Part 11

Corpus, curiously enough, is a College which preserved its plate at a time when the plate of most of the colleges was melted down into money to reinforce the royal treasury. The story goes that it was preserved—exactly how, the story does not say—through the devotion of a butler to the College interests. The exploration of a secret cellar, or of an old drain, according to the legend, discovered the skeleton of a butler with the grip of his bony fingers clenched upon a precious punch-bowl. That is not the sort of story that one would willingly give up; but the evidence for it does not appear to be very solid; and the conjecture of Dr. Fowler that the bowl was first surrendered and afterwards redeemed with a money payment has more of the ingredients of plausibility.

Be that as it may, however, the Corpus men suffered more than the members of most colleges from the heavy hands of the Parliamentary Commissioners; and we have to picture “a Drum with a guard of musketeers” marching through the gate into the quadrangle—the drum beaten as a call for silence—the affixing of the Visitors’ Orders in the porter’s lodge—and the reading of a long list of Fellows and Scholars who were to be expelled.

It was a longer list than at some of the other colleges because the Visitors had been received in a contumacious spirit. They had no sooner entered the name of the new President of their choice, Dr. Staunton, in the College Register than two Scholars of the College—Will Fulman and Tim Parker—first erased the entry, and then tore out the sheet on which it had been made. When they proceeded to break open the College Treasury, which the Bursar would not unlock for them, they found that its valuable contents had already been removed. Whence resulted wholesale evictions of a brutally precipitate character.

The proclamation, according to one of its victims, was to the effect that “whosoever named in the Order should remain in Oxon, or within five miles of it, after sunset, should be taken and prosecuted as a spy.” This, it is added, was taken to mean that they would be hanged, “though many knew not whither to go on so short warning, nor could they have time to dispose their books and such goods as they had”; while, as an additional affront, “some were searched for letters only to pick their pockets.” It must have been a shocking scene, though the relation of it can be relieved by an anecdote which has the merit of exhibiting Oliver Cromwell in a more human light than usual.

One of the ejected, it appears, a certain James Quin, was presented to the Lord Protector; and the Lord Protector, having been told that he had a good voice, called upon him for a song. He sang so well that the Lord Protector “liquor’d him with sack,” and bade him ask a favour. He asked that his place on the foundation of the College might be restored to him, and his request was granted: a quaint incident, judged by our modern notions, but one for which there is a parallel in the later annals of the College, during the genial period of the Restoration.

Dr. Staunton had, by that time, been turned out; and his predecessor, Dr. Newlyn, had been brought back. This Dr. Newlyn was a shocking nepotist. He filled all the profitable places on the foundation with relatives of his own, and was only moderately shocked by the fact that one of them broke into the rooms of one of the Fellows and tried to murder him in his sleep; but there were some offences at which he drew the line, as the occurrence of a gross scandal was presently to prove.

This time there was a lady in the case. The offender was Matthew Curtois, a Probationer Fellow, a Master of Arts, and a Clerk in Holy Orders; and the offence was committed within the College walls. The punishment was a refusal to confirm Matthew Curtois in his Fellowship; but Matthew Curtois, instead of submitting and slinking away, made bold to appeal to the King. His weakness, he judged, was one with which the lover of Nell Gwynne and so many others was likely to sympathise; and his judgment was correct. The King, acting through the Visitor, George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, not only decreed his fellow-sinner’s restitution to his honours and emoluments, but also ordered him to be paid a pecuniary indemnity for his suspension: an act of royal interference with academical affairs which marks, as well as any other, the difference between those times and these.

But now, before going farther, we must turn back, and glance at the careers of a few of the representative men of whom Corpus is most justly proud.

* * * * *

Bishop Jewell should properly come first; but he is less interesting than Bishop Hooker, who comes next, and was introduced to Corpus through Jewell’s patronage. First a Scholar, he afterwards became a Fellow and a Lecturer in Hebrew; and we read of him, in the Life by Izaak Walton, that “in four years he was but twice absent from the chapel prayers.” Evidently he was just such a man as good Bishop Foxe would have wished to inhabit his “bee-hive”; and the tragedy of his life, which Walton relates in sympathetic detail, was his removal from it. The story must be told, if only to show that it was not in the conduct of his private life that the illustrious author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” earned the fixed epithet of “judicious.”

He was, in fact, a pious don of the old-fashioned, simple-minded sort; and, of course, he was a bachelor, and in Holy Orders. Appointed to preach certain endowed sermons at Paul’s Cross, and coming up to London from Corpus for that purpose, he lodged in the house of John Churchman, sometime a draper in Watling Street. He caught a chill on the way; but Mrs. Churchman gave him “drink proper for a cold,” and then proceeded to admonish him in a motherly manner.

