studious habits and prevalence of among the students. 1 their seniors from afar and made way for them in the CHAP. II. streets; many seemed to have altogether discarded the long Decline of gown and the cap. Their pocket money, he learned, was no longer spent on books, their minds were no longer given to dissipation study, but both alike devoted to dress and the adornment of their chambers. They wandered about the town frequenting taverns and wine shops; their nether garments were of gaudy colours; they gambled and ran into debt. Expulsions, he was informed, were not infrequent; and he expresses his regret that a good old rule has become obsolete, which inflicted upon any college or hall that received into its society a student. who had been banished from another house a penalty of forty shillings'. He hears that the students complain loudly that the generous patrons of learning of former times no longer exist; but, he takes occasion to observe, it is first of all necessary that the requisite merit should make itself apparent, whereas many students only bring discredit on the university and load their patrons with shame'. complaint Harrison. The indictment which we have condensed from Dr Caius' Dr Caius' somewhat diffuse Latin is confirmed at a considerable in- contirined by terval of time by the homely English of Harrison, who tells us of the undergraduates of his day, that 'being for the most part either gentlemen, or rich mens sonnes, they oft bring the universities into much slander. For, standing upon their reputation and libertie, they ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparel, and hanting riotous companie (which draweth them from their bookes unto another trade). And for excuse, when they are charged with breach of all good order, thinke it sufficient to saie, that they be gentlemen, which grieueth manie not a litle".' CHAP. II. leaders of recognised attainments Smith and Cheke. don an un It can hardly be doubted that the decline, thus amply Absence of attested, of the studious spirit among the younger members of the university was closely connected with the fact to which and ability. both Ascham and Lever refer, that no worthy leaders were now forthcoming who by their attainments and example Departure of might stimulate others to honourable exertion. The brilliant little band of scholars of which Cheke and Smith had been the leaders was broken up. In the year 1547, the former took his seat in Parliament for Bletchingly and shortly after became permanently attached to the royal court; while the latter, in the same year, went to reside in the Protector's family and in the month of December was presented to the provostship Walter Had- of Eton. Walter Haddon, who in 1551 succeeded Smith as Regius professor of the civil law, declared in his inaugural address that no such misfortune had ever before befallen the university as this double bereavement'. As an accomplished Latinist and perhaps as a dexterous controversialist, Haddon might appear not unworthy to succeed his former tutor, but in nearly every other respect his powers and attainments strike us as being of an inferior order. Even his Latin style reflects far too faithfully the affected refinements and forced conceits of the writers of the Silver Age, while his professional lectures, of which we have yet to speak more fully, give no evidence of that extended knowledge of the subject or grasp of its true significance which alone could avail to restore the studies of the civilian to their rightful place as a recognised branch of academic learn equal suc cessor. whether the impression he is here Ascham. dency of ing. In the departure of Ascham, Cambridge sustained CHAP. II. another loss scarcely inferior to that of Cheke or of Smith. Departure of In the year 1550 he left England for Germany, and though he continued to hold the office of public orator for four years longer' his visits to the university from this time were short and only at long intervals. It was, in fact, in the example that many of the leading men themselves gave of converting academic offices into sinecures that an undeniable precedent was afforded for the very evil which they unfeignedly deplored. But such instances as Ascham, retaining his public Non-resi oratorship while resident abroad,-Cheke, appointed suc- heads. cessively to the provostships of Eton and King's while officiating as royal tutor and immersed in state business,Ridley, still holding his mastership of Pembroke while bishop of Rochester and then of London, were probably looked upon as the most defensible examples of this abuse. If absent themselves from the university, they were present in spirit, ever watchful of its interests and often rendering it substantial service. Far more flagrant instances were such as that of Gardiner's long rule of Trinity Hall, while at a distance he plotted against the academic interests by espousing the cause of retrogression or faction, or Grindal's three years' tenure of the mastership of Pembroke unmarked by a single visit to the college'. To the example thus set we may The degree with justice partly attribute the gradual disappearance of the rarely taken. 