret Beaufort = Humphrey
1441-1509, Earl of Richmond Stafford
FOUNDER OF (half brother to ‘Earl of Stafford,’
CHRIST’S AND Henry VI.) by whom slain fighting for
ST. JOHN’S she was the mother House of Lancaster
COLLEGES. of Henry VII. at the battle of
= 2nd Sir Henry Stafford, S. Albans.
younger son of Duke
of Buckingham.
= 3rd Thomas Lord Stanley,
Earl of Derby.
Lady Margaret was the representative of John of Gaunt and the House of
Lancaster, as Elizabeth de Clare was the ancestor of the House of York.
TABLE III.
PEDIGREE OF THE DUKES OF BUCKINGHAM
Edward III.
|
+-------------------+
|
Thomas of Woodstock = Eleanor de Bohun.
(youngest son) Duke of |
Gloucester and Earl of |
Buckingham, ob. 1397. |
+----------------------------+
|
Edmund Earl of Stafford = Anne Plantagenet, sister and heiress of Humphrey
ob. 1404. | Plantagenet Earl of Gloucester and
| Buckingham (he died unm. 1399).
| She had previously married Thomas ‘Earl
| of Stafford,’ and her son by her 3rd husband,
| William Bourchier, married Anne, dau.
| of Richard Woodville Earl Rivers.
|
Humphrey Stafford = Anna Neville, dau. of Ralph
created Duke of | Earl of Westmoreland.
Buckingham, |
ob. 1460. |
|
Humphrey styled = Margaret Beaufort,
‘Earl of Stafford,’ | great-granddaughter of
slain fighting for | John of Gaunt.
the House of | (See Table II.)
Lancaster 1455. |
|
Henry = Katharine Woodville,
2nd Duke of | sister of
Buckingham, | Elizabeth, wife to
beheaded | Edw. IV.
1483. |
Edward
3rd Duke of Buckingham,
FOUNDER OF BUCKINGHAM COLLEGE.
beheaded 1521. Great-grandson
through his mother of Peter Comte
de Saint-Paul. [See Table II.]
PEDIGREE OF AUDLEY OF WALDEN
Thomas 1st Lord Audley of Walden = 2ndly Elizabeth Grey, dau.
(1488-1544) | of Marquess of Dorset.
FOUNDER OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE. |
|
+---------------------------+-------+
| |
Eleanor = 1stly Despenser. Margaret = 1stly Dudley Duke of
= 2ndly Lord Zouche Northumberland (beheaded).
of Mortimer. = 2ndly Thomas Howard
Duke of Norfolk (beheaded).
Thomas was very possibly descended from the ancient family of that name which
intermarried with the Clares, Staffords, and Greys.
TABLE IV.
PEDIGREE OF STAFFORD AND AUDLEY
Edward Stafford = Eleanor Percy, dau. of
3rd Duke of | 10th Earl of Northumberland.
Buckingham, |
beheaded 1521. |
FOUNDER OF BUCKINGHAM |
(now Magdalene) COLLEGE. |
|
Thomas Howard = Elizabeth Stafford
3rd Duke of | (2nd wife).
Norfolk, ob. 1554. |
|
Henry Howard ‘Earl = Frances de Vere,
of Surrey’ (the poet) | dau. of John Earl
beheaded 1547. | of Oxford.
|
+-----------------------------+-------------------+
| |
Thomas Howard = 2ndly Margaret, dau. of Henry Howard
4th Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Lord Audley of Earl of Northampton,
beheaded 1572. Walden, widow of Robert ob. 1624 (King’s
Dudley. _Daughter of the_ Coll. Cambs).
_founder of Magdalene_ Chancellor of the
_College._ University.
Their son Thomas Howard (ob. 1626) was created Earl
of Suffolk, and was Chancellor of the University.
PEDIGREE OF SIDNEY
Nicholas Sidney = Anne, sister of William Brandon,
| father of Charles Duke of Suffolk.
|
Sir William,
ob. 1553.
|
+----------------------------+
| |
Thomas Ratcliffe Earl = 2ndly Frances, Sir Henry = Mary, dau. of
of Sussex, ob. 9 March 1589, ob. 1586, | John Dudley
Lord Deputy for FOUNDER OF SIDNEY resident | Duke of
Ireland, 1557. SUSSEX COLLEGE. of Wales | Northumberland.
and Lord |
Deputy for |
Ireland. |
|
+-------------------------------+-------------------+--|
| | |
Sir Philip Sidney = a dau. of Robert Sidney Henry Herbert = 3rdly Mary.
ob. 1586. Sir Francis created Earl Earl of Pembroke
Walsingham. of Leicester, (2nd earl
She married ob. 1616. of this line).
2ndly Robert
Devereux Earl of
Essex (beheaded 1600),
and 3rdly Richard de Burgh
the ‘great Earl’ of Clanricarde.