“Mr. Hooker,” she said—so Walton tells us—“you are a man of tender constitution. It would be best for you to have a wife that might prove a nurse to you—such a one as might both prolong your life and make it more comfortable, such a one as I can and will provide for you if you see fit to marry.”

It was, no doubt, in the abstract, good advice. It seemed very good advice indeed to Hooker as he sat by the roaring fire and sipped the comforting possets which Mrs. Churchman prepared for him. And he knew too, as an earnest student of the Bible, that a busy man might find good precedents for entrusting the choice of his wife to another. As Eleazar had been trusted to seek a wife for Isaac, so Mrs. Churchman should be trusted to choose a wife for him. But Mrs. Churchman had a daughter; and her chief anxiety was not to make Mr. Hooker happy, but to get her daughter off her hands. So she brought Joan Churchman forward and presented her.

“Take her—she is yours,” she said; and the simple-minded don forgot to be judicious, but married Joan Churchman, as Mrs. Churchman had meant him to do from the beginning, and lived unhappily with her ever afterwards.

“By this marriage,” Walton continues, “the good man was drawn from the tranquillity of his College, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of peace, and a sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy world.” And he draws a pathetic picture of a visit paid to the good man by two of his old pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, in the country parsonage to which he retired together with the lady described by another biographer as “a clownish, silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe.”

The pupils found their tutor in a field attached to the parsonage, looking after the sheep; Mrs. Hooker having told him to do so, as she wished to employ the shepherd as a man-servant in the house. They went up to the parsonage with him, hoping to enjoy his conversation; but Mrs. Hooker immediately called him away to rock the cradle. They fled, driven out by Mrs. Hooker’s inhospitable proceedings; and one of them condoled with him, saying that his wife evidently was not a very “comfortable companion.” Whereupon Mr. Hooker made answer:

“My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me: but labour—as, indeed, I do daily—to submit myself to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.”

The story, of course, is full of morals for bachelor dons; only one imagines that the dons of our own day do not need the moral, but are much better able than was Hooker of Corpus to take care of themselves in the matters of the heart and the bonds of holy matrimony.

* * * * *

Another Corpus man of a very different character was the Duke of Monmouth, the favourite, and reputed natural son, of Charles II. He entered his name when the Court was driven to Oxford by the plague in 1665; but little is known about his term of residence except that he gave the College a piece of plate which the College is believed to have melted down in order to express its disapproval of the Monmouth rebellion. Dr. Pocock, the Oriental traveller, should also be mentioned, for he was the first of a long list of Oxford men who have distinguished themselves in the exploration of the Alps. He and William Windham, meeting at Geneva, in 1741, made up a party to explore the glaciers of Chamonix—a place till then unknown to tourists. General Oglethorpe, the associate of the Wesleys, and the founder of the State of Georgia, is a third who must not be overlooked. And a passing word may be given to Edward Young, afterwards Fellow of All Souls, the pious author of “Night Thoughts,” and the originator of the sentiment that “Procrastination is the thief of time.” “There are those,” we read, in a biographical account of the doings of this divine at Oxford, “who say that Young at this time was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became”; and that is credible enough, for we all know many ornaments of religion and morality whose proceedings while _in statu pupillari_ invite a similar remark.

The remark, however, is, on the whole, less applicable to the divines who have come from Corpus than to the divines who have come from a good many of the other colleges; so we need not insist, but may pass on to the period when the occurrence of more widely popular names gives Corpus a blaze of glory perceptible from afar. That period was in the early days of the nineteenth century, when Keble and Thomas Arnold—Arnold of Rugby—were contemporaries. A third member of the society at that time was John Taylor Coleridge—Mr. Justice Coleridge—who defeated them in some competitions for University and College prizes, and lived to write Keble’s Life, and to contribute a chapter of Corpus reminiscences to the Life of Arnold written by Dean Stanley.

Most of the time of the little company, when they were not reading for their examinations, appears to have been given to argument; most of Coleridge’s recollections are recollections of dialectical affrays. Oxford, at this date, was beginning to think of other matters besides political and academical affairs. The old wrangles between Jacobites and Hanoverians had ceased; and no one any longer thought it worth while to provoke authority by calling for cheers for the Young Pretender. Though the older men could remember such things, the younger men regarded them as belonging to history. The thing which was beginning to interest them was religion—or in some cases irreligion; and it interested them as an end in itself, and not merely in its relation to preferment and emolument.

