4
Royalist Gown, Puritan Town
When civil war broke out in August 1642, Charles I, fleeing London, established his capital in Oxford, where many Cambridge men rallied to him. The university itself sent the King neither cash nor kind, but five Cambridge colleges did. From Queens’ and Peterhouse more was sent by individuals than by the colleges as institutions, while Emmanuel’s entire contribution came from its Master, Dr Richard Holdsworth (1590–1649), who was also the Vice-Chancellor.
Cambridge, whose own Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), would become Parliament’s supreme war leader, was deep in Puritan country and became the headquarters of the Eastern Association – an alliance of the five East Anglian counties which provided Parliament’s core support. At Cromwell’s direction Cambridge townsfolk were armed, and the city fortified with ditches. The Cam’s wooden bridges were dismantled to tighten control over traffic, and the decayed castle was re-occupied and re-fortified. Colleges were ordered to quarter troops and had their property plundered under the blanket justification of ‘sequestration’. King’s College chapel was used as a stable and barracks. The remains of charred chicken bones, cards and dice uncovered during alterations in the 1960s suggest that the soldiers of ‘the godly’ weren’t worthy of the name in their off-duty hours.
Royalist heads of houses were dismissed, and some imprisoned – those of St John’s, Jesus and Queens’ were sent to the Tower of London. John Cosin (1594–1672), Master of Peterhouse, fled abroad. By 1643 eleven heads of colleges had been forced out. When the Commonwealth was established after the execution of the King in 1649 three more went for refusing to pledge allegiance to it. No fewer than seven new heads of houses were drawn from that Puritan stronghold, Emmanuel. By the time Parliament had completed its purge more than 200 fellows had gone, half the entire total.
Purging the ungodly meant not only persons but also premises. Usually the ‘purification’ of places of worship of ‘Popish’ practices, by removing altar rails and images, was done by churchwardens, or more destructively, by soldier zealots; but in Cambridge, uniquely, this was the work of a specific appointee, who, also uniquely, carefully recorded his activities relating to ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’. A Suffolk farmer’s son, William Dowsing (1596–1668), appointed Provost Marshal of the Eastern Association in August 1643, in December was ordered to ‘cleanse’ Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Dowsing was at Cambridge from 20 December to 2 January, visiting 16 college chapels and 14 parish churches. St Mary the Less lost 60 images. St John’s, Jesus and Christ’s all lost statues of their sacred patrons which adorned their gatehouses. Dowsing’s notes reveal that he believed his ‘work’ contributed directly to the victories of Parliament’s armies. His elation evaporated after the war when, deeply disillusioned by divisions between the victors and the abuses perpetrated by the self-styled ‘godly’, Dowsing returned to rural obscurity.
Securely under Parliamentary control, Cambridge was spared the horrors of combat, although a royalist incursion in August 1645, reaching nearby Huntingdon, provoked temporary panic and flight. Mostly, however, Cambridge suffered only the inevitable unpleasantness of a military occupation. The city’s fortifications were dismantled by the winter of 1645 and the quartering of soldiers in colleges was finally discontinued in 1652.
There were even some positive developments. The completion in 1651 of the Denver Sluice was a landmark in the drainage of the Fens, opening up new areas for cultivation. For Cambridge, however, the downside was a lowering of the level of the Cam, necessitating the use of smaller boats, thus diminishing the town’s role as an inland port. In 1653 the first public coach service to London was inaugurated from the Devil’s Tavern, then on the present site of the Senate House. The journey usually took around seven hours in good weather.
Hobson's Conduit
John Evelyn, visiting Cambridge in 1654, was distinctly unimpressed – ‘the whole town is situate in a low, dirty, unpleasant place, the streets ill-paved, the air thick and infected by the fens, nor are its churches (of which St Mary’s is the best) anything considerable in compare to Oxford.’ The library at King’s was ‘too narrow’, St Catharine’s ‘a mean structure’, its chapel ‘meanly erected, as is the library’. The Schools were ‘very despicable’. Evelyn’s only praise was grudging – ‘The Mercat place of Chambridg is very ample and remarkable for old Hobson’s the pleasant Carrier’s beneficence of a fountain’ – or backhanded – ‘Trinity College is said by some to be the fairest quadrangle of any university in Europe, but in truth is far inferior to that of Christ Church, in Oxford.’
