A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

This volume brings to completion the four-volume A History of the University of Cambridge, and is a vital contribution to the history not only of one major university, but of the academic societies of early modern Europe in general.

   Its main author, Victor Morgan, has made a special study of the relations between Cambridge and its wider world: the court and church hierarchy which sought to control it in the aftermath of the Reformation, and which at the same time gave it patronage and exploited it mercilessly; the ‘country’, that is the provincial gentry who provided much of the patronage and many of the recruits to Cambridge, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the wider academic world. Morgan also seeks to revive his readers’ interests in institutional history, and finds the seeds of contemporary problems of university governance in the struggles which led to and followed the new Elizabethan statutes of 1570.

Christopher Brooke, General Editor and part-author, has contributed chapters on architectural history – showing how imaginative study of the buildings of Cambridge provides a chronological framework for the whole period; and among other themes, a study of the intellectual giants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Robert Brady, physician and historian, Richard Bentley and Isaac Newton.

A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

VOLUME II
1546–1750

VICTOR MORGAN

With a contribution by Christopher Brooke

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Victor Morgan and Christopher Brooke 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Bembo 11/12.5 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 521 35059 X

CONTENTS

PLATES AND FIGURE

Cambridge University Press and the authors gratefully acknowledge the permission of all those noted above for the Plates. The photographs by Wim Swaan were originally taken for C.N.L. Brooke, J.R.L. Highfield and W. Swaan, Oxford and Cambridge (1988), and are reproduced with the generous approval of the Director of the Research Library, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (reference 96. P. 21, Wim Swaan Photographic Collection).

TABLES

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

The core of this book comprises the deep research of Victor Morgan, with a strong emphasis on the links between Cambridge and the wider world of Court, parliament and ‘the country’, and with its main orientation in the period 1546 to 1640. It was originally planned to be a thematic study, in which each of these elements would be carried through to 1750. But time has passed and the earlier chapters have grown: completion on this scale of a book in which every period and every theme was given equal weight would take many more years and a much larger book. So we have harvested what has been achieved and I have attempted to sketch some major themes not covered by Victor Morgan’s chapters, and above all what happened after 1640. This is not a perfectly balanced book, but I think it is in some ways more interesting than if we had tried drastically to reshape it. For those who seek some outline of the whole period, I have provided in chapter 2 a history of the university and colleges as it is reflected in the most vivid of all the materials for its study, in its buildings. For those who wish to know what academic legacy Cambridge acquired, chapter 14 attempts to penetrate the supreme intellectual adventures of the last two generations of our period. The rest will speak for itself.

   In my Preface to the first volume in this series – Damian Leader on The University to 1546 – I paid tribute to The History of the University of Oxford and humbly observed that ‘perhaps beside the great battleship launched by the Oxford Press there is room for a modest, serviceable frigate, sent from Cambridge’. Both are now complete, and the Oxford series will remain an incomparable monument of scholarly achievement, unequal in execution, but in the mass an immensely impressive statement of scholarly endeavour.

   Our own aim and achievement have been much more modest; but oddly, one of the chief faults of my own volume IV, 1870–1990, was that it was too long, so that the reviewers did not read it all. The late Lord Annan – failing to use the index – was astounded to find no mention of Lord Adrian. Another reviewer found a lack of ‘edge’ in the book. If he meant a lack of fashionable polemic, I plead guilty: I have tended in the past too much to avoid polemic, which I have thought fed its author’s vanity more than the cause of historical science. If he meant lack of subtlety and nuances, he had read a different book from the one I wrote. If he meant that I presented too bland and optimistic a view, that may be: such a book cannot be the vehicle for debates on university politics; but the book contains some of the most searching criticisms – for example of the treatment of women in Cambridge and the fissures between university and colleges – which I have seen in print.

