COLLEGE 
 
 HISTORIES 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
of xforft 
 
 COLLEGE HISTORIES 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 BY 
 
 J. WELLS, M.A. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "OXFORD AND ITS COLLEGES 
 
 LONDON 
 R E. ROBINSON 
 
 20 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, BLOOMSBURY 
 1898 
 
"' ' : '.J 
 
 Printed by BALI.ANTYNE, HANSON dr 5 Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IT ought to be more easy to write a short history of 
 Wadham than of any other college in Oxford ; for in the 
 case of no other are the already existing books so complete 
 and so good. Mr. Jackson's fine quarto ("Wadham 
 College/' Clarendon Press, 1893), with its elaborate illus- 
 trations, is admirable on all points that concern the fabric, 
 besides containing much other valuable and interesting 
 matter ; and in Mr. R. B. Gardiner's " Register of Wadham 
 College" (George Bell and Sons, vol. i. 1889, vol. ii. 1895), 
 the names of all who have been connected with Wadham 
 in any way, are given with a fulness which no other 
 college can yet equal. Both these books, and especially 
 Mr. Gardiner's volumes, have been used constantly, and I 
 wish at once to express my great obligations to them ; it 
 would indeed be a pleasure if my small book induced any 
 Wadham man to become familiar with these larger books. 
 Apart from these works, and the regular Oxford authori- 
 ties, Wood, Hearne, &c., the " Dictionary of National 
 Biography " has been found especially useful. 
 
 Except in Chapter V. I have used but little material 
 that has not appeared in print before ; my object in 
 writing has not been to publish unprinted documents, but 
 to render easily accessible the material which has been 
 collected by others. If I have succeeded in making the 
 history of Wadham interesting to Wadham men, and in 
 
 336569 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 telling them the story of the pictures and the stones that 
 they see every day, I am well satisfied. 
 
 Since this book aims at being popular, a large number 
 of biographical details have been introduced ; in doing 
 this it has seemed unnecessary to dwell on the lives of 
 really great men like Blake or Wren ; they belong to 
 English history rather than to the story of their college. 
 Much more space has been devoted to the men who in 
 their day played a great part in Oxford, or to those who 
 once were well known, though forgotten now. 
 
 The buildings of Wadham have changed so little that it 
 has seemed better to show them as they are rather than to 
 reproduce old views ; the Loggan plate is of course a 
 necessary exception. 
 
 I am especially grateful to Mr. Gardiner for his kindness 
 in reading through my book when in type-written sheets ; 
 he saved me from several mistakes, and made many 
 valuable suggestions. 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD, 
 Nov. 28, 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE FOUNDERS I 
 
 II. THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE . . , . IO 
 
 III. THE COLLEGE STATUTES AND THE MEMBERS OF 
 
 THE FIRST FOUNDATION 2O 
 
 IV. WADHAM COLLEGE BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR . . 35 
 
 V. WADHAM COLLEGE TILL THE RESTORATION (1642- 
 
 1660) 55 
 
 VI. WADHAM IN THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS . 69 
 
 VII. WADHAM COLLEGE TILL THE REVOLUTION . . 88 
 VIII. WADHAM UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER . . .113 
 
 IX. THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 130 
 
 X. THE BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES. THE DAYS OF 
 
 WARDEN WILLS AND TOURNAY, 1783-1831 . 153 
 
 XI. WADHAM UNDER WARDEN SYMONS (1831-1871) . 173 
 
 XII. WADHAM ATHLETICS ...... 194 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 APPENDICES 
 
 PAGE 
 I. THE COLLEGE LIBRARY ....... 209 
 
 II. PORTRAITS IN HALL AND ELSEWHERE . . . 213 
 
 III. LIST OF WARDENS AT WADHAM COLLEGE 2l6 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE IN 1675 (LOGGAN's VIEW) . Frontispiece 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE ...... Facing page 10 
 
 WADHAM QUADRANGLE FROM S.E. ... l6 
 
 THE CHAPEL (LOOKING EAST) .... ,, 52 
 
 WADHAM QUADRANGLE FROM S.W. ... 74 
 
 THE SENIOR COMMON ROOM .... ,, HO 
 
 THE HALL ,, 158 
 
 THE WARDEN'S LODGINGS FROM THE NORTH . ,, 176 
 
CHAPTER 1 
 
 THE FOUNDERS 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE may be compared especially with 
 New College and Corpus Christi among its predecessors. 
 All three owed their foundation and endowment to the 
 munificence of a single founder, who started them on 
 their course with buildings so complete as to require 
 little subsequent addition; all three too represented 
 the movement of their time ; for, as New College had 
 been founded to preserve the Mediaeval Church, and 
 Corpus to spread the New Learning of the Renaissance 
 so Wadham is an example of that revival of liberality 
 which, in the early days of the seventeenth century, did 
 something to repair the losses suffered by Education and 
 the Church in the days of the Reformation. The found- 
 ation stone of the college was laid in the year after the 
 death of Thomas Tesdale, to whose benefaction Oxford 
 owes Pembroke College, and in the year before Sir 
 Thomas Sutton obtained his letters-patent for his 
 foundation of the Charterhouse in London. 
 
 Nicholas Wadham, who planned and endowed the 
 college which perpetuates his name, was the last male 
 representative of the elder branch of one of the most 
 important untitled families in the West country. 
 
2 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Fuller * says of him : " He had great length in his 
 extraction, breadth in his estate, and depth in his 
 liberality." He himself had been- at Corpus Christi 
 College f, and after his marriage with Dorothy /daughter 
 of Sir William Petre, lived at his ancestral mansion of 
 Merifield, near Ilminster, in Somerset, where, Fuller says, 
 " his hospital house was an inn at all times, a court at 
 Xmas." In spite of this great hospitality, the Wad- 
 hams accumulated a large private fortune, amounting 
 to ^14,000, besides land to the value of <800 a year ; 
 and as their lives drew to a close, they, says W^ood,! 
 "resolved between them to bestow their frugality on 
 some pious use " ; for they had no children to whom to 
 leave it, and the sisters of Nicholas were amply provided 
 for by the reversion of the large ancestral estates. 
 
 In 1606 Nicholas Wadham founded an almshouse 
 for " eight poor people," in the neighbouring parish 
 of Ilton, where it still exists. According to Antony 
 
 * " Worthies " (ed. 1662), vol. ii. p. 30. 
 
 t This is the view now most generally adopted, and rests on the 
 authority of a still existing account of Nicholas Wadham, written 
 probably by one of the original members of the foundation, and 
 certainly before 1637. It is confirmed by the resemblances in the 
 Wadham statutes to those of Corpus Christi College, and by the 
 pelican which still crowns the east gable of the Library. On the 
 other hand, Dr. Boswell, one of the original members of Wadham, 
 told Antony Wood that Nicholas Wadham had resided in Christ 
 Church, and added circumstantial details ; there is, however, no 
 mention of him in the list of Fellow Commoners there, which seems 
 to be complete ; and Wood himself hesitates between Corpus Christi 
 College and Christ Church. The connection between Bishop Foxe's 
 college and the West country (four of the scholarships at C. C. C. were 
 for natives of the dioceses of Bath and Wells and of Exeter) tends 
 to confirm the view adopted. The question is fully discussed in 
 Fowler's " History of Corpus" (O. H. S.), pp. 101, 2. 
 
 J " Colleges and Halls," p. 592. 
 
THE FOUNDERS 3 
 
 Wood,* the suggestion of a far wider scheme of bene- 
 faction came from a neighbour, Mr. Orang, " who was 
 accounted a wise discrete man in that country"; he 
 urged that the master of Merifield should imitate the 
 recent example of Sir Thomas Bodley, and build a 
 college " which will last from generation to generation." 
 The story must be accepted with some reserve, for 
 princely benefactors do not generally form their plans 
 on a mere chance suggestion, and one part of it viz., 
 that Nicholas was on bad terms with his relatives is 
 inconsistent with known facts. 
 
 A more interesting point as to the Founder's inten- 
 tions is also raised by Antony Woodf , who says that the 
 original purpose of Nicholas and his wife was to build 
 and endow a college at Venice "for the reception of 
 English scholars of the Roman Catholic religion (they 
 themselves being of that persuasion)." Here again the 
 obliging friend steps in with a suggestion " that they 
 should do it at Oxford, that so the Church of England 
 might reap benefit thereby," and this suggestion 
 Nicholas Wadham " forthwith embraced." 
 
 If this story be accepted, we may perhaps suppose 
 that Nicholas changed his plan and his religious faith 
 in horror at the Gunpowder Plot ; but it seems better 
 to reject it altogether. Such a foundation as the 
 Wadhams are said to have planned at Venice, would 
 have exposed its authors to the terrible penalties of 
 Praemunire, and, apart from this, the details in Wood 
 are inconsistent with the Founder's will, and with 
 the very interesting account of his death-bed, 
 
 * " Life," i. p. 259. 
 
 f " Colleges and Halls," p. 592. 
 
4 WAt)HAM COLLEGE 
 
 which is still among the manuscripts in the possession 
 of the Warden. Probably the rumour was invented 
 because of the undoubted fact that Dorothy Wadham, 
 after her husband's death, was for a time a recusant, 
 though she certainly died in the communion of the 
 Church of England. But even while she was a recusant, 
 her care for the carrying out of her husband's intentions 
 never relaxed, and there is nothing in her conduct to 
 lend the slighest countenance to the view that she ever 
 had any sympathy with the fanatical Roman party 
 beyond the seas, and with their anti-national schemes. 
 
 The account of the Founder's last hours referred to 
 above may therefore with confidence be taken as repre- 
 senting the real history of the origin of the college. It 
 is dated October 16, 1609,* and was drawn up by 
 one of his nephews, no doubt Sir John Wyndham. 
 Nicholas Wadham began by reminding his nephew of 
 the " great care that he had for erecting a college in 
 Oxford," and went on to recount, in the most business- 
 like way, the moneys in hand and the landed properties 
 which he intended to devote to this purpose. Among 
 these latter were estates to the value of 4tOO a year in 
 Essex ; no doubt the Founder wished to keep his own 
 purchases of land quite apart from his ancestral estates, 
 and so invested his savings in a different part of the 
 country. Thus, from the first, Wadham, though a 
 West-country college, had no financial connection with 
 the West a fact of melancholy importance in these 
 recent years of agricultural depression. These Essex 
 estates were left to his " wife during her life," " yet he 
 
 * The existing copy, however, was certainly written in the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
THE FOUNDERS 5 
 
 hoped that out of her benevolence, considering how well 
 he had dealt with her, she would imparte a portion of 
 it unto his College during her life." As will be seen, 
 his confidence was fully justified by Mrs. WadhanTs 
 conduct (p. 38). 
 
 The Founder also announced that it had been his in- 
 tention to bequeath the patronage of all his livings to 
 his college an intention which unfortunately he never 
 carried out. He went on, with the shrewdness of an 
 old courtier, to give directions that suitable presents 
 should be made to the Lord Treasurer, who was to 
 receive " a piece of plate or what else I thought fit 
 would suit his fancy to the value of 50" and to Prince 
 Henry of Wales, who was to have a " white and pied 
 nagge." In this way Nicholas Wadham hoped to secure 
 royal favour for his new foundation. 
 
 With regard to its statutes and government, he was 
 too weak to speak, but he had often discussed this sub- 
 ject with his nephew before : on three or four points, 
 however, which were especially peculiar, his instructions 
 were once more deliberately given. Of these the first 
 was that the Warden was to remain unmarried as well 
 as the fellows a regulation which certainly may be 
 taken to show that Nicholas, like his wife, held high 
 views as to clerical celibacy. The second was that his 
 fellows were not to be bound to enter holy orders, but 
 " every man was left free to profess what he liked, as it 
 should please God to direct him." Thirdly, the fellow- 
 ships were to be terminable after a certain number of 
 years, and their holders were "not to live there all 
 their time like idle drones " (the words sound like an 
 echo of Bishop Foxe's statutes), but " to put themselves 
 
6 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 into the world, whereby others might grow up under 
 them, his intent being chiefly to nourish and train up 
 men unto learning.'" Finally he arranged that the 
 Bishop of Bath and Wells should be Visitor of his college 
 and that it should bear his own name, " Wadham. " 
 It is interesting to see this seventeenth-century antici- 
 pation of non-clerical and terminable fellowships. 
 
 Four days after this interview the Founder died, and 
 was buried with great pomp in a magnificent tomb at 
 Ilminster Church, where the North transept bears the 
 name of the " Wadham aisle." It had been built in the 
 fifteenth century by one of his ancestors. 
 
 Nicholas WadhanTs features are familiar to all 
 Wadham men from the portraits which the college 
 fortunately possesses of him ; but these all represent 
 him at the close of his life. The grave, stern face and 
 sober dress are more suggestive of the educational 
 reformer than of the court-bred squire and the magnifi- 
 cent entertainer. In his appearance, as in his views, 
 Nicholas Wadham belonged to the century in which he 
 mainly lived rather than to that in which the work was 
 done which has perpetuated his name. 
 
 The money for the new foundation and the ideas 
 which it was to embody came from the husband ; but 
 the application of the money to the carrying out of the 
 ideas was the work of his widow Dorothy, to whom by 
 his will his personal property was absolutely left "upon 
 special trust reposed. . . that she will employ such 
 sums. . . to such uses and purposes as I have requested 
 her." She proved a most admirable executrix ; though 
 she was now seventy -five years of age, yet she 
 proceeded to work with such energy that in less than 
 
THE FOUNDERS 7 
 
 four years the plans of her husband were realised. 
 Nor was she unimpeded in this task; an attempt 
 seems to have been made to take the work out of 
 her hands, and there is extant a firm and dignified 
 letter of the Foundress to the Earl of Salisbury, pro- 
 testing against this, and craving his help. Either the 
 justice of her cause or her husband's well-judged 
 present carried the day ; the trust for Wadham College 
 was finally constituted in July 1610, and in December 
 of the same year King James gave the Foundress the 
 charter, which is still preserved in the college muniment 
 room. The King's connection with the college is 
 commemorated by his statue, which stands, with those 
 of the Founder and Foundress, on the stone screen 
 above the entrance to the hall. This is very well shown 
 in plate ii. 
 
 Dorothy Wadham had, however, even before this, 
 taken measures to obtain a site for her college. By 
 her husband's direction the endowment was first offered 
 to Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College) ; but the 
 then principal refused to surrender his buildings and 
 site unless he were made head of the new foundation, 
 and, as the Foundress was unwilling to accept him in 
 this capacity, she had to seek her site elsewhere. She 
 found it outside the North postern of the city (" Smith 
 gate "), where the Augustinian Friars had had a famous 
 house. The site had been confiscated at the time of the 
 Dissolution of the Monasteries, and was now, after 
 various changes of ownership, in the possession of the 
 City of Oxford ; the Corporation asked the sum of 
 ^lOOO for it, but royal influence was brought to bear 
 upon these unreasonable sellers perhaps the result of 
 
8 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the Lord Treasurer's " piece of plate " and of the " pied 
 nagge " which was given to the Prince of Wales and 
 after a special letter had come from his Majesty, the 
 Mayor and Corporation resolved to treat with " Mr. 
 Wadham's heirs." The result was that 600 was 
 offered and accepted, but " every man [in the City 
 Council] thought it too little." The hard bargain 
 was sweetened by the promise that the City should 
 nominate one fellow and two scholars on the original 
 foundation. 
 
 This sale was effected on March 6 ; the site was at 
 once cleared, and on July 31 of the same year the 
 foundation stone was laid with " as much solemnity as 
 the time " would " permit, being as it is in Vacation, at 
 what time the University is always barest and most 
 stript of her company, yet stored with a sufficient 
 number."* Such were the modest anticipations as to 
 the ceremony of Christopher Trevelyan, a young West- 
 countryman, who was then a student in Oxford ; but 
 Wood's account argues no lack of company on the 
 occasion. The Vice-Chancellor, " with the Doctors and 
 Proctors," came in solemn procession from St. Mary's, 
 the Mayor of Oxford, " with his brethren," met them at 
 the site, a Te Deum was sung, and, after a Latin oration 
 from the Warden of New College, the foundation stone 
 was laid " where the chapel was afterwards built." f 
 
 The work after this went " cheerfully forward " ; of the 
 building operations an account will be given in the next 
 chapter. By August 1612 things were sufficiently 
 ready for the Foundress to issue her statutes and 
 
 * "Trevelyan Papers." Camden Society, part iii. p. 113. 
 f " Colleges and Halls," p. 593. 
 
THE FOUNDERS 9 
 
 on April 20, 1613, the first fellows and scholars were 
 admitted. We cannot better sum up the results 
 of her work and her husband's liberality than in the 
 quaint words of Fuller : " Absalom, having no children, 
 reared up for himself a pillar to perpetuate his name. 
 This worthy pair created that which hath doth and will 
 afford many pillars to Church and State, the uniform 
 and regular (nothing defective or superfluous therein) 
 college of Wadham in Oxford." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 THE site which Dorothy Wadham had purchased was 
 outside the walls, but it had long been well known in 
 the University. The Augustinian Friars had been 
 settled there since the thirteenth century, and the em- 
 battled steeple of their great church, which lay parallel 
 to Holywell Street, formed one of the " coronal " of 
 eight towers for which Oxford was already famous in 
 pre-Reformation days. More important, however, than 
 their architectural glories, was their connection with 
 the University degree course; by an early statute, 
 every B.A. was bound, as part of his qualification for 
 his M. A. degree, to " dispute once and to respond once 
 each year ad Augustmienses? These disputations had 
 been done away with, either before or at the Reforma- 
 tion, but the title remained, and the form of " doing 
 Austins " was only abolished by the great examination 
 statute of 1800. 
 
 The friary church, however, had completely dis- 
 appeared within forty years of the suppression of the 
 monasteries, and of the monastic buildings nothing now 
 remains except possible fragments; part of the east 
 wall of the College garden may go back to pre-Refor- 
 mation times, and this is certainly the case with some 
 
THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 11 
 
 of the fabric of No. 35 Holywell Street; but the only 
 clear connection between the friary and the college 
 which still exists is the charter of Edward IV., granted 
 in 1474, which permitted the Augustinians to hold a 
 fair in their own ground at the feast of St. John ante 
 Portam Latinam (May 6) ; this is preserved, as part of 
 the college archives, in the muniment room at the top 
 of the tower over the gateway. 
 
 Dorothy Wadham's purchase included the front towards 
 Holywell Street, as far down as No. 33, and the present 
 site of the college, with the gardens of the Warden and 
 the Fellows up to the line of the north wall of the 
 latter. Its great advantage lay in the fact that, though 
 close to the centres of University life, St. Mary's and 
 the Schools, it yet was in the country, for Park Street 
 then, and almost till our own day, was a private lane,* 
 and the only access to Oxford from the north was down 
 St. Giles. This last advantage was forcibly taken from 
 the college in 1871, but thanks to its own gardens, 
 those of Trinity and St. John's, and the University 
 Parks, Wadham is still almost as secluded as it was 
 when the Foundress chose the site.f 
 
 * The shrubberies under the wall of the Trinity garden opposite 
 were owned and maintained by Wadham. 
 
 f This privacy Wadham owes to a woman's tact and sense. 
 Dorothy would have nothing to do with Jesus College, which her 
 husband mentioned after Gloucester Hall, as a possible recipient of 
 his benefaction. The advantage thus gained has perhaps been a 
 danger to the college in our own day ; for some of the leaders in 
 women's higher education have let it be known that Wadham would 
 just suit them, and that when women have their rights, Dorothy's 
 college is to be a "ladies' college." "It came with a lass and it 
 will go with a lass," might be applied by desponding members of 
 Wadham to their own case; but such alarms are at least pre- 
 mature. 
 
12 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 The laying of the foundation stone on July 31, 1610, 
 has been already described ; but the work had been 
 begun nearly four months earlier. Of the actual 
 building operations the college has a contemporary 
 record, giving with the greatest fulness all particulars 
 as to the labourers, the purchase of materials, and the 
 progress of the work. It commences on April 9, 1610, 
 when twenty-nine workmen were engaged, of whom by 
 far the greater part seem to have been Somerset men ; 
 the entry concludes characteristically, " twelve pence in 
 beer when I agreed with them.' 1 '' The last entries are in 
 July 1613 ; they include the chapel bell, but are mainly 
 for plate and furniture. Thus the whole building 
 occupied about three years in building. The total sum 
 accounted for is about ^11,360. 
 
 The first question that it is natural to ask as to any 
 building, especially one of the architectural beauty of 
 Wadham, is " Who was the architect ? " Tradition has 
 answered this by assigning the design to Thomas Holt, 
 of York, who is described by Wood as " architect " of 
 the New Schools, which were begun in 1613, just after 
 Wadham was finished. To him too are attributed the 
 Fellows 1 quad at Merton, which certainly bears a 
 striking resemblance to that of Wadham, and the 
 garden front of Exeter College.* But unfortunately 
 for tradition, Holt's name does not appear in the 
 accounts till August 1611, and then only as a carpenter 
 engaged on the roofs. It seems clear that the super- 
 intendance of the work was intrusted to William 
 Arnold, who is paid 1 a week till October 1611, and 
 
 * There is an interesting but uncritical article on Holt by 
 Blomfield in the " Portfolio " for 1888. 
 
THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 18 
 
 then 106'. a week for some nine months longer, apart 
 from the payments made to him for his work as a 
 mason. He may well have been a kinsman of the 
 Wadhams 1 steward, John Arnold, who seems to have 
 managed all the expenditure on the work. To William 
 Arnold then is due, Mr. Jackson* thinks, the'design of the 
 college ; if this is the case, he is an interesting example 
 of the craftsman-architect, who was about to pass away 
 before the professional architect. 
 
 The buildings of Wadham are described by Ayliffe 
 of New College, at the beginning of the eighteenth 
 centuiTj as " in respect of beauty the most regular and 
 uniform of any in the University," and many others 
 who were not Wadham men have ranked them high 
 among the ornaments of Oxford. Three features 
 especially distinguish them. They were planned by the 
 Foundress on so complete a scale, and carried out with 
 such thoroughness, that no material alteration has been 
 made in them ; could one of the original fellows return 
 to his old home, he would see little that was strange 
 and unfamiliar. Again, they are perhaps the best 
 instance in Oxford of that late Gothic work, which is so 
 characteristic of our University. The Italian style had 
 been frankly adopted at Caius College, Cambridge, more 
 than a generation before; but the masons in Oxford 
 went on building as their predecessors had built in the 
 sixteenth and even the late fifteenth centuries ; in spite 
 of classical details here and there, the whole spirit of 
 the Wadham buildings is Gothic. Their third great 
 
 * "Wadham College," p. 34. My obligations to Mr. Jackson's 
 splendid and delightful book have been acknowledged in the Preface, 
 They are, of course especially marked in this chapter. 
 
14 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 feature is their extreme simplicity; except for the 
 screen over the hall entrance, and for the pinnacles, no 
 carving is used to decorate the exterior of Wadham. 
 The architect trusted to the beauty of his proportions 
 and to the simple lines of his string-courses for his 
 whole effect; and his confidence was amply justified. 
 The buildings need no adornment, for they are their 
 own adornment. 
 
 The materials for this triumph of the craftsman- 
 architect were provided direct by the Foundress. The 
 oak timber was purchased as it stood in Lord Abingdon's 
 woods at Cumnor, and with a curious disregard of 
 modern rules of carpentry, cut with all the sap in it, 
 and worked up almost at once. The stone was dug in 
 the quarries at Headington, and brought by Mrs. 
 WadhanVs own carriers to the spot. New quarries 
 seem to have been opened, and fortunately, though the 
 stone leaves something to be desired, they were well 
 chosen ; there has been decay at Wadham, especially in 
 those parts of the college that face south, but the stone 
 as a whole has worn far better than in the rather later 
 buildings at Oriel (begun in 1619). The main cost of 
 the stone was the cutting and the carrying, for Mag- 
 dalen College seems to have given " three quarries " for 
 nothing ; in 1610, a present of books to the value of 
 20., was made as a recognition of their liberality. 
 
 The first parts of the building to be completed were 
 the chambers on the three sides of the quad. Although 
 the foundation stone had been laid in the chapel, yet 
 when the exterior of the living rooms of the college 
 was finished in November 1611, work was only being 
 begun on the windows of the hall and the ante-chapel, 
 
 . 
 
THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 15 
 
 while the kitchen foundations had not long been dug. 
 The roofs of the chapel and the hall were not begun 
 till the July of the following year (1612). The living 
 rooms were planned on the old Oxford system of a 
 large room with small studies (musaeola) attached to it, 
 but the allowance of space was unusually liberal ; the 
 rooms themselves were larger than had been customary 
 in many of the older colleges, and the Foundress further 
 provided that each fellow should have one to himself, 
 whereas it had previously been the rule for two or more 
 to be in each set of rooms ; even at Corpus, a scholar 
 shared each set with a fellow, sleeping in a truckle bed, 
 while the fellow had " a high bed." At Wadham the 
 scholars still had rooms three together, sleeping in the 
 big room, and working in the small rooms, which are 
 now bedrooms or " scout-holes. 1 '' 
 
 But, good as the rooms are, it was not on them that 
 the architects skill was especially bestowed the glories 
 of the college are, next to its garden front, the hall 
 and the chapel. The hall measures 83 feet by 27, and 
 after those of Christ Church and New College,* is the 
 largest in Oxford ; in its proportions it is superior to 
 both these, though it has neither the magnificence of 
 Christ Church nor the charm of detail which distin- 
 guishes New College. 
 
 Its one fault is the heaviness of the roof timbers, 
 especially of the finials ; the painting of the plaster 
 ceilings between the beams is certainly ugly, but the 
 architect is not responsible for it, as it is the work of a 
 later generation. 
 
 * The hall of New College is only 78 feet long, but it is 35 
 broad. 
 
16 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 The ornamentation of the wood-work of the screen is 
 classical, as can be well seen in plate vi., but the 
 windows try hard to be Gothic, and there is no disputing 
 the fact that the whole room belongs in its conception 
 to the fifteenth century, not to the seventeenth. It may 
 be added that the floor was originally of oak ; at a later 
 period a stone pavement was substituted in the centre 
 an unfortunate change in every way. The oak has 
 been replaced in our day (1891) by the liberality of one 
 of the present fellows (Mr. Richards). One more detail 
 as to the hall must be mentioned, as it seems specially 
 contrary to modern notions of convenience : the fire was 
 originally in the middle, and the smoke from the brazier 
 escaped as best it could through the louvre above. 
 
 The chapel does not hold the same rank among 
 the chapels of the University as the hall among the 
 halls ; but architecturally it is even more interesting. 
 It is of the peculiar T-shape, which has been the 
 typical Oxford pattern since it was accidentally 
 developed at Merton.* The ante-chapel is unusually 
 spacious, no doubt owing to the fact that theological 
 disputations were to be held there ; it is 27 J feet broad 
 by 74 feet from north to south, and the arches by which 
 it is supported are singularly bold and dignified. 
 
 But it is the chapel proper which is the part at once 
 the most beautiful and the most puzzling to an architect. 
 While the windows of the ante-chapel are in the same 
 peculiar late " Gothic "" style as those of the hall, the 
 windows in the choir are to any but the most trained 
 
 * This origin has been disputed, because the present transepts at 
 Merton are later than New College Chapel ; but they are only the 
 successors of earlier ones 
 
THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 17 
 
 eyes pure Perpendicular work of the late fifteenth 
 century. Even so good a judge as the late Mr. Fergusson, 
 the historian of architecture, affirmed that they must 
 have been made before the Reformation ; when told that 
 the college possessed documents which proved the 
 contrary, he denied that any amount of documents 
 could prove what was impossible. But the fact remains 
 that, while William Arnold and his men were making 
 the ante-chapel windows of Jacobean Gothic, a certain 
 John Spicer, who was engaged in November 1611, was 
 working by their side in a style at least a century older. 
 He was paid 6 for each of the side windows, and 20 
 for the great East one these payments being of course 
 for labour only. The inference is irresistible that Spicer 
 was also a Somerset man, and that he was so steeped in 
 the style of his own county that he could work in no 
 other ; the choir of Wadham College is to all intents 
 and purposes the choir of a great Somerset church. 
 
 The carpenter, like the mason, worked in the style 
 of his neighbourhood, but wood-workers had been less 
 conservative than the workers in stone ; John Bolton, 
 who made the great screen which separates the choir 
 from the ante-chapel, must certainly have come from 
 Somerset too ; the screen of Crosscombe Church, between 
 Wells and Shepton Mallet, is so like that which he 
 constructed at Wadham that it can only be by the same 
 hand ; but in the Wadham screen, though the four- 
 centred Tudor arch is retained, the spirit as well as the 
 detail of the Renaissance is triumphant ; * this is the 
 case also with the stalls. Unluckily, the lower seats in 
 
 * He received 82 for this and the screen in the hall. Apparently 
 his work was not finished till after the opening of the college. 
 
18 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the chapel were " gothicised " in the " restoration "" of 
 1832, as can be seen in plate No. iii. Some of the old 
 balls which used to crown their ends are still used for 
 supporting the kneeling-stool by the altar rails. 
 
 One other feature in the original arrangements of the 
 chapel may be mentioned ; as the servants were provided 
 for in the Foundation Statutes, so they were provided 
 also with places in it ; for their use were intended the 
 two fine Jacobean pews which stand at the back of the 
 screen.* To the ante-chapel have now been banished 
 from the chapel proper the pulpit and the old altar of 
 the college ; the last stands under the east wall of the 
 southern transept ; its removal was due to the unsym- 
 pathetic Gothic purism of the " restorers " of 1832. But 
 their fault has been fully atoned for by the good fortune 
 of the college, which, in 1889, obtained the old altar of 
 Ilminster Church ; this too had been expelled for a 
 similar motive from its rightful place, and was secured by 
 the then bursar, Mr. Stowe, for the chapel of Wadham. 
 It is very handsomely carved, and may well date back 
 to the time when Nicholas and Dorothy communicated 
 at it. 
 
 Before the building was finally completed, and while the 
 workmen were still in it, the new society took possession ; 
 on April 20, 1613, the just-appointed Warden, Robert 
 Wright, admitted the Fellows and the scholars ; and on 
 April 29, the chapel was consecrated to St. Nicholas 
 
 * Even as late as the last years of Warden Symons, the six servants 
 mentioned in the statutes attended the sermon and the celebration 
 on Easter Day. Originally the servants were sometimes matricu- 
 lated, but more often they were admitted to University privileges 
 without this ceremony. 
 
THE BUILDINGS OF THE COLLEGE 19 
 
 with great pomp by the Bishop of Oxford. He was 
 received at the gate by the Warden and fellows, " the 
 music, both vocal and instrumental then sounding," and 
 after hearing the inevitable Latin oration, which at this 
 period marked all ceremonials, he himself preached on 
 John x. 22 " And he was in Jerusalem at the feast of 
 the Dedication." Afterwards the "cloister and the 
 cemetery joining to it [i.e., the chapel] on the South 
 side' 1 * were consecrated. The entertainment was most 
 magnificent, and cost 83 15s. 
 
 The college was now complete ; but before we begin 
 its history, it is necessary to give a chapter to its 
 statutes, and to the Warden and other members of the 
 first foundation. 
 
 * Wood, " Colleges and Halls," p. 692. At least one tombstone 
 still remains sunk in the grass that of a certain Robert Rogers, who 
 died in 1676. There was originally a door from the ante-chapel to 
 the cloister, which was doubtless used especially for funerals. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE COLLEGE STATUTES AND THE 
 
 MEMBERS OF THE FIRST 
 
 FOUNDATION 
 
 THE Society which had thus entered on its corporate 
 existence consisted of a Warden, fifteen fellows, fifteen 
 scholars, two chaplains, two clerks,* and a certain 
 number of servants. All of these were appointed by 
 the Foundress, with the exception of the three nominees 
 of the City of Oxford already mentioned (p. 8), and 
 she further reserved to herself all future nominations in 
 her lifetime. It was only after her death that the new 
 body was to enter on its full privileges, and, by electing 
 its own members, to realise completely its corporate 
 independence. 
 
 The Warden, according to the Foundress 1 original 
 intention, might be a layman ; he was, however, 
 required to proceed to his degree as doctor within a 
 year. Originally he might do this in any faculty ; but 
 
 * The " clerks," or bible clerks, existed down till 1872 ; they sat 
 in hall at a small table by the screen on the left. Their duties 
 had been to say grace, to ring the bell for and to mark attendances 
 in chapel, and to find the lessons there for the scholars ; it is to be 
 hoped they did it better than the scholars do now. They also 
 collected the alms. 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 21 
 
 the statute was altered by her, it is said at the wish of 
 the society, and he was henceforth bound to take his 
 D.D. ; the office of Warden therefore became of neces- 
 sity a clerical one. It was found, moreover, that the 
 time of one year allowed for proceeding* to the doctorate 
 was far too short, and resulted in great practical incon- 
 veniences ; it was therefore altered by Dorothy Wadham 
 herself, and the Warden was henceforth bound to pro- 
 ceed to the higher degree " as soon as he should be able 
 to do so by the statutes of the University." 
 
 The Warden was to be a real ruler ; when his office 
 is vacant, the College " velut ajnim examen sine rector e 
 obstupescit, ignaraprorsus cuipareat" He was the j udge 
 of all offences, of graduates as well as of undergraduates, 
 although, in the case of the more serious ones, the five 
 senior fellows, or some of them, are joined with him.* 
 He it was who gave leave of absence and dispensations 
 from the strict observance of the statutes. In fact, the 
 general management of the internal affairs of the 
 College was in his charge, as well as the superintendence 
 over its external property, and the care for its interests. 
 
 The Fellows were to be elected from among the 
 scholars of the College. They were originally to hold 
 their fellowship for ten years only from their Regency,! 
 but, at the advice of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the 
 Foundress extended this to eighteen years ; she writes, 
 
 * E.g., if the reader in Humanity or the Dean is negligent in 
 attending to his duties, the Warden can punish him by with- 
 holding his pay and commons " in presence of the two senior 
 fellows then residing " (stat., xi. ad fin.). 
 
 t An M.A. is still, according to the statutes of the University, a 
 necessary regent " for the two years after the end of the term in which 
 he was admitted to his degree." As such he can in theory be com- 
 
22 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 however, " I have added thereby eight years more than 
 their Founder's will was." They were free to read for 
 any faculty they chose, but there were strict rules as to 
 the time of their proceeding to their M.A. degree. As 
 has been already said, the Wadham statutes anticipate 
 the modern arrangements of non-clerical and terminable 
 fellowships. 
 
 Of the scholars three were to be elected from Essex 
 and three from Somerset, the rest from any county 
 in Great Britain. * They were to be elected on the 
 "morrow of St. Peter ,"f and were to be between the ages 
 of fourteen and nineteen. Their qualifications are the 
 same as those prescribed by Bishop Foxe at Corpus " to 
 write off* a Latin letter, to compose verses ' saltern medio- 
 criterj and to have begun Logic"; but if persons qualified 
 cannot be found, then those may be elected who " approach 
 as nearly as may be " to the standard of knowledge. A 
 man might keep his scholarship for twelve years after 
 he has taken his M.A. degree, provided he behaved 
 himself and made progress in his studies. Hence it 
 became practically certain that any scholar who chose 
 to wait would in time become a fellow. Succession, 
 however, was not quite a matter of course ; from time 
 to time we have in the Convention Book such entries as 
 
 pelled to come to make a quorum at a degree ceremony, though this 
 is very rarely, if ever, done in actual practice. In the earlier days 
 of the University the actual teaching was in the hands of these 
 " necessary regents." 
 
 * The statutes (cap. 7 ad fin.) originally read " Anglise," but 
 this was altered by King James into " Magnae Britanniae." 
 
 f June 30. The day was no doubt chosen with reference to the 
 maiden-name (Petre) of the Foundress. It was kept till our own 
 day, but since 1869, the election of Wadham scholars has taken 
 place on St. Nicholas Day (December 6). 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 23 
 
 " Non visi sunt idonei qui in socios admitterentur.'" By a 
 later addition on the part of Dorothy Wadham herself, 
 three scholarships and three fellowships were reserved 
 for "Founder's kin" i.e., those who were connected with 
 her late husband. This could be proved collaterally, 
 as well as by direct descent from his sisters.* 
 
 The payments made to members of the Foundation 
 were as follows. The Warden had ^lOO a year,f each 
 fellow 20, and each scholar 10. The chaplains 
 had 13 6s. 8d. each, and the clerks 6 13*. 4d. By 
 an arrangement that seems curious, the under-cook and 
 under-butler had each a pound more than their chiefs. 
 It must be remembered that money at the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century was worth at least ten times as 
 much as at present. 
 
 The picture of college life, as given in the statutes, 
 differs very materially from that of our own day ; per- 
 haps it differed also from anything that was ever 
 realised. 
 
 In the first place, the amount of actual residence was 
 
 * This arrangement, as well as other peculiarities of the Wadham 
 Statutes e.g., the termination of the fellowships at the end of eighteen 
 years, was abolished by the first University Commission in 1855 
 (p. 186). Of the last three Founder's kin fellows, two had been 
 the late Professor Shirley, the successor of Stanley in the chair 
 of Ecclesiastical History, whose premature death robbed Oxford of 
 a distinguished historian, and Dr. Codrington, the missionary and 
 philologer. I lay stress on this, because there is often a tendency 
 to assume that every modern change is an improvement, and that 
 the old system was producing nothing but abuses. The changes 
 were no doubt necessary, but this extreme view is not likely to be 
 maintained by any one who has even an elementary acquaintance 
 with unreformed Oxford. 
 
 t During the Foundress' lifetime, however, it was arranged that 
 all these officers had only half their stipends (stat., cap. 31). 
 
24 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 far in excess of that which is now required. By the 
 arrangements of the Foundress, no scholar was to be 
 away more than thirty days in the academic year, no 
 fellow more than forty,* unless with special permission ; 
 and there were never to be more than seven away at 
 the same time. So the disputations of the B.A.s and 
 Regent Masters go on all the year round from the feast of 
 St. Denis (October 9) to August 1, " except in vacations;" 
 these seem to have been at Christmas, Easter, and 
 Whitsuntide, while in Lent the character of the work 
 was changed. 
 
 And during this prolonged period of work the obli- 
 gations were very considerable. The M.A.s had their 
 theological disputations for two hours every other week 
 in the ante-chapel ; the B.A.s and Regent Masters had 
 to " dispute " twice a week from 6 to 8 P.M. in hall on 
 three questions, which were alternately in Logic and in 
 Natural Philosophy or Metaphysics. In addition, they 
 had to dispute in Philosophy before the Moderator in 
 that subject three times a week, in the morning, from 
 10 to 11. 
 
 * There was, however, a wise provision, borrowed from Bishop 
 Foxe's statutes, that two of the fellows might travel for purposes of 
 studying Civil Law or Medicine for not more than four years ; during 
 this time they were to receive half their stipends. It was, however, 
 especially provided that they were to obtain the permission of the 
 government ; the intrigues of the foreign seminary priests were 
 too familiar for Oxford fellows to be allowed to travel abroad with- 
 out special precautions (Cf. p. 3 for limitations on this right of travel). 
 
 So in the account book of James Wilding, edited (1885) for the 
 Oxford Historical Society by Mr. E. G. Duff, there is no entry for 
 going home to Shropshire between 1682 when he matriculated at 
 Merton and 1687, though there are payments for journeys to 
 London, to Cambridge, and elsewhere. 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 25 
 
 But the undergraduates had much heavier work. 
 They had three hours a day on Logic with the Dean 
 (the first of which began at 6 A.M.), during which they 
 either had lectures or " disputed. 11 They also had 
 Classical lectures two on a Greek author and one on a 
 Latin author three times a week at 2 P.M. On each 
 of these subjects they were examined every week, and 
 in addition they had every week or every other week 
 the Catechist's lecture on Thursday, and on Saturdays 
 at 1 o'clock public " declamations ; " in these last- 
 mentioned functions, " orationes ex bile natae " were for 
 obvious reasons to be avoided. Thus an undergraduate 
 had twenty-three or twenty-four hours of lectures or 
 disputations every week. And it is expressly provided 
 that, in the Long Vacation, Arithmetic, Geometry, or 
 Geography may be substituted for the Classical lectures. 
 We can hardly think that all this residence, or even all 
 these lectures, were actually enforced ; for, in addition, 
 there were the University exercises as well, which were 
 always to take precedence of the college ones. The 
 Foundress certainly legislated up to her principle "In 
 all matters of education nothing is better than prac- 
 tice," with which she begins her statute (cap. 11) on 
 " Lectures and Scholastic Exercises.' 1 '' 
 
 In other respects too the discipline of a seventeenth 
 century college was very strict. Nothing is expressly said 
 of corporal punishment, though it was certainly inflicted 
 from time to time ; the main punishment is depriva- 
 tion of commons z.<?., practically a fine for a longer 
 or shorter period. The sub-Dean and the B.A.s also 
 were liable to have to do an imposition, or even to sit 
 by themselves in hall at breakfast or dinner, with a 
 
26 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 meal solito exiliorem ; no doubt these penalties were 
 inflicted on undergraduates also. 
 
 This severe discipline extended into every depart- 
 ment of college life. All B.A.s and undergraduates 
 were to attend college chapel twice a day, the services 
 being between 5 and 6 in the morning, and between 
 8 and 9 in the evening.* Their dress too was strictly 
 prescribed : their clothes and boots were to be black, or 
 " as near black as possible." They were always to wear 
 gowns down to their heels (togae talares) and square 
 caps, inside and outside of the college, " except in their 
 bedrooms." But these caps were to be carefully removed 
 whenever they met a senior in fact, an undergraduate 
 scholar might not put on his cap in college at all. 
 They were also never to go out alone, unless for some 
 University function or to hear or read a lecture) at 
 some other college. There was naturally a severe rule 
 against noise in college, which might disturb another 
 student when " working or washing to work." 
 
 But, in spite of all this severity, there was a human 
 side in the arrangements of the Foundress. She pro- 
 vided that 30 from the general college revenues might 
 be spent on the meals in hall on certain feast days.f 
 She also allowed the fellows and scholars on certain 
 feast days to play at cards in the hall ; but this was to 
 
 * By a curious stretch of interpretation the Visitor gave relief to 
 modern weakness. In 1838 he ruled that "mane inter horam 
 quintam et sextam " meant "any hours at the discretion of the 
 Warden or sub- Warden." 
 
 f These were Christmas Day, Easter Day, and Whitsuntide, the 
 feasts of the Circumcision, of the Epiphany, and of the Purification, 
 the days of election of scholars and fellows, All Saints' Day, and 
 October 20 the day of Nicholas Wadham's death. 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 27 
 
 be " for moderate stakes and at reasonable hours.'" 
 For the rest she repeated the old statute of William of 
 Wykeham, forbidding all kinds of shooting-engines in 
 college, and the introduction of " dogs, ferrets, rabbits 
 or birds of any kind whatsoever. 1 ' 1 * 
 
 Besides the members of the Foundation, others were 
 also to be allowed at Wadham, as commoners or battel- 
 lars.t Of these two classes there were at least twenty-seven 
 when the college was opened, at the head of the list being 
 the two great-nephews of the Foundress. It is amusing 
 to notice that while the scholars' oath is in Latin, theirs 
 is only in English ; too much scholarship was obviously 
 not expected of them ; their obligations, however, are 
 much the same as those of the foundationers "to 
 keep the ordinary exercises of this house appointed for 
 you," &c. 
 
