Charles William Stubbs

“No more as once in sunny Avignon,
The poet-scholar spreads the Homeric page,
And gazes sadly, like the deaf at song:
For now the old epic voices ring again
And vibrate with the beat and melody
Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days.”
—Mrs. Browning.

The Lady Margaret Foundations—Bishop Fisher of Rochester—The Foundation of Christ’s—God’s House—The Buildings of the new College—College Worthies—John Milton—Henry More—Charles Darwin—The Hospital of the Brethren of S. John—Death of the Lady Margaret—Foundation of S. John’s College—Its Buildings—The Great Gateway—The New Library—The Bridge of Sighs—The Wilderness—Wordsworth’s “Prelude”—The Aims of Bishop Fisher—His Death.

WE may well in this chapter take together the twin foundations of Christ’s College and S. John’s which both had the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, and mother of Henry VII. for their foundress. The father of this lady was John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and her mother was Margaret, daughter and heiress of Sir John Beauchamp, of Bletso. “So that,” says Fuller, punning on her parents’ names, “fairfort and fairfield met in this lady, who was fair body and fair soul, being the exactest pattern of the best devotion those days afforded, taxed for no personal faults but the errors of the age she lived in. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preached her funeral sermon, wherein he resembled her to Martha in four respects: firstly, nobility of person; secondly, discipline of her body; thirdly, in ordering her soul to God; fourthly, in hospitality and charity.”

In that assemblage of noble lives, who from the earliest days of Cambridge history have laboured for the benefit of the University, and left it so rich a store of intellectual good, there are no more honoured names than these two:—the Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and her friend and confessor, Bishop Fisher, under whose wise and cautious supervision Cambridge first tasted of the fruits of the Renaissance, and welcomed Erasmus, I fear with but a very tempered enthusiasm, to the newly-founded Lady Margaret chair, and yet, nevertheless, in that encouragement of the New Learning laid the foundation of that sound method and apparatus of criticism which has enabled the University in an after age to take all knowledge for its province, and to represent its conquest by the foundation of twenty-five professorial chairs.

John Fisher, who came, as we have seen in the last chapter, from the Abbey School at Beverley, where, some twenty years or so before, he had been preceded by Bishop Alcock, was Proctor of the University in 1494, and three years later, in 1497, was made Master of his College, Michaelhouse. The duties of the proctorial office necessitated at that time occasional attendance at Court, and it was on the occasion of his appearance in this capacity at Greenwich that Fisher first attracted the notice of the Lady Margaret, who in 1497 appointed him her confessor. It was an auspicious conjunction for the University. Under his inspiration the generosity of his powerful patron was readily extended to enrich academic resources. It was the laudable design of Fisher to raise Cambridge to the academic level which Oxford had already reached. Already students of the sister university had been to Italy, and had returned full of the New Learning. The fame of Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre made Oxford renowned, and drew to its lecture-rooms eager scholars from all the learned world. It hardly needed that such a man as Erasmus should sing the praises of the Oxford teachers. “When I listen to my friend Colet,” he wrote, “I seem to be listening to Plato himself. Who does not admire in Grocyn the perfection of training? What can be more acute, more profound, or more refined than the judgment of Linacre? What has nature ever fashioned gentler, sweeter, or pleasanter than the disposition of Thomas More?”[68]

It was natural therefore that Fisher should be ambitious in the same direction for his own university. He began wisely on a small scale, with an object of immediate practical usefulness, the foundation of a Divinity professorship, which should aim at teaching pulpit eloquence. On this point he rightly thought that the adherents of the Old and the New Learning might agree. And there was desperate need for the adventure. For with the close of the fifteenth century both theology and the art of preaching had sunk into general neglect. Times, for example, had greatly changed since the day when Bishop Grosseteste had declared that if a priest could not preach, there was one remedy, let him resign his benefice. But now the sermon itself had ceased to be considered necessary.

