In the drawing room of the Master’s Lodge at Cambridge’s largest and most powerful college, Trinity College, hangs a portrait of Elizabeth I, thought to have been painted towards the end of the sixteenth century by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. This painting portrays a full-length, life-size figure standing on a red-covered step before a throne and is said to derive from the Armada Portrait by George Gower which currently hangs in Woburn Abbey. This fine portrayal of Elizabeth symbolizes a long and continuing connection between Cambridge and the Queen that had profound implications for this ancient seat of learning. Cambridge was to consequently benefit very considerably from the interest in its fortunes displayed by Elizabeth and the many powerful members of her Court who previously had been educated at the university.
Cambridge’s connection with the Tudor Court had begun well before the reign of Elizabeth, when Erasmus had paid a number of visits to the university during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. The great Flemish humanist, whose reputation had spread throughout Europe, resided at Queen’s College while he fulfilled the posts of Lady Margaret Reader in Greek and Professor of Divinity. The tower in the south-west corner of Old Court, where he is said to have lived, is traditionally known as Erasmus Tower, while the nearby President’s Lodge is an excellent example of early sixteenth-century architecture. Erasmus much approved of the pretty girls he found in the town, but complained bitterly about the poor quality of the college beer and the penetrating cold and damp of the East Anglian climate. He became friendly with Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, and the presence of someone with such a distinctive reputation in theological studies helped to set in motion the rise of the Protestant faith in England. The seeds of the Reformation germinated at Cambridge in places such as the White Horse Inn, an unlikely meeting place which became a hotbed of Protestant debate, where enthusiastic students such as Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer came to listen and learn about the new doctrine. In time, the fortunes of the university prospered considerably amid the rigorous climate of the Reformation, whereas Oxford was to go into relative decline as numerous Catholic scholars scurried abroad into self-induced exile, subsequently finding employment in such Catholic centres of learning as Louvain, Douai, and the English College at Rome. Many of these former scholars from Oxford were destined to become Jesuits; some, such as Edmund Campion, eventually returned to England and became martyrs, dying for their cause at Tyburn.
Today, Cambridge contains a considerable amount of Tudor architecture while Oxford remains predominately medieval in appearance. Erasmus noted that the ‘New Learning’ flourished at Cambridge, a fresh approach to scholarship born of the Renaissance, wherein medieval concepts were replaced by more modern thinking, a discipline which was wholeheartedly embraced by Elizabeth while still a young princess. The ‘New Learning’ centred on St John’s College, Cambridge, where there resided a particularly brilliant group of intellectuals, among them Sir John Cheke, the leading Greek scholar of the day, Roger Ascham and William Grindal, both destined to become tutors to the impressionable young Princess Elizabeth. This was the time ‘when the great scholars of St John’s taught Cambridge and King Edward, Greek’. Cheke also had William Cecil as a pupil who was later to marry Cheke’s sister, Mary. As a young student Cecil had been so keen on his studies that he paid a college servant to wake him every morning at four o’clock, even in the darkest depths of winter. William Cecil sent his son Robert to St John’s, and his three young wards, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Southampton, were enrolled next door at Trinity College, where Nicholas Bacon had once studied and where he in turn sent his two sons, Anthony and Francis, to study law.
The majority of the key members of the Queen’s Privy Council, such as Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Thomas Smith, had all studied at Cambridge, as had her major financial adviser, Sir Thomas Gresham, a former undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, while the two greatest Elizabethan lawyers, Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, had been at Trinity at the same time as the Earl of Essex, who was also a member of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. No wonder the eminent twentieth-century Elizabethan historian A.L. Rowse was to comment that the Queen could be regarded as a ‘Cambridge figure’1 – and Rowse was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford!
