Charles William Stubbs

“ And not less appropriately, perhaps, may I end, not only this chapter, but this whole sketch of the story of Cambridge and its colleges—for to the memory of what more kindly, more sound-hearted, more pious soul could any Sidney man more fitly dedicate his book than to his—with the prayer in which, in closing his own History, he gracefully connects the name of Cambridge with that of the sister university, and commends them both to the charitable devotion of all good men. ”

“ Under his inspiration the generosity of his powerful patron was readily extended to enrich academic resources. It was the laudable design of Fisher to raise Cambridge to the academic level which Oxford had already reached. Already students of the sister university had been to Italy, and had returned full of the New Learning. The fame of Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre made Oxford renowned, and drew to its lecture-rooms eager scholars from all the learned world. It hardly needed that such a man as Erasmus should sing the praises of the Oxford teachers. ”

“ Such a bull was granted, and in 1448 the University itself consented, by an instrument given under its common seal, that the College, in the matter of discipline as distinguished from instruction, should be entirely independent of the University. By the limitation also of the benefits of this foundation to scholars only of Eton, the founder, perhaps unconsciously, certainly disastrously, created an exclusive class of students endowed with exclusive privileges, an anomaly which for more than four centuries marred the full efficiency of Henry’s splendid foundation. ”

“ Certainly there was no scholar there of the calibre of William of Ockham, or even of Richard of Bury, or of the Merton Realist, Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not indeed until more than a century later when we have reached the age of Wycliffe, the first of the reformers and the last of the schoolmen, that the name of any Cambridge scholar emerges upon the page of history. ”

“ One enduring monument there is of his devotion to learning and of his saintly spirit, which must long keep his memory green, namely, the royal and religious foundation of the two great colleges which he projected at Eton and at Cambridge.
Of Eton we need not speak. The fame of that college is written large on the page of English history. And that fame and its founder’s memory we may safely leave to the “scholars of Henry” in its halls and playing fields to-day. ”

“ A woman of hard indomitable will, mistaking too often cruelty for firmness, using the pliancy and simplicity of her husband for mere party ends, outraging the national conscience by stirring up the Irish, the French, the Scots, against the peace of England, finally pitting the north against the south in a cruel and futile civil war, with nothing left of womanhood but the almost tigress heart of a baffled mother, this is the Queen Margaret as we know her in Shakespeare and in history. ”

“ Between 1777 and 1780 the old chapel was destroyed, and replaced by a new building designed by Essex, in a style in which, to say the least, there is certainly nothing to remind the modern student of the old hall of the Grey Friars’ Monastery, where for three centuries of stirring national life the Franciscan monks had kept alive, let us hope, something of the mystic tenderness, the brotherly compassion, the fervour of missionary zeal, which they had learnt from their great founder, Saint Francis of Assisi. ”

“ No Cambridge foundation, probably no academic institution in Europe, furnishes so striking an example as does Trinity College of the change from the mediæval to the modern conception of education and of learning. If, indeed, we may take the words of the Preamble to his Charter of Foundation, dated the thirty-eighth year of his reign (1546) as a statement of his own personal aims, King Henry had conceived a very noble ideal of liberal education. ”

“ The early fourteenth century was indeed an age of great events and of great men; but it was not an age, at least as far as England was concerned, of great scholars. There was no Grosseteste in the fourteenth century. Petrarch, the typical man of letters, the true inspirer of the classical Renaissance, and in a sense the founder of really modern literature, was a great scholar and humanist, but he had no contemporary in England who could be called an equal or a rival. ”

“ Whether the newly-created Lord of Walden regarded himself as inheriting also the Monks’ rights and responsibilities in connection with the Cambridge college or not, or whether, being an old man now and infirm and with no male heir, he thought to find some solace for his conscience in the thought of himself as the benefactor and founder of a permanent college, I cannot say. ”

“ O Lord, who art a God of knowledge and dost lighten every man that cometh into the world; O Lord, who in our nation hast moved the hearts of Founders and Benefactors to erect and endow two famous luminaries of learning and religion, bless them with the assistance of Thy Holy Spirit. ”

“ For it stood on the transcantine side, an anchoret in itself, severed by the river from the rest of the University. Here the monks some seven years since had once and again lodged and feasted Edward Stafford, the last Duke of Buckingham of that family. Great men best may, good men always will, be grateful guests to such as entertain them. Both qualifications met in this Duke and then no wonder if he largely requited his welcome. He changed the name of the house into Buckingham College, began to build, and purposed to endow the same, no doubt in some proportion to his own high and rich estate. ”

“ Probably never in the history of any nation had there been so rapid a development of learning. Certainly few things are more remarkable in the history of the intellectual development of Europe than that, in little more than a hundred years after knowledge had first dawned upon this country, an Anglo-Saxon scholar should be producing books upon literature and philosophy second to nothing that had been written by any Greek or Roman author after the third century. ”

“ It was fitting, perhaps, he felt, that some portion of this wealth should be devoted to the service of religion and sound learning. Anyhow, in the month of January 1584, we find the Queen granting to her old friend, “his heirs, executors, and assigns,” a charter empowering them “to erect, found, and establish for all time to endure a certain college of sacred theology, the sciences, philosophy and good arts, of one master and thirty fellows and scholars, graduate or non-graduate, or more or fewer according to the ordinances and statutes of the same college.” ”