The names of great Cantabrigians hardly ever appear singly in the annals
of the university, and as there are family groups among founders so
there are also among its other benefactors and distinguished
representatives. Babington, Bacon, Beaumont, Bryan, Cavendish, Cecil,
Coleridge, Darwin, Devereux, Fletcher, Greville, Harvey, Langton,
Lightfoot, Lytton, Manners, Montague, Neville, Newton, Palmer, Shepard,
Taylor, Thackeray, Temple, Wordsworth--all form such groups, and have
provided the university not only with great names, but with a family
history.
No name has clung more steadily to Cambridge than Babington--it was
known there at least as early as the xv century, and was that of the
25th abbot of Bury in the time of Henry VI. Henry Babington was
vice-chancellor in 1500; Dr. Humphrey Babington built the two sets of
rooms on the south side of Nevile’s court known as ‘the Babington
rooms,’ in 1681, and his family have given prominent members to the
university ever since. One of the Bacons was the last Master of
Gonville, and Nicholas Bacon and his two sons were at Corpus and
Trinity. Beaumont is a Peterhouse name; but in the reign of Elizabeth
Dr. Robert Beaumont was Master of Trinity and vice-chancellor, and a
Beaumont was Master of Peterhouse
[Sidenote: Temp. Ric. ii. 1380-1397.]
in the xviii century. Towards the end of the xiv century William
Cavendish was fellow and master of the same college, and John Cavendish
had been chancellor in 1380. In Gray’s time Lord John Cavendish was at
Cambridge, in the next century Henry Cavendish the scientist; and the
connexion of this family with the university has never been severed.
The Cecils appear at Cambridge with the rise of Burleigh’s family in
Elizabeth’s reign, and they were connected with the Bacons a family
which also came into prominence at the same time; the great Bacon was
Burleigh’s nephew, and the Cecils were kinsmen of other celebrated
Cambridge men--Cheke, Hatton, Howard, and the founder of the Brownists.
Moreover one of the early Cecils had been made water
[Sidenote: Temp. Hen. viii.]
bailiff of Whittlesey (‘bailiff of Whittlesey mere’) and keeper of the
swans in the fen district. William, first Lord Burleigh, was born in his
mother’s house at Bourn--the place which gave its name to the barony
held successively by Hereward, Picot, and Peverel. The third and fifth
lords married with the Manners, the sixth with a Cavendish. Both the
Cecils of Elizabeth’s time were chancellors of the university;
Burleigh’s eldest son Thomas Earl of Exeter and Lady Dorothy Nevill his
wife gave no less than £108 a year to Clare Hall, and ‘Mr. Cecil’ was
moderator when James visited the university in 1615. Darwin had been
preceded at Cambridge by old Erasmus Darwin, botanist and poet, the
‘Sweet Harmonist of Flora’s court’ as Cowper calls the ancestor of the
man who gave us the great harmonizing hypothesis of the century.[430]
Fletcher is another Cambridge name. Fletcher Bishop of London was at
Corpus, so was his son the dramatist; Giles the brother of the bishop,
one of Elizabeth’s ambassadors, was at King’s, his two poet sons were
Cambridge men, and there was a scientific Fletcher at Caius in the xvi
century. Greville or Grenville is another Cambridge name: Fulke
Greville, first Lord Brooke (whose mother was a Neville) was at Jesus
College, so was his cousin the second lord, whose father had been sent
to Trinity in 1595 by Robert Devereux Earl of Essex with a letter of
advice on Cambridge studies written by another old Cantabrigian, Bacon.
The first Lord Lansdowne in the time of Charles II. and Sir Bevil
Greville (ob. 1706) were both at Trinity.
The Suffolk name of Hervey is another which has always figured in
Cambridge--there was Hervey Dunning in the xiiith and Hervey de Stanton
in the xiv century; a Harvey succeeded Gardiner and Haddon in the
Mastership of Trinity Hall, of which he was a considerable benefactor,
and was vice-chancellor in 1560, Gabriel Harvey, a kinsman of Sir Thomas
Smith’s, was a fellow of this college and of Pembroke, William Harvey
was at Caius. Langton[431] is an ancient and honoured name; it was that
of the 6th Master of Pembroke, of John Langton chancellor of the
university in the time of Henry VI., of Thomas Bishop of Winchester, and
other Cambridge men. Lightfoot is a name which was known in the fen
before the Conquest, and was that of the eminent Cambridge Hebraist two
hundred years before the Bishop of Durham studied there. The Lyttons
have been known at the university since the xvii century, Sir Rowland
Lytton the antiquary was a member of Sidney Sussex College[432] and
Bulwer Lytton was at Trinity Hall. The Montagues and Montacutes have
been important since the day when Simon Montacute Bishop of Ely
befriended Peterhouse. Through the xvii century, the first Master of
Sidney Sussex, Richard Bishop of Norwich (the antiquary), the 2nd Earl
of Manchester, and Charles Montague (afterwards Lord Halifax) who, with
Prior, replied to Dryden’s “Hind and Panther,” were all Cambridge men;
and Sir Sidney Montague of Barnwell was one of Charles I.’s Masters of
the
[Sidenote: A.D. 1627.]
