“I HEAR, Sir Walter,” said Queen Elizabeth to the founder of Emmanuel College, “you have been erecting a Puritan foundation.” “No, madam,” he replied, “far be it from me to countenance anything contrary to your established laws; but I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit therefrom.” And Sir Walter Mildmay expressed no doubt truthfully what was his own intention as a founder, for although it is customary to speak of both Emmanuel and Sidney Colleges as Puritan foundations, and although it admits of no question that the prevailing tone of Emmanuel College was from the first intensely Puritan in tone, yet it cannot certainly be said that either Emmanuel College or the college established by the Lady Frances Sidney two years later, were specially designed by their founders to strengthen the Puritan movement in the University. They synchronised with it no doubt, and many of their earliest members gave ample proof of their sympathy with it. But as foundations they sprang rather from the impulse traceable on the one hand to the literary spirit of the Renaissance, and on the other to the desire of promoting that union of rational religion with sound knowledge, which the friends of the New Learning, the disciples of Colet, Erasmus, and More had at heart. The two colleges were born, in fact, at the meeting-point of two great epochs of history. The age of the Renaissance was passing into the age of Puritanism. Rifts which were still little were widening every hour, and threatening ruin to the fabric of Church and State which the Tudors had built up. A new political world was rising into being; a world healthier, more really national, but less picturesque, less wrapt in the mystery and splendour that poets love. Great as were the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognised the grandeur of the people as a whole.

Hall & Chapel, Emmanuel College.

As great a change was passing over the spiritual sympathies of man; a sterner Protestantism was invigorating and ennobling life by its morality, by its seriousness, and by its intense conviction of God. But it was at the same time hardening and narrowing it. The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The obstinate questionings which haunted the finer souls of the Renaissance were being stereotyped in the theological formulas of the Puritan. The sense of divine omnipotence was annihilating man. The daring which turned England into a people of adventurers, the sense of inexhaustible resources, the buoyant freshness of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which inspired Sidney and Marlowe and Drake, was passing away before the consciousness of evil and the craving to order man’s life aright before God.

Emmanuel and Sidney Colleges were the children of this transition period. Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reign of Elizabeth, known and trusted by the Queen from her girlhood—she exchanged regularly New Year’s gifts with him—a tried friend and discreet diplomatist, who had especially been distinguished in the negotiations in connection with the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. He had been educated at Christ’s College, though apparently he had taken no degree. He was a man, however, of some learning, and retained throughout life a love for classical literature. Sir John Harrington, in his “Orlando Furioso,” quotes a Latin stanza, which he says he derived from the Latin poems of Sir Walter Mildmay. These poems, however, are not otherwise known. He is also spoken of as the writer of a book entitled “A Note to Know a Good Man.” His interest in his old university and sympathy with letters is attested by the fact that he contributed a gift of stone to complete the tower of Great S. Mary’s, and established a Greek lectureship and six scholarships at Christ’s College. He had acquired considerable wealth in his service of the State, having also inherited a large fortune from his father, who had been one of Henry VIII.’s commissioners for receiving the surrender of the dissolved monasteries. It was fitting, perhaps, he felt, that some portion of this wealth should be devoted to the service of religion and sound learning. Anyhow, in the month of January 1584, we find the Queen granting to her old friend, “his heirs, executors, and assigns,” a charter empowering them “to erect, found, and establish for all time to endure a certain college of sacred theology, the sciences, philosophy and good arts, of one master and thirty fellows and scholars, graduate or non-graduate, or more or fewer according to the ordinances and statutes of the same college.” On the 23rd of the previous November, Sir Walter had purchased for £550 the land and buildings of the Dominican or Black Friars, which had been established at Cambridge in 1279 and dissolved in 1538. During the fifty years that had elapsed since the dissolution the property had passed through various hands. Upon passing into the hands of Sir Walter it is thus described:—

