Men who owe nothing to a university—40 great Englishmen—Cambridge men: the scientists, the poets, the dramatists, other literary men, the philosophers, the churchmen, lawyers and physicians, the statesmen. (pp. 250-260.) National movements: King John and the barons—the peasants’ revolt—York and Lancaster—the new world—Charles and the Parliament—James II. and the University—the Declaration of Indulgence—the Nonjurors—William and Mary and Cambridge whiggery—Jacobitism and Toryism at Cambridge in the reign of Anne—George I. and Cambridge—modern political movements. (pp. 260-269.) Religious movements: Lollards, the early reformers, the question of the divorce, Lutheranism at Cambridge, later reformers and the Reformation, the English bible, and service books, the Cambridge martyrs, the Puritans, the Presbyterians, the Independents, the Latitudinarians, the Deists, the evangelical movement, the Tractarian movement, anti-calvinism. (pp. 269-281.) Intellectual movements: the New Learning and the age of Elizabeth—the Royal Society—the Cambridge Platonists—modern science. (pp. 281-291.) Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the university: early Cambridge names—a group of great names in the xiii and xiv centuries—Cambridge men in the historical plays of Shakespeare—genealogical tables of founders—Cantabrigians from the xv century to the present day—Cambridge men who have taken no degree. (pp. 291-309.) WHAT part is played by a university in the life of a people? This can only be gauged by its output of men, its influence on great movements, the trend and character of the learning it fosters and the opinions it encourages. During the centuries in which the English universities have existed, the first degree of excellence has been reached in every department of human knowledge and activity by men whom no university can claim. Shakespeare, Bunyan, Hawkins, Raleigh, Drake, the Hoods, Howard of Effingham, Clive, Warren Hastings, Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington, Scott, Dickens, Keats, Browning, were at no university; the same is true of Smollett, Richardson, and Sheridan. It is noticeable, nevertheless, that the literary names cited include none but poets and novelists. Among scientific men and philosophers, Bishop Butler, Faraday, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Spencer, G. H. Lewes, Buckle, and Grote were not trained at universities—even among the great educationalists, the founders of colleges in our universities and of great public schools, few received an academic education. Some careers, again, are entirely outside the sphere of university influence—admirals and great captains, sailors and soldiers, do not go to universities, and among inventors hardly one hails from a seat of learning. Art, also, is not fostered by an academic atmosphere; painters, architects, and musicians owe nothing to it; and although universities adorn themselves with professorships of the fine arts, and of music, it is not to Nevertheless if we were to take a short list of representative Englishmen, of the men who have influenced and shaped the national life, its religion, its politics, its thoughts, who have helped to realise the English genius and to make England what it is, we should find that a large proportion of those who could have been educated at Cambridge or Oxford were in fact university men. In the following list those who have had a preponderant influence on English education from the vii century onwards, are included:—
Of these, 9 could not have been at a university and are marked †, but of the remaining 31, 23 were at a university; 12 at Cambridge, 10 at Oxford. Two were at both Paris and Oxford, and one was at Paris. In this chapter, however, our concern is with the great men produced by the one university. There are two fields in which Cambridge is and always has been Literature. If the scientific pre-eminence of Cambridge is unquestioned, her poetical pre-eminence is no less absolute. Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson called her mother. In the long list of English poets every poet of first rank (excluding Shakespeare and Keats who were at no university) was at Cambridge, except Shelley who was expelled from Oxford. The dramatist movement from Marlowe to Shirley is one of the most important in our literature. Here for the first time in English history a group of Englishmen set themselves, on leaving the university, to earn an independence by literature—and the opportunity offered them was writing for the players. The dramatists were, with but few exceptions of which the greatest is Shakespeare himself, university men; and of these all who were epoch-marking hail from Cambridge. The list is headed by the first English tragic poet, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great predecessor; and Ben The sonneteers had preceded the dramatists, and the first writer of an English sonnet was another Cambridge man, Sir Thomas Wyatt. All literary initiative, indeed, between the xiv and xviii centuries appears to have come from the one university; the epoch-making representatives of our literature, that is, were Cambridge men: Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe and Ben Jonson (in defect of THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM—EVENING In the distance are seen the square tower of the Pitt Press and Pembroke