  “Tax not the royal saint with vain expense, With ill-matched aims the architect who planned, Albeit labouring for a scanty band Of white-robed scholars only—this immense And glorious work of fine intelligence! Give all thou can’st: high Heaven rejects the lore Of nicely calculated less or more; So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof, Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells, Where light and shade repose, where music dwells Lingering—and wandering on as loth to die; Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality.” —Wordsworth’s Sonnet on King’s College Chapel. Henry VI.—The most pitiful Character in all English History—His devotion to Learning and his Saintly Spirit—His foundation of Eton and King’s College—The Building of King’s College Chapel—Its architect, Reginald of Ely, the Cathedral Master-Mason—Its relation to the Ely Lady Chapel—Its stained glass Windows—Its close Foundation—Queens’ College—Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Wydville—The buildings of Queens’—Similarity to Haddon Hall—Its most famous Resident, Erasmus—His Novum Instrumentum edited within its Walls. ON the 6th of December 1421, being S. Nicolas’ Day, the unhappy Henry of Windsor was born. On the 1st of September in the following year, as an infant of less than a year old, he began his reign of forty miserable years as Henry VI. There is “Henry VI.”—I quote the pathetic words of my kinsman, the historian of the Constitution— “Henry was perhaps the most unfortunate king who ever reigned; he outlived power and wealth and friends; he saw all who had loved him perish for his sake, and, to crown all, the son, the last and dearest of the great house from which he sprang, the centre of all his hopes, the depositary of the great Lancastrian traditions of English polity, set aside and slain. And he was without doubt most innocent of all the evils that befell England because of him. Pious, pure, generous, patient, simple, true and just, humble, merciful, fastidiously conscientious, modest and temperate, he might have seemed made to rule a quiet people in quiet times.... It is needless to say that for the throne of England in the midst of the death struggle of nations, parties, and liberties, Henry had not one single qualification.” And yet he did leave an impression on the hearts of Of Eton we need not speak. The fame of that college is written large on the page of English history. And that fame and its founder’s memory we may safely leave to the “scholars of Henry” in its halls and playing fields to-day. “Christ and His Mother, heavenly maid, Mary, in whose fair name was laid Eton’s corner, bless our youth With truth, and purity, mother of truth! O ye, ’neath breezy skies of June, By silver Thames’ lulling tune, In shade of willow or oak, who try The golden gates of poesy; Or on the tabled sward all day Match your strength in England’s play, Scholars of Henry giving grace To toil and force in game or race; Exceed the prayer and keep the fame Of him, the sorrowful king who came Here in his realm, a realm to found Where he might stand for ever crowned.” It was on the 12th of February 1441, when Henry of Windsor was only nineteen years old, that the first charter for the foundation of King’s College, Cambridge, was signed. On the 2nd of April in the same year he laid the first stone. It is difficult to say from whence the first impulse to the patronage of learning came to the King. He had always been a precocious scholar, too early forced to recognise his work as successor to his father. Something of his uncle Duke Humfrey of Gloucester’s ardent love of letters he had imbibed at an early age. No doubt, too, the Earl of Warwick, “the King’s master” for eighteen years, had faithfully discharged his duty to “teach him nurture, literature, language, and other manner of cunning as his age shall suffer him to comprehend such as it fitteth so great a prince to be learned of,” and had made his royal pupil a good scholar and accomplished gentleman: though perhaps he had suffered the young king’s mind to take somewhat too ascetic and ecclesiastic a bent for the hard and perilous times which he had to face: a feature of his character which Shakespeare emphasises in the “I thought King Henry had resembled (Pole) In courage, courtship, and proportion: But all his mind is bent to holiness, To number Ave-Maries on his beads: His champions are the Prophets and Apostles: His weapons holy saws of sacred writ: His study is his tilt-yard, and his loves Are brazen images o’ canonized saints. I would the college or the cardinals Would choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome, And set the triple crown upon his head: That were a state fit for his holiness.” However, the first fruits of the royal “holiness” was a noble conception. A visit to Winchester in the July of 1440, where Henry studied carefully from personal observation the working of William of Wykeham’s system of education, seems to have fired him with the desire to rival that great pioneer of schoolcraft’s magnificent foundations at Winchester and Oxford. The suppression of the alien priories, decreed by Parliament in the preceding reign and carried out in his own, provided a convenient means of carrying out the project. Henry V. had already appropriated their revenues for the purposes of war in France. Henry VI. proceeded to confiscate them permanently as an endowment for his college “It is our fixed and unalterable purpose, being moved thereto, as we trust, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that our poor scholars of our Royal foundation of S. Mary of Eton, after they have been sufficiently taught the first rudiments of grammar, shall be transferred thence to our aforesaid College of Cambridge, which we will shall be henceforth denominated our College Royal of S. Mary and S. Nicholas, there to be more thoroughly instructed in a liberal course of study, in other branches of knowledge, and other professions.”
