"But still the old quadrangle keeps the same,
The pelican is here;
Ancestral genius of the place, whose name
All Corpus men revere."
J. J. C., in "/The Pelican Record/," 1700.
[Plate XVI. Corpus Christi College : The First Quadrangle]
Corpus is emphatically, before all other colleges in Oxford, the
college of the Revival of Learning; its very foundation marked the
change from the old order of things to the new. Its Founder, Bishop
Foxe, of Winchester, was one of the great statesman-prelates to whom
mediaeval England owed so much, and he had a leading share in
arranging the two royal marriages which so profoundly affected the
history of our country, that of Henry VII's daughter, Margaret, with
the King of Scotland, and that of his son, afterwards Henry VIII,
with Catharine of Aragon.
After a life spent "in the service of God" "in the State," rather
than "in the Church," Foxe resolved to devote some of his great
wealth to a foundation for the strengthening of the Church. His first
intention was to found a college for monks, but, fortunately for his
memory and for Oxford, he followed the advice of his friend, Bishop
Oldham, of Exeter, who told him, in words truly prophetic, that the
days of monasteries were past: "What, my lord, shall we build housed
for a company of buzzing monks, whose end and fall we ourselves may
live to see? No, no, it is more meet a great deal that we should have
care to provide for the increase of learning." In the next generation
the monasteries were all swept away, while Foxe's College remains a
monument of the Founder's pious liberality and of his friend's wise
prescience.
Corpus was the first institution in England where definite provision
was made for a teacher of the Greek Language, and Erasmus hailed it
with enthusiasm; in a letter to the first President of the new
college, he definitely contrasts the conciliatory methods of
Reformers in England with the more violent methods of those in
Germany, and counts Foxe's foundation, which he compares to the
Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes, among "the chief glories
of Britain."
Foxe, however, did not confine his benefactions to classical studies,
important as these were. He imported a German to teach his scholars
mathematics, and the scientific tastes of his students are well
illustrated by the picturesque and curious dial, still in the centre
of his College Quad, which was constructed by one of them in the
reign of Elizabeth. It is well shown in our picture, as are also
Foxe's charming low buildings, almost unaltered since the time of
their Founder.
But it has been on the humanistic, rather than on the scientific,
side that Corpus men have specially distinguished themselves. The
first century of the College existence produced the two great
Elizabethan champions of Anglicanism. Bishop Jewel, whose "Apology"
was for a long period the great bulwark of the English Church against
Jesuit attacks, had laid the foundations of his great learning in the
Corpus Library, still--after that of Merton--the most picturesque in
Oxford; he often spent whole days there, beginning an hour before
Early Mass, i.e. at 4 a.m., and continuing his reading till 10 p.m.
"There were giants on the earth in those days." Even more famous is
the "judicious Hooker," who resided in the college for sixteen years,
and only left it when, by the wiles of a woman, he, "like a true
Nathanael who feared no guile" (as his biographer, Isaac Walton,
writes), was entrapped into a marriage which "brought him neither
beauty nor fortune." The first editor of his great work, /The
Ecclesiastical Polity/, was a Corpus man, and it was only fitting
that the Anglican Revival of the nineteenth century should receive
its first impulse from the famous Assize Sermon (in 1833) of another
Corpus scholar, John Keble.
Corpus has been singularly fortunate in its history, no doubt because
its Presidents have been so frequently men of mark for learning and
for character. Even in the dark period of the eighteenth century it
recovered sooner than the rest of the University, and one of its sons
records complacently that "scarcely a day passed without my having
added to my stock of knowledge some new fact or idea." A charming
picture of the life of the scholars of Corpus at the beginning of the
last century is given in Stanley's /Life of Arnold/; for the famous
reformer of the English public-school system was at the College
immediately after John Keble, whom he followed as fellow to Oriel, on
the other side of the road. It need hardly be added that in those
days an Oriel Fellowship was the crown of intellectual distinction in
Oxford.
Bishop Foxe had set up his college as a "ladder" by which, "with one
side of it virtue and the other knowledge," men might, while they
"are strangers and pilgrims in this unhappy and dying world," "mount
more easily to heaven." Changing his metaphor he goes on, "We have
founded and raised up in the University of Oxford a hive wherein
scholars, like intelligent bees, may, night and day, build up wax to
the glory of God, and gather honeyed sweets for their own profit and
that of all Christian men." So far as it is given to human
institutions to succeed, his college has fulfilled his aims.