College. Behind the trees are Peterhouse and the Congregational Church. THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM—EVENING In the distance are seen the square tower of the Pitt Press and Pembroke College. Behind the trees are Peterhouse and the Congregational Church. Shakespeare), Bacon, Milton, Dryden. The last branch of literature, the importance of which is much greater than its literary merit, is journalism. Here, too, Cambridge led the way, though here, as elsewhere, it has not maintained its position. It was Roger Le Strange who as sole licenser and authorised printer and publisher of news, printed the first number of the “London Gazette”; A.D. 1658-78. Marvell’s newsletters to his constituents at Hull were among the earliest attempts at parliamentary reporting. The learned professions. When we turn to philosophy, we find that Cambridge has been singularly poor in metaphysicians, logicians, and political philosophers. Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Oxford all precede her. Among eminent representatives of the learned faculties Cambridge had, with the exception of Segrave, Bateman, and Beaufort, no great churchmen in the xiv century. In the xvth it can boast that it nurtured Thomas Langton,* Fox,* Rotherham,* Alcock,* Tunstall, and Fisher.* In the next century Cambridge has it all its own way, the succession of primates is hers, and nearly every one of the prelates who took the leading parts in that busy century were Cambridge alumni: Fox,* Gardiner,* Latimer,* Ridley,* Cranmer,* Parker,* Grindal,* Whitgift,* Bancroft. Cambridge has also contributed her large share of the lawyers, lords chancellors and chief justices of Statesmen and diplomatists. The roll of Cambridge statesmen is not less distinguished: the two Cecils, Walsingham, Boyle ‘the great earl’ of Cork, of whom Cromwell said that had there been one like him in every province it would have been impossible for the Irish to raise a rebellion; Cromwell himself, Sir W. Temple, Halifax, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Castlereagh, Wilberforce, Stratford de Redcliffe, Palmerston. National movements. The first great national movement in which the groups of scholars and teachers settled at Cambridge and Oxford could have taken part was the conflict with King John under the leadership of Stephen Langton, and the Barons’ war led by Simon de Montfort. Cambridge clerks were implicated in the former, for as soon as Henry III. came to the throne he ordered the expulsion of all those excommunicate scholars who had joined Louis the Dauphin, the Barons’ candidate for the throne of England; and it is surmised that Hugh de Balsham Wars of the Roses. later in the century favoured the side on which Simon de Montfort fought. It was at Cambridge too that the Dauphin held his council after the demise of John. Much had happened at the university between this struggle in the xiii century and the latter part of the A.D. 1378-1381. xivth when the peasants’ revolt again raised the standard of rebellion. The university was no longer a mere aggregate of poor scholars and unendowed teachers, it had long grown into a privileged corporation possessing fine buildings and a full treasury. As such, peasant and burgess bore to it no good will, and Wat Tyler’s riots were seized as the opportunity to burn the university charters, ransack the colleges, and mishandle the masters and scholars. At the neighbouring manor-house of Mildenhall (which had formed part of the historic dowry of Queen Emma the mother of the Confessor) Prior John of Cambridge who was acting at the time as abbot of Bury-St.-Edmund’s, was murdered by the mob. In 1381 Buckingham, after dispersing the revolted peasantry in Essex, held ‘oyer and terminer’ at Cambridge, and the town was among the few which was exempted from the general pardon. Through the next great national crisis Cambridge was Lancastrian. The men of letters of this party, its poets and historians, were Cambridge men, members of Cambridge colleges—Warkworth, Skelton, the Pastons. The Lancastrian sympathies of the university dated indeed from the time of “the good duke” and of John of Gaunt, both of whom befriended it and became patrons of one of its important The colonisation of the new world. We have seen that a Washington lies buried in the ancient chapel of the first Cambridge college, and we are to see further on that the impulse which set the “Mayflower” on her course proceeded from a Cantabrigian. The oldest of the ‘pilgrim fathers’ was a Peterhouse man, persecuted in England for his ‘Brownist’ opinions. There were many university men among the first settlers, but they were chiefly from the one university; and ‘Cambridge’ was the name which rose to their lips when they christened the town in the great state of Massachusetts where they first set foot. Thomas Hooker, one of the founders of Connecticut, was a Cambridge graduate and exercised great influence The Parliament and the Stuarts. No sooner had America been colonised by these exiles for their faith than the English revolution brought about the changes which would have kept them in this country. Both universities declared for the king. The loyalty of Oxford is a household word, and it certainly was not diminished by the fact that Charles had his headquarters in the university town: but Cambridge loyalty was not less; the university plate was sent to Charles at York in A.D. 1642-4. 