CHAPTER VIITHE OXFORD MARTYRS

“Where your poor orators have always had received and enjoyed by the means of your Colleges founded by your grace’s most noble progenitor’s singular treasure, help & commodity for the education of their sons, and especially the more part of us being not otherwise able to bring up our children in good learning and to find them at grammar.... There be in danger to be cast out of some college thirty, some other forty or fifty, some other more or fewer, & the most part of them children of your poor orators, having of the said college meat, drink, cloth & lodging & were verie well brought up in learning in the common grammar scoole at the College of S. Marie Magdalen, & so went forward & attained to logicke & other faculties at the charges of the said College & likewise of other houses and little or nothing at the charge of their parents, after their admission into any of the said colleges, wh. thing hath always heretofore been a great succour unto your said poor orators.”

The petition was successful, though some schools were suppressed.

Magdalen College School, thus preserved, was intended by the

The Grammar Hall Magdalen CollegeThe Grammar Hall Magdalen College

founder to be to Magdalen what Winchester was to New College. It had been housed in his life-time in a building (1480), a picturesque fragment of which yet remains, in what is known as the Grammar Hall. The Grammar School buildings stood outside the west gate of the college, on the ground between the modern S. Swithun’s buildings and the present “Grammar Hall,” which belonged in part to this school building and in part (including the south portion and the little bell-tower) to other buildings that were added to it (1614). All these buildings, save the fragment that remains to be used as undergraduates’ rooms, were removed in 1845 together with the houses that faced the gravel walk between them and Long Wall. The present school-room, facing the High, was erected shortly afterwards (Buckler), in the Perpendicular style, and recently (1894), across the bridge, on the site once occupied by Turrel’s Hall, a handsome house for the master and fifty boarders has been built (Sir Arthur Blomfield). At the same time the ground by the river below the bridge was converted into gardens and a cricket ground for the choristers and schoolboys, a conversion which has greatly improved the aspect of the bridge.

THE sufferings of the Protestants had failed to teach them the value of religious liberty. The use of the new liturgy was enforced by imprisonment, and the subscription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by royal authority from all the clergy and schoolmasters. The excesses of the Protestants led to a temporary but violent reaction.

The married priests were driven from their churches; the images were replaced, the new prayer book was set aside, the mass restored. Ridley and the others who had displaced the deposed bishops were expelled; Latimer and Cranmer were sent to the Tower. After the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion and the defeat of the Protestants, Mary set herself to enforce the submission of England to the Pope.

With the restoration of the system of Henry VIII. the country was satisfied. But Mary was not content to stop there.

The statutes against heretics were revived. The bigotry of Mary knew no restraint. She ferreted out Protestants all over the country, and for three and a half years England experienced a persecution which was insignificant if judged by continental standards, but which has left an indelible impression on the minds of men. Nearly three hundred Protestants were burnt at the stake, and among them Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer—all Cambridge men—at Oxford.

The accession of Mary had caused much dismay in the hearts ofthe Protestants in that city. The Queen’s proclamation as to religion on 18th August 1553, was followed two days after by letters to the Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge enjoining the full observance of the ancient statutes. A special letter from the Queen was sent to Magdalen annulling the ordinances made contrary to the statutes since the death of Henry VIII. Prudent Protestants who had made themselves prominent in their colleges now wisely took leave of absence from Oxford. Peter Martyr left the country; and his place was soon afterwards taken by a Spanish friar from the court of Philip and Mary. Commissioners arrived, and were shocked to find that at Magdalen, for example, there was no priest to say mass, and no fellow who would hear it; there was no boy to respond, no altar and no vestments. Visitors were sent by Stephen Gardiner to New College, Magdalen and C.C.C. Many fellows were ejected, and mass was restored.

The work of death had now begun. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from the Tower in March and placed in the custody of the mayor and bailiffs of Oxford. For preparations had been made to examine them before a commission appointed from both the Universities. They were lodged at first in Bocardo, the town prison, now become, as Ridley observed, “a very College of Quondams.” Shortly afterwards Ridley was removed to the house of an alderman, and Latimer elsewhere, in order that they might not confer together. Presently

“a solemn Convocation was held in S. Mary’s Chancel concerning the business forthwith to be taken in hand; which being concluded all the Doctors and Masters went in a solemn procession to Carfax and thence to Christ Church, where they heard Divine service, and so they went to dinner;[33]afterwards they with some others, in number thirty-three, thatwere to dispute with the Bishops, met in Our Lady’s Chapel on the North side of S. Mary’s Church, and thence going into the Chancel, placed themselves in a semi-circle by the High Altar.”