The first site chosen for the College was a very cramped and inconvenient one. It had Milne Street, then one of the principal thoroughfares of the town, on the west, the University Library and schools on the east, and School Street on the north. On the south side only had it any outlet at all. A court was formed by placing buildings on the three unoccupied sides, the University buildings forming a fourth. These buildings, however, were never completely finished, except in a temporary manner, and indeed so remained until the end of the last century, when they were more or less incorporated in the new buildings of the University Library facing Trinity Hall Lane, erected by Sir Gilbert Scott in It very soon, however, became evident that the selected site was much too small for the projected college. Little time was lost by the earliest provost and scholars in petitioning the King to provide an ampler habitation for their needs. “The task was beset with difficulties that would have daunted a mind less firmly resolved on carrying out the end in view than the king’s; difficulties indeed that would have been insuperable except by royal influence, backed by a royal purse. The ground on which King’s College now stands was then densely populated. It occupied nearly the whole of the parish of S. John Baptist, whose church is believed to have stood near the west end of the chapel. Milne Street crossed the site from north to south, in a direction that may be easily identified from the two ends of the street that still remain, under the name of Trinity Hall Lane and Queen’s Lane. The space between Milne Street and Trumpington Street, then called High Street, was occupied by the houses and gardens of different proprietors, and was traversed by a narrow thoroughfare called Piron Lane, leading from High Street to S. John’s Church. At the corner of Milne Street and this lane, occupying the ground on which about half the ante-chapel now stands, was the small college called God’s House, founded in 1439 by William Byngham for the study of grammar, which, as he observes in his petition to Henry VI. for leave to found it, is “the rote and ground of all other sciences.” On the west side of Milne Street, between it and the river, were the hostels of S. Austin, S. Nicholas, and S. Edmund, besides many dwelling-houses. This district was traversed by several lanes, affording to the townspeople ready access to the river, and to a wharf on its bank called Salthithe. No detailed account has been preserved of the negotiations necessary for the acquisition of this ground, between six and seven acres in extent, and in the very heart of Cambridge.... On this splendid site of many acres, where now the silent green expanse of sunlit lawn has taken the place of the busy lanes and crowded tenements, which in Henry’s time hummed with the life of a mediÆval river-side city, there rises the wondrous building, the crown of fifteenth century architecture, beautiful, unique—a cathedral church in size, a college chapel in plan—seeming in its lofty majesty so solitary and so aloof, and yet so instantaneously impressive. Who was the architect of this masterpiece? The credit has commonly been given to one of two men—Nicholas Close or John Langton. Close was a man of Flemish family, and one of the original six Fellows of the College. He had for a few years been the vicar of the demolished Church of S. John Zachary. He afterwards became Bishop of Carlisle. Langton was Master of Pembroke and Chancellor of the University, and was one of the commissioners appointed by the King to superintend the scheme of the works at their commencement. But “Any one,” he truly says, “who will carry up his eye from the bases of the vaulting shafts to the springing of the great vault will perceive at once that the section of the shaft does not correspond with the plan of the vault springers. There is a sort of cripple here. The shaft is, in fact, set out with seven members, while the design of the vault plan requires but five. Thus two members of the pier have nothing to do, and disappear somewhat clumsily in the capital. The section of these shafts was imposed by the first architect, and does not agree with the requirement of a fan-groin (designed by the architect of a later date).... The original sections, and the peculiar distribution of their bases, unmistakably indicate a ribbed vault, with transverse, diagonal, and intermediate ribs. Now, if we apply to the plan of these shaftings at Cambridge the plan of the vaulting at Ely, we find the two to tally precisely. Each member of the pier has its corresponding rib, in the direction of the sweep of which each member of the base is laid down. This might serve as proof sufficient, but it is not all. There exist in the church two lierne-groins of the work of the first period, those namely of the two easternmost chapels of the north range, and these are identical in principle with the great vault at Ely, and with the plan that is indicated by the distribution of the ante-chapel bases. We know then that the first designer of the church did employ lierne and not fan-vaulting, even