1642, and among the chests which reached Oxford there were some which arrived safely at the colleges and never arrived anywhere else. A.D. 1643. by the Puritans, and yet another poet and yet another fellow in Richard Crashaw, a royalist born in the year that Shakespeare died, who on refusing to sign the Covenant retired to Paris where he was employed on royalist business by the exiled queen. Isaac Barrow, too, whose father lost everything for the royal cause, and had been with Charles at Oxford when Isaac went up to Trinity, refused the Covenant; and lived to find himself in an increasing solitude amidst A.D. 1645. sermon preached by Brownrigg (Bishop of Exeter) deprived him of the Mastership of S. Catherine’s, and Queens’ College was entirely depopulated by the Parliament men. But contemporary with Herrick and Crashaw there were Cambridge men still more famous, and they espoused the parliamentary cause. Chief of these was the Cambridge poet on the parliament side, John Milton. Both universities suffered severely from the Roundheads, yet together they contributed the chief actors against the king. From Cambridge came Cromwell, Milton, and Hutchinson, from Oxford Ireton, Hampden, and Pym. Anti-monarchical and Puritan opinions were, however, only grafted on the university as a result of the violent measures and the wholesale ejectments carried out by Cromwell and his agents. A.D. 1657. By the middle of the xvii century Cambridge had become Puritan, though here she was outstripped by Oxford which had been Puritan fifty years earlier, before Elizabeth died. Among the “regicides” many were university men; Andrew Marvell and the young Dryden at Cambridge were friends to Oliver: but the The university and James II. The Restoration was welcomed at both universities. The scheme to secure a Protestant succession and the attempt to exclude James now agitated men’s minds. The ‘bill of exclusion’ was condemned both at Oxford and Cambridge; and the earlier Rye House plot was met at the latter by the deposition of Monmouth at that time chancellor of the university. To the loyal addresses sent by both Cambridge and Oxford on the coronation of James II., Cambridge added a condemnation of the attempt to alter the succession. The attitude of the bench of bishops was not less emphatic—only two prelates could be found to sign the invitation to William of Orange. A.D. 1687. This was refused. The vice-chancellor, and with him eight fellows (one of whom was Isaac Newton) was cited to appear at Westminster before the High Commission. Oxford was much more harshly treated, and there is nothing in the history of either university to A.D. 1688. fellows. The Declaration of Indulgence, however admirable in itself, struck a blow at constitutional principles, and introduced the dangerous corollary that he who could loose motu proprio could also bind. The loyal archbishop of Canterbury, a graduate of Emmanuel, with six other prelates refused to publish the Indulgence, and were sent to the Tower. Lloyd of S. Asaph, Lake of Chichester, Turner of Ely, and White of Peterborough were Cantabrigians; Ken of Bath and Wells and Trelawney of Bristol, Oxonians. A.D. 1689. The nonjurors. In the following year five of the seven staunch prelates who had withstood James, refused to take the oath of fealty to William and Mary. The primate, with Turner, Lake, White, and Ken, to whom were joined Lloyd of Norwich The House of Hanover. Although, as we have seen, the two bishops who signed the invitation to William were Oxford men, Oxford had no love for the ‘Roman-nosed Dutchman,’ and William had no love for Oxford. Halifax, William’s henchman, and Nottingham, the leaders of the party which placed William and Mary on the throne, hailed respectively from Cambridge and Oxford: but it was the favour with which Cambridge greeted the accession of the new sovereigns that became the seed of its whiggery. During the reign of Anne, nevertheless, an anti-Hanoverian spirit spread among the younger men. Not only were there Jacobites A.D. 1702-14. among the undergraduates and the junior dons, but a political party was forming which represented the permanent elements in Toryism when separated from Jacobitism. Amongst this party high churchmanship also found refuge. The non-juring clergy still left at the university lived there in close retirement, and helped to swell the ranks neither of the nascent A.D. 1714. A.D. 1715. Jacobitism nor the new high churchism. A new (Oxford) The King observing with judicious eyes, (Sir Wm. Browne Modern politics. When we come to modern politics, the parts are played on the political stage at Westminster. In the radical matter of parliamentary reform, the first step was made by one of Cambridge’s great sons, the younger Pitt, fifty years before a Whig ministry led by Earl Grey, another Cantabrigian, laid the Reform Bill on the table of the House. The claims of America to self government and freedom from taxation were upheld by both the Pitts, by Fox and by Burke, and Cambridge opposed the Manchester school of Liberalism—and Catholic emancipation, Free-trade, Reform bills, and Home Rule for Ireland were all measures which received no support from the Whig-Conservative university. Philanthropy seems to be as far removed from the academic purview as art or practical politics: none of the great