 One more department of the college life, as represented 
 by the statutes, must be briefly touched on that of 
 the servants. The Foundress was true to the mediaeval 
 principle that no woman was to be allowed inside 
 college ; the only female servant was the laundress, and 
 even she apparently was to wash only for the chapel 
 and the buttery. She was only to come to the entrance 
 of the "first gate" of the college i.e., no doubt, the 
 gate of the inclosure in front, towards what is now Park 
 Street ; and she was to be of such age, position, and 
 reputation that no unfavourable suspicions could fall on 
 her. The men-servants who are provided consist of a 
 
 * The words suggest that University men were prone to a little 
 mild coursing or cock-fighting. 
 
 t The battellars were commoners of inferior rank. They waited 
 on themselves, fetching their own " battels " from the kitchen. 
 
28 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 manciple, two butlers, two cooks, a porter, and a barber.* 
 The last named was both to cut the hair of and to 
 shave the fellows and scholars, for, says the Foundress^ 
 " I do not allow that any one residing in my college, 
 should grow his beard, or have his hair long on his 
 shoulders ; nor on the other hand too clipped and cut 
 short.' 1 ' 1 The Warden with the Dean has the power o* 
 inflicting such penalties as he thinks fit on offenders 
 against this rule. The Foundress nominated as butler 
 her poor kinsman, John Buller, an inscription to whose 
 memory can still be seen in the ante-chapel. 
 
 The statutes, which cover some 60 pages, are full of 
 points of interest, and abound in shrewd and quaint 
 remarks ; but it is time to turn to the body of men who 
 were appointed to carry them out. 
 
 The first Warden, Robert Wright, came from Trinity 
 College, and was of the ripe age of fifty-three. He had 
 been chaplain to Queen Elizabeth, and now held the 
 same position to James I. ; he was also in possession of 
 several livings, so that he had abundant need of the 
 special provision in the statutes that the Wardenship 
 might be held along with other ecclesiastical preferment. 
 Hence it was not any objection to his pluralism which 
 led to his soon vacating his post ; but it seems that he 
 was anxious to many, and was disappointed when he 
 
 * All these offices are still found in college except that of the 
 barber, but the present cook has performed for many years the 
 duties of both cook and manciple. 
 
 The barber existed down to the end of the time of Warden 
 Symons ; his last recorded activity was dressing the wigs of the 
 college actors during the early " sixties ; " this was a period of great 
 dramatic activity at Wadham ; the plays were performed in the 
 large room on the second floor of No. vi. The barber insisted on 
 his rights in this matter, and threatened, if the wigs were dressed 
 by another, to inform the Warden of the whole proceedings. 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 29 
 
 found himself not permitted to do so. He therefore 
 resigned after holding his office five months.* 
 
 The Foundress and he seem to have parted on bad 
 terms ; in a letter after his resignation, she accuses him 
 of jobbing in his own nominee into the place of under- 
 cook ; probably he had not been sufficiently submissive 
 to please the masterful Dorothy. But he must have had 
 some affection for the college of his adoption, as he 
 sent his son Calvert Wright there in 1634 ; the young 
 man does not seem to have been a credit to anybody, 
 for he ran through his father's large savings, and died 
 in poverty at the age of forty-four in the King's Bench 
 Prison. 
 
 Robert Wright was a considerable scholar ,t and is 
 addressed somewhat haltingly by a contemporary poet as 
 
 " Ubera cui charites dant etjavet innuba Pallas." 
 
 He was also the first of the long roll of Wadham bishops, 
 and in this office played for a short time, some thirty years 
 later, a not inconsiderable part in one of the greatest 
 crises in English history. He, as Bishop of Lichfield, was 
 one of the twelve bishops who presented to King Charles 
 (December 29, 1641) the famous protest against their 
 
 * Tradition has affirmed that the Foundress herself wished to 
 marry him, and, on his refusal, debarred him, and all future Wardens 
 for two centuries, from marriage. It has been already seen that the 
 arrangement of celibacy was part of the Founder's instructions. 
 Were any further proof needed against a story, which has absolutely 
 no authority, it might fairly be found in the ages of the parties 
 (Mrs. Wadham was seventy-nine and he was fifty-three), and in the 
 hard and unpleasing features of his portrait in the college hall. 
 
 t A specimen of Wright's own Latin verses may be read in Mr. 
 Jackson's " Wadham " (p. 67) ; they are much better than those 
 addressed to him. 
 
30 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 exclusion, by mob violence, from the House of Lords, 
 declaring all proceedings in their absence null and void. 
 For this they were sent to the Tower as guilty of high 
 treason, though one member suggested the bishops were 
 only "stark mad," and should be sent to Bedlam. 
 Wright was soon released, and died two years later, 
 defending his episcopal seat, Eccleshall Castle, against 
 the Parliamentarians. 
 
 The first Warden was an Essex man, but the great 
 majority of the Fellows and scholars were from the 
 West country. Four fellows and five scholars were 
 from Somerset, four fellows and two scholars from 
 Devon ; the local connection thus begun has continued, 
 in part at any rate, till the present time, and it is to be 
 hoped may still continue and grow stronger, although 
 local connections are not popular in these reforming days. 
 
 As might be expected, the West-country connection 
 was also shown in the large number of fellows more 
 than a fourth who were drawn from Exeter College, 
 which has always maintained the tradition which its 
 name implies. It is 'also interesting to notice, as illus- 
 trating the contrast between the seventeenth century and 
 our own day, that no less than five fellows and one of 
 the chaplains came from the Halls. According to the 
 agreement with the Foundress, the City of Oxford 
 nominated one fellow, Thomas Harris, apparently the 
 son of the Mayor of 1610, and two scholars ; Harris 
 had the sad distinction of being the first member of the 
 college to be buried in the chapel, for he died in June 
 1614. The Foundress writes regretting his death, 
 u which if it had pleased God, for the good I have 
 heard of him, I could have wished otherwise." 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 31 
 
 Of the original Fellows none were men of very great 
 eminence; but several of them must be mentioned in 
 the next chapter for their part in the College history, 
 and no less than three, Smyth, Estcott, and Pitts, 
 became Wardens. Two, however, in different ways 
 typical men, may fitly be spoken of here, since their 
 subsequent history lies mainly outside the College walls. 
 Henry Ancketyll was the first fellow to enjoy the 
 permission of the Foundress to travel ; whether his 
 Protestantism was suspected we cannot say, but in his 
 passport he is specially warned not to go to Rome. 
 But his title to remembrance is that he is said to be 
 the original of one of Sir Walter Scott's great creations 
 the militant divine, Dr. Rochcliffe, in "Woodstock." 
 Whether this be so or not, " Anketell, the priest and 
 malignant doctor " was well known in the Civil War, 
 and held Corfe Castle for the King. 
 
 The other, Humphrey Sydenham, was the first person 
 to take his M.A. from Wadham College; he, too, 
 fought for Church and King, but with his tongue and 
 pen, not his sword. The same fiery temper which 
 made him incur " scandalosa excommunicatio" for some 
 unrecorded reason, while he was residing as Fellow, 
 made him a keen disputant when he was a parish priest 
 in Somerset. Fuller mentions him as one of the 
 " worthies" of that county, and says that he was known 
 as "silver-tongued Sidenham"; the sermon which the 
 annalist specially mentions as " to set forth his praise," 
 the " Athenian Babler," is not to be found either in the 
 Bodleian or in the College Library; but the "Well- 
 tuned Cymbal " preached at the dedication of Bruton 
 organ the " Arraignment of the Arian," and others 
 
32 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 can still be read with some pleasure. In the dedication 
 of his sermons to Archbishop Laud in 1637, he says 
 that he owed his first spiritual preferment to him,* and 
 is very severe on the "sanctified revilers" "who dare 
 play with the very beard of Aaron." He, too, like 
 Wright and Anrketyll, was a " confessor" for the royal 
 cause, and lost his livings after the triumph of the 
 Parliament. 
 
 One of the chaplains also, Gilbert Stokes, may deserve 
 a passing mention, as an early instance of a type still 
 familiar in the University. He was a " continual dis- 
 putant even to his last " (and Stokes was in residence as 
 chaplain over forty years) "among the juniors in the 
 time of Lent," says Wood in his " Athenae," and " his 
 use was to ferret them from one hole to another with 
 subtilties." We no longer " dispute in Lent," but Mr. 
 Stokes, with his fondness for examining his j uniors, is a 
 type of character which is never without example in 
 Oxford. 
 
 Of the original fifteen scholars I regret to say that 
 two were punished as B.A.s for staying out of college 
 all night " quia pernoctavit in oppido"" says the 
 record. f A like lawless spirit brought one of the 
 "clerks," Alexander Gill, into more serious trouble, 
 when he had left Wadham for Trinity. He was 
 brought before the Star Chamber for drinking a health 
 to Felton, the Duke of Buckingham's murderer, and for 
 saying "the Duke had gone to hell to meet King 
 
 * Laud seems to have procured him the living of Ashbrittle in 
 1627 ; Laud was at that time Bishop of Bath and Wells, and as Visitor 
 of Wadham he was not likely to overlook a man of learning and 
 eloquence, who was also a sound Churchman. 
 
 f The punishment was deprivation of commons for a week. 
 
THE COLLEGE STATUTES 33 
 
 James.'" He had also said that King Charles " was 
 fitter to stand with an apron in a Cheapside shop, and 
 to say 'What lack you, 1 than to govern the King- 
 dom."* He was fined ^?2000, and sentenced to lose 
 one ear in London and the other in Oxford. But the 
 fine was diminished, and the mutilation altogether 
 remitted, at the prayer of his father, the High Master 
 of St. Paul's School, and through the intercession of 
 Laud. Gill, I think, is the only Wadham man whose 
 ears were ever in danger. Yet seven years after (1 635), 
 in spite of his bad record, he was appointed head of 
 St. Paul's in succession to his father. His severity in 
 this post was so excessive that he had to be pensioned 
 in 1640, and ended his stormy life two years later. 
 Wood records that he was one of the best Latin poets 
 of the time. 
 
 Gill must have found a kindred spirit in Wadham in 
 the famous Cornelius Burges, who, as one of the leading 
 London clergy (he was Rector of St. Magnus the 
 Martyr), took a prominent part in the Civil War. 
 According to Wood, he was the "ringleader of the 
 rout " which intimidated the Lords at the time of Lord 
 Stafford's trial; a less partial judge might say that he 
 is to be honoured as a leader in the defence of Parlia- 
 ment against the violence plotted by the King. At all 
 events, he was one of the committee appointed to raise 
 money for the Civil War, and was, at the request of the 
 City Council, appointed Sunday Lecturer at St. Paul's, 
 with the enormous salary of ^400 a year. Wood says 
 he also greatly enriched himself by buying the forfeited 
 lands of the bishops and chapters. The Restoration 
 * Wood, " Athenae," iii. 42. 
 
 c 
 
34 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 reduced him to great poverty, and he was also dying of 
 cancer in the face ; but only three weeks before his 
 death (1665) he sent certain rare prayer-books to the 
 Bodleian, with a touching dedication, which ends : 
 " All these I most humbly and thankfully give to my 
 said honourable mother of Oxford, (I being ready to 
 dye), beseeching her to account of these four small 
 mites, as our Lord and blessed Saviour did of the poor 
 widow's two mites. Cornelius Burges." This is not the 
 tone of the time-server and hypocrite which Wood 
 represents him to be. It is tempting to dwell on the 
 varying views and fortunes of our first predecessors, but 
 the next chapter must return to the general history of 
 the college. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE BEFORE THE 
 CIVIL WAR 
 
 THE new college thus founded seems to have attracted 
 a considerable amount of attention, even in London. 
 Among the State Papers for 1613 figure, somewhat 
 incongruously, a number of papers as to a college for 
 "innocents or fools," to be called "Gotam College," which 
 had been founded by Sir Thomas a Cuniculis, with a 
 charter from the Emperor of Morea. There seems to 
 be no special reference in the mock statutes to those 
 which had just been issued by Dorothy Wadham ; but 
 the event of the foundation of a new college seems to 
 have given occasion to the publication once more of 
 the time-honoured jokes against colleges and their 
 arrangements in general. 
 
 Wadham at once became popular as a place of 
 education ; the West-country gentry hastened to send 
 their sons to it. The first name on the University 
 Register of a man matriculating at Wadham may be 
 taken as typical of the sources from which for some 
 time the college drew most of its members,* and also 
 
 * To take a single instance in 1615 : of twenty-five names that can 
 be identified, twenty come from Dorset, Somerset, Devon, and 
 Cornwall ; there are twenty-six entries in all. 
 
36 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 of the subsequent fortunes of a large number of them. 
 He was called William Coker, was the son of a Dorset 
 squire, and having succeeded to his father's estate, he 
 served as colonel under Lord Hopton in the King^s 
 Western army, and had to pay a heavy fine when he 
 submitted to the Parliament after their victory. 
 
 The new college was hardly inhabited before it 
 received its first considerable benefaction, and, as was 
 befitting a West-country college, it came from a 
 Somerset man. Dr. Bisse, the Archdeacon of Taunton, 
 gave his books to furnish the library of the new founda- 
 tion, and they arrived in July 1613. Antony Wood 
 says there were 2000 of them, and that they were 
 valued at ^1700. The number would seem to be not 
 at all exaggerated, for all Dr. Bisse^s books can still be 
 identified; by the Foundress 1 special direction, they 
 have the name of their donor inscribed on the title- 
 page. A large number of them, especially of the folios, 
 can also be recognised by the fact that they have their 
 titles carefully written in black letter character on the 
 edges of the pages ; Dr. Bisse, it appears, followed the 
 fashion of his time, and put his books on the shelves 
 with their backs inside with a view presumably to 
 saving the binding. The same arrangement of books 
 can be seen in the frame of the monument of Thomas 
 Hams (p. 30) on the north wall of the ante-chapel. 
 
 Of the present value of the gift it is much harder to 
 speak. Mr. Gordon Duff, to whose care the Wadham 
 Library owes much, rather unkindly says, " it is sur- 
 prising how so large a collection could have been 
 formed, containing so very little interesting or rare." 
 But one treasure certainly deserves mention the Latin 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 37 
 
 translation of the " Letters of Phalaris," published at 
 Oxford in 1485, which is not only most valuable to 
 bibliophiles, but also interesting to all Oxford men 
 from its Latin verse colophon, giving the history of the 
 Oxford Press. The splendid maps of the great sixteenth- 
 century geographer, Ortelius, may also be mentioned. 
 But the bulk of the collection is theological, and 
 answers accurately to the account of Bishop Manner- 
 ing's library, which so delighted Dominie Sampson : 
 
 "The close pressed leaves, unoped for many an age, 
 The dull red edging of the well-fill'd page, 
 On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled, 
 Where yet the title stands in tarnished gold." 
 
 Such a collection enables the nineteenth century to 
 realise, better than anything else, the main interests of a 
 seventeenth-century scholar.* Every variety of theology, 
 historical, doctrinal, above all controversial, is repre- 
 sented fully, and not only by English works, or by 
 works of the Protestant divines of Germany or Holland, 
 but also by Roman theologians from all corners of 
 Europe. Long-forgotten Jesuits from Spain or Poland 
 stand in dusty oblivion side by side with their oppo- 
 nents ; Alexander of Hales and St. Thomas Aquinas 
 are as fully represented as Erasmus and Luther. We 
 see how in those days scholars from all parts of Europe 
 met armed with the common language, Latin, on the 
 common battle-field, Theology. 
 
 * Dr. Bisse had been buying books to the last. His library was 
 given in 1613, but it contains Sir Henry Savile's fine edition of St. 
 Chrysostom, in eight folio volumes, which was only published early 
 in that year. 
 
38 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 By a special provision in the statutes, all books were 
 to be chained (a custom which prevailed in Oxford 
 libraries till the latter half of the eighteenth century), 
 and on no account to be taken out of the library. The 
 chains seem to have remained till 1785 (cf. p. 145), 
 and the Visitor has since relaxed the restrictions of the 
 statute, so as to permit books to be used more freely. 
 
 Dr. Bisse's portrait, painted by Mrs. Wadham^s special 
 order, " with his doctoral formalities on," still adorns 
 the library, and his nephew was appointed by her one 
 of the first Fellows, though he was not a graduate at the 
 time, " ob singularem amorem avunculi sui erga collegium 
 meum" 
 
 In the very first year of the collegers existence the 
 Foundress gave a striking example of her love and care 
 for it. She had already at Christmas sent d^lO extra 
 for the gaudy festivities ; in February 1614, she writes 
 giving, for the immediate enjoyment of the college, her 
 estates in Essex, subject only to a charge of ^200 a 
 year for herself, which seems to have been less than half 
 their real value. This increase of income was to be 
 applied to bringing the stipends more nearly up to the 
 level fixed by the statutes. She warns the fellows, 
 however, that henceforth they must "trust to them- 
 selves and look into their own estates."" And her warn- 
 ing was at once realised ; for the annual income of the 
 Essex lands fell off in the first year nearly 20 per cent., 
 and in the next (1615) some 18 per cent. It was quite 
 an anticipation of our own days of agricultural depres- 
 sion. Dorothy Wadham was, however, equal to the 
 occasion. " I am heartily sorry," her letter begins, 
 "that now, in your first entrance, you should be so 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 39 
 
 cumbered with bad tenants ; " she then goes on to remit 
 half her own fixed charge of %QO. It was in this 
 liberal spirit that she carried out her husband's wishes. 
 Nor was she careless of her young foundation's spiritual 
 welfare, for she writes soon after a special postscript 
 that " prayers and fasting-days be duly observed in the 
 house, not allowing any in their chambers to break it, 
 or elsewhere in the college." 
 
 Among the early entries at Wadham is the name of 
 Thomas Gower, a little Yorkshire boy aged twelve, who 
 came up in 1616. To him a particular interest may be 
 said to attach, not merely because of his loyal service to 
 King Charles as Sheriff* of York, nor because he is the 
 direct ancestor of the Duke of Sutherland and of two 
 earls, but from a curious chance, which preserved under 
 the floor of his room (No. v. 1 pair it.) one of his 
 mother's letters to him when in his fourteenth year. It 
 is like countless other mothers' 1 letters, but there is a 
 charming pathos in it, as it comes to us out of the past; 
 it shall, however, speak for itself (I preserve Mrs. 
 Gower's spelling and punctuation) : 
 
 " Tom : I am so fearfull of you now being far from me 
 that your iyoung years should forgett your maker which 
 hath been so beneficiall unto you, I charge you to continue 
 with your daily prayers unto him for the increase of them 
 and alwayes acknowledge whence they came. I writt to 
 you in my last letter that you shoulde send me word 
 whether you heard from your granmother or whether you 
 writt to her since your being at Oxford, and you sent me 
 no word att all." 
 
 Young Mr. Gower was bad at answering questions, 
 like many modern correspondents. His mother then 
 
40 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 goes on to tell him of a neighbour's death, and how 
 there has been a duel between two others, ending in the 
 death of the one and the flight of the other from the 
 country. She adds, " It was ther exeemye great pride," 
 and charges him " to beware of this sin and to pray 
 against it. Thus with my daly prayers to God to con- 
 tinue you with His blessings I rest your ever lovihge 
 mother till death, Ann Gower." 
 
 Then follows a P.S. on family business. But on the 
 back of the sheet, in a different hand, there is a 
 fragment of a letter which seems to show that the 
 young undergraduate was perhaps rather inclined to 
 those duels against which his mother warns him : it 
 begins, " hopinge of your health I have made the best 
 means for your sworde and canne not get it by no 
 means.' 11 
 
 So ends our glimpse of this seventeenth-century 
 undergraduate . 
 
 Within two years after this there was admitted to 
 the college one who is perhaps its most famous member. 
 Robert Blake matriculated at Alban Hall in January 
 1615, but took his B.A. from Wadham in February 
 1618. He seems to have resided for some time after- 
 wards, perhaps hunting for fellowships ; at all events he 
 stood for one at Merton College, and, according to tra- 
 dition, was rejected because his short stature and 
 clumsy build displeased the then Warden of Merton. 
 Blake's history is part, and no inconsiderable part, of 
 England's history during this period, and Oxford can 
 hardly claim to have taught him either the iron deter- 
 mination which did so much to ruin the royal cause in 
 the West, or the naval skill which has joined Blake's 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 41 
 
 name to Nelson's in the front rank of English 
 admirals.* 
 
 Blake's younger brother was a fellow of the college, 
 and resided for more than twenty years (with intervals), 
 till after the outbreak of the Civil War. He took his 
 D.C.L. at Padua in 1637, and afterwards was incorpo- 
 rated with the same degree at Oxford.f The University 
 in the seventeenth century was not so exclusive as it is 
 now in regard to foreign degrees. 
 
 The very year in which Blake joined the college he 
 had an experience of Stuart respect for statutes and 
 constitutions which may well have had something to 
 do with forming the Republican notions which he is 
 supposed to have held at Oxford and later. On October 
 30, 1618, King James wrote to " our trusty and well 
 beloved, the Warden and Fellows of Waddam College,' 1 ' 1 
 bidding them elect Walter J Durham of St. Andrews a 
 Fellow, " notwitstanding anything in your statutes to 
 
 * Wadham not only has in its hall a fine portrait of Blake as a 
 young man (for its history see Appendix II.), which has been recently 
 reproduced in Laird Clowes' " History of the Royal Navy." It has 
 also one of the four gold admirals' medals, struck to commemorate 
 the victories over the Dutch in 1653, which are the masterpieces of 
 the art of Simon, the greatest of English medallists. And in the 
 collection of Wadham portraits there is a unique gathering of the 
 engraved pictures of Blake. It is amusing to see how, when the 
 demand for his likeness outran the supply, the print-sellers of the 
 time unscrupulously sold Drake's portrait for Blake's. Yet there is 
 not the slightest resemblance between the close-cropped bullet-head 
 of the Elizabethan sea-dog and the somewhat heavy John Bull face 
 and long curls of the Puritan admiral. The collection of engraved 
 portraits and the medal the college owes to the care and munificence 
 of the late Warden, Dr. Griffiths. 
 
 t Wood, "Fasti," 1640. 
 
 Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Jackson call him "William," but the 
 " Walter " is distinct in the Warden's MSS. 
 
42 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the contrary." But the college had that English regard 
 for legality which the Stuarts never could understand ; 
 Durham had not been a scholar of the college, and so 
 was ineligible, and, moreover, the Foundress, for whose 
 funeral " their eyes were still wet, 11 had filled up the 
 place beforehand. They were much afraid that the 
 King might put down their refusal to dislike of a 
 Scotchman, but while they u feared the King, they 
 feared Almighty God still more." Durham, as the 
 official Latin narrative preserved among the Warden's 
 MSS. quaintly says, " nullum non movebat lapidem ut 
 voti compos Jieret ; " he even called on the fellows " in 
 their bedrooms " ; but the college stood stoutly to its 
 guns, and, thanks to the help of the Chancellor, William 
 Herbert, the great Earl of Pembroke, they had their 
 way. Durham did not get his fellowship, and the 
 statutes remained inviolate. 
 
 It is impossible not to connect this aggression on the 
 part of the King with an entry in the Admission 
 Register of next year ; the bald list of names suddenly 
 becomes eloquent, when Carew Ralegh is entered as 
 "fortissimi doctissimique equitis Gualteri Raligh films" * 
 Warden Smith was only voicing in Latin what all 
 England was saying as to the King's victim of the pre- 
 ceding year. Carew Ralegh seems to have had some at 
 least of his father's ability ; James told him to leave 
 
 * The register becomes even more eloquent in 1636 over Thomas 
 Drake, who is described as " Magni illius Francisci Drake, qui 
 primus nostrorum hominum totum orbem circumnavigat ex fratre 
 nepos." Another member of the same family, Gilbert Drake, was 
 a great benefactor of the Library (1629), and by a charming co- 
 incidence presented it with the rare first edition of Hakluyt's 
 " Voyages" (1589). 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 43 
 
 the Court, because he looked so like his father's ghost ; 
 but he served the son of his father's murderer in the 
 Civil War, and had some share, as a member of the 
 Long Parliament, in restoring the grandson. 
 
 While the college was thus struggling for its rights, 
 the Foundress had passed away. She had been failing 
 in health and bedridden for a year before her death, 
 but she still continued to appoint to the fellowships ; in 
 fact, she had given them for some time in advance. She 
 died on May 16, 1618, aged eighty-four, and was buried 
 beside her husband at Ilminster ; in spite of her own 
 express wishes to the contrary, her funeral was magni- 
 ficent, both in Oxford and in Somerset. In Oxford the 
 mercer's bill alone came to ^157 Us. &/., for all the 
 members of the foundation had cloaks of broadcloth, 
 the quality of which varied according to their rank, 
 and the whole chapel was hung with black, on which 
 texts were pinned. * The funeral feast in hall cost 
 c41 9*. Id. 
 
 Dorothy Wadham may claim at least equal rank with 
 her husband as a college founder, and her picture always 
 hangs beside his within our walls. It shows her, as we 
 should imagine her, a woman of somewhat hard features, 
 but evidently of strong character, great common sense, 
 and real kindness. She was a well-marked specimen of 
 a type still familiar in every country-side a great lady 
 
 * There is an entry in Mr. Boswell's account, preserved among 
 the Warden's MSS. : " 3 papers of pins for to pin on the verses, is." 
 
 Mr. Boswell's son was a Fellow of Wadham (see p. 2) and a 
 distinguished] lawyer. He lies buried in All Saints' Church, in the 
 High Street. Among other presents to the library he gave an 
 eleventh-century Latin MS. of the four Gospels, with interesting 
 Anglo-Saxon illuminations. 
 
44 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 with strong views of her own, and small patience with 
 those who opposed her, but also as unsparing of herself 
 as of others and devoted to her ideals of duty. Her 
 college may do well to remember the closing words of 
 one of her last letters to Wadham (October 1616). 
 " Above all things I would have [you] to avoid conten- 
 tions among yourselves, for without true charity, there 
 cannot be a true society." 
 
 In the year of the death of the Foundress, the college 
 matriculated its first dramatist, Shakerly Marmion. It 
 must be confessed that his title to permanent fame is 
 not great, and only one of his plays " The Antiquary,"" 
 has even got so far as to be included in Dodsley's Collec- 
 tion. But he was one of Ben Jensen's "sons," 11 and 
 lived the usual life of a man about town with such 
 effect that he ran through a large estate. His death 
 was better than his life, for he served as a captain of 
 horse under Sir John Suckling in the Bishops' War ; but 
 the hardships of the campaign were too much for him, 
 and he died early in 1639. 
 
 Wadham itself at this period seems to have been 
 anything but a healthy place ; the college register of 
 burials in the chapel and the cloister between 1613 and 
 1646 contains twenty-six names, among which are those 
 of two Wardens (Fleming, d. 1617, and Escott, d. 1644). 
 This mortality is not surprising when we find that in 
 1645 an unnamed stranger who died of the plague was 
 actually buried in the College. In fact, that terrible 
 scourge seems to have been at this time almost endemic 
 in Oxford ; in 1625 general leave of absence is granted 
 ob pestem (ut tune credebatur) in ipso Collegio grass- 
 antern, and this was twice extended, lasting in all more 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 45 
 
 than six months. It was with good reason that the 
 Foundress provided, in the college estate of Southrop 
 (near Fairford in Gloucestershire), a place to which her 
 society might remove in times of pestilence. Yet our 
 ancestors seem to have been stoically indifferent to 
 infection ; in 1625, when the plague was " raging in the 
 city," the number of admissions only fell off' eight from 
 that of the previous year (from 24 to 16). 
 
 Among those who died the best known certainly is 
 Sir John Portman, whose monument, which once stood 
 within the sanctuary of the chapel, is now so familiar 
 a feature in the ante-chapel ; but 'probably the greatest 
 loss was young John Flavell, one of the original scholars, 
 who took his B.A. at the age of eighteen, and was 
 " senior of the Act," when he proceeded to his M.A. 
 Young as he was, he took a prominent part in teaching 
 his juniors, and his Logic lectures can still be read by 
 the curious ; they show considerable familiarity with 
 Aristotle. They were published after his death by his 
 fellow scholar, Alexander Huish, who was himself to 
 attain scholarly fame later as assisting to edit the Poly- 
 glot Bible ; he is therefore the first of the many Orien- 
 talists who have been trained at Wadham. He presented 
 the college library with his edition of Flavell, and with 
 a beautiful copy of his own elaborate work on the Lord's 
 Prayer (1636). The inscriptions with which he records 
 his gifts are charming, and from the tone of his prefaces 
 we can well believe what Wood says of him, that he had 
 " done extraordinary benefit for the common good." 
 
 One of the earliest acts of the college in its relations 
 with the outside world was to attempt to assert its 
 claim over the adjoining parish as the legal successor of 
 
46 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the Austin Friars. A person in Holywell was convicted 
 of manslaughter, and Wadham and Merton jointly 
 claimed his goods. The claim failed, for what reason 
 is not known, and Merton paid Wadham 6 13s. 4<d. 
 towards its charges.* 
 
 In the same year (1623) was admitted to the college 
 a man who has succeeded in marking himself off from 
 all other Wadham men by writing a book which the 
 University publicly burned as pernicious. Philip Hunton, 
 whom even Wood admits to have been "a man of 
 parts," was one of the prominent Puritan ministers in 
 Wilts, and was actually made provost of the new college 
 at Durham which Cromwell founded in 1657. This, how- 
 ever, was soon dissolved, and Hunton 's title to fame is his 
 controversy with the Cambridge political philosopher, 
 Sir Robert Filmer. His treatise on monarchy upheld 
 the terrible doctrine that " the Sovereignty of England 
 is in the three estates, King, Lords, and Commons," and 
 the book was condemned by the University, along with 
 some of Milton's political writings, and burned in the 
 School quadrangle in 1683 the year after its author's 
 death. Wood says it had " great vogue among many 
 persons of levelling principles." Perhaps Hunton found 
 a congenial spirit at Wadham in Robert Maton, who 
 was admitted later in the same year, and who became 
 prominent in the stormy days of the Commonwealth as 
 one of the leading " millenaries " ; he published " Israel's 
 Redemption," a " Discourse of Gog and Magog," and 
 other books popular in Fifth-Monarchy circles. 
 
 The varying fortunes and the diverse views of contem- 
 poraries in England at this period can be well illustrated 
 * Warden's MSS. 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 47 
 
 by the fortunes of three men who matriculated at 
 Wadham at the same time (1626) ; of these, Charles 
 Dymoke * died in the King's garrison at Oxford in 
 1644, and in the same year, the second of them, Francis 
 Blewett, was killed as a royalist colonel at the siege of 
 Lyme Regis, which Blake was so unexpectedly defend- 
 ing ; between their names on the Register comes that 
 of Charles D'Oiley,! who commanded Fairfax 1 Guards 
 at Naseby. With them at college were two other men, 
 much better known, who played a leading part on 
 opposite sides : Nicholas Love, who came up in 1625, 
 was a distinguished lawyer, and was a member of the 
 High Court of Justice which condemned King Charles I. 
 Though he dissented from the sentence, Love was pro- 
 secuted as a regicide, and died in exile at Vevey. Wyke- 
 hamists, at any rate, will be grateful to him for preserving 
 the old buildings of their college from Waller's troopers. 
 On the other side, there is Nicholas Monk, who matri- 
 culated in 1628, and whose influence with his brother 
 George, afterwards Duke of Albemarle, was supposed 
 to have had a share in bringing about the Restoration 
 of 1660. At all events, this brought to Monk the 
 Bishopric of Hereford and a monument in Westminster 
 Abbey.J It is interesting to speculate how the begin- 
 
 * He is entered in the register as " Pugil Regius" Royal 
 Champion ; he had just served in that capacity at the coronation 
 of Charles I. 
 
 t His nephew, John, gave the Library its fine copy of Walton's 
 " Polyglot." 
 
 J It is rather curious that another Wadham man, Sir Thomas 
 Clarges, the brother-in-law of the Duke of Albemarle, represented 
 the University of Oxford in the second Convention Parliament 
 that of January 1689 which undid the work of the Restoration, and 
 expelled the direct line of the Stuarts. 
 
48 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 nings of the Parliamentary conflict would be discussed 
 at college by these young men, whose fortunes were to 
 be so affected in its subsequent development. 
 
 But the members of the foundation at this time seem 
 to have been more concerned with the ordinary routine 
 business of University and of college than with the 
 political questions of the day. In 1624 a Wadham 
 M.A., Daniel Escott, was elected Senior Proctor, after 
 "the greatest canvas in the memory of man." The 
 scrutiny continued till after 9 P.M., so great was the 
 number of non-resident voters who had been brought 
 up, and Escott headed the poll with 255 ; in all 984 
 M.A/s voted.* Even more engrossing was the question 
 as to Harrington's fellowship, which distracted the 
 college for years. The details are worth giving briefly, 
 because they illustrate the kind of questions which fill 
 a college register, and because they show how the 
 greatest persons in England were called on to interfere 
 in these petty quarrels. 
 
 James Harrington, one of the original fellows, had 
 inherited some money, and was therefore deprived of 
 his fellowship in October 1627, because his property 
 was much in excess of the limit fixed by the statutes 
 ^10 a year. He did not deny his wealth, or the 
 obvious meaning of the statute, but he pleaded that 
 the Foundress had given him a dispensation from 
 its application. The case was laid before the Visitor 
 (cf. p. 6) at this time Laud in the early summer 
 of 1627, but Harrington failed to appear, and instead 
 obtained, under false pretences, a commission from the 
 King, to examine the matter at Oxford. This was 
 too much ; Harrington was suspended, and Charles 
 * Wood, " Fasti," 1624. 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 49 
 
 being informed of the circumstances, revoked his royal 
 commission. When the matter was inquired into, it 
 appeared that the Foundress had certainly talked of 
 giving Harrington the exemption he claimed, but her 
 letter could not be produced ; he therefore accused the 
 Warden of suppressing it. After investigating these 
 points, Laud decided the main point in Harrington's 
 favour, but ordered him to apologise to the Warden, 
 and to pay the costs of the college in the suit. The 
 troublesome fellow then apologised, admitting that he 
 had "oftentimes behaved himself toward the Warden 
 both in gesture and speeches very uncivilly ;" and that he 
 " had given scandal to the college." He at once, how- 
 ever, proceeded to do this again, even threatening the 
 Visitor himself ; he was therefore once more compelled 
 to apologise, and in the end was deprived of his fellow- 
 ship for six months. But he was not finally " removed " 
 till 1631, when his full term of eighteen years had run 
 out. The only person who comes quite well out of the 
 squabble is the Visitor, Laud, who showed great temper 
 and judgment under severe provocation ; the College as 
 a whole seems to have been very careless and unbusiness- 
 like in its management of affairs, while Harrington 
 spoiled a strong case by outrageous behaviour; his 
 ideas too of the meaning of an apology seem to have 
 been loose in the extreme. 
 
 About this time we have another curious glimpse of 
 undergraduate life in four letters,* from John 
 Willoughby (who came up as a commoner to Wadham 
 in 1630), to his father. They are mainly made up of 
 requests for money ; he urges as a reason that prices 
 * " Trevelyan Papers," vol. iii. (Camden Society). 
 
 D 
 
50 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 have risen so much in Oxford that bread is as dear 
 again as it had been. The father not unnaturally did 
 not look on this as a sufficient reason for an increased 
 allowance, and like a wise man, took his son away next 
 year from a place where he seems to have been doing no 
 good. 
 
 In the same year (1630) there was incorporated at 
 Wadham a Cambridge man of considerable distinction ; 
 it is curious by the way to note how many of Wadham's 
 most famous sons have come to her from the sister 
 University ; John Gauden, who entered at Wadham as 
 tutor to two young Russells, fellow commoners, had 
 been educated at St. John's College there. He resided 
 in Oxford till 1635, devoting his time to unwearied 
 study. In the controversies of the stormy times that 
 followed he played a leading part, and did not escape 
 the charge of time-serving in his religious opinions ; but 
 at all events he deserves credit for having ventured to 
 plead with Cromwell on behalf of the oppressed clergy of 
 the Church. His real title to fame, however, is that he 
 is the probable author of the famous " Eikon Basilike," 
 which did so much for the reputation of the Royal 
 Martyr;* as a reward for keeping the secret of the 
 authorship of this, or for his controversial works, Gauden 
 was soon after the Restoration made Bishop of 
 Worcester. It is a pity the college has no portrait of 
 him, especially as Wood says he was " a very comely 
 person." He presented several books to the College 
 library. 
 
 Of the other side in politics during this decade there 
 were at Wadham three famous preachers, Francis Bamp- 
 * Of this book the college library has a first edition. 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 51 
 
 field* (1631), Thomas Manton (1635), and Thomas 
 Leigh (1636). The first of these died in Newgate in 
 1683 under sentence for "unlicensed preaching"; the 
 second was recognised as one of the leading divines 
 expelled in 1662, and for this reason he is assailed by 
 Wood with unusual bitterness; the third was an 
 educational reformer as well as a divine, and published 
 an English grammar under the title of " The Child's 
 Delight," which ran through several editions. To judge 
 from the preface the name is a sad misnomer. 
 
 The Civil War was now approaching, and it seems to 
 have cast its shadows before, for, in 1639, only nine 
 persons were admitted at Wadham. The King too was 
 appealing to his people by issuing his " declaration " as 
 to the real causes of the troubles in Scotland; the 
 library still possesses the splendid copy it received, 
 bound with the Royal Arms. But the alarm passed off 
 and the number of admissions rises again in the follow- 
 ing years ; men did not believe in the war till it was 
 upon them. 
 
 During the period described in this chapter the 
 fabric of the college was completed by the glazing of 
 the chapel windows. The first to be done were those 
 on the North side, representing the prophets, which 
 seem to have been finished about 1614 ; the blue-eyed 
 whale of Jonah in the last window to the West is the 
 best known part of them. They are decidedly inferior 
 to the rest of the windows in the chapel, and perhaps 
 this was partly the reason why their maker, Rudland, 
 
 * By a curious chance the future "anabaptist" took his B.A. 
 along with the future Romanist, Obadiah Walker, the notorious 
 Master of University under James II. 
 
52 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 was paid off and dismissed at the direction of the 
 Foundress, after much " brabbling." 
 
 The next windows to be done were those opposite, on 
 the South side of the chapel, representing the 
 Apostles, with our Lord and SS. Paul and Stephen ; 
 this figure, the last to the West, bears date 1616; 
 these windows are much superior, and are artistically 
 perhaps the best in the chapel. But the most effective 
 glass is undoubtedly that in the great East window, 
 representing the scenes of the Passion, with Old Testa- 
 ment types above ; * in spite of the Dutch faces, and the 
 lack of dignity in many of the figures, it is admirably 
 dramatic, and much of the colour is very fine ; in it, as 
 in the windows on the South side, the old method of 
 using pot-metal glass is combined to some extent with 
 the new process of enamelling. The designs of the East 
 window are mainly copied from a curious book in the 
 library, given by Dr. Bisse, " Meditationes in Evangelia," 
 published at Antwerp in!595 by a Jesuit, Natalis. 
 
 * The subjects of the window are as follows : 
 
 In the lower tier (beginning from the left) 
 
 1. The Triumphal Entry into 4. Jesus before Caiaphas. 
 
 Jerusalem. 5. Pilate offering Jesus to the 
 
 2. The Agony in the Garden. people. 
 
 3. The Betrayal. 
 
 In the upper tier 
 
 1. The Scourging. 4. The Resurrection. 
 
 2. Christ bearing His Cross. 5. The Ascension. 
 
 3. The Crucifixion. 
 
 In the larger tracery lights above are 
 
 1. The Sacrifice of Isaac. 3. The Translation of Elijah. 
 
 2. The Brazen Serpent. 4. Jonah and the Whale. 
 There are also some heraldic panels. A good number of these 
 
 details can be made out in plate iii. 
 
From a photograph by the] [Oxford Camera Club 
 
 THE CHAPEL (LOOKING EAST) 
 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 53 
 
 Of the cost of this window the college has full 
 details ; its artist, Bernard Van Ling,* was engaged 
 for the work at Wadham by a Londoner, Mr. Lang- 
 ton, who seems to have been a glass merchant. His 
 letter to Warden Smyth is amusing; he gives 
 Van Ling's history, and guarantees that he is " of 
 sober and good carriage, and not given to drink. 11 He 
 further presses the Warden to decide at once, as 
 otherwise he will find work for Van Ling in St. Paul's, 
 and "after he have wrought here, it will be hard 
 for you to agree with him upon these conditions." 
 Langton then warns the Warden against English 
 workmen, who want money down in advance, and 
 " such is their subtility that they will by one means or 
 other get beforehand with you." He urges that Van 
 Ling should be put up in college ; " then our glaziers 
 here can put no tricks upon him, for I am sure there 
 will be attempt, because they would have him depart 
 the land " ; they had already tried to get at Van Ling, 
 urging him not to undersell the British workman. It 
 seems that modern trades-union methods were not 
 unknown early in the 17th century. 
 
 Van Ling finally covenanted with the college to do 
 the work for 2s. a square foot ; all materials but 
 " paynter " (i.e., paint) were to be found for him, and 
 he was to be put up and fed in college, an oven also 
 was to be built for him to " neale his Glase in." This 
 
 * He came from Friesland, and had worked in Paris. He is to 
 be carefully distinguished from Abraham Van Ling, the artist of the 
 Jonah window at Christ Church, and of windows at Balliol, Queen's 
 and University. There are many most interesting details as to his 
 work in Mr. Jackson's " Wadham," p. 163 seq. 
 
54 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 was erected in what is now the fellows' garden. The 
 work lasted rather more than 10 months, during which 
 time his battels came to % Yls. Sd. The total cost of 
 the window was ^113 17,?. 5d. 
 
 Of this cost by far the largest part (^100) was borne 
 by the Founders' 1 nephew and co-heir, Sir John Strange- 
 ways, whose portrait still hangs in Hall over the High 
 Table. He and his son Giles deserve mention for 
 another reason, as they were confessors for the royal 
 cause, and were sent to the Tower, after Naseby, for 
 20 months.* Giles lived to see the triumph of his 
 party at the Restoration, and was a leading man in the 
 "Cavalier" Parliament of 1661; he was selected in 
 1665 to convey the thanks of Parliament to the Univer- 
 sity for their " reasons concerning the Solemn League 
 and Covenant," and then was made a D.C.L. 
 
 * Their liberation in 1648 is commemorated by a gold medal, of 
 which there is a specimen in the college collection. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE TILL THE 
 RESTORATION (1642-1660) 
 
 THE Long Parliament met in November 1640 ; its 
 assembling was eagerly looked for both by friends and 
 by foes, but men did not foresee that before it was 
 legally dissolved, nineteen years would pass, and 
 England would be torn by Civil War ; it seemed like 
 any other of its predecessors, and met with the ordinary 
 forms. The earliest relations of the college to it were 
 commonplace enough; in the first month of its 
 existence, Parliament appointed a committee to consider 
 the grievances of Wadham and of Emmanuel College, 
 Cambridge ; so much can be learned from the Warden^ 
 MSS., but what the grievances were, they do not say. 
 
 The Parliament, however, had other work to do than 
 investigating private grievances ; the grievances of 
 England were its care, and in redressing these the long-* 
 postponed struggle became inevitable. In the autumn 
 of 1642 war broke out ; after Edgehill the King entered 
 Oxford (October 29, 1642), and that city for the next 
 four years practically ceases to be a University, while it 
 becomes instead a capital and a fortress of the first 
 rank. The number of graduations sank to fifty a year, 
 and it is surprising there were so many, for the scholars 
 
56 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 either left the city, or devoted themselves to arms. And 
 very few new scholars came up ; only seven admissions 
 are recorded at Wadham in 1643, and this number 
 included such non-academic persons as the Earl of 
 Bedford,* one of the King's captains, and Sir Edward 
 Herbert, his Att orney- General ; in 1644 there are 
 three, in 1645 none. 
 