in the small areas of the chapels, and that these liernes resemble not the later form—such as we may observe in the nave of Winchester Cathedral—but There seems little doubt then that the architect of King’s Chapel was its first master-builder, Reginald of Ely, who, trained under the shadow of the great Minster buildings in that city, probably in its mason’s yard, naturally took as his model for the King’s new chapel at Cambridge one of the most exquisite of the works of the great cathedral builder of the previous century, Alan de Walsingham. Had the original design of Reginald been completed, several of the defects of the building, as we see it to-day, would have been avoided. The chapel vault would have been arched, and the great space which is now left between the top of the windows and the spring of the vaulting would have been avoided. Much of the heaviness of effect also, which is felt by any one studying the exterior of the chapel, and which is due to the low pitch of the window arches, rendered necessary by the alteration in the design of the great vault, would have been avoided.
Reginald of Ely’s work, however, indeed all work on the new chapel, ceased in 1461, when the battle of Towton gave the crown to the young Duke of York, and the Lancastrian colleges of his rival fell upon barren days. On the accession of Richard III. in 1483, the new king In November of the same year a payment of £100 is made to Barnard Flower, the King’s glazier, and a similar sum in February 1517. It would seem that the same artist completed four windows, that over the north door of the ante-chapel being the earliest. Upon his death agreements were made in 1526 for the erection of the whole of the remaining twenty-two windows. They were to represent “the story of the old lawe and of the new lawe.” Above and below the transome in each window are two separate pictures, each pair being divided by a “messenger,” who bears a scroll with a legend giving the subject represented. In the lower tier the windows from north-west to south-west represent the Life of the Blessed Virgin, the Life of Christ, and the History of the Church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The upper tier has scenes from the Old Testament or from apocryphal sources which prefigure the events recorded below. The whole of the east window is devoted “A bare enumeration of the subjects, however, can give but a poor idea of these glorious paintings. What first arrests the attention is the singularly happy blending of colours, produced by a most ingenious juxta-position of pure tints. The half-tones so dear to the present generation were fortunately unknown when they were set up. Thus though there is a profusion of brilliant scarlet, and light blue, and golden yellow, there is no gaudiness. Again, all the glass admits light without let or hindrance, the shading being laid on with sparing hand, so that the greatest amount of brilliancy is insured. This is further enhanced by a very copious use of white or slightly yellow glass. It must not, however, be supposed that a grand effect of colour is all that has been aimed at. The pictures bear a close study as works of art. The figures are rather larger than life, and boldly drawn, so as to be well seen from a great distance; but the faces are full of expression and individuality, and each scene is beautiful as a composition. They would well bear reduction within the narrow limits of an easel picture.... There is no doubt that a German or Flemish influence is discernible in some of the subjects; but that is no more than might have been expected, when we consider the number of sets of pictures illustrating the life and passion of Christ that had appeared in Germany and Flanders during the half century preceding their execution.... That these windows should (at the time of the Puritan destruction of such things) have been saved is a marvel; and how it came to pass is not exactly known. The story that they were taken out and hidden, or, as one version of it says, buried, may be dismissed as an idle fabrication. More likely the Puritan sentiments of the then provost, Dr. Whichcote, were regarded with such favour by the Earl of
The magnificent screen and rood-loft are carved with the arms, badge, and initials (H. A.) of Henry and Anne Boleyn, and with the rose, fleur-de-lis, and portcullis. Doubtless, therefore, they were erected between 1532 and 1535. The doors to the screen were renewed in 1636, and bear the arms of Charles I. The stalls were set up by Henry VIII., but they were without canopies, the wall above them being probably covered with hangings, the hooks for which may still be seen under the string-course below the windows. The stalls are in the Renaissance manner, and are the first example of that style at Cambridge. They appear to differ somewhat in character from Torregiano’s works at Westminster, and to be rather French than Italian in feeling, although some portions of the figure-carving recalls in its vigour the style of Michael Angelo. The stall canopies and the panelling to the east of the stalls were the work of Cornelius