   There is however a serious point here. One of my main concerns was to expound some of the ways in which Cambridge had won high international esteem; and this can only be achieved by dwelling on the heights. John Prest, in a genial review in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (46 (1995), 344–6) took me to task for concentrating on the leaders and ignoring the rank and file. He commended my courage but doubted my wisdom in attempting as a single author to do what twenty-four contributors provided in the twentieth-century volume of the Oxford History. It is notoriously unwise to answer reviewers, but Prest raised serious issues in what he both said and did not say. One central problem in the history of Oxford in the twentieth century is how a very traditional university was able not only to hold its own as a great centre of humanist studies but to win international fame in the natural sciences too. Future readers of volume VIII will look in vain for answers to this question: even the excellent chapter on the medical sciences fails to bring to life such central characters as Sir Charles Sherrington; and research in the humanities between the two World Wars is represented by a list of books, in no particular order. Prest says nothing of the colleges – wisely, for the Oxford History was conceived in conscious reaction against the pious college histories of a former generation, and never fully came to terms with the problem of doing justice to the individuality of the colleges in a unitary history. Doubtless the same is true of our venture; but we have tried. Prest encourages his readers to compare Greenstein’s chapter on junior members with mine. Greenstein has indeed provided an ample stock of charts and tables, the outward and visible sign of a marvellous database provided for him by the staff of the History – the envy of those of us who have had to work with much inferior tools in Cambridge; but his analysis of them, though full of interesting detail, is sometimes superficial. Social categories too often are reduced to ‘middle class’ and the like without consideration of the meaning of ‘class’, and there is no serious discussion of the changing nature of schools or the bewildering patterns of their relation to the social and economic standing of parents; nor are the categories of parents and occupations subjected to adequate critical analysis. In other words, Prest was in a measure criticising me for not falling victim to the inadequate analysis lying behind most current university statistics. I cited as many figures as I thought were reliable: I believe profoundly in the value of statistics, and for that reason am sceptical of the value of much which social historians parade before us. Even the much more sophisticated chapters in the nineteenth-century volumes of the Oxford History rely heavily on the university’s matriculation records, which have provided often ambiguous material for the statistical analysis of parents’ status in the world for which Cambridge has nothing to compare – though the authors have been at infinite pains to check their evidence to the limited extent to which this is possible (see Curthoys and Howarth 1999, pp. 576–9). Some of Greenstein’s tables are valid and interesting – but their value cannot be assessed except by the kind of close analysis I attempted. Several reviewers noted that I was more given to narrative and exposition than to analysis; but the truth is that my closely woven analyses of student backgrounds and of what I called the ‘anthropology’ of the late twentieth century – its relation to the world-wide movements and prejudices of the age – were less readable than my vignettes of the men and women who have made Cambridge internationally famous. But a closer look even at my studies of major figures might have revealed the element of reflection which I thought and think the chief mark of my volume.

   Yet, though I admire the Oxford History – as Ben Jonson said he loved and honoured Shakespeare – ‘this side idolatry’, I freely admit that the authors of the Cambridge History, and all students of academic history, are deeply in its debt. For the present book I have myself found particular guidance and inspiration in the contributions of Mordechai Feingold to the seventeenth-century volume; but our debts are many, and widely scattered among volumes III–V of the Oxford History. In my own studies of university and college history, the contrast between Oxford, which had the courage in the 1960s to form a department out of university resources to write the History, and the failure of the Cambridge History Faculty to make even the most modest provision for research in the field has been painful. In my last years as Dixie Professor, indeed, I was allowed to teach a segment of Cambridge history – roughly that of the present volume – with the aid of a generous and enthusiastic group of colleagues; and Barrie Dobson and I took regular courses on the physical evidence for medieval and early modern Cambridge, which helped to enlarge my knowledge of the theme of chapter 2.