“Latimer tells us that in his own recollection, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays in succession without fear of complaint. Even the devout More, in that ingenious romance which he designed as a covert satire on many of the abuses of his age, while giving an admirably conceived description of a religious service, has left the sermon altogether unrecognised. In the universities, for one master of arts or doctor of divinity who could make a text of Scripture the basis of an earnest, simple, and effective homily, there were fifty who could discuss its moral, analogical, and figurative meaning, who could twist it into all kinds of unimagined significance, and give it a distorted, unnatural application. Rare as was the sermon, the theologian in the form of a modest, reverent expounder of Scripture was yet rarer. Bewildered audiences were called upon to admire the performances of intellectual acrobats. Skelton, who well knew the Cambridge of these days, not inaptly described its young scholars as men who when they had “once superciliously caught

A lytell ragge of rhetoricke,
A lesse lumpe of logicke,
A pece or patch of philosophy,
Then forthwith by and by
They tumble so in theology,
Drowned in dregges of divinite
That they juge themselfe alle to be
Doctours of the chayre in the Vintre,
At the Three Cranes
To magnifye their names.”[69]

It was to remedy this state of things that, in the first instance, Fisher set himself to work. The Divinity professorship was soon supplemented by the Lady Margaret preachership, the holder of which was to go from place to place and give a cogent example in pulpit oratory: one sermon in the course of every two years at each of the following twelve places:—

“On some Sunday at S. Paul’s Cross, if able to obtain permission, otherwise at S. Margaret’s, Westminster, or if unable to preach there, then in one of the more notable churches of the City of London; and once on some feast day in each of the churches of Ware and Cheshunt in Hertfordshire; Bassingbourne, Orwell and Babraham in Cambridgeshire; Maney, St. James Deeping, Bourn, Boston, and Swineshead in Lincolnshire.”[70]

We have already spoken in the chapter on Queens’ College of the work of Erasmus at Cambridge. He was summoned to Cambridge in 1511 to teach Greek and to lecture on the foundation of Lady Margaret. He himself tells us that within a space of thirty years the studies of the University had progressed from the old grammar, logic, and scholastic questions to some knowledge of the New Learning, of the renewed study at any rate of Aristotle, and the study of Greek.

The literary revival had no doubt been quicker and more brilliant at Oxford, but Cambridge, owing to Fisher’s cautious and careful supervision, and his foundation of the Lady Margaret Colleges of Christ’s and S. John’s, was the first to give to the New Learning a permanent home.

The Chapel, Christ’s College

The religious bias of the Countess of Richmond had inclined her to devote the bulk of her fortune to an extension of the great monastery of Westminster. But Bishop Fisher knew that active learning rather than lazy seclusion was essential to preserve the Church against the dangerous Italian type of the Renaissance, and he persuaded her to direct her gift to educational purposes. He pointed out that the Abbey Church was already the wealthiest in England, “that the schools of learning were meanly endowed, the provisions of scholars very few and small, and colleges yet wanting to their maintenance—that by such foundations she might have two ends and designs at once, might double her charity and double her reward, by affording as well supports to learning as encouragement to virtue.”

The foundation of Christ’s College in 1505 is an enduring memorial of the wisdom of the Bishop and the charity of the Lady Margaret.

There is a tradition that Fisher, who undoubtedly had joined Michaelhouse before taking his B.A. degree in 1487, had, upon his first entering Cambridge, been a student of God’s House. However that may be, it was to this small foundation he turned as the basis of his projected new college.

God’s House, an adjunct of Clare-Hall, founded by William Byngham, Rector of S. John Zachary, in London, in 1441, stood originally on a plot of land at the west end of King’s Chapel, adjoining the Church of S. John Zachary. In the changes which were necessary to secure a site for King’s College, the Church of S. John and God’s House were removed. In return for his surrender, Byngham had received license from Henry VI. to build elsewhere a college. Land was accordingly secured on what is now the site of the first and second courts of Christ’s College, and in the charter of the new God’s House, dated 16th April 1448, it is stated that Byngham had deferred the foundation owing to his ardent desire that “the King’s glory and his reward in heaven might be increased” by his personal foundation of God’s House. Henry could not resist such an argument, and thus God’s House became, and Christ’s College, as its successor, claims to be, of Royal Foundation. The little foundation, however, was always cramped by lack of means. Within fifty years of its first foundation the time had evidently come for a reconstitution of God’s House.

The arrival of the charter was soon followed by the news of the Lady Margaret’s noble benefactions—consisting of many manors in the four counties of Cambridge, Norfolk, Leicester, and Essex—which thus exalted the humble and struggling Society of God’s House, under its new designation of Christ’s College, into the fourth place in respect of revenue, among all the Cambridge colleges.

