Part 3

The Statutes of New College are elaborate, and were largely copied by other founders. They present to us a half-monastic life, with the general hue of asceticism which pervades everything mediæval. Here, as in the case of Merton, there are no vows, but there is strict discipline, with frugal fare. The Commons, or allowances for food, are not to exceed twelve pence per week, except in the times of dearth. Once a year there is an allowance of cloth for a gown. There is a chest for loans to the very needy, but there is no stipend. The Warden rules with abbatial power, though in greater matters he requires the consent of the Fellows, and is himself under the censorship of the Visitor, the Bishop of Winchester, who, however, rarely interposed. Every year he goes on "progress" to view the College estates, there being in those days no agents, and is received by tenants with homage and rural hospitality. The Fellows and Scholars are lodged three or four in a room, the seniors as monitors to the juniors. Each Scholar undergoes two years of probation. As in a baronial hall the nobles, so in the College Hall the seniors, occupy the dais, or high table, while the juniors sit at tables arranged down the Hall. In the dining-hall the Fellows and Scholars sit in silence, and listen to the reading of the Bible. In speaking they must use no tongue but the Latin. There is to be no lingering in the Hall after dinner, except when in winter a fire is lighted on some church festival. Then it is permitted to remain awhile and rehearse poems, or talk about the chronicles of the kingdom, the wonders of the world, and other things befitting clerical discourse. This seems to be the principal concession made to the youthful love of amusement. As a rule, it appears that the students were confined to the College and its cloisters when they were not attending the Schools of the University. They are forbidden to keep hounds or hawks, as well as to throw stones or indulge in any rough or noisy sports. The injunctions against spilling wine and slops in the upper rooms, or beer on the floor of the Hall, to the annoyance of those who lodged beneath, betoken a rough style of living and rude manners. The admission of strangers is jealously restricted, and on no account must a woman enter the College, except a laundress, who must be of safe age. There were daily prayers for the Founder's soul, daily masses, and fifty times each day every member of the College was to repeat the salutation to the Virgin. The Founder's obit was to be celebrated with special pomp. Self-love in a mediæval ascetic was not annihilated by humility, though it took a religious form. Thrice every year are held scrutinies into life and conduct, at which the hateful practice of secret denunciation is admitted, and the accused is forbidden to call for the name of his accuser. Every cloistered society, whether monastic or academic, is pretty sure to seethe with cabals, suspicions, and slanders. Leave of absence from the College was by statute very sparingly allowed, and seldom could the young Scholar pay what, in the days before the letter post, must have been angel's visits to the old people on the paternal homestead. The ecclesiastical and ascetic system of the Middle Ages had little regard for domestic affection. It treated the boy as entirely a child of the Church. In times of pestilence, then common, the inmates of the Colleges usually went to some farm or grange belonging to the College in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and those were probably pleasant days for the younger members. Oaths of fearful length and stringency were taken to the observation of the statutes. They proved sad traps for conscience when the statutes had become obsolete, a contingency of which the Founders, ignorant of progress and evolution, never dreamed.

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In the interval between the foundation of New College and the revolution, religious and intellectual, which we call the Reformation, were founded Lincoln, All Souls', Magdalen, and Brasenose. Lincoln, All Souls', and Brasenose lie immediately round us, close to what was the centre of academical life. Magdalen we recognise in the distance by the most beautiful of towers. Lincoln was theological, and was peculiar in being connected with two of the Churches of Oxford, which its members served, and the tithes and oblations of which formed its endowment. Its Founder, Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, had as a graduate resident at Oxford been noted for sympathy with the Wycliffites. But when he became Bishop of Lincoln, the fact dawned upon him that the Scriptures too freely interpreted were dangerous. He went over to the Reaction, burned Wycliffe's body, and determined to found a little college of true students in theology, who would "defend the mysteries of the sacred page against those ignorant laics who profaned with swinish snouts its most holy pearls." His successor, Bishop Rotherham, being of the same mind, carried forward the work, and gave the College statutes enjoining the expulsion of any Fellow convicted of favouring in public or in private heretical tenets, and in particular the tenets of "that heretical sect lately sprung up which assails the sacraments, diverse orders and dignities, and properties of the Church." Rotherham had evidently a keen and just sense of the fact, that with the talismanic sacraments of the Church were bound up its dignity and wealth. The two orthodox prelates would have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that their little College of true theologians would one day number among its Fellows John Wesley, and that Methodism would be cradled within its walls. They would not less have stood aghast if they could have foreseen that such a chief of Liberals as Mark Pattison, would one day be its Rector. The history of these foundations is full of lessons for benefactors who fancy that they can impress their will upon posterity.