Keble and Arnold of Corpus, it is instructive to remember, were the contemporaries at Oxford of Shelley of University; but Shelley does not seem to have been known to the others. Being orderly persons, scrupulous observers of the regulations, well-conducted reading men, they would probably have regarded him, if they had known him, as a dangerous and disreputable associate. Keble’s business in life was to be to preach at, and Arnold’s to summon to his study and flog, those who were, like Shelley, “tameless and swift and proud.” And yet he and they had more in common than they knew. They all represented, in their several ways, the new spirit of the dawning century; they were all, in their several ways, revolutionists, or at least men definitely related to revolution. Shelley was the revolutionist _pur sang_; Keble was the counter-revolutionist; Arnold was the practical man—the reformer with a reformer’s turn for compromise and opportunism—who knew how to make a little revolution go a long way.

Keble may perhaps be classed as an English analogue of Chateaubriand. Personally, it is true, he bore not the faintest resemblance to the religious reactionary who “took up religion as a subject,” and has been described as the Catholic Don Juan; but he resembled Chateaubriand in being a literary artist, with an artist’s feeling for the “beauty of holiness,” and he launched the English Movement which corresponds to the return of the æsthetes and aristocrats to their Catholic allegiance in France. The principal story told of him at Corpus is that he damaged the sun-dial in the quadrangle by throwing a bottle at it; and we may permit ourselves to discover a certain symbolism in that performance. The great sermon on National Apostasy—preached because reformers proposed to curtail the scandalous superfluity of Irish bishoprics—may similarly be described as a weak man’s heroic attempt to stop the clock.

The story of that attempt, however, and of the consequences which ensued from it, belongs more properly to the annals of Oriel than of Corpus. Arnold as well as Keble went on from Corpus to Oriel as a Fellow; but what there is to be said about him may best be said in the present chapter.

He and Keble became estranged in later years; but they continued to respect each other’s characters while examining each other’s propositions. To Arnold it seemed that Keble’s piety was no excuse for the narrowness of his mind, and he would have nothing to say to Keble’s view that a man could only achieve salvation by running in a groove. He believed in earnestness, indeed—perhaps there never was a man in more deadly earnest; but what he desired was an earnest conduct of the common affairs of life, not an earnest adherence to a complicated series of ecclesiastical propositions.

Hence his success, and his fame, as a schoolmaster. It was predicted of him, by the Provost of Oriel, when he stood for the Headmastership of Rugby, that he would, if elected, “change the face of public school education throughout England.” He was elected, and he did change it. Many of the changes which he introduced at Rugby were, indeed, based upon a system of school government already in force at Winchester; but Arnold breathed a new spirit into the institutions which he adopted. Members of the Sixth Form, under his inspiration, held up their heads with a new kind of pride. Rugbeians were distinguished—and boasted that they were distinguished—from other schoolboys by their “moral seriousness.”

The other schoolboys, of course, have not accepted the Rugbeian example without cavil or criticism. It has even been remarked—most notably by Etonians—that the difference between the “moral seriousness” of Rugby and the thing which is elsewhere called “priggishness” is not always visible to the naked eye. Possibly it is not. Possibly Arnold “overdid it,” like many another valuable innovator. But the thing which he did needed doing. It was better to overdo it than not to do it at all; and the pride which Corpus takes in Arnold is amply justified.

* * * * *

And so, of course, is the pride which Corpus takes in many _alumni_ of a later date, distinguished in a great variety of fields—in Henry Nettleship, Professor of Latin; in Professor Fowler, the historian of the College, whose lectures on Logic used to be as good as a play; in Professor Case, to whose robust faith in the external world a reference has already been made; in Mr. F. T. Dalton, who, as an editor, has struck out many purple passages from the compositions of the present writer; in Mr. Horace Hutchinson, the greatest living authority on the game of golf; in Mr. Henry Newbolt, the author of “Admirals All”; in Mr. Herbert Paul; and in Mr. A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic who thrusts Aristotle down the throats of the vulgar, and concerning whom it was deposed by Mr. Zangwill, before a Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship, that to him “nothing is sacred except the dancing of Adeline Genée.”

CHRIST CHURCH

Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell, and all the little Fells—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John Fell—“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.

Cardinal Wolsey founded Cardinal College, spent about £8,000 on it—say £100,000 of our modern money—out of the proceeds of the disendowment of the monasteries, and then fell like Lucifer. Henry VIII. first stopped the work, but presently refounded the College, and united it with the new bishopric of Oxford, which was removed to that site from Osney. The Head of the College was also to be the Dean of the Cathedral; and the number of students on the foundation was to be 101. The 101 strokes of Great Tom, which are to be heard every evening of the year at nine o’clock, were originally ordered as a separate reminder to each one of the students that it was time to go to bed. Five minutes after the last stroke, the gates, not of Christ Church only but of every college in Oxford, are closed; though nowadays, as a concession to the modern spirit, porters are in attendance to open them to those who knock.