Restoration
At Cambridge the Restoration of the status quo ante brought changes in both personnel and the appearance of the city. Bridges over the Cam were rebuilt and the landscaping of ‘the Backs’ was begun. In college chapels altar rails and organs were restored. St John’s paid £11 for the statue of St John the Evangelist that still adorns its main entrance. Samuel Pepys, attending Sunday service at King’s in July 1661, was greatly struck by the contrast with a decade before – ‘the schollers in their surplices at the service with the organs – which is a strange sight to what it used in my time to be here’. The Restoration and its ideological reverberations brought some academic careers to an abrupt end and revived others. It did not, however, revive the appeal of the university as a whole. The average annual number of students matriculating in the early 1660s was 280; by 1700 it had fallen to 190. By 1750 it would be down to 150.
The last of the plague
The ‘Great Plague’ of 1665–6, famously the last to devastate London, eventually reached out as far as Cambridge. Between July 1665 and March 1666, 366 died in the city, 171 recorded as plague victims. A second outbreak (June 1666 – January 1667) was even worse, at least for the townsfolk – ‘All the Colledges (God be praised) are and have continued without any Infection of the Plague’. Most of their residents, like the young Isaac Newton fled their homes and took refuge in the countryside. The town, however, was devastated, with almost 600 dying at home and another 155 in the pesthouse. Mass graves on Midsummer Common received the corpses.
Casualty of conscience
The civil wars wrecked many academic careers; others were destroyed by the Restoration. John Ray (1627–1705) is now honoured for establishing ‘the species’ as the fundamental category for classifying nature. Posthumously hailed as a founding father of British botany and for establishing zoology as a systematic discipline, Ray enjoyed little security or reputation in his lifetime. The son of a village blacksmith and a herbalist, at Trinity Ray taught Greek and mathematics, mastered Hebrew and became an effective preacher. But his personal passion was for plants, which he collected and categorised on summer expeditions when released from his duties as junior dean and college steward. In 1660 Ray published his Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium, the first ever comprehensive catalogue of the plants of an English locality, identifying 626 varieties found around Cambridge. Shortly afterwards, he, and a dozen other fellows, refused on grounds of conscience to take the oath of submission to the Restoration’s religious settlement. Resigning his college position, Ray wrote ruefully ‘I shall now cast myself upon Providence and good friends. Liberty is a sweet thing.’ Freed from regular teaching, he undertook a three year botanic odyssey from the Netherlands to Malta. For him this was the equivalent of Darwin’s voyage round the world aboard HMS Beagle, an opportunity to collect data which would take years to digest. Cut off from Cambridge, Ray was at least recognised by election as a fellow of the newly-established Royal Society. In 1680 he settled in his Essex birthplace, Black Notley. Less than a day’s ride from Cambridge, it was still, he felt, ‘barren of wits.’ He nevertheless produced a three-volume history of plants, plus major works on birds, fishes and insects and collected data on fossils, mining, proverbs and dialects.
Ray’s bust, by L F Roubiliac (1705–1762), is in the Wren Library at Trinity College. In 1942 a masterly appreciation, John Ray: Naturalist, was published by Charles Raven (1885–1964), Master of Christ’s and Regius Professor of Divinity, himself a pioneer in the art of photographing birds in flight. Doubtless Raven felt a sympathy for Ray’s career, wrecked on the rocks of principle; his own pacifism during World War Two and his pioneering support for the ordination of women cost him high office in the Church of England.
Not until 1724, more than 60 years after Ray’s ejection, did Cambridge finally appoint its first professor of botany. Richard Bradley (1688–1732) was a prolific and popular horticultural writer, but knew neither Latin nor Greek, and failed to lecture or to create the botanic garden he had promised to get his professorship. He died before the creaky university administration could sack him. His successor, the polymath John Martyn (1699–1768), a devoted disciple of Ray, met so little encouragement that he gave up lecturing in 1735 – but hung onto the chair for his son, Thomas (1735–1825), who held it for 63 years, despite leaving Cambridge for good in 1798. It was just as bad in other disciplines. No Regius Professor of History between 1725 and 1773 ever gave a single lecture, and the learned preacher Dr Samuel Ogden (1716–1778), Professor of Geology from 1764 to 1778, freely admitted his complete ignorance of the subject.
‘Whose heart and soul were one’
Such place-bound time-servers contrast strikingly with the careers of alumni who remained devoted to learning and hazarded their lives in service to others. On the north wall of Christ’s College Chapel, a monument dating to 1684 marks the joint grave of Sir John Finch (1626–1682) and Sir Thomas Baines (1622–1680). They met in 1649 and were inseparable thereafter, both qualifying as doctors at Padua and Cambridge and becoming Fellows Extraordinary of the College of Physicians. Finch became an early Fellow of the Royal Society, and Baines Professor of Music at Gresham College in London. Together they served as diplomats in Tuscany and at the court of the Ottoman Sultan, where Finch, after seven dogged years, won confirmation of English merchants’ trading rights and where Baines died. Finch brought Baines’s body back for burial, gave the funeral oration and himself died soon after. A long Latin inscription tells their story.