To support the platform where they sat the finials of the stalls are said to have been then levelled. “Soon after was brought in Cranmer (with a great number of rusty billmen), then Ridley, and last of all Latimer, to subscribe to certain articles then proposed. They all denied them.”

On Monday, the 16th April, the Vice-Chancellor and proctors met at Exeter College and thence went to the Divinity School, there to dispute with the bishops on the nature of the Eucharist. The Oxford and Cambridge doctors took their places, and the Moderator of the schools presided in his lofty chair. Cranmer was brought in and set opposite to the latter in the respondent’s place. By his side was the mayor of the city, in whose charge he was. Next day it was Ridley’s turn, and on the third Latimer’s. So the solemn farce of the disputations, punctuated by “opprobrious checks and reviling taunts,” was gone through; the bishops were pronounced no members of the Church, Cranmer was returned to Bocardo, Ridley taken to the sheriff’s house and Latimer to the bailiff’s. The judicial sentence followed the academical judgment.

In September 1555 a commission was sent down from London, and sat in the Divinity School. The two bishops had looked death steadily in the face for two years, expecting it every day or hour. It was now come. Ridley was urged to recant, but this he firmly refused to do or to acknowledge by word or gesture “the usurped supremacy of Rome.” His cap, which he refused to remove at the mention of the Cardinals and the Pope, was forcibly taken off by a beadle. Latimer when examined was equally firm. He appeared

“with a kerchief on his head and upon it a night cap or two and a great cap such as townsmen use, with two broad flaps to button under the chin, wearing an old threadbare Bristol frieze gown, girded to his body with a penny leather girdle, at the which hanged by a long string of leather hisTestament and his spectacles without a case, depending about his neck upon his breast.”

Bread was bread, the aged bishop boldly declared when asked for his views on transubstantiation, and wine was wine; there was a change in the Sacrament it was true, but the change was not in the nature but the dignity.

The two Protestants were reprieved for the day and summoned to appear next morning at eight o’clock in S. Mary’s Church. There, after further examination, the sentence of condemnation was pronounced upon them as heretics obstinate and incurable. And on 16th October the sentence was fulfilled.

Ridley and Latimer were led out to be burnt, whilst Cranmer, whose execution had been delayed, since it required the sanction of Rome, remained in Bocardo, and ascending to the top of the prison house, or, as an old print represents it, to the top of S. Michael’s Tower, kneeled down and prayed to God to strengthen them.

On the evening of the 15th there had been a supper at the house of Irish, the mayor, whose wife was a bigoted and fanatical Catholic. Ridley, as we have seen, was in their charge, and the members of his family were permitted to be present. He talked cheerfully of his approaching “marriage”; his brother-in-law promised to be in attendance and, if possible, to bring with him his wife, Ridley’s sister. Even the hard eyes of Mrs Irish softened to tears as she listened and thought of what was coming. The brother-in-law offered to sit up through the night, but Ridley said there was no occasion; he “minded to go to bed and sleep as quietly as ever he did in his life.” In the morning he wrote a letter to the Queen. As Bishop of London he had granted renewals of certain leases on which he had received fines. Bonnor had refused to recognise them; and he entreated the Queen, for Christ’s sake, either that the leases should be allowed, or that some portion of his own confiscated property might be applied to the repayment of thetenants. The letter was long; by the time it was finished the sheriff’s officers were probably in readiness.

Bocardo, the prison over the North Gate, spanned the road from the ancient tower of S. Michael’s, and commanded the approach to Broad Street. Thither, to a place over against Balliol College, “those special and singular captains and principal pillars of Christ’s church” were now led. The frontage of Balliol was then much further back than it is now; beyond it lay open country, before it, under the town wall, ran the water of the tower-ditch. Some years ago a stake with ashes round it was found on the site which is marked by a metal cross in the roadway, at the foot of the first electric lamp, as the site of the martyrs’ death.[34]To this spot then came the two bishops.

Lord Williams of Thame was on the spot by the Queen’s order; and the city guard was under arms to prevent disturbance. Ridley appeared first. He wore

“a fair black gown furred and faced with foins, such as he was wont to wear being Bishop, and a tippet of velvet furs likewise about his neck, a velvet nightcap upon his head and a corner cap upon the same, going in a pair of slippers to the stake.”