The building of the College seems to have gone on uninterruptedly between 1505 and 1511. The amount spent by the Foundress during her lifetime is not ascertainable; but the cost, as given in the household books of the Lady Margaret after her death, was more than £1000.

We may interrupt the Master’s record here to tell the characteristic story of the Lady Margaret which most probably has this oriel window for its scene: “Once the Lady Margaret came to Christ’s College to behold it when partly built; and looking out of a window, saw the Dean call a faulty scholar to correction, to whom she said, ‘Lente! Lente!’ (Gently! gently!) as accounting it better to mitigate his punishment than to procure his pardon: mercy and justice making the best medley to offenders.”[72]

The hall, between the Lodge and the buttery, has no exceptional features. Early in the eighteenth century it was entirely Italianised, as also were many of the other buildings. It was entirely rebuilt by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1876, the old roof, with its ancient chestnut principals, being reconstructed and replaced. The walls were raised six feet and an oriel window was built on the east side in addition to the original one on the west. In 1882 and following years portraits of the Founders, of benefactors, and of worthies of the College were placed in the twenty-one lights of the west oriel. The persons chosen as “glass-worthy” were William Bingham, Henry VI., John Fisher, Lady Margaret, Edward VI., Sir John Finch, Sir Thomas Baines, John Leland, Edmund Grindall, Sir Walter Mildmay, John Still, William Perkins, William Lee, Sir John Harrington (this because of a mistaken claim on the part of Christ’s, for Harrington was a King’s man, and possibly also of Trinity at a later date), Francis Quarles, John Milton, John Cleveland, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, William Paley, Charles Darwin. The glass-work was executed by Burlison & Grylls.

At an early period “a very considerable part of y^e schollars of Christ College lodged in y^e Brazen George; and y^e gates there were shut and opened Morning and Evening constantly as y^e College gates were.” The Brazen George Inn stood on the other side of S. Andrew’s Street, opposite to the south-east corner of the College. Alexandra Street no doubt represents the Inn yard. In 1613 the accommodation in the College was further increased by the erection of a range of buildings in the Second Court. This was a timber building of two stories with attics. In 1665 it is described as “the little old building called Rat’s Hall.” It was pulled down in 1730; the large range of buildings known as the Fellows’ buildings, parallel to Rat’s Hall and further east, having been erected, according to tradition, by Inigo Jones about 1640. A large range of building, similar in style to the Fellows’ building, was erected in 1889, and in 1895-97 Messrs. Bodley & Garner enlarged the old library, and altered and refaced the street front, extending the building to Christ’s Lane, and thus added much to the dignity of the College buildings, as seen from S. Andrew’s Street. The “re-beautifying the chappell,” as the then Master, Dr. Covel, called it, took place in 1702-3, when it was panelled by John Austin, who did similar work about the same time in King’s College chapel. The chapel has no remarkable or beautiful features. It is unnecessary to contradict the verdict of the present Master: “It must have been much more beautiful during the first fifty years of the College than at any later time.”

The Courtyard of the Wrestlers Inn. To face p. 220

In the list of twenty-one names which we give above as being “glass-worthy,” we have also, no doubt, the list of the most eminent members of Christ’s College. Of these the two greatest are undoubtedly John Milton and Charles Darwin.

Milton was admitted a pensioner of Christ’s College on 12th February 1624-25, and was matriculated on 9th April following. He resided at Cambridge in all some seven years, from February 1625 to July 1632. His rooms were on the left side of the great court as it is entered from the street, the first floor rooms on the first staircase on that side. They consist at present of a small study with two windows looking into the court, and a very small bedroom adjoining, and they have not probably been altered since his time. In the gardens behind the Fellows’ buildings, perhaps the most delightful of all the college gardens in Cambridge, is the celebrated mulberry tree, which an unvarying tradition asserts to have been planted by Milton. “Unvarying,” I have ventured to write, for I dare not repeat the heresy of which Mr. J. W. Clark was guilty when he suggested that Milton’s mulberry tree was in reality one of three hundred which the College bought to please James I., and which was “set” by Troilus Atkinson, the College factotum, in the very year that Milton was born. Concerning such heresy I can only repeat the rebuke of the present Master: “The suggestion that the object of wider interest than anything else in Christ’s—‘Milton’s mulberry tree’—is probably the last of that purchase, is the one crime among a thousand virtues of the present Registrary of the University.” Milton took his B.A. degree 26th March 1629, the year in which he wrote that noble “Ode on the Nativity,” in which the characteristic majesty of his style is already well marked. Three years earlier at least he had already written poems—the epitaph “On the Death of an Infant”:—