Self-made man
The archetypal Restoration professional, Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), son of a London tailor, became head of the biggest-spending government department, responsible for the nation’s navy, which, under his energetic administration, more than doubled in size. If Britain was protected by ‘wooden walls’ for two centuries, it was Samuel Pepys who built them. He also became an MP, Master of Trinity House and, as President of the Royal Society, authorised the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia. Pepys was, in the words of fellow diarist, John Evelyn, a friend of 40 years, ‘a very great cherisher of learned men’, including Christopher Wren and John Dryden; but he is still best known for the most famous diary in English history, a racy romp through a turbulent decade, during which he survived London’s last great plague and personally brought news of the Great Fire to King Charles II himself.
As an undergraduate at Magdalene, Pepys was once ‘solemnly admonished’ for being ‘scandalously overserved with drink’ but he also found time to learn shorthand from Shelton’s Tachygraphy, published by Cambridge University Press. This later proved invaluable, not only for his famous Diary but for his role as a busy bureaucrat. Indeed, shorthand became an obsession, leading him to collect 32 textbooks and pamphlets on the subject. Pepys retained a lifelong affection for Magdalene, often passing through Cambridge en route to family property at Brampton in Huntingdonshire. In 1667, returning to show the sights to his wife, he was cheered to see ‘at our College of Magdalene the posts new-painted’; but, on another visit, in May 1668, was greatly irritated when he ‘lay very ill by reason of drunken scholars making a noise all night’, although he cheered up after visiting the buttery where he ‘drank my bellyful of their beer, which pleased me as the best I ever drank’.
Raised to eminence by industry and integrity, Pepys fell through the malice of enemies, even enduring a spell in the Tower; but his last 14 years were spent in tranquil retirement, meticulously ordering his superb collection of books, maps, papers and pamphlets. This numbered 2,903 volumes, housed in 12 bookcases, built by the Admiralty’s own master carpenter. Dying childless, Pepys left his fortune and library, to his nephew, upon whose death in 1726 it passed to Magdalene, where it remains intact. In 1677 Pepys had partly funded the new buildings, which, fittingly, now house the Pepys Library, an unforeseeable outcome which would doubtless have given him much satisfaction.
The celebrated diary, running to 1,250,000 words, in six bound volumes, was carefully preserved but not intended for publication, not least because it was written in coded shorthand with more confessional passages rendered into French, Latin, Greek or Spanish. Not until the successful publication of Evelyn’s diary in 1818 were four years spent deciphering and transcribing Pepys’s. Since its publication in 1825 Pepys’s diary has established itself as ‘the best bedside book in the English language’, according to Sir Arthur Bryant. A portrait of Pepys, by Sir Peter Lely, is in the Pepysian library; another, by the prolific Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723) (another friend!) is in Magdalene’s dining-hall.
Cantabrigia Illustrata
Born in Danzig and trained in Holland, the artist David Loggan (1634–1692) arrived in England as a teenager. In 1669 he was appointed official engraver to the University of Oxford and in 1674 issued a work, with twelve plates, illustrating various academic costumes, followed in 1675 by a work with forty plates, showing the architecture of the colleges. Loggan’s treatment of Cambridge began in 1676 with his publication of Wren’s designs for the new library at Trinity College. Cantabrigia Illustrata, a companion volume to the Oxford project, also took more than a decade and was probably published in 1690, the year in which Loggan was appointed engraver to the University of Cambridge and awarded £50 for his efforts.
Cantabrigia Illustrata contains a portrait of the Chancellor, Charles, Duke of Somerset; a plan of the city; two general views of Cambridge; a view of Eton (the feeder school to King’s College) and 26 views of the colleges and public buildings. Packed with lively detail the volume indeed constitutes, in the words of a Victorian enthusiast, ‘not merely a record of the architecture but of the life of the period’. Plate IX, for example, shows a grave being dug in the churchyard of Great St Mary’s, the skull and bones of a previous occupant casually strewn nearby. Plate XXV gives a bird’s-eye view over Christ’s College, revealing collegiate self-sufficiency in the form of beehives, a dovecote and an extensive orchard and herb garden. Plate XXIX, showing Trinity College, features the celebrated garden and apartments of Isaac Newton. More distant prospects feature hunters and harvesters, a reminder of the rustic rim which still defined the perimeters of the academic world.