He walked between the mayor and aldermen, and Master Latimer followed him in the same shabby attire as that which he had worn on the occasion of his examination. As they passed towards Bocardo they looked up in the hope of seeing Cranmer at the little glass window. It was from this window[35]that the Bocardo

South View of Bocardo Herbert RailtonSouth View of Bocardo Herbert Railton

prisoners used to let down an old hat and cry, “Pity the Bocardo Birds.” For prisoners in those days depended for their daily sustenance on the charity of strangers, even as the prisoners in Portugal or Morocco do to-day, and “Bread and meat for the prisoners” was a well-known cry in the London streets. The Parisian version was, “Aux prisonniers du Palais.” Cranmer’s attention at this moment was engrossed by a Spanish friar, who was busy improving the occasion, and the martyr could not see him. But Ridley spied Latimer hobbling after him. “Oh, be ye there?” he exclaimed. “Yea,” answered the old man. “Have after as fast as I can follow!” When he reached the stake Ridley ran to Latimer, “and with a wondrous cheerful look embraced and kissed him” and comforted him, saying, “Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” With that he went to the stake, kneeled down by it, kissed it and effectually prayed, and behind him Master Latimer kneeled, as earnestly calling upon God as he.

The martyrs had now to listen to a sermon from Dr Smith, who denounced them as heretics, and exhorted them to recant. The Lord Williams of Thame, the Vice-Chancellor and other commissioners sat upon a form close at hand. The martyrs asked leave of them to reply, but the bailiffs and the Vice-Chancellor ran up to Ridley and stopped his mouth with their hands. The martyrs now commended their souls and their cause to God, and stripped themselves for the stake, Ridley giving away to the eager crowd his garments, dials, napkins and nutmegs, whilst some plucked the points off his hose; “happy was he that might get any rag of him.” They were chained to the stakes, and gunpowder was hung about their necks, thanks to the humane care of Ridley’s brother-in-law. Then men brought a faggot kindled with fire, and laid the same down at Dr Ridley’s feet, to whom Master Latimer spake in this manner:

‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall thisday light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

Then Latimer crying aloud, “O Father of Heaven, receive my soul,” bathed his hands in the flame that blazed up about him, and stroked his face. The powder exploded, and he “soon died with very little pain or none.” Ridley was less fortunate, for the fire being lit beneath and the faggots heaped above, the flames burnt his legs slowly away, and did not ignite the gunpowder round his neck. Amid cries to heaven of “Lord, Lord, receive my soul,” and “Lord have mercy upon me,” he screamed in his agony to the bystanders to let the fire come unto him. His brother-in-law with awkward kindness threw on more wood, which only kept down the flame. It was not till the lower part of his body had been burned away that he fell over, “and when the flame touched the gunpowder he was seen to stir no more.”

The lot of Cranmer was still more pathetic, and made a yet deeper impression upon the popular mind. He, like the others, had been examined in S. Mary’s (7th September 1555). He had appeared, clad in a fair black gown with his hood on his shoulders, such as Doctors of Divinity used to wear, and in his hand was a white staff. The aged Archbishop confronted there the Pope’s Legate, who sat on a raised dais ten feet high, with cloth of state, very richly and sumptuously adorned, at the east end of the church. Summoned to answer to a charge of blasphemy, incontinency and heresy, he refused as firmly as the others to recognise the authority of the Bishop of Rome within this kingdom.

“I protest,” he said, “I am no traitor. I have made an oath to the King and I must obey the King by God’s law. By the Scripture the King is chief and no foreign person in his own realm above him. The Pope is contrary to the Crown. I cannot obey both, for no man can serve two masters at once. You attribute the keys to the Pope and the sword to the King. I say the King hath both.”

Before further proceedings were taken against the Archbishop,it was necessary to obtain sanction of the Pope. It was not till the middle of the following February that the Papal breve arrived and a new commission came down to Oxford. Sitting before the high altar in the choir of Christ Church, Thirlby and Bonnor announced that Cranmer had been tried at Rome, where, according to the preamble of the Papal sentence, he had been allowed every opportunity to answer for himself. “O Lord!” commented Cranmer, “what lies be these!” They were directed, the commissioners continued, to degrade him, excommunicate him and deliver him up to the secular power. The form of degradation was begun when Cranmer appealed to the next Free General Council. The appeal was refused; the degradation was continued. Cranmer was stripped of his vestments, his hair was shorn, the sacred unction scraped from his finger-tips, and he was then dressed in a poor yeoman-beadle’s gown, full bare and nearly worn, and handed over to the secular power.

