Chapter V: University Men and National Movements (1)

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 them that we go for definitions of art, or for an output of artists. In Orlando Gibbons, indeed, Cambridge possessed a native musician whose compositions and unrivalled technique as an organist place him in the first rank of musical Englishmen; but while nearly every English artist owes something to a _wanderjahr_ in Italy, scarcely one ever resided at a university.

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:--

vii-viii c. Bede.†
vii c. Hild.*†[380]
viii c. Alcuin.*†
ix c. Alfred.†
xii c. Stephen Langton (Paris).
“ Grosseteste* Oxford (and Paris).
xiii c. Roger Bacon (Paris) and Oxford.
“ Edward I.†
xiv c. Wyclif Oxford.
“ Chaucer Cambridge.
“ William of Wykeham*[381] none.
xiv-xv c. Lady Margaret.*†
xv-xvi c. Colet* Oxford.
“ Bishop Fisher* Cambridge.
“ Wolsey Oxford.
xvi c. Sir Thomas More Oxford.
“ Cranmer Cambridge.
“ Ascham* Cambridge.
“ Elizabeth†
“ Drake none.
“ Raleigh[382] none.
“ Sir Philip Sidney Oxford.
“ Lord Bacon Cambridge.
xvi-xvii c. Shakespeare none.
“ Harvey Cambridge.
“ Cromwell Cambridge.
“ Milton Cambridge.
“ Jeremy Taylor Cambridge.
“ Bunyan none.
“ Locke Oxford.
“ Newton Cambridge.
xvii-xviii c. Marlborough none.
xviii c. Wesley Oxford.
“ Clive none.
xviii-xix c. Nelson† none.
“ Pitt Cambridge.
xix c. John Stuart Mill none.
“ Darwin Cambridge.
“ Gladstone[383] Oxford.
“ Florence Nightingale†[384]

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 _facile princeps_. She has nurtured all the great scientists, and all the great poets. The discoveries of world-wide importance have been the work of Cambridge men--such were the three which revolutionised the science of the world, the laws of the circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of evolution. From Bacon the founder of experimental philosophy to Darwin and Kelvin, every great name is a Cambridge name, if we except indeed the few who like Wallace, Humphry Davy, Faraday, and the elder Herschell owe nothing to a university.

[Sidenote: 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 Jonson the greatest of his younger contemporaries was also a Cambridge man. Lyly who created the art tradition of English comedy, went to Cambridge from Oxford and there graduated _M.A._ Lodge after leaving Oxford went to Avignon, took his _M.D._ degree there, and on returning to England went to Cambridge. Shirley, the last of the dramatists, went from Oxford to Cambridge.[385]

The sonneteers had preceded the dramatists, and the first writer of an English sonnet was another Cambridge man, Sir Thomas Wyatt.[386] Surrey whose university, if he went to one, was certainly Cambridge, wrote the first blank verse. The first English essayist was Bacon, and he takes his place in literature by another tide, because he was the first to adapt our language as the vehicle for a scientific literature. Of the five men who in the great days of the flowering of English poesy wrote about the art of verse Spenser, Webbe, Harvey, Sidney, and Puttenham, the first three, whose contribution is also the most important, were Cambridge men.

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

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.[389] The first history of English literature also comes from the hand of a Cantabrigian, John Bale. There are two other classes of English literature to which reference must be made. The novelists as we have already seen have not been _alumni_ of our universities, partly because this is a field in which women have attained the highest rank, partly because there seems to be that something more of the artistic afflatus in the novelist’s craft and that something less of the academic, as compared with the other forms of literature, which we should à priori have certainly predicated of poetry also. A list of the novelists, from Mrs. Afra Behn to George Meredith would however show how different is the case of the novelists to that of the poets.

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”;[390] and Andrew

[Sidenote: A.D. 1658-78.]

Marvell’s newsletters to his constituents at Hull were among the earliest attempts at parliamentary reporting.

[Sidenote: 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.[391] In the xvii century Andrewes,* Cosin,* Williams* the opponent of Laud, Taylor, Stillingfleet, and the primates Bancroft, Sancroft, Tillotson, Tenison, represented the university.

