Cecil Headlam

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 there yielded 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 Queen merrily 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 pitifully murdered.” 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 College
The 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 extraordinary coup at 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 University had 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 put out.” 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 Jesus
Chapel 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 her time, 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 gave public 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.

“Whereupon, examining exactly for the rest of my life what course I might take, and having sought, as I thought, all the ways to the wood, to select the most proper, I concluded at the last to set up my staff at the Library door in Oxford.”

He wrote accordingly, offering (1597-8) to restore the place at his own charge. The offer was gratefully accepted. Bodley had married a rich widow, and his “purse-ability” was such that he was able to bear the expense of repairing the room, collecting books and endowing the library: a work, says Casaubon, rather for a king than a private man. Two years were spent in fitting up the room and erecting its superb heraldic roof. The ceiling is divided into square compartments, on each of which are painted the arms of the University, the open Bible with seven seals (I Rev. v. I) between three ducal crowns, on the open pages of which are the words, so truly fitting for a Christian school: “Dominus Illuminatio mea.”

Cooks Buildings S. John’s
Cooks Buildings S. John’s

On bosses which intervene between each compartment are painted the arms of Bodley himself.

Bodley now began to solicit his great store of honourable friends to present books to the library. His proposal was warmly supported by his countrymen in Devonshire, where, as a contemporary records, “every man bethought himself now how by some good book or other he might be written in the scroll of benefactors.”

This scroll was the register which Bodley had provided for the enrolment of the names of all benefactors, with particulars of their gifts. It consists of two large folios, ornamented with silver-gilt bosses on their massy covers, which lie on a table of the great room.

Bodley’s own donations were large, and he employed a London bookseller to travel on the Continent and collect books for the library. Besides numerous private benefactors like Lord Buckhurst and the Earl of Essex in the early years, the Stationers Company agreed to give Bodley a copy of every book which they published on condition that they might borrow the books thus given if needed for reprinting. This arrangement, in making which Bodley said he met with many rubs and delays, was the precursor of the obligation of the Copyright Acts, by which a copy of every book published has to be presented to the Bodleian and the British Museum. In 1603 Sir Walter Raleigh made a donation of fifty pounds, and he no doubt had some share in influencing the bestowal of many of the books which had once belonged to the library of Bishop Hieron. Ossorius, and were carried off from Faro in Portugal, when that town was captured by the English fleet under Essex. Raleigh, an Oriel man, was a captain in the squadron. The library was opened with full solemnity in 1603, and in the following year King James granted letters patent naming the library after its founder. That was an honour most richly deserved, for Bodley was “the first practically public library in Europe; the second, that of Angelo Rocca at Rome, being opened only in this same year.”

To this library, two years later, James, the pedant, who seemed determined to prove that a learned king, too, could be a crowned ass, paid a visit. After making an excessively feeble pun anent the bust of the founder in the large room, which had been sent there by the Earl of Dorset, Chancellor of the University, he looked at the book shelves, and remarked that he had often had proof from the University of the fruits of talent and ability, but had never before seen the garden where those fruits grew, and whence they were gathered. He examined various MSS. and discoursed wisely on them; took up the treatise by Gaguinus entitled “De puritate conceptionis Virginis MariÆ,” and remarked that the author had so written about purity, as if he wished that it should only be found on the title of his book. The opportunity of thus displaying his learning was so grateful to the King, that he was moved to an astonishing act of generosity. He offered to present from all the libraries of the royal palaces whatever precious and rare books Sir T. Bodley might choose to carry away. It does not appear that the number or importance of books so granted was in the event very great. Upon leaving the room the King exclaimed, probably with sincerity, that were he not King James he would be a University man; and that were it his fate at any time to be a captive, he would wish to be shut up, could he but have the choice, in this place as his prison, to be bound with its chains, and to consume his days among its books as his fellows in captivity.

To this library came James’ ill-starred son, and here, it is said, he was tempted by Lord Falkland to consult the “Sortes VirgilianÆ.” The passage which first met his eye runs thus in Dryden’s translation:

Lord Falkland then opened the Virgil in his turn, hoping that his “lot” might remove the gloomy impression of this bad omen.