“Now are you lord no longer!” cried Bonnor when the ceremony was finished. “All this needed not,” the Archbishop replied; “I myself had done with this gear long ago.”

Cranmer had been three years in prison; he was an old man, and his nerve may well have been upset by the prolonged delay and fear of death and the recent degradation which he had undergone. There is no authentic account of what happened to him during the next few hours. But Protestant tradition relates that he was taken from the Cathedral to the Deanery of Christ Church, where he was entertained at his ease and exposed to the arguments and exhortations of Soto, the Spanish friar. He was warned at the same time that the Queen’s mind was so set, that she would either have Cranmer a Catholic or else no Cranmer at all. He was taken back to his cell that night, and there his constancy at last gave way. He signed a series of recantations. But the Queen refused to relent; she had humiliated her enemy, and now he must die. She fixed the 25th of March for the day of his execution. But first he was called uponto make a public confession of his recantation. It was a foul and rainy day when he was brought out of Bocardo to S. Mary’s Church. Peers, knights, doctors, students, priests, men-at-arms and citizens thronged the narrow aisles, and through their midst passed the mayor and next the aldermen in their place and degree; after them came Cranmer between two Spanish friars, who, on entering the church, chanted theNunc Dimittis. A stage was set over against the pulpit—the ledge cut for it may still be seen in the pillar to the left of the Vice-Chancellor’s chair—and here Cranmer was made to stand in his bare and ragged gown, and old square cap, whilst Dr Cole, the Warden of New College, preached his funeral sermon, and justified the sentence that had been passed, by which, even though he had recanted, he was condemned to die.

Cole gave this reason and that, and added that there were others which had moved the Queen and Council “which were not meet and convenient for every one to understand.” He congratulated the Archbishop on his conversion, and promised him that a dirge should be sung for him in every church in Oxford. Finally, he called upon the whole congregation to kneel where they were and to pray for him. When the prayer was finished the preacher called upon the Archbishop to make the public confession of his faith. “Brethren,” cried he, “lest any man should doubt of this man’s earnest conversion and repentance, you shall hear him speak before you.” But the spirit of revenge had overreached itself. Cranmer’s enemies had hoped to humiliate him to the uttermost; instead, they gave him the opportunity of redeeming his fame and adding his name to the roll of martyrs.

“The tongues of dying menEnforce attention, like deep harmony....More are men’s ends marked than their lives before.”

To the astonishment of friends and foes alike, Cranmer stood up before the congregation, and chanted the palinode of his forsworn opinions; he recanted his recantation. Face to face with that cruel

The President’s Lodge Trinity CollegeThe President’s Lodge Trinity College

death, which in his weakness he had so desperately striven to avoid, he made the declaration of his true belief. “And now I come,” he concluded,

“to the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience, more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be;... And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. As for the Pope I utterly refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Anti-Christ, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester.”

So far he was allowed to proceed before, amidst the infuriated cries of his enemies, he was pulled down from the stage and borne away to the stake. “Priests who did rue to see him go so wickedly to his death, ran after him exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself.” But Cranmer had remembered himself at last. He had done with recantations at the bidding of Spanish priests and “bloody” Bonnor. He approached the stake with a cheerful countenance, we are told, undressed in haste and stood upright in his shirt. The Spanish friars finding they could do nothing with him, exclaimed the one to the other, “Let us go from him, for the devil is in him.” “Make short,” cried Lord Williams, and “Recant, recant,” cried others. The wood was kindled. “This was the hand that wrote it,” Cranmer said, extending his right arm, “therefore it shall suffer first punishment.” He held his hand so steadfast and immovable in the flame that all men might see it burned before his body was touched. And so holding it he never stirred nor cried till the fire reached him and he was dead.

A portrait of Cranmer hangs in the Bodleian. But the chief monument to the Protestant martyrs was raised in 1841. TheMartyrs’ Memorial in S. Giles’, opposite the west front of Balliol College, was happily designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in imitation of the beautiful crosses which Edward I. raised in memory of Queen Eleanor. The statues of the martyrs are by Weekes. The north aisle of the neighbouring Church of S. Mary Magdalene was restored at the same time in memory of the same event.