Cambridge has also contributed her large share of the lawyers, lords chancellors and chief justices of England, from Thorpe, Cavendish and Beaufort in the reigns of Edward III. and his successors to Booth, Rotherham, Alcock, Fox, Ruthall, Goodrich, Wriothesley, Gardiner, Heath, Coke, the two Bacons, Williams, Guilford and Lyndhurst in later times. The great physicians, Caius, “Butler of Cambridge,” Gilbert, Harvey, Wharton, Sydenham,[392] Paris, Grew, Sir William Browne and Sir Samuel Garth, were all Cambridge men, and illustrate the early history of medicine from the xvi century to the xixth.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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 colleges; and the intimate connexion with the House of Beaufort, which began when Cardinal Beaufort studied at Peterhouse,[393] culminated when Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII., crowned by her singular benefactions the sympathies of the university for the House of Lancaster. Edward IV. had not loved Cambridge, had indeed robbed Henry VI.’s college of its revenues; but it was there that the royal houses laid down the sword to join in a work of scholarly peace, and few episodes in the annals of a university are more interesting than the building of Queens’ College by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville, and the labours of Lady Margaret in whose son were at length reconciled the rival claims of York and Lancaster.

[Sidenote: 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 among the New England settlers. John Eliot, “the Indian apostle,” had graduated at Cambridge in 1622; and Harvard, the ‘Cambridge’ of the new world, was founded by another of her sons.

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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.[394] The royalist poet was a Cambridge man with a Devonshire cure, Robert Herrick. Cambridge also supplied ‘the first cavalier poet’ John Cleveland, who lost his fellowship for the king, Abraham Cowley, ejected in the same way

[Sidenote: 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 the growing Puritanism of the university. A royalist

[Sidenote: 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.[395]

[Sidenote: 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 Presbyterian Wallis, a member of Emmanuel College and later one of the founders of the Royal Society, protested against the king’s death warrant which met with the approval of such men as Milton, Hampden, and Hutchinson.

[Sidenote: 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.[396] It was with these facts before him that James set to work to affront a loyal clergy and the two loyal seats of learning; and thus gave to each a rare occasion of proving their quality. The king first attempted to force the hand of the universities, and began by ordering Cambridge to confer the _M.A._ degree on a Catholic.

[Sidenote: 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 surpass the splendid resistance of Magdalen College to tyranny, during which it was twice depleted of its

[Sidenote: 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.[397] Perhaps never since the primacy of Stephen Langton had the Church in England been so popular, or shown itself so ready to slough the servilism which attends on state Churches.

[Sidenote: A.D. 1689.]

[Sidenote: 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[398] and Frampton of Gloucester, headed some 400 of the clergy as ‘Nonjurors.’ Under Bancroft the non-juring clergy established a schism in the English Church which lasted till the xix century. The Cambridge Sherlock had at first the greatest influence among them, but neither he nor Ken followed them in the subsequent schism. If another Cambridge man, Jeremy Collier, was the ablest of the nonjurors, Dodwell, a Dublin man, and professor of Ancient History at Oxford, was the most erudite.

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: A.D. 1714.]

Jacobitism nor the new high churchism. A new

[Sidenote: A.D. 1715.]

vice-chancellor, favourable to the House of Hanover, followed a Jacobite predecessor just in time to present a loyal address to George I. on his accession. This was rewarded by the splendid gift of Bishop Moore’s library; while at Oxford, where the Jacobites were more noisy and had just made the anniversary of the Pretender’s birthday the occasion for a disturbance, two Jacobite officers were placed under arrest, and a troop of horse was quartered in the city. These events gave rise to the following couplets:

(Oxford) The King observing with judicious eyes,
The state of both his Universities,
To one he sends a regiment; for why?
That _learned_ body wanted _loyalty_.
To th’ other books he gave, as well discerning
How much that _loyal_ body wanted _learning_.

* * * * *

(Sir Wm. Browne
for Cambridge)

The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse:
For Tories own no _argument_ but _force_.
With equal care to Cambridge books he sent:
For Whigs allow no _force_ but _argument_.

[Sidenote: 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 opposed by Samuel Johnson. The Whigs, as we know, were, as a whole, of Johnson’s mind in the matter.

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

[Sidenote: A.D. 1807-34.]

abolished slavery itself in 1834.

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: The Reformation.]

