court, a wing in line with the gateway-tower, continuing the front of
the college along King’s Lane. This, which was built about 1617, is not
very remarkable, and appears to have been intended for use rather than
ornament. Everything north of this is modern. The northernmost range of
chambers was built by Mr W. M. Fawcett in 1886. Although it is very good
in its way, its juxtaposition to the new court of King’s is fatal to its
beauty. Here, too, Mr Bodley has been at work. His new chapel, the most
recent addition to the buildings, is a pretty but not a very successful
piece of work. The interior is elaborately fitted with a very complete
set of stalls, and the organ-case and reredos are very fair reproductions
of medieval painting. Mr Kempe’s windows and the Flemish altar-piece
deserve admiration, but the south side of the building has been spoiled
by some very poor glass by Hardman, taken from the old chapel. Queens’,
on the whole, if we except the President’s Lodge, depends on its
delightful general effect rather than on any very special architectural
merit.
* * * * *
In 1446 Andrew Doket, rector of St Botolph’s Church, founded the College
of St Bernard for a president and four fellows. The site which he chose
for his foundation was east of the present college, and comprehended
an oblong strip of ground running from what was then Milne Street
eastwards to Trumpington Street—in fact, part of the site occupied by
St Catharine’s. Doket, who may be regarded as a second Edmund Gonville,
was first president of his college. However, his original idea was small
and its success was scarcely inevitable. Henry VI. had just founded his
splendid college at the other end of Milne Street, and Doket conceived
the happy idea of inducing his queen to perpetuate her name in the same
way. Margaret of Anjou, who was then, as Mr Atkinson points out, only
fifteen years old, showed great readiness in emulating her husband. She
consented in 1448 to refound the college under the name of the Queen’s
College of St Margaret and St Bernard, and petitioned Henry for a
charter, which was readily granted. The buildings were begun about this
time on the present site. The history of Queens’ College thus offers an
interesting parallel to that of the similarly named college at Oxford. In
both cases the first idea is due to a clerk in holy orders, who invites
the reigning queen to occupy his foundation. Margaret of Anjou has been
since looked upon as the chief foundress and benefactress of the college.
In gratitude, the society adopted her coat-of-arms, and, although this
was superseded no less than three times by other devices, it was adopted
again in 1575, and is now, with the addition of a bordure, the escutcheon
of the college. This magnificent piece of heraldry, which attracts all
eyes by its prominent situation in the first court, recalls the claims
of the House of Anjou to European sovereignty. The unfortunate history
of Margaret’s father, René of Provence, and her brother, the Duke of
Calabria, is the key to the shield. Its quarterings include the arms of
the kingdoms of Hungary, the two Sicilies and Jerusalem in the upper
half, and, in the lower, those of the county of Anjou and the Duchies of
Bar and Lorraine.
The thirty-six years of Doket’s presidency were interrupted by the Wars
of the Roses, which prevented the building from going on. Doket, however,
like so many heads of houses in subsequent years, had an affection for
his college which hindered him from displaying any political prejudice.
In 1465, when Edward IV. was firmly established on the English throne,
he applied for help to Queen Elizabeth Wydvil. This lady owed her
position at court to a situation in Queen Margaret’s retinue, and she
readily accepted his offer. Just as her husband helped on the building
of the chapel of King’s, she extended her aid to this other Lancastrian
foundation, and, under her protection, the work of building proceeded.
The only alterations due to Yorkist patronage were a new coat-of-arms
for the college, and the change of the title from Queen’s College in the
singular to Queens’ College in the plural. The invocation of St Margaret
and St Bernard was retained without alteration. The floriated cross of St
Margaret and St Bernard’s crosier are to be seen upon the groined roof of
the gateway, and, later on, when Richard III. gave a new coat-of-arms to
the college in place of that granted by Edward IV., these emblems appear
surmounted by the well-known boar’s head.
