"The building, parent of my young essays,
Asks in return a tributary praise;
Pillars sublime bear up the learned weight,
And antique sages tread the pompous height."
TICKELL.
Queens's is one of the six oldest colleges in Oxford, and is far on
to celebrating its sexcentenary, but it has purged itself of the
Gothic leaven in its buildings more completely than any other Oxford
foundation. It does not even occupy its own old site, for the
building originally lay well back from the High Street. It was only
the "civilities and kindnesses" of Provost Lancaster which induced
the Mayor and Corporation of Oxford, in 1709, to grant to Queen's
College "for 1,000 years," "so much ground on the High Street as
shall be requisite for making their intended new building straight
and uniform." And so the most important of "the streamlike windings
of the glorious street" was in part determined by a corrupt bargain
between "a vile Whig" (as Hearne calls this hated Provost) and a
complaisant mayor. But much of the credit for the beauty of this part
of the High must also be given to the architect of University College
(seen in Plate IX on the left), who, whether by skill or by accident,
combined at a most graceful angle the two quads, erected with an
interval of some eighty years between them (1634 and 1719).
A man must, indeed, be a Gothic purist who would wish away the
stately front quadrangle of Queen's, designed by Wren's favourite
pupil, Hawkmoor, while the master himself is said to be responsible
for the chapel of the College, the most perfect basilican church in
Oxford.
If Queen's has been revolutionary in its buildings, it has been
singularly tenacious of old customs. Its members still assemble at
dinner to the sound of the trumpet (blown by a curious arrangement
/after/ grace has been said); it still keeps up the ancient and
honoured custom of bringing in the boar's head--"the chief service of
this land"--for dinner on Christmas Day; while on New Year's Day, the
Bursar still, as has been done for nearly 600 years, bids his guests
"take this and be thrifty," as he hands each a "needle and thread,"
wherewith to mend their academic hoods; the /aiguille et fil/ is
probably a pun on the name of the founder, Robert Eglesfield. The
College at these festivities uses the loving, cup, given it by its
founder, perhaps the oldest piece of plate in constant use anywhere
in Great Britain; five and a half centuries of good liquor have
stained the gold-mounted aurochs' horn to a colour of unrivalled
softness and beauty.
Robert Eglesfield was almoner of the good Queen Philippa, wife of
Edward III, and, like Adam de Brome, the founder of Oriel, he, too,
commended his college to a royal patron. Ever since his time, the
"Queen's College" has been under the patronage of the Queen's consort
of England, and the connection has been duly acknowledged by many of
them, especially by Henrietta Maria, the evil genius of Charles I,
and by Queen Caroline, the good genius of George II. Her present
Gracious Majesty, too, has recognized the college claim. The Queens
Regnant have no obligations to the college, but Queen Elizabeth gave
it the seal it still uses, and good Queen Anne was a liberal
contributor to the rebuilding of the college in her day; her statue
still adorns the cupola on the front to the High.
[Plate IX. High Street]
No doubt it was the royal connection which brought to Queen's, if
tradition may be trusted, two famous warrior princes, the Black
Prince and Henry V; though it is at least doubtful whether the
Queen's poet, Thomas Tickell, Addison's flattering friend, had any
authority for the picture he gives of their college life. He
describes them as:
"Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' Court,
Their meals were frugal and their sleeps were short;
To couch at curfew time they thought no scorn,
And froze at matins every winters morn."
The College has an interesting portrait of the great Henry, which may
be authentic; but that of the Black Prince, which adorns the college
hall, is known to have been painted from a handsome Oxford butcher's
boy, in the eighteenth century. While we condemn the lack of historic
sense in the Provost and Fellows of that day, we may at least acquit
them of any intention of pacificist irony in their choice of a model.
Queen's has had better poets than Tickell on its rolls, but, by a
curious chance, the two most eminent--Joseph Addison and William
Collins--were both tempted away from their first college by the
superior wealth and attractions of Magdalen.
The old local connections which were such a marked feature in the
statutes of founders, and which so profoundly influenced Oxford down
to the Commission of 1854, have been almost swept away at other
colleges; but at Queen's they have always been strongly maintained.
It has been, and is, emphatically, a north-country college. Not the
least important factor in maintaining this tradition has been the
great benefaction of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, fondly and familiarly
known to all Queen's men as "Lady Betty." Steele wrote of her when
young, that to "love her was a liberal education"; this may have been
flattery, but her bounty, at any rate, has given a "liberal
education" to hundreds of north-country men, who come up from the
twelve schools of her foundation to her college at Oxford.
It is interesting to note in Modern Oxford, attempts to re-establish
those local connections, which the wisdom of our ancestors
established, and which the self-complacency of Victorian reformers
"vilely cast away."