hardly less beautiful than the slightly later dirge “On the Marchioness of Winchester”:—

which in their exquisite grace and tenderness of wording scarcely fall below the mastery of the mightier measure and deeper thought of “Lycidas,” written in 1637. Of his Latin poems, written also during his undergraduate years, Dr. Peile has said—and on such a point there could be no higher authority:—“Even then he thought in Latin: his exercises are original poems, not mere clever imitations. There is remarkable power in them—power which could only be gained by one who had filled himself with the spirit of classical literature.” After this testimony we can assuredly afford to smile at those rumours of some disgrace in his university career spread about in later years by his detractors. That he had met perhaps, according to Aubrey’s account, with “some unkindnesse” from his tutor Chapell, even though that phrase by an amended reading is interpreted “whipt him,” need not distress us. It is a doubtful piece of gossip, and even if it were true—for flogging of students was by no means obsolete—it was a story to the tutor’s disgrace, not to Milton’s; and certainly the poet himself bore no grudge against the College authorities, as these magnanimous words plainly testify:—

Between the matriculation of John Milton at Christ’s and that of Charles Darwin at the same college is a period exactly of two centuries. The Christ’s Roll of Honour for that period contains many worthy names, but none certainly which shed a brighter lustre on the College history than that of Henry More, a leader in that remarkable school of thinkers in the seventeenth century—Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, John Smith, John Worthington, Samuel Cradock—known as “the Cambridge Platonists,” for whom Burnet claims the high credit of “having saved the Church from losing the esteem of the kingdom,” and whose distinctive teaching is perhaps best brought out in More’s writings. Henry More had been admitted to Christ’s College about the time when John Milton was leaving it. He was elected a Fellow of the College in 1639, and thenceforth lived almost entirely within its walls. Like many others, he began as a poet and ended as a prose writer. He had, in fact, the Platonic temperament in far greater measure probably than any other of the Cambridge school. How the soul should escape from its animal prison—when it should get the wings that of right should belong to it—into what regions those wings could carry it—were the questions which occupied him from youth upwards. “I would sing,” he had said in one of his Platonical poems,

But the neo-platonic extravagances which lay hidden in his writings from the first grew at last into a new species of fanaticism, which makes his later books quite unreadable. And yet he remains perhaps the most typical, certainly the most interesting, of all the Cambridge Platonists, and at least he held true to the two great springs of the movement—an unshrinking appeal to Reason, coupled with profound faith in the essential harmony of natural and spiritual Truth—doctrines which are of the very pith of the seventeenth century Cambridge evangel, and which one is glad to think remain of the very essence of the Cambridge theology of to-day. That Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists failed in much that they attempted cannot be denied. They failed partly because of their own weakness, but partly also because the time was not yet ripe for an adequate spiritual philosophy. Such a philosophy of religion can indeed only rise gradually on a comprehensive basis of historic criticism, and of a criticism which has realised not only that religious thought can no more transcend history than science can transcend nature, but has also learnt the lesson—which no man has more clearly taught to the students of history and of science alike, in the century which has just closed, than that latest and greatest of the sons of Christ’s College, Charles Darwin—that knowledge is to be found not only in sudden illumination, but in the slow processes of evolution, and progress not in pet theories of this or that ancient or modern thinker, but only in patient study and faithful generalisation.

Let us turn now to the second and perhaps greater Lady Margaret Foundation of S. John’s College.

Three years after Henry VI.’s incompleted foundation of God’s House had been enriched by a fair portion of the Lady Margaret’s lands and opened as Christ’s College, the Oxford friends of the Countess petitioned her for help in the endowment of a college in that University. For a time it seemed as if Christ’s Church was to have the Lady Margaret and not Cardinal Wolsey as its founder. But Bishop Fisher again successfully pleaded the cause of his own University, and the royal licence to refound the corrupt monastic Hospital of S. John as a great and wealthy college was obtained in 1508.