Doket died in 1484, and was succeeded by Thomas Wilkinson, whose rule
lasted till 1505. Then followed the three years during which John Fisher,
the celebrated Bishop of Rochester, was president. This great man was
one of that band of scholars and divines who reformed the state of
learning in England. Queens’ College probably owes to him the chief
episode in its history, the residence of Erasmus* within its walls. It
is improbable that Erasmus was at Queens’ during Fisher’s presidency,
as has been so generally supposed. He was invited to England by Henry
VIII. soon after 1509, and Fisher had given up the presidency in 1508.
No doubt, Fisher advised Erasmus, who, as Fuller says, “might have
_pickt_ and _chose_ what house he pleased,” to the cloistral seclusion
of Queens’; and this is more likely than the somewhat far-fetched
alternative that he was “allured with the situation of this Colledge
so near the River, as Rotterdam his native place to the Sea.” In fact,
Erasmus was simply allured to Cambridge by the prospect of work, and
does not seem to have enjoyed life there at all. Three of his letters
are dated from Queens’ by name, and they, as well as the rest written
from no particular address in Cambridge, prove that he regarded his work
there as a _pis aller_. He complained of his situation, his food and
drink. Cambridge beer encouraged the most painful ailments. He wrote to
a friend for a cask of Greek wine. This rare beverage was finished all
too soon; when it was done, he kept the empty cask by him, that he might
at least refresh himself with the smell. He was ill most of his time; he
was also continually in want of money. His professorships were merely
lectureships, and his pay was probably small. Had it not been for the
patronage of Archbishop Warham and other lovers of learning, he might
have fallen into serious straits. At no time did he realise the value of
money. Doubtless, he represented himself as more unpleasantly situated
than he actually was. Like most delicate men, he was very self-conscious,
and expected an inordinate amount of praise and flattery, which it is
hardly probable that he obtained at Cambridge. On a previous visit to
Oxford, he had been the centre of a group of scholars; at Cambridge,
he was isolated from his old friends. We can therefore hardly trust to
his vivacious narrative for an accurate account of his Cambridge life.
But, everything taken into consideration, he was seriously discontented,
and was glad to leave in 1514. His memory has been more than ordinarily
cherished in an University which perhaps caressed him very little in his
lifetime, and his prestige has had a salutary influence on Cambridge
scholarship. When he came to Cambridge, he found the old scholastic
learning, which he detested, still in vogue; when he left, it was with
the consciousness that he had inaugurated a new era.
The next point in the history of Queens’ is its acquisition under Dr
William Mey of the Carmelite house which lay between the college and
the present site of King’s. This house was surrendered to the society
in 1538, just before the dissolution; but the interference of the Crown
delayed the completion of this transaction till 1544. The ground which
thus came into the possession of the president and fellows was the
foundation of all their future building. Dr Mey was deprived at the
accession of Queen Mary, but was restored in 1559. He lived for only a
year afterwards. His next successor but one was Dr William Chaderton,
of whom Fuller has preserved some curious anecdotes. He is reported to
have said one day in a wedding sermon “That the choice of a wife is full
of hazard, not unlike as if one in a barrel full of serpents should
grope for one fish; if (saith he) he ’scape harm of the snakes, and
light on a fish, he may be thought fortunate, for perhaps it may be but
an eel.” The ingenuity of the comparison is very characteristic of our
Elizabethan universities, and is not a little in the manner of Fuller
himself. Fuller, indeed, received most of what he would have called
his “breeding” at Queens’, and, here and at Sidney, he picked up that
curiously miscellaneous knowledge which has made him one of our most
entertaining prose writers. He was essentially a Cambridge man, and in
all his books, however distant they are from the purpose, we trace a
certain appeal to his university. He was not less positive as to its
antiquity than Dr Caius, although he went less far back for its origin.
His _Church History_ records the foundation of Cambridge as an University
by Sigebert, King of the East Anglians, and in the sequel punctiliously
refers to the foundation of every college as an important event in the
history of the Church. He did for Cambridge, in a more limited area,
what Anthony Wood did for Oxford. His politics were of an undecided kind,
and he fell into disfavour with both Parliamentarians and Royalists, but
he was, in fact, a moderate partisan of the King. There is a story that
he was to have been made a bishop at the Restoration, but he died before
the offer was made.
John Davenant,* president from 1614 to 1622, was, as Bishop of Salisbury,
one of that galaxy of prelates which relieves the darkness of the Civil
Wars. He was the friend of George Herbert, whose parsonage of Bemerton
was within three miles of Salisbury. He died in 1641, before affairs had
come to their final climax. It is probable that he was guilty of some
of those numerous idolatries which Dowsing the iconoclast destroyed on
his visit to Cambridge. Dowsing visited the college on St Stephen’s Day,
1643, when he “beat down 110 superstitious pictures besides Cherubim and
Ingravings,” and “digged up the steps for three hours.” What Dowsing
would say to the internal fittings of the new chapel we have no idea!
After the storm had passed over and the Restoration had given back quiet
to the college, its history languished: and, although it has done well
in the schools, it cannot be said to have produced many men of great
distinction. In Isaac Milner (* Harlow), Dean of Carlisle and President
from 1788 to 1820, it had a Church historian of some reputation. Simon
Patrick,* Bishop of Ely during the reigns of William III. and Queen Anne,
was a fellow here, and was one of the latest survivors of the Laudian
school. His account of the opening of Edward the Confessor’s tomb is
preserved in the University Library in its original manuscript. He was a
great theologian and something of a controversialist. Quite recently the
familiar figure of Dr Campion,* Vicar of St Botolph’s and Honorary Canon
of Ely, and President of Queens’ for the last five years of his life, has
been removed from Cambridge. His successor is Dr Herbert Ryle of King’s,
who holds with the office the Hulsean Professorship of Divinity.