Cranmer had atoned for his inconstancy, and crowned the martyrdoms of the English Reformation. From that moment the cause of Catholic reaction was hopeless. Cranmer’s career had not been that of a saint or a martyr. He was a weak man with a legal rather than a religious cast of mind. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Others more constant to their belief, and more noble in character, had died at the stake. But the very weakness of the man and the pathos of the humiliation of one so highly placed, appealed to the crowd who could not rise to heights of unshaken constancy. More easily understood by the people than the triumphant cry of heroic sufferers like Latimer, the dramatic end of the Archbishop filled every independent mind with sympathetic dread. In vain did Mary heap rewards on the University. In vain did Cardinal Pole institute a fresh visitation, hunt all heretics from the University, burn in the common market-place all English Bibles and Protestant books that could be found. In vain did he revise the University and college statutes. His work was undone as soon as finished. The lesson of Cranmer’s death had gone home to a thousand hearts. England refused to be a province of Spain and of Rome. The news of Mary’s death was received in Oxford with the ringing of bells and other signs of discreet delight.

The Catholic Reaction is marked in Oxford history by the institution of two colleges, Trinity and S. John’s, both founded on the sites of old monastic houses by wealthy citizens of London who were lovers of the old order and adherents of the old religion. In 1555 Sir Thomas Pope, a faithful servant of the Tudors, who hadacquired large tracts of abbey lands in Oxfordshire, bought the site and vacant buildings of Durham College, which were then “mere dog-kennels,” and the half of the grove which had not been included in the grant of S. Bernard’s College to Christ Church. Here he founded the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, consisting of a president, twelve fellows and eight scholars. And in drawing up his statutes he availed himself of the advice both of Elizabeth and Cardinal Pole. The hall was completed in 1620. In 1665 the decay of the old Durham buildings made reconstruction imperative. Wren was the architect. He wished to build a long range in the upper part of the grove, but the quadrangular form was preferred; and he designed the garden quadrangle, a block in the Renaissance style which was spoilt by additions and alterations in 1802. The chapel (1691), which boasts some magnificent carving by Grinling Gibbons, is, in style, closely akin to the advanced palladian of Dean Aldrich’s Church of All Saints. He certainly made some suggestions for it, and so did Wren. The President’s house and New Buildings, by T. G. Jackson (1883), form, with the iron railings and old halls, including the old Perilous or Kettle Hall (1615), that face “the Broad,” a new and handsome quadrangle.

It was in 1555, also, that Sir Thomas White, a rich merchant tailor who had twice been Lord Mayor of London, chose the site of the suppressed College of S. Bernard for his foundation, being guided thereto, as tradition asserts, by a dream which warned him to build near a place where there was a triple elm having three trunks issuing from one root. Between his college and the Merchant Taylors’ School in London White established a connection similar to that between Winchester and New College. The treasure of ecclesiastical vestments preserved in the library, and the fact that Edmund Campion, the Jesuit poet and conspirator, after whom the new Jesuit Hall in Oxford is called, was the fellow chosen to preach the founder’s funeral sermon, indicate the Roman Catholic sympathies of the institution. Yet it was an alumnus of this college,William Laud, whose body was laid in the chapel (1530), and whose ghost, it is said, still haunts the library he built and the quadrangle which owes its completion (1635) to his munificence, who fixed the University in its sympathy with the High Church party of the Anglican Church. The classical colonnades and the charming garden front, wherein Inigo Jones combined the Oxford Gothic with the style which he had recently learned to love in Italy, form a fitting background to the most perfect of Oxford gardens (1750).

THE University had declined sadly under Mary. Affairs were not at first greatly improved when Elizabeth ascended the throne. “Two religions,” says Wood, “being now as it were on foot, divers of the chiefest of the University retired and absented themselves till they saw how affairs would proceed.” It was not long, however, before Queen Elizabeth appointed a body of Visitors to “make a mild and gentle, not rigorous reformation.” The Edwardine system was for the most part restored; the ejected fellows were brought back, whilst those who refused to comply with the new Act of Supremacy were expelled in their turn. Of these the largest number were New College men. The loss of these scholars did not improve the state of learning at Oxford. But in 1564 the Earl of Leicester became Chancellor, and it is in some part due to him that order was restored and a regular course of studies once more established.

Queen Elizabeth had been imprisoned at Woodstock during her sister’s reign, and some of the needlework which she did when she was there is preserved at the Bodleian. The University had dispatched a deputation to her, with a present of gloves and a congratulatory address upon her accession; she now (31st August 1566) paid to Oxford a long-promised visit.