Of the Hospital of the Brethren of S. John the Evangelist, which was founded in the year 1135, we have already spoken in the chapter on Peterhouse. It owed its origin to an opulent Cambridge burgess, Henry Frost, and was placed under the direction of a small community of Augustinian Canons, an Order whose rule very closely resembled that of a monastery, their duties consisting mainly in the performance of religious services, and in caring for the poor and infirm. The patronage which the little community received would seem to show that, during its earlier history at least, the Brethren of S. John had faithfully discharged their duties. Several of the early Bishops of Ely took the Hospital under their direct patronage. Bishop Eustace, a prelate who played a foremost part in Stephen’s reign, appropriated to it the livings of Homingsea and of S. Peter’s Church in Cambridge, now known as Little S. Mary’s. Bishop Hugh de Balsham, as we have seen in our account of his foundation of Peterhouse, endeavoured to utilise the Hospital for the accommodation of the many students who in his time were flocking to the University in quest of knowledge, and to that end endowed the Hospital with additional revenues. After the failure of that scheme and the successful foundation of Peterhouse, Bishop Simon Montagu came to the help of the little house, and decreed, that in compensation for the loss of S. Peter’s Church, the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse should pay to the Brethren of S. John a sum of twenty shillings annually, a payment which has regularly been made down to the present day. The Hospital continued to grow in wealth and importance down to the time of its “decay and fall” in Henry VII.’s reign. The last twelve years of the fifteenth century, under the misrule of its then Master, William Tomlyn, saw its estates mortgaged or let on long leases, its discipline lax and scandalous, its furniture, and even sacred vessels, sold. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it had fallen into poverty and decay, and the number of its brethren had dwindled to two. Its condition is described in words identical with those applied to the Priory of S. Rhadegund.[75] The words, as given in the charter of S. John’s College, are these:—

The legal formalities necessary for the suppression of the Hospital were so tedious, that it was not “utterly extinguished,” as Baker, the historian of S. John’s, called its dissolution, until January 1510, when it fell, “a lasting monument to all future ages and to all charitable and religious foundations not to neglect the rules or abuse the institutions of their founders, lest they fall under the same fate.” Meanwhile, before these difficulties could be entirely overcome, King Henry VII. died, and within little more than two months after, the Lady Margaret herself was laid to rest by the side of her royal son in Westminster Abbey. Erasmus composed her epitaph. Skelton sang her elegy. Torregiano, the Florentine sculptor, immortalised her features in that monumental effigy which Dean Stanley has characterised as “the most beautiful and venerable figure that the abbey contains.” Bishop Fisher, who two months before had preached the funeral sermon for her son Henry VII., preached again, and with a far deeper earnestness, on the loss which, to him at least, could never be replaced.

Entrance S. John’s College

The executors of the Lady Margaret were Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester; John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; Charles Somerset; Lord Herbert, afterwards Earl of Worcester; Sir Thomas Lovell, Knight; Sir Henry Marney, Knight, afterwards Lord Marney; Sir John St. John, Knight; Henry Hornby, clerk; and Hugh Ashton, clerk. Unforeseen difficulties, however, soon arose. The young king looked coldly on a project which involved a substantial diminution of the inheritance which he had anticipated from his grandmother, while the young Bishop of Ely—“the Dunce Bishop of Ely”—James Stanley,[76] although stepson to the Countess, and solely indebted to her for promotion to his see, a dignity which he little merited, did his best after her death to avert the dissolution of the Hospital. As a result of this opposition of the Court party, to which no less a person than Cardinal Wolsey, out of jealousy it would seem for his own university, lent his powerful support, Lady Margaret’s executors found themselves compelled to forego their claims, and the munificent bequest intended by the foundress was lost to the College for ever. As some compensation for the loss sustained the untiring exertions of Bishop Fisher succeeded in obtaining for the College the revenues of another God’s House, a decayed society at Ospringe, in Kent, and certain other small estates, producing altogether an income of £80. “This,” says Baker, “with the lands of the old house, together with the foundress’s estate at Fordham, which was charged with debts by her will, and came so charged to the College, with some other little things purchased with her moneys at Steukley, Bradley, Isleham, and Foxton (the two last alienated or lost), was the original foundation upon which the College was first opened; and whoever dreams of vast revenues or larger endowments will be mightily mistaken.”