XI
ST CATHARINE’S COLLEGE
It has been said that the decorous quadrangle of St Catharine’s gives
the stranger the impression of an old manor house rather than of a
college; and the trees which guard it on the side of Trumpington Street
are certainly a party to the illusion. The western front of the college,
which occupies one side of King’s Lane, has a more definitely scholastic
air. For the most part the buildings are uninteresting. The tiny court
at the north-west angle dates from 1626; the rest of the college is the
fruit of a rebuilding which went on slowly from 1680 to 1755. Loggan, who
published his illustrations soon after the work was begun, figures, with
some optimism, an eastern façade with a central cupola. This, however,
was never attempted. The chapel is an interesting piece of Queen Anne
architecture, dating from 1704; and lately a fine organ by Norman &
Beard of Norwich has been placed in it. In the present century, the
Hall has been restored in the Gothic style, but otherwise no radical
alteration has been made.
[Illustration: Sᵗ. Catharine’s College]
* * * * *
St Catharine’s is, in a certain sense, the daughter of King’s, for
its founder was Robert Woodlark,* provost of the latter college. The
reason for its foundation is not very obvious: it was probably merely
a pious act on the part of Woodlark, of whom we know very little
beyond this. The site on which it stood occupied the greater part of
that oblong space which still is bounded on the north by King’s Lane
and on the south by Silver (then Small Bridges) Street. Even now the
space is somewhat cramped by houses; then the college was thoroughly
“town-bound,” as Fuller puts it. However, although one of the smallest
colleges in Cambridge, it has given, in comparison with its size, more
famous men to England than any college in either University. These men
are all clergy, and their names are among the most reverend in Church
history. Seventy-four years after the foundation of the college, Edwin
Sandys* became master. He is chiefly known as Archbishop of York and as a
translator of the Bible, and, while in exile abroad during Mary’s reign,
he cultivated friendly relations with foreign Protestant churches. As
Master of St Catharine’s and Vice-Chancellor, he went through a critical
experience, which is narrated by Fuller. The Duke of Northumberland, who
was at Cambridge in the hope of intercepting Mary’s progress from the
Eastern Counties to London, ordered Sandys to preach before him at the
University Church. Sandys was a timid man and had very little faith in
Lady Jane Grey’s cause, so that the order caused him some perplexity. He
rose at a very early hour next morning, and took the _sortes Biblicae_
after the approved manner of the sixteenth century. The text at which
his Bible opened was the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of the
first chapter of Joshua, “All that thou commandest us we will do, and
whithersoever thou sendest us we will go. According as we hearkened
unto Moses in all things, so will we hearken unto thee: only the Lord
thy God be with thee, as he was with Moses.” He preached from this text
in so politic a manner that no one could find a handle of accusation
against him. The exacting Northumberland came back to Cambridge after
a short tour in Suffolk, well aware that his enterprise was over, and
with the forlorn hope that, if he proclaimed Mary queen, he might win
his pardon. He invited Sandys to join in the proclamation with him, but
the Vice-Chancellor refused with an answer that must have been a very
cold comfort to Northumberland. The Duke, however, went through the
business mechanically at the old Market Cross, and was arrested very soon
afterwards at his lodgings in King’s. Sandys escaped to the Netherlands,
and returned when Elizabeth came to the throne. He is buried at
Southwell, where the archbishops of York had one of their palaces.
John Overall, Bishop of Lichfield, and afterwards of Norwich, another of
the translators of the Bible, was master from 1598 to 1607. The college
leaned throughout its history to the Puritanic side of the religious
question, and Richard Sibbes, master from 1626 to 1635, is one of
those strongly Puritan divines who had the advantage of an University
education. His evangelical theology, rich in quaint phrase and full of
ingenious learning, is still popular with serious readers, although his
fame has been somewhat overshadowed by the greater names of Bunyan,
Baxter, and John Owen. In spite of this spiritual activity, it appears
that the college was about this time in a very bad and ruinous state,
and, on the side of Trumpington Street, was excessively cramped for room.
During the mastership of John Hills, Sibbes’ predecessor, John Gostlin,
the eccentric master of Caius, gave the Bull Inn, which was his personal
property, to the college, and thus the society was enabled to enlarge
its frontiers. Nevertheless, the commotions of the Civil Wars delayed
operations until long after the Restoration, when Dr John Eachard, master
in 1675, carried out the longed-for improvements. There is no college
whose external appearance belies a medieval foundation more than St
Catharine’s.