She was welcomed by a deputation from the University at Godstow Bridge and at Bocardo by the civic authorities, who thereyielded up to her the city mace, and presented her with a gilt cup and forty pounds of gold. A Latin oration at the North Gate and a Greek oration at Carfax were delivered. The Queen thanked the orator in Greek, and was then escorted to Christ Church. For three days Disputations were held in the royal presence in S. Mary’s Church. Elizabeth was a good scholar, one remembers, taught by Roger Ascham, and she really seems to have enjoyed this learned function. On the last day, at any rate, so keen was the argument and the Queen’s interest in it, that the disputants “tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky,” so that the lights had to be lit in the church. At the end of the Disputations a Latin oration was delivered in praise of the Queen and her victories over the hosts of Spain and the Pope. “Tuis auspiciis,” the peroration ran, “Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi captivum.”

Loud cries of “Vivat Regina” resounded through the church. Elizabeth was pressed to reply. She pretended to hesitate, suggesting that the Spanish Ambassador, or Leicester, or Cecil should speak for her. The courtiers were wise enough to bow dissent. At length she rose, and her opening words contained a happy allusion to the growing darkness: “Qui male agit odit lucem”; “Dominus illuminatio mea,” she might have added.

Some relaxation was provided for Her Majesty in the shape of Latin and English plays which were acted in Christ Church Hall “upon a large scaffold erected, set about with stately lights of wax variously wrought.” The Latin play was entitled “Marcus Geminus and Progne”; the English play “Palamon and Arcite,” written by Mr Richard Edwards, and acted, we are told, with very great applause. “In the said play was acted a cry of hounds in the Quadrant upon the train of a fox in the hunting of Theseus, with which the young scholars who stood in the windows were so much taken, supposing it was real, that they cried out ‘Now, now. There, there. He’s caught! He’s caught!’ All which the Queenmerrily beholding said ‘O excellent! Those boys in very troth are ready to leap out of the window, to follow the hounds.’” The play, indeed, was considered to surpass “Damon and Pythias,” than which they thought nothing could be better.

The acting of plays of this kind and in this manner at the Universities as at the Inns of Law on occasions of high festivity throws considerable light on the development of the Elizabethan drama. The University Wits, as they were called, began at this period to lay the foundations of English fiction in their “Tales”; the early English drama received its classical tone and form from them also. For John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Lodge and others were Oxford men.

The Bohemian extravagance of the life of the “University Wits” in London will help us to understand why it was that Henry Savile, Warden of Merton (1586), the austere and accomplished scholar, could not abide wits. He preferred the plodding scholar, and used to say that if he wanted wits he would look for them in Newgate. Neither Wits nor their plays, which were often scurrilous enough, were acceptable to the Puritans, and within a few years both city and University began to restrict the performances of plays.

Queen Elizabeth bade farewell to Oxford on 6th September, and on that day the walls of S. Mary’s, All Souls’ and University were hung with innumerable copies of verses bemoaning her departure. By Magdalen College she took leave of the civic authorities; the University officials attended her to Shotover, and there, at the conclusion of a speech from the Provost of Oriel, “she gave him her hand to kiss, with many thanks to the whole University, speaking then these words, as ‘tis reported, with her face towards Oxford. ‘Farewell the worthy University of Oxford; Farewell my good subjects there; Farewell my dear scholars and pray God prosper your studies. Farewell. Farewell.’” No wonder she won universal homage by “her sweet, affable and noble carriage.”

The name of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, lover of Elizabeth, is inseparably connected with Oxford, not only by his chancellorship, but also by the fact that it is here that his ill-fated wife, Amy Robsart, is buried. She was found dead at the foot of the stairs in Cumnor Place. After the inquest her body was brought to Gloucester Hall, and lay there till it was buried with full heraldic ceremonial on 22nd September 1560 in the choir of S. Mary’s Church. The funeral sermon was preached by one of Dudley’s chaplains, who had just been transferred from the mastership of Balliol to the rectorship of Lincoln. He, fumbling for a phrase to express her violent death, “tripped once or twice by recommending to his auditors the virtues of that Lady, so pitifullymurdered.” But there is no evidence that Amy Robsart was murdered, with or without the connivance of Leicester. The story which Sir Walter Scott has used in “Kenilworth” is the baseless invention of political enemies. What happened to the unfortunate lady was either accident or suicide.

The influence of Leicester and the interest which as Chancellor he took in the University, is marked by various Acts which had an important effect upon the course of its development. In 1571 the Chancellor, masters and scholars received the right of perpetual succession, and were thus relieved of the necessity of obtaining a new charter from each succeeding king. In this year too an Act was passed, supplemented by further enactments in 1575, by which one-third part at least of the rents to be reserved in college leases is required to be payable in corn or in malt. The continual rise in prices which has resulted ever since from the increase, and therefore depreciation, of the precious metals, has thus only impoverished the colleges so far as rents were fixed in money, but corn having more or less kept its value, the one-third of the rents so wisely reserved came to exceed the remainder by far.