The Gardens Exeter College
The Gardens Exeter College

But the passage on which he lit dealt with the untimely death of Pallas:

To this library Bacon sent his new book, “The Advancement of Learning,” and here Milton, leaving the allegro of Horton or Forest Hill for the penseroso of Oxford’s cloisters, made friends with the librarian, and added his own poems to those treasures which were soon to be defended by the “unshaken virtue” of his friend, Fairfax, and increased by the Chancellor, Oliver Cromwell. This is not the place to catalogue the list of those treasures, the wealth of European literature and the MSS. of the nearer and the farther East; the great collections which immortalise the names of the donors, like Laud and Selden, Rawlinson, Gough, Douce and Sutherland; the books which belonged to Queen Elizabeth and Queen Margaret, to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Addison and Shelley; the curios and objets-d’art, princely gifts, like the Arundel and Selden marbles, coins and portraits, minor curiosities, like stuffed alligators and dried negro boys, or the lantern of Guy Fawkes, which have all found a resting-place in

In such a place, with such a history, it would be strange indeed if we did not feel something of the charm that breathes from the very stones of Bodley.

From the hot and noisy street you pass into the peaceful Schools’ quadrangle, lying beneath the shade of that curious tower, which, as it were an academic conceit in stone, blends the five orders of classic architecture with Gothic turret and pinnacle. Architecturally the “Schools” are plain and poor, but you remember that Bodley conceived the idea of rebuilding them, and that it was the day after his body had been put to rest in Merton Chapel (29th March 1613) that the first stone was laid. The Bodleian forms the west side of this quadrangle. The east wing of the great library, built (1610-1613) by Bodley when already there was “more need of a library for the books than of books for the library,” is panelled like the Divinity School, and stretches over the entrance to it, the Proscholium or “Pig Market,” where candidates for degrees were obliged to wait. The west wing extends over Laud’s late Gothic Convocation House (1634-1640); the books have usurped the third story of the Schools and the Clarendon building; they are filling the mighty camera beyond and overflowing into the Ashmolean. But the entrance to the heart of this grand collection is a modest portal. It opens on a long winding stair, so long and so wearisome that you seem to have trodden the very path by which true knowledge is gained ere you pass through a simple green baize door and see the panorama of all learning, lit by the glass of the east window, outspread before your eyes.

So to approach it, and passing by the outer library through the yielding wicket, into Duke Humphrey’s gallery, there to turn into one of the quiet recesses, and calling for book after book, to summon spirits from the deep of the past, to hold quiet converse with them, while the breeze and sunlight flow gently in across Wren’s huge buttresses from the green garden of Exeter, till Bodley’s own solemn bell calls them back to their resting-place; this, as has been well said, is the very luxury, or rather the very poetry of study. “What a place,” exclaimed Elia, “What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.”

The growth of the Puritan feeling in Oxford is shown by the formation of the first Baptist society under Vavasour Powell of Jesus College, whom John Bunyan once accompanied to this city. The growth of the Puritan tendency to preach is also indicated by the strange case of Richard Haydock, a physician of New College, who obtained some notoriety about this time by preaching at night in his bed. Sermons, he said, came to him by revelation in his sleep, and he would take a text in his slumbers and preach on it, “and though his auditory were willing to silence him by pulling, haling and pinching, yet would he pertinaciously persist to the end and sleep still.” He was not a married fellow evidently. King James sent for him, and he preached to the monarch in his sleep, but James made him confess that he was a fraud, who had adopted this curious means of advertising himself.

The King and Queen and Prince Henry visited Oxford in 1605, and were welcomed very much as Elizabeth had been. The King, we are told, showed himself to be of an admirable wit and judgment. The scholars welcomed him by clapping their hands and humming, which, it was explained to him, signified applause.

The presence of King James’ court, however, was responsible, if we may believe Wood, for a serious change in manners. For he traces the rise of that “damnable sin of drunkenness” to this time.

The vice in fact grew so prevalent in Oxford, as in the rest of England, that a statute was passed forbidding members of the University to visit any tavern and there “sit idly, drink, or use any unlawful play.” The use of the Latin tongue, attendance at lectures and the wearing of academical dress was also insisted on by the new Chancellor, Archbishop Bancroft, who added an injunction that long hair was not to be worn: long hair in those days being accounted a sign not of a poet but of a swaggerer and ruffian. A few years later it was provided, as a measure directed against the still increasing vice of drunkenness, that no scholar should lodge without his college or hall, and that no citizen should entertain a scholar in his house.