Side by side with Sibbes we may reckon the famous Dissenting preacher,
Edmund Calamy, who was also a member of this college and was connected
with Sidney as well. But, after the Restoration and Eachard’s
improvements, St Catharine’s settled down again to its episcopal
traditions. Sir William Dawes, Eachard’s successor from 1697 to 1714, was
a worthy but in no way remarkable Archbishop of York. During his time,
however, the society received a famous member in the militant Benjamin
Hoadly,* Bishop first of Bangor, then of Hereford, then of Salisbury,
and lastly of Winchester. It is curious that Hoadly, the typical
Latitudinarian, as the ugly phrase goes, of his age, and his opponent,
the no less typical High Churchman, William Law, were members of the two
Cambridge colleges which had shown most activity on the Puritan side, St
Catharine’s and Emmanuel. Hoadly’s book, _On the Nature of the Kingdom
and Church of Christ_, is his chief claim to celebrity, as the doctrines
which it advocated gave rise to the Bangorian Controversy and were the
cause of many polemical treatises which have a distinct literary rank.
Other members of St Catharine’s about the end of the seventeenth century
were Dr John Lightfoot,* master from 1650 to 1675, illustrious as an
Orientalist; John Strype, the ecclesiastical antiquarian, who died in
1737 at the advanced age of ninety-four; and John Ray,* the naturalist,
who died in 1705. In 1704, during Dawes’ mastership, the chapel was
consecrated by Bishop Simon Patrick of Ely, who was a member of Queens’
College. In 1714, Dawes was succeeded by Thomas Sherlock,* whose
oratorical powers gained him the Bishoprick of London. His sermons,
which are specimens of a cold and stilted kind of eloquence, are read
no longer, but his name survives as that of one of the great preachers
of the last century. His successors down to the end of the century
have not much interest outside the college. The long mastership of Dr
Procter* covers almost the first half of the nineteenth century. During
his time, the versatile Dr Turton* was fellow of the college and held
various professorships. He became Dean of Westminster and eventually
Bishop of Ely, where he continued till within comparatively recent
years. He is perhaps best remembered as the composer of one of the most
beautiful hymn-tunes which we possess—the tune called by him “Ely.” The
college produced yet another bishop in Dr Procter’s successor, Henry
Philpott, who was made Bishop of Worcester in 1861. He was succeeded by
the present master, Dr Robinson. The mastership of St Catharine’s is
one of those pleasant posts, which, like Pembroke College at Oxford,
have a canonry attached to them. The canonry belonging to St Catharine’s
is at Norwich, the pleasantest of all English cathedral cities, and,
during the long vacation, the master fulfils his term of residence in
the Norwich close. Among recent distinguished members of St Catharine’s
we may mention Dr George Forrest Browne, late Disney Professor of
Archæology, who succeeded Dean Gregory as Canon of St Paul’s, and was, in
1897, translated from the suffragan Bishoprick of Stepney to the revived
Bishoprick of Bristol.
XII
JESUS COLLEGE
[Illustration: Jesus College]
Bishop Alcock’s gate-tower, a few years earlier than those of Christ’s
and St John’s, and almost contemporary with that of Queens’, forms a
charming prelude to this beautiful college. Its stepped battlements are
original, and its plan is more domestic than those of the other towers,
which have a very monastic appearance. The founder’s coat-of-arms, the
three cocks which the college has ever since borne as its cognisance,
appear on various parts of the tower and in the roof of the gateway;
but the statue of Bishop Alcock and a good deal of the decoration are
new.[5] The tower is the entrance to the outer court of the college,
whose ivy-grown buildings date from 1641. They are very fair late Gothic
work and carefully follow Alcock’s tower in their general lines; they are
due to Richard Sterne (master, 1633-1644 and again in 1660), but they
were not actually finished until the beginning of George the First’s
reign. They occupy three sides of the court; the western side is open,
affording a good view of the towers in the centre of the town. From the
opposite side a low postern gateway (part of the original work) leads
into the inner court of the college, round which the public buildings
are situated. The Hall is on the north side; opposite it is the Master’s
Lodge and the nave of the chapel. The Library occupies the west side, and
the northern transept of the chapel the east side. This was originally
the cloister of the nunnery which was superseded by the college. The
cloisters which exist are subsequent to the founding of the college,
and for some time were shut in, like those at Wilton House. In the last
century, however, they were opened to the court, and now they are simply
of the ordinary covered type, without any wall of partition. A few years
ago, while repairs were being carried on in the eastern wall of these
cloisters, just north of the transept-end of the chapel, a beautiful
triple arch of the Early English period was laid open, and may now be
examined. This was probably the entrance to the nuns’ chapter-house. It
is a very unique and delicate piece of work, dating probably from about
1240, and compares very well with the excellent work of that period to be
found in Cambridgeshire.