Leicester revived the practice of nominating the Vice-Chancellor, and by an Act of the University passed at his instigation (1569) a great step was taken in the direction of establishing the monopoly

The Chapel Quad Jesus CollegeThe Chapel Quad Jesus College

of the colleges in the government of the University. The preliminary deliberations of the Black Congregation, consisting of resident masters, were henceforth to be conducted by the Vice-Chancellor, Doctors, Heads of Houses and Proctors.

Leicester earned the reputation of being meddlesome, and he certainly used his position as Chancellor in the dispensing of patronage. But many of his reforms were statesmanlike, and his endeavours to raise the standard of discipline and learning were evidently genuine. One of his chief aims was to prevent the possibility of Romanising priests obtaining a foothold once more in the University. With this object he introduced among other provisions a test which was destined to have the most potent influence on the history of the place. Every student above sixteen years of age was now required to subscribe on his matriculation to the Thirty-nine Articles and the royal supremacy. Intended to exclude the Romanising party only, this rule affected in the future mainly the descendants of the Puritans who enacted it. Thenceforth, Mr Brodrick remarks, the University, once open to all Christendom, was narrowed into an exclusively Church of England institution and became the favourite arena of Anglican controversy, developing more and more that special character, at once worldly and clerical, which it shares with Cambridge alone among the Universities of Europe.

The country, meanwhile, was filled with the Jesuits’ propaganda. There was Robert Parsons, for instance, who had been compelled to resign his fellowship at Balliol and had since joined the Society of Jesus. Disguised as a soldier and armed with a secret printing press, he wandered about the country disseminating Romanist literature. He finally brought off an extraordinarycoupat Oxford. In a wood near Henley he printed copies of a tract by Campian, a fellow Jesuit, and on Commemoration Day (1580) every member of the University found a copy of it in his seat at S. Mary’s when he came there to listen to the University sermon.

Proceedings against the Roman Catholics became more severe as the struggle continued. Fellows were ejected from colleges; priests were hung, drawn and quartered. In the reign of James I. George Napier of Corpus, a seminary priest convicted of high treason, was so treated, parts of his quartered body being set over the gates of the city and over the great gate of Christ Church. Puritan Oxford, however, was not distinguished for learning or discipline, in spite of Leicester’s fatherly exhortations. For the Chancellor rated the University for its deficiency in sermonising and lecturing, its lack of religious instruction and education of youth. And as to discipline, he finds fault with the prevailing excess in apparel “as silk and velvet, and cut doublets, hose, deep ruffs and such like, like unto or rather exceeding both Inns of Court men and Courtiers.” The streets, he complains, are more full of scholars than of townsmen, and the ordinary tables and ale-houses, grown to great number, are overcrowded day and night with scholars tippling, dicing, carding, tabling and perhaps worse. Ministers and deacons were presently solemnly forbidden to go into the field to play at football or to wear weapons to maintain any quarrel under penalty of expulsion. Plays acted by common stage players were forbidden, and scholars were not allowed, under pain of imprisonment, to sit on bulks or penniless bench or other open places, or to gad up and down the streets. Leicester, however, made a reservation in favour of the “Tragedies and Comedies used to be set forth by University men,” and he himself was entertained (1585) at Christ Church and at Magdalen with pleasant comedies.

The students, indeed, had shown themselves so unruly that the affrays and riots of the Middle Ages seemed to have been revived. The times were unsettled. Not only were the Roman Catholics and the Calvinists at feud alike with each other and the moderate party of the Reformed Church, whom the Queen favoured, but the old quarrels between North and South and the Welsh broke out again. And the old disputes between the town and the Universityhad been reopened by a series of orders put forth by the Privy Council in 1575 which were intended to settle them for ever.

The lack of discipline resulting from these causes is vividly brought before us by the attack made on the retinue of Lord Norreys by some scholars of Magdalen who wished to revenge themselves for the punishment inflicted on one of their number for stealing deer in Shotover forest. They were repulsed and “beaten down as far as S. Mary’s”; but when Lord Norreys was leaving the town, the scholars

“went up privately to the top of their tower and sent down a shower of stones that they had picked up, upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of their lives. It is said that upon the foresight of this storm, divers had got boards, others tables on their heads, to keep them from it, and that if the Lord had not been in his coach or chariot he would certainly have been killed.”