humanitarian movements which dignified the xix century took their rise in Cambridge; but Clarkson and Wilberforce were Cambridge men, and Grey abolished slavery itself in 1834. Religious movements. The Lollards. In the century succeeding that which saw the historical birth of our two national universities, the first breath of the early renascence was wafted to our shores: but that dual aspect of the later movement which haunted and shaped its whole course in England had been presaged in a remarkable way, and in Wyclif Oxford gave a forerunner of the religious renascence a hundred years before the advent of the humanistic. Even when Henry IV. ascended the throne, Ralph Spalding, a Carmelite friar, was the only person of note at Cambridge A.D. 1401. suspected of Lollardry; and when Archbishop Arundel set himself to crush Wyclif’s movement at the two universities, the Cambridge harvest was of the poorest. The Reformation. But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement passed from Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as we have The end of the xv century found Cambridge very happily situated. It met the dawn of the religious awakening with a galaxy of men representing the noblest spirit of the time: Fisher, Fox, Thomas Langton, Alcock, Rotherham, even Lady Margaret herself and Erasmus, belonged to Cambridge in a sense which did not apply to Colet and More at Oxford. They constitute a group of Cambridge ‘reformers before the Reformation’ who were eager patrons of the New Learning; and the epoch was marked there by the rise of important college foundations. As a result, the university benefited to an extraordinary degree by gifts of religious lands made not by the hand of the despoiler but by the friends of the old faith. UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF GREAT ST. MARY The original church dates back at least to the thirteenth century and was partially rebuilt in 1351. The present edifice is Perpendicular Gothic, and was begun in 1478 and not completely finished until 1608. It is the largest Parish Church in Cambridge, and the University sermons are preached in it. UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF GREAT ST. MARY The original church dates back at least to the thirteenth century and was partially rebuilt in 1351. The present edifice is Perpendicular Gothic, and was begun in 1478 and not completely finished until 1608. It is the largest Parish Church in Cambridge, and the University sermons are preached in it. Peterhouse had itself been one of the earliest known instances of the conversion of religious property to secular purposes; But the hopes raised in England by the spirit of catholic reform were defeated: and it is again to Cambridge that we must look for the next group of men in the march of events—Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer all drew their inspiration from Cambridge. The divorce of Catherine. Closely allied to the movement for reform was the question of the divorce, and Cranmer, less scrupulous than Wolsey, was the first to suggest a legal solution in the king’s favour. The Church and the universities were invited to emit a (favourable) judgment on the point; and as a result of the tactics to this end the junior leaders at Oxford pronounced in its favour, while the opinion elicited from Cambridge really left the matter where it was before. The university declared that Henry’s marriage with his brother’s wife was illegal if the previous union had been consummated, but no answer was given to Lutheranism. Meanwhile, at the Austinfriars, a Lutheran movement had sprung up. Here, as elsewhere, the community to which Luther himself belonged led the way in the Protestant revolt. Barnes, the Augustinian prior, was the centre of a group of reformers who met at the White Horse inn; and Miles Coverdale, one of his friars, learnt his reforming principles at the Cambridge friary. The meetings at the White Horse were to have consequences which affected the other university. Clerke Cox and Taverner were to form part of the little group of Cambridge scholars who took possession, at Wolsey’s bidding, of Cardinal College, and to provoke the cry of the warden of Wykeham’s house: “We were clear without blot or suspicion till they came!” The famous “Oxford Brethren” were the Cambridge nucleus of the Reform in the sister city. The English bible and service books. The travail of the times, indeed, passed through a series of men who came from the one university—the laboratory of the Reformation was at Cambridge. The English Bible comes from A.D. 1524-68. its hands: Tyndale was the earliest worker, and Coverdale produced the first complete English bible in 1535-6. “Cranmer’s bible” appeared in 1540; “Matthew’s” bible (1537) was the work of the Cambridge martyr John Rogers who had also assisted Tyndale. Amongst the latter’s assistants had been The service books owe as much to the one university: it is the ‘Cambridge mind’ which sets its seal on these formularies. The Cambridge scholars were the best prepared men: Cranmer knew more about liturgies than any one among the reformers; no one but Andrewes was the equal of the catholic divines in patristic knowledge. The prayer book as it stands is in the main Cranmer’s work; Cox and Grindal were on the Windsor Commission which compiled the Communion service in the first Prayer-book of 