All Souls' was designed by its Founder, Archbishop Chicheley, _ad orandum_ as well as _ad studendum_; it was to serve the purpose of a chantry not less than of a College. The sculptured group of souls over the gateway in High Street denotes that the Warden and Fellows were to pray for the souls of all Christian people. But particularly were they to pray for the souls of "the illustrious Prince Henry, late King of England, of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and of all the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, and others who fell in the war for the Crown of France." Of that unhappy war Chicheley had been the adviser; and seeing the wreck which his folly, or, if the suspicion immortalised by Shakespeare is true, his selfish policy, as the head of a bloated Establishment threatened with depletion, had wrought, he may well have felt the sting of conscience in his old age. The figures in the new reredos of the Chapel tell the story of the foundation.

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Magdalen was the work of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of Henry VI., another statesman-prelate who turned from the political storm to found a house of learning. Of all the houses of learning in England, perhaps of any country, that which Waynflete founded is the loveliest, as he will say who stands in its cloistered and ivy-mantled quadrangle, either beneath the light of the summer's sun or that of the winter's moon. Some American architect, captivated by the graces of Magdalen, has reproduced them in his plan for a new University in California. Those courts, when newly built, were darkened by the presence of Richard III. Waynflete came to Oxford to receive the king; and this homage, paid by a saintly man, seems to show that in those fierce times of dynastic change, Richard, before the murder of his nephews, was not regarded as a criminal usurper, perhaps not as a usurper at all. The tyrant was intellectual. In him, as still more notably in Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, nicknamed for his cruelty the Butcher, but literary and a benefactor to the University, was something like an English counterpart of the mixture in the Italian Renaissance of culture with licentiousness and crime. But as he sat beside Waynflete in the Hall wooing popularity by apparent attention to the exercises, Richard's thoughts probably were far away. A red rose among the architectural ornaments is found to have been afterwards painted white. It changed, no doubt, with fortune, when she left the red for the white rose. A new relation between College and University is inaugurated by the institution at Magdalen of three Readers to lecture to the University at large.

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The old quadrangle of Brasenose remains much as it was left by its co-founders, a munificent Bishop and a pious Knight. It is of no special historic interest, and its importance belongs to later times. It absorbed several Halls, the sign of one of which was probably the brazen nose which now adorns its gate, and so far it marks an epoch.

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The quiet and sombre old quadrangle of Corpus Christi lies yonder, by the side of Merton, much as its Founder left it. Now we have come to the real dawn of the English Renaissance, a gray dawn which never became a very bright day; for in England, as in Germany and other Teutonic countries, reawakened and emancipated intellect turned to the pursuit of truth rather than of beauty, and the great movement was less a birth of literature and of art than of reformation in religion. This is the age of Grocyn, the teacher of Greek; of Linacre, the English Hippocrates; of Colet, the regenerator of education; of Sir Thomas More, who carried culture to the Chancellorship of the realm, and whose "Utopia" proclaims the growth of fresh aspirations and the opening of a new era in one way, as Rabelais did in another. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle of Henry VI., had perhaps opened the epoch at Oxford by his princely gift of books, in which the Renaissance literature was strongly represented, and which was the germ of the University Library. Soon Erasmus will visit Oxford and chant in elegant Latin the praises of the classical and cultured circle which he finds there. Now rages the war between the humanists of the new classical learning, called the Greeks, and its opponents, the Trojans, who desired to walk in the ancient paths, and who, though bigoted and grotesque, were, after all, not far wrong in identifying heresy with Greek, since the study of the New Testament in the original was subversive of the mediæval faith. Again, as in the cases of Merton, Wykeham, and Waynflete, a statesman-prelate turns in old age from the distractions of State to found a house of learning. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, was the chief counsellor and diplomatist of Henry VII., in whose service he had no doubt passed anxious hours and trodden dark paths. It may have been partly for the good of his soul that he proposed to found a house in Oxford for the reception of young monks from St. Swithin's Priory in Winchester while studying in Oxford. He was diverted from that design, and persuaded to found a College instead, by his friend Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, who is represented as saying, "What, my Lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a company of bussing 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 and for such as by their learning shall do good in the Church and Commonwealth." Supposing the prognostication embodied in these words genuine, they show that to an enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable. The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional, tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the mediæval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in imagination did he see his literary bees at work.

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Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which, "swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St. Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and filled with those portraits of _Alumni_, which, notwithstanding the frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X. in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where the portrait of the Cardinal should be. The Cardinal's hat, on the outer wall of the house, is left to speak of the true Founder. That the College was to be called after its Founder's name, not, like the Colleges of Wykeham and Waynflete, after the name of a Saint, seems a symptom of the pride which went before Wolsey's fall.