'old fatherly doctors' to which Lever refers,-a complaint which is further illustrated by the fact that in the year in which his sermon was delivered the only instance of the conferring of the degree of doctor in any of the faculties is that of the admission of Martin Bucer, a foreigner, to the degree of D.D.; while in the following year not a solitary instance occurs3. It may perhaps appear that this want, so generally felt 1 This practice on the part of an important functionary was checked by one of the Injunctions of 1549, when it was ordered that the university orator should not go away without having previously obtained the consent of the vice-chancellor,that in his absence he should leave a competent substitute, while a 2 Cooper, Athenae, 1 471. 3 Degree Book, No. 1 in Registrary; of doctor but Cambridge and the first English of the compilers not CHAP. II. and deplored, contrasts somewhat singularly with the fact that the first edition of the English Prayer Book was the Prayer Book. Work almost exclusively of Cambridge divines. We can imagine that many a Cambridge clerk,' on that memorable. Whit Sunday of 1549, when the new service was first used in the churches throughout the land, must have been conscious of a not unreasonable pride in the thought that of its thirteen compilers all but one were men who had been educated at his own university. But while their labours thus redounded to the credit of Cambridge, the divines who had rendered this signal service to the Church were engaged in other spheres of activity than those of academic teachThe services ing. Cranmer, Day, Goodrich, Skip, Holbeach, Ridley, and Thirlby were presiding over their respective dioceses. Dr Mey was largely employed on various commissions. Taylor, Heynes, and Cox were engaged in similar duties. Dr Redman, who was elected a second time in the July of the same year to the Margaret professorship, was the only one of the number whose services were at the command of the university. On the retirement of Eudo Wigan from the Regius professorship of theology he had been succeeded by Madew. But Madew, though zealous for the Reformation, disliked the disputatious spirit that now began more and more to characterize the supporters of the Protestant doctrine', and as master of Clare Hall and vice-chancellor found another employment for his energies. No theologian of sufficient authority and ability to guide the community at large. seemed forthcoming from the ranks of the younger men. available for university instruction. Polemical theology seriously to study. In this growing dearth of able teachers at home, it is not begins surprising that Cranmer should have looked for help to the affect genuine Continent, and he and Melanchthon were now in frequent correspondence. The latter had at this time just given a notable pledge of his desire to reconcile contending parties. by his public assent to the Interim3, and of both him and 1 Ascham, Epist. p. 288; BakerMayor, pp. 125-6. A concession in which Melanchthon stood almost alone. Bucer, according to Burnet, told the Elector of Brandenburg that the Interim was 'nothing but downright popery, only a little disguised.' Burnet-Pocock, II 164-5. 1 Cranmer it may be said that their best efforts and fondest CHAP. II. aspirations were now directed to the attainment of religious peace and unity among the several Protestant communions. Unfortunately they were exceptions to the prevailing spirit and tendencies of their age, and it was beyond the power of either to control the overwhelming current of passion, prejudice, and bigotry which was converting the universities into camps of rival schools of theology, and almost every scholar into a polemic. At no period indeed in the history of the Church has the controversial spirit assumed a more repulsive form or been attended by more baneful results. To find its parallel it would be necessary to go back to the Arian controversy of the fourth century, or that which divided the Realists and Nominalists in the fourteenth1. The broad grounds on which the earlier Reformers had vindicated their position, and in connexion with which they had won so considerable a victory, were gradually almost lost sight of in a series of interminable disputes respecting isolated doctrines. The Eucharist, justification by faith, predestination and free-will, and the personality of Christ were each made the subjects of speculative refinements asserted with a vehemence and adhered to with a tenacity too often. proportioned to the doubtfulness or absence of any explicit teaching in the Scriptures themselves. It will not be irrelevant to our main enquiry if we here turn aside briefly to mark the working of this sinister influence in those continental schools from whence Oxford and Cambridge alike derived no small portion of their theological bias. ant universi It was in the midst of those same tranquil regions where, The Protestlong centuries before, St Boniface had reared the monastic ties of Gerwalls of Fulda as a bulwark of the Latin Church and the papal power, that the university of Marburg was founded in Marburg, f. 1 Unfortunately the warnings afforded by the past were altogether lost sight of in a system of theological study in which Church history found no place. Von Raumer (Gesch. d. Pädagogik, 1 318) notes that even in the time of Luther and Melanchthon dogmatic theology and exegesis were the only subjects taught by the pro- many. University of 1527. |