The Gunpowder Plot led to more stringent measures being taken to root out the Roman Catholics from the University. It is possibly to the deep impression made by that event that the foundation of Wadham College is due. The founder of that college (1609), Nicholas Wadham, is said to have intended to endow a Roman Catholic college at Venice, but to have decided to endow a number of non-clerical and terminable fellowships at Oxford instead. His widow, Dorothy, carried out his plans, and, after Gloucester Hall had refused the benefaction, purchased the site of the suppressed settlement of Augustinian Friars and built the front quadrangle with hall and chapel as, externally, we have them to-day. For the interior of the chapel was dealt with by the Gothic revivalists (1834). The Wadhams were West Country folk, and the majority of workmen engaged were Somersetshire men. It is suggested that the extraordinarily fine Perpendicular character of the chapel choir is due to this fact; and that the masons reproduced, in the seventeenth century, the style of their county churches. The choir is a copy of fifteenth-century work; the ante-chapel and the rest of the quadrangle, so charming in its unadorned simplicity, are beautiful examples of the survival in Oxford of the Gothic tradition. Quadrangles at Merton and Wadham are the most notable examples of this debased and nondescript style, redeemed by most excellent composition, proportioned like some Elizabethan manor.

James had been inclined at first to favour the Puritans, but when he finally cast in his lot with the High Church party, the University, which he, like Elizabeth, had done his best to conciliate as the educational centre of the national clergy, supported him loyally. In the year of his accession he had granted letters patent to both Universities, empowering them each to choose two grave and learned men, professing the civil law, to serve as burgesses in the House of Parliament; and the Universities were again indebted to him when they were called upon to furnish scholars for the great task of preparing the Authorised Version of the Bible.

Thus Oxford had its share in giving the Book to the people. From this time forward every Englishman was more than ever a theologian, and at the Universities, as at Westminster, theological controversy absorbed all energies. Literature, says Grotius (1613), has little reward. “Theologians rule, lawyers find profit, Casaubon alone has a fair success, but he himself thinks it uncertain, and not even he would have had any place as a literary man—he had to turn theologian.”

Oxford, in return, declared itself on the side of passive obedience. The Church embraced the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings; the University burned the books of ParÆus in S. Mary’s Churchyard, and solemnly decreed that it was not lawful for the subject to resist his sovereign by force of arms, or to make war against him, either offensive or defensive (1622). Thus it is evident that the influence of Calvin had died away at Oxford, and that the University had adopted, by the end of James’ reign, the reactionary creed of Laud, and was ready to support the Stuart claim to absolutism. The Divine Right of Kings and the Divine Right of Bishops, as it was indicated by James’ own phrase, “No Bishop, no King,” was to be for more than a generation the official creed of Oxford schooled by Laud. For meanwhile one William Laud, B.D. of S. John’s College, had filled the office of proctor and had been censured by the Vice-Chancellor for letting fall in a sermon at S. Mary’s divers passages savouring of Popery. But he survived the reproof. President of S. John’s from 1611-1621, he set himself to reform the discipline of the University and to undo the work of Leicester.

In 1630 he was elected Chancellor in opposition to the younger brother of the late Chancellor, Lord Pembroke, who was supported by the Calvinists. Preaching on the points in dispute between Calvin and Arminius was at once forbidden. This, with Laud as Chancellor, meant that the Puritans, who regarded Laud’s “High Church” views as little better than Popery in disguise and as exposing the country to a danger which was too near and too deadly to be trifled with, were muzzled or driven from the country; but their opponents, if they preached against the practices of Geneva, met only with the mildest kind of rebuke. Laud’s experience of the University had convinced him of the necessity of revising and codifying the statutes “which had long lain in a confused heap.” As Chancellor he at once set about that difficult task. The Caroline or Laudian Statutes were based on the old statutes and customs as collected, transcribed and drawn up by the antiquarian, Brian Twyne, fellow of C.C.C. Laud rewarded him with the office of Custos Archivorum. It was from the vast and scholarly collections of Brian Twyne that Wood quarried freely, and, it must be said, without due acknowledgment. But Wood succeeded in a task beyond Twyne’s powers. He achieved immortality by clothing the dry bones of antiquarian fact or fancy in prose at times so racy and at times so musical.

Already (1629) Laud had been responsible for the introduction of the cycle, which put an end to the riots that had hitherto attended the election of proctors. Free election by the academical democracy had resulted in frequent abuses. The cycle invented

Oriel Window S. John’s College
Oriel Window S. John’s College

by Peter Turner of Merton assigned to each college in turn, and in proportion to its size and dignity, the right of nominating proctors. The system, modified in 1856 and 1887, still obtains. His care for discipline led the Chancellor to make some much-needed reforms in the direction of diminishing the number of ale-houses and enforcing a proper system of licensing in the town. By his own proclamation he named a toll-gatherer for the market; he obtained an order from Council for the destruction of cottages which the townsmen had erected round about the wall and ditch; and, in spite of a protest from the citizens, the Caroline Charter was obtained, confirming the rights of the University over the town.