Some progress, one hopes, had been made in the restoration of order when Elizabeth paid her final visit “to behold the change and amendment of learning and manners that had been in her long absence made.” She was received with the same ceremonies as before, but this time, at the Divinity Disputations in S. Mary’s, she did not hesitate to send twice to a prosy bishop and bid him “cut it short.” The fact was that she was anxious to make a Latin speech herself. But the bishop either could not or would not sacrifice his beloved periods, and the Queen was obliged to keep her speech for the Heads of Houses next morning. In the middle of her oration she noticed the old Lord Treasurer, Burleigh (Cecil), standing on his lame feet for want of a stool. “Whereupon she called in all haste for a stool for him, nor would she proceed in her speech till she saw him provided with one. Then fell she to it, as if there had been no interruption. Upon which one that knew he might be bold with her, told her, that she did it on purpose to show that she could interrupt her speech, unlike the Bishop, and not be putout.” In her speech she, “the only great man in her kingdom,” gave some very good advice to the University, and took the opportunity of rebuking the Romanising and the Puritan factions of the Church, counselling moderation on all sides.

On her departure she again expressed her love for the place. “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford,” she exclaimed as she viewed its towers and spires from the heights of Shotover. “God bless thee and increase thy sons in number, holiness and virtue!”

Chapel in JesusChapel in Jesus

Some outward and visible signs there certainly were that the Queen’s encouragement of learning and her policy of selecting for her service “eminent and hopeful students” had borne fruit. In 1571 Jesus College, the first of the Protestant colleges, had been founded by Hugh ap Rees, a Welsh Oxonian, at a time when the increase of grammar schools in Wales was likely to produce an influx of Welsh students into the University. The statutes were free from any local or national restriction, but Welshmen always predominated, and Jesus soon came to be regarded, in Wales, as the National College. Elizabeth figured as a nominal foundress; and the college, the front of which in Turl Street dates from hertime, the rest being mainly seventeenth-century Gothic, possesses a famous portrait of her by Zucchero.

A still more noble memorial of Elizabethan times exists in Bodley, as the great library is called after its founder, “whose single work clouds the proud fame of the Egyptian Library and shames the tedious growth o’ the wealthy Vatican.”

Scarcely had the Duke of Gloucester’s library been completed than it began to be depleted of its treasures. Three volumes only out of that splendid collection now remain in the Bodleian; one volume has found its way to Oriel College, another to Corpus Christi; six others may be seen at the British Museum. The rest had by this time been lost through the negligence of one generation or the ignorant fanaticism of another. For scholars borrowed books on insufficient pledges, and preferred to keep the former and sacrifice the latter. The Edwardine commissioners, as we have seen, appointed to reform the University, visited the libraries in the spirit of John Knox. All the books were destroyed or sold. In Convocation (1556) “venerable men” were chosen to sell the empty shelves and stalls, and to make a timber-yard of Duke Humphrey’s treasure-house!

But the room remained; and it was destined, in its very emptiness and desolation, to work upon the imagination of one Thomas Bodley, an accomplished scholar, linguist and diplomatist, who believed with Bury that a “library of wisdom is more precious than all wealth.”

Born at Exeter, he accompanied his father when he fled to Germany from the Papist persecutions. Whilst other Oxonian Protestants were “eating mice at Zurich,” he studied at Geneva, learning Hebrew under Chevalerius, Greek under Constantinus, and Divinity under Calvin. Queen Mary being dead and religion changed, young Bodley was sent to Magdalen. There, he tells us, he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts (1563). In the following year he was admitted fellow of Merton College, where he gavepublic Greek lectures, without requiring any stipend. He was elected proctor in 1569, and was subsequently University orator and studied sundry Faculties. He next determined to travel, to learn modern languages and to increase his experience in the managing of affairs. He performed several important diplomatic missions with great ability and success. On his return from the Hague Burleigh marked him out for the Secretaryship, but grew jealous of the support he received from Essex. Bodley found himself unsuited for party intrigue and, weary of statecraft and diplomacy, decided to withdraw into private life.

But whilst refusing all subsequent offers of high office, he felt that he was called upon “to do the true part of a profitable member in the State.” All his life, whether immersed in affairs of State at home or lying abroad for the good of his country, he had never forgotten that ruined library at Oxford. That there once had been one, he has to remind the University, was apparent by the room itself remaining.

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