 A single instance of the troubled nature of the times 
 will suffice to illustrate this point. There is an entry 
 in the Admission Register of 1645 that Thomas Baker,f 
 scholar, though properly elected, " rebellium armatorum 
 impetu impeditumfuisse ut ad hoc collegium accedere ante 
 hoc tempus non potuit" (sic.). The rooms thus left 
 vacant were, at Wadham, as elsewhere, partly let out 
 to the King's followers. We have Mr. Shorthouse's 
 authority that John Inglesant lived in the college, and 
 the Warden's MSS. show us the just-mentioned Sir 
 Edward Herbert using it as a kind of family residence : 
 he had two sons born to him there, who were baptized 
 in the chapel. 
 
 But the colleges suffered directly as well as indirectly. 
 Hardly had the King arrived, when (January 5, 1643) 
 he sent a circular letter to them, demanding the " loan "" 
 of their plate. He had already had money from most 
 of them (including a sum of ^100 from Wadham), and 
 our society now at once (January 26, 1643) voted to 
 surrender the plate to the King. It is a remarkable 
 
 * He was the father of Lord William Russell and became the 
 first Duke in 1694. 
 
 t He was afterwards a distinguished mathematician ; though his 
 parish was in a remote part of Devon, he wrote the "Gate of 
 Equations Unlocked," and received a medal from the Royal Society. 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 57 
 
 proof of the popularity of Wadham since its foundation, 
 that although it had not yet been in existence thirty 
 years, it came seventh in the list of colleges con- 
 tributing. The amount handed over was about 100 Ibs. 
 weight of white (i.e., silver) plate, and 23 Ibs. of "gilt" 
 plate ; this was to be repaid at the rate of 5s. and 
 5s. 6d. an ounce respectively, for, writes the King, 
 " assure yourselves we shall never let persons, of whom 
 we have so great a care> to suffer for their affection to 
 us." The college still has the royal receipt, but of 
 course no other return was ever made. The only plate 
 saved was the Communion plate given by the Foundress 
 and by Warden Smyth ; * this was no doubt redeemed, 
 as was done in other colleges ; for everywhere " piety " 
 in both senses of the word was allowed to prevail 
 over loyalty. 
 
 John Pitts had become Warden in 1644, and held 
 the office four years till he was removed by the Parlia- 
 mentary Commission ; the only admission of importance 
 in his time is that of the great Thomas Sydenham, who 
 had left his original home, Magdalen Hall, to serve with 
 distinction in the Parliamentary army of the West, but 
 who took the opportunity of the surrender of Oxford 
 (June 24, 1646)f to return to the University, and 
 enter his name at Wadham. He remained there two 
 
 * For details as to this I must refer to Mr. Jackson's " Wadham," 
 p. 209 ; the two flagons, which were left by the Foundress, are 
 especially interesting. Her "cup," in spite of its antique shape, 
 and of the inscription upon it, bears the hall-mark of 1752. Pro- 
 bably the old cup was worn or damaged, and so was melted down 
 in the eighteenth century and remade. This seems to have been 
 frequently done with College plate (cf. p. 68). 
 
 t This is his own statement ; the Dictionary of National Bio- 
 
58 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 years, and then, like two other great Wadham men of 
 his time, Wren and Mayow, migrated to All Souls as a 
 fellow. His subsequent career belongs to the history 
 of English medicine, in which his is the most famous 
 name. It is very sad that the college has no portrait 
 of him, and the library's collection of his works, though 
 fairly complete, has no copies given by himself. 
 
 The surrender of the city gave Sydenham to Wadham, 
 but it brought ruin to most of the existing members of 
 the foundation. It was stipulated in the articles of 
 surrender that members of the University might be 
 removed, and that Parliament might reform the Univer- 
 sity ; in fact there was already a Parliamentary Com- 
 mittee for this very purpose, which, as early as July 2, 
 1646, sent an order that no elections should be made to 
 vacant posts in Oxford an order which, of course, was 
 treated with contempt. Nothing was actually done for 
 nearly a year till May 1, 1647 when twenty-four 
 Visitors were appointed for the University. Oxford 
 had played too prominent a part on the Royal side to 
 go unpunished, and Parliament knew the influence of 
 learning in the country too well not to endeavour to 
 secure the scholars for their own side. But still no 
 active proceedings were taken, and the University had 
 time to draw up its "Reasons'" for objecting to the 
 tests about to be imposed on them; Warden Pitts is 
 said to have had a leading share in composing this 
 work, while the legal learning was supplied by Dr. 
 
 graphy says that Sydenham made a mistake of a year, and was not 
 really admitted till October 14, 1647. This is improbable in itself, 
 and he certainly was a member of Wadham in September 1647, 
 when he was appointed delegate by the Visitors mentioned above. 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 59 
 
 Zouch, one of the most eminent civilians of the time, 
 who had been appointed from Wadham to the headship 
 of Alban Hall in 1625. 
 
 The whole proceedings were very characteristic of the 
 legality of the English Revolution. The Vice-Chancellor 
 and the heads of houses were summoned at the close 
 of 1647 before the Parliamentary Committee, and after 
 some delay were allowed to be represented by counsel. 
 Both sides appealed to the law, but neither side would 
 admit the main principles on which the other's case was 
 based ; finally the Committee voted the denial of their 
 authority a " high contempt, 11 and proceeded to depose 
 the Vice-Chancellor and various heads of houses. But 
 nothing came of this till next year, when the new 
 Chancellor, the Earl of Pembroke, came down to 
 Oxford, with a force of soldiers (April 11, 1648), and 
 the obstinate University was at last coerced into 
 submission. 
 
 Oxford had had nearly two years of grace given her, 
 and could hardly complain that her conquerors used 
 the strong hand at last ; but there is something very 
 pathetic in the conduct of her authorities, who stead- 
 fastly refused all offers of compromise, and stuck to 
 their principles to the end. Among the first to fall was 
 Warden Pitts, who was ejected on April 13, when the 
 name of the new Warden, John Wilkins, was entered 
 on the Buttery Book. 
 
 This long delay in striking was partly due to the 
 rivalry between the Presbyterians and the Indepen- 
 dents ; but it was also partly due to consideration for 
 the University. Those who were visiting and reforming 
 her were in most cases old Oxford men ; among them 
 
60 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 was the famous scholar Selden, the burgess of the Uni- 
 versity, who actually assisted his constituents with 
 advice how to prepare and conduct their case against 
 the Commission of which he himself was a member. It 
 is at once amusing and most instructive to notice how 
 distressed the Visitors were at not being able to obtain 
 the " pokers " of the Bedels, which those loyal officers 
 refused to surrender to usurped authority. They com- 
 plain that the want of them is " a great dishonour of 
 this University," but they did not get them till the 
 year 1649 was well advanced. 
 
 Men so minded were not likely to let the University 
 dignity and property suffer, however severe they might 
 be with individuals. Some of the college tenants seem 
 to have thought they might safely withhold rent from 
 such "malignant"" landlords,* but they soon learned their 
 mistake. The authority of the Parliamentary Com- 
 mittee was brought to bear on them, and the colleges 
 were saved at all events from this indirect form of 
 spoliation. 
 
 But though the University went on, and, as we shall 
 see, prospered, it was a hard time for its royalist mem- 
 bers. At Wadham, of thirteen Fellows, nine shared 
 the fate of the Warden ; of fourteen scholars also nine 
 refused to submit and paid the penalty, while of four- 
 teen commoners or battellars who came before the 
 Visitors, all were expelled but three, t The behaviour 
 of the scholars is especially heroic ; all of them were 
 
 * So the Wadham tenant at Hockley is summoned before the 
 Parliamentary Committee at Westminster, and compelled to pay 
 his rent, (Warden's MS. 74). 
 
 f Some of these had been in residence fifteen years. The above 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 61 
 
 young men (the oldest had been elected in 1640, while 
 three dated from the previous year only 1647), and 
 they had a fellowship in certain prospect if they sub- 
 mitted. But they showed the same firmness against a 
 domineering Parliament as the demies of Magdalen 
 showed forty years later against an arbitrary King. 
 
 The terms of the refusals are various ; some appeal 
 to the authority of the Visitor as the only one to which 
 they are bound to submit ; a large number decline to 
 recognise the authority of Parliament without the 
 King. Others again simply evade the question by 
 declaring their submission to "all just and lawfnl 
 authority." The answer of Mr. Lionel Pine is delight- 
 fully obscure in its elaborate self-justification : " I hope 
 that no man, since he cannot find in my past life whence 
 to censure me, greedy to find faults that he will rake 
 my own breast to confess that which no man accuse me 
 of neither do I myself yet know viz., what I possibly 
 shall do hereafter this when I shall be commanded that 
 which I yet never heard of." The Committee, however, 
 cut the knot of obscurity by resolving that Mr. Pine 
 did not " submit." Rather touching also is the answer 
 of one of the servants, R. Mayo : " Seeing many learned 
 men, which are better skilled in the laws and statutes 
 of the University than myself, have given a denial to 
 the proposed question, I, following their rules, have 
 thought fit to deny it myself." 
 
 But, in admiring those who gave up all for their con- 
 figures are based on Mr. Gardiner's Register. Prof. Burrows in 
 his Register of the Visitors, 1647-1658 (Camden Society, 1881) gives 
 the figures as twenty-two expelled and nineteen submitting (I count 
 his doubtful ones in each total). 
 
62 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 victions, we must not be too hard on those who chose 
 the easier part. There was a large amount of legality 
 on the side of the Visitors, and after all the college had 
 to go on and its continuous history to be maintained. 
 Of those who submitted the most famous was Walter 
 Blandford, who afterwards became Warden, Chaplain 
 to Lord Clarendon, and finally Bishop of Worcester. 
 He had obtained his election as scholar under false 
 pretences, since he was too old by four years, and his 
 life shows him to have been something of a time-server ; 
 his portrait in Hall rather confirms this view of his 
 character ; but he deserves the gratitude of the College 
 for reviving the register of all admissions which had 
 been neglected by his predecessor, Wilkins, and at his 
 death, in 1675 (among his other benefactions), he left 
 ^200 to his College. 
 
 Of the new members intruded into the vacant places, 
 the Warden and two of the Fellows came from Mag- 
 dalen Hall, which had been, even under Laud, a great 
 stronghold of Puritanism ; another, R. Atkins, came 
 from Hart Hall, and is said to have been a chaplain of 
 Oliver Cromwell ; a fourth came from St. Andrews, and 
 a fifth from Cambridge. Of their characters and 
 the work which they did, and of the men admitted 
 under them, I must speak in the next chapter. 
 For the present I must continue the general story of 
 Wadham, especially in its relation to the Parliamentary 
 Visitors. 
 
 Here, however, it may be said generally that the 
 University went on very much as before. This can be 
 illustrated at Wadham as well, perhaps, from the Library 
 as anywhere else ; there are a few books of Puritan con- 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 63 
 
 troversial divinity added in 1649 the most valuable 
 being some of the works of Reynolds ; this we know 
 from the quaint inscription, " unus ex illls admissionis 
 in Bibliothecam pecunia emptis, 1649." But the 
 majority of the books added are works of real learning 
 e.g., Samuel Lee (p. 79), a Puritan of the Puritans, 
 presents in 1653 the Aldine edition (1549) of the 
 " Etymologicon Magnum," and other books of the 
 same kind. 
 
 The Parliamentary Commission did not continue the 
 same all through ; the original members, among whom 
 the Presbyterians had the upper hand, gave place in 
 1652 to a second commission, in which the Independents 
 were the main power, and these again in 1654 to a new 
 set. Some of the members, however, served on all three 
 bodies. Wood* notes how this theological division 
 prevailed through the whole period ; the Presbyterians, 
 he says, were very severe in their course of life, and 
 preached nothing but " damnation " ; the Independents 
 were " more free and gay and, with a reserve, frolic- 
 some " ; they preached for liberty. 
 
 Of this latter party, he mentions Dr. Wilkins, the 
 head of Wadham, as a leader, and facts seem to bear 
 out this statement, for, in all the acts of the intruded 
 Warden, it is the secular side that is prominent ; e.g., 
 in September 1649 he is one of a committee of three 
 who confer with the Mayor as to the safety of the city, 
 at the time of the Levellers' rising, while two years 
 later he is on a similar committee to check beggars, 
 " that they may no more trouble the University." f 
 
 All through this period, and largely owing to these 
 * " Life," i. 148. YJbid. 155, 166. 
 
64 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 religious differences among the Visitors, the indepen- 
 dence of the University was growing, and in 1652 free- 
 dom of election was restored to the different colleges, 
 although they could only select from among candidates 
 who had been passed by a board appointed for this 
 purpose. It was no doubt owing to Wilkins' influence * 
 that Wadham was one of the earliest colleges to receive 
 back self-government ; the Visitors decided in May 
 1651 that it and Trinity were " in a fit capacity to 
 make their own elections in a statutable way." But 
 the Parliamentary Committee in London did not recog- 
 nise this decision, and continued to make appointments ; 
 even as late as 1654 the rights of the college to elect 
 its scholars to fellowships were questioned, though they 
 had been recognised in 1653.f 
 
 Even after the members of the college had submitted 
 to the Visitation, their tests were not over ; they were 
 called upon in February 1650 to appear before the 
 Visitors in hall, and sign the Engagement, promising 
 fidelity to the established government. All apparently 
 did this, although the demand offended some prominent 
 Presbyterians at other colleges in Oxford, especially 
 Reynoldsj the Dean of Christ Church, who lost his 
 headship from refusing to comply. 
 
 But the Visitors had other work to do besides political 
 work and clearing the colleges of their opponents. 
 At Wadham they were very solicitous as to the finances 
 of the society ; in 1650 they permitted three fellowships 
 and three scholarships to be suspended for four years ; 
 
 * Of this Board Wilkins the Warden of Wadham was one. 
 f Warden's MS. in: 106. 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 65 
 
 sad to say there was owing more than 4*00 to " brewers, 
 bakers, and others. 11 * 
 
 They had already in 1649 made special inquiries as 
 to the value of all headships. In 1651 they ordered 
 that " augmentations " should be paid out of the 
 '' profits of first fruits " to eleven colleges and one hall ; 
 the Warden of Wadham was to receive ^63 10,$. a year, 
 i.e., in addition to the c^lOO which he received under 
 the statutes.-)- These too were revised in other respects ; 
 the restriction of the Founders on the marriage of the 
 Warden was removed, (1652),^ and Wilkins was the 
 only married Warden of Wadham for more than two 
 centuries. 
 
 But their religious work was undoubtedly, in the eyes 
 of most of the Visitors, the most important part of their 
 duties. In April 1651 they issued an elaborate order 
 as to public and private services ; probably the college 
 chapel had been made an excuse for not attending 
 public worship in the churches. This evasion is to be 
 prevented in future, and services fixed for late on 
 Saturday or early on Monday are to be changed " in order 
 that the scholars may the more comfortably enjoy the 
 public ordinances of the Lord's Day. 11 But it was not 
 
 * Warden's MSS. 86. 
 
 f Warden's MSS. 102. I think Mr. Jackson (p. 117) misreads 
 this in treating it as referring to the whole value of the headship. 
 It is distinctly called an "augmentation." Cf., note in Burrows' 
 " Visitation," p. ex., but he does not refer to the Wadham MS. 
 
 J The date is important to notice, as it disproves Wood's state- 
 ment that the change was merely made because Wilkins married 
 Cromwell's sister ; this marriage did not take place till 1656. No 
 doubt the Visitors thought that the statute savoured of Popery as it 
 enforced celibacy. 
 
 Warden's MSS. 89. 
 
 E 
 
66 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 on the Lord's Day only that the students were to 
 attend services; as early as 1649 the Visitors ordered 
 that the Tuesday lecture at St. Mary's at 7 A.M. be 
 " frequented." This was to be provided by the colleges 
 according to a cycle in which Christ Church has five 
 turns, Magdalen and New College four and three respec- 
 tively, while Wadham, with four other colleges, has two. 
 Balliol and University had sunk so low that they only 
 had one turn between them.* The list is interesting as 
 a rough indication of the relative size and importance 
 of the various foundations. 
 
 Nor were the students merely to attend sermons ; 
 they were also to take notes, and in the evening between 
 six and nine, to give an account of them to persons 
 " of known ability and piety v in hall or chapel. The 
 Warden and all seniors were to attend, and there were 
 to be prayers and other proper religious exercises.-)- This 
 was in 1653 ; as might be expected the rule was difficult 
 to enforce, for the question of attendance at divine 
 service is raised again in 16564 and as late as March 
 1657, a special University committee was appointed to 
 take measures for its enforcement. Apparently the 
 Restoration found them still sitting, and rendered their 
 further labours needless. 
 
 The Visitors further asked for a return of the 
 preachings and divinity exercises at Wadham, "for 
 exercise in the things of God doth much increase 
 knowledge and savour therein," || and went on to order 
 all M.A.s to preach, even though unordained, unless 
 they are students in one of the higher faculties. Tutors 
 
 * Wood's Life," i. 159. f Warden's MSS. 103. 
 
 + Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. || Ibid. 108. 
 
TILL THE RESTORATION (1642-1660) 67 
 
 also were to take careful account of the time of their 
 pupils, to " cause them to repair to their chambers " 
 between seven and ten, and to pray with them.* 
 
 Besides these provisions for godliness, rules for the 
 encouragement of study are frequent. The Visitors 
 attempted to check non-residence, and to enforce the 
 use of Latin within college walls, while tutors were to 
 exercise supervision over their pupils'* money matters, 
 and to receive and manage their allowances for them.f 
 In fact just as the Laudian reform had endeavoured to 
 make Oxford men good churchmen and scholars, so now 
 the Parliamentary Visitors tried to make their genera- 
 tion Puritans and scholars. Both had some success on 
 the side of study, though Laud succeeded better in 
 church matters ; Clarendon's tribute to Puritan Oxford 
 is well known ; it " yielded a harvest of extraordinary 
 good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning." 
 
 This success seems to have been especially marked at 
 Wadham, which flourished mightily under Wilkins ; 
 there are fifty-seven admissions in Mr. Gardiner's 
 Register for the year 1650, and they average twenty- 
 eight for the next three years. And the character of 
 the men remained the same ; the old West country 
 connection revived, % and Wyndhams and Strange wayes 
 came to the old place as though no revolution had 
 occurred. And as new fellow commoners were admitted, 
 their purses were called on to replace the plate which 
 King Charles' mint had swallowed. The benefactions 
 of this kind begin again in 1652, although we can no 
 
 * Warden's MSS. 105. 
 
 t Warden's MSS. 105. This supervision was in part the established 
 rule at Cambridge at least till recent years. 
 
68 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 longer count among them the famous sugar-castor of 
 that "prodigious young scholar," 1 Mr. Christopher Wren. 
 It is true that it bears his name, and the date 1653, but 
 Mr. Cripps says that the makers' mark proves that it 
 could not have been made till 1720 ; either then the 
 money was not spent for more than two generations, or 
 the gift is that of Wren's old age he died in 1723 
 and shows that he remembered his old college to the 
 last.* In any case the date is fatal to the belief as to 
 the sugar-castor, which I have heard from the college 
 under-butler : " They do say as how he designed the 
 Dome of St. Paul's from it afterwards. 1 ' But Wren's 
 great name is only the most famous of those which form 
 the subject of the next chapter. 
 
 * If this theory be adopted, the college put on the castor the 
 date of Wren's leaving Wadham. There is, of course, a third view 
 possible (see p. 57) that the sugar-castor was remade about 1720. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WADHAM IN THE TIMES OF WARDEN 
 WILKINS 
 
 To give the Warden's name in the heading of this 
 chapter is no mere compliment to his office ; for he was 
 undoubtedly the first in the eyes of contemporaries of 
 the brilliant group of men who then adorned the 
 college, and is second only to Wren in the j udgment of 
 posterity. Of Wilkins" activity in the University some- 
 thing has been already said ; in this chapter we must 
 speak of his personal career, and of his influence on 
 Wadham. 
 
 He was the son of an Oxford tradesman, and graduated 
 from Magdalen Hall : he owed his first rise to the 
 patronage of Lord Saye and Sele, and at the age of 
 thirty -four was intruded into the lodgings of Wadham. 
 From that time onwards he was one of the chief forces 
 in the University, using his influence to promote know- 
 ledge and to reconcile opposing parties. He had, says 
 Burnet, " a courage which could stand against a cur- 
 rent," and he ventured to protect royalists of learning 
 against the victorious party. He also has the credit 
 of having done something to save the University itself 
 from the violence of fanatics ; it was much attacked 
 
70 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 by them, and it was even proposed in Parliament in 
 1653 that the lands of the Universities should be con- 
 fiscated ; the attempt was renewed in 1659. Wilkins 
 owed part of his influence to his marriage with Oliver 
 Crom weirs sister, which took place in 1656, but he was 
 already a leading man in his party when he was appointed 
 at Wadham. 
 
 As might be expected he was unpopular with the 
 extreme men of both parties. He was preached at 
 from the University pulpit, by a fanatic of one side, as a 
 " mere moral man, without the power of godliness ; " * 
 Wood tells us that on the other side Sheldon, Fell and 
 others did "malign him for his wavering and uncon- 
 stant mind in religion." But Wood himself has 
 nothing worse than this to say against him, and tries 
 to say as little ill as possible. In fact he was popular 
 with all parties, and even the Restoration did not 
 check his career of advancement, for he was made 
 Bishop of Chester by Charles II. in 1668. From the 
 point of view of English history this is perhaps Wilkins 1 
 most important characteristic ; he is one of the founders 
 of the Latitudinarian party in the Church. He has 
 the more claim to this title as he was Tillotson's father- 
 in-law, and he actually was residing at the house of the 
 future Archbishop when he died in 1672. 
 
 But Warden Wilkins is much more important in the 
 history of English science. The manifold activities of 
 the revival of learning had sent men to Nature as well 
 as to the study of the ancient languages, and the 
 foundations of modern science were laid in the sixteenth 
 
 * The whole passage is given in Pope's "Life of Seth Ward," 
 p. 43. I shall quote this most amusing book in future as " Pope." 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 71 
 
 century ; but human weakness always likes to trace 
 great movements to a definite author, and so Bacon and 
 his " Novum Organon "" were looked upon (even in his 
 own day) as the starting-point of the new movement. 
 Cowley^s fine lines are well known : 
 
 " Bacon like Moses led us forth at last, 
 The desert wide he passed, 
 And did upon the very border stand 
 Of the fair Promised Land, 
 And from the mountain top of his exalted wit, 
 Saw it himself and showed us it." 
 
 The Royal Society, in praise of which these lines 
 were written, set itself to enter on the domain of the 
 " new philosophy, 1 '' as it was called, and Wilkins was, 
 says Aubrey,* the "principal reviver" of this study, 
 " secundum mentem domini Baconi" at Oxford. Already, 
 in 1645, weekly meetings of those interested in this 
 subj ect had begun in London ; but these were trans- 
 ferred to Oxford, where Wilkins had "weekly an 
 experimental philosophical club, which began 1649, 
 and was the incunabula of the Royal Society. 1 ' This 
 
 * Aubrey's Brief Lives (ed. A. Clark), vol. ii. 301. Aubrey was 
 himself a Fellow of the Royal Society, and began his Lives in 1680 
 A similar account of the origin of the Royal Society is given in 
 Sprat's History, 1667. There is, however, a different version of the 
 facts given by Dr. John Wallis in a pamphlet published in 1678 ; 
 according to this the scientific meetings were continuous in London 
 from 1645 onwards, and the Oxford meetings were always sub- 
 sidiary ; they were also held originally in Dr. Petty 's lodgings, and 
 only later at Wadham. This account, it will be seen, minimises 
 the connection between the college and the Royal Society ; it is 
 however, less consistent with probability and with other known 
 facts than that which I have adopted. 
 
72 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 was transferred to London about 1658, and the official 
 journal of the Society begins by telling how, on 
 November 28, 1660, at a meeting at Gresham College, 
 .it was resolved to formally organise a college for 
 promoting " physico-mathematical experimental learn- 
 ing."*. Of the committee appointed to cany out this 
 resolution Wilkins was the chairman, and he apparently 
 took the lead till March 1661, when the first president 
 was appointed. The Royal Charter was obtained in 
 July 1662. It is the proudest boast of Wadham that 
 it was thus the cradle of the Royal Society. The 
 tradition that the meetings were held in the room over 
 the gateway (now the Tower Library) must be given 
 up, for before the time of Wilkins, the Warden of 
 Wadham had already migrated from his original 
 quarters to the north-west corner of the front quad, 
 which he still occupies ; it is to one of the rooms of the 
 present lodgings, perhaps the large drawing-room, that 
 the honour belongs of being the first local habitation of 
 the new movement. The Tower Library must content 
 itself with the honour surely great enough of having 
 been for three years the home of Sir Christopher 
 Wren.']' The Oxford branch of the Royal Society 
 continued to meet till 1690, but not at Wadham. 
 
 Wilkins was a " dear and excellent friend " of the 
 Royalist Evelyn, who has left us an account of the 
 curious contrivances in which this " most obliging and 
 
 * Of the 12 then present, 3 Wilkins, Wren, and Rooke, were 
 Wadham men. 
 
 + The windows on the garden side of the two main rooms in the 
 lodgings are clearly seen in plate vii. The fine bow window of the 
 Tower Library is prominent in the centre of plate iv., while the 
 lodgings are seen in the right hand corner of the same picture. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 73 
 
 universally curious " scholar delighted. " He has in 
 his lodgings and gallery variety of shadows, dials, per- 
 spective and many other artificial, mathematical, and 
 magical curiosities, a way-wiser, a thermometer, a 
 monstrous magnet most of them of his own, and of 
 that prodigious young scholar, Mr. Chr. Wren. v * He 
 also gave Evelyn a transparent apiary for taking the 
 honey without destroying the bees. 
 
 The interests of Wilkins were perhaps rather 
 mechanical and mathematical than literary ; but he 
 was a considerable author. His first work was an 
 attempt to prove that the moon may be habitable 
 (published in 1638), which attracted attention even on 
 the Continent; it was followed by a treatise on the 
 possibility of reaching the moon. He also tried to 
 invent a universal (or, as he called it, a " philosophical ") 
 language (1668), and wrote on " Mathematical Magic " 
 i.e., the wonders of geometry. His theological works 
 were especially devoted to discouraging enthusiasm and 
 fanaticism. It is one of his minor writings which, by a 
 curious chance, is perhaps the best remembered ; he 
 contributed to " Pole's Synopsis *" an article on Noah's 
 Ark, showing the possibility of putting all the animals 
 into it as required by the narrative of Genesis. This 
 was illustrated with a wonderful picture, and survived 
 in editions of Josephus down even to our own day. It 
 does more credit to the Warden's ingenuity and ortho- 
 doxy than to his judgment. f 
 
 It is tempting to go on writing of Wilkins, but only 
 
 * Evelyn "Diary," ii. 57 seq. 
 
 t Most of Wilkins' books are in the library, and are quite 
 readable. Unfortunately they are not presentation copies from him, 
 
74 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 one side more of his varied accomplishments can be 
 dwelt on. He was a great patron of music, and Antony 
 Wood gives an interesting story of how he was invited 
 to the Warden's lodgings to hear Baltzar, the German 
 violinist, play in a way " which no one in England saw 
 like before." Unfortunately no one could be induced 
 to play with him, until at last Antony Wood himself 
 was " haled in, and play forsooth he must against 
 him " ; " whereupon he took up a violin and behaved 
 himself as poor Troilus did against Achilles."* Wadham 
 seems to have been a great centre of music at the time, 
 and several Wadham men are mentioned among Wood's 
 musical friends. 
 
 The portraits of Wilkins, of which the college has 
 two, are very characteristic ; they show him, as Antony 
 Wood describes him, " a burly, strong-grown, well-set, 
 broad-shouldered person, cheerful and hospitable." He 
 left <200 in his will to his old college. 
 
 Wilkins gathered round him at Wadham a number 
 of men like-minded with himself; foremost amongst 
 these was Christopher Wren, who came up as a fellow- 
 commoner in 1649, and resided till he was elected 
 a fellow at All Souls' in 1653. Even after this 
 he seems to have kept rooms in Wadham, for he was 
 still paying for the " chamber over the gateway " (the 
 present Tower Library) in October 1663. He was a 
 universal genius, for (apart from his fame as an archi- 
 tect) he was Savilian Professor of Astronomy, while in 
 
 though his early works were given in 2 handsome volumes by one 
 of his fellows. The only gifts to the library (that I know of) from 
 Wilkins himself are Harvey's De Gensratione Animalium, a very 
 characteristic choice, and two books of John Lightfoot, the great 
 Rabbinic scholar. * " Life," i. 257. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 75 
 
 mathematical ability he was ranked by competent 
 authorities second only to Newton among the men of 
 his time. It was his genius which caused the Italian 
 style of architecture to prevail at last over the late 
 Gothic, of which his own college is so conspicuous an 
 example. His affection to that college was shown 
 by his present of a clock, of which the face still tells 
 the time to his successors ; the works, after 200 years 
 of service, now stand at rest (and a little damaged) in 
 the antechapel. 
 
 Another of the celebrities whom Wilkins brought to 
 Wadham was Wren^s predecessor in the chair of Astro- 
 nomy, Dr. Seth Ward, who was incorporated from 
 Cambridge in 1649, and who lived in " the chamber 
 over the gateway " * till he was elected President of 
 Trinity in 1659. He had been expelled from Cambridge 
 by the Parliamentary party, and even imprisoned for a 
 time ; but his fame as a mathematical scholar was so 
 great that he was not required to take at Oxford either 
 the Covenant or the Engagement. As professor, he 
 at once revived the reputation of his chair by regular 
 lecturing; this seems to have been unusual, and still 
 more that he never " failed of a good auditory." He 
 also taught privately for nothing, and preached fre- 
 quently, though he was not bound to do so by the 
 rules of his chair. Even at this time men saw the lawn 
 sleeves falling on his shoulders, and Pope tells an 
 amusing story of a fair precisian who, " drolling with 
 him," promised him a pair of lawn sleeves when he was 
 a bishop, and who paid them too, when he was nomi- 
 
 * He was thus Wren's predecessor in his college rooms as well as 
 in his University professorship. 
 
76 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 nated to the See of Exeter.* His biographer says that 
 he nearly escaped this promotion by being " buried 
 alive in Trinity College " ; but fortunately for him, the 
 expelled President returned, and Ward had to retire 
 to the West, where he, as Dean of Exeter, made himself 
 so popular that, when the Bishop died, the whole 
 county pressed his claims on King Charles II. ; " the 
 old bishops .g\, Cosin of Durham were exceedingly 
 disgruntled at it, to see a brisk young bishop, but forty 
 years old, not come in at the right door, but leap over 
 the pale " ; f but, when once appointed, he gave the 
 greatest satisfaction to all churchmen, both there and at 
 Salisbury, to which see he was translated in 1667. 
 Ward, while at Oxford, defended the Universities in 
 his Vindiciae Academiarum against the "frenzy and 
 weakness "> of those who styled them " nurseries of 
 wickedness, nests of mutton tuggers, and dens of formal 
 drones ? ; \ he also wrote against the philosophy of 
 Hobbes. He too like Wren and the Warden, was a 
 friend of Evelyn. The college unfortunately has no 
 portrait of him, but his dark handsome face can be seen 
 in the hall of Trinity, and also at Oriel. Besides 
 Ward, Wadham College at this time imported another 
 famous mathematician from Cambridge in Mr. Laurence 
 Rooke, who succeeded Wren as Gresham Professor of 
 Astronomy, but who died the next year. 
 
 Along with the four scholars j ust mentioned, Wadham 
 had three other original members of the Royal Society in 
 Walter Pope (of whom more presently), Richard Napier, 
 
 * Pope, p. 33. t Aubrey, ii. 287. 
 
 J Wood, " Life," i. 293. 
 
 Napier was created M.A, after only 3 years' residence. The 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 77 
 
 who had joined the college as long ago as 1624, and 
 Thomas Sprat, who as early as 1667 was the Royal 
 Society's historian; his account* of the advantage of these 
 meetings is very characteristic of his time : " there was 
 a race of young men provided against the next age, 
 whose minds, receiving their first impressions of sober 
 and generous knowledge, were invincibly armed against 
 all the encroachments of enthusiasm." Unfortunately 
 for himself, Sprat left the safe paths of science for poli- 
 tics, and ended his days as Bishop of Rochester; his 
 conduct in that position, when he became one of 
 James II.'s Ecclesiastical Commissioners, has earned for 
 him a place in Macaulay's pillory. He had a good 
 prose style, and he was also, says Wood, " an excellent 
 poet," but the judgment of the seventeenth century on 
 this latter point has not been confirmed by posterity, 
 and his name of " Pindaric " Sprat is only remembered 
 as a jest. Those who wish to make further acquaintance 
 with Sprat cannot do better than begin with his answer 
 to a certain Frenchman named Sorbiere, who had 
 written an account of England ; it is an amusing little 
 book. His portrait in the hall shows him, as might be 
 expected, a comfortable looking, not to say smug, divine. 
 The scientific enthusiasm at Wadham was so great 
 that it spread even to the servants. Aubrey f mentions 
 
 Chancellor wrote specially on his behalf, that he was "a kinsman 
 of the Duchess of Richmond," and " a person that is well deserving 
 in all that is necessary in a gentleman and a scholar; " to which 
 of these grounds he owed his rapid graduation does not appear. 
 The superstitious Aubrey (ii. p. 92) tells a marvellous story of the 
 vision which foretold Napier's death. 
 
 * " History of the Royal Society," P. 53. 
 
 f " Brief Lives," i. 127 ; see also Wood's " Fasti," sub anno, 1621. 
 
78 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 a manciple of the college, Christopher Brookes, who 
 was a mathematical instrument maker, and invented a 
 new quadrant. Wilkins gave him a servant's place worth 
 ^30 a year, " purposely to encourage his ingenuity ." 
 
 As was natural in a body of such tastes, the number 
 of men who devoted themselves to medicine was con- 
 siderable ; none of them rose to the eminence of the 
 Wadham doctors of the preceding generation, Syden- 
 ham and Joyliff,* but Mayow, as a pure scientist, ranks 
 higher than even Sydenham. His chemical views anti- 
 cipate those of Lavoisier, and his physical and anatomical 
 discoveries were also considerable. He too like Wren 
 and Sydenham, went as a fellow to All Souls' (1660) 
 after two years' residence at Wadham, where his under- 
 graduate career seems to have been of a somewhat 
 festive kind. He took part in the first stage perform- 
 ances in Oxford (July 1660), after the Restoration had 
 once more given licence for such amusements. The 
 performance caused the greatest offence to the Puritans, 
 one of whom, in a contemporary pamphlet, described 
 (with more vigour than accuracy) the awful deaths 
 that soon overtook the actors.t Mayow, in spite of 
 his Puritan censor, did not die suddenly in 1660 ; his 
 death at the early age of thirty- seven will hardly be 
 looked upon by the present generation as a judgment, 
 but it was a grievous blow to English science. There 
 is unfortunately no portrait of him in Wadham. 
 
 * This distinguished physiologist entered at Wadham in 1636. 
 After serving in Lord Hopkins' army, he graduated in medicine at 
 Cambridge, and discovered the lymph ducts ; his early death (at 35) 
 was a great loss to scientific medicine. 
 
 f Wood, " History," iii. 704 seq. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 79 
 
 Several other members of the college also were well 
 known as doctors in their day ; I can only just mention 
 the erratic Guidott (matriculated 1656), who, after 
 declining the professorships of medicine at Venice and at 
 Leyden, formed a great practice at Bath and ruined it by 
 his ungovernable temper and conceit ; his medical works 
 are numerous. A still more curious person was Jeamson 
 (matriculated 1654), the only Wad ham fellow who has 
 ever been a professional " beautifier " : his book on 
 " Artificial Embellishments " promises those ladies who 
 will follow it that all others shall look compared to 
 them "as blubbered jugs in a cupboard of Venice 
 glass." Nor must I quite omit another medical man, 
 Robert Smith (matriculated 1659), who was afterwards 
 a considerable benefactor of the college ; * his name 
 can still be read on the East wall of the garden, which 
 was rebuilt at his expense in 1685. f 
 
 It is time to turn to other sides of the College studies 
 besides those more immediately patronised by the 
 Warden. And here at once Samuel Lee becomes pro- 
 minent, one of the intruded Fellows, who deserved well 
 of Wadham for the improvements he introduced in the 
 system of account keeping and in the Chamber Book ; 
 it is to him we owe the original names of the staircases. J 
 
 * He left a charge on his estate of Warnbrook near Chard, for the 
 improvement of the stipends of the Warden and of other college officers, 
 t The college received another benefaction about the same time 
 from a senior contemporary of Smith's, Sir Benjamin Maddox, an 
 Essex gentleman, who left a farm in his native country to endow an 
 exhibition for a poor student. 
 % These are : 
 
 I. Buller's Inn and Prince's Buller (cf, p. 28) was the poor 
 
 kinsman of the Foundress, and the first butler. 
 The Lodgings. North Bay and North Crest. 
 
80 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 He seems to have been a man of extraordinary vigour, 
 and as such was appointed Junior Proctor by the Visitors 
 in 1651, although he had only been up four years. He 
 was selected by an Oxford publisher to continue to his 
 own time Helvicus' " Theatrum Historicum," which 
 seems then to have been a popular historical manual, 
 and, after he had gone down to his congregation in 
 London, the University caused to be printed at its own 
 expense his " Orbis Miraculum " (1659), a treatise on 
 the Temple of Solomon. His dedication of this book 
 to his old society is really eloquent, and some old Wad- 
 ham men may care to hear part of the blessings which 
 are invoked upon them : " I shall meanwhile not cease 
 to breathe our hearty prayers towards the Golden Mercy 
 seat, that all within your walls may be set up for stand- 
 ing pillars in the House of God, that your hearts may 
 be flaming altars, your tongues golden harps, and that 
 garments of praise may be your covering ; that the 
 Great High Priest would please to sprinkle your con- 
 sciences from all dead works, with His own precious 
 blood, and that He would cany your names engraven 
 upon the stones of His breastplate continually before 
 the Father." 
 
 After Lee had been deprived by the Rump of his 
 
 II. Foundress' and University. 
 III. The Chapel Chambers. 
 IV. The Hall Chambers. 
 V. College Chambers and Founder's. 
 VI. South Crest and South Bay. 
 VII. Chaplains and Tower Chambers. 
 Tower Library. Astronomy Chamber. 
 
 In the Back quad the site No. X. was occupied by " the Back 
 Buildings." 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 81 
 
 living, St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, he still continued to 
 preach, and some old pupil of his seems to have pre- 
 sented his sermons to the college, which has a complete 
 set of the famous " Morning Exercises " in which they 
 occur. Finally he went to America, where Cotton 
 Mather, his son-in-law, described him as " the most 
 universally learned person that ever set foot on the 
 American strand " ; but perhaps that was not saying 
 much in those days. 
 
 Wadham, however, was much richer at this period in 
 conformists than in nonconformists. Besides Wilkins 
 and Ward, four* other future bishops became members 
 of Wadham within ten years ; Sprat of Rochester has 
 been already mentioned, and Ironside of Hereford will 
 be spoken of in the next chapter. The other two 
 played very opposite parts in the last great struggle for 
 English liberty ; Samuel Parker (matriculated 1 657) 
 was the Bishop of Oxford whom James II. forced upon 
 Magdalen as its President, while William Lloyd (a 
 former Fellow of Jesus ; matriculated at Wadham 1655) 
 was, as Bishop of St. Asaph, sent to the Tower with his 
 six brethren for venturing to petition the King against 
 the order in council as to the publication of the Decla- 
 ration of Indulgence. Lloyd was a considerable scholar, 
 though of a popular kind ; Wilkins said of him that he 
 had " more learning in ready cash " than any one else 
 whom he knew ; he also seems to have been something 
 
 * I do not reckon the famous preacher and bishop of Derry, 
 Ezekiel Hopkins, although he is well represented in the college 
 collection of engravings. He seems to have been a member of 
 Wadham for only 4 days at all events his caution money was 
 restored after that interval and he really belongs to Magdalen ; 
 his son, Samuel, however, was sent by him to Wadham. 
 
82 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 of a wag ; for he induced a Londoner named Kynaston, 
 a man of venerable appearance, to pretend, while stop- 
 ping at the Mitre, to be a Greek patriarch. Several 
 royalists went to him to be blessed, among them Lloyd's 
 fellow Wadham man, Ironside ; while even the Dean of 
 Christ Church (Owen) and some of the Presbyterians 
 " resorted to him for to draw up and give him a model. r> 
 Finally the Greek Professor came down and delivered a 
 formal harangue in Greek, which was too much for 
 those who were in the joke, so that they burst out 
 laughing. Lloyd had to abscond for the time, but he 
 used to " make his braggs " of it afterwards.* 
 
 There seems more point of a kind in this joke 
 than in a more elaborate one which Sprat and others 
 played on a young Wadham poet, Samuel Austin, who 
 appears to have been an insufferable coxcomb, a kind of 
 seventeenth-century Robert Montgomery. They suc- 
 ceeded in procuring some pieces of his prose and verse, 
 and published them with humorous comments, and with 
 introductory verses of feigned commendation, under the 
 title of " Naps upon Parnassus" (1658). It is hard to 
 say which are the duller, the real or the sham verses. 
 Austin, owing to this jest or from some other cause, 
 soon migrated to Cambridge. 
 
 Wadham, of course, was in high favour with the 
 powers that were ; it had both a son-in-law John 
 Russell and a nephew of the Protector a young 
 Desborough. But much better known are three men 
 of rank who play a prominent part in the succeeding 
 generation. John Lord Lovelace and Sir Charles Sedley 
 both came up in 1655; neither of them has much to 
 * Wood's "Life," i. 262-3. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 83 
 
 boast of in the way of character, but, while the latter 
 was only a witty and reckless rake, the former was a 
 man of action, and played a considerable part in bring- 
 ing about the Revolution of 1688 ; he was one of the 
 first to rise for the Prince of Orange, and was captured, 
 but, thanks to William's success, he regained his liberty 
 instead of losing his head. More pathetic is the story 
 of the well-known Earl of Rochester, who came up at 
 the age of twelve in 1660, took his M.A. at fourteen, 
 ran away with his wife " a great fortune " at the age 
 of eighteen, and died at Woodstock, bankrupt in health, 
 character, and fortune, in 1680. Burners account of 
 his death-bed repentance is one of the most human and 
 touching of works of edification. All these three are 
 represented by gifts among the college plate, while the 
 Whig sympathies of Wadham made it welcome a 
 gigantic portrait of Lord Lovelace (by Laroon), which 
 now hangs over the screen in hall, (plate vi.) 
 
 One other Wadham worthy of this period must be 
 mentioned, Dr. Walter Pope, the half-brother of 
 Warden Wilkins, whose life of Seth Ward has been 
 already referred to. He succeeded Rooke as Professor 
 of Astronomy at Gresham College, being the third 
 Wadham man in succession to hold the post ; but he 
 had other interests than those of pure science, if Wood 
 is right in attributing to him the memoirs of Claude 
 Duval, the famous highwayman ; the book was so suc- 
 cessful that 10,000 copies were printed. His great title 
 to fame, however, is the brave stand which he made as 
 Proctor in 1658 for University "formalities," "the 
 decent distinctions of degrees, caps, and hoods," against 
 the " godly party " who were pleased to cry out against 
 
84 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 them as " relics of popery and rags of the Scarlet 
 Whore ; " in this they even had the support of the 
 Vice- Chancellor, the famous Dr. Conant, head of Exeter 
 College. But when the repeal of the statute enforcing 
 these came on in Convocation, "all the antediluvian 
 cavaliers I mean fellows of colleges, who had the 
 good fortune to survive the flood of the Visitation " 
 came out of their retirement " in troops," and in spite 
 of the heads of houses, the change of statute was 
 rejected. The Vice-Chancellor at first declared the vote 
 was the other way, but Pope, as Proctor, told him that 
 he was usurping the Proctors' 1 duty, and that " he had 
 nothing to do in that affair.' 1 Conant replied, " Egregie 
 Procurator, tace ("Good Mr. Proctor, hold your tongue"). 
 Upon this the masters, in a tumultuary manner, rose 
 from their seats, and began to mutiny ," so that the 
 house broke up in confusion. Conant next day sent for 
 Pope to attest the repeal of the statute; but Pope 
 bade the bedel "present his service to the Vice- 
 Chancellor, and withal to tell him that ' I wondered he 
 should esteem me so great a fool, knave, or coward, or 
 all of them together, as to give it under my hand that 
 I was perjured. 1 " To this " there was no rejoinder, and 
 so this affair ended." The result was an extraordinary 
 run on the " makers and sellers " of caps and gowns, and 
 more " scholars at St. Mary's in their formalities than 
 ever I saw before or since." * And so University order 
 was saved. 
 