When the labours of Twyne were finished and the Delegacy had at last succeeded in codifying the laws and customs, the code was placed in the hands of Laud. He corrected the draft, and in 1636 the Corpus Statutorum was promulgated, confirmed by the King and gratefully accepted by the University. The new code was destined to govern it for two hundred years and more. Though to a great extent a digest of statutes already in force, the Laudian Statutes completed and stereotyped the changes which had long been taking place. The old order changes; the academic commonwealth becomes an oligarchy; the University is henceforth to be governed by a “Hebdomadal Board,” and all power is definitely concentrated in the hands of the colleges and the Heads of Houses.

The old scholastic disputations were superseded by a system of public examinations; the studies required for a degree were organised and defined; the tutorial system was emphasised by the regulation which required the student to enter under a tutor resident in the same college. The code was received with effusive gratitude. The popularity of Laud was not merely due to the vigour with which he had been enforcing his views of orthodoxy, and compelling all, whether Roman Catholics or Puritans, to recant if ever in their sermons they controverted the Arminian doctrines, which the Stuarts had adopted as the fundamental principles of their policy in Church and State. For apart from his narrow Church policy Laud was, in University matters, both an earnest reformer and a great benefactor. He presented the library with a magnificent collection of Oriental MSS.; he founded and endowed the Professorship of Arabic, and, most valuable of all, he obtained for the University the right of printing Bibles, which is one of the most valuable endowments of that insufficiently endowed institution to-day. Besides his buildings at S. John’s College, the building of the Convocation House, adjoining the Divinity School (1634-1638), with the extension of the Bodleian above it, mark the chancellorship of Laud, and as the seat of Oxford’s government fitly recall the age of its great lawgiver. The Botanic Gardens were also founded at this period, and the porch of S. Mary’s was erected in 1637 by the Archbishop’s chaplain, Dr Owen. The beautiful twisted columns of this, the south-west porch, are surmounted by a fine statue of the Virgin, crowned, with the Child in her arms. This statue gave such offence to the Puritans, that it actually figured in the articles of impeachment against the Archbishop.

Under Laud the University had quite recovered its popularity. There were no less than four thousand students; many men of learning and piety were numbered among its alumni; discipline was to a great extent established. But the coming struggle soon began to upset the new rÉgime. For the Civil War was inevitably approaching. The chancellorship of Laud was crowned by a visit from the King and Queen in 1636. But though the University and town went out, as was their custom, towards Woodstock to meet their royal visitors, and though speeches and ceremonies were performed as usual, Wood notes that in the streets “neither scholars nor citizens made any expressions of joy or uttered as the manner is, Vivat Rex!” The visit lasted three days. The Elector Palatine and Prince Rupert received honorary M.A. degrees. Charles paid special attention to S. John’s College, out of compliment to Laud, who entertained the royal party there, and drew attention to the library he had enlarged and the quadrangle he had built, mainly out of the stones obtained from the old Carmelite Convent in Beaumont Palace—once the Palace of Kings. From that time forward S. John’s was the most royalist of colleges. One of its most treasured possessions was the portrait of the Royal Martyr, “which has the whole of the book of Psalms written in the lines of the face and the hair of the head.” Of this picture, as of other things, the story is told that Charles II. begged it of the college, and promised in return to grant them any request they might make. They gave the picture, and requested His Majesty to give them—the picture back again. Comedies were performed at S. John’s and Christ Church. The play at S. John’s, “The Hospital of Lovers” was “merry and without offence,” but that at Christ Church, by William Strode, the public orator, called the “Floating Island,” had more of the moralist than poet in it. The scenery was realistic, but Lord Carnarvon declared the piece to be the worst he ever saw, except one at Cambridge. Another play at Christ Church, “The Royal Slave,” by William Cartwright, was more successful. The scenery of the interludes was arranged by Inigo Jones. The Queen was so pleased with this piece, that she borrowed the Persian dresses and the scenery of the piece and had it repeated at Hampton Court, but “by all men’s confession, the players came short of the University actors.”

Charles, in this matter at least, was more fortunate than his father. For James had suffered much boredom from a play called “Technogamia, or the Marriage of the Arts,” in which “there was no point and no sense but non-sense.” He was with difficulty induced to stay to the end.