But with the blaze of the renascence the reform movement passed from Oxford to Cambridge. Great national movements, as we have seen, are seldom the consequence of an opinion of the Schools. The struggles of the barons, the parliamentary wars, the restoration, the revolution which placed William and Mary on the throne, were not prepared in any university. But there is one exception--and the prime part in that reawakening of the human mind which issued in the English Reformation, must be assigned to the university of Cambridge. Here was laid the intellectual and historical basis of the reformed religion, and Cambridge produced the men and the minds which created the ecclesiastical order, the liturgy, and the service books deemed suitable to the reformed faith. The stones of Cambridge are indeed a monument to the academic and intellectual form of Protestantism, as the cathedral at Orvieto is a monument to the crudest form of eucharistic doctrine.

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.

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;[399] but in the xv and early xvi century the instances crowd upon us. Henry VI. bestowed on King’s College and on God’s House land from the alienated priories; Alcock obtained from the Pope the dissolution of the Benedictine nunnery which he converted into Jesus College; Lady Margaret endowed Christ’s College with abbey lands; her stepson the Bishop of Ely dissolved the Canons’ House of S. John’s bestowing its property upon the new S. John’s College; and Mary gave monastic property to Trinity.

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.

[Sidenote: 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 the second question--whether the pope possessed the dispensing power. This was no answer at all, and undermined neither the king’s position nor the pope’s.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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

[Sidenote: 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 Roy, a Cambridge Franciscan, and Scory, a Cambridge Dominican.[400] The “Bishop’s bible” was published under the auspices of the Cambridge primate, Parker; and other scholars associated in the work of translation were Clerke and Dillingham of Christ’s, Layfield, Harison, and Dakins of Trinity, Sir Thomas Smith, and Bishops Andrewes and Heath.[401] Erasmus’ New Testament had appeared under the auspices of Warham, and of three Cambridge men, Fisher, Fox, and Tunstall.[402]

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 of 1660 Cosin rendered great services; and even when the still-born attempt was made to revise the liturgy in the reign of William and Mary, the task was once more assigned to Cambridge men, Tenison, and Patrick who was set to mutilate the collects.

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.[403] Whitgift drew up for Elizabeth the famous “Lambeth Articles”; and when the vexed subject of the Athanasian creed agitated the ecclesiastical commission of 1689 as it is agitating the national Church now--then, as now, when Cambridge heads of houses, professors of divinity, and deans and tutors of colleges have signed a declaration in favour of its excision from the public services, two Cambridge men protested--the one against its retention, the other against its unqualified damnatory clauses.[404] Dryden had already made a similar protest.

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.[405]

[Sidenote: 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.[406] The first man to die for his faith when Mary’s reign opened was Rogers of Pembroke[407]; and “the hardiest” of the Marian Martyrs was another Cambridge man, Bradford. As she had nurtured the only martyr-bishop on the Catholic side, so Cambridge nurtured the Protestant group of prelates who died at the stake: Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer are three Cambridge martyrs whose only title to be known as “the Oxford martyrs” is that Oxford burnt them. It must not be forgotten, also, that one of the fifteen heroic London Carthusians, martyred at Tyburn in 1535, was William Exmew of Christ’s.

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.[408]

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 movement was checked by Elizabeth, and Cartwright was driven from his professorship. Later on the Puritan Tuckney was Regius professor of Divinity as Cartwright had been Margaret Professor. Presbyterianism was not congenial to the university: Hall Bishop of Norwich, the satirist who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and Archbishop Williams the life-long opponent of Laud, both went to the Tower for protesting against the acts of the Long Parliament, and Hall though he was a noted ‘low-churchman’ remonstrated against the proposed abolition of episcopacy. Among still more eminent Cantabrigians, Jeremy Taylor was as much opposed to its abolition as Milton favoured it: but when, in 1643-4, the Westminster Assembly met, Wallis the Cambridge scientist acted as its secretary, the Oxonian Selden being another of the thirty laymen present at its deliberations.

[Sidenote: 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 schools both of them represented far-reaching principles, and have left a lasting impression on Anglo-Saxon religion. It is easy to show this in the case of the Brownists: for Browne was the spiritual father of the Pilgrim Fathers, of the men who colonised a continent to obtain space to form those free Church communities which many Englishmen regarded as the logical completion of the principles of the Reformation. The English refugees at Amsterdam were disciples and adherents of Robert Browne, and it was a little company

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 belief was very far ahead of the theoretical and practical narrowness of the German Protestantism around them. The problem at issue was stated by Stillingfleet,[409] “fresh from the generous intellectual life of Cambridge,” on the eve of the Restoration: Does there exist, in regard to Church government, any such _jus divinum_ as would prevent men, under the stress of circumstances, learning from each other, and arriving at unity? The doctrine of _accommodation_ stated in his _Eirenicum_, though it was not in advance of the earlier speculation of Ussher, Chillingworth, Taylor, and Hales, anticipated later developments of theological speculation with which we are all familiar.