Genius
Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.
Alexander Pope
Britain’s £1 banknote, circulated from 1978 to 1988, bore a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Dressed with uncharacteristic formality in coat and wig, he sits, unsmiling, beneath a blossoming tree, on his knees an open book, with a diagram. Beside him, on a table, are a telescope and prism – tributes to his work in astronomy and optics. The banknote is dominated by an enlargement of the diagram, depicting the planets’ orbits around the sun. Nowadays the £2 coin bears an enigmatic inscription around its edge, ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’, an incomplete quotation from Newton – ‘If I have seen further is it by standing on the shoulders of giants’ – a valedictory reference to such illustrious predecessors as Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes. Tributes on the nation’s currency are peculiarly appropriate because Newton was, in later life, Master of the Mint, and as such was responsible for introducing coins with milled edges to make counterfeiting and debasement much harder.
Born on Christmas Day, the posthumous son of a Lincolnshire farmer, Newton in youth showed versatility as a carpenter, bricklayer, metalworker and maker of ingenious models. Entering Trinity College as a good Latinist, he was as yet entirely ignorant of ‘natural philosophy’. Despite his mother’s splendid annual income of £700, Newton had to scrape by on £10 a year, working his way through college as a sizar, while devouring books on science. Within less than ten years the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), gave up his seat in Newton’s favour. The inscription on Barrow’s statue (1853) in Trinity’s ante-chapel, however, claims that he had ‘a better title to that position because of his outstanding mathematical discoveries’. Charles II regarded Barrow, astronomer, preacher, wit and former professor of Greek, as the outstanding scholar of the age and appointed him Master of Trinity.
Newton’s early Cambridge career was interrupted by prolonged absence when plague emptied the university. Returning home, Newton formulated his basic notions of the differential and integral calculus and began experiments revealing that white light was in reality composed of the fusion of many colours. He also famously sat under an apple tree whose fruit, dropping – the tale varies – onto his head, hand or book, gave him his fundamental insight into the nature of gravity. In physics a ‘newton’ is the amount of force needed to move an object of one kilogram so that it accelerates at one metre per second. As a unit of weight a newton is equal to 100 grams – roughly a medium-sized apple. Newton spent 35 years at Trinity in rooms on E staircase, overlooking the Great Court and, on the street side, a small, walled garden set aside for his own exclusive use. The garden, to the right of the main college entrance, now features an apple tree, planted some half century ago, from a cutting taken from the original at Newton’s Lincolnshire home. The variety, pleasingly named ‘Flower of Kent’, is not, apparently, very nice to eat.
In 1687 Newton published his magnum opus, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton’s theories of gravitation and inertia and ‘three laws of motion’ appeared to contemporaries to provide an elegant and comprehensive explanation of the workings of the physical universe, from the movements of the heavens to the principles governing the physics of everyday life. The Principia immediately established Newton’s reputation as a scholar of European standing and coincidentally made him a figure of consequence within the university at a crucial moment.
A fierce Protestant, Newton was one of the leaders of the Cambridge resistance to James II’s efforts to interfere in university affairs. He was, in fact, on thin ice as a defender of orthodoxy, being a closet socinian – a denier of the doctrine of the Trinity – which was ironic for a professor at Trinity College. Elected MP for Cambridge, Newton spoke only once in Parliament, to ask for a window to be opened.
Newton was eventually persuaded to leave Cambridge for London. As Warden, then Master, of the Mint, Newton received a massive £2,000 a year. The appointment was supposed to be a sinecure in recognition of his scientific eminence but Newton threw himself into the work, masterminding a major recoinage and becoming the terror of London counterfeiters, many of whom he gleefully sent to the gallows. The most celebrated mathematician of the age, however, was so hopeless at simple arithmetic he had to have his accounts done for him. In 1705 Newton was knighted, the first scientist to receive this honour.
Absent-minded, antisocial and a vegetarian, Newton was fonder of pets than of people. (He is credited with inventing the cat-flap.) As President of the Royal Society he presided over its meetings like an unpredictable volcano, often dozing but sometimes tyrannising over lesser mortals. Famously quarrelsome, Newton fell out with his former collaborator Robert Hooke (1635–1703), with John Flamsteed (1646–1719), the Astronomer Royal, and even with Samuel Pepys. His most famous quarrel was a sustained vendetta with Leibniz (1646–1716) over which of them had invented calculus. Modern scholarship has established that Newton did first – but also that Leibniz did so, if later, quite independently.