Gateway S. John’s College

Such were the conditions under which the new society of the College of S. John the Evangelist was at last formed in 1511, and Robert Shorten appointed Master with thirty-one Fellows. During Shorton’s brief tenure of the Mastership (1511-16) it devolved upon him to watch the progress of the new building, which now rose on the site of the Hospital, and included a certain portion of the ancient structure.

The buildings of S. John’s College consist of four quadrangles disposed in succession from east to west, and extending to a length of some nearly 300 yards. The westernmost court is across the river, approached by the well-known “Bridge of Sighs,” built in 1831. The easternmost court, facing on the High Street, is the primitive quadrangle, and for nearly a century after the foundation comprised the whole college. The plan closely follows what we have now come to regard as the normal arrangement, and is almost identical with that of Queens’.

S. John’s College from the Backs

The Great Gateway, which is in the centre of the eastern range of buildings, is by far the most striking and beautiful gate in all Cambridge. It is of red brick with stone quoins. The sculpture in the space over the arch commemorates the founders, the Lady Margaret and her son King Henry VII. In the centre is a shield bearing the arms of England and France quarterly, supported by the Beaufort antelopes. Above it is a crown beneath a rose. To the right and left are the portcullis and rose of the Tudors, both crowned. The whole ground is sprinkled with daisies, the peculiar emblem of the foundress. They appear in the crown above the portcullis. They cluster beneath the string course. Mixed with other flowers they form a groundwork to the heraldic devices. Above all, in a niche, is the statue of S. John. The present figure was set up in 1662. The original figure was removed during the Civil War. There is evidence that at one time the arms were emblazoned in gold and colours, and that the horns of the antelopes were gilt.

Over the gateway is the treasury. The first floor of the range of buildings to the south of the treasury contained at first the library. The position of this old library is the only feature in the arrangement of the buildings in which S. John’s differs from Queens’.

Oriel in Library, S. John’s College

The second court, a spacious quadrangle, considerably larger than the first, was commenced in 1598, and finished in 1602, the greater part of the cost being defrayed by the Countess of Salisbury. In the west range there is a large gateway tower. The first floor of the north range contains the master’s long gallery—a beautiful room with panelled walls and a rich plaster ceiling. In this fine chamber for successive centuries the head of the College was accustomed to entertain his guests, among whom royalty was on several occasions included. According to the historian Carter, down even to the middle of the last century it still remained the longest room in the University, and when the door of the library was thrown open, the entire vista presented what he describes as a “most charming view.” It was originally 148 feet long, but owing to various rearrangements its dimensions have been reduced to 93 feet. It is now used as a Combination Room by the Fellows.

The new library building, which forms the north side of the third court, was built in 1624. It is reached by a staircase built in the north-west corner of the second court. The windows of the library are pointed and filled with fairly good geometrical tracery, while the level of the floor and the top of the wall are marked by classical entablatures. The wall is finished by a good parapet, which originally had on each battlement three little pinnacles like those still remaining on the parapet of the oriel window in the west gable. This gable stands above the river, and forms with the adjoining buildings a most picturesque group. The name of Bishop Williams of Lincoln, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who had contributed as “an unknown person” two-thirds of the entire cost of £3000, is commemorated by the letters I.L.C.S. (i.e. Johannes Lincolniensis Custos Sigilli), together with the date 1624, which appear conspicuously over the central gable. His arms, richly emblazoned, were suspended over the library door, and his portrait, painted by Gilbert Jackson, adorns the wall. The original library bookcases remain, though their forms have been considerably altered.

The west range of the second court and the new library formed two sides of the third court. The remaining river range and the buildings on the south adjoining the back lane were added about fifty years later. They were probably designed by Nicholas Hawkes, then a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. The central composition of the western range was designed as an approach to a footbridge leading to the College walks across the river. This footbridge gave way to the covered new bridge, commonly spoken of as the Bridge of Sighs from its superficial resemblance to the so-called structure at Venice, leading to the fourth court, which was completed in 1831 from the plans of Rickman and Hutchinson. The old bridge, leading from the back lane, was built in 1696. Beyond the new court are the extensive gardens, on the western side of which is “the wilderness,” commemorated by Wordsworth, who was an undergraduate of John’s from 1787 to 1791, in the well-known lines of his Prelude:—