[Sidenote: Deism.]

The xvii and xviii centuries saw the rise and progress of Deism. Lord Herbert of Cherbury[410] “the father of deism” was educated at Oxford; the great opponent of his doctrines was the Cambridge philosopher Samuel Clarke. Nevertheless deism was not a university movement. Bolingbroke, Morgan, and Blount (1654-93) were at no university; Shaftesbury (b. 1621) and Tindal had been at Oxford; Woolston and Anthony Collins (b. 1676) had been at Cambridge; and Toland after a residence at three other universities, retired to Oxford. Conyers Middleton, librarian of Trinity, was another opponent of the deists. Like unitarianism, deism undoubtedly responds to a certain temper of English religious speculation and sentiment, but apparently to no very wide-spread temper; and the success of English deism was consummated not here but on the continent.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 England.[411] The influence on religion of Charles Simeon and other Cambridge men in ante-Tractarian days should also be remembered; neither should it be forgotten that the liberal anti-Calvinistic churchmanship of Peter Baro and Overall was first taught by Cambridge men.

[Sidenote: 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 churchmen. The two Cecils, Walsingham, Haddon and Fletcher (Masters of the Requests), Bacon, Knollys, Sussex, Smith, and Mildmay were all Cambridge men; and so were all Elizabeth’s great prelates: Lancelot Andrewes, her chaplain, and dean of Westminster, and the primates Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift: and they represented every party in the country. Fulke Greville the most fortunate of the Queen’s favourites, Sir John Harrington her godson, and Essex, were also Cambridge men. Among the gallant little company of the first adventurers one only is known to have studied at a university, and he was at Cambridge: Sir Thomas Gresham conducted the expedition fitted out by Raleigh which resulted in the discovery of Virginia--named after the virgin queen--and in the introduction of the tobacco leaf. Cavendish, a Corpus man, brought to England the tobacco called after him. Clifford, third earl of Cumberland, a Trinity man, was one of the early privateers and navigators; and young Roger Manners, of Queens’ and Corpus, went the “Islands Voyage” with Robert Devereux who had studied at Trinity. Even Drake, who was at no university, is known as a Cambridge benefactor, and was as we have seen a large subscriber to the chapel of Corpus Christi College.

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 it at Oxford; and Fox of Pembroke founded a belated _Corpus Christi College_ with the express purpose of erecting a monument in Oxford to the Renaissance.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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, Sir William Petty, Ward the mathematician, Ray, Woodward the mineralogist, Flamsteed, Sloane, Boyle, Halley, Chief-Justice Hale, Lord Keeper Guilford, with Sprat the Bishop of Rochester (its historian), Cowley and Dryden (its poets), and Sir Robert Moray--Wallis, Foster, Rooke, Ray, Woodward, Flamsteed, Guilford, Cowley, and Dryden, were Cantabrigians. Four of the most prominent, Ward, Boyle, Sloane and Ball, were at no university; Goddard went from Oxford to Cambridge where he graduated; Petty though he became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford was educated at foreign universities; Moray was at S. Andrews and Paris; Wilkins, Halley, Hale, and Sprat were at Oxford. Among the first fellows there came from Oxford Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, Hook of the microscope, Sydenham: More the Platonist, Sir William Temple, Willughby the ornithologist, and Grew, came from Cambridge. Two more of Charles’s courtiers joined Moray, Kenelm Digby from Oxford, and Villiers Duke of Buckingham from Cambridge.

[Sidenote: 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.[412] Here it was handled by a group of men, from the two colleges Emmanuel and Christ’s, so as to embrace a moral and political philosophy, to which the term _Platonist_ is only aptly ascribed if it be meant to stand for the “mass of transcendental thought”; that traditional Platonism of the speculative schools which had succeeded one another down the centuries, always at war with nominalism and constantly asserting the transcendent character of moral ideas and the reality of free will. Hobbism came to assail this position; for Hobbes applied Bacon’s method to the moral and social order, and found the basis for them in certain obvious facts of human nature. The spirit of enquiry set afoot by the Cambridge Platonists was none the less real because it was opposed to such tenets. They set themselves, in fact, to enquire whether authority and tradition should guide men in matters of faith. They asserted that reason was supreme, and they sought to place Christianity again--to place Protestantism for the first time--under the protection of that noble spiritual idealism which the great thinkers of the early Church had chosen for the new faith; to penetrate Christianity with philosophy.[413]