Academically Newton’s later life was, from the perspective of modern science, relatively barren. He spent some time elaborating editions of his earlier works, but even more on perfecting a chronology of the ancient world, dabbling with alchemy and obsessively pursuing the hidden meanings of the Book of Daniel – hence J M Keynes’s summary of Newton as ‘the last of the magicians’. Like Keynes, Newton dabbled in investments and lost £11,000 in the South Sea Bubble debacle of 1720. Like Keynes, however, he still died rich, indeed, very rich, leaving a fortune of more than £60,000.
Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey; his flamboyant monument, designed by William Kent (1685–1748) and executed by the Flemish master Peter Scheemakers (1691–1781), features terrestrial and celestial globes for his work as an astronomer and coins in reference to his role as Master of the Mint. It also has the dubious honour of featuring in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Voltaire (1694–1778), then in exile in London, attended Newton’s funeral in person and subsequently popularised his work in French, making it accessible to a general European readership and establishing Newton as virtually the Father of the Enlightenment.
In an uncharacteristic outburst of modesty Newton referred to his career as that of ‘a boy playing on the sea-shore … while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
Succeeding generations remained in awe of Newton’s achievements. Trinity’s tribute, in its ante-chapel, is a superb statue of 1755 by the French master Roubiliac, commissioned by Robert Smith (1689–1768), Master of Trinity (1742–68), as part of his campaign to assert the intellectual pre-eminence of the college. Referring to his work on optics, Newton is shown holding the prism he bought at Stourbridge Fair. The Latin inscription on the plinth is Lucretius’s tribute to the philosopher Epicurus – ‘Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit’ (‘who surpassed the human race with his genius’). There is also a bust by Roubiliac in the Library and a stained-glass window by Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727–1785) which, with masterly disregard for chronology, shows Francis Bacon (1561–1626), dead before Newton was born, presenting Newton to George III (1738–1820), not born until after Newton died. A generation later it was Roubiliac’s depiction that inspired Wordsworth’s tribute, in The Prelude, to
… Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
The Library at Trinity also possesses Newton’s walking-stick, while his death mask is at King’s. The computerised catalogue of the University Library is named after Newton, as is a pub at the top of Castle Hill. The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences was opened in purpose-built premises in 1992. Appropriately this also has its own offshoot of the apple tree at Woolsthorpe and the original maquette of the statue of Newton which stands outside the British Library in London.
Self-made man
While Newton was revolutionising the understanding of physics throughout Europe, a foreign-born contemporary laid the foundations of chemistry in Cambridge. Born in Verona, Giovanni Vigani (1650–1712) travelled widely from Spain to the Netherlands, studying mining, metallurgy and pharmacy, but never acquired any formal qualifications. Settling in Cambridge around 1683, Vigani began teaching on a purely private basis, attracting pupils by his growing reputation and eventually developing links with Queens’ and Trinity. In 1703 the Senate recognised Vigani as the university’s first Professor of Chemistry, explicitly acknowledging his track record of 20 years’ teaching. Vigani’s preference for systematic experimentation rather than abstract theorising may be partly explained by the fact that he never mastered English competently, despite having an English wife. This did not, apparently, prevent him from telling ‘a loose story about a nun’, which cost him the friendship of the ultra-prim Newton.
Self-help in science
Vagani was certainly known to William Stukeley (1687–1765), who entered Corpus to study ‘Physick’ (medicine) and whose experience shows how a scientific education might be haphazardly acquired at that time. Armed with Ray’s ‘catalogus’, Stukeley forayed into the Cambridgeshire countryside ‘simpling’ (collecting medicinal herbs to make ‘simples’ or home remedies), collecting fossils, butterflies and frogs and stealing dogs and other animals for dissection. Stukeley also benefited from the teaching of Dr Stephen Hales, FRS (1677–1761) a Corpus don and distinguished botanist and physiologist, who introduced him to ‘the doctrine of Optics & Telescopes & Microscopes and some Chymical Experiments’. He also knew Dr Addenbrooke and John Waller, later parson of Grantchester (d.1718), who performed ‘Philosophical Experiments in Pneumatic Hydrostatis Engines and instruments’. In 1706 Stukeley’s tutor assigned him a college room as a laboratory ‘which had a very strange appearance … the wall … hung round with Guts … & all sorts of Chymical Implements’. By his own admission Stukeley ‘sometimes surprised the whole College with a sudden explosion,’ and claimed ‘I cur’d a lad once of an ague with it by fright’. He also distilled his own hooch which ‘I used to distribute … with a plentiful hand to my Tutors’. Stukeley himself became a Fellow of the Royal Society, an early Freemason, a vicar and, as a founder of the Society of Antiquaries, put forward the entirely erroneous idea that Stonehenge was the work of Druids.
