Religion at Cambridge.
There are no ‘high Church’ centres among the colleges, and there is no ‘broad Church’ movement among the undergraduates. The ‘broad Church’ movement is among the younger donsand in connexion with the University Settlement. There are nonconformists in every college, but the reunion with Christendom which begins at home finds no advocates among other university men. As usual there is at Cambridge no particular ‘school’ of religious thought. There is however just now a decided religious movement among the undergraduates, almost exclusively connected with the ‘high Church’ parish of S. Giles. The majority of the men make little religious profession, but there is no violent reaction such as agitated Oxford in the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ and the yearly increasing number of scientific students inclines to a pantheistic rather than a materialistic standpoint.
Cambridge politics.
The undergraduate population is decidedly conservative, as the university has always been. At the present moment both sides of the fiscal controversy are represented, the distinguished Cambridge economist Dr. Cunningham advocating tariff reform, while the Professor of Political Economy is a free-trader.
The university settlement in Camberwell.
The “slumming” movement made an early appeal to the younger members of the university. Their present work in south London was begun over twenty years ago, and “Cambridge House” has existed for ten years in a district which has been called “the largest area of unbroken poverty in any European city.” The workers are all laymen, 11 out of the 17 colleges being represented by resident Cambridge men, while an undergraduatesecretary in every college assists in furthering the movement.
Married dons.
We saw at the beginning of this chapter that the aspect of the university had changed with the marriage of fellows, tutors, and officials; and in time this factor must greatly modify the conditions of life at our universities. Both of these are now overrun with children’s schools, and there can be little doubt that all the boys (and many of the girls) will go to college. The natural profession for many of these, owing to the father’s influence with his college and the son’s inherited inclinations, will be academic. It would certainly not be to the advantage of our seats of learning if they became in this sense close corporations. It is obvious that this would mean less movement of ideas and less opportunity for the outside world to affect the university; and if a large number not only of the teachers but of the scholars belonged to such a caste as this, if the profession of teaching were handed down from father to son, the situation would not be unlike that which threatened Europe when Gregory VII. interposed and made the Christian world his executor in enforcing clerical celibacy. A new tuitional field would be open to the young graduate in the numerous schools of Cambridge and Oxford, but this would only accentuate the vicious circle of an education which might come to suggest the ecclesiastical seminary rather than the English university. Perhaps, too, a young man loses more than half the social and worldly advantages of a college life if when
DITTON CORNER, ON THE CAM From this spot the boat races are viewed. Behind the elms is the village of Ditton, and the building we see is Ditton Church.DITTON CORNER, ON THE CAMFrom this spot the boat races are viewed. Behind the elms is the village of Ditton, and the building we see is Ditton Church.
he “goes up to the university” he does not change his habitat.
The married fellow cannot begin life again elsewhere after the 5 or 10 years’ teaching at his college which used to precede his departure for a benefice: the old bachelor, if he stayed on, no longer taught, and new men took his place in the lecture room. But now a fellow cannot renounce the lecture room, for he and his family cannot live on the fellowship. Lecturers are therefore often men past the prime of life, and moreover men who no longer live in daily contact with the undergraduate. New blood comes in seldom, and percolates slowly. On the other hand valuable men stay who would under the old system have left. The influx of the “monstrous regiment” will not however, one hopes, diminish an advantage at present possessed by the seniors at our centres of learning—a general equality of fortune which frees university society from the laborious vulgarity that travails the soul elsewhere, from the general “ponderousness,” as someone has called it, of English life. At least Gray’s advice to Wharton not to bring his wife to Cambridge would now be quite out of place; the “few” women are no longer “squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves or other people,” and the men are no longer “not over agreeable neither.”
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.)
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.)
WHATpart 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 tothem 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 awanderjahrin 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:—
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 beenfacile 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.
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 BenJonson 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 graduatedM.A.Lodge after leaving Oxford went to Avignon, took hisM.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
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.THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM—EVENINGIn 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 beenalumniof 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
A.D.1658-78.
Marvell’s newsletters to his constituents at Hull were among the earliest attempts at parliamentary reporting.
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 Cambridgealumni: 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 ofEngland, 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.
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.
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
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
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 importantcolleges; 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.
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 influenceamong 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.
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
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
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 amidstthe growing Puritanism of the university. A royalist
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]
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 thePresbyterian 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.
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 theM.A.degree on a Catholic.
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 tosurpass the splendid resistance of Magdalen College to tyranny, during which it was twice depleted of its
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 loosemotu propriocould 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.
A.D.1689.
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 ofGloucester, 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.
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
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
A.D.1714.A.D.1715.
Jacobitism nor the new high churchism. A newvice-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?Thatlearnedbody wantedloyalty.To th’ other books he gave, as well discerningHow much thatloyalbody wantedlearning.
(Sir Wm. Brownefor Cambridge) The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse:For Tories own noargumentbutforce.With equal care to Cambridge books he sent:For Whigs allow noforcebutargument.
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, andopposed 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
A.D.1807-34.
abolished slavery itself in 1834.
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
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.
The Reformation.
But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement passed from Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as we haveseen, 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.
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.UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF GREAT ST. MARYThe 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.
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 tothe 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.
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.
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
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 beenRoy, 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 revisionof 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]