The early Latitudinarianism was merely an essay in liberal ecclesiastical polity. The new movement was something more, something finer. Cambridge now gathered up the floating philosophical speculation which existed in the xvii century side by side with the intense absorption in dogmatic wranglings, the rapid growth of sects--of Anabaptists, Antinomians, anti-Trinitarians, Arians. “A kind of moral divinity,” as Whichcote’s tutor, the Puritan Tuckney, cried out in alarm, was to be substituted for theological polemic. The movement indeed was due to the combination of a higher spirituality than the Puritan with the new spirit of bold enquiry in moral and speculative fields[414]--it constituted a Cambridge reaction against the trammels of Puritanism. It was the first of all English religious movements (not excepting Wycliffism) to ally a growth of the religious sentiment with the demand for a wide and liberal theoretical basis to theology. At the head of this theological movement stands Benjamin Whichcote (_b._ 1609) tutor of Emmanuel, who numbered among his pupils Wallis, Smith, and Culverwell, and who was afterwards Provost of King’s. Ralph Cudworth (_b._ in Somersetshire 1617) is perhaps the central figure: he is great as a moral philosopher, great in his impartial statement of an opponent’s case, great even in his freedom from the party and political heat which consumed his contemporaries.[415] In John Smith (_b._ 1616) of Emmanuel[416] the movement becomes more speculative, his was the finest and most richly stored mind, and his “Select Discourses” perhaps mark the culminating point of the Cambridge school. There remains Henry More (_b._ 1614) the better known name, of Christ’s College, the exponent of Descartes, the ardent follower of Plato, from whom he learnt “that something better and higher than the knowledge of human things constitutes the supreme happiness of man.” His _Enchiridion ethicum_ and _Enchiridion metaphysicum_ were the text books of the school.

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 Platonists.[417] The Englishman--fed with the crude dogmatism of Luther, the arid ecclesiasticism of Laud, the dull fancy of the Puritan, and the intolerance of all three--now for the first time was called dispassionately to consider the claims of the philosophical reason, the eternal distinction between essential and non-essential--a distinction anathema to the ordinary Protestant--fundamental and non-fundamental, between the reality and the figure; to the claims, in fine, of those ontological verities on which belief in the revealed verities ultimately depends. A “rational Christian eclecticism” was for the first time presented to Protestants, and in so far anticipated the principle upon which the problems of the present day attend for solution. The values to be assigned to the notions of “orthodoxy,” of dogma--who around them had ever thought of such things before! At Oxford it has always been a question of form, of Church order; but at Cambridge a question of substance, an enquiry into the criteria of truth, the credentials of theories.

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 from Pythagoras to Plato, who thus becomes the heir of divine (the Hebrew) philosophy. Such a doctrine was a serious embarrassment to a cause in the age of Hobbes; it meant that the rational and critical _criteria_ of the day went unutilised, and no doctrine can withstand such a charge. There was, too, a certain lack of the spirit of adventure, that gallant spirit which is not out of place even in philosophy, and of the courage which belongs to enthusiasm. The appeal to reason made by Hooker had debouched as Latitudinarianism; Laud and George Herbert had both opposed it; but Puritan England was stronger than both and would have none of either. The Platonists stood between them--called upon the Laudian to modify his conception of authority, upon the Puritan to admit the claims of reason, enriched Latitudinism with a philosophy. They were not listened to. None the less the _via media_ they offered has penetrated English thought. The Englishman favours reason but is no Hobbist, he must have his God behind the machine; he likes the supremacy of reason with a nebulous Plato behind it--not the real Plato, but a Plato to hurl as a weapon in the face of the materialist, without understanding too much about it. The ‘Cambridge mind’ hit on a middle term, a resting place for speculation and for faith, which suits the Englishman in the long run better than either Laud or Hobbes. In Cudworth we have that mind typified--that union of toleration with half lights which triumphs in England. Very bold speculation is not the Englishman’s _forte_. His intellect in such _gesta_ is not clear-cut, and his practical sense is always compatible with unturned-out-corners of mysticism, prejudices, reverences false and true--all the haziness made by those useful half lights loved by a people who do not like to be mystified, but do not wish to be too much enlightened.

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.

[Sidenote: 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.

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.