Wren
The late 17th century saw great advances in the arts as well as the sciences. The first project completed by England’s greatest – and entirely self-taught – architect was the chapel of Pembroke College (1663–5), the gift of his uncle, Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely. Though modest in scale, this was an architectural milestone as it was the first chapel at either university to be entirely without Gothic features – its design was derived from Sebastiano Serlio’s L’Architettura (1537–51), an Italian treatise already more than a century old.
The son of the Dean of Windsor, Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was hailed by Evelyn as ‘this miracle of youth’ while still an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was a member of the scientific circle which became the Royal Society. Until he became Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford at 29, Wren’s interests ranged from medicine, mathematics and meteorology to hydraulics, ship-design and etching. From then onwards, architecture dominated Wren’s life.
Wren’s second major Cambridge project was a new chapel for Emmanuel College (1668–74), sponsored by a former Master and future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft (1617–1693). The basic conception echoes the chapel at Peterhouse, where Wren’s uncle, Bishop Matthew, had once been Master. Its most dominant feature is the central pedestal with a clock breaking through the pediment to support a jaunty cupola.
Wren’s Cambridge masterpiece is the 150 foot long library he built between 1676–90, without a fee, for Trinity College, establishing an entirely new standard for collegiate architecture in Cambridge and beyond. Derived from an unrealised plan for a combined Senate House and University Library, its upper, Ionic storey contains the actual library; the lower, Doric level being an arcade or stoa. To the onlooker the two seem of equal height, but to accommodate tall bookcases and long, light-giving windows, the upper floor is much higher, the difference cunningly but simply concealed by the solid upper sections of the cloister arches. Supplying a fourth side to complete Nevile’s Court, the main façade of Wren’s library is surmounted by four statues representing the academic disciplines of Divinity, Law, Physic and Mathematics, carved by the Danish sculptor, Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630–1700), for £80. The interior boasts exquisite limewood carvings (1691–3) of fruit, flowers and heraldic devices by the Anglo-Dutch master, Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721). Wren himself designed the library fittings, observing that ‘the disposition of the shelves along the walls and breaking out from the walls must needs prove very convenient and graceful and the best way for the students will be to have a little square table in each cell, with two chairs’, which he also designed. Trinity was thus the first library to have bookcases standing along the walls as well as at right angles to them. The rear façade of the library, greatly admired by visitors approaching the college from the Backs, is much plainer, because it was built when the Cam was a working waterway, not a landscape feature.
The treasures of Trinity Library now include a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, letters by Michael Faraday, David Livingstone, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson, Wittgenstein’s notebooks and the original manuscript of A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, not to mention Newton’s own personal library.
Critical visitors
Between 1685 and 1703 the indefatigable Celia Fiennes, riding side saddle and often alone, visited every county in England, keeping a journal of her travels, eccentric in spelling but lively and opinionated. Cambridge got the Fiennes treatment in 1697. Like Evelyn, she was less than bowled over – ‘the Buildings are old and indifferent, the Streets mostly narrow’. Like Evelyn she compared Trinity unfavourably with Christ Church but she liked the river – ‘they have fine stone bridges over it and gates that lead to fine walks’ – and was very taken with Wren’s Library and King’s College Chapel.
Street-wise Ned Ward (1667–1731), who ran a London pub, poured on a full blast of metropolitan scorn:
The Buildings in many parts of the Town were so little and so low, that they look’d more like Huts for Pigmies, than Houses for Men; and their very Shop-keepers seem’d to me to be so well-siz’d to their Habitations, that they appeared like so many Monkeys in their Diminutive Shops mimicking the Trade of London … the Town …. in plain Terms is a Corporation of Ignorance, hem’d round with Arts and Sciences, a Nest of Fools, that dwell on the Superfluities of the Learned…
The German bibliophile Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683–1734) came to Cambridge in 1710 specifically to visit the libraries. His guide was the Italian Domenico Ferrari (1685–1744), who spoke to him in French, and ‘told us of the state of this university, which is certainly very bad.’ Scholarly but supercilious, Uffenbach thought much the same of most of the libraries. The University Library he found in ‘utter confusion’ and Emmanuel’s the same, while at Magdalene ‘all the books, with hardly one single exception, are entirely overgrown with mould’. At Peterhouse the library was housed in ‘a poor room of moderate size … The manuscripts … were so buried in dust, that the librarian was forced to send for a towel, for me to wear as a pinafore, that I might not dirty myself too much.’ Corpus Christi ‘one of the ugliest colleges … lying entirely among the houses’ did, he conceded, have ‘the choicest manuscripts of all’ and the librarian of St John’s was ‘friendly and learned’. The high point was Wren’s library at Trinity, which he praised as
… exceedingly handsome … It could not be handsomer or more convenient … very light, long and well lighted and also highly decorated … no only is the floor inlaid with white and black marble, but also the cases are all of oak, with excellent and very artistic carvings. It is very neat, made like little closets – an excellent device because … you can stow away many more books … and it is good for those who study there as they are not put out by seeing others facing them …
Cambridge itself the disgruntled German dismissed as ‘no better than a village … were it not for the many fine colleges it would be one of the sorriest places in the world.’ He had come to England with the thought of settling, but disliked it so much, Oxford and Cambridge in particular, that he simply went back to Frankfurt.