   History in my eyes is first and foremost the scientific study of evidence about the past; and in all the volumes of this series one of the first aims has been to deploy our current knowledge of what the historical evidence reveals. One imperceptive reviewer claimed that there was little original research in Peter Searby’s volume: as it is virtually all written from sources, most of them little tapped by earlier historians, it is hard to know what he meant. For historical research is the investigation of historical evidence, no more and no less. As a portrayal of the spectrum of university activities and institutions – and of the variety of the colleges – this volume, like its predecessors, is selective. That it must be, for three reasons. We have attempted to portray in depth the themes we pursue, and space would not permit an encylopaedic coverage. Nor would the time we have to spare: the book has been long in the making, and the tyrannical demands of the RAE – to which Victor Morgan is still subject – no longer permit most members of faculty to engage in large research projects.

   The third reason is that our aim is to combine an intelligible survey of the current state of knowledge of our theme with revelation in depth of the sources we have been able to plunder. Thus chapters 13 and 15 are greatly indebted to Twigg (1990) and Gascoigne (1989); and we have made very full use of the recent college histories of Trinity Hall, Caius, Queens’, Magdalene, Sidney and Emmanuel. For many years Victor Morgan has been accumulating material from the very rich goldmines in the PRO and local collections, and in the printed literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, throwing new light into many dark corners. There are many more corners to be explored; but the generous reader will appreciate that any attempt to compass a stretch of history in 500 pages which took the authors of the Oxford History close on 2,000 must be highly selective, or else superficial; and that we have avoided. I generously gave the reviewers of volume IV some amusement by frequent references to my own memories and experiences, though with less generosity none gave me credit for my purpose – which was precisely to underpin a broad survey of an enormous subject with as much authentic evidence as possible. The present volume ends well past the memory of man or usable oral tradition; but in our collaboration we have tried to combine Victor Morgan’s exceptional knowledge of the byways of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century written sources with my own knowledge of the buildings, colleges and books of early modern Cambridge.

C.N.L.B.

PREFACE

While the analogy is not perfect, a parallel can be drawn between the biography of an individual and the history of an institution. In the representations of the ‘ages of man’ and the ‘steps of life’ that were so popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, characters representing the different ages are shown, variously, as withdrawn and inward to themselves or as being defined by their engagement with the wider world. Here, in examining the life of Cambridge University, for the most part the story is of one such period of active engagement.

   Another institution, in another place, has been able to devote two volumes and dozens of authors to telling its story over the same period. Necessarily, this more modest offering has had to be more selective and more thematic. The dominant theme is the relationship between the University and the wider society of which it was part. It has selected itself and it has done so for two reasons. The first is to do with where we are now in terms of our understanding of the wider historical context. The second is to do with the nature of the period.

   Any history is itself the history of the moment of its doing, and the present moment is one in which we enjoy the fruits of that efflorescence of historical curiosity that had its roots in the mid-1960s. This volume attempts to place the history of the university within the context of at least some of the understandings that we now have as a result of that revivification of historical inquiry. While attempting to attend to the quiddities and quirks of the places and people gathered on the banks of the Cam it also broaches upon such things as the royal Court, provincial society, the social order, parliament, urban history, intellectual endeavour and religious thought and practice. In attempting this broad purview it cannot but be that much more imperfect than a more constricted and inward-looking project might have been, in and of itself. But it is what the moment demands. In time others will replace it with the insights brought to the history of the university by the concerns of their moment.

   Incidentally, it will be gratifying if what is said here goes some way to reassert the status of institutional history as a genre. Much of the impulse for the growth of the ‘new’ history to which allusion has just been made arose as a reaction to the aridities to which political and institutional history can too easily degenerate. Perhaps, after all this time, we need to consider the possibility of a new type of institutional history: one that infuses the history of the institution with an understanding of the broader context but also one that attempts to gauge the impact of the institution on the shaping of that context.