 It is to this period that belongs the beginning of the 
 garden, which has always been and is still one of the 
 charms it might be said the glories of Wadham. 
 * Pope, p. 40 seq. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 85 
 
 Originally the land to the north of the buildings had 
 been let, and the college had only a narrow lane 
 running close under its wall ; the Foundress, however, 
 obviously intended that the tenant should prepare his 
 holding for the future use of her foundation, for she 
 stipulates in the lease of thirty-six years (given 1611) 
 that "he is to leave the ground well and sufficiently 
 furnished with apple-trees, pear-trees, and other fruit- 
 trees, thereupon, to be growing of the growth of twenty 
 years, fit for an orchard at the end of thirty-six years." * 
 This lease did not, however, run out its full course, for 
 Warden Estcott, who died in 1644, had resumed for 
 his own use the western part of the land i.e., the piece 
 north of the present lodgings. This arrangement was 
 confirmed by the college in 1645, and in 1650 the rest 
 of the land was taken in i.e., the larger part of the 
 fellows' garden to the north of the chapel. It was then 
 elaborately laid out with formal walks and trim beds, 
 after the fashion of the time ; in the centre was a 
 mound, with a figure of Atlas "holding a world 
 curiously gilded,'*' 1 which seems to have been a familiar 
 object in Oxford, and it is referred to in the light 
 literature of the next generation.! The whole can be 
 be seen in Loggan's picture (1675), which is reproduced 
 as the frontispiece of this book. 
 
 During the reign of Warden Wilkins, Wadham 
 received its first considerable benefaction since the 
 
 * The rent was 8 for about 2 acres, a very high price. 
 
 f Cf., Remains of John Oldham, ad fin., 1697. I owe this reference 
 to the Rev. H. A. Wilson of Magdalen. The world was looked 
 upon as a " poetical emblem to express the vast comprehension 
 Atlas had in inventing Astronomy." (Poynter, " Guide to Oxford,'' 
 1748). 
 
86 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 death of the Foundress. John Goodridge had been 
 appointed by her one of the original fellows, and had 
 resided, filling in succession all the college offices, till 
 1631, when the term of his fellowship expired ; on 
 leaving Oxford, he had presented the whole of his fur- 
 niture to the college, which in those days, as now, pro- 
 vided this for all but fellows. * Since then he had 
 been Gresham Professor of Rhetoric and Warden of 
 Trinity Hospital at Greenwich. Dying in 1654, he 
 bequeathed to the college not only his library, contain- 
 ing a number of curious medical works, f but also his 
 property, including a farm at Walthamstow. The pro- 
 ceeds, subject to a payment to some connections of hisj 
 were to go towards the foundation of certain exhibitions 
 at Wadham, and for other purposes, of which the most 
 important were the following: each of his pensioners 
 (i.e., the exhibitioners) received 9, and three of the 
 foundation scholars had each 3. Then there was a 
 payment of Q for the catechist, with another \ if he 
 lectured in the Long Vacation. There were six other 
 payments, including \ a year for a speech in praise of 
 the Founder on October 20 (the day of his death). This 
 was unfortunately abolished in the latter days of Warden 
 Symons ; but the payments, as a whole, went on till the 
 last revision of the statutes in 1882. They, and similar 
 payments, made the bursar's accounts a marvel of com- 
 plexity ; it is one, and not the least, of the many 
 services to Wadham of the present Warden, that he, as 
 
 * The Spartan simplicity of the provision usually made is well 
 shown in the lists printed in Jackson, pp. 151-2. 
 f He had been admitted to practise medicine, 1618. 
 J This is still paid. 
 
THE TIMES OF WARDEN WILKINS 87 
 
 Bursar, organised the whole system of the college 
 accounts on modern lines. 
 
 There are few Wadham men of any standing to whom 
 the name of Goodridge is not familiar ; but unluckily 
 the last University Commission (1882) has merged his 
 exhibitions, with those of other benefactors, in one com- 
 mon Exhibition Fund, and now not only are the old 
 names lost, but the use of the funds is partly changed ; 
 the money is spent largely on exhibitioners elected along 
 with the scholars, instead of being given, as in old days, 
 to men already in residence, for work and good conduct 
 at Oxford. John Goodridge had a sumptuous funeral, 
 costing nearly <f 9, of which full accounts are preserved 
 in the Warden's MSS.* His blunt honest face is still 
 familiar to the college from his picture in hall. 
 
 * No. 112. No less than 3 6s. yd. was spent in wine, of which 
 four different kinds were provided ; 2s. 6d. was deemed enough for 
 bread, and even this small charge included " beer " also. The 
 figures irresistibly recall the famous story of the funeral in Kansas, 
 and make us wonder if the fellows asked the bursar "what in 
 thunder he had wasted all that money on bread for? " 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE TILL THE 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE was affected but little by the 
 Restoration. The expelled Warden, Pitts, had long 
 been dead, and his successor, Wilkins, had been pro- 
 moted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1659. Hence, 
 there was no claimant to disturb Dr. Blandford, who 
 had been duly elected to succeed Wilkins, and even had 
 any one been likely to attack him for his submission to 
 the Puritan Visitation, he possessed powerful friends at 
 Court. As a matter of fact, he was appointed a mem- 
 ber of the new commission which was to restore expelled 
 royalists to their places, and served as Vice- Chancellor 
 in 1662 and 1663. In one case only was Wadham 
 touched by the change of political fortune ; Nicholas 
 Strangewayes had been expelled from his fellowship in 
 1649 for non-submission to the Visitation, and had 
 afterwards (1653) applied in vain for restitution. He 
 now obtained a mandamus for his restoration, but he 
 had to appeal to the new Royalist Chancellor, the 
 Marquis of Hertford, to get it carried out ; the college 
 objected that there was no place vacant " suitable for 
 him " i.e., presumably no Founder's kin fellowship was 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 89 
 
 vacant. But the Chancellor ruled that Strangewayes 
 was to be reinstated at once, "notwithstanding any 
 practice of the college to the contrary," and the 
 expelled fellow recovered his place, and took a pro- 
 minent part in the college life for the next sixteen 
 years; he died in 1676, and was buried in the Ante- 
 chapel. 
 
 To the same decade belongs another fellowship dis- 
 pute, which is interesting as illustrating the powers of 
 the Visitor and their limitations. Francis Pyle, a 
 Devonshire man, who had been admitted scholar in 
 1661, was allowed to proceed to his M.A. in 1668, on 
 condition that " he resigned all his rights in college at 
 the next election " i.e., that he resigned all claim to a 
 fellowship ; such enforced resignations seem to have 
 been customary at the time,* no doubt because the 
 flow of promotion at Wadham was somewhat congested. 
 But Pyle refused to be bound by his agreement, and 
 "fidem guardiano datam omni frande et perfidia 
 violavit ; qui vero Jidem jollit, oppugned omnium com- 
 mune praesidmm? as the Convention book grandly 
 puts it ; he appealed to the Visitor, who summoned the 
 Warden and fellows to appear before him at Waltham- 
 stow. They seem to have obeyed this first summons, 
 but the Bishop failed to keep the appointment he had 
 made, and instead, ordered them to plead their case 
 before him at Wells. This was too much for the sturdy 
 Warden, Ironside, who had been elected to succeed 
 Blandford (1665); he "replied denying the Bishop's 
 right to visit except once in five years, 11 unless requested, 
 
 * There are two similar cases among the men admitted in 1661 
 and 1662. 
 
90 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and pointing out that the Visitation must be at Oxford, 
 not where the Bishop pleased. The Bishop then gave 
 sentence (by default) for Pyle, and the college appealed 
 to Sheldon, the Archbishop of Canterbury ; they also 
 employed the mediation of a distinguished ex-fellow, 
 William Turner, one of the judges of the Admiralty 
 Court. Pyle had told the Warden that the Visitor was 
 coming, and "the college would be too hot to hold 
 them both " ; but the Bishop denied the use of these 
 threats, and withdrew his claim to restore Pyle. The 
 college thus triumphed over its Visitor. 
 
 It is often said that, as Oxford had suffered in the 
 cause of the Stuarts, so she prospered in their prosperity. 
 No doubt this was the feeling of the time ; but it is 
 hard to see where the prosperity of the University came 
 in after the Restoration. Of course it never received 
 repayment of its loan of plate and money ; Charles II. 
 had quite other uses for his revenues than repaying his 
 father's debts. Moreover, it cannot be said to have 
 received any material access of dignity or privileges, 
 which it had not enjoyed during the years immediately 
 preceding the Restoration. It must rather be confessed 
 that, in order and discipline, in learning and industry, 
 in fact in all that makes a University deserve its name, 
 the falling off in Oxford after 1660 was terrible. The 
 witness against her is not only that of the conquered 
 Puritans, but also of the devoted loyalist, Antony 
 Wood, who laments the sad change. Oxford had been 
 a real home of learning during Laud^s Chancellorship ; 
 it had become so again when the troubles of the Civil 
 War were over ; but the pages of Wood and of Prideaux 
 are filled under Charles II., not with records of the 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 91 
 
 advancement of knowledge, but with grave scandals and 
 petty quarrels. One or two passages may be quoted. 
 " There is no reward of learning, virtue, industry," says 
 Wood ; " our Universities decay, and those that are fit 
 for them betake themselves to other employments."* 
 "Noblemen's sons get fellowships and canonries for 
 nothing, and deprive others more deserving of their 
 bread." f The drinking in taverns which Laud had set 
 himself so vigorously to suppress, was worse than ever ; 
 Wood records that there were more than 370 alehouses 
 in Oxford, and attributes the decline of " solid and 
 serious learning " to these and to the " coffey-houses." 
 How low the sense of University decorum had sunk 
 may be gathered from the proceedings of the Proctors 
 in 1664; the' Senior Proctor, Nathaniel Crewe, of Lincoln 
 College (afterwards the munificent Lord Crewe), actually 
 had the bad taste, in his speech on resigning office, to 
 make personal allusions to the handsome daughter of a 
 member of the University. 
 
 Whether Wadham suffered along with the rest of 
 the University is not definitely recorded ; it certainly 
 is not singled out for unenviable notoriety as St. John's 
 and New College are;J but the few indications we 
 have point to the conclusion, which is otherwise pro- 
 bable, that it was no marked exception to the rule. 
 In 1664, one of the commoners, Turner, the son 
 of the distinguished judge just mentioned, actually 
 committed murder; the victim was a bible clerk at 
 Exeter. The crime seems to have .been the result 
 of a drunken quarrel, but Wood says that his father's 
 
 * Wood, i. 465. t Ibid. ii. 277. 
 
 I "Life," iii. 4. Ibid. ii. 18. 
 
92 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 influence saved young Turner when he was tried at 
 the assizes on the capital charge. Even more signi- 
 ficant, from the point of view of the general manners of 
 the University, are the insults offered to the Proctors ; 
 in 1665, the undergraduates, who had just been flattered 
 by the outgoing Senior Proctor as " men that are 
 examples rather than to be made examples of," accom- 
 panied the new Senior Proctor, Phineas Bury, to the 
 gate of Wadham, " kicking a barrel or a kidderkin that 
 lay in the street, up Kat Street even with the Proctors," 
 while the Vice-Chancellor " turned not back to reprove 
 them.'*' 1 * Perhaps these rioters were not Wadham men, 
 but it is to be feared the same excuse cannot be offered 
 for the behaviour recorded in 1673, when the under- 
 graduates invaded Wadham Hall, where the Junior 
 Proctor, Salter, was just entertaining the members of 
 Convocation who had escorted him home, " scrambled 
 for biscuits, took away bottles, glasses, etc. 1 ' : the same 
 thing happened at Trinity to the Senior Proctor. Well 
 may Wood end " Tempora mutantur, etc." f Another 
 example of outrageous behaviour in a Wadham man 
 on an official occasion was the speech of Nicholas 
 Hall, M.A., at the Act on July 10, 1671. Twenty 
 Cambridge men were being incorporated, among them 
 the famous historian of the Reformation, John Strype ; 
 Hall attacked these so furiously that he was compelled 
 next day to apologise for his offence against "bonos 
 mores et hospitalia jura.' 1 ' 1 Yet Hall was a man of some 
 distinction in the Church, and was made a prebendary 
 of Exeter in the very next year, and shortly afterwards 
 treasurer and canon residentiary. If M.A.s and 
 * " Life," ii. 34. f Ibid. ii. 262. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 93 
 
 clerics behaved in this way, it is not surprising that 
 undergraduates were unruly. 
 
 This relaxation of discipline seems to have left a 
 permanent result on the college life. As has been 
 already mentioned, the Foundress has laid special stress 
 on the use of Latin in the college hall, and the Puritan 
 Visitors had striven to enforce this ; but Wood notes 
 in 1675 that " since the King was restored, it was 
 looked upon as a piece of pedantry to produce a Latin 
 sentence in discourse, to dispute theologically at the table 
 at meals, to be earnest or zealous in any one thing " ; * 
 " bantering " was the fashion i.e., " uttering fluently 
 romantic nonsense, unintelligible gibberish."" f Court 
 fashion in this way destroyed the regulations of founders. 
 
 But there is no need to exaggerate the darkness of 
 the picture. If Wadham did not produce so plentiful 
 a crop of learned men as in the time of Wilkins, yet, as 
 will be seen, the days of Ironside were by no means 
 barren of undergraduates of distinction. This Warden 
 succeeded Blandford, who had been appointed Bishop 
 of Oxford in December 1665,J and for the next twenty 
 
 * It need hardly be said that a fine or "sconce" was imposed 
 for these offences ; this was assessed in beer. During the -last ten 
 years, however, the rule has been altered ; "sconces " are now at 
 all events supposed to be inflicted in money, which is paid over to 
 the Junior Common Room. Undesirable as it is to change old 
 customs, the new rule is surely an improvement on the old one, 
 which caused an excessive amount of beer to be ordered and then 
 left to the servants. In other respects the old code remains un- 
 changed, and a man, when "sconced," can still "appeal" to the 
 Senior Commoner or Scholar, and then to the High Table. 
 
 t Wood, ii. 332, 4. 
 
 J Blandford was consecrated in New College Chapel ; he owed 
 his bishopric to the influence of Lord Clarendon. 
 
94 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 years and more was one of the leading men in the Uni- 
 versity. He was the son of Gilbert Ironside, Bishop of 
 Bristol, and inherited his father's latitudinarian views ; 
 these must have been strengthened by the influence of 
 Wilkins, at whose feet, Wood tells us, he sat, and whom 
 he greatly admired. This admiration led to a curious 
 scene in 1674, when Wood's " History and Antiquities 
 of the University of Oxford " (in its Latin version) was 
 published. Warden Ironside invited the author and 
 his friend, Nicholas Lloyd, to supper, and, as Wood 
 says, "he gave me roast meat and beat me with the 
 spit. He told me my book was full of contumelies, 
 falsities, contradictions, and full of frivolous stuff." 
 Wood's offence had been his reference to Wilkins 1 mar- 
 riage, and to his obtaining promotion through the 
 influence of the Duke of Buckingham. The Warden was 
 rude enough to say it was shameful " that every snivelling 
 fellow should undertake to write of secret matters of 
 state " ;" that if he had been Vice-Chancellor, he would 
 have caused the book to be burned," and " that scholars 
 were generally clowns." Wood pertinently remarks: "But 
 who was the more clown ? he for abusing me and my 
 book in his lodgings, I for my humility. A fool, puppy, 
 child." * What made the conduct of Ironside the more 
 outrageous was that he himself had used his influence 
 to get Wood an extra payment of ^50 for his work, 
 and that Wood had come to supper especially to thank 
 him. The whole scene seems to have been characteristic 
 of Ironside, who on the one hand was notorious as the 
 rudest man in the University, f and who yet was a man 
 
 * Wood, " Life," ii. 297. 
 
 + " Oxford Hist. Soc. Collectanea," vol. ii. 415. This was 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 95 
 
 of vigour and sense, ready to encourage good work and 
 to reward its authors. As might be expected, Ironside 
 did not agree with Fell, the great Dean of Christ 
 Church, at this time the ruling spirit in the University, 
 who had hated Wilkins; Fell thought Ironside "a prating 
 and proud coxcomb " (" as indeed he is," adds Wood), 
 and prevented him from being Vice-Chancel lor.* 
 
 Whatever the merits or demerits of Iron side, f Wad- 
 ham prospered greatly under him, at once in numbers 
 and in the character of the men admitted ; even in the 
 stormy times of the Popish Plot (from 1679 to 1682), 
 the number of admissions averaged over twenty, although 
 Wood I draws special attention to the falling off' in the 
 matriculations in Oxford generally. In one point, 
 however, the historians of Wadham must blame Iron- 
 side ; he gave up altogether the register, which had 
 been hitherto kept, of those admitted who were not on 
 the foundation. This is not resumed till 1719. 
 
 In speaking of the studies of this period, it is natural 
 
 Bishop Hough's opinion ; yet Ironside, as will be seen, had been 
 strongly on his side in the struggle between James II. and Magdalen 
 College. 
 
 * Wood, " Life," iii. 224 ; but an entirely different and more 
 probable reason for Ironside not being Vice- Chancellor at this time, 
 is given by Prideaux, p. 52, who says the office was actually offered 
 to him in 1676. 
 
 t The college is rich in portraits of the Ironside family. Of the 
 Warden himself there are two, one in Hall and one in the Senior 
 Common Room ; he is represented as a firm and resolute looking 
 man, with a somewhat ill-humoured expression. There are alsoi n 
 the bursary pictures of his father, the Bishop of Bristol, and of his 
 grandfather (Ralph Ironside, with the date 1590) : the last is a sad 
 daub. These two and one of the portraits of the Warden were 
 bequeathed to the college in this century by a member of the 
 Ironside family. I " Life," iii. 7. 
 
96 WAUHAM COLLEGE 
 
 to refer first to the scientific enthusiasm which had been 
 so marked at Wadham in the preceding generation. 
 This seems to have continued, and the register is full of 
 names of medical practitioners, some of whom, at all 
 events, were scientific researchers also. When the 
 Oxford Chemical Society was formed in October 1683, 
 to " improve real and experimental philosophy,' 1 and to 
 correspond with the Royal Society in London, four of 
 the original twenty-one members were Wadham men. 
 Of these Robert Pitt (matriculated 1669) was the most 
 eminent ; he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and 
 deputy- Professor of Anatomy, but deserves special 
 remembrance as being one of the first physicians who 
 ventured to protest against the " folly of taking too 
 much physic," and against some of the popular drugs in 
 the pharmacopoeia of the day, such as mummy or powdered 
 vipers. As might be expected, his book, " The Craft 
 and Fraud of Physic Exposed," involved him in a storm 
 of controversy. Caswell (matriculated 1671), another 
 of the four members just referred to, was afterwards 
 Professor of Astronomy, and Head of Hart Hall; 
 Hearne often mentions him, and praises his mathe- 
 matical ability ; he was one of the mainstays of that 
 study in Oxford ; but he was too Low Church for 
 Hearne, who speaks of him as "hippish," and as a 
 " crazed, whimsical, and at least deluded man," because 
 he discoursed for an hour and a half about the Camisard 
 prophets. Hearne says he was in the habit of doing 
 this * " frequently to the no small trouble of his friends, 
 who for this reason avoided his company." Caswell 
 
 * Hearne, O. H. S. Hi. 114. These prophets belonged to the expelled 
 Huguenots, and seem to have claimed to possess the gift of tongues. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 97 
 
 was buried in Holywell Church with a long Latin 
 inscription on his tomb. 
 
 Wadham also admitted during this period several 
 considerable scholars in the strict sense of the word. 
 Humphry Hody matriculated with his two brothers in 
 1675, but his activity as Regius Professor of Greek 
 belongs to a later period, and he must be reserved for 
 the following chapter. Much better known in his own 
 day, and perhaps less forgotten in ours, was Thomas 
 Creech, the editor and translator of Lucretius, who 
 came up in 1677 ; if his own account may be trusted, 
 his scholarship, which was considerable, was all acquired 
 at Wadham, and not at Sherborne School. As he was 
 the friend and the " chum " i.e., the sharer of the 
 rooms of Hody, he certainly was in good company, 
 and likely to make progress. 
 
 At all events, in 1682 he took the world by surprise 
 with his translation of Lucretius 1 " De Rerum Natura"; 
 he is said to have done the work fifty lines at a time, 
 walking in the Parks, and then afterwards revising the 
 rough draft in his rooms. The book was so successful 
 that a new edition was called for next year, to which were 
 prefixed a number of curious and interesting verses by 
 the leading writers of the day. No less a person than 
 the Poet Laureate, John Dryden, led the way, and very 
 sonorous and sensible (to say no more) his lines are. 
 Four of them towards the end seem almost to anticipate 
 Creech's sad fate, and warn him against it : 
 
 " For this in Wadham's peaceful halls reside, 
 Books be thy pleasure, to do well thy pride 
 Quit not for public cares thy college life, 
 Nor take that sort of settlement, a wife." 
 
 G 
 
98 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Evelyn follows with some verses which in idea have 
 an extraordinary resemblance to Keats' finest sonnet, 
 that on Chapman's Homer ; but there is all the 
 difference between the work of ingenious culture and the 
 inspiration of genius. Thomas Otway, Edmund Waller, 
 and Nahum Tate are also represented. 
 
 But the most interesting verses from the point of 
 view of college history are those of the notorious Mrs. 
 Aphra Behn, who is kind enough to sing of Wadham 
 as follows : 
 
 " Hail, sacred Wadham, whom the Muses grace, 
 And from the rest of all the reverend pile 
 Of sacred palaces, designed thy space, 
 Where they in soft retreat might dwell, 
 They blest thy fabric, and they said 
 We thee our sacred nursery ordain." 
 
 The poets who win this high praise for Wadham are 
 " the learned Thyrsis," who has been already mentioned 
 as Sprat (p. 77), afterwards the Bishop of Rochester, 
 " Strephon the Great," a wretched poetaster of fashion 
 named Sir Carr Scroop, who was about ten years senior 
 to Creech, and who versified Ovid, and now "young 
 Daphnis" i.e., Creech who is bidden to prove 
 
 " Still happy in thy poetry and love." 
 
 Creech's translation is a fine performance, especially for 
 a young man of twenty-one ; but the minor poets of 
 our own day may well envy their predecessors in the 
 seventeenth century, who found reputation so much 
 easier to win. Creech gained something else more solid 
 than mere praise, for he was in 1683 elected fellow of 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 99 
 
 All Souls', where the old system of corrupt resignations 
 had been just abolished, and election by merit restored. 
 He resided in Oxford for some time longer, and was 
 known as a good scholar ; he wrote various other trans- 
 lations, of which the chief was that of Manilius, pub- 
 lished posthumously in 1700. He also edited the text 
 of Lucretius, and has the honour of winning praise 
 from Monro for his " clearness and brevity, 11 though he 
 is j ustly condemned for his " arrogant and supercilious 
 temper." He finally accepted the All Souls living of 
 Welwyn in Herts, but committed suicide next year 
 (1700), being still under forty. There seems some 
 reason for thinking that he was really out of his mind, 
 although the immediate causes of his act were the 
 pressure of poverty and an unhappy love affair. A 
 portrait of him hangs in the college hall, in which, in 
 spite of the full wig, it is still possible to trace the fine 
 features and nervous excitable nature of the poet. 
 
 Another scholar who was working in Oxford during 
 most of this period was Antony Wood's friend Nicholas 
 Lloyd (or Floyd); he had been elected scholar from Win- 
 chester in the time of Wilkins, and resided till 1670, in 
 which year he brought out a formidable " Dictionarium 
 Historicum Geographicum et Poeticum," based on that 
 of Stephens ; it was so successful that it went into a 
 second edition in 1686. Lloyd added to the College 
 collection of bibles a copy of Cranmer's Great Bible. 
 He was presented by his friend Bishop Blandford to the 
 living of Newington, at that time a country village near 
 London. His feeling towards the capital is expressed 
 by him in Greek : 
 yt 
 
100 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 In eminent churchmen during this period Wadham 
 was not rich; three future bishops, however, were 
 admitted in Warden Ironside's time, two of them, 
 Willis and Baker, being of the ordinary Whig type, 
 whose misdeeds and shortcomings fill so much space in 
 the diary of Hearne. The third, Thomas Lyndesay, who 
 belongs to a generation earlier (1672) than the other 
 two, resided in Oxford some twenty years, filling all the 
 college offices in turn. He then went to Ireland, and 
 rose rapidly from being Dean of St. Patrick's to the 
 post of Archbishop of Armagh; he was Primate of 
 Ireland for ten years till his death in 1724. He was a 
 liberal benefactor of his cathedral, and may perhaps be 
 rememembered also as one of the friends of Dean Swift. 
 Hearne * admits that he had ability, but says he was a 
 man " of loose life," and " of little or no learning." It 
 is not necessary to construe too literally Hearne's 
 censures on the leading churchmen of his day.f 
 
 Although he never attained to a bishopric, Henry 
 Godolphin, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, may claim a 
 mention. His memory ought to be cherished at Eton, 
 of which he was Provost and a liberal benefactor ; but 
 Wadham will remember to his discredit that he did his 
 best to hinder Wren's plans in the rebuilding of St. 
 Paul's. He should have sympathised with the architect, 
 as they both had passed from Wadham to a fellowship 
 
 * Hearne, O. H. S. i. 187 ; ii. 49. 
 
 f There is an amusing account in Wood's " Life," ii. 547, of the 
 opposition led by Lyndesay to the degree of a certain Pembroke 
 man, Nicholls, in 1681. The Vice-Chancellor finally threatened to 
 " send him to the Castle if he dared to speak one word more in that 
 business." The whole story admirably illustrates the complexity of 
 the old degree ceremonies. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 101 
 
 at All Souls'. He was one of six brothers, of whom the 
 eldest, Sidney, was the great Whig financier, and friend 
 of Marlborough. Sidney himself was not at the Uni- 
 versity, but two more of his brothers were at Wadham. 
 Of these Charles was deemed in his day a person of 
 sufficient eminence to obtain a place in Westminster 
 Abbey ; he had been for many years a prominent civil 
 servant as commissioner of customs. The standard of 
 qualification for burial in the Abbey was not high in 
 the eighteenth century, at all events for the brother of 
 a Lord High Treasurer, but Charles Godolphin may 
 claim a place in the memory of Wadham men as a 
 liberal benefactor to the library ; to him is due the 
 fact that Wadham is especially rich in Spanish books, 
 for he inherited the library of a distant relative, Sir 
 William Godolphin, for many years ambassador in 
 Spain, and presented at least a considerable part of it 
 to the college.* 
 
 It is time to turn from these obscure and forgotten 
 worthies to the part which the college played in the 
 great events of the time ; of these three must be men- 
 tioned, the Popish Plot and all the political troubles 
 connected with the Exclusion Bill, the rebellion of 
 Monmouth, and, most important of all, James II.'s 
 
 * A certain number of Spanish MSS. came with the books ; on 
 these a report has been presented to the Spanish Academy of History 
 by my old pupil, Mr. H. Butler Clarke, now Fellow of St. John's. In 
 our own day (1880) the presence of The Godolphin books at Wadham 
 was one reason why the college received the bequest of the Wiffen 
 collection of Spanish books ; this last is especially rich in Spanish 
 Reformation theology, and as might be expected, thanks to the 
 Inquisition, many of the books in it are at any rate very rare, if not 
 valuable. 
 
102 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 attack on Magdalen College and the Church of 
 England. 
 
 In regard to the first of these, the college seems to 
 have on the whole inclined to the Whig side; the 
 Warden, as has been seen, was somewhat Latitudinarian 
 in his views, and the influence of John Lord Lovelace, 
 who had an estate at Woodstock, and was powerful in 
 the city of Oxford, was throughout strongly on the same 
 side. This peer, to gain favour with the citizens, 
 organised races on Port Meadow, to which he brought 
 the Duke of Monmouth, and had the notorious " Dr." 
 Oates to preach before him at Woodstock.* 
 
 A much more interesting and creditable person is 
 John Pratt, who was admitted as scholar in 1674; he has 
 the honour of coming next to John Locke in the list of 
 seven prominent Whigs given by Wood early in 1679 ; 
 at the end of the next year he openly ventured to drink 
 " confusion to the Duke of York " at Fedge's " coffey- 
 house," but could find no one to pledge him. He took 
 a leading part also in encouraging petitions to Parlia- 
 ment, and was present at the banquet to the Duke of 
 Monmouth given by the Mayor and Corporation of 
 Oxford in September 1680; he is there spoken of as 
 " Pratt of the Green Ribbon Club." f Fortunately for 
 PrattV prospects at the bar, the Revolution was more 
 successful than the Exclusion Bill ; he rose stage by 
 stage till finally he was made Lord Chief Justice (1718), 
 and in that office earns from Lord Campbell the double- 
 edged praise that, unlike his predecessors, he is " un- 
 redeemed from insipidity by the commission of a single 
 
 * Wood, " Life," ii. 496, 495. 
 + Ibid. ii. 431, 497 ; iii. 508. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 103 
 
 great crime." He was, at all events, a sound lawyer, 
 and may claim some remembrance as being the father 
 of the great Lord Camden. His portrait, which shows 
 him in his robes as sergeant-at-law, is that of a solid, 
 sensible-looking man, perhaps, it might be said, of a 
 typical Whig. By a curious chance it hangs almost 
 under that of his senior contemporary, Thomas Sprat 
 (see p. 77), who differed from him so little in name 
 and so much in principles. Sprat was a strong sup- 
 porter of the Duke of York, and preached a sermon 
 before the House of Commons, when they met at 
 Oxford in March 1681, which so displeased them that 
 he was ostentatiously omitted from the vote of thanks : 
 he was 
 
 " Above the thanks of the mad Senate- House," 
 
 to quote Mrs. Behn once more. 
 
 When, however, Monmouth rose in open rebellion in 
 1685, Oxford was united against him ; constitutional 
 agitation was one thing, armed force quite another. 
 Wadham, Lincoln, and Trinity joined to form one of 
 the companies of loyal volunteers which mustered for 
 the King ; they trained in Trinity Grove, having Philip 
 Bertie of that college, nephew of the Earl of Abingdon, 
 as their captain, and William Latton, fellow of Wad- 
 ham, as lieutenant ; one of the drummers also was a 
 Wadham commoner. Their only service was a review 
 in Christ Church meadow, where the officers were very 
 fine, with "scarlet coats and white feathers in their 
 hats " : apparently it was only the horse soldiers who 
 had the honour of dining with the Earl of Abingdon 
 
104 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and " came home well fuz'd.' 1 * But in the West many 
 of the old members of Wadham were seeing real service 
 for the King, among whom Wadham Strangewayes, son 
 of the Sir Giles who has been already mentioned 
 (p. 54), fell at the hands of the rebels early in the 
 campaign ; he was treacherously surprised at Bridport. 
 The victory over Monmouth only encouraged James II. 
 in his headstrong attacks on the religion and the liberties 
 of his subjects. The next great struggle was already 
 casting its shadows before ; on the very Sunday (July 
 26) after the University troops had dispersed, a sermon 
 was preached in St. Mary's at the thanksgiving service, 
 which savoured so " strongly of Popery " that the 
 Warden of Wadham delated it to the Vice-Chancellor, 
 and the preacher, Henry Bois of University College, 
 was compelled to recant ; yet the King was foolish 
 enough to provoke Oxford opinion by sending for him 
 and telling him that he was " very well pleased with 
 the discourse," and that it was " ingenious and well 
 penned." He shortly afterwards gave Bois, who became 
 an open Romanist, a dispensation under seal to protect 
 him.-f- No amount of warnings could convince James II., 
 who was a true Stuart, that his subjects attached at 
 least as much importance to their consciences as he 
 himself did ; and so he finally committed his crowning 
 act of folly in April 1687, by ordering the fellows of 
 Magdalen to violate their statutes, and elect as presi- 
 dent a person at once unqualified and most unsuitable. 
 
 It is not the place here to tell the story how the 
 fellows and the demies of Magdalen resisted all efforts 
 
 * Wood, " Life," iii. 149 seq. 
 f Ibid. 153 ; 165 ; 184. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 105 
 
 to wheedle or to coerce them into doing what they held 
 not to be right, how they suffered the loss of everything 
 rather than violate their sworn obligations ; this story, 
 one of the most glorious in the history of Oxford, 
 belongs to another volume of the college series. But 
 it is worth while mentioning here that not the least 
 famous of the fellows expelled, Maynard, was an old 
 Wadham man, while two of those who basely submitted 
 to receive fellowships from King James, Genefar, a demy, 
 and Haslewood, one of the chaplains, had obtained their 
 posts at Magdalen from our college. 
 
 Such details are perhaps merely antiquarian ; but the 
 conduct of the Warden, who became Vice- Chancel lor in' 
 the middle of the troubles, is an important part of 
 Oxford history. King James himself came down in 
 September to coerce the unruly fellows of Magdalen, 
 and was entertained by the University with a grand 
 banquet in the Bodleian. After this was over, the 
 King had a private conversation with the Vice-Chan- 
 cellor, of which a report probably written by Ironside 
 himself remains among the Magdalen MSS. 
 
 The King began by saying tht the clergy of the 
 Church of England lacked humility ; they were really 
 " wolves in sheep's clothing, 11 and his only real enemies ; 
 Ironside replied by pointing out that His Majesty 
 might " please to remember that none of them were 
 exclusioners/ 1 The King then proceeded to attack 
 Magdalen especially, for " denying his mandate,'" but 
 Ironside made the obvious answer that, absolute as 
 Kings were, " while our statutes do continue, we cannot 
 go against them." The King then said, " your eye is 
 evil, because mine is good " ; they objected to his indul- 
 
 
106 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 gence to tender consciences. Here Ironside claims to 
 have silenced the King by a reference to the ill effects 
 of toleration ; but his answer seems less convincing than 
 he says it proved to James. The King then shifted the 
 subject, and complained of the attacks on his religion; 
 but on this point the retort was ready that the Anglicans 
 were never the aggressors, but were bound to answer 
 when attacked. " Everything that hath or shall come 
 from that press," said Ironside, referring to Obadiah 
 Walker's Roman propaganda, " hath or will receive an 
 answer from hence, and perhaps with more sharpness 
 than will be acceptable ; but in this case the aggressor 
 must thank himself." * The King had the good sense 
 not to be offended by the Vice-Chancellor's plain speak- 
 ing, and commended him afterwards as " an honest, 
 blunt man " ; but he was not wise enough to take the 
 warning. 
 
 When the King had left Oxford, the Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners proceeded to expel the President and 
 fellows. Ironside showed his opinion clearly of their 
 proceedings by declining to partake of their hospitality ; 
 he did " not like, with Colonel Kirk," he grimly observed, 
 " to dine under the gallows." As Vice-Chancellor also 
 he declined to recognise the intruded fellows; when 
 St. Mark's Day f came round, he bluntly told the Vice- 
 President of Magdalen : " We shall not be there (i.e., at 
 Magdalen) to hear eulogies on the Virgin Mary ; " and 
 he appointed one of his own fellows, Charles Whiting, 
 
 * The conversation is printed in full in Bloxam's Magdalen 
 College and James II. (O. H. S.), p. 90, 92. 
 
 f The University sermon on St. Mark's Day is still preached a 
 Magdalen College, not at St. Mary's Church. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 107 
 
 to preach at St. Mary's.* And on resigning office in 
 1689, when the victory had been won, he showed his 
 own views very clearly by congratulating his successor, 
 " non habebis monstra ilia horrenda communiter vocata 
 ' quo warrantees,"* non habebis Obadiatus." f But, though 
 a partisan, Ironside was severe on disorder, even among 
 his own partisans; he published a severe (and most 
 amusing) decree against the " humming " with which 
 the Commissioners of King James were greeted ; he says 
 " monemus omnes, quotquot sunt scholares, ut ab omnibus 
 illiberalibus dicteriis, sannis, pedum supplosione, male 
 feriatorum et turbinum cachinno screatu, clamore, et mur- 
 mur e aTrpoaSiovvfftypenitus abstineant" Vice-cancellarial 
 edicts have become much more colourless since they 
 have appeared in English. 
 
 So, too, when the demies of Magdalen took the law 
 into their own hands, " sate with their hats cocked in 
 defiance of the new M.A.s," and drank confusion to the 
 Pope, the Vice-Chancellor proceeded to vigorous action. 
 One of the offenders was expelled the University, and 
 the others were fined. J It is an honour to Oxford 
 and to Wadham that, at this great crisis of the national 
 history, Oxford's highest resident officer was one who 
 was not afraid to speak the truth before Kings, but who 
 yet vigorously repressed disorder, even when justifying 
 itself by a good cause. 
 
 The Revolution speedily brought Ironside a bishopric, 
 that of Bristol, from which he was soon advanced to 
 Hereford ; but the triumph of his Whig principles in 
 Oxford belongs to the next chapter. 
 
 * Wood, " Life," iii. 265. f Ibid. iii. 311. 
 
 i Ibid. 256. 
 
108 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Before ending this one, however, it is necessary to 
 give one or two details as to undergraduates unknown 
 to fame, and to continue the history of the college 
 fabric during this period. 
 
 There is a pathetic interest attached to the presenta- 
 tion to Wadham of the advowson of Wadhurst, in 
 Sussex, which was long the most prized piece of clerical 
 patronage in the hands of the society ; it was bequeathed 
 to the college in 1668 by Thomas Aynscombe, in recog- 
 nition of the kindness shown to his son, who died at 
 Wadham two years before. The college, however, did 
 not present till 1714, and so long-lived have been the 
 rectors of Wadhurst that there have been only seven 
 Wadham men there in almost 200 years. The college 
 has now unfortunately parted with the patronage.* 
 
 The personal details in this chapter may be concluded 
 with a contemporary letter to a Wadham undergraduate, 
 George Kemeys, from his sister, bearing date June 1674; 
 like Lady Gower's letter of sixteen years previous, it 
 was found in a college room, and shows that there were 
 many points of resemblance between the seventeenth- 
 century undergraduate and his modern representatives. 
 As the letter is short, it may be quoted in full : 
 
 * Oxford, and perhaps Wadham especially, seem to have been 
 very unhealthy at this period. The pages of Wood's "Life "are 
 full of references to outbreaks of fever and of smallpox. Lovers of 
 the marvellous too may like to read ("Life," ii. 77, 8) how two 
 members of Wadham were struck by lightning when boating at 
 Medley ; one was killed outright, while the other was struck out of 
 the boat and " stuck fast in the mud (with his feet downwards and 
 his upper parts above water) like a post, not able to help himself 
 out." Fortunately help was at hand, he was rescued, and in the 
 end was none the worse for his escape. His name was William 
 Herman. 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 109 
 
 " (Dear) Brother: This day I received yours of the llth 
 instant ; your long silence made us think that you would 
 quite forget us, were it not for the quarter day. Your 
 brother intends to travel, and therefore desires to see you 
 here if it may be with your convenience : in order thereto 
 Mr. Evans has 10 and your mare : so I hope to see you 
 suddenly. My Mother's blessing to you. My brother, 
 Nancy, and my love to you. 
 " I am, 
 
 " Your affectionate sister, 
 
 " Mary Kemeys." 
 
 The Nancy and the Mary of this letter are the 
 " Martha and Mary,"" whose care soothed the declining 
 years of Bishop Ken at Naish. It is interesting to note 
 that, though, according to modern notions, the Long 
 was just beginning, there was no expectation of seeing 
 young Kemeys at home in Wales, had he not been thus 
 specially summoned. He has left another memorial of 
 himself at Wadham in a fine porringer, bearing date 
 1671, which has a lid with three unicorns'* heads. 
 
 The fabric of the college during this period was 
 seriously damaged by the storm of February 18, 1662 ; 
 three of the chimney stacks on the West side were 
 blown down, and " falling inward, and beating into the 
 chambers, would have killed several scholars, if not 
 accidentally then at prayers."* More permanent changes 
 were the fitting up of the common room and the flooring 
 of the chapel with black and white marble. As to the 
 former the College has no record, but its date can be 
 inferred almost with certainty. The " room over the 
 
 * Wood " Life," i. 4 2. 
 
110 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 buttery " was originally set apart as a busary, but its 
 present wall-panelling obviously dates from the latter 
 half of the seventeenth century ; the richly carved fire- 
 place has been attributed, though without any reason, 
 and no doubt quite wrongly, to Grinling Gibbons. It 
 is difficult to conceive that the Fellows of Wadham 
 should have fitted up the room so elaborately for any 
 other purpose than to serve as a common room for 
 themselves and for the gentleman-commoners ; and we 
 know that about the same time other colleges were 
 obtaining the same luxury ; the first recorded as having 
 a " common room " is Merton College in 1661.* Pro- 
 bability, therefore, and artistic style join in fixing the 
 establishment of the common room in this period; a 
 further confirmation is the insertion of the portrait of 
 Wilkins in the panelling over the fireplace, which seems 
 contemporary with the rest of the work, but which would 
 not have been natural at any time after 1690. The 
 beauty of the room and some of the details above 
 referred to are well shown in the accompanying picture 
 (plate v.); but it is impossible in this to do justice to 
 the view from the window, which used to be thought 
 one of the most beautiful in Oxford. Even now, though 
 the building of Manchester College has partially spoiled 
 it, it remains charming, with the quiet nook of garden in 
 the foreground, and Headington Hill in the distance. 
 
 The changes in the chapel can be dated with more 
 certainty ; in 1669 it was ordered that fellow commoners 
 should pay 8 each on admission, instead of giving plate, 
 and that this money should be used for the " public 
 
 * It should be added, however, that there is no mention at 
 Wadham of the common room till 1724. 
 
From a photograph by the] [Oxford Camera Club 
 
 THE SENIOR COMMON ROOM 
 
TILL THE REVOLUTION 111 
 
 advantages of the college" 1 i.e., the library and the 
 chapel ; and in 1673 a charge of 6d. a head was put on 
 all but servitors "for cleansing the marble in chapel 
 and ordering the clock. "* So early had the college dis- 
 covered the principle that " the undergraduate pays 
 for all." Mr. Jackson therefore fixes the paving of the 
 chapel about 1670, and dates the cedar altar rails from 
 the same time.* Finally, when he resigned the Warden- 
 ship, Ironside added the fine silver-gilt dish, which bears 
 his name, to the already existing communion plate ; it 
 is still used for the collection of alms. 
 