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) came through Cambridge in the course of gathering material for his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6). A man of many incarnations – journalist, merchant, manufacturer, government spy – Defoe’s take on Cambridge was that of a businessman and moralising Dissenter. Immediately grasping that ‘the trade of the town very much depends’ on the colleges and their residents, he saw that
… this is the surest hold the university may be said to have of the townsmen and by which they secure the dependence of the town upon them, and consequently their submission … ’tis to the honour of the university to say that the governors so well understand their office, and the governed their duty, that here is very little encouragement given to … dancing, gaming, intriguing …
A forceful fellow
Richard Bentley (1662–1742) would exhibit all the steely stubbornness expected from a Yorkshire yeoman. Arriving at Cambridge at just 14, Bentley became a classicist of distinction, bringing a new level of rigour to textual criticism and making determined efforts to reform the university’s disordered press. In 1696 the press, traditionally run as a licensed commercial venture, came under the charge of university-appointed ‘Curators’, who supervised both the business and editorial aspects of its activities, even sharing personally in its financial risks. The press would later secure the services of the famed typographer John Baskerville (1706–1775), whose majestic Folio Bible of 1763 proved a triumph of the printer’s art – if also something of a commercial disaster.
As a preacher, Bentley dazzled congregations by invoking Newtonian thought in defence of orthodox Christian belief. A Fellow of the Royal Society at 30, Bentley became Royal Librarian and chaplain in Ordinary to William III (r.1689–1702) before becoming Master of Trinity and Vice-Chancellor in 1700. As Master he conducted a vendetta with the fellows of his college which, in the words of a contemporary, ‘lasted a year longer than the Peloponnesian War’. Tyrannical in disposition, abusive in manner and high-handed in methods, Bentley nevertheless had a worthy aim in view, to make Trinity ‘not only a great college but a miniature university in itself’. He did manage to establish a chemical laboratory and an astronomical observatory and pioneered the introduction of written college examinations but these were limited victories in a campaign against inertia and spite stretching over 38 years, and showed just how much effort over how long a period would be needed to rescue Cambridge from self-indulgent somnolence. A statue of Bentley can be seen on the outside of the chapel of St John’s College, where he had been an undergraduate. Appropriately he stares across St John’s Street at the Divinity School.
Sightless star
In 1710 William Whiston (1667–1752), Newton’s successor, was sacked from the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics for publishing a denial of the Trinity. His successor, Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), had lost both eyes from smallpox as a baby but had nevertheless mastered Latin, Greek and French and was an accomplished flautist. Whiston brought him to Christ’s to teach an informal class on Newtonian science. Appointed to Newton’s chair on the express intervention of Queen Anne, Saunderson spent eight hours a day teaching and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1719. Saunderson was also acutely perceptive in dealing with individual students and dismissed the young Horace Walpole within a fortnight – ‘Young man, it is cheating you to take your money: believe me, you can never learn these things: you have no capacity for them.’ A two volume edition of Saunderson’s Algebra was published posthumously in 1740 by the University Press.
Stourbridge Fair
Stourbridge Fair was a commercial institution of national importance long after comparable gatherings had withered away and was almost certainly the inspiration for ‘Vanity Fair’ as depicted by John Bunyan (1628–1688) in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Daniel Defoe gave an enthusiastic account of it in the 1720s, especially impressed by its orderly arrangement as a half mile square, divided into regular streets, with ‘Rows’ for sellers of books, brushes, trunks, cheeses, joinery and lathe-turned woodwork, and ‘Hills’ for the sale of fish, soap and tallow. He was even more impressed by what was on offer:
… scarce any trades are omitted, goldsmiths, toyshops, braziers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers, china-warehouses … all trades that can be named in London, with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops and eating houses innumerable.