Austin, and were put up about 1675. The north and south entrance doors leading to the quire and the side chapel are probably of the same date as the screen. The lectern dates from the first quarter of the sixteenth century, having been given by Robert Hacombleyn, provost, whose name it bears. As to the remaining buildings of King’s College it is sufficient to say that the great quadrangle projected by the founder was never built. The old buildings at the back of the schools, hastily finished in a slight and temporary manner, To return, however, to the history of the foundation. It is an illustration of the way in which at this time ultramontanist theories were contending for supremacy in England, in the universities as elsewhere, that the King should have applied to the pope for a bull granting him power to make his new college not only independent of the bishop of the diocese, but also of the University authorities. Such a bull was granted, and in 1448 the University itself consented, by an instrument given under its common seal, that the College, in the matter of discipline as distinguished from instruction, should be entirely independent of the University. By the limitation also of the benefits of this foundation to scholars only of Eton, the founder, perhaps unconsciously, certainly disastrously, created an exclusive class of students endowed with exclusive privi “A little flock they were in Henry’s hall . . . . . . . . . . Hardly the circle widened, till one day The guarded gate swung open wide to all.” It may certainly be hoped that there is truth in the present provost’s gentle prophecy, that “it is hardly possible that the College should relapse into what was sometimes its old condition, that of a family party, comfortable, indeed, but inclined to be sleepy and self-indulgent, and not wholly free from family quarrels.” And yet at the same time it should not be forgotten, as good master Fuller reminds us, that “the honour of Athens lieth not in her walls, but in the worth of her citizens,” and that during the lengthened period in which the society was a close foundation only open to scholars of Eton, with a yearly entry therefore of new members seldom exceeding half-a-dozen, it could still point to a long list of distinguished scholars and of men otherwise eminent—mathematicians like Oughtred, moralists like Whichcote, theologians like Pearson, antiquarians like Cole, poets like Waller—who had been educated within its walls. In Cooper’s “Memorials of Cambridge,” the list of eminent King’s men down to 1860 occupies twenty pages, a similar list of Trinity men, the largest college in the university, only ten pages more. This Let us now turn from King Henry’s College to the other royal foundation of his reign which claims his consort, the Lady Margaret of Anjou, as its foundress. The poet Gray in his “Installation Ode,” speaking of Queen Margaret in relation to Queens’ College, calls her “Anjou’s heroine.” But those Shakespearean readers who have been accustomed to think of his representation of the Queen, in The Second Part of King Henry VI., as a dramatic portrait of considerable truth and historic consistency, will hardly recognise the “heroic” qualities of Margaret’s character. Certainly she is not one of Shakespeare’s “heroines.” She has none of the womanly grace or lovableness of his ideal women. A woman of hard indomitable will, mistaking too often cruelty for firmness, using the pliancy and simplicity of her husband for mere party ends, outraging the national conscience by stirring up the Irish, the French, the Scots, against the peace of England, finally pitting the north against the south in a cruel and futile civil war, with nothing left of womanhood but the almost tigress heart of a baffled mother, this is the Queen Margaret as we know her in Shakespeare and in history. But “Our Lady the Queen Margaret,” who was a “nursing mother” to Queens’ College, seems a quite different figure. She has but just come to England, a wife and queen when little more than a child, “good-looking and well-grown” (specie et forma prÆstans), precocious, romantic, a “devout pilgrim to the shrine of Boccaccio,” delighting in the ballads “As Miltiades’ trophy in Athens would not suffer Themistocles to sleep, so this queen, beholding her husband’s bounty in building King’s College, was restless in herself with holy emulation until she had produced something of the like nature, a strife wherein wives without breach of duty may contend with their husbands which should exceed in pious performances.” Accordingly we read that in 1447 Queen Margaret, being then but fifteen years old, sent to the King the following petition:— “Margaret,—To the king my souverain lord. Besechith mekely Margaret, quene of England, youre humble wif. Forasmuche as youre moost noble grace hath newely ordeined and stablisshed a Collage of Seint Bernard, in the Universite of Cambrigge, with multitude of grete and faire privilages perpetuelly apparteynyng unto the same, as in your lettres patentes therupon made more plainly hit appereth. In the whiche Universite is no Collage founded by eny quene