 Wadham daring this period, as always, was one of the 
 poor colleges in the University ; it is rated with Balliol, 
 University, Pembroke, and Jesus in 1682f at but ,100, 
 while the colleges altogether are rated at 7730, Christ 
 Church of course being first with a rating of 2000. 
 But it was always reckoned as one of the show places, 
 and was exhibited to the various royal and noble persons 
 e.g., the Prince of Orange, the Ambassador of 
 Morocco, and others who visited the University. 
 How hard these distinguished visitors were worked we 
 may see from the visit of the first named,J who started 
 with his retinue from Christ Church about ten in the 
 morning, in coaches borrowed from some of the heads 
 of houses, and saw the Physic Garden and seven 
 colleges, hearing six speeches on the way, before eleven: 
 then he went to prayers in the Cathedral, and after 
 these was conducted by the Doctors " in scarlet " to the 
 
 * P. 158. His reasons seem conclusive against Wood's date 
 1677, 8. 
 
 f Wood, "Life," ii. 565. 
 Ibid. ii. 206, seq. 
 
112 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Bodleian, where he had another speech. Then he was 
 led on to the Sheldonian, where he was made a D.C.L., 
 and presented with the works of King Charles I., "richly 
 bound and gilt "" ; degrees were also conferred on several 
 members of his train. Then followed disputations, and 
 then the Prince adjourned to dinner at St. John's, 
 escaping an entertainment in the Music School, through 
 the forgetfulness of the Vice-Chancellor. At St. John's, 
 besides his dinner, he had another speech, and then at 
 five he came across by the back way to Wadham, where 
 he had a speech, and so on to New College, where he 
 had not only a speech, but a service. He then " went 
 out the back way, thinking to call at Queen's College, 
 but the Fellows being at supper, and the gates shut " 
 (it was then about six), he went straight to Christ 
 Church. We are not surprised to hear that he had a 
 post that night from London, requiring his immediate 
 presence in Town. Our ancestors had a truly wonderful 
 appetite for speeches and shows. 
 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 WADHAM UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 
 
 IN 1670 William of Orange was in Oxford as a mere 
 visitor; in 1688 the Congregation of the University 
 passed an address of welcome to him as the " most 
 honourable and invincible prince," who had come, at 
 the invitation of all parties, to be the champion of 
 English liberties ; but, even before the first struggle for 
 these was over, division of feeling began to arise among 
 those who had united to oppose James, and throughout 
 the next generation, party quarrels burned with as great 
 fury as ever. 
 
 Oxford in this, as in other respects, reproduced in 
 her own small world the prevailing feelings of the nation 
 generally. Although comparatively few of her sons put 
 themselves outside the pale of the ordinary political and 
 religious life of England, as Jacobites or Non-jurors, 
 yet there was a minority who did this, a minority, 
 too, which contained some of the members of the Uni- 
 versity most eminent for learning and piety. And ot 
 those in Oxford who took the oaths, and submitted to 
 the established order of things in Church and State, a 
 majority did so with great unwillingness, and with 
 much discontent at the new principles introduced into 
 government. Parliamentary supremacy and Toleration 
 
WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 had formed no part of Oxford's creed, since Laud had 
 set his mark upon her, and there was great bitterness at 
 the change of affairs which had forced these on the 
 nation and on the Universities. On the other hand, 
 the old Latitudinarian party of Wilkins and his friends 
 found their ranks largely recruited from among the men 
 who wished to stand well with the government of the 
 day ; there were many in Oxford who could have said 
 with the Vicar of Bray : % 
 
 " Old principles I did revoke 
 
 Set conscience at a distance ; 
 Passive obedience was a joke, 
 A jest was non-resistance." 
 
 During this period of division in Oxford, Wadham 
 was undoubtedly a Whig College ; it shared this honour 
 (or dishonour) with All Souls 1 , Exeter, and Merton. A 
 permanent memorial of this phase of opinion is fur- 
 nished by the portraits of William III. and George I. 
 which hang in the college hall ; no other college cer- 
 tainly has both these kings among its pictures, nor do 
 I know of any that has even one of them. Neither of 
 these sovereigns, to put it mildly, did much for Oxford 
 or her colleges, nor indeed had they any reason to do 
 so. It must be confessed, however, that Wadham loyalty 
 to the Protestant succession was easily satisfied ; the 
 picture of George I., though one of the largest, is 
 certainly the worst in the Hall ; perhaps this is fitting 
 for a king who was wont to say that he cared neither 
 for " bainting nor for boetry." 
 
 One result of Wadham Whiggism is that it suffers in 
 the pages of the scholar who is the Oxford annalist for 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 115 
 
 most of this period, Thomas Hearne ; his diary covers 
 the years from 1705 to 1735. Hearne combines the 
 acerbity, which too often marks the neglected researcher, 
 with the fury of a partisan ; he is even more bitter than 
 Antony Wood, for, while the great antiquarian of 
 Charles II.'s reign was only inconvenienced by the 
 suspicion that he was a Romanist, Hearne lost both 
 place and pay in Oxford because of his views as a 
 Jacobite. Hence, amusing and racy as Hearne is, and 
 great as are the debts which English History owes to 
 him as an editor and researcher, yet it would be most 
 unfair to his opponents to take him as at all a trust- 
 worthy witness to character, or even to facts. With 
 Hearne "rascal and rogue 1 '' are the equivalents of 
 " Whig, 11 while every Tory is ipso facto an " honest "" 
 man. 
 
 It is especially necessary to bear this in mind in 
 estimating the character of Warden Dunster, who pre- 
 sided over Wadham for thirty years after the Revolution. 
 Hearne describes him as "one of the violentest Whigs and 
 most rascally Low Churchmen of the age " ; he accuses 
 him of simony, of pluralities, of gross neglect of duty, 
 and of gluttony. He quotes almost unquotable epi- 
 grams, which "honest" gentlemen of Christ Church 
 wrote on the Warden and his Whig friends ; and he 
 gloats over the humiliation put upon Dunster and other 
 Whig Heads of houses in!706, when they visited Wood- 
 stock to congratulate the Duchess of Marlborough on her 
 husband's victories, and were refused not only entertain- 
 ment, but even admittance.* But, making all allowance 
 for Kearneys exaggeration, there are certain indisputable 
 * Hearne, ii. 191 ; ii. 109 ; ii. 167. 
 
116 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 facts which tell heavily against Dunster. It may easily 
 be accident that not a single person who rose to any 
 eminence was admitted during the last ten years of 
 his reign, it might almost be said during the last fifteen. 
 But certainly it was his fault that all entries in the 
 college register, even of the names of foundationers, 
 cease in 1694, and are not resumed again in any form 
 till the time of Warden Baker, his successor ; even more 
 culpable is the complete cessation of entries in the con- 
 vention book. And if, as seems probable, the chapel 
 windows which were smashed by a great storm in 
 January 1690, * were not properly repaired till 1742, 
 this certainly proves there was something very much 
 amiss in the government of the college. It is perhaps 
 always somewhat fanciful to read characters in the 
 features of a picture, but certainly those of Warden 
 Dunster, in his picture in hall, seems to have something 
 sly and mean, though they are well cut and in some 
 ways even handsome. Hearne's judgment on him is 
 also partially confirmed by the fact that though to be a 
 strong party man was in those days one of the safest 
 paths to a bishopric, he, unlike his three predecessors 
 and his successor, failed to attain this honour. 
 
 With Dunster it is natural to couple his junior 
 contemporary, Willis, another object of Kearneys de- 
 testation. He says that Willis, " being improved in 
 impudence and all arts of insinuation, being a man of 
 true Revolution principles, to the surprise of all good 
 men, attained the Deanery of Lincoln ; " his published 
 sermons show that he is " hardly fit to be a country 
 curate or schoolmaster.'" His career is certainly that of 
 * Wood, "Life," iii. 321. 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 117 
 
 a typical Whig bishop; having been elected from 
 Wadham to All Souls, he became Chaplain to King 
 William in Flanders, tutor (under Gilbert Burnet) of 
 the Duke of Gloucester, the son of Queen Anne, and 
 finally Bishop of Gloucester in 1714. From this poor 
 see he was gradually promoted till he reached the 
 "deeper manger" of Winchester, which he enjoyed 
 eleven years. It is characteristic of his revolutionary 
 principles that he was content to be a mere Lambeth 
 D.D., and never donned the scarlet and black of his own 
 Alma Mater. 
 
 Whether Warden Dunster himself and Bishop Willis 
 represented the worst side of Whiggism or not, there is 
 no doubt that during Dunster's reign Wadham was 
 brought into unfortunate notoriety by the extravagances 
 of free thinking among its members. William Freeke 
 had ceased to reside regularly in 1679, but he was still 
 connected with Oxford, and was known to Hearne as a 
 "'whimsical" man; in 1694 he was convicted of 
 blasphemy for a tract called a "Brief and Clear 
 Confutation of the Doctrine of the Trinity," fined 
 500, and forced to make a public recantation.* If 
 it is not fair to hold Wadham responsible for his 
 strange views, yet the college can hardly escape blame 
 for the extraordinary folly of a certain George Bear, 
 who was refused his degree in 1709 for blasphemy ; 
 " he had asserted that the birth of King William was a 
 greater miracle than the birth of our Saviour," and had 
 said other foolish things, which he refused to apologise 
 for or withdraw. A year's waiting for his B.A. soon 
 
 * It ought to be recorded to Freeke's credit, however, that he was 
 a considerable benefactor to the Bodleian coin collection. 
 
118 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 brought him to a less insulting frame of mind, and he 
 publicly recanted in the Apodyterium before the Vice 
 Chancellor and Proctors. Hearne especially draws 
 attention to the fact that he had been the pupil at 
 Wadham of a certain "Republican" White. Such 
 men as Bear, who adopt extreme views without thinking, 
 for the sake of display, are always likely to be found in 
 a college of " advanced " opinions. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn to a brighter side of the College 
 life ; at no other period has classical soholarship been 
 so well represented at Wadham, as it was by the brilliant 
 group who were in residence at the beginning of 
 Warden Dunster's long reign. Creech has been already 
 mentioned, but more famous as a scholar was his 
 contemporary and friend Humphrey Hody, who became 
 a Fellow in 1685, and Regius Professor of Greek in 
 1698. He was undoubtedly the leading scholar on the 
 Whig side in Oxford during this troubled period, and 
 Hearne asserts that he owed his professorship to the 
 influence of the Latitudinarian Bishop of Salisbury, the 
 well-known Gilbert Burnet ; but this connection was 
 unfortunate for real scholarship, as the leaders of his 
 party called Hody away from his proper work to 
 engage in an unprofitable controversy on schism with 
 the Non-juror Dodwell, and to take part in the quarrel 
 about the powers of the two Houses of Convocation. 
 Even here he seems never to have been in a hurry to 
 fight ; his own principle was : " I hate everlasting 
 wrangle, and an adversary that cavils I think deserves a 
 reply as little as one that rails.' 1 * And his method of 
 controversy was that of the scholar ; he attacked the 
 * Preface to case of " Sees Vacant," 1693 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 119 
 
 English Non-jurors by editing a Greek treatise on 
 schism attributed to Nicephorus from one of the 
 Barocci MSS. in the Bodleian, and he wrote a history 
 of Convocation based largely on the MSS. in the 
 Lambeth Library.* 
 
 His real tastes were not for controversy ; they had 
 been shown by him when, as a young man of only 
 twenty-three, he published a masterly dissertation on 
 the LXX. Version, showing that the received account 
 of its origin, that of Aristeas, was a late forgery and of 
 no historical value. This brought him into collision 
 with the great Dutch scholar, Isaac Voss, who was 
 furious that an " English stripling " ventured to refute 
 a view which he himself had adopted on a subject that 
 he considered especially his own. But the world has 
 agreed with the young Englishman, though Hody did 
 not himself trouble to reply till, in 1705, he published 
 his great work on the Versions of the Bible,t which 
 remained a standard book down to our own day. In 
 the preface he compares his critic and himself to 
 Goliath and David, though he treats Voss with the 
 greatest courtesy. 
 
 Hody's early death at the age of forty-sevenj was a 
 great loss to English scholarship; he was at the time 
 engaged on a course of lectures on the Greeks of the 
 Revival of Learning, Bessarion, Theodore of Gaza, and 
 others, which were only published some thirty years 
 after his death (1742). Hearne says of him that he 
 
 * He was chaplain to two archbishops in succession, Tillotson 
 and Tenison, as can still be read in his epitaph in the college ante- 
 chapel. 
 
 f The library still has the copy which he presented. 
 
 $ Hearne, i. 323, wrongly says he was forty-five. 
 
120 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 was " a man of great industry, good natural parts and 
 a great memory, but had but little j udgment ; however, 
 he was very useful " * a criticism which applies in every 
 point to himself. 
 
 Hody has a special claim on the gratitude of 
 Wadham men, apart from the lustre which he threw 
 on their college by his life and work ; he left to it the 
 reversion of most of his property, amounting to more 
 than WO a year, for the establishment of ten 
 exhibitions, five for Greek and five for Hebrew. The 
 Greek ones were, down to our own day, prizes for the 
 best scholars in College ; the Hebrew ones were the 
 beginning of that special connection with Oriental 
 studies which has been, for the last two centuries, one of 
 the main features of Wadham. The exhibitioners 
 were to be yearly examined by the Regius Professors 
 of Greek and of Hebrew, and " to be turned out if 
 found negligent." f The professors were to have a 
 dinner with the exhibitioners, and ten shillings a-piece 
 every time. Hearne says there was a rumour that 
 Wadham was going to refuse the benefaction, because 
 " they found they should be losers by it," and " upon 
 account of trouble ; " if such unworthy views were ever 
 mooted, they were at once overruled. By the arrange- 
 ments of the last Commission, the Hody exhibitions 
 have been changed into five scholarships, three for 
 Greek and two for Hebrew. 
 
 * Hearne, i. 318. 
 
 t Even during the dark times of the eighteenth century, this over- 
 sight remained a reality ; there are at, any rate frequent instances of 
 forfeiture by Hody exhibitioners for failing to present themselves 
 for examination. 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 121 
 
 Hody further left to the College Library such of his 
 books as the Bodleian did not want.* His widow also 
 presented his portrait by Thomas Forster, a very 
 charming picture ; it represents a singularly handsome 
 man, with a face of almost feminine delicacy, but 
 redeemed from weakness by the high forehead and the 
 clear-cut features. 
 
 Among Hody's contemporaries at Wadham was 
 another scholar in his time of European reputation, 
 William Nicholls, who afterwards became Fellow of 
 Merton. He was a considerable liturgiologist, and his 
 " Defensio Ecclesiae Anglicanae " (1707) was especially 
 written to inform Continental scholars as to the formu- 
 laries of the English Church ; it attracted at the time 
 much attention in learned circles throughout Europe. 
 
 With Hody^s name at Wadham is linked that of a 
 much greater man, the prince of all English scholars, 
 Richard Bentley. His glory belongs to the sister 
 University, but Wadham may well claim some credit 
 for the fact that, when the great Cambridge Hellenist 
 had to choose a College at Oxford for himself and for 
 his pupil, James Stillingfleet,f his choice fell on their 
 foundation. His reason seems to have been the 
 proximity of the Bodleian, and perhaps also the fact 
 that Wadham was the college of Hody and of Bishop 
 Lloyd (cf. p. 81), who was at this time encouraging, 
 
 * I fear that he did not put his name in his books. At all events 
 I have been unable to find it in any of our numerous Oriental books. 
 
 f Young Stillingfleet was the son of Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of 
 St. Paul's and afterwards Bishop of Worcester, perhaps the greatest 
 theologian of the Whig party at the time. His son James became 
 Dean of Worcester. There were Stillingfleets at Wadham for three 
 generations ; they were a Dorset family. 
 
WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and to some extent directing, Bentley^s studies. 
 Bentley resided at Wadham for about a year, during 
 which time he was joint tutor with Hody to young 
 Stillingfleet, and seems to have become very intimate 
 with him. Their friendship, however, received some 
 shock from a difference of opinion, although it was only 
 a difference as to a single letter. Hody was editing the 
 history of John Malela, his prolegomena to which 
 contained original points of some importance. 
 Bentley was asked to contribute, and wrote his famous 
 letter to Mill, which once and for all put him in the 
 front rank of Greek scholars. Unfortunately, he set 
 himself to prove, at the end of the letter, that the 
 author's name was not Malela but Malelas, a view 
 which Hody refused to adopt, and to which he replied 
 in an appendix. The world of scholars since has, of 
 course, agreed with Bentley, but it would have saved 
 the great Cambridge man much trouble if he had taken 
 to heart the rebuke implied in the prayer with which 
 Hody concludes his answer : 
 
 " Faxit numen 
 
 ut vel aeterno ego silentio inter non scribentes delitescam, vel 
 semper, ut virum ingenuum, liberalis ac generosae educationis 
 veraeque Philosophiae studiosum decet scribam ; veritatis unicae 
 indagator, absque omni styli acerbitate, mitis. urbanus, candidus, 
 ad id quod indecens est non pronus ut nee movendus, nugarum 
 denique contemptor.'' 
 
 The book appeared in 1691, when Bentley had left 
 Wadham nearly a year. The friendship between him 
 and Hody, as has been said above, was cooled, but the 
 Oxford Greek Professor had too much good sense to 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 123 
 
 join in the furious attack which the scholars of Christ 
 Church made on Bentley in 1698, an attack which has 
 been rendered immortal by his Dissertation on the Epistles 
 of Phalaris, the most crushing reply in the history of 
 scholarship. 
 
 Another Wadham scholar of a very different kind 
 must be mentioned, who succeeded Hody as Regius 
 Professor of Greek, Thomas Mills; he came up in 
 the same year (1689) that Bentley joined the College. 
 Mills is Hearne's special aversion ; he is " a poor 
 pretender to learning," and is of an unsettled temper 
 with " a worm in his head " which prevents him from 
 sticking to anything.* Hearne's note on his appoint- 
 ment as professor is characteristic ; he calls him the 
 " rhapsodist," and then goes on, " The Court could not 
 have put a greater affront upon us than pitching upon 
 a person void of integrity, parts, or learning, he not 
 understanding the rudiments of the Greek Tongue. ""f 
 
 We need not take all this too literally ; Hearne 
 himself records that Mills'* edition of St. Cyril was a 
 work of merit,J though he claims that he himself made 
 the indexes, and says that the quotations were all 
 borrowed from Suicer's Thesaurus a charge which has 
 been brought against at least one work of English 
 theological learning in our own day. Mills also seems 
 to have made a vigorous Bishop when he was appointed 
 to the see of Waterford in 1708. 
 
 * Hearne, O. H. S. i. 314 ; 105. f Ibid. i. 326. 
 
 J Ibid. iii. 113. 
 
 Ibid. i. 13. In our day public opinion would praise Mills for an 
 act which Hearne (i. 95) records with implied contempt, his attempt 
 to convert the famous actress, "Bracegirdle the Brown " to a more 
 respectable life. The attempt was a failure. 
 
WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 But Wadham was not entirely Whig even under 
 Dunster. Nicholas Whalley, who was in residence as 
 Fellow for the first fifteen years of the century, wins 
 Hearne's commendation for a sermon preached at St. 
 Mary's, on January 30, 1710, on the text " Hazael 
 said, ' But what, is thy servant a dog that he should do 
 this great thing?'" (2 Kings viii. 13.) The preacher 
 compared Hazael to the Parliamentarian leaders in 1641, 
 as instances of the progress of sin ; and finally, by a 
 very forced transition, brought his argument round to 
 " Mr. Hoadley and his deposing doctrine " ;* but 
 Hearne fears that Whalley is a wolf in sheep's clothing, 
 for he is "a vain, empty, proud fellow," whose High 
 Church principles seem to have been merely a matter of 
 talking in coffee-houses and common-rooms, where he 
 u smokes his pipe and casts a scornful look," " tucks up 
 his gown and talks against Hoadley."f 
 
 A more " honest " man, however, was Joseph Trapp,J: 
 who became Fellow in 1703. It is no wonder that 
 
 * Hearne, ii. 339. 
 
 f Ibid. iii. 121. 
 
 J There were no doubt many other High Churchmen in Wadham 
 whose names have been forgotten. One of these, John Ballam, 
 who matriculated in 1692, presented the Library with a fine folio 
 containing an account of the trial of Dr. Sacheverell, in which he 
 has put an inscription saying that he gives this, " collegii optime de 
 se meriti simul et amid inter opprobria patientis, inter pericula 
 magnanimi, inter triumphos modesti et hand pessime de Patria meritt 
 memor." We can imagine the pride of the country clergyman 
 as he thus praised his old friend, and the disgust of the Whig 
 Librarian-fellow who had to put the book on the shelves. It may 
 be added that prosecutions for sermons " were in the air " all 
 through this stormy period ; another Wadham man, William Tilly, 
 nearly had his Assize Sermon burned by the Whigs in Parliament 
 because, preaching on Proverbs xxiv. 10, 12, he managed to turn 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 125 
 
 Hearne calls him an " ingenious, honest gentleman,"* for 
 he was manager for Dr. Sacheverell in his trial, and 
 dedicated his " Prselectiones Poetica? " to Henry St. 
 John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke. Trapp was the 
 first Oxford Professor of Poetry, and not the least 
 famous occupant of that famous chair. The peroration 
 of his last lecture, delivered in 1718, is still interesting ; 
 he describes, in words as appropriate to our own day as 
 to his, the new " towers of the Muses " arising on every 
 side, so numerous that an Oxford man returning to 
 Oxford after a few months feels himself "almost a 
 stranger, 1 ' and then goes on to refer to the attack on 
 the privileges of the University which the Whigs were 
 even then threatening. It was that attack, in its 
 concrete form of Pepper's troop of horse, which inspired 
 the only lines of Trapp now remembered, the famous 
 epigram against Cambridge : 
 
 "King George observing with judicious eyes 
 The state of both his Universities, 
 To Oxford sent a troop of horse ; and why ? 
 That learned body wanted loyalty. 
 To Cambridge books he sent, as well discerning 
 How much that loyal body wanted learning, "t 
 
 But Trapp was in his day a well-known poet, and is 
 among the many who have essayed to translate Virgil ; 
 to modern judgment he seems to have failed a little 
 
 his discourse against Occasional Conformity (Hearne, i. 10, 70) ; 
 
 but Tilly had migrated from Wadham to C. C. C. , perhaps he did 
 
 not like its Whig politics. It is noticeable that at least two other 
 
 prominent High Churchmen of this time, Thomas Hart and Peter 
 
 Waldo, had migrated from Wadham to other colleges. 
 
 * Elsewhere (iii-56) however, he is " a silly, rash hot-headed fellow. " 
 
 f Fairness to the sister University requires that I should quote at 
 
126 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 worse even than most of his rivals. The college has a 
 portrait of him, showing him as a solemn and judicious 
 divine, with a face such as would be expected in a man 
 who wrote (in 1739) a course of sermons against George 
 Whitfield on the " folly of being righteous overmuch. 1 '* 
 These attracted so much attention that Cave, who was 
 publishing an abridgment of them in the Gentleman's 
 Magazine, was stopped by a threat of prosecution for 
 infringement of copyright. 
 
 It is natural to couple with Trapp another Wadham 
 poet, junior to him by more than twenty years, who 
 also translated Virgil, and who was thought by his 
 contemporaries to have surpassed Dryden, Christopher 
 Pitt. Even in our own day Conington thinks it worth 
 while to mention his version ; but beyond securing him 
 a burial in the " Collections of the English Poets," it 
 has done little for his fame. The honour of rearing 
 even this small poet must be shared by Wadham with 
 New College, to which Pitt migrated as scholar in 
 1719. 
 
 It is time to turn briefly to the lives of three or four 
 Wadham men of this period, whose fame was won in a 
 wider field than the academic one. Of these Thomas 
 Wyndham, Lord Chancellor of Ireland (matriculated 
 
 least in a note the crushing reply improvised by Sir William Browne 
 to Johnson, who had quoted Trapp's lines : 
 
 " The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse, 
 For Tories own no argument but force ; 
 With equal care to Cambridge books he sent, 
 For Whigs admit no force but argument." 
 
 If all the winners of the Cambridge verse prizes wrote half as 
 brilliantly as did the founder of the medals, how much more witty 
 the sister University would be. 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 127 
 
 1698), may be left to the next chapter, when his 
 generous bequest fell in to the college. George, Lord 
 Hastings (matriculated 1693), is Wadham's repre- 
 sentative in Marlborough's ever-victorious army. Two 
 more, William Lee and Arthur Onslow, must be noticed 
 at rather greater length. The former matriculated in 
 1704, but his academic career was not brilliant in 
 ordinary eyes ; his contemporaries laughed to hear that 
 he intended to go to the bar, but his tutor had the 
 good luck or the prescience to foretell that he would be 
 Lord Chief Justice of England ; " for to plodding and 
 perseverance nothing is impossible." Lee realised the 
 prophesy in 1737, and though his fame suffers from 
 comparison with that of his great predecessor, Lord 
 Hardwicke, and of his still greater successor, Lord 
 Mansfield,* yet he was an able and impartial judge. In 
 these days of women's rights it may be remembered to 
 his credit that in the famous case of " Ely v. Olive " he 
 decided that a woman both might be a sexton and 
 might vote for one. Lee was a good Whig, though, if 
 we may trust Lord Campbell, he never gave any reason 
 for being so except that " he came in with King 
 William " (he was born in 1688). This humorous 
 reason for his political principles is said to have been 
 his sole joke. We can almost accept this statement of 
 Lord Campbell's about a man who had so little sense of 
 humour as to enter in his diary: "Six bushels of oats 
 for four horses per week ; hempseed good in their corn ; 
 walking them in the dewy grass in the morning, very 
 good ; for rheumatism elder tea. I married to Mrs. 
 M. M." However, the lady was his second wife. 
 * There was a brief interval of two years between them. 
 
128 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Arthur Onslow (matriculated 1 708) was distinguished 
 in a wider field, for he was the greatest Speaker who 
 ever ruled the House of Commons. He held the Chair 
 from 1726 to 1761. His affection for his old college is 
 well shown in the splendid service books which he 
 presented to the chapel. His portrait hangs both in 
 hall and in the common room. 
 
 At the beginning of the reign of Warden Dunster 
 Wadham made a considerable addition to its fabric. 
 There had always been since the foundation of the 
 college a small building not used for rooms of 
 timber and rough cast, on the site of the present No. 
 IX. staircase.* This was now pulled down, and the 
 present building erected (1693-4).t Tradition attri- 
 butes the design to Sir Christopher Wren, but there is 
 no need to do the great man's memory the injustice of 
 accepting this as true. It seems to have been intended 
 to erect a corresponding block at the North- West 
 corner of the college possibly (as Mr. Jackson 
 suggests) as a lodging for the Warden; but this, 
 fortunately, was never carried out. 
 
 The college, too, at this time, received its finest piece 
 of plate the great loving cup given by J. S. Moore in 
 1704,+ and one of its best known art- treasures. It 
 had given lodging for some time to a Dutch painter 
 
 * It is shown in Loggan's print (1675), which is reproduced at 
 the beginning of this book. 
 
 f Wood, "Colleges and Halls," p. 597, gives the date. The 
 corresponding block at the N.W. corner is shown in the Oxford 
 Almanack of 1738. 
 
 I As befitted the donor of a punch bowl, he came from Jamaica. 
 
 The fine brass lectern in chapel was presented about the same 
 time 1691 by Sir Thomas Leir. 
 
UNDER WARDEN DUNSTER 129 
 
 Van Sonman who had been employed in making copies 
 of the portraits of the Founder and the Foundress. In 
 gratitude for his entertainment he presented the 
 Fellows with the portrait of a well-known old Oxford 
 character, Mother George, which still hangs in the 
 Senior Common Room. The only facts that are 
 certain about her are that she died in July 1691, that 
 she was very old, and that she had nothing to do with 
 Wadham. When Locke saw her in 1682 she "pos- 
 sessed all her faculties perfect, and had as comely a 
 face as ever he saw an old woman have." Locke does 
 not say whether she threaded a needle for him without 
 spectacles and received a gratuity in return ; but this 
 was her usual means of support. She claimed to be 
 108 at the time. According to this account, she 
 would have been 118 when she died, while other versions 
 make her 111 or 120 ; but all these figures are very 
 untrustworthy, especially as Wood says that " when 
 she came to be 100 she doubled every year." She had 
 been married at thirty, and had fifteen children, and, 
 according to one story, died of a fall which inj ured her 
 back. Unless the painter has flattered her, she cer- 
 tainly was very handsome for her years, and her hands, 
 which she carefully displays in the picture, and which 
 are beautifully rendered, were especially fine. The 
 fellows of Wadham seem to have been at a loss what 
 to do with their present, and so hung it in the Senior 
 Common Room, where it has remained ever since.* 
 
 * Wood, " Life," iii. 367 and note. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 
 
 THE reign of Warden Dunster had not been a bright 
 period for Wadham, at least towards its close ; but it 
 was brighter than the two generations that succeeded it ; 
 the eighteenth century is an inglorious time for Oxford 
 as a whole, and Wadham is not one of the brilliant 
 spots which relieve the darkness. 
 
 The election of the successor of Warden Dunster led to 
 a grave scandal, or at least to well-grounded suspicions of 
 one ; parties were very evenly divided, but Mr. Girdler, 
 the High-Tory candidate, had received the promises of 
 four, including the sub-warden, while his Whig opponent, 
 Dr. Baker, had just as many ; hence the " honest " can- 
 didate, as Hearne calls him, felt himself sure of election, 
 for the sub-warden had a casting vote. The election 
 took place in chapel, according to the statutes,* 
 after Morning Prayer, and to the surprise of all, Baker 
 had five votes, and Girdler only three ; hence the 
 former was elected. It was said that one of the fellows, 
 whose name was known, had changed his vote, because 
 he had received a purse of fifty guineas from Dr. Baker's 
 
 * The place of election was changed in 1872. 
 
 i 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 131 
 
 agent. Hearne, who is our authority for the whole 
 story, gives the following epigram :* 
 
 " Upon one who was bribed while he was at prayers in the 
 chapel, to vote contrary to his conscience. 
 
 " One hand and eye erect were close engaged 
 In pray'r, and holy war with heaven waged : 
 The other eye obliquely view'd the gold, 
 Which into t'other hand was shyly told. 
 What ! brib'd within the consecrated walls ! 
 Strange magick power of gold ! to hush the calls 
 Of sacred promises, dissolve the ties 
 Of oaths ! Was this thy morning sacrifice ? 
 Transcendent knave ! who could have closer trod 
 Thy friend Iscariot's steps, who sold his God ? 
 Transcript of Judas ! go, refund thy pelf, 
 Then, like thy great exemplar, hang thyself : 
 For while thou liv'st, the world will be surprised 
 To meet a walking hell epitomiz'd." 
 
 Baker was only Warden five years, and was, in some 
 respects, an improvement on Dunster, as the Convention 
 Book was again kept up, and he also resumed the list of 
 commoners of various kinds; curiously enough the 
 Register of members of the foundation was not begun 
 again till 1739, at which time that of non-founda- 
 tioners in its turn becomes blank till 1806. But 
 Baker failed to keep up the improvement he had begun, 
 for in 1722 he received leave of absence from the 
 college, as he was commanded to attend the King in 
 Hanover as chaplain ; in 1723 he was made Bishop of 
 
 * Bliss, "Reliq.," Hearne, p. 431. 
 
132 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Bangor, and was soon after translated to Norwich. He 
 was a bishop of the bad type so common in the 
 eighteenth century ; he did not reside in his see, and he 
 provided for his family out of his patronage. His full 
 smug face and portly figure are still familiar from his 
 picture in hall over the scholars' table. 
 
 The period opened badly, and it went on worse ; a 
 new feature appears in Wadham history in bankrupt 
 fellows and defaulting bursars ; Mr. Philip Speke was 
 already in debt to the college when he was elected 
 fellow in 1724 ; his debts were allowed to go on 
 increasing, till at last, after endless resolutions about 
 him, the college in 1746 had to take 100 in full 
 release for a debt of ,213. Still worse was the case of 
 William Thomas, who was elected fellow in 1725 ; he 
 died thirteen years later as bursar, owing the college 
 over dPIOOO. Part of this was the value for the trees of 
 the Grove in the Back Quad, which were cut down in 
 1731 and 1732 (p. 146). 
 
 Much worse than mere debt was the career of 
 Bennett Allen, who became fellow in 1760 ; he was in 
 Holy Orders, and filled all the college offices, but he 
 made himself notorious in London society by writing 
 books with titles which will not bear quotation here. 
 Finally, thanks to his libelling in the Morning Post the 
 secretary of one of the American States, he was forced, 
 much against his will, to fight a duel, and killed his 
 man (1782); for this he was tried, but was found 
 guilty of manslaughter only, and sentenced to six 
 months' imprisonment. His fellowship had already 
 lapsed, the college rightly refused to help such a scamp 
 in any way, and so he disappears from Wadham 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 133 
 
 history.* Even the highest post was no guarantee for 
 good behaviour ; in 1739 the Warden himself, Thistle- 
 thwayt, who had succeeded Baker in 1724, had to 
 resign on a charge of serious misconduct. 
 
 It is no wonder then that during this period college 
 admissions are few and undistinguished. They had 
 averaged sixteen during the closing years of Dunster ; 
 the average sank to fifteen under Baker, to twelve under 
 Thistlethwayt (1724-1739), to ten under Lisle (1739- 
 1744), and to nine under Wyndham ( 1744-1 777). f 
 Non-residence of fellows became frequent, the duties of 
 the college offices were continually discharged not by 
 their actual holders but by deputies, and all things 
 were weakly administered and disorderly. 
 
 It was natural that when college authority was of 
 this kind, undergraduate conduct should follow suit ; 
 and the undergraduate of the day cuts but a poor 
 figure in contemporary drama or fiction, where the life 
 of the ordinary man can best be seen reflected. In the 
 "Humours of Oxford ,""t a play written by an under- 
 graduate of Wadham, John Miller, which gained some 
 success when acted in London in 1730, most of the 
 
 * By a curious irony his place as Sub-Warden was filled by Dr. 
 John Wills, eminent alike as Warden and as benefactor to Wadham 
 and the University (p. 153). 
 
 f In 1762 there were only two admissions. 
 
 ^ The play has some cleverness, and one character in it, Lady 
 Science, may have given Sheridan the idea of his Mrs. Malaprop. 
 Miller was not only a successful dramatic author, but also a vigorous 
 High Churchman ; unfortunately his political views hindered his 
 advancement in the Church, and he had a gift for quarrelling ; he 
 actually brought Pope into one of his plays, under the name of 
 " Alexander Taste," in the character of a deformed poet, who thinks 
 all the ladies in love with him. 
 
134 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 villains are University men, either undergraduates or 
 dons; the undergraduate, Apeall, is described by the 
 two heroes of the poem as a " true representative of 
 Oxford scholars," " a fool by birth and rake by educa- 
 tion," " a little abridgment of the follies of the age, and 
 a compleat burlesque on wit and fashion." This is only 
 one of countless instances which might be quoted to 
 prove that too many of the students of the time had 
 neither good morals nor good manners ; but this 
 unsatisfactory conclusion need not be dwelt on further. 
 
 The one man of vigour in college administration at 
 this period seems to have been Samuel Lisle. He 
 consented to take the Wardenship at a difficult crisis 
 in 1739, and during his short period of office he 
 restored the chapel to a decent state by repairing the 
 great East window (1742); for this purpose sub- 
 scriptions were obtained from old members of the 
 college. Lisle also will be praised in these days of 
 archaeological research, for his energy in collecting 
 Greek inscriptions, when chaplain to the Levant 
 Company at Smyrna. But he only held the Warden- 
 ship till 1744, when he was appointed Bishop of St. 
 Asaph. His portrait in hall shows him as an honest 
 but somewhat heavy-looking divine. 
 
 There was nothing in the University regulations to 
 supply the shortcomings of college administration ; in 
 fact where good work was being done in Oxford during 
 this century, as at Christ Church, at Corpus Christi 
 College, or at University under William Scott as tutor, 
 it was due to the energy of individuals. The degree 
 examinations, which had been reformed by Laud, and 
 which vigorous Vice-Chancellors, such as Dr. Fell, had 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 135 
 
 tried to make a reality, had become a mere form. 
 Vicesimus Knox, a not undistinguished scholar of the 
 latter half of this century, who was a St. John's man, 
 gives, in an essay published in 1782, the following account 
 of the various ceremonies necessary for graduation* 
 
 In theory a candidate had to attend the public 
 lectures of various professors, but these were by no 
 means regularly given ; in fact, if we may trust the 
 letter printed in Amhersfs Terrae Filins, which pro- 
 fesses to come from Wadham College, no lecturer, 
 except on poetry and music, had been seen in the 
 Schools for three years before 1721 ; and when the 
 writer and two others were lucky enough to catch the 
 Regius Professor of Divinity, he was much surprised 
 and disgusted to find he had an audience, and proceeded 
 to address them " Magistri vos non est'is idonei 
 auditores ; prcuterea, juxta legis doctorem Boucher, ires 
 nonjaciunt collegium. Valete" Hence it was requisite 
 that the candidate for a degree should obtain a " dis- 
 pensation " because he had not heard lectures, which 
 had never been delivered for him to hear. 
 
 But there were also examinations ; of these the first 
 important one was commonly known as " doing 
 generals," and was taken in or after the ninth term ; 
 two candidates performed it together. Their first duty 
 was to procure " arguments," which were furnished on 
 long slips of paper, handed down from generation to 
 generation ; with these they sat for two hours opposite 
 each other in the schools, reading a novel, cutting their 
 names, or otherwise profitably employed ; if any official 
 came in, a syllogism or two was read out, and the forms 
 were then considered to have been complied with. 
 
136 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 The final examination was called " answering under a 
 Bachelor," and was of the same kind. "Every can- 
 didate was obliged to be examined in the whole circle 
 of the sciences by three M. A/s of his own choice ; " * the 
 examination was to last two hours. Here again 
 things were made easy by " schemes " of questions, 
 which contained all that would be asked, and which 
 could easily be learned by heart. The translations too 
 from Latin and Greek, and into those languages, pre- 
 sented no difficulty when the examiner was a friend, 
 well plied with port before the examination, and 
 intending to dine with the candidate after the ceremony 
 was over. It was considered " ungenteel " for a Vice- 
 Chancellor or one of the Proctors to come in and 
 disturb this very social examination. 
 
 Such were the tests ; the rest of the qualifications for 
 the B.A. were, if possible, of an even more formal 
 character. The only resemblance which the degree 
 bears to our present one is that for it also fees were 
 required at every step a permanent feature in uni- 
 versities as in all other human institutions. As the 
 current epigram put it, 
 
 " E'en Baalam's ass, 
 If he could pay the fees, would pass." 
 
 More ceremonies of the same kind were required for 
 the M.A., including especially the so-called "Wall 
 lectures." By these (in theory) the Bachelor showed 
 himself able to give a course of six Latin lectures ; in 
 practice he had no audience except the " walls," and 
 never lectured, unless a Proctor entered, in which 
 
 * In theory the Senior Proctor nominated the examiners; in 
 practice a bribe of 55. to his servant secured the right of choice. 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 137 
 
 unlikely case any old Latin book would do to furnish 
 him with a sheet or two to read aloud. By this time 
 the old requirement of continuous residence till the 
 M.A. degree was taken had been commuted into formal 
 residence of a term a year.* 
 
 It may be noted here that two of the three men whose 
 influence in the University swept away most of these 
 forms, and introduced a real system of examination, were 
 scholars of Wadham at this period ; but the labours of 
 John Parsons (matriculated 1777), afterwards Master 
 of Balliol, and of John Eveleigh (matriculated 1766), 
 afterwards Provost of Oriel, belong to the next chapter. 
 
 The Oxford Sausage t gives us a picture of the 
 Fellows of this period, who 
 
 " Live indeed like petty kings, 
 And dine untaxed, untroubled under 
 The portrait of our pious founder." 
 
 When the Fellow has retired to his country parish 
 and his bride, 
 
 " Haply some friend may shake his hoary head, 
 And say, ' Each morn unchilled by frosts he ran 
 With hose ungartered, o'er yon turfy bed, 
 To reach the Chapel ere the psalms began. 
 
 " There in the arms of that lethargic chair, 
 Which rears its moth-devoured back so high, 
 At noon he quaffed three glasses to the fair, 
 And pored upon the news with curious eye. 
 
 * This in the nineteenth century became residence for the term 
 only in which the M.A. degree was taken. This last, which will be 
 familiar to many from " Tom Brown at Oxford," was only abolished 
 about 1860. 
 
 f Published in 1764 ; pp. 31, 34, 40. 
 
138 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 " Now by the fire, engaged in serious talk 
 Or mirthful converse, would he loitering stand ; 
 Then in the garden chose a sunny walk, 
 Or launched the polished bowl with steady hand.' " 
 
 However, there was another side to university life 
 and work even in the eighteenth century. As will be 
 seen, hard study was pursued, and original work done, 
 at the darkest period, and things cannot have been so 
 hopeless as the satirists say, even for the ordinary man, 
 when old members of the college are found regularly 
 sending their sons where they themselves had been 
 before, and moreover adding to the endowments and 
 treasures of Oxford. This is not the conduct of men 
 who were conscious that their own university careers 
 had been worse than wasted. 
 
 Prominent among the Wadham studies of this 
 period is the cultivation of Oriental learning, to which 
 Hody had given special encouragement by the founda- 
 tions of his Hebrew exhibitions. The Laudian Pro- 
 fessorship of Arabic was held for more than half 
 the century by two Wadham men, John Wallis* 
 (1703-1738), and Joseph White (1774-1814); the 
 latter was, for the last twelve years, also Regius 
 Professor of Hebrew. The college actually gave him 
 in 1776 the use of the Senior Common Room for his 
 Arabic lectures; but perhaps, like other professors in 
 more recent days, the lecture never went beyond an 
 announcement. There is no doubt, however, that 
 White was an indefatigable worker, and the author of 
 
 * He held also (1699) one of the Arabic Studentships founded by 
 William III., out of which foundation grew the Lord Almoner's 
 Professorship of Arabic. 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 139 
 
 numerous books bearing on Oriental scholarship ; but 
 he is now only remembered for his Bampton Lectures 
 (1784), which were the cause of a literary controversy 
 of considerable importance. His subject had been a 
 " Comparison of Mahometism and Christianity, 1 " and 
 he had attracted especial attention by his contrast 
 between Christian and Mohammedan ethics; he was 
 accused of having his lectures written for him by an ex- 
 Dissenting minister, Samuel Badcock, and by Dr. Parr, 
 but he succeeded in clearing himself of the main charge, 
 though it was admitted that he had received consider- 
 able assistance, and had paid handsomely for it. Many 
 of White's Oriental books came to the College library. 
 
 More famous than White is Benjamin Kennicott, 
 who matriculated as servitor early in 1744; he was, 
 like White, of very lowly origin, being the son of 
 the baker and parish clerk of Totnes ; he was twenty- 
 five when he came up. These two are instances of a 
 fact too often forgotten in these reforming days that 
 patronage was more favourable to merit in humble life 
 than the modern system of competitive examination ; a 
 parish-clerk^s son, however great his aptitude for 
 Oriental languages, would look in vain for a servitor- 
 ship and a fellowship, since all endowments are now 
 given by a system which requires merit, and only such 
 merit as can be shown by a candidate whose parents 
 have been able to give him the ordinary education. 
 