1549. Nine years later Elizabeth entrusted the revision of Edward VI.’s 1552 Prayer-book to Parker, and Cox and Sir Thomas Smith were among the revisers. In the final revision The Articles of Religion in their original form and number were the work of Cranmer, their reduction to Thirty-nine was the work of another Cambridge primate, Parker. Long however before the reformers had a free hand, Burleigh in his retirement in Lincolnshire had jotted down the names of the eight learned men most fit to carry out the Reform and to settle its formularies when a Protestant queen should succeed. Seven of these men hailed from Cambridge. The Cambridge martyrs. It was not only in what concerned scholarship that the travail of the Reformation belonged to Cambridge. It gave, in the person of Fisher, the only member of the episcopal bench who died for denying the royal supremacy. Early in the reign of Henry VIII. the first group of Cambridge Lutherans gave other martyrs: Bilney, like Barnes, had carried his faggot and recanted Lutheran opinions before Wolsey, but afterwards took new courage and went to the stake for them. The cause left smouldering by the death of Barnes, Bilney, and George Stafford (a fellow of Pembroke) was rekindled by Latimer. Henry himself had examined another Cambridge reformer, John Nicholson (“Lambert”) who denied the corporal presence in the eucharist, and that royal and rigid sacramentarian had condemned him. “Pleasant Taylor” “making himself merry with the stake” was another Cantabrigian. The death of Fisher, chancellor of the university, was followed by a wholesale ejection of the professors of the ancient learning, and the man who died for his denial of that ‘anglican solecism’ the royal supremacy was immediately succeeded by the man who first suggested it to Henry—Thomas Cromwell. The Puritan. The next religious movement in the country was the Puritan, against which we know that Elizabeth fought as lustily as Henry had combated Lutheranism. Despite the fact that there were Puritan nuclei, as there had earlier been Lutheran nuclei, at Cambridge, Puritanism was eventually imposed on the university only by the same violent means as had banished the old religion—wholesale ejections. The Anglican heads of colleges were turned out, under Oliver, to be replaced by Puritan Masters, in precisely the same way as Thomas Cromwell had replaced the Catholics by men who accepted the royal supremacy. Early Presbyterianism. One of these early nuclei of Puritanism was fomented by Thomas Cartwright, and Thomas Aldrich, Master of Corpus, became the leader of the Cambridge Puritans. Cartwright was one of the first Presbyterians, and canvassed the English counties in the interest of that form of Church government. The Brownists or Independents. Milton had no liking for the Westminster Assembly; with Cromwell he sympathised with the rising Independent Congregations who took their principles from the Brownists of Elizabeth’s time. Of the five movements which were still to sweep over the face of religious England, two originated in Cambridge. How inept the university is to the creation of such schools of thought, how alien to its genius such creations are, may be gauged by the comparatively puny character of these two movements. The Brownists and the Cambridge Platonists do not suggest a world set ablaze; but though ineffective as A.D. 1620. of Brownists which eventually set out in two ships for the new world, one of which—the “Mayflower”—reached what is now the State of Massachusetts. The Brownists were the first party of separatists from the newly established Church in England, and the old and new worlds recognise in them the true spiritual forbears of all Independent and Congregational Churches; whose ecclesiastical polity requires that each congregation should suffice to itself, be complete in itself. The Latitudinarians. In the next century arose the liberal church movement of Hales, Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor. Falkland, the great layman who inspired it, had been educated at Dublin university, but was entered for S. John’s College as early as 1621, and claimed in after life, in a letter to the then Master, to have been a member of that society. Taylor was a Cambridge man who had removed to Oxford; Hales and Chillingworth were both distinguished Oxford scholars. The distinction made by Taylor and Chillingworth between essential and non-essential articles of Deism. The xvii and xviii centuries saw the rise and progress of Deism. Lord Herbert of Cherbury The Evangelical movement. The evangelical movement is entirely associated with the names of John and Charles Wesley and Whitfield—with a group of Oxford men. There was no principle of ecclesiastical polity and none of philosophy underlying it: it was a fervent religious revival begun within the Church of England and ending outside it, and as such the great influence it has exerted would appear to have presented few attractions for the Cambridge mind. The Tractarian movement, and the earlier Cambridge movement. The ‘Tractarian movement’ which also arose as a renewal of religious life in the Church of England, was, like Wesleyanism, due exclusively to Oxford men. A still earlier ‘High Church’ movement—a ritualistic movement before ‘Tractarianism’—had however found its home in Cambridge under the auspices of Andrewes, Wren, and Cosin. These three