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Now come upon the hapless University forty years of religious revolution, the monuments of which are traces of destruction and records of proscription. All the monastic houses and houses for monastic novices were forfeited to the Crown, and their buildings were left desolate, though, from the ruins of some of them, new Colleges were afterwards to rise. Libraries which would now be priceless, were sacked and destroyed because the illumination on the manuscripts was Popish. It was the least to be deplored of all the havoc, that the torn leaves of the arid tomes of Duns Scotus were seen flying about the quadrangle of New College, while a sporting gentleman of the neighbourhood was picking them up to be used in driving the deer. There is a comic monument of the religious revolution in the coffer shrine at Christ Church, in which the dust of Catherine, wife of the Protestant Doctor, Peter Martyr, is mingled with that of the Catholic Saint, Frydeswide. Catholicism, in its hour of triumph under Mary, had dug up the corpse of the heretic's concubine and buried it under a dung-hill. Protestantism, once more victorious, rescued the remains, and guarded against a repetition of the outrage, in case fortune should again change, by mingling them with those of the Catholic Saint. A more tragic memorial of the conflict is yonder recumbent cross in Broad Street, close to the spot, then a portion of the town ditch, where Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley died. Bocardo, the prison over the neighbouring gate of the city, from the window of which Cranmer, then confined there, witnessed the burning of Latimer and Ridley, was pulled down at the beginning of this century. The Divinity School, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. Mary's Church witnessed different scenes of the drama. St. Mary's witnessed that last scene, in which Cranmer filled his enemies with fury and confusion by suddenly recanting his recantation, and declaring that the hand which had signed it should burn first. College archives record the expulsion, readmission, and re-expulsion of Heads and Fellows, as victory inclined to the Protestant or Catholic side. So perished the English Renaissance. For the cultivation of the humanities there could be no room in a centre of religious strife.

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Fatal bequests of the religious war were the religious tests. Leicester, as Chancellor, introduced subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles to keep out Romanists; King James, that to the three articles of the Thirty-sixth Canon to keep out Puritans. These tests, involving scores of controverted propositions in theology, were imposed on the consciences of mere boys. The Universities were thus taken from the nation and given to the State Church, which, in the course of time, as dissent from its doctrines gained ground, came to be far from identical with the nation.

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In the first lull, however, new Colleges arose, partly out of the ruins of the monastic houses of the past. Trinity College, of which the quiet old quadrangle is curiously mated with a fantastic Chapel of much later date, was founded out of the ruin of Durham College, a Benedictine House. Its Founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was one of that group of highly educated lay statesmen, eminent both in the councils of kings and among the patrons of learning, which succeeded the great Prelates of the Middle Ages. He was a Catholic, as his statutes show; but a liberal Catholic, not unfriendly to light, though little knowing perhaps whither it would lead him. Among his friends was Sir Nicholas Bacon, who bequeathed to him the splendid whistle, then used to call servants, which is seen round his neck in his portrait. Another of his friends was Pole, who showed his intellectual liberality by recommending him to enjoin in his statutes the study of Greek. St. John's College, again, rose out of the wreck of a Bernardine House. The Founder was not a statesman or a prelate, but a great citizen, Sir Thomas White, sometime Lord Mayor of London, who had amassed wealth in trade, and made a noble use of it. White also was of the olden faith. That the storm was not over when his College was founded is tragically shown by the fate of Campion, who, when White was laid in the College Chapel, preached the funeral sermon, and afterwards becoming a Jesuit and an emissary of his Order, was brought to the rack and to the scaffold. There was also a great secession of Fellows when the final rupture took place between Rome and Elizabeth. In the group of cultivated Knights and statesmen, who patronised learning and education, may be placed Sir William Petre, the second Founder of Exeter College, whose monument is its old quadrangle, and Sir Thomas Bodley, whose monument is the Bodleian Library. If Petre and Bodley were Protestants, while Pope and White were Catholics, the difference was rather political than religious. In religion the public men changed with the national government, little sharing the passions of either theological party.

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Jesus, whose old quadrangle, chapel, and hall belong to early Stuart times, was the first distinctly Protestant College. This its name, in contrast with Colleges named after Saints, denotes. The second Protestant College was Wadham, the buildings of which stand in their pristine beauty, vying with Magdalen, perhaps even excelling it in the special air of a house of learning, and proving that to be interesting and impressive it is not necessary to be mediæval. At the same time Wadham shows how long the spirit of the Middle Ages clung to Oxford; for the style of the Chapel is anterior by a century and a half to the date. Here we have a conscious desire, on the part of the architect, to recall the past. The Founder, Sir Nicholas Wadham, was a wealthy Western land-owner. We may dismiss the tradition that his first design was to found a College of Roman Catholic priests in Italy, and his second to found a Protestant College at Oxford, as at most significant of the prolonged wavering of the religious balance in the minds of a number of the wealthier class. The statutes were, in the main, like those of the mediæval Colleges, saving in making the Fellowship terminable after about twenty-two years, thus more clearly designating the College as a school for active life. The prohibition of marriage was retained, not as an ascetic ordinance, but as a concomitant of the College system. In the mediæval Colleges it was not necessary to extend the prohibition to the Heads, who, being priests, were bound to celibacy by the regulations of their Order; but marriage being now permitted to the clergy generally, the prohibition was in the statutes of Wadham expressly extended, in the interest of the College system, to the Head. Hence it is an aspersion on the reputation of Dame Dorothy Wadham, who, after her husband's death, carried out his design, and whose effigy kneels opposite that of her loving lord in the old quadrangle, to say that she was in love with the first Warden, and because he would not marry her, forbade him by statute to marry any other woman.

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