 Kennicott was a very great man in his day; even 
 George III. actually gave him a pension of %QO as 
 early as 1761, and more than ^9000 was collected in 
 England in order to enable him to pursue his great 
 work of examining and collating the Hebrew MSS. of 
 
140 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the Old Testament. Here, again, it is difficult to 
 believe that our own day would subscribe with anything 
 like the same liberality for such an object, or indeed 
 for any literary object at all. Kennicott seems to have 
 been an indefatigable worker rather than a great 
 scholar ; he was not a man of ideas like Lowth, whose 
 lectures (as Professor of Poetry) on Isaiah mark an 
 epoch in sacred scholarship ; but he will be remembered 
 at least for the scholarships which his widow founded in 
 his memory, and perhaps also for the exquisitely 
 ridiculous compliment paid him by Mr. Hurdis, the 
 would-be refuter of Gibbon; Awhile the Colossus, 
 Kennicott, literally bestrides the world, it is the inferior 
 lot of Mr. Gibbon to be great only among us petty men, 
 who 
 
 " Walk under his huge legs, and peep about 
 To find ourselves dishonourable graves/' 
 
 (The italics are Mr. Hurdis" 1 , not my own.) 
 In a different field of sacred scholarship the name of 
 James Parsons (matriculated 1777) deserves a brief 
 mention, as he completed for the Septuagint an 
 enterprise similar to that which Kennicott had carried 
 out for the Hebrew text ; this had been begun by Dr. 
 Holmes, of New College, on whose death Parsons was 
 invited by the delegates of the Press to carry on the 
 work ; it took him nineteen years more (1808-1827). 
 Truly if there were idle fellows in those days, there 
 were also workers who, in the scale of their under- 
 takings, far exceed anything which our own busy age 
 can show. 
 
 Other Orientalists of note were the Rev. George 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 141 
 
 Costard*, whose work on the History of Astronomy 
 (1767) is said to be still valuable for its wealth of 
 quotations from Oriental and classical writers, and 
 John Richardson (matriculated 1775), whose great 
 Persian Dictionary has been often re-edited, and has 
 done much for the advancement of the knowledge of 
 the language in England. His preface is well worth 
 looking at for its extraordinary mixture of real 
 criticism as to Greek History and Mythology 
 (Herodotus fares but badly at Richardson's hands), 
 and of absolute credulity as to Persian writers. 
 
 The only notable Wadham scholar in the strict 
 sense during this period was Floyer Sydenham, whom 
 Dr. Parr ranked first among the Platonists of his time ; 
 he translated the Greek philosopher's works in four 
 volumes; but his labour was so little remunerative 
 that he died in prison for debt. This sad end to a 
 respected career is said to have led to the foundation of 
 the Literary Society for the relief of distressed authors. 
 
 For natural science Wadham seems to have done 
 nothing of note at this period, if we except the extra- 
 ordinary career of William Austin ; he came up from 
 Wootton-under-Edge in 1773, in 1776 became Assistant 
 Lecturer in Arabic, then went to London to study 
 medicine, and returned to Oxford in 1780, to lecture for 
 the Savilian Professor of Mathematics (1781). He 
 next proposed to lecture on physiology, and actually 
 became Professor of Chemistry ; he also wrote sermons, 
 
 * Costard deserves praise also for a higher sense of public duty 
 than usually marked his time. When offered the Wardenship in 
 1777, he declined it on the ground of age (he was then sixty-seven), 
 though he was quite a poor man. 
 
142 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 though apparently he did not publish them. It is not 
 surprising that such a jack-of-all-trades did not 
 materially advance knowledge in any department, or 
 that he died at thirty-eight; but he was an acute 
 observer as well as a prodigious worker, and he was the 
 first to establish regular chemical lectures at St. 
 Bartholomew's Hospital. 
 
 Of men of real eminence during this period, Wadham 
 seems to have been singularly unfruitful. James Harris 
 (matriculated 1726) was a not undistinguished member 
 of the Johnsonian circle, though the great Doctor had 
 but a poor opinion of him, pronouncing him a " cox- 
 comb " and " a prig and a bad prig," and denying his 
 title to be an eminent Grecian.* His great work, 
 " Hermes, 1 '* an inquiry into universal grammar, had the 
 honour of being translated into French by order of the 
 Directory in 1796, and was praised by Lowth as " the 
 most beautiful example of analysis since Aristotle," but 
 the reader if it find any now will probably agree 
 with Johnson that Harris " did not understand his own 
 system." He was, however, so amiable a man that 
 Boswell could not understand Johnson's hard words 
 about him, and cruelly records a specimen of Harris" 
 wit ; f he also condones the " affected " style of Hermes 
 by the double-edged saying " it clothes plain thoughts 
 in analytick and categorical formality.'" 
 
 Harris was a considerable politician in his own day, 
 as a supporter of George Grenville, and has preserved 
 his memory, in his own college at any rate, by his 
 portrait a Reynolds | in excellent condition which 
 
 * Boswell's " Life of Johnson" (Hill's edition), v. 378; ii. 225; 
 iii. 245. t Ibid. v. 378. 
 
 For the evidence as to its genuineness, see Appendix II. 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 
 
 represents him as a somewhat formal but kindly-looking 
 old gentleman in a tie-wig. 
 
 The vigorous Bishop Woodward * (matriculated 1742) 
 of Cloyne, who was an early opponent of penal laws 
 against Catholics, a Governor of Madras, Robert Palk 
 (matriculated 1736), who was a friend of Warren 
 Hastings, and gave his name to the strait between 
 India and Ceylon, and two successful judges, complete 
 the list of men of public distinction that the Wadham 
 of this dull time has to show. Of these two last 
 Richard Richards (matriculated 1774), Chief Baron of 
 the Exchequer, was a sturdy friend of Lord Eldon's ; 
 and William Draper Best (matriculated 1782) afterwards 
 Lord Wynford, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 
 another sound Tory Judge, may claim to be remem- 
 bered for the delightful literalness of the compiler of 
 the legal index, who entered a casual remark of 
 Lord WynfonTs "that he had a great mind to com- 
 mit the plaintiff," under "Lord Wynford, His great 
 mind/ 
 
 During this period politics were ceasing to occupy 
 Oxford ; in fact, after the conspiracy of Atterbury, her 
 Jacobitism became more and more a mere sentiment, 
 and less and less a force moving to action. Hence, 
 apart from the above-mentioned scandal of 1719 (p. 130), 
 little is heard of politics in the college, although in 
 1754 one of the scholars, John Pester, was deprived of 
 his place for wearing political colours at the famous 
 Oxford county election, when the Jacobite rioters held 
 the approaches to the Broad Street, and the Whig 
 
 * A scholarship for natives of Gloucestershire has just been 
 founded at Wadham to commemorate the bishop and other more 
 recent members of the Woodward family. 
 
144 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 freeholders baffled them by slipping through Exeter 
 College to the polling booths there. 
 
 A new force was arising to disturb the peace of 
 colleges, in the Wesleyan movement ; this, however, 
 seems to have left Wadham untouched, nor do the 
 members of the college play a prominent part in the 
 religious struggles away from Oxford. There is nothing 
 to mention in this connection except that one prominent 
 Wadham divine, John Bradford, migrated to the 
 Countess of Huntingdon^ connection, and that another, 
 William Bishop, as Vicar of Wedmore in Somerset, 
 protested against Hannah More's attempt to reform his 
 parish by her Sunday school. It is only in the next 
 century that Wadham becomes a prominent Evangelical 
 college. 
 
 But Wadham was steadily becoming more wealthy 
 during this inglorious period. In 1733 it was able to 
 pass the welcome resolution " That every person on the 
 foundation receive the full stipend as left by the will of 
 Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham for the first time;" 
 the first century of college life, like our own days in the 
 latter part of the third, had been a time of reduced 
 stipends. And shortly after this, in 1746, Wadham 
 received a very considerable benefaction from Thomas, 
 Lord Wyndham (matriculated 1698), who had served 
 with distinction for many years as Lord High Chan- 
 cellor of Ireland.* Part of his gift went to increase the 
 stipend of the Warden, and part was applied, in the 
 usual way in which colleges apply spare cash, to altering 
 and improving the fabric. In fact, the eighteenth 
 
 * His portrait hangs in the college hall, and also in the Warden's 
 lodgings. 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 145 
 
 century was a busy time in the way of college changes, 
 though fortunately the good genius of Wadham, or 
 rather the excellence of the original building, kept 
 these all to matters of detail. 
 
 One of the most important of these changes was the 
 recasting of the library, which took place at the end of 
 this period. In 1776 a new approach was opened to it 
 from the college hall.* Some ten years later, owing to 
 the large additions to the Library, the old practice of 
 chaining books was given up, and probably the present 
 shelves were erected. These additions came from three 
 main sources, Richard Warner of Woodford, Essex, 
 who died in 1775, Samuel Bush, Vicar of Wadhurst, 
 who died eight years later, and Alexander Thistle- 
 thwayte,f M.P. for Hants, who died in 1771 ; the last- 
 named gave an unusual number of foreign books, while 
 Bush's collection is of a more miscellaneous kind. 
 Warner's gift, however, is far more important than the 
 other two together, in fact it would be no exaggeration 
 to say that his 4000 books are the most precious por- 
 tion of the Library. He was an Essex man of scientific 
 tastes, and some of his books are botanical ; but the 
 greater part of them form an extraordinarily well- 
 selected collection of English literature ; it is rare to 
 find a Warner book which even now has not some value. 
 He was especially a devoted student of Shakespeare, 
 
 * This was given up in 1807, when the original approach to the 
 Library was restored ; the present staircase is of course new, dating 
 from this latter year. There are still traces, in the seat behind the 
 scholars' table, of this approach from the Hall to the Library. 
 
 f Curiously enough, these three great benefactors to the Library 
 almost overlap. Bush resided from 1722 to 1741, Warner from 
 1730 to 1734, and Thistlethwayte came up in 1735. 
 
 K 
 
146 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and published an elaborate letter to Garrick as to a 
 Shakesperian glossary (1768) ; he also projected an 
 edition of Shakespeare, and apparently of Ben Jonson 
 and of Beaumont and Fletcher, but, like other wealthy 
 would-be editors, he never got further than preparing 
 elaborately interleaved texts. However, he collected all 
 the books he could on the subject, beginning with the 
 first four folios of Shakespeare ; * a glance at the 
 shelves of Wadham is alone sufficient to refute the 
 ignorant and arrogant claim of the Germans that the 
 English never appreciated their great countryman till 
 the German Schlegel revealed him to them at the end 
 of the last century. Further details as to Warner's 
 treasures must be banished to an appendix.f 
 
 One of the earliest changes in the appearance of the 
 college at this period has been already referred to (p. 
 132) ; the trees in " the grove " in the Back Quad were 
 cut down in 1731 in order to enclose a site for a stable 
 for the Warden; thus the space available for college 
 purposes was reduced to a pathway under the South 
 wall of the college building, by which access was given 
 to Nos. IX and X. The stable, however, was not built 
 till 1826. 
 
 Much more important were the changes by whieh the 
 gardens were brought nearer to their present shape. 
 What happened in the garden in 1730 we cannot say, 
 but there is a grim reference in the Convention Book 
 
 * Unfortunately he was satisfied with a poor copy of the first 
 folio (1623); it has been badly "cut " and lacks the portrait, and 
 several leaves, but the other three are fine copies. 
 
 t Warner also founded a botanical exhibition ; this gave W. 
 Austin his first impulse (p. 142) to the study of science. It has now 
 been merged in the General Exhibition Fund (p. 87). 
 
V 
 THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 147 
 
 to " causeless and expensive alterations " ; in 1753, 
 however, we hear that Atlas had been blown down and 
 smashed by a high wind which rendered some new 
 laying out of the garden necessary. Finally, in 1777 
 the old " graveyard " at the back of the chapel was 
 converted into a garden, since it was no longer used for 
 its original purpose ; it was, however, still separated by 
 a wall from the main part of the fellows' garden. 
 During all this time the two small gardens in front of 
 the college, on what is now Park Street, were still 
 enclosed by high walls with a Jacobean gateway in the 
 centre ; one of them was assigned to the Warden, the 
 other to the fellows. 
 
 An equally important change in the rooms of the 
 college was the fitting up of the garrets for habitation. 
 These "cocklofts," as they were originally called, had 
 been at first unoccupied, and then were let with the 
 rooms underneath them on the second floor which 
 were usually held by fellows. Even as early as the Civil 
 War, however, some of them seem to have been 
 inhabited, though they had, as can be seen from 
 Loggan's picture of the college, no windows (except a 
 few skylights) towards the quad, and no fireplaces. 
 But in the eighteenth century a great change came 
 over the habits of Oxford ; " chumming " went out of 
 fashion, and every man wanted a room to himself; 
 hence in 1773 it was resolved that, "though the 
 members of the College were not near so many as they 
 have formerly been," yet because " all the chambers 
 were full so that there was no room into which to put 
 any young person that should enter," * the garrets 
 
 * It need hardly be said that at this time and long after, till 
 
148 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 should henceforth be let separately. These garrets 
 were to be assigned to the scholars along with the 
 .ground room of No. III. the present bursary.* They 
 were fitted up with windows and fireplaces gradually, 
 as they were surrendered by their holders to the 
 college, during the last quarter of the eighteenth 
 century. It may be added that in 1765 the number 
 of students in residence seems to have been only about 
 fifty. 
 
 The modernisation of the windows was also carried 
 out during this period, but fortunately the front of the 
 mullions was left and the sashes only inserted behind 
 them ; thus convenience was combined with pictu- 
 resqueness. No doubt, however, it was economy and 
 not admiration of the old windows, which led to this 
 compromise; for in April 1792 it was resolved, "in 
 order to beautify the entrance to the college from the 
 street, to sash the bow window fronting the west." If 
 this was ever carried out, it has been altered again 
 since ; the room still has casement windows, as all who 
 have used it know from experience, for it is bitterly 
 cold. 
 
 One more small change may be mentioned the 
 alteration of the staircases on Nos. III., IV., and VII., 
 which are much less precipitous than those elsewhere 
 in the Front Quad ; this change seems to have been 
 carried out in the years 1773 (for the first two) and 
 
 1870, " residence " could only be kept within the walls of a college ; 
 hence all men had to be in rooms for three years. The abolition 
 of this requirement is perhaps the most important change in modern 
 Oxford, for it has rendered easy the growth of large colleges. 
 
 * This room had originally been assigned to the bible clerks, as 
 they had to be near the chapel. 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 149 
 
 1745 respectively. Previously the staircases had run 
 right across the building. 
 
 In all these ways Wadham was approximating to its 
 present appearance. So, too, it is during this period 
 that some of the most important changes took place 
 in manners; the times of meals especially began to 
 approach to our modern hours. Originally, no doubt, 
 dinner in hall had been at eleven A.M., and supper at 
 five or six P.M. ; but Hearne notes, with great disgust, 
 the change of the dinner hour to twelve. In February 
 1722 he writes: " Whereas the University disputations 
 on Ash Wednesday should begin at one o'clock, they 
 did not begin this year till two or after, which is owing 
 to several colleges having altered their hour of dining 
 from eleven to twelve, occasioned by people's lying in 
 bed longer than they used to do." So next year, twelve 
 o'clock dinner at S. Edmund Hall and " no fritters " on 
 Shrove Tuesday inspire the remark, " When laudable 
 old customs alter 'tis a sign learning dwindles." In the 
 middle of the century, Newton fixed the dinner hour at 
 Hertford at one P.M. (but he was a reformer), and by 
 the end of it all colleges were dining at three or four 
 P.M., and beginning to move to four or five P.M. As 
 there are many members of the University who still 
 remember five o'clock hall, it may fairly be said that 
 the eighteenth century brings us very close to the 
 habits of our own day. 
 
 The change in the hour of dinner introduced a 
 change also in the character of breakfast. At the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century this was still 
 bread and ale, which the scholar himself fetched from 
 the buttery; by the middle of the century tea had 
 
150 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 come in for the exquisite and the person of fashion ; as 
 the hardy scholar sings in 1764 : * 
 
 " Let the tender swain 
 Each morn regale on nerve-relaxing tea ; 
 Be mine each morn with eager appetite 
 And hunger undissembled, to repair 
 To friendly buttery ; there on smoking crust 
 And foaming ale to breakfast unrestrained." 
 
 By the end of the century ale was going out of 
 fashion with the ordinary man, though it still seems to 
 have survived well into the nineteenth century.f In 
 one important respect, however, the dinners of the last 
 century conformed rather to the formal arrangements 
 of the Foundress than to the free-and-easy licence of 
 our own day ; every one " dressed " for dinner, and the 
 College barber was still an important functionary to 
 prepare the wig, or at least to elaborately dress a man's 
 own hair. It is no wonder that " dress " was obligatory 
 in hall, when knee-breeches and stockings were still 
 required in the streets ; the first proctor who neglected 
 to take notice of the modern abomination of trousers 
 was Rigaud, in 1810. 
 
 But greater ceremonial was not inconsistent with great 
 roughness of service. A curious light is thrown on the 
 hall dinners of the eighteenth century by a resolution 
 
 * Oxford Sausage, p. 58. 
 
 t The college breakfasting society the Beef Steak (Diu 
 floreat) still preserves a relic of the old custom in the tankard of 
 beer ("Toby,") which stands on the table, and always goes round 
 after breakfast ; but in these degenerate days too many only put 
 their lips to it or pass it altogether. The society was founded in 
 1842 (p. 183). 
 
THE DARK DAYS, 1719-1783 151 
 
 of the college in 1820 : " The under-butler be respon- 
 sible for the cleansing of as many knives and forks as 
 shall be necessary for the daily supply of the hall 
 tables, and that the practice of wiping them only be 
 discontinued.' 1 '' 
 
 In the matter of coffee-houses and Society rules, the 
 last century more resembles its predecessor than it does 
 our own. Till the time of Warden Wills, it was the 
 custom of " every academic of fashion " to visit the 
 coffee-house in the afternoon ; Wadham men went with 
 those of New College to " Baggs"*," a stone house at the 
 corner of Holywell, facing the King's Arms i.e., where 
 the Indian Institute now stands.* It is the modem 
 development of amusements which has especially killed 
 this old fashion. The seventeenth-century rules of " all 
 work and no play" gave way to the licence of the 
 Restoration; but the amusements were still rather 
 those of the wealthy e.g., riding and driving, with 
 such sports as cock-fighting and horse-racing for the 
 more extravagant. It was only at the end of the 
 eighteenth century that boating became common, and, 
 of course, organised races are much later still. 
 
 One amusement, however, of a different kind music 
 was fully organised at the period described in this 
 chapter, and with this Wadham has a special con- 
 nection through the Holywell Music Hall, which was 
 built on a site belonging to the college in 1742. 
 Hearne had blamed the Vice- Chancellor for lending 
 the theatre to " one Handel, a foreigner, 1 ' in 1733, 
 whose "book (not worth one penny) sells for one 
 shilling ; " he was spared seeing the erection of this 
 * Wood, "Life," i. 16. 
 
152 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 " Odeum Oxoniense," which was the centre of University 
 music during the rest of the century. 
 
 These facts are all trifles in themselves, but they 
 illustrate the change which came over Oxford in the 
 eighteenth century. Even after the Restoration, the 
 University had been above everything else a training 
 place for students ; it was, it may be said, a microcosm 
 of its own ; in the eighteenth century it was rapidly 
 becoming, what it now is above everything else, a 
 place of preparation for the great world outside. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES. 
 
 THE DAYS OF WARDEN WILLS AND 
 
 TOURNAY, 1783-1831 
 
 WITH the beginning of the reign of Warden Wills our 
 own times seem to be drawing near. There are many 
 still living, and they not old, who have known well men 
 who matriculated under him (1783-1806) ; and there 
 can be very few Wadham men who have not at least 
 seen, if they have not actually enjoyed the acquaintance 
 of, sturdy survivors of the times of Warden Tournay 
 (1806-1831), who are or quite recently were still left 
 among us. 
 
 Neither of these two Wardens can be called a great 
 man, but they were both leading men in their day, and 
 they certainly ruled Wadham with wisdom and success. 
 Wills takes a high rank among the benefactors of 
 the College, for he left it at his death a large sum, 
 so distributed as to meet those needs which his expe- 
 rience had specially brought before his notice ; part of 
 his bequest went to substantially augment the stipend 
 of the Warden, while he also sought to provide for 
 superannuated fellows both by the purchase of livings 
 and by direct annuities. The former gift has been the 
 
154 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 origin of the modern Pension Fund for tutors, which 
 has been started (according to the arrangements of the 
 last University Commission) with the proceeds of the 
 sale of some of the Wills* livings. His exhibitions, 
 too, for Law and for Medicine, have already been 
 the first steps in several distinguished careers. Nor did 
 he forget the University in his kindness to his college ; 
 his benefactions to the Vice-Chancellor, to the Bodleian, 
 and to the Sheldonian Theatre have gained him a place 
 in the long roll of University Benefactors, recited on 
 Commemoration Sunday and other special occasions. So 
 too both the parishes of which he held the livings 
 received a permanent mark of his wealth and liberality. 
 His most beautiful memorial is the Wadham garden, 
 which assumed its present form in his time; but he 
 is deservedly also commemorated in Hall by a picture 
 of Hoppner's, which, though somewhat hard in the 
 handling, is a good and vigorous piece of work. It 
 shows him as a man in whose face shrewd common 
 sense and kindly caution are the prominent charac- 
 teristics. 
 
 Wills seems to have been a college head of great 
 simplicity of character and life; he is described as 
 working with his haymakers "in the Warden^ close, 
 quite in earnest, and in his shirtsleeves." f He had the 
 foresight to take from Merton College the lease of this 
 
 * If any sale of livings be justifiable, this certainly may be justi- 
 fied ; for a pension fund is an absolute necessity in a college whose 
 tuition is to be maintained efficiently, and Dr. Wills' money is 
 applied to the very object for which he left it, though by a different 
 channel. 
 
 t Cox, " Oxford," p. 158 ; a foolish book, but containing much 
 interesting information, unattainable elsewhere. 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 155 
 
 property about four acres which now forms the 
 North part .of the Warden's garden, and the liberality 
 in 1795 to give it to the college "for the use of 
 the Warden for ever." * It was at the same time 
 (1796) that the fellows' garden assumed its present 
 form; the old walls of division had been swept away 
 in the previous year, and now the formal walks dis- 
 appeared, and the grounds were laid out in the " new 
 style " of " landscape gardening " which had become 
 fashionable. The artist who designed this triumph was 
 the gardener of the Duke of Marlboro ugh ; his name 
 was Shipley. 
 
 Wills was Vice-Chancellor from 1792 to 1796, and 
 displayed to the full that caution which, perhaps not 
 unnaturally, marked all those in authority during the 
 stormy days of the French Revolution. About 1794 a 
 society for " Scientific and Literary Disquisition " was 
 formed by some eleven undergraduates, and as they 
 wished to meet in a hired room, they applied to the 
 Vice-Chancellor and Proctors for their sanction; they 
 submitted for their approval the rules of the society, 
 which had been carefully drawn up to exclude all 
 topics of political or religious discussion. Wills 
 received the deputation courteously, but asked for 
 time to consider and to consult other heads of houses ; 
 when the deputation called again at the end of the 
 appointed week, he gave them the following answer: 
 " Gentlemen, There does not appear to be anything 
 
 * It was then held on a beneficial lease. Finally, in 1834, the 
 college bought the freehold from Merton for ,1600 ; the lease had 
 fourteen years yet to run. In 1795 it was still unenclosed on its 
 North side, except by a hedge and a ditch. 
 
156 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 in these laws subversive of academic discipline, or 
 contrary to the statutes of the University but, as it is 
 impossible to predict how they may operate, and as 
 innovations of this sort, and in these times, may have a 
 tendency which may be as little anticipated as it may 
 be distressing to the framers of such laws, I am com- 
 pelled, in the exercise of my magisterial authority as 
 Vice-Chancellor, to interdict your meeting in the 
 manner proposed." And so the poor members of the 
 society had to meet in each other's rooms ; and 
 popular feeling was no doubt on the side of the Vice- 
 Chancellor, for they were generally known as "the 
 Lunatics." 11 * 
 
 Warden Tournay was elected on the death of Dr. 
 Wills in 1806, t and presided over Wadham for 
 twenty-five years. Cox relates that he was a man who 
 rather shunned than courted power, and he is said 
 to have declined the office of Vice-Chancellor. His 
 special fondness was for improving and planting, and 
 he has left his mark for good on Wadham and on 
 Oxford. He enclosed the Warden's Garden with a 
 wall, and laid it out, raising the long terrace walk 
 on the East side, which is one of its most beautiful 
 
 * Reminiscences of T. F. Dibdin in " Reminiscences of Oxford 
 (O. H. S.)," p. 219. The society contained several men afterwards 
 distinguished, especially Edward Copleston, Scholar of C. C. C., 
 and Fellow and Provost of Oriel, the champion of Oxford against 
 the Edinburgh Review in the next generation. 
 
 t It was in this year 1806 that the obligation of celibacy was 
 removed from the headship of the college ; a special short Act of 
 Parliament was passed, allowing the Warden of Wadham to marry. 
 It need hardly be added that there is no truth in the college tra- 
 dition, that the change was accomplished by a clause " tacked on " 
 to a Canal Bill. 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 157 
 
 features.* He also, by a more doubtful improvement, 
 took away the enclosure which had originally protected 
 the front of Wadham like that of St. John's; one 
 result of this was that in the Long Vacation of 1871, 
 the city of Oxford arbitrarily converted the road past 
 Wadham, which was a private one, into a public 
 thoroughfare. All Wadham men will be grateful to 
 him, however, for the improvement made (1809) just 
 after he had become Warden, and probably at his 
 suggestion, which laid down grass in the Front Quad ; 
 previously it had been gravelled. There is no doubt 
 that a large part of the charm of this quad is due 
 to the contrast between the grey stone and the green 
 of the grass plat, and no grass in Oxford is better kept. 
 For the University the Warden laid out numerous 
 paths, especially the " pretty winding path up the back 
 of Headington Hill," past what is now Mr. MorrelPs 
 park, to " Jo. Pullen's tree." 
 
 In Wadham itself Tournay especially tried to 
 improve the hall. The great chandeliers, which were 
 once used for oil-lamps and are now channels for the 
 electric light, were bought by him after their use at 
 the coronation of George IV. ; there is a sumptuousness 
 about them which, in spite of their somewhat heavy 
 ornament, has endeared them to many generations of 
 Wadham men. But Tournay's taste cannot be equally 
 
 * Cox, p. 183, says it was "entirely created" by Tournay, and he 
 is a contemporary authority of the greatest value on such a point. 
 Mr. Jackson (p. 215) adopts the college tradition that the mound 
 had its origin in King Charles I. 's fortifications ; but the passage of 
 Wood ("Ann.," ii. 456), which he quotes, distinctly refers to the 
 " New Park," and seems to me to place the works which it de- 
 scribes farther north than the Warden's garden. 
 
158 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 commended in the painting of the woodwork of the 
 hall, and in the somewhat garish glass with which he 
 glazed the great South window in 1827 ; at the same 
 time, the other windows were glazed by other old 
 members of the college, whose coats of arms can still 
 be seen in them, and the oriel window over the end of 
 the High Table was adorned with the arms of WadhanTs 
 most distinguished sons.* 
 
 Most of the changes of fabric at this period can 
 be definitely connected with one of the Wardens ; but 
 there is another which may well be mentioned here, 
 though there is no ground for attributing it to any 
 special person. Dr. Johnson said it was a "sign of 
 Whiggerv" when the old fireplaces in the middle of 
 college halls were removed ; it is not likely that the 
 politics of Wadham under Warden Wills were of that 
 objectionable colour, but certain it is that in 1797 it 
 was decided to get rid of the old brazier which stood 
 under the hall louvre. What arrangement was sub- 
 stituted for the next thirty years is unknown ; it was 
 only in 1826 that the present fireplace was erected. 
 
 Warden Tournay seems to have been a man of great 
 geniality and kindness ; there is, it might be said, a 
 humorous twinkle in the face, which is so familiar from 
 the excellent portrait of him by Thomas Kirkby, which 
 hangs in the hall. But he had one curious prejudice; 
 
 * Both these changes have been largely undone in our own day. 
 The paint was taken from the woodwork in 1872, and in 1898 the 
 windows have been reglazed with clear green glass, only the coats 
 of arms being left. The artistic effect is much improved, and the 
 beauty of the hall can be far better seen, as there is now abundance 
 of light. The college owes this change to the generosity of Mr. 
 Richards, to whom it already owed the oak hall-floor (p. 16). 
 
w\ 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 159 
 
 he disliked those born outside Great Britain, or rather 
 he thought that the benefits of the foundation over 
 which he ruled were not intended for such. The late 
 Professor Bonamy Price was never weary of telling how 
 Warden Tournay refused to admit him because he was 
 a Frenchman (he was born in the Channel Islands), and 
 so Wadhani lost and Worcester gained the honour of 
 rearing one of the most brilliant talkers and kindest 
 men of nineteenth-century Oxford. And the register* 
 records a curious instance of a certain Mr. Sampson, of 
 Belfast, who had to pay 60 caution-money, because 
 he was not a native of Great Britain. 
 
 A contemporary records of Warden Tournay that he 
 never went to chapelf in his latter days ; he resigned 
 his post two years before his death. He was buried at 
 Peterborough, where he was prebendary; his epitaph, 
 after speaking of his "firm belief in the religion of 
 Jesus Christ,"" goes on somewhat quaintly to end the 
 catalogue of his virtues " In social intercourse he was 
 distinguished by a playful fancy, a refined taste, and 
 peculiar powers of conversation/'' Both he and his 
 predecessor have memorials in the college chapel. 
 
 It was during the reign of Warden Wills that the 
 change was introduced into the University system, 
 which has had the most potent influence on the Oxford 
 of this century: the new Examination Statute was 
 passed in the year 1800, and came into operation in 
 1802. It is not necessary here to go into the details of 
 
 * Warden Tournay deserves especial praise for having (in 1810) 
 begun once again to keep most carefully the register of all who 
 entered at Wadham. This has been continued ever since, 
 
 f "Notes and Queries," 1878, p. 321. 
 
160 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the way in which it was gradually developed ; it must 
 suffice to say that since 1807 the characteristic Oxford 
 School of Literse Humaniores has been in existence, 
 and that the Oxford principle of arranging candidates 
 in classes, and not by order of individual merit, has been 
 established. The effect of the new statute was to sweep 
 away the ridiculous forms which had survived till they 
 were meaningless, and to substitute a real examination. 
 The result of the system has been undoubtedly a 
 great increase of work and encouragement to systematic 
 reading; the result also at least of later years has 
 perhaps been to discourage originality, to limit the 
 range of studies, and to substitute cram work for real 
 interest. But it is not the time now to balance the 
 ultimate results of the system ; there is no doubt that 
 for many years at any rate it was a great power for 
 good in Oxford ; and it ought never to be forgotten 
 that the system, as originally established, was very 
 different from that which has been evolved during the 
 course of the century ; at least half of the examination 
 was conducted viva voce, and men went as a matter of 
 course to hear the performance of a brilliant under- 
 graduate against his examiners. It is on record how a 
 Wadham tutor sent all the men attending his lecture 
 to hear the viva of a safe first, " which will do you 
 more good than any lecture of mine" 1 ; unfortunately 
 the certain first was "plucked" at once in Divinity, 
 and so the viva never came off.* 
 
 * "Notes and Queries," 1878, p. 321. It was looked upon as a 
 judgment because the undergraduate in question had been excused 
 attending chapel by the Sub-Warden, Symons, in order that he 
 might make his first doubly sure. 
 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 161 
 
 Of the three men most influential in carrying 
 through, in spite of the opposition of idleness and the 
 prejudices against all innovation, the new system of 
 examination, two had been bred at Wadham ; Cyril 
 Jackson, the great Dean of Christ Church, may have 
 been the prime mover in the changed order of things, 
 but he was ably supported by John Eveleigh, Provost 
 of Oriel, and John Parsons, Master of Balliol, both of 
 whom had been scholars of Wadham. 
 
 It was under Eveleigh, who became provost of Oriel 
 in 1781, that the system of open competition for 
 the fellowships of his college was introduced, which 
 made them the "blue ribands" of the University. 
 The result was the election, in rapid succession, of 
 men like Copleston, Keble, Arnold, and Newman. 
 
 Parsons, who became Master of Balliol in 1788, did 
 at least as much as Eveleigh for the fortunes of his new 
 college; he was the first of that series of strong 
 Masters who have raised Balliol from quite a low 
 position to an undisputed place in the front rank of 
 colleges ; especially he was one of the first heads to 
 organise the system of tutorial supervision and in- 
 struction, which is so important a feature in modern 
 Oxford. Parsons' career as Master belongs to the 
 history of Balliol, and it is fitting that the original 
 of his portrait painted when he was Bishop of Peter- 
 borough should hang there ; but there is a copy in 
 the hall of his old college. The artist has somewhat 
 maliciously hit off one of the old man's foibles ; Parsons 
 prided himself on being free from all tricks of manner, 
 while at the same time he had a very curious habit of 
 pressing his fingers and thumbs together as he talked, 
 
162 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and slowly moving up and down his hands thus joined. 
 When the artist begged him to make himself at his 
 ease, to take any characteristic attitude, the Master 
 replied : " No, Sir, I have no peculiarities about me, 
 no, no peculiarities ; " at the same time he arranged his 
 hands as usual, and waved them slowly up and down. 
 The artist took him not at his word but as he acted, 
 and the Master's fingers and thumbs remain pressed 
 against each other, in a sort of triangle, to amuse 
 future generations. 
 
 As might be expected, the long war with the French 
 Republic and with Napoleon tended for the time to 
 thin the numbers of the University, and so of Wadham. 
 During the first five years of Warden Wills (1784-8), 
 the entrances at Wadham averaged fourteen ; for each 
 of the six following similar periods they average eleven 
 (1789-93), ten (1794-8), twelve (1799-1803), eleven 
 (1804-8), fifteen (1809-13), eighteen (1814-8). The 
 most remarkable thing as to these figures is the evident 
 revival of public confidence for some years before 
 Napoleon had been finally crushed. 
 
 With the war itself colleges had little to do; the 
 Army and the Navy as a rule are the two professions in 
 which University men do not take part. Mr. Gardiner 
 only records two or three Wadham men who served as 
 Chaplains in the Fleet during these stirring times, one 
 of whom, Thomas Morgan, was present at Lord Howe's 
 victory on " the glorious 1st of June " 1794, while 
 another, William Holbyn Lake, a Fellow of the College, 
 went down in the wreck of the St. George, off the 
 coast of Jutland, in December 1811, when only eleven 
 were saved out of a crew of nearly eight hundred. 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 163 
 
 Edward Meade also, after two years of residence, went 
 down to enlist in the 40th Regiment, and met a soldier^ 
 death at the landing in Aboukir Bay (1801). A little 
 better remembered is Joseph Dornford, who left Cam- 
 bridge for the Peninsular War in 1811, and after 
 serving two years in the Rifle Brigade, returned to his 
 studies, but migrated to Oxford as he did not find 
 himself in harmony with the Simeonite party at his own 
 University. He matriculated at Wadham in December 
 1813, and was known as " Corporal Joe " ; he was one 
 of the most popular men in college and took his 
 first class and a fellowship at Oriel. Mozley * 
 records that one summer night he " induced half the 
 college to bivouac in the quad." Dornford had been 
 strongly under the influence of his tutor Symons 
 when at Wadham, though he had always " kept aloof 
 from the synagogue at St. Edmund Hall""; but at 
 Oriel, and still more in his country livings later, he 
 drifted away into Tractarianism. 
 
 Among the churchmen trained at Wadham during 
 this period was William Skinner, afterwards Bishop of 
 Aberdeen and Primus of the Scotch Church; his 
 influence in building up Episcopacy in Scotland was 
 considerable, though he is less known than his father, 
 who also was Bishop of Aberdeen, and who had taken 
 part in the famous consecration of the American 
 Bishop Seabury in 1784. The younger Skinner was 
 about twenty years senior at Wadham to two 
 men who played a prominent part in the establishment 
 of the Anglican Church in the American Continent, 
 
 * " Reminiscences ii.," 57, seq. one of the most amusing parts of 
 that charming book. 
 
164 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Edward Feild who (matriculated 1819) was Bishop of 
 Newfoundland from 1844 to 1876, and John Medley 
 (matriculated 1822), who was consecrated Bishop of 
 Fredericton only a year after Feild, but whose work was 
 continued sixteen years longer till he died at his post 
 in 1892 ; he had then been Metropolitan of Canada 
 since 1879. His portrait, showing his cathedral (which 
 he completed), hangs in the college hall. Medley was 
 something of a scholar, and took part in the trans- 
 lations of the Fathers, which were issued as part of 
 the Anglo-Catholic Library; his share was some of 
 the homilies of St. John Chrysostom. 
 
 Perhaps Henry Soames too deserves mention as a 
 pioneer in the revival of the study in Early English 
 Ecclesiastical History ; his Bampton Lectures in 1830 
 were on the " Doctrines of the Anglo-Saxon Church.'" 1 
 His learning in editing Mosheim has received the high 
 honour of commendation from the present Bishop of 
 Oxford, and his choice of a subject for his lectures is a 
 significant sign of that reviving interest in antiquity 
 which was one of the causes of the Oxford Movement. 
 
 It was during this period, however, that Wadham 
 became the special home of the Evangelical Party in 
 Oxford, a character which it retained for the next half 
 century ; of this School much the most famous example 
 is the future Warden, Benjamin Parsons Symons, who 
 matriculated in 1802, and who was one of the fourteen 
 bold men who managed to get honours in the first five 
 years of the " New Statute, 11 before its requirements 
 were modified in 1807 so as to be more adapted to 
 human powers. Other prominent divines of the same 
 school were Charles Girdlestone, a considerable scholar, 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 165 
 
 a voluminous writer, and a most devoted parish clergy- 
 man, Daniel Wilson, for so many years the well-known 
 Vicar of Islington, and Charles Vores of Hastings, an 
 eloquent pulpit orator ;* two of the three were first 
 class men and fellows of their colleges. . 
 
 Of quite a different school and rather later in date 
 (they matriculated in the last six years of Dr. 
 Tournay^s reign) were W. J. Blew, famous for his 
 great liturgical collection! so recently dispersed by 
 auction, and T. W. Allies, one of the early perverts to 
 Rome. 
 
 But theological questions had not yet attracted that 
 all absorbing attention which marks the Oxford of the 
 next generation. It is time to turn to WadhanTs part 
 in the " New Schools/ 1 which were already becoming 
 one of the great objects of University interest. The 
 list in Easter Term 1818 was a glorious one for 
 Wadham, as it contributed three of the seven first 
 classes. t One of these, Girdlestone, has already been 
 mentioned, and Buchanan is otherwise unknown ; but 
 it was the third, Richard Bethell, who was the hero 
 of the hour, and who was carried by his exultant 
 contemporaries in triumph round the quad. No doubt 
 this enthusiasm was due to his extraordinary youth, 
 
 * According to a college tradition, for which there seem to be 
 some grounds, he, when " sconced" on one occasion, "floored the 
 Langton." (It holds 2 quarts and half a pint). This feat, however, 
 is not commemorated by the cup which he presented to the college. 
 
 f I have heard that at one time he proposed to leave it to the 
 college, but later altered his will. 
 
 $ All three also obtained a second-class in mathematics at the 
 same time, though, it must be added, Girdlestone was the only one 
 above the line ; Bethell's second, therefore, was what would now be 
 called a third. 
 
166 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 for he was not yet eighteen. There was, however, 
 little that was particularly youthful about the future 
 Lord Chancellor unless we except the banquet he gave 
 in the gardens to celebrate his " first," at which he poured 
 a goblet of claret over his new B.A. gown, as a libation 
 in its honour. He had joined the college in October 
 1814, while still wearing a jacket and frill, although 
 the Warden urged his father to postpone his matricula- 
 tion for a year, as " children were not admitted to the 
 college." " Sir," replied his fond father, " I think my son 
 a prodigy," and his confidence was justified ; the boy won 
 his scholarship in June 1815, on his fifteenth birthday, 
 a fact which was recorded at his special wish on his 
 monument in the Ante-chapel : " Fortunarum vero 
 suarum principium ab eo die memor repetebat, quo annum 
 cetatis XVum conficiens scholar is collegii Wadhami renun- 
 ciatus est.' 1 ' 1 From the age of seventeen onwards he, with 
 good reason, claimed to have maintained himself entirely 
 by his own exertions ; and when residing after his 
 degree and taking pupils in order to have some money 
 for his start at the Bar, he was able, by excessive 
 work, to make enough, also, to assist his father 
 whose means were straitened.* It is no wonder that 
 Bethell always held the idea, and strongly urged it, 
 that most men came up to Oxford much too late ; 
 he was of opinion that the degree course should 
 be got over quickly in order to give a man time 
 
 * The present Warden has furnished to " Lord Westbury's Life " 
 (i. 1 6) an interesting estimate of his annual receipts from college : 
 " Scholarship, 10 ; Exemption from rent, 10 ; From other pay- 
 ments, 10 ; Hody Greek Exhibition, 20 (raised to 24) ', Good- 
 ridge Exhibition, 3; Wills' Law Exhibition (after 1818) 16 ; 
 about 70 in all. 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 167 
 
 for some general reading before he entered on his life's 
 profession. 
 
 Two more points may be noticed as to his under- 
 graduate career, his particular care for his dress, and 
 the fact that he read for an hour every day before 
 morning chapel, having first run round Christ Church 
 meadow by way of exercise. His subsequent career, as 
 one of the most brilliant of advocates and most vigorous 
 of law reformers, and his famous judgments when raised 
 to the Woolsack as Lord Westbury, belong to English 
 history ; but his old college never saw that side of him 
 which has become especially famous, his extreme and 
 almost " vitriolic " bitterness ; he was always most loyal 
 to his Alma Mater, and delighted to remember her and 
 his old friends ; in his will he directed that the best of 
 his three busts should go to Wadham, and it still 
 stands in the hall. His university career, in more ways 
 than one, had laid the foundation of his later fortunes, for 
 it was his brilliant performance in the " Schools " which 
 led the Principal of Brasenose College, Dr. Gilbert, to 
 entrust his society's case to a young and previously 
 unknown advocate ; and Bethell's success in Rex v. 
 Brasenose ensured his subsequent fortunes. 
 
 One more memorial of him still survives in college ; 
 the Book Club which furnishes each of its twenty 
 members with one or more new books a week, was 
 founded by him, according to a tradition which seems 
 well grounded; for, though its earliest records have 
 perished, yet his name appears in the first preserved 
 minutes, those of the meeting of April 26, 1822. He is 
 then, it is sad to say, held responsible for two or three 
 books missing, and is also found proposing k< Disraeli's 
 
168 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Literary Characters," " Cain " (? Lord Byron's) and a 
 book called " Waddington." At the first sale of 
 books recorded, he buys McCrie's "Knox" for 12s.,* 
 and three numbers of the Retrospective Review. 
 
 The next distinguished scholar who appears at 
 Wadham was Richard Michell, afterwards Public 
 Orator, well known for many years in Oxford as coach, 
 tutor and examiner, and still remembered for his bril- 
 liant Orationes Creweiance ; he was only twenty-four 
 when he first examined in the Final Classical School. 
 He was an unsuccessful competitor against Mark 
 Pattison for the Rectorship of Lincoln in 1861, but 
 lived to see himself head of a college, when the liberality 
 of Mr. T. C. Baring, himself a member of Wadham 
 (p. 188), transformed Magdalen Hall, of which Michell 
 was head, into Hertford. 
 
 The scholastic successes of Wadham have always 
 been won mainly in Literce Humanwres^ and sad to 
 relate, no member of the College has ever got either the 
 Latin Verse Prize t or the Latin Essay ; but Wadham 
 won the Newdigate five times between 1822 and 1834, 
 and the Ireland three times in the first ten years of its 
 foundation (1825-1834). All three of these occasions 
 were a little out of the ordinary ; Massie J was the 
 
 * The Book Club is maintained by its entrance fees (1 is. from 
 each member), and by the prices realised for books after they have 
 been read. It is still most flourishing, and continues to take in the 
 Quarterly Review, as it did already in 1822. 
 
 t By a curious fatality two of the successful competitors in the 
 'thirties had been commoners of Wadham, but they obtained 
 scholarships elsewhere ; one of these was Dr. Henderson, the 
 present Dean of Carlisle. 
 