men, later bishops of Winchester, Ely, and Durham respectively, established a type of Reformed churchmanship not only more tolerant and scholarly than Laud’s but one which was more genuinely a university movement; for it was indigenous—its patrons were all heads of Cambridge houses—and it did not meet, as did Laud’s efforts at Oxford, with dislike and rejection at the university. Two hundred years passed before the Tractarian movement at Oxford reproduced its likeness and tendered it to Englishmen as the vera effigies of the Church of The age of Elizabeth and the New Learning. The pre-eminence of Cambridge during the age of Elizabeth would be in itself sufficient proof of its relation to the New Learning—to the revival of letters and of Greek, the rise of experimental science, and the theological speculations of the century. Round Elizabeth there gathered from the first to the last days of her reign a brilliant group of men—scholars, poets, tutors, prelates, lawyers, statesmen, philosophers, travellers, explorers. Every name we chance upon, every man who influenced the court, the letters, the science of the day, hails from Cambridge. The tutors of Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth had all been Cambridge men, and Cambridge men were appointed as their physicians and chaplains. Names like those of Skelton, Fisher, Erasmus, Croke, Tyndale, Ascham, Sir Thomas Smith, and Cheke; of Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey and Caius, conjure up a picture of the scholarship of the age, of the new stir in thought, letters, and learning. Let us look at two other well-defined groups of Elizabethans—the statesmen and the In the last place the New Learning of the Tudor age was carried from Cambridge to the sister university. It was so well understood that Cambridge represented this new learning that Wolsey went there for the men who, by colonising Cardinal College, were to introduce The schoolmasters. The last half of the xv century brought with it the great schoolmasters. Mulcaster of Eton and King’s was master of Merchant-Taylors’ on its foundation; Colet’s school, S. Paul’s, sent to Cambridge for its second head, and five of its first eight head masters were Cambridge and King’s men. King’s College has supplied a large proportion of the Provosts and head masters of Eton, many of the famous masters of Harrow, and a King’s man counts as the creator of Rugby “as it now is.” Ascham’s “Schoolmaster” was epoch-making, and his connexion with his university was much closer than William Lily’s with Oxford. The Royal Society A.D. 1660-62. The brilliant epoch of Elizabeth spent, intellectual life smouldered during the reigns of the first two Stuarts and the Protectorate, to be renewed and rekindled not by fresh literary activity but by the inquisitive temper which invaded the nation as it emerged, with the Restoration, from civil conflict and the slough of doctrinal wrangling. This inquisitiveness took shape in the institution of the Royal Society. The foyer of the Royal Society was London, although some of its most distinguished members migrated later with Wilkins to Oxford. Of the eminent men who formed the first Royal Society Wallis, Wilkins, Foster, Jonathan Goddard, Sir William Ball, Lawrence Rooke, The Cambridge Platonists. The next movement in English thought was both religious and philosophical. When Latitudinarianism ceased to be ecclesiastical it passed from Oxford and became identified with the sister university. The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal ecclesiastical polity. The new movement was something more, something finer. Cambridge now This academic group forms, as Tulloch points out, not only “one of the most characteristic groups in the history of religious and philosophical thought in England,” but one of the most homogeneous. Whichcote’s aphorism “There is nothing more unnatural to religion than contentions about it” sums an epoch in religious thought. Questions of Church order and Church policy were left aside, to philosophise; the clash of ecclesiastical parties ceased to trouble, and an academic enquiry into the relation of philosophy to religion takes its place. Neither Puritan nor Presbyterian had brought any such liberating attitude towards theology, for which indeed the early Protestantism cared not one jot, but which has never entirely died out of England since the speculations of the Cambridge Nevertheless, the Cambridge Platonists were ineffective. Their philosophy lacked a touchstone, concentration; and they allied its fate to a ridiculous bibliology. For More, who taught at the university which gave us our school of biblical critics—Erasmus, Colenso, Westcott, Lightfoot, Hort—the wisdom of the Hebrew had been transmitted to Pythagoras, and And if we ask why Cambridge should be Platonist, the answer is because it always resisted the Aristotelianism of the Schools. Reaction against scholasticism had brought Plato to Florence in the xv century, it made Plato at home in Cambridge in the xviith. We have called Cambridge the laboratory of the Reformation; there too, we see, was made the first attempt to reconcile Protestantism with philosophy: in undoing the servitude of the latter to religion, which had been the mark of the middle ages, the Cambridge Platonists did away with medievalism, joined hands, behind its back, with that Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrine schools which had influenced the early Church, defied, of course, scholasticism, and prepared the place for our modern moral sciences tripos. Modern science. We have already seen that Cambridge is the representative in England of the scientific movement which has changed the face of the modern world. It may perhaps be pretended that the stages of its development in Europe have been marked by the great men emanating from this one university. The names of Bacon, Gilbert, Harvey, Flamsteed, Newton, Darwin, are signposts of the direction which science was to take and landmarks of its achievements. ADDENBROKE’S HOSPITAL IN TRUMPINGTON STREET This building, as we now see it, was remodelled by Sir M. Digby Wyatt 1864-65. ADDENBROKE’S HOSPITAL IN TRUMPINGTON STREET This building, as we now see it, was remodelled by Sir M. Digby Wyatt 1864-65. William Gilbert the discoverer of terrestrial magnetism and of the affinity of magnetic and electric action, was praised by Galileo, while Erasmus called him “great to a degree which is enviable.” Flamsteed began that series of observations which initiated modern astronomy, Horrox came still earlier, and they have been followed by such Cantabrigians as Newton, Nevil Maskelyne, Herschell, Airy and Adams. Newton and Darwin are two of the greatest names in the history of the physical and physiological sciences—they stand out as creators of epochs in the march of human knowledge: on Newton’s statue in Trinity chapel are inscribed the words qui genus humanum ingenio superavit—of whom else could they be spoken?—Darwin has revolutionised our thoughts in spheres far removed from those directly affected by his great hypothesis. When we turn to consider the relation of these distinguished sons to the university which bred them, it is interesting to find how close this has always been. From the first makers of Cambridge to the last, from its earliest distinguished sons to its latest, the individual’s relation to the university has been a close one and the same names come down the centuries and create a homogeneity in Cambridge history which has certainly not received its due meed of recognition. A group of persons—of families—is already assembled in this remote eastern corner of England in the xiii and xiv centuries which contains the elements of our university history: Stantons, de Burghs, Walsinghams, The name of Clare figures on every page of the history of the Plantagenets. The first Gilbert de Clare had been employed to terrorise the East Anglians who held out against William; another Gilbert is at the head of the barons, his son is the guardian of Magna A.D. 1248. to send timber from her estates towards the building of the king’s Hall, as Queen Elizabeth sent a similar gift just two hundred years afterwards to the king’s college of Trinity. The Clares had received 95 lordships in Suffolk, which formed “the honour of Clare,” and they gave their name to the county in Ireland. Through Ralph de Monthermer the founders of Clare and Pembroke were allied, for he was Elizabeth de Clare’s stepfather, and afterwards brother-in-law to Aymer de Valence (see Tables I, II). A.D. 1198. A.D. 1225. We first hear of the de Burghs in 1198 when Thomas, brother to Hubert the king’s chamberlain, became guardian to a Bury ward. In 1225 a de Burgh was bishop of Ely, and a hundred years later John de Burgh the 4th earl of Connaught and 2nd earl of Ulster married with Elizabeth de Clare. Towards A.D. 1385 the end of the xiv century another de Burgh, author of the “Pupilla oculi” was chancellor of the university, and it is he who purchased the land of S. Margaret’s hostel in 1368. A.D. 1291. The connexion of the Mortimers with Cambridge also dates from the xiii century: Guy de Mortimer The name of Walsingham occurs as that of a prior of Ely in 1353. The Walsinghams held two manors A.D. 1344. in Suffolk, besides land in Cambridge part of which was sold to the king for the site of King’s Hall. A.D. 1290-1299. There was a Ralph Walpole bishop of Ely, and subsequently of Norwich in the time of Edward I., who gave a messuage to Peterhouse as early as 1290. The Walpoles continued to figure on the roll of this college till in the xvi century the Walpole of that day fled with the Jesuit Parsons to Spain after the trial of Campian; he became vice-rector at Valladolid but was eventually martyred at York five years before the close of the century. Robert and Horace Walpole continued the Cambridge traditions of their family. With the xiv century other names appear: the Scropes, Gonvilles, Stantons, The connexion of the Scropes with Cambridge A.D. 1371. Scrope, and the Master of Pembroke in 1371, and the Scropes A.D. 1414. Richard Earl of Cambridge “—— Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, in their dear care, And tender preservation of our person”—— are the words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Henry V. before his discovery of their treachery. Shakespeare and Cambridge men. Indeed the historical plays of Shakespeare, from the dawn of our university history in the reign of John to its zenith in that of Henry VIII., place prominently before us our Cambridge protagonists. In “King John” the names of Louis the Dauphin, Chatillon, and de Burgh recall the Cambridge In the xv century we have some new names. Zouche is there still, and Scrope, and