[Illustration: TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH.

[To face p. 209.]

That is as much as space permits to be said concerning the “beginnings.” They were not humble beginnings, like those of most of the other colleges, but splendid and ostentatious. Christ Church started with a flourish of trumpets which has hardly yet ceased sounding in our ears. Henry VIII. himself often dined in its Hall; and it has ever since been the frequent recipient of royal favours. It is impossible to walk in Tom Quad without feeling that this is the college of all others which kings, to whom life is a pageant, would delight to honour. Tom Quad, with its great spaces, its fountain, its wide pavement, has “an air about it” which no other college even simulates. There is an indefinable suggestion, not of study for study’s sake, but rather of leisurely preparation for the leadership of men. The very place, one would say, for the training of statesmen and pro-consuls. It seems incredible that the student who has had the right to pace Tom Quad should go away and fail in life. It does not cease to seem incredible when one learns that it has sometimes happened.

The history of Christ Church, indeed, is more of a pageant—or is fuller of pageants—than the history of any other college. Its full history would fill a book—not a short book, but a long one; but those whose historic sense bids them conjure up the picturesque features of the past will make their first pause at the striking scene of the degradation of Archbishop Cranmer, punished for being a Protestant at a time when the majority were Catholics: a shocking spectacle, though an imposing ceremony, and one anticipating, in all its meanest details of humiliation, that ceremony of the degradation of Captain Dreyfus which, not many years since, stirred the civilised world to horror.

The exact locality of the degradation is uncertain; but it took place, at any rate, somewhere close to the cathedral, and probably in the cloisters. Within the cathedral, Cranmer was set up on the rood-screen and made to listen to the recital of his iniquities. Then he was dragged down again and invested in episcopal robes made, in mockery, of rags and canvas. Then, when he had been declared, in the name of the Blessed Trinity and by the authority of the Church, deposed, degraded, and cut off from all the privileges attached to his episcopal Order, he was marched outside to endure the remainder of his punishment.

“One by one,” writes his biographer, Dean Hook, “all the ornaments and distinctions of office were taken off.... A barber clipped the hair round the Archbishop’s head; and Cranmer was made to kneel before Bonner. Bonner scraped the tips of the Archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand which, itself anointed, had administered the unction to others. The threadbare gown of a yeoman bedel was thrown over his shoulders, and a townsman’s greasy cap was forced upon his head. The Archbishop of Canterbury, or, as he was now called, Thomas Cranmer, was handed over to the secular power. In the lowest and most offensive manner the innate vulgarity of Bonner’s mind displayed itself. Turning to Cranmer, he exclaimed: ‘Now you are no longer my Lord,’ and he thought it witty ever afterwards to speak of him as ‘this gentleman here.’”

And so to Bocardo, and thence to the stake of martyrdom—a lamentable illustration of the bitter saying that Cambridge educated Reformers and that Oxford burnt them.

* * * * *

Such might be the first striking scene in a Christ Church pageant. A further scene—a whole series of further scenes, less tragic, indeed, but not less remarkable—may be found at the time of that Civil War to which it has been necessary to make so many references.

The King, as has already been mentioned, lodged at Christ Church, while the Queen’s Court was at Merton. Almost all the Christ Church men save the old and decrepit and the few who, as Wood puts it, “retained their sacred habit as a cloak for their sloth or timidity,” were ready to fight for the King; and they and many other men from other colleges mustered at the Schools and were marched through the High to Christ Church, “where, in the great quadrangle, they were reasonably instructed in the word of command and their postures.” They fought valiantly—twenty of them as officers—but with the result which the world knows; and presently, of course, when the city surrendered, and the Parliament sent its Visitors, there was as much trouble at Christ Church as anywhere.

Dean Samuel Fell, who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University, did his best to be dignified in extremely difficult circumstances. The Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who was Chancellor, harangued his Vice-Chancellor in the coarse language of the camp, and told him that he ought to be flogged; but Samuel Fell was not to be intimidated. These Visitors, he said, his juniors in academic standing and position, were too “inconsiderable” persons for the Dean of Christ Church to parley with. He therefore refused to parley with them; and they haled him off to prison, and then proceeded to the Deanery, where Mrs. Fell and the children held the fort.