 J Massie was afterwards (Dean) Stanley's coach for the Ireland. 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 169 
 
 only commoner who won the scholarship in the first 
 thirty years after its foundation, and Brancker took it 
 as a schoolboy from Shrewsbury, who, though matricu- 
 lated, was not yet in residence ; he was not yet eighteen, 
 and among his competitors were Robert Scott, of 
 dictionary fame, afterwards Master of Balliol, and 
 W. E. Gladstone. The third successful Wadham can- 
 didate, Hyman, who won it in 1834, was again a dark 
 horse. Neither Brancker nor Hyman, as fellows of the 
 College, ever fulfilled the promise of their youth ; the 
 latter, however, was Mark Pattison's " coach," and has 
 the honour of being one of the few persons well spoken 
 of in the late Rector of Lincoln's posthumous chronique 
 scandaleuse ;* Pattison said that he owed to Hyman 
 his first introduction to "high scholarship,"" and his 
 love of the great scholars of the past. Let it then 
 stand to the credit of the forgotten Wadham fellow 
 that he inspired the enthusiasm to which Oxford owes 
 the " Life of Casaubon," and most of the charming 
 " Essays.' 1 Hyman, according to college tradition, was 
 blessed with so prodigious a memory that he not only 
 never needed to read a book twice, but also presumed 
 on this ability to such an extent that he tore out the 
 contents of a book when he had read it, and kept only 
 the covers as a sort of trophy, t This story is told, in a 
 modified form, of a distinguished contemporary of 
 Hy man's, Charles Badham, who was in the habit of taking 
 
 * " Memoirs," p. 142. This book may be said, only too truly, to 
 have damaged no one's reputation except Pattison's own. 
 
 f There is an interesting sketch of Hyman in Macmillan's Maga- 
 zine, vol. lx., and also in the charming articles on " Glasgow and 
 Balliol," and" An Old Oxford Common Room," by the present Sub 
 Warden, which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for May 1896. 
 
170 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 his classes in translation without any text before him. He 
 is a striking instance of the proverb that a " prophet is 
 not without honour save in his own country ; " on the 
 Continent he was respected as one of the first Hellenists 
 of the day, he corresponded with the great Cobet on 
 terms of equality, and received the honour of a Doctor's 
 degree from Leyden ; yet at home he obtained only a 
 third class, he never was elected to a fellowship, and 
 after being headmaster of one or two not very important 
 schools, he left England for the post of Professor of 
 Classics at Sydney ; this he held from 1867 to his death 
 in 1884. He was a brilliant scholar, largely of the 
 old-fashioned type, which seemed to read the Greek 
 authors mainly for the pleasure of correcting their 
 mistakes and rewriting their texts ; but in this line his 
 emendations were " palmary." 
 
 Only one more can be mentioned of the band of 
 scholars who were at Wadham in the last days of 
 Warden Tournay ; John Bradley Dyne, who came 
 into residence in 1825, gained a distinguished name 
 for himself as headmaster of Highgate School, which 
 flourished exceedingly under his vigorous administra- 
 tions ; he still survives as a striking example of what 
 manner of men were among us in the brave days of old. 
 
 The changes of the fabric in gardens, hall and quad 
 have been already referred to ; but it remains to 
 chronicle the additions which have brought Wadham to 
 its present size. Even in the time of the Foundress 
 there had been a building on the site of the present 
 No. X., which was used for rooms as early as the middle 
 of the seventeenth century; Bursar Lee calls it the 
 "back lodgings." It was frequently repaired during 
 
BEGINNING OF MODERN TIMES 171 
 
 the subsequent period, but at the end of the last 
 century it was " in a ruinous state," and it was resolved 
 (1801) to convert it into a brewhouse.* Probably the 
 College did not need so many rooms as before, owing to 
 the decrease of numbers which was due to the war 
 (p. 162). 
 
 About the same time in 1796 Wadham was 
 unwise enough to part with the freehold of the site of 
 No. XI.j the buildings on which had long been let to the 
 University. A foundry and warehouse were at once 
 erected on the site, in which the Clarendon Press could 
 carry on its stereotyping a practice just introduced at 
 this time. In 1828, however, when the pressure for 
 rooms must have been becoming very serious, it was 
 resolved to repurchase the " University Stereotype 
 Foundry,"! an ^ to convert it into rooms ; the present 
 No. XI. staircase was the result, and this for many 
 years was known in the college books as " Bible Ware- 
 house." In 1828, it was also resolved to convert the 
 brewhouse into rooms, and to erect a new brewhouse 
 elsewhere. Thus No. X. was added at this time as 
 well as No. XL 
 
 It may be some comfort to those old members of the 
 college who inhabited No. XL in former days, to know 
 that not only have the enclosures and the Warden's 
 stables been removed (1875-6) to form a Back Quad, 
 
 * It was pulled down accordingly. Skelton ("Oxon Antiqua," 
 " 153). who gives a picture of it, says it was the last remnant of 
 the Augustinian Priory ; to judge by its appearance, however, it 
 must have been built between 1550 and 1600. 
 
 f The College gave apparently about 400 more than it had 
 received ; but the buildings were better than those on the site when 
 sold. The price paid was 1081. 
 
172 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 but that also part of the King's Arms has been taken 
 away (1890), which once made the lower rooms of No. 
 XI. dark, and almost unhealthy. The Back Quad now, 
 though it has not the dignity of the Front Quad, may 
 claim a picturesqueness of its own, as seen from inside, 
 while its inhabitants gain by the increased size of bed- 
 rooms which was required by public opinion in buildings 
 put up during our own century. 
 
 The next great transformation of the college will 
 come when the King^s Arms is pulled down and a new 
 open quadrangle built on its site and that of staircases 
 IX. to XI. Mr. Jackson has shown at Trinity how well 
 he can deal with a site good in itself but much inferior 
 to what Wadham might offer ; the college only needs 
 money to give him the grandest opportunity which he 
 has had even in Oxford ; and we know that he would 
 not fail to rise to the full height of it. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 WADHAM UNDER WARDEN 
 SYMONS (1831-1871) 
 
 THE improvement in the position of Wadham which 
 had begun under Dr. Wills and had continued under 
 Dr. Tournay, was still maintained under their successor, 
 Benjamin Parsons Symons, who was elected Warden, on 
 Dr. Tournay ""s resignation, on June 16, 1831. In fact, 
 Symons himself had been as much the cause of the 
 recent prosperity of the College as Tournay ; it is his 
 name which is always mentioned in contemporary 
 accounts as representing the teaching and the influence 
 of Wadham, and he had discharged those various 
 duties in the College and in the University at large, 
 the performance of which marks a man as indispensable 
 and brings him to the front in Oxford, even though he 
 have written nothing and may be comparatively un- 
 known to the world outside. Symons had filled all the 
 college offices,* especially those of Bursar and Sub- 
 Warden ; and in the University he had been Proctor, 
 Public Examiner, and Select Preacher. He was, there- 
 fore, the natural person to succeed Dr. Tournay. 
 
 Symons himself belonged to the county of the 
 
 * According to the system then prevalent he was in most cases 
 only deputy for some other fellow who was non-resident. 
 
174 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Founder, having been elected scholar from Cheddar* 
 in 1803. His success in the early days of the Exami- 
 nation Statute has been already mentioned (p. 164), 
 and he is the first instance in Wadham records of 
 a successful candidate receiving a grant of books ; he 
 was also the first to win the Wills 1 Reading Prize, now 
 unfortunately abolished. His intellectual position can 
 best be described in the words of Dean Church, who 
 matriculated at Wadham in 1832, and who will hardly 
 be accused of prejudice in the old Warden^ favour ;f 
 Dr. Symons was " a courageous witness for Evangelical 
 divinity in the days when Evangelicals were not popular 
 in Oxford, a man of ponderous and pedantic learning, 
 and considerable practical acuteness"; it is the more 
 necessary to insist on the Warden's ability, because in 
 the heat of the religious controversy which blazed in 
 the University during the first twenty years of Symons'' 
 reign at Wadham, it was customary for the more daring 
 spirits of the "Oxford Movement" to speak of him 
 with scarcely veiled contempt.^ 
 
 But it is for his theological position especially that 
 Symons will be remembered. It was because he was an 
 Evangelical that he was able to make Wadham even 
 more popular as a college than it had been ; men were 
 sent there, as Dean Church records of himself, because 
 
 * The monument erected by him in the church there to his parents 
 and his brother can still be seen. 
 
 f " Oxford Movement," pp. 283, 284. 
 
 Such are the references to him in Mozley's "Reminiscences," ii., 
 57, 107, in the account of Dornford and Blencowe, both of whom 
 were elected from Wadham to Oriel in the days when the Oriel 
 common room was the centre of " light and leading " in Oxford. 
 
 " Life and Letters," p. 10. 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 175 
 
 the Warden and the tutors were of that school in the 
 Church ; and the Warden's famous " Articles lecture " 
 on Sunday mornings is the memory which is still the 
 most prominent in the Wadham traditions of the time. 
 
 " Big Ben " then, as he was always called, was the prop 
 and pillar of Evangelicalism in Oxford. His portrait 
 (painted by Pickersgill) still looks down on the scholar's 
 table from the east side of the college hall ; but those 
 who knew him say that the somewhat heavy and florid 
 parson there represented is but a poor representation of 
 the vigorous and hearty old gentleman whom they 
 remember. There are so many stories afloat as to the 
 Warden that it is difficult to realise him aright ; but he 
 seems, on the good side to have been a clear-headed, 
 determined man of a pre-eminently English type, a 
 thorough John Bull; while, on the bad side he cer- 
 tainly belonged to that type of worldly Evangelicalism 
 which Thackeray so unmercifully satirised, a school of 
 thought which in the first half of this century had soon 
 succeeded to the heroic age of the Eighteenth Century 
 Revival, and which attached so much importance to 
 shibboleths and forms that the right pronunciation of 
 these would excuse a large amount of real worldliness. 
 
 But Warden Syrnons was something more than what 
 I have tried to describe him ; he was a sound and 
 accurate theologian of an old-fashioned but truly 
 Anglican type. His "Articles" lectures, which have 
 been already referred to, are said by those who care- 
 fully attended them to have been a most careful and 
 thorough exposition of the views of the Fathers of 
 the English Church, of such men as Waterland and Bull 
 and Beveridge. Hence it seems certain that many 
 
176 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 
 
 stories of the old Warden are only inventions, more or 
 less happily set going by those who had no eyes for 
 religious truth at all, or who had seen so much of his 
 less attractive side that they could not conceive there 
 was another. Such is his reported answer to an over 
 curious person who asked why the Litany was never 
 said on Sundays in Wadham chapel ; " Sir, the Litany 
 is appointed for the 11 o'clock service, and the 11 
 o'clock service is suspended." Such, too, is his remark 
 as to the offertory in the college chapel, that 
 " Gentlemen must really give a little more liberally ; 
 I have been quite out of pocket by the last two or 
 three collections;" but the method of carrying away 
 the alms, by which they were shovelled into the 
 Warden's capacious pocket, is as well authenticated as 
 it was unseemly in practice. 
 
 A word must also be said as to the Warden's wife, the 
 only lady who has ever held that position in Wadham 
 with the exception of Mrs. Wilkins, the wife of the 
 great Warden of Commonwealth times. Mrs. Symons 
 belonged to one of the families of wealthy city 
 Evangelicals, but seems to have represented thoroughly 
 the more spiritual, though somewhat formal, side of 
 that school, which was perhaps lacking in her husband. 
 Tradition has it that she at times rebuked the War- 
 den for the worldliness of his conversation, as, e.g.^ 
 when after the funeral of the great Duke of Wellington 
 in 1852, he was describing at breakfast to some 
 undergraduates the countless throngs of people : " I 
 wondered," he said, " where they could all get their 
 breakfasts." " My dear," broke in Mrs. Symons, from 
 the end of the table, "you ought rather to 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 177 
 
 have wondered where they could get their spiritual 
 food/ 1 
 
 But she was also a true woman, who had the tact 
 to save men from the difficulties into which they 
 blundered. A good instance is the following : the 
 Warden's habit of telling the same story over and 
 over again was of course familiar in college ; on one 
 occasion at breakfast in the Lodgings, a helpless fresh- 
 man, one of those who are born " to put their foot 
 into it on every possible occasion,' 1 ' 1 having heard the 
 usual story, observed with a smile : " I was told, sir, 
 you would tell us that story this morning."" But 
 before the Warden could sufficiently realise his own 
 astonishment, Mrs. Symons wisely interposed with : 
 " I am very glad to find the good Warden's words arc 
 so treasured in college.'' 
 
 Her influence on the life of Wadham must have 
 been helpful to the few who were like-minded with 
 her, but it certainly had its bad side. It may well 
 be believed that her prayer meetings in the Warden's 
 drawing-room were occasions of hypocrisy as well as of 
 spiritual profit ; that there were a few men, though only 
 a few, who went to pray and came away to scoff, men who 
 wished to stand well with the Warden and so went to 
 Mrs. Symons' "tea and hassocks," as the gatherings were 
 irreverently called. Interested conformity of this kind 
 is the inevitable result, whether in a college or in 
 wider spheres, as soon as it is once known that those in 
 authority attach importance to certain forms and 
 formulae ; it makes no difference whether these be 
 Protestant or Catholic in character. 
 
 The Warden's theological views were a not un- 
 
 M 
 
178 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 important element in the University history of the 
 time. Under the Laudian Statutes, which still were 
 in full force, the government of Oxford was practically 
 vested in the Hebdomadal Board, composed of the 
 heads of houses ; the strongest men among these were 
 Dr. Symons, Dr. Hawkins of Oriel, and Dr. Cardwell 
 of Alban Hall. Hence the attitude which was assumed 
 by those in power in the University towards the 
 " Oxford Movement 11 was one of suspicion and dislike ; it 
 was not only feared for its " Romish " tendencies, but 
 also suspected as an innovation, for, as Dr. Church 
 humorously says, he was looked upon by the old- 
 fashioned and elderly heads of houses " with a mixture 
 of horror and contempt as a semi-papist and a young 
 man. 1 ' 1 * This aversion to all change had been already 
 shown in a quite different field. Warden Symons, like 
 many others of the men who in the 'forties drove 
 Newman out of the English Church, had in the previous 
 decade been united with him and other Tractarians in 
 the attack on the Broad-Churchism of Dr. Hampden. 
 
 The faults of temper, however, and the lack of 
 charity were not all on one side ; when Symons was 
 appointed Vice- Chancellor in the ordinary course by 
 the Duke of Wellington in 1844, an attempt was 
 made by the extreme members of the " High Church " 
 party to reject the Chancellor's nomination ; but this 
 attempt was with good reason defeated in an over- 
 flowing Convocation by a majority of 700 (883 to 183). 
 It is not surprising that this crushing victory was 
 followed by attempted reprisals. In the famous Con- 
 
 * "Life and Letters," p. 53. He was, as Proctor, a member of 
 the Hebdomadal Board for a year. 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 179 
 
 vocation of February 13, 1845, resolutions were passed 
 condemning Mr. Ward's notorious book, " The Ideal of 
 a Christian Church, 1 ' 1 and depriving him of his degrees ; 
 the third resolution, censuring Tract No. XC., was vetoed 
 by the Proctors, Guillemard and Church. So high 
 did feeling run, that as the Vice- Chancel lor left the 
 Sheldonian Theatre, he was received with hisses and 
 even, it is said, with snowballs. 
 
 This was not the only occasion on which the 
 Evangelicalism of the Wadharn authorities came into 
 collision with the " Oxford Movement, 11 and especially 
 with Tract No. XC. When that famous pamphlet 
 appeared in February 1841, it called forth a storm of 
 disapprobation; its main contention that the articles 
 of the Church of England admitted of a Catholic 
 interpretation, and that they were directed simply 
 against the Roman perversions of Catholic doctrine, 
 was looked upon as threatening the very foundations 
 of the English Church. One of the earliest and at once 
 also one of the most important protests against it was 
 that of four senior tutors, Churton of Brasenose College, 
 Wilson of St. John's, Griffiths of Wadham (afterwards 
 the Warden), and Tait of Balliol (afterwards the Arch- 
 bishop). This protest, which condemns the tract 
 because " it has, in our apprehension, a highly dan- 
 gerous tendency, from its suggesting that certain very 
 important errors of the Church of Rome are not 
 condemned by the Articles of the Church of England, 11 
 was mainly the work of Tait, but it was drawn up at 
 a meeting held in Wadham. Its importance can hardly 
 be exaggerated, for it was the first instance in Oxford 
 of official condemnation of the Tractarian Movement, 
 
180 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 and so it begins that separation which was to end in 
 the secession of Newman and so many others from the 
 English Church. 
 
 One curious result of Wadham Evangelicalism was 
 the change of the hour of the Sunday services. Chapel 
 had always been in the evening after dinner, but it was 
 now transferred to the afternoon, in order (it was said) 
 to prevent the undergraduates from attending the 
 services at St. Mary's, where Sunday after Sunday, at 
 4 P.M., Newman was delivering that wonderful series of 
 " Parochial Sermons " which in some ways were the most 
 potent intellectual and spiritual influences of the new 
 movement. The Warden's Articles lecture also was put 
 at noon, in order to prevent the possibility of a long 
 Sunday walk. 
 
 But it must not be thought that Wadham was 
 entirely Evangelical in this stormy period. In Richard 
 William Church it had the honour of training one of 
 the leaders of the opposing party, and one who con- 
 trived to hold the strongest views himself without 
 forfeiting the love and the esteem of his opponents; 
 even Mark Pattison, who was beaten by him in the 
 election for the Oriel fellowship in 1838, speaks well of 
 him, and quotes the saying of his own rival Michell : 
 " There is such a moral beauty about Church that they 
 could not help taking him." * Church notes that in the 
 Wadham of his day there was a very pronounced 
 Evangelical set, and a fast set ; his own friends were 
 "mostly men of no special colour"; but "all sets 
 touched more or less, and met occasionally at wine- 
 parties and breakfasts." j- 
 
 * Pattison, "Memoirs," p. 163. 
 
 t " Life and Letters," p. 13. Dean Church maintained his in- 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 181 
 
 It sounds strange to our modern notions of organised 
 tuition and cast-iron examination systems, that the first 
 thing which made Church think of reading for honours 
 was the fact that one of the Wadham tutors actually set 
 him a piece of Greek prose in " Little-Go " (" Smalls "), 
 in order to show his colleague what good commoners 
 they had at Wadham. 
 
 Another prominent High Churchman in this period 
 of Wadham history was Alexander Heriot Maconochie, 
 the once famous Vicar of St. Alban's, Holborn, who was 
 in residence from 1844 to 1848. Maconochie seems to 
 have been one of the most constant speakers at the 
 College Debating Society, to judge by the old minutes- 
 Among those immediately senior to him was the late 
 Bishop of Wakefield, William Walsham How (1840- 
 1845), whose portrait has just been added to the 
 college collection. Among Wadham^s many bishops, 
 " the bishop of East London " will hold by no means 
 the least prominent place. 
 
 One striking feature of the old Warden's devotion to 
 Evangelicalism was his interest in missions ; this was 
 shown in a curious way. The cow which used to feed on 
 the grass in the north part of the Warden's garden was 
 "a missionary cow," belonging to Mrs. Symons, and 
 gave its milk for that cause ; those undergraduates who 
 wished to support the C. M. S., or to stand well with 
 
 terest in his old college to the very end of his life. He left to the 
 library some half-dozen specially selected choice books mainly 
 early editions of Hooker and Bacon. The authorities of Oriel 
 College also, with the consent of Dr. Church's executors, kindly 
 handed on to Wadham a number of the books left to them by the 
 Dean, of which their library already had copies ; the books thus 
 received were mainly linguistic and historical. 
 
182 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the Warden, were served with this milk at a penny per 
 quart above the market price. Among the most 
 prominent of the men who went out from Wadham at 
 this period was H. W. Fox, whose memory is per- 
 petuated by a scholarship in India maintained by his 
 old school, Rugby, and by a memoir from his brother's 
 pen. This book has some interest for Wadham men 
 from the information it gives as to the inner life of 
 their college, but it is largely spoiled by the constant 
 effort of its writer to force a moral. 
 
 The reign of Warden Symons at Wadham naturally 
 falls into two parts, the interest of the earlier of which 
 mainly centres in the " Oxford Movement," while the 
 later begins with the rise of the Positivist school at 
 Wadham in the middle of the century. It has already 
 been attempted to describe the former period ; before 
 the latter is entered on, a word must be said as to 
 another of the Wadham authorities, mentioned earlier 
 in this chapter, John Griffiths, who, as sub-warden and 
 deputy bursar from 1837 to 1853, had an influence in 
 college second only to that of the old Warden. He is 
 too well known to many still living for me to attempt 
 to describe his character, or even to dwell on his 
 wonderful kindness to all whom he knew, or on his 
 extraordinary accuracy ; but it would be impossible for 
 any one to write even the shortest history of Wadham 
 without some reference to his invaluable services to all 
 students of that subject. He not only carefully arranged, 
 and in many cases translated and copied, the bulk of 
 the College documents; his wonderful knowledge of 
 prints and his liberal purse were also employed in 
 making the unique collection of engravings and medals 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 183 
 
 bearing on the history of the college itself, and of all 
 who had been even remotely connected with it, which 
 has been so often mentioned : these, with several other 
 art treasures, he left to the college on his death in 
 1885. It was the hope of all Wadham men that 
 Dr. Griffiths himself would write the history of their 
 Alma Mater ; but so great was his sense of the 
 thoroughness with which the work should be done that, 
 at the end of his long life, he was still only collecting 
 materials and making preliminary studies. It is unfor- 
 tunate that the only likeness which Wadham has of him 
 is a crayon drawing by Watts, representing him as a 
 comparatively young man; there is a copy of this in 
 oils in the college hall. 
 
 It was during the earlier period of Warden Symons 1 
 reign that Wadham's famous breakfasting society, the 
 "Beef Steak," was founded (February 1842). Its 
 object was, according to the earliest copy of the rules, 
 which dates before 1845, " the promotion of good fellow- 
 ship by periodical meetings at breakfast. 11 The now- 
 established tradition of the society, that three of the 
 members are elected mainly for athletic merit and three 
 for intellectual, finds no place in the rules, but seems to 
 have been observed from the first ; among the earliest 
 members, though not among the original six, was 
 Walsham How.* 
 
 * From the first there has been a rigid sumptuary rule to check 
 extravagance in the breakfasts, but originally it was beefsteaks and 
 sausages that were allowed; kidneys were only admitted in the 
 autumn of 1845 as an alternative to sausages when these were out of 
 season. I grieve to say that I find several instances in the early 
 minutes when mutton-chops were also introduced, though usually 
 (but not always) under protest. 
 
184 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Though, as has been said, the long reign of 
 Warden Symons divides into two periods, it must not 
 be supposed that any hard-and-fast line distinguishes 
 them ; but the return of Richard Congreve from Rugby 
 to Oxford may be said to be the beginning of the new 
 period. This distinguished man had matriculated at 
 Wad ham in 1837, and obtained his first class in 1840 ; 
 he was, however, for some years a master at Rugby, and 
 did not begin work as a tutor in Wadham till about 
 1849 ; but he had never lost his connection with 
 Oxford e-g"> in the spring of 1848 Mozley records in 
 his letters that Congreve came up from Rugby espe- 
 cially to fight the battle of Stanley's sermons against 
 the librarian of the Oxford Union, J. W. Burgon 
 (afterwards Dean of Chichester), who had refused the 
 book a place on the society's shelves on the ground of 
 its heterodoxy. Burgon and orthodoxy triumphed. 
 
 Congreve at this time, and for some years after, was 
 still a member of the Church of England ; his views, 
 though broad, were comparatively orthodox, and his 
 influence over his pupils was very great; the moral 
 earnestness which marked his teaching makes his one 
 published sermon of this period that preached before 
 the University on Whit-Sunday 1850 still well worth 
 reading and very impressive. It is, to say the least, 
 interesting and suggestive to find that " unbridled 
 desire for enjoyment" and "systematic inattention to 
 all those pursuits which could qualify " men for the 
 work of life are denounced as characteristic of Uni- 
 versity men nearly half a century ago. But Congreve 
 left Wadham and the English Church about the same 
 time ; he went down in 1854, and became a preacher of 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 185 
 
 the religion of Humanity, taught by Auguste Comte, 
 of whom he was the earliest English adherent. He 
 certainly did not directly employ his influence as tutor 
 to influence the theological views of his pupils, but it 
 can hardly have been an accident that almost all the 
 leaders of the new movement were at Wadham under 
 him, especially Frederic Harrison and Edward Spencer 
 Beesley, who matriculated in 1849, and John Henry 
 Bridges, who was elected scholar in June 1851, and 
 became a fellow of Oriel in 1855. Congreve^s com- 
 manding personality no doubt influenced those who 
 had been brought into close contact with him. Wad- 
 ham, it has always been admitted, was the original 
 home of English Positivism. 
 
 During the short period of his second residence in 
 the University, Congreve had made himself a position 
 as one of the foremost tutors of the time ; he had some 
 share in the change at Oxford which was transforming 
 the old system of lectures, given to Pass and Class 
 men together, into the modern system of close personal 
 supervision by essays and otherwise, which has been for 
 the last forty years so striking a feature in Oxford. In 
 this he may be put by the side of Jowett at Balliol and 
 Pattison at Lincoln. 
 
 Congreve, as might be expected, belonged to the 
 reforming party in the University, whose efforts were 
 at length crowned with success by the appointment of 
 the University Commission in August 1850 ; the trans- 
 formation of Laudian Oxford was earned out in the 
 following years, and in 1855 Modern Oxford may be 
 said to begin. But the change was much less marked 
 at Wadham than elsewhere; the most important altera- 
 
186 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 tions of statute in our college were the abolition of the 
 few local restrictions that had been placed on the 
 choice of scholars, and of the privileges of Founder's 
 kin. The fellowships also were thrown open to 
 competition from the whole University, but no election 
 took place under the new statute for more than ten 
 years; it was only in June 1867 that the first open 
 fellow, the present Sub-Warden, was elected from 
 Balliol a most happy beginning for the new system. 
 One at least of the changes has been only temporary 
 that by which the tenure of fellowships was extended 
 for life, so long as the holder remained single; by this 
 change the direct object of the Founder, who had 
 no wish to have permanent fellows on his foundation, 
 was frustrated. The last University Commission that 
 which issued its statutes in 1882 has undone the work 
 of its predecessor, and has returned, in idea at any rate, 
 to the intentions of Nicholas Wadham. It is a tribute 
 to the far-sightedness of the Founder of our college 
 that the great changes made in other colleges i.e., the 
 abolition of clerical restrictions or of local limitations 
 were not required at all, or only required very partially 
 at Wadham. 
 
 One sad result of the change which had passed over 
 Oxford was the alienation of the old Warden from the 
 foundation over which he ruled, an alienation which 
 became somewhat marked towards the close of his long 
 term of office ; * but there is no doubt that the years of 
 
 * No doubt this was the cause why, though he had accumulated 
 a very large fortune, he only left his college 1000; the interest on 
 this sum was to be employed for founding an exhibition for the best 
 commoner in residence ; it is in the gift of the Warden from year to 
 year. 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 187 
 
 transition were among the most glorious in the history 
 of the college. In no previous decade of its existence, 
 not even in the days of Warden Wilkins himself, did 
 Wadham produce more men of mark than in the ten 
 years which succeed Warden Symons" appointment as 
 Vice-Chancellor (i.e., 1845-1854). It is during this 
 period that the brilliant group of Positivist essayists 
 and historians mentioned above (p. 185) were admitted ; 
 but not less distinguished were Wadham's contributions 
 to the Church. Walter Waddington Shirley (matricu- 
 lated 1847) was one of the foremost of the Oxford 
 school of historians which begins in the "forties ; his 
 premature death at the age of thirty-eight, only three 
 years after his appointment to the chair of Ecclesiastical 
 History, prevented him from fulfilling his promise, but 
 he had already had time to put on a new basis the 
 study of English history in the fourteenth century.* 
 
 * Dr. Shirley's portrait must be sought at Keble ; in the move- 
 ment for lessening the expenses of a University education, which 
 ultimately led to the foundation of that college, he had played a 
 prominent part. I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to his 
 memory if I reproduce here one of the most successful of Comme- 
 moration jokes, of which he, with two other Wadham men, was the 
 author ; even after fifty years it can be read with some amusement. 
 
 Every one still remembers that the years 1848 and 1849 were years 
 of revolution ; hence it can be imagined how effective was the 
 following squib which was posted everywhere, and showered broad- 
 cast, at the Encaenia of 1849 ; the joke was pointed the more by the 
 efforts of one of the pro-proctors of the year to suppress it : 
 
 11 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. 
 
 " CITIZEN ACADEMICIANS, 
 
 " The cry of Reform has been too long unheard. Our in- 
 fatuated rulers refused to listen to it, the term of their tyranny is at 
 length accomplished. The Vice-Chancellor has fled on horseback, 
 the Proctors have resigned their usurped authority, the Scouts have 
 
188 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Distinguished in a different way and in different 
 climes were two men who still survive, Edward Ralph 
 Johnson (matriculated 1847), Bishop of Calcutta, and 
 Metropolitan of India from 1876 to 1898, and Robert 
 Henry Codrington (matriculated 1848),the missionary 
 and philologer, whose name is familiar to all interested 
 in the South Seas, whether their interest be religious, 
 linguistic or scientific. The portraits of both these 
 men hang in the college hall. 
 
 To the University of Oxford at this time Wadham 
 gave the present Warden, George Earlam Thorley 
 (matriculated 1849), and the late Principal of Brasenose 
 College, Albert Watson (matriculated 1847), the well- 
 known editor of " Cicero's Letters " ; and in Thomas 
 Charles Baring, Wadham reared for Magdalen Hall a 
 second founder, who for wealth and generosity may be 
 compared to Nicholas Wadham himself. Baring was 
 himself a good scholar, and published a poetical transla- 
 tion of Lucretius. 
 
 fraternised with the friends of liberty. The University is no more. 
 A Republic Lyceum will henceforth diffuse light and civilisation. 
 The Hebdomadal Board is abolished. The Legislative Powers will 
 be entrusted to a General Convention of the whole Lyceum. A 
 Provisional Government has been established. The undersigned 
 citizens have nobly devoted themselves to the task of administration. 
 
 "(Signed) CITIZEN CLOUGH. 
 
 (President of the Executive Council.) 
 SEWELL. 
 
 BOSSOM. (Operative.) 
 JOHN CONINGTON. 
 WRIGHTSON. (Queen's.) 
 
 FLOREAT LYCEUM." 
 
 The names of Clough, Sewell (the founder of University Exten- 
 sion, of Radley College, and of so many other things), and Conington, 
 are still familiar ; so too in a different connection is that of Bossom. 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 189 
 
 James Andrew (matriculated 1848) was a worthy 
 successor of Sydenham in SydenhanTs old college, and 
 Benjamin Bickley Rogers (1846) has won for himself a 
 lasting reputation, among scholars at all events, for 
 the wonderful vigour and fidelity of his translations 
 of Aristophanes: may he soon complete his work. 
 Last in time, but far from last in distinction, is Thomas 
 Graham Jackson, the architect, who has had in Oxford 
 such an opportunity for his work as may almost be 
 compared with that which his predecessor Wren had in 
 London after the Great Fire of 1666. It may safely be 
 said that no other architect at any period has had a 
 hand in so many college and university buildings, and 
 the hackneyed quotation may once more be used of 
 him with the greatest truth " Nihll tetigit quod mm 
 ornavit" 
 
 During this period too Wadham lost by migration 
 John Henry Overtoil, the historian of the Church of 
 England, who went as scholar to Lincoln College in 
 1853, and the future Cabinet Minister, Hugh Culling 
 Eardley Childers, who, after two years at Wadham, 
 migrated to Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 
 Since 1855, it cannot be said that Wadham has been 
 so productive of distinguished men, and it becomes 
 increasingly difficult to speak of a period of which, 
 fortunately, the surviving representatives are so nu- 
 merous ; but no Wadham man will quarrel with me if 
 I single out for mention as representatives of the last 
 decade of Warden Symons, Samuel Augustus Barnett 
 (matriculated 1862), so well known as the Vicar of 
 St. Jude's, Whitechapel, and as the founder of the Uni- 
 versity Settlement Movement, and Francis John Jayne 
 
190 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 (matriculated 1863), the present Bishop of Chester. 
 In 1871 Warden Symons resigned, and the present 
 generation of college life begins. Here then our story 
 may end. 
 
 But a word must be said as to the changes in the 
 fabric at this period, which were, in the chapel at any 
 rate, both numerous and important. The Gothic 
 Revival went hand in hand with the Oxford Movement, 
 and the former penetrated at Wadham though the 
 latter was excluded, so far as authority could exclude it. 
 In the very first year of Dr. Symons' Wardenship (1831) 
 it was resolved, at the college meeting on St. Nicholas 
 Day, to consult the well-known architect Mr. Blore. 
 Fortunately Wadham did not, like Exeter and Balliol, 
 sacrifice its old chapel altogether to please the Gothic 
 purists ; but the year 1832 saw more changes than had 
 been caused by the two preceding centuries. In the 
 first place the old boarded ceiling, " divided into panels 
 with rosettes at the intersections," * gave way to the 
 present four-centred ceiling of stucco, painted to re- 
 semble oak. The change certainly gives more warmth, 
 but it had the unexpected effect, from the greater 
 weight of the new roof, of forcing the side walls of the 
 chapel out of the perpendicular. Fortunately this was 
 discovered in time (1889), and remedied by the inser- 
 tion of the present iron tie -rods ; but in this, as in 
 other cases at Wadham, it was the injudicious tamper- 
 ing with the old work which made repairs necessary in 
 buildings which time had failed to injure. 
 
 * One of these, the only survivor of the original roof, can still be 
 seen in the summer-house at the N.W. corner of the Warden's 
 garden. 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 191 
 
 In the next place Mr. Blore swept away the curious 
 painting, fixed on cloth with a hot iron, which stood 
 originally over the altar at Wadham ; it represented the 
 Lord's Supper in the centre, with Old Testament types 
 on each side, and was the work of a well-known artist 
 named Fuller. In its place the " restorer " inserted the 
 present stone panelled work, which, though very hard 
 for and formal in its details, is yet surprisingly good 
 the time when it was inserted. Other minor changes 
 were the addition of new seats and the casing and 
 alteration of the old ones (p. 17), and the removal of 
 the pulpit* to the ante-chapel. 
 
 But more important was the rearrangement of the 
 glass, which was carried out at Mr. Blore's suggestion 
 in 1833 or 1834; at this time the figures of the 
 Apostles were moved from the windows on the South 
 side and placed in the upper and lower lights of the 
 two East windows one on the North and the other on 
 the South thus forming a kind of sacrarium at the 
 East end of the chapel. The vacant spaces on the 
 South side were filled by two windows of late sixteenth 
 century Flemish glass, which had been once at Louvain, 
 and which were bought by the Warden in Bond 
 Street. 
 
 Thus the chapel remained till 1885, when the 
 Apostles were restored to their original places, and 
 
 * It is strange that Warden Symons, with his Evangelical lean- 
 ings, attached so little importance to the pulpit. For some time 
 after 1832 sermons were still preached from the reading-desks, but 
 these gradually dwindled down to one on Easter Day, and even that 
 had disappeared before the old Warden resigned. It is much to be 
 desired that in this, as in other chapel matters, the changes of 
 Warden Symons' days should be undone. 
 
192 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 the foreign glass was put in the upper lights of the two 
 most easterly windows (North and South). The money 
 for this " restoration " (in the real sense) was obtained 
 in a curious way. Between 1837 and 1840 there had 
 been a subscription to glaze the windows of the ante- 
 chapel, as will be described immediately ; of the sum 
 raised about ^200 remained, when the work was 
 completed, unspent in the hands of the treasurer, 
 Dr. Griffiths ; its very existence was forgotten, but it 
 was carefully nursed by him, and in 1885, having 
 now amounted to more than ^?1200, it was handed 
 over to the college, with the special request that it 
 might be employed in the first place to undo the 
 work which had been done with the bulk of the 
 original subscription. It is not often that the progress 
 of taste can be so clearly traced. 
 
 Of the windows in the ante-chapel, the four West 
 ones were filled by Evans of Shrewsbury, between 1837 
 and 1840, with glass of the true " early Victorian " style ; 
 these remain as they were, though two of them were 
 fortunately covered up by the organ and are invisible. 
 The other six windows were glazed with " heavily matted 
 grisaille quarries, 11 in which were inserted the arms of 
 the various subscribers ; these too have been " restored " 
 out of Dr. Griffiths 1 fund, the dull glass has been 
 replaced by clear glass, while the scutcheons have 
 been retained. Thus the ante-chapel is once more 
 properly lighted, and the artistic effect of the windows 
 is greatly improved. The fund which the college thus 
 owed to Dr. Griffiths 1 care and skill, was also employed 
 in completing and casing the organ, and building the 
 present organ loft ; this was done in 1 886 from the 
 
UNDER WARDEN SYMONS 193 
 
 designs of Mr. Jackson.* About the same time (1887) 
 the old side entrance to the chapel from the passage 
 to the gardens was reopened on ordinary use, and the 
 main entrance from the quad closed ; the result is a 
 great gain in artistic effect, the beauty and dignity 
 of the chapel are only gradually revealed instead of 
 being displayed all at once, and the ante-chapel, by its 
 severity of style, prepares the eye for the more elaborate 
 work beyond the screen. 
 
 * The organ was built in 1878, under the direction of the then 
 chaplain, Rev. J. C. Hanbury, who had a large share in raising the 
 money for it. It is considered one of the best of its size in Oxford. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 WADHAM ATHLETICS 
 
 THE present devotion to all forms of athletic sports is, 
 as has been said, a growth of our own century, in fact 
 of the latter half of it. The very word itself is a 
 witness of this, for down to 1850 at all events, 
 " sports " still continued to mean not rowing, cricket 
 and football, but hunting, shooting and fishing ; hence 
 inter-collegiate competitions only begin in the third 
 decade of the century, preceding inter-University com- 
 petitions by a few years. In the early days of the 
 century boating was a common amusement, but was 
 not systematised ; clubs, however, began to be formed, 
 at first independently of college limits, and before 1810 
 their members distinguished themselves by a special 
 uniform.* At this time six-oar boats were used, but 
 eights were introduced very soon after. Racing is said 
 to have been begun in the following way. The various 
 crews rowed down to Sandford or Nuneham to dine, 
 
 * Cox, p. 54. He claims to have belonged to the first club which 
 had a special dress a green leather cap with jacket and trousers of 
 nankeen. 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 195 
 
 and, returning together, raced from Iffley to Oxford. 
 As they could not row abreast, the system of " bump- 
 ing" was naturally introduced at once ; but at first all 
 the boats were shut up together in Iffley Lock, and 
 started in succession. The start was effected in the 
 following way; stroke stood upon the thwart of bow* 
 and then ran along, pushing the boat out as he 
 went till he reached his own, dropped on to it, and 
 began to row. Each boat therefore was allowed as 
 much start as the skill of its stroke could gain for it. 
 This very primitive method of starting was used in 
 1822 and in 1824, but in 1825 the boats were arranged 
 in a line along the bank. 
 
 There is no record of a Wadham boat, however, 
 during this early period; but rowing seems to have 
 been vigorously begun in college, at any rate very 
 early in the thirties. The earliest surviving accounts 
 are for 1837, but the account-book is labelled "Bk. II." 
 In 1837 a new boat and two sets of oars were bought 
 for ^75, not to mention sundries ; the boat was sold in 
 less than two years for ].Q. After this it is not sur- 
 prising to find financial difficulties appearing, as has 
 always been the case with college boat clubs ; but in 
 spite of these a boat was sent to Henley in 1840, and 
 W. J. Dry, of Wadham, rowed six in an Oxford boat, 
 which beat Cambridge at the Thames Regatta in 1844. 
 There was no regular inter-University race in that 
 year. 
 
 In 1845 a new set of minutes is started in splendid 
 
 * It need hardly be said that the racing boats of those days were 
 very broad in the beam ; one or two specimens survived in the Pro- 
 cession of Boats till about 1870. 
 
196 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 style with the record of a meeting on February 15, at 
 which it was resolved to found a boat club in college. 
 As, however, a captain and a crew are spoken of in the 
 minutes as already existing, it is evident that the club 
 was rather reconstituted than formed. This new start 
 is the beginning of the most glorious time in Wadham 
 rowing ; for three years running, 1848-50, the University 
 Sculls were won by two Wadham men, David Wauchope 
 and John Erskine Clarke, of whom the former also 
 rowed bow for the University in 1849. Both of them 
 were members of the famous Wadham Eight of 1849, 
 which swept the board at Henley, winning both the 
 Grand and the Ladies" Challenge Cups. The following 
 account of the race was contributed to the Wadham 
 College Gazette* for March 1898 by one of the crew, 
 the Rev. Canon Erskine Clarke, who has just been 
 mentioned. 
 
 HENLEY GRAND REGATTA, 1849. 
 
 "The Regatta of 1849 was the eleventh Annual Regatta 
 on that charming reach. In 1 84.Q it was fixed so early in the 
 year that the Oxford term was not over. Only the Second 
 Trinity, Cambridge, had entered for the Grand Challenge 
 and the Ladies' Challenge at the date fixed for closing. 
 As this would have robbed the Regatta of its chief feature, 
 the eight-oared races, the Committee, with the consent of 
 Second Trinity, allowed post-entries, and the Wadham and 
 the Oriel Eights were entered, being the second and fifth 
 boats on the river. As there was doubt whether the 
 College authorities would let the men go to Henley, the 
 Wadham boat was entered as The St. John of Malta, f and 
 
 * This paper was started in October 1887. 
 
 t The Maltese cross is still the Wadham badge. 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 197 
 
 the crew under pseudonyms the Captain, W. H. Hum- 
 phery, figuring as W. H. Duke, and the Secretary, D. 
 Wauchope, as D. Niddrie, the name of his Scotch home. 
 The Oriel boat also entered as N.O.B.C., and the crew 
 had pseudonyms. 
 
 " On Monday, June 11, the crew attended their lectures 
 up to 2, and then started in a drag with four post-horses at 
 2.30, dining at Benson on the way, and getting to Henley 
 at 5. They had not been over the course before the race. 
 The Ladies' Challenge Cup was rowed on the first day. 
 Wadham won the toss and had best station. The race is 
 thus described in Bell's Life the one sporting weekly 
 paper of those days. 
 
 " ' A beautiful start was effected, and for the first quarter 
 of a mile the three boats were oar and oar after this Oriel 
 tailed off slightly, but continued to the finish to put on most 
 plucky spurts. Trinity and Wadham worked on to Remen- 
 ham : first one rose in front and then the other, but at the 
 Poplars Wadham's steering told, and they began to draw 
 their boat away slowly but surely, and on passing the win- 
 ning-post, were about a boat's length clear of the Cantabs. 
 Oriel were about two lengths behind the second boat. It 
 was a most spirit-stirring race, and the crews rowed 
 beautifully and most determinedly throughout, amid the 
 vociferous cheering of vast numbers who ran along the 
 meadows, many of them from start to finish, when some 
 were so " blown " that they had to recline on the hillocks 
 of hay till they could regain their wind.' There was not 
 a single house-boat in those days. There was much cheer- 
 ing and excitement when the drag got back to College 
 about ten. 
 
 " The next day the order of proceedings was the same. In 
 the draw for stations for the Grand Challenge, the Second 
 Trinity had the first place, and Wadham the second. 
 