“ When a nation is in the throes of revolution, wild spirits are abroad in the storm: and poor human nature presses blindly forward with the burden which is laid upon it, tossing aside the obstacles in its path with a recklessness which, in calmer hours, it would fear to contemplate.” [78]
And here are Mr. Mullinger’s:—
“When it was known at Cambridge that the Chancellor (Fisher) was under arrest, it seemed as though a dark cloud had gathered over the University; and at those colleges which had been his peculiar care the sorrow was deeper than could find vent in language. ”

“ It was not indeed until the little group of Hellenists—Erasmus and Linacre and Grocyn and Colet—had shown the value of Greek thought as an interpreter of the New Testament, that any enthusiasm for the New Learning could be awakened in England. An increase of a knowledge of the Bible was worth working for, not the elegancies of an accurate Latin style. Englishmen in the fifteenth century were busy in the task of developing trade and commerce, and their intellectual tone took colour from their daily work. ”

“ It is disappointing to find that there are no guild records telling of the union of S. Mary’s guild with that of Corpus Christi, or of the circumstances which led to the creation of the college bearing the joint names of the two guilds. Such foundation was, as we have said, a remarkable event in the history of Cambridge collegiate life. Not that these guilds were the first or the last to take part in the endowment of education; for many of the ancient grammar schools of the country owe their origin to, or were greatly assisted by, the benefactions of religious guilds. ”

“ Later we shall find the stately patronage of kings and queens given to great foundations, and on the long roll of university benefactors we shall have to commemorate the names of great statesmen and great churchmen, philosophers, scholars, poets, doctors, soldiers, “honoured in their generation and the glory of their days.” ”

“ The last in date of foundation of the Cambridge Colleges with which we have to deal—for Downing College, unique as it is in many ways, and attractive (its precincts, “a park in the heart of a city”) , is not yet a century old, and its history although in some respects of national importance, lies beyond our limit of time—was the “Ancient and Protestant Foundation of Sidney Sussex College.”
The foundress of Sydney Sussex College was the Lady Frances Sidney, one of the learned ladies of the court of Elizabeth. She was the aunt both of Sir Philip Sidney and of the Earl of Leicester ”

“ The Renaissance in Germany indeed we rightly know by the name of the Reformation, and the paramount task of the German scholars of the New Learning we recognise to have been the elucidation of the true meaning of the Bible. ”

“ A few chosen Englishmen, it is true, “pilgrim scholars” they were called—William Grey, Bishop of Ely, John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Thomas Linacre, William Grocyn stand out perhaps most conspicuously—were drawn to Italy by the rumours of the marvellous treasures rescued from monastic lumber rooms, or conveyed over seas by fugitive Greeks, but they returned to England to find that there was little they could do except to bequeath the books and manuscripts they had collected to an Oxford or a Cambridge College, and hope for happier times when scholars would be found to read them. ”

“ How essentially Puritan was the prevailing tone of Emmanuel during the early days we may surmise from the fact, that in the time of the Commonwealth no less than eleven masters of other colleges in the University came from this Foundation—Seaman of Peterhouse, Dillingham of Clare Hall, Whichcote of King’s, Horton of Queens’, Spurston of S. Catharine’s, Worthington of Jesus, Tuckney of John’s, Cudworth of Christ’s, Sadler of Magdalene, Hill of Trinity. Among some of the earliest students to receive their education within its walls were many of the Puritan leaders of America. ”

“ He pointed out that the Abbey Church was already the wealthiest in England, “that the schools of learning were meanly endowed, the provisions of scholars very few and small, and colleges yet wanting to their maintenance—that by such foundations she might have two ends and designs at once, might double her charity and double her reward, by affording as well supports to learning as encouragement to virtue.”
The foundation of Christ’s College in 1505 is an enduring memorial of the wisdom of the Bishop and the charity of the Lady Margaret. ”

“ Experience, which is the mistress of all things, clearly teaches that in every rank of life, as well temporal as ecclesiastical, a knowledge of literature is of no small advantage; which though it is searched into by many persons in many different ways, yet in a University, a place that is distinguished for the flourishing of general study, it is more completely acquired ”

“ Geographical and commercial importance of the city site—Map of the county a palimpsest—Glamour of the Fenland—Cambridge the gateway of East Anglia—The Roman roads—The Roman station—The Castle Hill—Stourbridge Fair—Cambridge a chief centre of English commerce.
ONE could wish perhaps that the story of Cambridge should begin, as so many good stories of men and cities have begun, in the antique realm of poetry and romance. ”

“ Sir Walter Mildmay, the founder of Emmanuel, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reign of Elizabeth, known and trusted by the Queen from her girlhood—she exchanged regularly New Year’s gifts with him—a tried friend and discreet diplomatist, who had especially been distinguished in the negotiations in connection with the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. He had been educated at Christ’s College, though apparently he had taken no degree. He was a man, however, of some learning, and retained throughout life a love for classical literature. ”

“ IN the centuries which preceded the rise of the Universities, the monks had been the great educators of England, and it is to monastic origins that we must first turn to find the beginnings of university and collegiate life at Cambridge.
In the library of Trinity College there is preserved a catalogue of the books which Augustine and his monks brought with them into England. “These are the foundation or the beginning of the library of the whole English Church, A.D. 601,” are the words with which this brief catalogue closes. ”

“ In the old days the term “college” was strictly and accurately applied to the persons who formed the community of scholars, not to the building which housed them. For that building the correct term always used in mediæval times was “domus” (house) , or “aula” (hall) . Sometimes, indeed, the two names were combined. Thus, in an old document we find the earliest of the colleges—Peterhouse—entitled, Domus Sancti Petri, sive Aula Scholarium Episcopi Eliensis—The House of S. Peter, or the Hall of the Scholars of the Bishop of Ely. ”