Nearly all the most prominent figures in the Church throughout Elizabeth’s reign eminated from Cambridge University rather than Oxford. This influence had originally begun with John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who was later to be executed by Elizabeth’s father for speaking out against Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his traumatic break from Rome. Fisher had previously been Master of Michaelhouse, a college which Henry was to combine with King’s Hall in order to form Trinity College. Fisher had been instrumental in persuading Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother, to found St John’s College and later Christ’s College as well. Her distinctive coat of arms with their dramatic mythical beasts remain above the main entrance of both colleges today. Fisher’s presence at Cambridge had begun a trend of leading clerics occupying key posts at this university; Bishop Nicholas Ridley had been an undergraduate at Pembroke and was later to be elected a Fellow of that College. Thomas Cranmer studied at Jesus College and John Whitgift was Master of Trinity as well as Regius Professor of Divinity and Vice-Chancellor of the University. Edward Grindal was Master of Pembroke. Thus all three men who the Queen successively appointed as Archbishops of Canterbury during her reign came from Cambridge: first Parker, then Grindal, who had previously been Bishop of London, and finally Whitgift, who was by the Queen’s side when she died at Richmond in 1603.
Cambridge was at the very heart of the new religious doctrines sweeping across Europe, firstly Protestantism, then the more extreme beliefs of Presbyterianism and Puritanism. These radical theologies were to have a profound effect on all those Cambridge men who later occupied such influential positions on the Queen’s Privy Council. They in turn influenced the political and religious thinking of the English Queen and were to have considerable effect on the development of the Church of England. Cambridge had also provided the initial battleground in the ideological war between Protestantism and Puritanism. Feelings often ran high between over-excited rival groups of students: all the windows of Trinity College Chapel, a place of worship originally founded by Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary, were smashed by Puritans in 1565. At this time one of the most influential men at Cambridge concerning religious issues was Thomas Cartwright, a Fellow of Trinity College and a fanatical leader of the Presbyterians, who advocated the abolition of both the bishops and the prayer book service.
Thomas Cartwright was vigorously opposed in these extremist views by John Whitgift, at that time the Master of Trinity. Their intense debate became so ferocious that at times it represented a form of single-handed combat; their titanic struggle ended with Cartwright losing his Fellowship and Whitgift being summoned by the Queen to be appointed firstly Bishop of Worcester and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury. Cartwright lost his position as a Fellow at Trinity because he refused to take Holy Orders, at that time a mandatory requirement for all Fellows of the college. Fellows were also not allowed to be married and were required to remain celibate, a condition that continued at Trinity until Victorian times, although Isaac Newton was permitted to marry by Elizabeth’s successor James I. G.M. Trevelyan, Master of Trinity between 1940 and 1951, was later to say ‘that the great struggle of Anglican and Puritan, in which a man from Sidney Sussex was one day to take a hand, may almost be said to have originated, certainly to have been rehearsed, in the chambers and the chapel of Trinity’.2 The man from Sidney Sussex was of course Oliver Cromwell and a student at that college at the age of seventeen.
The next great Master of Trinity was Thomas Nevile, formerly Dean of Canterbury. He was appointed by an ageing Elizabeth to the Mastership in 1593. Nevile instigated the massive building programme that made the college into what it is today. His Great Court, begun towards the end of the sixteenth century, remains one of the most spectacular sights to be seen in the whole of the university.
Elizabeth selected Matthew Parker to be her first Archbishop of Canterbury and entrusted him with the vital task of putting into practice the religious principles that would establish the Anglican Church of England. To assist him in this venture Parker in turn appointed a considerable number of new bishops, most of whom came from Cambridge. Thus the twin pillars of Elizabeth’s kingdom, her Council and her Church, were dominated by the men of Cambridge and policies and practices of the nation were heavily influenced by the current philosophies of that university. In Henry VIII’s time, the two most powerful men in the kingdom, Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, had both come from Oxford University, as indeed had Queen Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Pole, who, conveniently for Elizabeth, died at the same time as the last Catholic monarch to occupy the English throne. In Elizabeth’s time, Cambridge was firmly in the ascendancy and relatively few of the influential men of that era emanated from Oxford.
Cambridge’s influence on the Queen and her kingdom multiplied as the power brokers who had once been members of the university tended to favour their own kind: Grindal succeeded Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury largely because he had been recommended to the Queen by William Cecil and it was Cecil who persuaded Elizabeth to appoint Francis Walsingham as her Principal Secretary in the Council. When Walsingham died, Cecil convinced the Queen that his son, Robert, like his father a former law student at St John’s, should be Walsingham’s replacement as Secretary of State.