The present buildings stand upon nearly the same sites as those occupied by the original buildings, which were adapted to the requirements of the new college by Ralph Symons, the architect, who had already been employed at Trinity and S. John’s. The hall, parlour, and butteries were constructed out of the Church of the Friars. It is recorded that “in repairing the Combination Room about the year 1762, traces of the high altar were very apparent near the present fireplace.” The Master’s lodge was formed at the east end of the same range, either by the conversion of the east part of the church, or by the erection of a new building. A new chapel, running north and south—the non-orientation, it is said, being due to Puritan feeling—was built to the north of the Master’s lodge. The other new buildings consisted of a kitchen on the north side of the hall and a long range of chambers enclosing the court on the south. Towards the east there were no buildings, the court on that side being enclosed by a low wall. The entrance to the College was in Emmanuel Lane, through a small outer court, having the old chapel as its southern range and the kitchen as the northern. From this the principal court was reached by passages at either end of the hall. The range known as the Brick Building was added in 1632, extending southwards from the east end of the Founder’s Chambers. In 1668 the present chapel was built facing east and west, in the centre of the southern side of the principal court. By this time, it is said, the old chapel had become ruinous. Moreover, it had never been consecrated, and the Puritanical observances alleged to have been practised in it were giving some offence to the Restoration authorities. The following statement, drawn up in 1603,[89] is interesting, not only as giving a graphic picture of the disorders complained of at Emmanuel, but also incidentally of the customs of other colleges:—

There is one interesting feature in connection with the foundation of Emmanuel College which calls for special notice, as showing that the Puritan founder was fully conscious of the dangers attaching to a perpetual tenure of Fellowships, as affording undue facilities for evading those practical duties of learning and teaching, the efficient discharge of which he rightly considered it should be the main object of the University to demand, and the interest of the nation to secure. “We have founded the College,” says Sir Walter, “with the design that it should be, by the grace of God, a seminary of learned men for the supply of the Church, and for the sending forth of as large a number as possible of those who shall instruct the people in the Christian faith. We would not have any Fellow suppose that we have given him, in this College, a perpetual abode, a warning which we deem the more necessary, in that we have ofttimes been present when many experienced and wise men have taken occasion to lament, and have supported their complaints by past and present utterances, that in other colleges a too protracted stay of Fellows has been no slight bane to the common weal and to the interests of the Church.”[90]

In the sequel, however, the wise forethought of Sir Walter Mildmay was to a great extent frustrated. The clause of the College statutes which embodied his design was set aside in the re-action towards conservative university tradition, which followed upon the re-establishment of the Stuart dynasty. A similar clause in the statutes of Sidney College, which had been simply transcribed from the original Emmanuel statutes, was about the same time rescinded, on the ground that it was a deviation from the customary practice of other societies, both at Oxford and Cambridge. It was not, in fact, until the close of the nineteenth century that university reformers were able to secure such a revision of the terms of Fellowship tenure as should obviate, on the one hand, the dangers which the wisdom of the Puritan founder foresaw, and, on the other, make adequate provision, under stringent and safe conditions, for the endowment of research. The old traditionary system is thus summarised by Mr. Mullinger:—

How essentially Puritan was the prevailing tone of Emmanuel during the early days we may surmise from the fact, that in the time of the Commonwealth no less than eleven masters of other colleges in the University came from this Foundation—Seaman of Peterhouse, Dillingham of Clare Hall, Whichcote of King’s, Horton of Queens’, Spurston of S. Catharine’s, Worthington of Jesus, Tuckney of John’s, Cudworth of Christ’s, Sadler of Magdalene, Hill of Trinity. Among some of the earliest students to receive their education within its walls were many of the Puritan leaders of America. Cotton Mather, in his “Ecclesiastical History of New England,” gives a conspicuous place in its pages to the names of Emmanuel men—Thomas Hooker, John Cotton, Thomas Shephard. “If New England,” he says, “hath been in some respect Immanuel’s Land, it is well; but this I am sure of, Immanuel College contributed more than a little to make it so.” Few patriotic Americans of the present day, visiting England, omit to make pilgrimage to Emmanuel, for was not the founder of their University, Harvard College, an Emmanuel man, graduating from that college in 1631, and proceeding to his M.A. degree in 1635? John Harvard, “the ever memorable benefactor of learning and religion in America,” as Edward Everett justly styles him—“a godly gentleman and lover of learning,” as he is called by his contemporaries, “a scholar, and pious in life, and enlarged towards the country and the good of it in life and death,” seems indeed to have been a worthy son of both Emmanuel and of Cambridge, a Puritan indeed, but of that fuller and manlier type which was characteristic of the Elizabethan age rather than of the narrower, more contentious, more pedantic order which set in with and was hardened and intensified by the arbitrary provocations of the Stuart regime.