   The second reason for the approach adopted here is simply that this is a period when the two English universities were drawn ever more closely into relationships with the central institutions of the state while also and in a variety of ways being tied more intimately to a diversifying kaleidoscope of provincial societies. At the same time the Reformation and Renaissance impulses projected them into a continent-wide traffic of ideas. Related to these considerations is the issue of the balance of the relationship between the institution and its context. To what extent does the institution place its imprint on the wider society and how far does the wider society intrude its values and ‘style’ into the institution, possibly subverting some of its core purposes in the process?

   These questions also have implications for how we do institutional history. The danger is that if we chronicle only the internal doings of the institution we will not be able properly to judge the significance of those activities. Thus, in essence, the argument adopted here is that between – roughly – the 1560s and the 1680s the English universities were remarkably influential in setting the tone for the learned, pedantic, latinate culture that then prevailed. Thereafter, and contrary to much received opinion, Cambridge continued to generate much lively intellectual endeavour. However, an appreciation of that endeavour has to be tempered by a realisation that by then much of the action was elsewhere. That ‘elsewhere’ was an emergent metropolitan-based, cosmopolitan-orientated culture that favoured wit above sagaciousness. For, as a primary source of the pedantic, ‘Jacobethan’ culture, Cambridge was swept up in the consequences of a reaction to what was a broad dismissal of ‘pedantry’ – a word that when used abusively implied more than simply a style of academic practice. In this it was one of the victims of that broader reordering of thinking and doing that we might term the ‘English Resolution’ of the late seventeenth century.

   In writing this book I have engaged many obligations. As best as I can recall these are recorded in the acknowledgements. However, here I wish to record my profound gratitude to the General Editor of the series in which this volume appears. Christopher Brooke has done far more than a General Editor should have to do in order to ensure that it has got to press without – as he clearly feared – another fifteen years of gestation. In bringing an outsider’s eye and an outsider’s interests to the history of the institution to which he and others like him are devoted I hope that in my judgements I have not been too unkind to the object of their affections. For, in the final judgement, in the moving and stirring times recounted here, the university was a doer and a mover, as even again it is in these latter days.

Victor Morgan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been aided over many years by kindly advice in editorial meetings from William Davies and Peter Searby; by deeply valued support and help from William Davies and many of his colleagues in the Cambridge University Press, especially Frances Brown in copy-editing, in production Alison Powell, and Barbara Hird who has made the index; and by the resources and the generous help of the staff of the Cambridge University Library and University Archives, the Library of the University of East Anglia, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Public Record Office, the Institute of Historical Research, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Lambeth Palace Library, and the Libraries and Archives of several Cambridge colleges, especially Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Gonville and Caius, Jesus, St John’s, Trinity and Trinity Hall. We owe a particular debt in the University Archives to the late Heather Peak and Dorothy Owen, and to Elisabeth Leedham-Green, Patrick Zutshi and Jacky Cox; and in the Manuscript Room also to Godfrey Waller; in Emmanuel to Janet Morris, Sarah Bendall and Frank Stubbings; in Gonville and Caius College to Philip Grierson, Jeremy Prynne and their colleagues; in St John's College to Malcolm Underwood; in Trinity College to David McKitterick and Jonathan Smith; in Trinity Hall to Sandra Raban; in the UEA Library to David Palmer and his staff of the Inter-Library Loan service. Chapter 2 owes much to the generous help of Hugh Richmond.

   Victor Morgan wishes especially to thank Hassell Smith and Robert Ashton for the inspiration and support from which his researches have sprung. He thanks the Princeton University Press for permission to reproduce the article on which chapter 6 is based; and the authors of the theses listed in the bibliography for allowing their works to be cited. He is grateful to the marquess of Salisbury, the earl of Iveagh and the Marquis Townshend for the use of unprinted material in their possession.

   We are both deeply indebted to help in word-processing by Edna Pilmer and Rosemary Brooke. We have constantly depended on the support, advice, help and tolerance of our wives, Rosalind Brooke and Jane Key – above all, on their patience, and occasional impatience. Of what we owe to each other, something is said elsewhere.

C.N.L.B.

V.M.

ABBREVIATIONS