The Cambridge influence also extended into the cultural activities of the nation. Marlowe, Spenser, Nashe and Greene, that formidable quartet of poets, had all previously been Cambridge students. Edmund Spenser was successful in attracting the Queen’s patronage and introduced the cult of ‘Gloriana’ when he wrote The Faerie Queene, a theatrical work which greatly influenced the public perception of Elizabeth during the second half of her reign. These poets were soon to be followed by Milton, who received his education at Christ’s College, Cambridge; his epic work Paradise Lost could be said to symbolize the passing of the Elizabethan age.
Cambridge’s influence on Elizabethan England was all-embracing at Court, in Council, in Parliament and in the Church. It extended even into more unorthodox services, such as those provided by the Queen’s official Court Astrologer, Dr John Dee, one of the initial Fellows at Trinity College who had previously been at St John’s. The exceedingly witty courtier, Sir John Harington, the Queen’s godson, had been at Christ’s College, Cambridge, while another of the Queen’s eminent courtiers, George Clifford, the 3rd Earl of Cumberland, who succeeded Sir Henry Lee as her Champion of the Tilt and became a prominent naval commander in the latter part of her reign, had previously been at Trinity College. Lord Henry Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain towards the end of the sixteenth century, had also resided at the college, taking his degree at the age of thirteen.
In turn, Cambridge was to considerably benefit from its high profile throughout Elizabeth’s reign. In addition to Thomas Nevile’s extensive work at Trinity, Sir Walter Mildmay, a highly effective Lord Chancellor, had studied at Christ’s and founded the new Emmanuel College, while the widow of the long-serving Privy Councillor, the Earl of Sussex, endowed Sidney Sussex College. The Second Court at St John’s was financed by Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, the daughter of Bess Hardwick. The Second Court’s Tudor Long Gallery, currently the Senior Common Room, remains one of Cambridge’s most impressive interiors with an elaborate plastered ceiling nearly one hundred feet long and dating from 1600. Cloister Court at Jesus College dates from the sixteenth century, as does the First Court at Magdalene, constructed in that mellow red brick which became such a fashionable material during that period.
The impact that Cambridge had on Elizabeth and her kingdom and the powerful patronage it received in return had long-lasting benefits. Four hundred years later, Cambridge remains a centre of academic excellence with an undisputed reputation as a major international university. Trinity, founded by Henry VIII, is currently Cambridge’s biggest and most prestigious college, universally regarded for the quality of its scholarship; thus, the Master of Trinity, Professor Amartya Sen, is a recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. The tradition for intellectual genius which began in Tudor times is very much maintained as Henry VIII’s statue guards the Main Gate and Elizabeth’s gazes out across the immaculate lawns of the Great Court, the largest in either Oxford or Cambridge.
The origins of the ‘Establishment’, that mysterious network of power and influence, can be traced to the Elizabethan age. This highly authoritative, yet invisible force, is formed from the aristocracy, the Church, judiciary, the military and academia. It could be said to have had its roots in the days of Cecil, Whitgift, Coke, Bacon and Cumberland. Then, as now, educational background is one of the key factors that creates a common bond, a meeting of minds, a unified sense of purpose binding its members together. Today the term ‘old school tie’ is a well-known phrase – in Elizabethan times there was no such item in a gentleman’s wardrobe but eminent public schools such as Eton, Harrow, St Paul’s and Winchester already existed. The major educational impetus was to be found at Cambridge and so many of the great men of Elizabeth’s reign originated from that centre of learning set among the remote fens of eastern England.
In the second half of the sixteenth century, just as today, the Establishment was a complex, mysterious web, essentially a predominantly masculine society with a female monarch at its centre. In the late twentieth century, the heads of the Church, the armed forces, the judiciary and academia surprisingly still remain largely a male prerogative. Although club-like in nature, the Establishment has never been a place for which membership can be applied: there is no rule book, no list of members, not even any firm evidence that it even exists. Yet it remains a major force in English society, seemingly oblivious to political, historical or social change, just as it was in Elizabethan England, where personalities such as Sir Walter Ralegh tried exceedingly hard to gain entry into this exclusive inner world but never succeeded. Ralegh was an Oxford man. The Queen and the Elizabethan Establishment definitely appeared to be coloured light, Cambridge, blue.