198 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 " In the report of the race it is written : ' Wadham and 
 Trinity continued almost oar and oar till they passed the 
 bay above Remenham Church and were nearing the Poplar 
 point., a distance of about three-quarters of a mile, when 
 Wadham was a trifle in advance. At this juncture the 
 Trinity coxswain, who had for some hundred yards been 
 gradually boring Wadham into the middle of the stream, 
 made what might be called a rank steer, and the con- 
 sequence was a foul ; but as there was plenty of room on 
 each side of each boat (for Oriel was a length or two 
 behind), both went at it " hammer and tongs," the Cantabs 
 with an advantage of about half a boat's length, and a race 
 then ensued than which a more gallant struggle has seldom 
 been seen at Henley or on any other water. Wadham 
 soon picked up their lost ground, and nose and nose was 
 again the order of the day up to within fifty yards from 
 home, when Cambridge put on a terrific burst, the effects 
 of which Wadham were unable to counteract : and Cam- 
 bridge passed the post first, having drawn about a third of 
 their boat clear. The Cantabs were in ecstasies at the 
 result, but alas ! it was only to be disappointed, as Wadham 
 claimed the foul, which was at once given in their favour 
 by the umpire, Mr. Fellows, of the Leander, without any 
 hesitation indeed it was impossible that any other decision 
 could have been given in so clear a case. The pace 
 throughout was slashing, the time being from 7 minutes 
 30 seconds to 8 minutes, and it was, if not the fastest, at 
 least one of the fastest races that have been rowed over 
 Henley reach.' 
 
 " As there had been no trial heat for the Grand Challenge, 
 the Wyfold Cup went with it, and the College for the year 
 held the three cups, which were valued at 200 : viz., 
 'The Ladies',' the < Grand Challenge,' and the 'Wyfold.' 
 The Wyfold is now given for four-oar races. The drag did 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 199 
 
 not reach the College on the second night till half-past 
 twelve, but the Sub- Warden of the time, John Griffiths, 
 had much sympathy with rowing men, and so the lateness 
 of the ' Gate ' was condoned ; indeed,* the achievements of 
 the crew were celebrated by a grand supper in Hall on 
 the Thursday evening."* 
 
 I have heard from other contemporaries that the old 
 Warden was more sympathetic than the above account 
 might show ; it was he personally who gave the use of 
 the hall for the entertainment of the beaten Cam- 
 bridge crew, only stipulating that there should be " no 
 hot lush." 
 
 The names of this famous crew were as follows : 
 
 Bow. O. Ogle. 
 
 2. J. Semple. 
 
 3. A. M. Sugden. 
 
 4. E. R. Johnson. 
 
 5. W. H. Humphery (Captain). 
 
 6. J. E. Clarke. 
 
 7. H. Hodgson. 
 
 8. D. Wauchope. 
 Cox. C. E. Ranken. 
 
 It speaks well for the healthiness of rowing that, 
 after fifty years, all of the crew but two >are alive 
 and in good health ; of these two exceptions one was 
 killed by an accident ; and the subsequent careers of the 
 crew have been worthy of their early success. E. R. 
 Johnson has been already mentioned as the late dis- 
 
 * There is no foundation for the college tradition that Wadham 
 adopted its light blue colours on account of this victory over 
 Cambridge $ on the contrary, I have heard from contemporaries 
 that light blue was the college colour before 1849. 
 
200 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 tinguished Bishop of Calcutta ; the captain became an 
 M.P., a baronet and a K.C.B. ; J. Erskine Clarke has 
 been for many years one of the leading clergy in 
 South London ; O. Ogle, after winning the Vinerian 
 Scholarship, was elected a fellow of Lincoln, and was 
 a considerable authority on the history of Oxford ; C. E. 
 Ranken was the founder of the University Chess Club. 
 
 The great race has been commemorated in Wadham 
 by the Henley Cup, which was given at the time, and 
 quite recently by the presentation to the boat club of 
 a trophy made out of the Henley medals of several 
 members of the crew, and of the silver oars which were 
 presented to them by the college as memorials.* 
 
 After this brilliant success on other waters the 
 Wadham boat went head of the river at Oxford in 1850 ; 
 it then fell rapidly, but rose as rapidly, and in 1856 was 
 again head. At this time it was stroked by Mr. J. T. 
 Thorley, who for three years (1856-1858) was also the 
 stroke o the University boat. Mr. T. G. Jackson, who 
 was then a scholar of the college (p. 189), rowed in it. 
 
 For the next ten years Wadham still kept a high 
 place on the river, though it never could quite get head 
 again. To this period belong the names of H. E. 
 Medlicott and W. Robertson, who rowed three and 
 four for the University in 1861, and of C. R. Carr who 
 was seven in the winning boats at Putney of 1862 and 
 1863 ; S. O. B. Ridsdale, too, was cox. for Oxford in 
 1861, and T. R. Finch won the University Sculls in that 
 
 * The Boat Club owes this most interesting memorial to the kind 
 thought and care of Dr. Johnson and Canon Erskine Clarke ; it was 
 presented at the Wadham Dinner in London on June 30, 1898, and 
 now hangs in the Junior Common Room. This was founded in 
 1888. 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 201 
 
 year. In 1866 the College boat was fourth on the river ; 
 but that of 1867, in which the present Bishop of 
 Chester rowed, was the last of Wadham's great eights ; * 
 after this year the boat fell rapidly into the second 
 division, and has remained there ever since with the 
 single exception of 1873, when it was tenth. During the 
 reign of Dr. Griffiths as Warden (1871-1881) athletics 
 were very far from flourishing at Wadham ; the sole 
 representative of the college during this decade in the 
 world of " blues 11 was W. F. A. Lambert, who was cox. 
 to the University boat in 1874. And the college, after 
 going to the bottom of the river in 1877, " took off,' 1 
 and had no boat on at all in 1878 and 1880. Since then 
 the position of the eight has been a little better, and 
 Wadham has had two more "blues' 1 in W. St. L. 
 Robertson, who rowed in 1886, and T. A. Cook, the 
 author of Old Touraine, in 1889 ; both these rowed 
 three. The former is interesting as one of the few 
 instances of the son of a "blue 11 himself becoming a 
 " blue " in the next generation ; he was the son of 
 W. Robertson who rowed in 1861. 
 
 In 1886 the College Boat Club cleared off its long 
 outstanding debt to Salter, and began to hire a barge. 
 A good position was assigned to this by the Thames 
 Conservancy, close to the new mouth of the Cherwell. 
 A barge more worthy of this place was secured last year 
 (1897)t by the liberality of past and present members 
 of the College, and the crew are now housed for the first 
 
 * There is an interesting account of Wadham boating at this 
 period in a story called " Boating Life at Oxford," which appeared 
 in London Society for April 1867. 
 
 f The barge was built in Oxford by R. A. Talboys. 
 
202 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 time in quarters of their own, which, in convenience 
 at all events, are equal to any on the river. It is 
 the earnest hope of all Wadham men that the new 
 home may bring new energy into the boating, and 
 that the long spell of misfortune may be at last 
 broken.* 
 
 No other Oxford sport stands on the same footing as 
 boating ; the fame of a brilliant eleven or fifteen is only 
 a memory in the next season, while the success of a boat 
 leaves a permanent memorial in places gained on the 
 river. And what is far more important, boating calls 
 out to a much greater extent than any other sport 
 those qualities of self-denial and endurance, of subordi- 
 nation to a common end and obedience, which are the 
 real glories of English athletics. Hence it could be 
 said with certainty, at any rate till quite recently, and 
 I hope can be said still, that in " the river " the whole 
 of a college is interested, while it is only sections who 
 care for cricket or football. Something, however, must 
 be recorded as to Wadham's performances in these 
 fields also. 
 
 The inter-University cricket match dates from 1827, 
 
 * I believe that success on the river is largely a matter of energy 
 and character, and therefore I attach the greatest importance to the 
 position of a college boat ; but I hope that old Wadham men will 
 pardon me if I say that the whole condition of things aquatic has 
 changed since the sixties. In the first place our college, though 
 absolutely larger than it has ever been, is relatively smaller, owing 
 to the increase of numbers at Oxford generally, and to the growth of 
 large colleges ; and secondly, rowing has become a much more 
 specialised pursuit ; the introduction of slides has made it more 
 scientific, and the headship of the river is determined, not by the 
 energy of a college's life, but by the number of trained oars which it 
 gets up from the rowing schools, especially from Eton. 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 203 
 
 but only becomes regular in 1838 ; it was some time 
 before Wadham was represented, but in 1858 and 1859 
 Henry Linton played, and his brother Sidney in 1861 
 and 1862 ; the latter was afterwards Bishop of Riverina ; 
 both brothers died in their prime serving England 
 abroad, in Madras and in Australia. There was another 
 Wadham man with the younger Linton in the eleven 
 of 1862, S. O. B. Ridsdale, who kept wicket; he had 
 also been the cox. of the University eight in the previous 
 year. He, too, died in India after a distinguished career 
 as a civil servant. 
 
 But it is in our own day that Wadham has been best 
 represented in the eleven. Wadham had two repre- 
 sentatives in Kemp's all- victorious team of 1884, H. V. 
 Page and E. W. Bastard ; they had both played in the 
 previous year, 1883, and were respectively Captain and 
 Secretary in the following year, 1885 ; Page was also 
 Captain in 1886. The long stand made by them in 
 1885, when they put on some sixty runs for the last 
 wicket, may rank among the " events to be remembered " 
 in inter-University cricket; they could not save the 
 game, but they made it interesting once more, when it 
 had seemed to be a mere " Oxford collapse." Page, in 
 fact, though purists said he was " no cricketer, 11 was one 
 of the most useful men who have ever represented the 
 Dark Blues ; he positively revelled in a crisis, and was 
 never more like to pull a ball round to leg for four than 
 when the bowler had good reason to think his break 
 from the off was unplayable. Page also played in the 
 Rugby fifteen in 1885. 
 
 Wadham has had another Captain of the eleven since 
 Page in the world-famous C. B. Fry, who played from 
 
204 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 1892 to 1895, and was Captain in 1894 the year in 
 which he was also President of the O.U.A.C., and 
 Captain of the " Socker " XI. ; as he made his century 
 at Lord's, and his side won a brilliant victory, it was the 
 crowning success of the most brilliant athletic year which 
 has ever fallen to the lot of an undergraduate. Fry was 
 not only a triple " blue, 1 ' but he represented the Uni- 
 versity doubly at the Queen's Club, in the Hundred and 
 in the Broad Jump ; * and in the latter event in 1892 
 he surpassed himself and the world's record by clearing 
 23 ft. 5 in.f 
 
 Fry won his three blues in his first year (1891-92), 
 and kept them till his last year (1894-1895) ; in this he 
 seemed certain at one time to secure a fourth blue for 
 Rugby football ; an unlucky knee, however, at the last 
 moment prevented his playing against Cambridge. But 
 even for the University Fry probably never played 
 more brilliantly than he did for his College in the Final 
 of the Association Cup Tie in 1893, when Wadham 
 nearly wrested the cup from Magdalen. Till within 
 the last quarter of an hour Wadham was ahead, and 
 nothing seemed able to break down the stubborn 
 defence of the two backs, Fry and Lister (now a 
 member of her Majesty's Civil Service in India); but 
 then Magdalen scored twice in ten minutes, and kept 
 the cup by two goals to one. 
 
 In the athletic sports, when first established, Wadham 
 was prominent. In the earliest meeting, that of 1864, 
 
 * In 1892 also he competed for both the High and the Broad 
 jumps. 
 
 t This remains a University record, and is likely to do ; but it has 
 been since beaten both in England and in America. 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 205 
 
 S. B. Darbyshire won both the hundred and the quarter, 
 while Wadham also furnished Oxford's second string, 
 H. Skelton, for both hurdle races. In 1865, 1868, 
 and 1869 Wadham was also represented; but then 
 came a long interval, which was only broken when 
 G. C. Lindsay, of Rugby football fame, ran the quarter 
 in 1886. Since then F. J. Sadler and W. S. Lee have 
 both represented the University in the three miles ; 
 the latter made a sensation when in 1894 he all but 
 beat the Cambridge crack Horan, who had been 
 supposed to be invincible, in the last lap after a very 
 fast race. 
 
 Football, compared with cricket and athletics, is but 
 a thing of yesterday ; but in the judgment of many it 
 is the sport of the day. Wadham was well represented 
 in the great teams of the early "eighties by G. C. Lind- 
 say, who played three-quarter back from 1882 to 1885, 
 and was captain in the last-named year. He was 
 extraordinarily successful with his drop kicks, and 
 was very fast, though almost too light for a three- 
 quarter in some respects. With him in the team of 
 1885 played F. C. Cousins, as well as H. V. Page. 
 Since then R. B. Littlewood (1893) has been the only 
 Rugby blue from Wadham ; but the college team 
 has maintained (since the beginning of the 'nineties) 
 the reputation of being one of the strongest in the 
 University. 
 
 Perhaps it may interest old members of the college 
 to add that since October 1885 the athletic clubs have 
 been united so far as finance is concerned ; one sub- 
 scription is paid for all, and a permanent treasurer has 
 been appointed. Hitherto the result has been financial 
 
206 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 solvency and a more equally distributed pressure of 
 burdens. 
 
 It may seem somewhat unworthy to end the chronicle 
 of a learned foundation with athletic records, but the 
 colleges of Oxford have always been much beside learned 
 foundations. They are the homes of generation after 
 generation of young Englishmen for the four happiest 
 years of their lives ; and where the young Englishman 
 is, there sport must take a prominent place. And 
 there is reason in this; the object of athletics is not 
 to break "records," or even to train "blues"; these 
 are but the means by which interest is kept up ; if ever 
 they become the ends of sport, and if games are given 
 over to a number of professional amateurs who perform 
 while the rest of the world looks on, then athletics 
 become purely mischievous. That there is a tendency 
 to this few would deny ; but it is only a tendency at 
 present, and it may still be confidently maintained that 
 sport more than any other pursuit reveals man to man 
 and links them together; it trains the body to the 
 greatest activity and endurance ; but it also trains the 
 temper: it teaches honourable observance of rules, it 
 enforces self-control. It is for these reasons that sport 
 in its various forms is held by many of us to be one of 
 the great educating influences of Oxford ; and because 
 of this it has a right to a place in the history of a 
 college, and still more because it breeds the keenest 
 patriotism. 
 
 It is this last, it is the love of the old foundation, 
 which makes a college history worth writing. If this 
 decays, then colleges cannot prosper, and their story 
 
WADHAM ATHLETICS 207 
 
 will be forgotten. But there is no sign of this ; on the 
 contrary, the words of the old Puritan, Samuel Lee, are 
 still appropriate : " I haVe generally observed I know 
 not what genius (may I so term it) or affectionate 
 tincture to run in the veins of such as have been bred 
 at Wadham." This has been true for nearly three 
 centuries. May it ever continue to be true. 
 
APPENDICES 
 
 I. THE COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 [N.B. Under the head " Library " in the Index will be found a 
 number of references to other rare or interesting books, which have 
 been mentioned in the history of the college.] 
 
 THE most valuable portion of the college library, as has 
 been said, is that bequeathed by Richard Warner. Besides 
 his scientific tastes, he specialised in English Literature ; 
 in the list of books mentioned below I have added a " w " 
 to those given by him. 
 
 Of pre-Reformation English literature we have rare early 
 editions of 
 
 Piers Plowman, 1550 (w). 
 
 Gower's Conjessio Amantis* 1554 (w). 
 
 Barclay's Ship of Fools, 1570 (w). 
 Of the sixteenth-century literature there are : 
 
 Sir T. More's Utopia (First Edition), (w), and the 
 first collected edition of More's English works, 1557. 
 
 Some poetical tracts of Skelton (on vellum), (w). 
 
 Sir P. Sidney's Arcadia, 1598. 
 
 * Of this there is also a valuable fifteenth-century MS. 
 
 o 
 
210 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 Spenser's Faerie* Queene (First Edition, 1590, con- 
 taining only three books). 
 
 Of the sixteenth-century history there are first editions 
 of Hall (two copies, 1548 and 1550), and Holinshed, 
 1577 all Warner's, and one volume of Pynson's Froissart, 
 1525. 
 
 But the most fascinating book is the first edition of 
 Hariot's account of Raleigh's Colony in Virginia (printed 
 at Frankfort by De Bry in 1590) ; in this and in the 
 accompanying account of the French in Florida there are 
 the most wonderful pictures of the natives, their manners 
 and customs. 
 
 Of Reformation theology there are an incomplete copy of 
 Latimer's Sermons, 1549 (w), no less than three copies of 
 Cranmer's Treatise on the Sacrament (1550) against Gardiner, 
 and Hooper's Comfortable Expositions (published 1580, 
 though written during his imprisonment). There is also 
 a unique collection of the various editions of the Homilies 
 of the Church of England, which was bequeathed by Dr. 
 Griffiths. Of seventeenth-century literature, beside the 
 four folios of Shakespeare (p. 146), there are first editions of 
 Paradise Lost 1669 (w), and Paradise Regained, 1671, (w) 
 and of some of Milton's prose works, and of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher (1647 ; also that of 1679). Webster is repre- 
 sented by a first edition of The White Devil, 1612 (w), and 
 Dray ton by that of the Polyolbion, 1613. 
 
 There is abundance, too, of the eighteenth-century litera- 
 ture, but it is impossible to dwell on it. The only other 
 English books I can mention are the charming collection 
 of many of the first editions of Dickens, of Thackeray and 
 of Tennyson, which have come to the college this year by 
 
 * There is also a copy of the second edition 1596, and the 1609 
 edition of Spenser's collected works; these two are both from 
 Warner. 
 
APPENDIX I 211 
 
 the bequest of the widow of Henry King, our late senior 
 fellow. 
 
 Of Bibles there are some of considerable interest. Besides 
 Cranmer's Great Bible (p. 99), there are Daye's Bible of 
 1549 (which is in the main the same as Mathews' Bible) ;* 
 the Geneva Bible (1562, (w); this is the "Breeches 
 Bible "), the Bishop's Bible (1568), the " Treacle Bible/' cf. 
 Jer. viii. 22) ; one volume of the Roman Catholic version 
 the Douai Bible, 1609; and the Authorised Version of 
 l6ll (a splendid folio). 
 
 There are also copies of the Hebrew Bible of R. Stephens, 
 four volumes, 1539-1544, and his Greek Testament of 
 1550, with fine folios of the Sixtine Septuagint (1587) and 
 of the Sixtine Vulgate (1592); both these last came from 
 Dr. Bisse (p. 37). 
 
 Of early editions of classical books there are, of course, 
 plenty. The earliest is a splendid folio of S. Jerome's Letters 
 printed at Rome in 1468 ; this was given in the last century 
 by W. Baynton of Gray's Inn, a descendant of the Founder's 
 family, who also presented several other handsome 
 volumes.f There is too a beautiful Ccesar (w), printed at 
 Venice in 1471. The most interesting classic in some 
 respects is the Aldine Euripides (w) of 1503, which has 
 the autograph and conjectures of the great Dutch scholar, 
 Nicholas Heinsius. The collection of Elizabethan transla- 
 tions of the classics is both numerous and rare. 
 
 There are also one or two splendid specimens of the 
 modern printing of Greek : the large paper edition of the 
 Grenville Homer seems to me the most beautiful Greek book 
 
 * It is erroneously lettered " Tyndale's Bible." It begins with lists 
 of the " wicked men of the O. T.," the " wicked men of the N. T.," 
 and other curious tables. 
 
 f Especially the Nuremburg Chronicle (1493), in the original bind- 
 ing ; it is full of curious woodcuts. 
 
WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 which I know, but it is usually considered to be surpassed 
 by another Clarendon Press book, Tyrwhitt's Poetics of 
 Aristotle ; this, in the large paper edition, was considered 
 to be the finest specimen of Greek printing ever executed 
 in Oxford.* 
 
 Of foreign classics may be mentioned a very curious 
 Boccaccio de Claris Mulieribus, printed at Ulm in 1473 ; it 
 has hand-painted wood-cuts of the roughest kind. Warner 
 also left us a fine copy of the Petrarch of 1490, a 
 splendid edition with illustrations and an excellent text. 
 
 I have not mentioned a tithe of the books which have 
 some bibliographic value, either for their rarity or their 
 age, still less the even more numerous class of scholars' 
 books, which are full of interest to any one who cares to 
 watch and study the gradual progress of knowledge ; but 
 I have mentioned more than enough for the interest of a 
 casual reader. One word, however, must be said as to MSS. 
 The College is too modern to have many of these ; only 
 fifty-three are mentioned by Coxe, but his list is not com- 
 plete. The finest by far is an early sixteenth-century 
 Flemish missal of large folio size, made for an abbot of the 
 Premonstratensian Order. The illuminations are very rich, 
 and the book is in excellent preservation. 
 
 [In this appendix I have borrowed largely from the 
 appendix on the library contributed by Mr. E. Gordon 
 Duff to Mr. Jackson's book (pp. 198-200). The writing of 
 this is the very least of the many services which Mr. Duff 
 has rendered to the Wadham library.] 
 
 * This copy one of thirty printed has a special interest, as it 
 belonged to Parsons (p. 161), who saw it through the press, and was 
 given by him to Warden Tournay, who in turn left it to the college. 
 
APPENDIX II 213 
 
 II. PORTRAITS IN HALL AND 
 ELSEWHERE 
 
 [In every case I have begun on the left, and have mentioned 
 the lower portrait before that hanging above it.] 
 
 SOUTH WALL 
 
 1. The Founder. 
 
 2. The Foundress. 
 
 (pp. 6; 43). Painted by Sonmans, 
 probably from the original in 
 
 the Warden's Lodgings. 
 WEST WALL: 
 
 3. J. Griffiths, eighteenth Warden (p. 182). Painted 
 
 by W. E. Miller from the drawing by Watts 
 in the Warden's lodgings. 
 
 4. Dr. Lushington, scholar. 1728. 
 
 5. G. E. Thorley, the present Warden. Painted 
 
 in 1889 by John Collier. 
 
 6. Sir John Strangeways, donor of the East window 
 
 in chapel (p. 54). 
 
 7. King James I. (bought in the present century). 
 
 Painted by Van Somer. 
 
 8. King William III. | , , 
 
 9. King George I. ] V 
 
 10. J. Wills, fifteenth Warden (p. 154). Painted by 
 
 Hoppner. 
 
 11. T. Creech, Poet (p. 99). Copied by Joseph 
 
 Smith of Oxford, from the portrait by Sumner 
 in the Bodleian. 
 
 12. W. Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield (p. 181). 
 
 Painted in 1897, by Hugh Norris. 
 
 13. John Medley, Metropolitan of Canada (p. 16'4). 
 
 14. E. R. Johnson, Metropolitan of India (p. 188). 
 
 Painted in 1897 by F. E. Calderon. 
 
WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 15. R. H. Codrington, Missionary and Philologer 
 
 (p. 188). Painted by W. E. Miller. 
 
 16. S. Lisle, twelfth Warden (p. 134). 
 
 17. G. Ironside, eighth Warden (p. 95). 
 
 18. T. Dunster, ninth Warden(p. 1 1 6 ). 
 
 NORTH WALL : 
 
 19. The Founder. 
 
 20. The Foundress. 
 
 Between them hangs the large picture of 
 
 21. John Lord Lovelace (p. 102), by Marcellus Laroon. 
 
 EAST WALL : 
 
 22. R. Wright, first Warden (p. 29). 
 
 23. W. Smyth, third Warden (p. 31). 
 
 24. J. Wilkins, sixth Warden (p. 74). 
 
 25. W. Blandford, seventh Warden (p. 62). 
 
 26. Sir Christopher Wren, Architect. Copied by J. 
 
 Smith from a picture in the Theatre. 
 
 27. R. Blake, Admiral, which represents Blake when 
 
 a young man (p. 41). This picture was bought 
 by the College in 1826 from a Mr. Rodd, who 
 had obtained it from the well-known picture 
 dealer, Barker of Northampton; it had come 
 with other good portraits from the Manor 
 House, Market Bosworth. Its authenticity, 
 therefore, rests on tradition, which may be said 
 to be confirmed by internal evidence ; though 
 the features decidedly resemble those in the 
 well-known portraits of Blake as admiral, and 
 as a man of middle age, yet the difference 
 between these portraits and the Wadham picture 
 is sufficiently great to make it unlikely that the 
 tradition is based on internal evidence only. 
 
 28. J. Goodridge (p. 87), Benefactor. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 29. W. Baker, tenth Warden (p. 132). 
 
 SO. T. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester (p. 77). Copied in 
 
 1825 by J. Smith, from the portrait in the 
 
 Bodleian by Dahl (?). 
 
 31. Thomas Lord Wyndham(p. 144), Lord Chancellor 
 
 of Ireland and Benefactor. 
 
 32. Lord Wynford, Chief Justice of Common Pleas. 
 
 33. Sir John Pratt (p. 103), Lord Chief Justice of 
 
 England. 
 
 34. H. Hody (p. 121), Regius Professor of Greek and 
 
 Benefactor. Painted by Forster. 
 
 35. Arthur Onslow (p. 128), Speaker of the House of 
 
 Commons. 
 
 36. John Parsons (p. l6'l), Master of Balliol. A copy 
 
 of the portrait in Balliol Hall by William Owen. 
 
 37. James Harris (p. 143), author of Hermes. This 
 
 picture has always been considered in College 
 to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and tradition in 
 such a case is very trustworthy. It was engraved 
 by Every in part fifty of Graves' continuation of 
 the engraved work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
 1861. On the other hand, it is not in Collins* 
 catalogue of Sir Joshua's works (1857 ; but 
 this is certainly incomplete), and there is a 
 picture in the National Portrait Gallery, attri- 
 buted to Romney, which is almost a replica 
 of this. 
 
 38. B. P. Symons (p. 175), seventeenth W 7 arden. 
 
 Painted by H. W. Pickersgill. 
 
 39. W.Tournay(p. 158), sixteenth Warden. Painted 
 
 by T. Kirkley, 1825. 
 
 40. J. Trapp (p. 126), first Professor of Poetry. Copied 
 
 by J. Smith, 1825. 
 The bust of Lord Westbury is by Baily. 
 
216 
 
 WADHAM COLLEGE 
 
 In the Senior Common Room there are second portraits 
 of Bishop Wilkins, Bishop Ironside, and Speaker Onslow. 
 There is also the portrait of "Mother George/' and a 
 curious picture of the Pool of Bethesda, by Van Delen ; 
 the artist excelled in representing Greek architecture, and 
 in this painting the miracle is quite lost in the magnifi- 
 cence of the " Five Porches." 
 
 In the Warden's lodgings there are a number of pro- 
 bable replicas,, and also the original pictures of the Founder 
 and Foundress, painted in 1595 ; these are admirably re- 
 produced in Mr. Jackson's Wadham (pp. 1 86-8), to which 
 I must refer any who wish for further information as to the 
 art treasures of the lodgings. 
 
 III. LIST OF WARDENS AT WADHAM 
 COLLEGE 
 
 [A star prefixed to the name implies there is a portrait 
 in the Hall.] 
 
 1. *Wright, Robert, 1613. 
 
 2. Fleming, John, I6l3-l6l7. 
 
 3. *Smyth, William, 1617-1635. 
 
 4. Estcott, Daniel, 1635-1644. 
 
 5. Pitts, John, 1644-1648. 
 
 6. *Wilkins, John, 1648-1659. 
 
 7. *Blandford, Walter, 1659-1665. 
 
 8. *Ironside, Gilbert, 1 665-1689. 
 
 9. *Dunster, Thomas, 1689-1719. 
 
 10. *Baker, William, 1719-1724. 
 
 11. Thistlethwayte, Robert, 1724-1739. 
 
 12. *Lisle, Samuel, 1739-1744. 
 
APPENDIX III 217 
 
 13. Wyndham, George, 1744-1777. 
 
 14. Gerard, James, 1777-1783. 
 
 15. * Wills, John, 1783-1806. 
 
 16. *Tournay, William, 1806-1831. 
 
 17. *Symons, Benjamin Parsons, 1831-1871. 
 
 18. ^Griffiths, John, 1871-18S1. 
 
 19. *Thorley, George Earlam. 
 
INDEX 
 
 ALBAN Hall, 40 
 
 Allen, B., 132 
 
 Allies, T. W., 165 
 
 Ancketyll, H., 31 
 
 Andrew J., 189 
 
 Arnold, J., steward of the Wadhams, 
 
 13 
 Arnold, W., architect of the College, 
 
 13,17 
 
 Atkins, R., 62 
 Austin, S., 82 
 Austin, W., 141; Warner exhibitioner, 
 
 146 (note) 
 Austin Friars, 7; remains of friary 
 
 8; disputations with, 10 
 Aynscombe, J., 108 
 
 BAKER, T., 56 
 
 Baker, W., 100, 116; election as 
 
 Warden, 130-1; character of, 
 
 132 
 
 Badham, C., 169 
 Bampfield, F. , 51 
 Barber, College, 28 
 Barge New, 201 
 Baring, T. C., 168 ; 188 
 Barnett, S. A., 189 
 Bastard, E. W., 203 
 Bath and Wells, Bishop of, Visitor, 6; 
 
 Laud as V., 32 ; in Harrington's 
 
 case, 48 ; dispute with Warden 
 
 Ironside, 89 
 Battellars, 27 
 Bear.G., 117 
 Bedford, Earl of, 56 
 
 Beef Steak Club, old customs at, 
 150 ; foundation of, 183 
 
 Beesley, Professor, 185 
 
 Behn,A.,on Creech, 98 ; on Sprat, 103 
 
 Bentley, R., at Wadhain, 121; dispute 
 with Hody, 122 
 
 Bethell, R. See Lord Westbury 
 
 Bible Clerks, 20 
 
 Bisse, Dr., bequest of books, 36 ; 
 character of B.'s books ; portrait 
 of B., 38 
 
 Blake, R., 40 ; his portrait, 41 (note); 
 214; his brother, 41 
 
 Blandford, W., submits to Puritan 
 Visitation, 62; Warden and Vice- 
 Chancellor, 88 
 
 Blew, W. J., 165 
 
 Blore, architect, 190 
 
 Boat Club founded, 195; refounded, 
 196 ; colours of 198 (note) 
 
 Bolton, J., 17 
 
 Book Club, 167-8 
 
 Bos well, W., original fellow, 2 (note); 
 benefactor to library, 43 (note) 
 
 Bradford, J., 144 
 
 Brancker, T., 169 
 
 Bridges, J. H., 185 
 
 Buildings, Cap. ii. ; No. ix. staircase 
 added, 128; "back lodgings," 
 170 ; Nos. x. and xi., 171 
 
 Burges, C., 33-4 
 
 Bush, S., benefactor of library, 145 
 
 CARR, C. R., 200 
 Caswell, E., 96 
 
INDEX 
 
 219 
 
 Chandeliers in Hall, 157 
 
 Chapel. Antechapel, Windows in 17 ; 
 disputations in, 24; burials in, 
 44 ; monuments in, 30, 36, 45, 
 119 (note)-, 159, 166; glass in, 
 192; Chapel, size of, 16; windows 
 of, 17; woodwork of, 17-18; old 
 glass in, 51-2 ; rearrangement 
 of glass, 191-2; floor of, 109; 
 ceiling of, 190; chapel conse- 
 crated, 18 
 
 Charles I., 39, 56-7 
 
 Charter, Royal, given, 7 
 
 Chemistry, Mayow's services to, 78 ; 
 Chem. Society founded, 96; 
 Chem. in 18th cent., 142 
 
 Childers, H. C., 189 
 
 Church, R. W., as Proctor, 178-9 ; at 
 Wadham, 180 
 
 Clarke, J. E., quoted, 196 ; 200 
 
 Codrington, K. H., 188; founder's 
 kin, 23 
 
 Coffee-houses, 91, 151 
 
 Coker, W., 36 
 
 Common Room, Senior, fitted up, 109- 
 110; lectures in, 138; pictures in, 
 129,216; Common Room, Junior, 
 200 
 
 Congreve, R., 184; and Positivism, 
 185 
 
 Cook, T. A., 201 
 
 Corpus Christ! College, N. Wadham, 
 at 2 ; statutes of, 5 ; rooms at, 
 15 
 
 Costard, G., 141 
 
 Cousins, F. C., 205 
 
 Creech T., 97-9 
 
 Cricket at Wadham, 203 
 
 DAHBYSHIRE, S. B., 204 
 
 Desborough, V., 82 
 
 Discipline, severe, 25-26 ; corporal 
 punishment, 25 ; relaxation of 
 after 1660, 91-2; in 18th cent., 
 133-4 
 
 Dornford, J., 163 
 
 D'Oiley, C., 47 
 
 Dry, W. J., 195 
 
 Drake, T. 42 
 
 Duff, E. G., 24, 36, 212 
 
 Dimeter, Warden, 115, seg. 
 
 Durham, W., 41-42 
 
 Dymoke, C., 47 
 
 Dyne, J. B., 170 
 
 ESSEX, Estates in, 4, 38 
 
 Estcott, D., Warden 31 ; buried in 
 Chapel 44 ; as Proctor, 48 ; 85 
 
 Eveleigh, J., 137, 1G1 
 
 Evelyn, J. , quoted 72, 76 
 
 Examinations weekly in College, 25 ; 
 formal character of, in 18th 
 century, 135-6; new statute 
 of 1800, 159, seq. ; in Literae 
 Humaniores, 165, seq. 
 
 FEILD, E., 161 
 
 Fellows, qualifications for, 21 ; ap- 
 pointed by Foundress, 20 ; 
 fellowships, lay and terminable, 
 22, 186 ; Founders' kin, 23 note; 
 defaulting, 132 ; non- residence 
 of, 133 ; fellowships thrown 
 open, 186 
 
 Finch, T. R., 200 
 
 Flavell, J., 45 
 
 Fleming, Warden, 44 
 
 Forster, T., 121 
 
 Founder's kin, 23 (note); 88 
 
 Fox, H. W., 182 
 
 Freeke,W., 117 
 
 Fry, C. B., 203 
 
 GARDEN, in 17th cent. 84-5; changes 
 in 18th cent. 147, 155 ; banquet 
 in, 166 ; in front of College, 147. 
 Warden's, beginning of, 85 ; 
 N. part of, 155 ; mound in, 157 
 and note 
 
 Garrets, fitted up, 147 
 
 Gauden, J.,50 
 
 Genefar, S., 105 
 
INDEX 
 
 George, Mother, 129 
 
 Gill, A., 32 
 
 Girdler, T., 130 
 
 Girdlestone, C., 164 
 
 Glass, Stained at Wadliam. See 
 
 Chapel 
 Godolphin, C., 101 ; Henry, 100 ; Sir 
 
 W.,101 
 
 Goodridg-e, J., 86-7, 166 {note) 
 Gothic, Late in Oxford, 13, 15, 16 
 Gower, T., 39 
 Gresham Colleg-e, 72 ; Professors at, 
 
 76, 83, 86 
 Griffiths, J., 179, 182 ; collection of, 
 
 41 
 
 Grinling Gibbons, 110 
 Guidott, T., 79 
 
 HALL, N., 92 
 
 Hall, roof of, 15; size of, 15; de- 
 scription of, 16 ; floor of, 16 J 
 windows of, 158 ; fireplace of, 15 8 
 
 Harrington, J., 48-9 
 
 Harris, J., 142 ; portrait of, 143, 215 
 
 Harris, T., 30, 36 
 
 Harrison, F., 185 
 
 Haslewood. F., 105 
 
 Hastings, Lord, 127 
 
 Headington quarries, 14 
 
 Henley Crew, 199; Regatta, 196; 
 Trophy, 200 
 
 Herbert, Sir E., 5 6 
 
 Hody,H., 97, 118-120 ; portrait, 121; 
 exhibitions, 120, 166 ; scholar- 
 ships, 121 
 
 Holt, T.,12 
 
 How, W. W., 181 
 
 Huish, A., 45 
 
 Hunton, P., 46 
 
 INGLESANT, John, 56 
 
 Ilminster, Wadham house at, 2 ; 
 
 tombs at, 6, 43; altar of Ilminster 
 
 Church, 18 
 Ireland Scholarship, 168-9 
 
 Ironside, G., Warden, 89 ; and Wood, 
 94 ; portraits of, 95 ; and King 
 James, 105-7; gift of plate, 111; 
 character of, 94-5 
 
 JACKSON, T. G., 187; his book in 
 
 Wadham, Cap. ii. and pass 
 James I., King, 7, 41 
 Jayne, F. J., 190 
 Jeamson, T., 79 
 Johnson, E. K., 188, 199 
 Joyliff, G., 78 
 
 KEMEYS, G., 108, 109 
 Kennicott, B., 139, 140 
 
 LAKE, W. H., 162 
 
 Lambert, W. F. K., 201 
 
 Latton, W., 103 
 
 Laud, Archbishop, 32, 33, 48, 49 
 
 Lee, S, 63, 79-81 ; quoted, 207 
 
 Lee, W., 127 
 
 Lee, W. S., 205 
 
 Leigh, T., 51 
 
 Library, founding of, 36 ; recasting 
 of, 145 ; and Appendix ; other 
 benefactions, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 
 50, 63, 74, 86, 99, 101, 121, 139, 
 145, 180 
 
 Lindsay, G. C. 205 
 
 Ling, Van, 53 seq. 
 
 Linton, H., 203; S., 203 
 
 Lisle, S., 134 
 
 Littlewood, R. B., 205 
 
 Lloyd, N., 94, 99 
 
 Lloyd, W., 81 
 
 Love, N., 47 
 
 Lovelace, Lord, 82, 102 
 
 Lushington, H., 213 
 
 Lyndesay, T., 100 
 
 MACONOCHIE, A. H., 181 
 Man ton, T., 51 
 Marmion, S., 44 
 Massie, E., 168 
 Maton, R., 46 
 Maynard, E., 105 
 
INDEX 
 
 Mayo, R., 61 
 
 Mayow, J., 78 
 
 Mcade, E., 163 
 
 Medals, college collection of, gift of 
 
 Dr. Griffiths, 182 ; referred to, 
 
 41, 54 
 
 Medley, J., 164 
 Medlicott, H. E., 200 
 Merton Quad, 12 ; Chapel 16, 40 
 Michell, R., 168 
 Miller, J., 133 (note) 
 Monk, N., 47 
 Morgan, T., 162 
 Music in Wadham, 74; Holywell 
 
 Music Koom, 151 
 
 NAFIER, R., 76 
 Nicholls, W., 120 
 
 OGLE, O., 200 
 
 Onslow, A., 127-8 
 
 Orange, William of, 111, 114 
 
 Organ, 192 ; completed and cased 
 
 193 
 
 Overton, J. H., 189 
 Oxford Movement, 178 seq 
 
 PAGE, H. V., 203 
 
 Palk, R., 143 
 
 Parker, S., 81 
 
 Parsons, J., 140 
 
 Parsons, John, 137 ; portrait, 161, 
 
 212 
 
 Pester, J., 143 
 Pine, L., 61 
 Pitt, C., 126 
 Pitt, R., 96 
 Pitts, J., Warden, 31 ; and Puritan 
 
 Visitors, 57-9 
 Plate surrendered, 56 ; communion 
 
 plate, 57, 111 ; Loving-cup, 128 
 Pope, W., 76 ; as Proctor, 83 
 Portman, Sir J., 45 
 Positivism, 184 
 Pratt, J., 102-3 
 Pyle, F., 89 
 
 RALEIGH, C., 42 
 Ranken, C. E., 200 
 Reynolds, Sir J., 215 
 Richards, H., 16, 158 
 Richards, R., 143 
 Ridsdale, S.O.B., 200, 203 
 Robertson, W., 200 
 Robertson, W. St. L., 201 
 Rochester, Earl of, 83 
 Rogers, B. B., 189 
 Rooke, L., 76 
 
 Rooms in original arrangement, 15 ; 
 in Back Quad, 171-2. See G arrets 
 Royal Society, 71-2 
 Russell, J., 82 
 
 S ALTER, N., 92 
 
 Sampson, J. C., 159 
 
 Scholars Qualifications of, 22 ; day 
 of election of, 22 
 
 Scroop, Sir C., 98 
 
 Sedley, Sir C., 82 
 
 Sermons at Wadham, 18, 191 
 
 Servants, 18, 27 
 
 Shirley, W. W., 23 (note), 187 
 
 Skeltou, H., 205 
 
 Skinner, W., 163 
 
 Smith, Robert, 79 
 
 Smyth, Warden, 31, 42, 57 
 
 Soames, H., 164 
 
 Somerset, workmen from, 12 ; archi- 
 tecture, 17 
 
 Souman, Van, 129 
 
 Southrop, 45 
 
 Speke, P. 132 
 
 Spicer, J., 17 
 
 Sprat, T., 77 seq. ; poet, 98 ; Tory, 
 103 
 
 Statutes, 8, and Cap. iii. 
 
 Stillingfleet, J., 121 
 
 Stokes, G., 32 
 
 Stowe, A., 18 
 
 Strangewayes, G., 54 
 
 Strangewayes, Sir J., 54 
 
 StrangeWayes, N., 88 
 
 Straugewayes, W., 104 
 
INDEX 
 
 Sydenham, P., 141 
 Sydenham, H., 31 
 Sydenham, T., 57, 78 
 Symons, B. P., Warden, 164, and 
 Cap. xi. 
 
 THISTLETHWAYTE, A., 145 
 Tkistlethwayte, R., 133 
 Thomas, W., 132 
 
 Thorley, G. E., as bursar, 86 ; as War- 
 den, 188 
 
 Thorley, J. T., 200 
 Tournay, W., 156 seq. 
 Trapp, J., 124 
 Turner, Sir W., 90-91 
 
 UNIVERSITY Commission of 1850, 
 185-6 ; of 1882, 87, 186 
 
 VISITOR. See Bath v. Wells, Bishop 
 
 of 
 
 Visitors, Parliamentary, Cap. v. pass 
 Vores, C., 165 
 
 WADHAM, N. at C. C. C., Oxford, 2 ; 
 
 Wood's stories as to, 3 ; his 
 
 deathbed instructions, 4-5; his 
 
 tomb, 6 ; portrait of, 6 
 Wadham,D., her marriage, 2 ; chooses 
 
 site, 7, 10 ; benefactions of, 38 ; 
 
 death of, 43 ; portrait of, 43 ; 
 
 letters of , quoted, 7; 29; 30; 38-9 
 Wadhurst, 108 
 
 Warden, office of, 20 seq. ; to remain 
 unmarried, 5 ; marriage of, per- 
 mitted, 156 (note) 
 
 Ward, Seth, 75-6 
 
 Warner, R., 145, and Appendix I. 
 
 Watson, A., 188 
 
 Wauchope, D., 196 
 
 West Country connection, 30, 67 
 
 Westbury, Lord ; election as scholar, 
 166; his monument, 166; foun- 
 der of Book Club, 167 
 
 Whaley, N., 124 
 
 White, J., 138-9 
 
 White, "Republican," 118 
 
 Whiting, C., 107 
 
 Wilkins, J., Warden, 59 ; leader of 
 Independents, 64 ; marriage of 
 65, Cap. vi. pass; portrait of, 110 
 
 Willis, R., 100, 116-7 
 
 Willoughby, J., 49 
 
 Wills, J., 153 seq. 
 
 Wilson, D., 165 
 
 Woodward, R., 143 
 
 Wren, C., plate, donor of, 68 ; pupil 
 of Wilkins, 72-4 ; 100 
 
 Wright, C., 29 
 
 Wright, R., first Warden, 18, 28 seq. ; 
 bishop, 29 
 
 Wright-Henderson, P. A. ; first open, 
 fellow, 186; quoted, 169 
 
 Wyndham, Sir J., 4 
 
 Wyndham, T., 126 ; benefaction of 
 144 
 
 ZOUCHE, R., 59 
 
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