Downing College

The last in date of foundation of the Cambridge Colleges with which we have to deal—for Downing College, unique as it is in many ways, and attractive (its precincts, “a park in the heart of a city”), is not yet a century old, and its history although in some respects of national importance, lies beyond our limit of time—was the “Ancient and Protestant Foundation of Sidney Sussex College.”

The foundress of Sydney Sussex College was the Lady Frances Sidney, one of the learned ladies of the court of Elizabeth. She was the aunt both of Sir Philip Sidney and of the Earl of Leicester; the wife of Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, known at least to all readers of “Kenilworth” as the rival of Leicester. To-day the noble families of Pembroke, Carnarvon, and Sidney all claim her as a common ancestress. A few years ago, in conjunction with the authorities of the college, they restored her tomb, which occupies the place of the altar in the chapel of S. Paul in Westminster Abbey. It was the Dean of Westminster, her friend Dr. Goodman, who gave to the college that portrait of the foundress which hangs above the high table in the college hall.

It is a characteristic of the period which may be worth noting here—of the middle, that is, of the sixteenth century—when the destinies of Europe were woven by the hands of three extraordinary queens, who ruled the fortunes of England, France, and Scotland—that, as the fruits of the Renaissance and of the outgrowth of the New Learning, and perhaps also of the independent spirit of the coming Puritanism, learned women should in some degree be leading the van of English civilisation.

How long the Lady Frances had had the intention of founding a college, and what was the prompting motive, we do not know. In her will, however, which is dated December 6, 1588, the intention is clearly stated. After giving instructions as to her burial and making certain bequests, she proceeds to state “that since the decease of her late lord”—he had died five years previously—“she had yearly gathered out of her revenues so much as she conveniently could, purposing to erect some goodly and godly monument for the maintenance of good learning.” In performance of the same, her charitable pretence, she directs her executors to employ the sum of £5000 (made up from her ready-money yearly reserved, a certain portion of plate, and other things which she had purposely left) together with all her unbequeathed goods, for the erection of a new college in the University of Cambridge, to be called the “Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College, and for the purchasing some competent lands for the maintaining of a Master, ten Fellows, and twenty Scholars, if the said £5000 and unbequeathed goods would thereunto extend.”

On her death in the following year her executors, the Earl of Kent and Sir John Harrington, at once attempted to carry out her wishes. Of them and their endeavour, Fuller, himself a Sidney man, has thus, as always, quaintly written:—

“These two noble executors in the pursuance of the will of this testatrix, according to her desire and direction therein, presented Queen Elizabeth with a jewel, being like a star, of rubies and diamonds, with a ruby in the midst thereof, worth an hundred and forty pounds, having on the back side a hand delivering up a heart into a crown. At the delivery hereof they humbly requested of her Highness a mortmain to found a College, which she graciously granted unto them”—though the royal license did not actually come until five years later. “We usually observe infants born in the seventh month, though poor and pitiful creatures, are vital; and with great care and good attendance, in time prove proper persons. To such a partus septimestris may Sidney College well be resembled, so low, lean, and little at the birth thereof. Alas! what is five thousand pounds to buy the site, build and endow a College therewith?... Yet such was the worthy care of her honourable executors, that this Benjamin College—the least and last in time, and born after (as he at) the death of his mother—thrived in a short time to a competent strength and stature.”[92]