Requests. We have seen how the Nevilles intermarried with the families
of Cambridge founders; Henry Neville was proctor, and vice-chancellor in
1560; Thomas Nevile was 8th Master of Trinity[433] and vice-chancellor,
and 6th Master of Magdalene, where the name was again recorded in the
last Master of the college (Lord Braybrooke). There was a Newton at
Cambridge, 6th Master of Peterhouse, contemporary
[Sidenote: A.D. 1381.]
with Beaufort, Thorpe, Scrope, and de Burgh. In the middle of the xvi
century another Newton was vice-chancellor; fifty years later Fogg
Newton was Provost of King’s and vice-chancellor in the 8th of James I.,
and an Isaac Newton unknown to fame entered for Peterhouse about the
same time as the discoverer of the law of gravitation entered Trinity.
Palmer is another well-known name: a John Palmer was proctor in the
reign of Elizabeth, Edward Palmer was fellow of Trinity in the reign of
Charles I., and Edward Palmer Professor of Arabic, the sheikh Abdullah,
was a Cambridge man. Skeltons have been found at
[Sidenote: A.D. 1391.]
the university since a proctor of that name who flourished in the days
of Richard II.; Shepards since the days of Elizabeth when there was a
proctor of that name; Jeremy Taylor was kin to Rowland Taylor the
Cambridge martyr; and Palmerston continued the tradition of the Temples.
The Sternes had played a part in Cambridge before the days of Laurence
Sterne;[434] Thackeray followed other members of his family to the
university, and there have been Wordsworths at Cambridge ever since the
poet went to S. John’s and his brother Christopher was Master of
Trinity.
Other Cambridge names claim attention. There had been Latimers and
Ridleys at Cambridge before the Protestant martyrs. Aldrich belongs to
the xvi and xvii centuries. Byngham was not first heard of when the
parson of S. John Zachary built God’s House, but is the name of no less
a personage than the first Master of Pembroke (Thomas Byngham), and
another William Byngham was proctor
[Sidenote: A.D. 1570.]
in the year when Whitgift was vice-chancellor. One of the Bassetts was
proctor as late as 1488, and Roger Ascham’s father in the xvi century
was steward to the great Yorkshire house of Scrope; Mildmay, the founder
of Emmanuel, was brother-in-law to Sir Francis Walsingham, and was
allied to the Ratcliffes.[435] There were Days before the Days of
King’s; the Harringtons--allied to the Montagues, Stanleys and
Sidneys--were Cambridge men; a Hatton was proctor in 1499 and later
Provost of King’s, and the Hattons of the time of Elizabeth and her
successors--who intermarried with the Montagues--were all benefactors of
Jesus College.[436] The northern Percies have often taken part in
Cambridge affairs, and Percy Bishop of
[Sidenote: A.D. 1451.]
Carlisle was chancellor of the university in the time of Henry VI. Roger
Rotherham was Master of King’s Hall before the days of the great
chancellor. There were Somersets at Cambridge from the days of Henry
VI., and a Stafford was proctor the year Henry VIII. beheaded
---- bounteous Buckingham
The mirror of all courtesey.
Stokys and Stokes was a well-known name before Sir George Stokes went to
Pembroke; Sedgwick was on the papist side in the controversy held before
Edward VI.’s commissioners; Tyndale, like Aldrich, belongs to the xvi
and xvii centuries. Fitzhugh is a name which flourished at the
university in the xv and early xvi centuries. Parker, Paston,[437]
Morgan, Cosin and Cousins, and the various forms of Clark are constant
Cambridge names. In modern times Macaulay, Trevelyan, Paget, Maitland,
and Lyttelton should be added.
The subject of university men must not be dismissed without noticing how
many of the most distinguished Cantabrigians never earned a degree. We
have already seen (in chapter iii.) that in some periods of greatest
intellectual achievement the examination tests at the university were
wholly inadequate: what follows is a list of great and prominent men who
took no degree at all:--Bacon, Byron, Macaulay (fellow of Trinity), Gray
(professor of history),[438] Morland the hydrostatician,[439] Woodward
the founder of mineralogy,[440] Donne, Fulke Greville, Parr the classic,
Sir William Temple, Cromwell, Pepys and Mildmay both of whom were
conspicuous benefactors of the university, Dryden who received his
degree by dispensation of the Primate, Stratford de Redcliffe who was
created _M.A._ by royal mandamus, Palmerston who graduated “by right of
birth.” There was no one so important as Macaulay in 1822 when his name
was absent from the tripos list, no one so great as Darwin in the tripos
lists of 1831 when he took an ordinary degree.
The Oxford roll of non-graduates is not less distinguished: Sir Thomas
More, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney,
Wolsey, Massinger and Beaumont the dramatists, Shaftesbury, Gibbon,
Shelley--while Halley the astronomer took his _M.A._ by royal mandamus,
and Locke’s degree was irregular. Dublin university has not a dissimilar
tale to tell; Burke failed to distinguish himself there, and Swift was
given a degree _speciali gratia._