of England hidertoward. Plese hit therfore unto your highnesse to geve and graunte unto your seide humble wif the fondacon and determinacon of the seid collage to be called and named the Quene’s Collage of Sainte Margarete and Saint Bernard, or ellis of Sainte Margarete, vergine and martir, and Saint Bernard Confessour, and thereupon for ful evidence therof to hav licence and pouoir to ley the furst stone in her own persone or ellis by other depute of her assignement, so that beside the mooste noble and glorieus collage roial of our Lady and Saint Nicholas, founded by “And she shal ever preye God for you.” The College of S. Bernard, mentioned in the first paragraph of the Queen’s petition, was a hostel, established by Andrew Dokett, the rector of S. Botolph’s Church, situated on the north side of the churchyard in Trumpington Street, adjoining Benet College. For this hostel, Dokett had obtained from the King in 1446 a charter of incorporation as a college, but a year later procured another charter, refounding the College of S. Bernard on a new site, between Milne Street and the river, adjoining the house of the Carmelite Friars. The true founder, therefore, of Queens’ College was Andrew Dokett, but he was foresighted enough The earliest extant statutes appear to be those of the second foundress, the Queen Consort of Edward IV., revised at a later time under the authority of Henry VIII. It seems indeed likely that the absence of canon law from the subjects required by statute from all fellows after regency in arts, and the provision of Bible lectures in College, and divers English sermons to be preached in chapel by the fellows, indicates a somewhat
The principal court of Queens’ was almost completed before the Wars of the Roses broke out. “It is,” says “The staires which rise up to his studie at Queens’ College in Cambr. doe bring into two of the fairest chambers in the ancient building; in one of them which lookes into the hall and chief court, the Vice-President kept in my time; in that adjoyning it was my fortune to be, when fellow. The chambers over are good lodgeing roomes; and to one of them is a square turret adjoyning, in the upper part of which is the study of Erasmus and over it leads. To that belongs the best prospect about the Colledge, viz. upon the river, into the corne fields, and country adjoyning. So yt it might very well consist with the civility of the house to that great man (who was no fellow, and I think stayed not long there) to let him have that study. His sleeping roome might be either the President’s, or to be neer to him the next. The roome for his servitor that above it, and through it he might goe to that studie, which for the height and neatnesse and prospect might easily take his phancy.” It was in this study no doubt that much of the work was done for his edition of the New Testament in the original
Queens’ College has many claims upon the gratitude of English scholars and English churchmen—it would have been sufficient that she had been the “nursing mother” of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester—“vere Episcopus, vere Theologus”—under whose cautious supervision Cambridge first tasted of the fruits of the Renascence, who “sat here governor of the schools not only for his learning’s sake, but for his divine life”—but she can lay no claim to greater “If the footprints of Christ are anywhere shown to us, we kneel down and adore. Why do we not rather venerate the living and breathing picture of him in these books? If the vesture of Christ be exhibited, where will we not go to kiss it? Yet were his whole wardrobe exhibited, nothing could exhibit Christ more vividly and truly than these Evangelical writings. Statues of wood and stone we decorate with gold and gems for the love of Christ. They only profess to give us the form of his body; these books present us with a living image of his most holy mind. Were we to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have so intimate a knowledge as they give of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising again, as it were, in our actual presence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The sun itself is not more common and open to all than the teaching of Christ. For I utterly dissent from those who are unwilling that the Sacred Scriptures should be read by the unlearned translated into their vulgar tongue, as though Christ had taught such subtleties that they can scarcely be understood even by a few theologians, or as though the strength of the Christian Religion consisted in men’s ignorance of it. The mysteries of kings it may be safer to conceal, but Christ wished his mysteries to be published as openly as possible. I wish that even the weakest woman should read the Gospel—should read the Epistles of Paul. And I wish these were translated into all languages, so that they might be read and understood, not only by Scots and Irishmen, but also by Turks and Saracens. To make them understood is surely the first step. It may be that they might be ridiculed by many, but some would |
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