Bridge of Sighs S. John’s College

The new chapel of S. John’s, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in a style of pointed architecture, repeating, with some added degree of richness, the same architect’s design of Exeter College chapel at Oxford, was begun in 1863 and finished in 1869. The scheme involved the destruction of the old chapel and the still earlier building to the north of it. The hall was enlarged by adding to it the space formerly occupied by the Master’s lodge, a new lodge being built to the north of the third court, and the Master’s gallery being converted into the Fellows’ combination room. The stalls from the old chapel were refixed in the new building, and some new stalls were added. The beautiful Early English piscina, three arches and some monuments were also removed from the old chapel.

Considerations of space compel me to bring this chapter to a conclusion. I have spoken of the two Lady Margaret foundations as colleges of the New Learning. How far they have succeeded in fulfilling the aims of their founder only a careful study of their subsequent history can tell, and for that we have not space. But this, at least, we may say, that a college in which, generation after generation, there were enrolled men of such varying parts and powers as Sir Thomas Wyatt and William Grindall; as Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham, the former the tutor of Edward VI., the latter of Queen Elizabeth, and both famous as among the most sagacious and original thinkers on the subject of education; as Robert Greene and Thomas Nash, the dramatists; as Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, and Thomas Cartwright, “the most learned of that sect of dissenters called Puritans”; of John Dee, mathematician and astrologer, the editor of Euclid’s “Elements,” and William Lee, the inventor of the stocking-frame; of Roger Dodsworth, the antiquary, and Thomas Sutton, the founder of Charterhouse; as Thomas Baker, the historian of the College, and Richard Bentley, the great scholar and critic; as Henry Constable, and Robert Herrick and Mark Akenside and Robert Otway and Henry Kirke White and William Wordsworth—a galaxy of names which seems to prove that not Cambridge only, but S. John’s College, is “the mother of poets”—as William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, can hardly be said not to have contributed much to the history of English culture and English learning, to the extension of the older Classical studies, and to the advance of the newer Science, to that wider and freer outlook upon the world and upon life to which so much that is best in our modern civilisation may be traced, and all of which took its origin from that movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which we know by the name of the Renaissance. Of the genuine attachment of Bishop Fisher, the true founder of S. John’s, to the New Learning there can be no doubt. He showed it clearly enough by the sympathy which he evinced with the new spirit of Biblical Criticism, and by the friendship with Erasmus, which induced that great scholar to accept the Lady Margaret professorship at Cambridge. That the study of Greek was allowed to go on in the University without that active antagonism which it encountered at Oxford was mainly owing—it is the testimony of Erasmus himself—to the powerful protection which it received from Bishop Fisher. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that his attachment to the papal cause, and his hostility to Luther, whom he rightly enough regarded as a Reformer of a very different type to that of his friends Erasmus, Colet, and More, remained unshaken.

Tower & Turrets of Trinity from S. John’s College

On the occasion of the burning of Luther’s writings in S. Paul’s Churchyard in 1521, he had preached against the great reformer at Paul’s Cross before Wolsey and Warham, a sermon which was subsequently handled with severity by William Tyndall. It is, in fact, not difficult to recognise in the various codes of statutes, which from time to time he gave to his college foundations, evidence of both the strength and weakness of his character. In 1516 he had given to S. John’s statutes which were identical with those of Christ’s College. But in 1524 he substituted for these another code, and in 1530 a third. In this final code, accordingly, among many provisions, characterised by much prudent forethought, and amid statutes which really point to something like a revolution in academic study, we see plainly enough signs of timorous distrust, not to say a pusillanimous anxiety against all innovations whatever in the future. But in one cause, at any rate, he bore a noble part, and for it he died a noble death. His opposition to the divorce of King Henry and Queen Catharine was not less honourable than it was consistent, and he stood alone among the Bishops of the realm in his refusal to recognise the validity of the measure. It was, in fact, his unflinching firmness in regard to the Act of Supremacy which finally sealed his fate. The story of his trial and death are matters that belong to English history. The pathos of it we can all feel as we read the pages in which Froude has told the story in his “History,” and its moral, we may perhaps also feel, has not been unfitly pointed by Mr. Mullinger in his “History of the University.” Here are Froude’s words:—

And here are Mr. Mullinger’s:—