Bassett, and Beaufort, but there are also Langton, Stafford, Pole, Brandon, Stanley, and Babington. In the xvi century Stanley, Brandon, Stafford, Sidney, Audley, Bacon and Cecil, are all prominent names. These various groups are not independent. The annexed pedigrees will show us that the Clares, Mortimers, de Burghs, Audleys, and Staffords had intermarried: that Valence and Chatillon, Mortimer, The names of great Cantabrigians hardly ever appear singly in the annals of the university, and as there are family groups among founders so there are also among its other benefactors and distinguished representatives. Babington, Bacon, Beaumont, Bryan, Cavendish, Cecil, Coleridge, Darwin, Devereux, Fletcher, Greville, Harvey, Langton, Lightfoot, Lytton, Manners, Montague, Neville, Newton, Palmer, Shepard, Taylor, Thackeray, Temple, Wordsworth—all form such groups, and have provided the university not only with great names, but with a family history. No name has clung more steadily to Cambridge than Babington—it was known there at least as early as the xv century, and was that of the 25th abbot of Bury in the time of Henry VI. Henry Babington was vice-chancellor in 1500; Dr. Humphrey Babington built the two sets of rooms on the south side of Nevile’s court known as ‘the Babington rooms,’ in 1681, and his family have given prominent members to the university ever since. One of the Bacons was the last Master of Gonville, and Nicholas Bacon and his two sons were at Corpus and Trinity. Beaumont is a Peterhouse name; but in the reign of Elizabeth Dr. Robert Beaumont was Master of Trinity and vice-chancellor, and a Beaumont was Master of Peterhouse Temp. Ric. ii. 1380-1397. in the xviii century. Towards the end of the xiv century William Cavendish was fellow and master of the same college, and John Cavendish had been chancellor in 1380. In Gray’s time Lord John Cavendish was at Cambridge, in the next century Henry The Cecils appear at Cambridge with the rise of Burleigh’s family in Elizabeth’s reign, and they were connected with the Bacons a family which also came into prominence at the same time; the great Bacon was Burleigh’s nephew, and the Cecils were kinsmen of other celebrated Cambridge men—Cheke, Hatton, Howard, and the founder of the Brownists. Moreover one of the early Cecils had been made water Temp. Hen. viii. bailiff of Whittlesey (‘bailiff of Whittlesey mere’) and keeper of the swans in the fen district. William, first Lord Burleigh, was born in his mother’s house at Bourn—the place which gave its name to the barony held successively by Hereward, Picot, and Peverel. The third and fifth lords married with the Manners, the sixth with a Cavendish. Both the Cecils of Elizabeth’s time were chancellors of the university; Burleigh’s eldest son Thomas Earl of Exeter and Lady Dorothy Nevill his wife gave no less than £108 a year to Clare Hall, and ‘Mr. Cecil’ was moderator when James visited the university in 1615. Darwin had been preceded at Cambridge by old Erasmus Darwin, botanist and poet, the ‘Sweet Harmonist of Flora’s court’ as Cowper calls the ancestor of the man who gave us the great harmonizing hypothesis of the century. The Suffolk name of Hervey is another which has always figured in Cambridge—there was Hervey Dunning in the xiiith and Hervey de Stanton in the xiv century; a Harvey succeeded Gardiner and Haddon in the Mastership of Trinity Hall, of which he was a considerable benefactor, and was vice-chancellor in 1560, Gabriel Harvey, a kinsman of Sir Thomas Smith’s, was a fellow of this college and of Pembroke, William Harvey was at Caius. Langton Other Cambridge names claim attention. There had been Latimers and Ridleys at Cambridge before the Protestant martyrs. Aldrich belongs to the xvi and xvii centuries. Byngham was not first heard of when the parson of S. John Zachary built God’s House, but is the name of no less a personage than the first Master of Pembroke (Thomas Byngham), and another William Byngham was proctor A.D. 1570. in the year when Whitgift was vice-chancellor. One of the Bassetts was proctor as late as 1488, and Roger —— bounteous Buckingham The mirror of all courtesey. Stokys and Stokes was a well-known name before Sir George Stokes went to Pembroke; Sedgwick was on the papist side in the controversy held before Edward VI.’s commissioners; Tyndale, like Aldrich, belongs to the xvi and xvii centuries. Fitzhugh is a name which flourished at the university in the xv and early xvi centuries. Parker, Paston, The subject of university men must not be dismissed without noticing how many of the most distinguished Cantabrigians never earned a degree. We have already seen (in chapter iii.) that in some periods of greatest intellectual achievement the examination tests at the university were wholly inadequate: what follows is a list of great and prominent men who took no degree at all:—Bacon, Byron, Macaulay (fellow of Trinity), Gray (professor of history), The Oxford roll of non-graduates is not less distinguished: Sir Thomas More, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney, Wolsey, Massinger and Beaumont the dramatists, Shaftesbury, Gibbon, Shelley—while Halley the astronomer took his M.A. by royal mandamus, and Locke’s degree was irregular. Dublin university has not a dissimilar tale to tell; Burke failed to distinguish himself there, and Swift was given a degree speciali gratia. |