Apart from London luxuries, like the celebrated prism Newton bought, there were also the specialities of particular cities, brassware from Birmingham, steelwares from Sheffield and stockings from Leicester. At the heart of the fair was ‘the Duddery’, a square, a hundred yards along each side, for the sale of woollens, cottons, rugs, quilts, sacking, ticking, blankets and garments. The second most important trade was in hops – ‘there is scarce any price fixed for hops in England, till they know how they sell at Sturbridge Fair’ – the major dealers converging from Chelmsford in neighbouring Essex, from Canterbury and Maidstone in Kent and from Farnham in Surrey.
Defoe held Stourbridge to be ‘not only the greatest in the whole nation but in the world’, far outstripping the celebrated fairs at Leipzig, Frankfurt, Nuremburg and Augsburg. This claim he made, not on account of its size but its importance for face-to-face dealing:
… wholesale men from London and all parts of England … transact their business wholly in their pocket-books … make up their accounts, receive money chiefly in bills, and take orders: These they say exceed by far the sales of goods actually brought to the fair, and delivered in kind; it being frequent for the London wholesale men to carry back orders from their dealers for £10,000 worth of goods a man … This especially respects those people who deal in heavy goods, as wholesale grocers, salters, brasiers, iron-merchants, wine-merchants …
The great exception was the trade in hops, moved in bulk. Scarcely any hops were cultivated north of the River Trent, so ‘vast quantities’ were taken back into Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire as a return freight on shipping used to bring down wool and textiles from those sheep-rearing and manufacturing counties. All because the Cam was still navigable – ‘all heavy goods are brought even to the fair-field, by water carriage from London and other parts; first to the port of (King’s) Lynn and then in barges up the Ouse, from the Ouse into the Cam, and so … to the very edge of the fair.’
The fairgoers’ spending was a huge cash injection into the local economy. Cambridge, emptied by the university vacation, naturally welcomed lodgers but was quite inadequate to cope with the number of transients so that, as Defoe observed, ‘all the towns around are full; nay, the very barns and stables are turned into inns … to lodge the meaner sort of people’. And all had to be fed, so every morning countryfolk converged on the incomers with eggs, chickens, cheeses, butter and bread. And ‘when the great hurry of wholesale businesses begins to be over, the gentry come in, from all parts of the county round … for their diversion’, spending freely at the booths of the goldsmiths and milliners and strewing loose change for the benefit of the ‘puppet-shows, drolls, rope-dancers and the like’.
Defoe also saw, with surprise, that ‘there are sometimes no less than fifty hackney coaches, which come from London, and ply night and morning to carry the people to and from Cambridge’. Defoe’s sharp-eyed contemporary, Ned Ward, noted that the well-sprung hackney carriages also served another purpose. Observing of the fair’s patrons that ‘their pretence is coming down to meet their customers, though it’s plain by their Loitering, they have little else to do but to Drink, Smoke and Whore and to help support the fair in its Ancient Custom of Debauchery’, Ward recorded that the going rate for a strumpet and her client to hire a hackney for their transaction was one shilling and sixpence – hence the pointed title of his account of Stourbridge as A Step to Stir-Bitch Fair. The last event of all, following the closure of a horse fair, was a series of ‘horse and foot-races, to divert the meaner sort of people only, for nothing considerable is offered … Thus ends the whole fair and in less than a week there is scarce any sign left that there has been such a thing there’.
A century after Defoe saw it, Stourbridge Fair remained a major occasion for the sale of cheese, leatherwares, earthenwares, ironmongery, groceries, woollens and hops, only finally dying in the 1930s.
An embarrassment of riches
In 1709, when Cambridge was recognised as a copyright library with the right to receive a free copy of any book newly published in the kingdom, the university collection ran to some 15,693 books and 658 manuscripts. Shortly afterwards, in recognition of the University’s conspicuous loyalty to the newly-established Hanoverian dynasty during the attempted Jacobite rising of 1715 (on behalf of the exiled Stuart ‘Old Pretender’), ‘James III’, George I (r.1714–27) presented the library with 30,000 books, including the fabulous collection recently bequeathed to the Crown by Dr John Moore (1646–1714), Bishop of Ely. The collection included first editions of Palladio, Shakespeare and Newton and more than 40 volumes produced by the first English printer, William Caxton (c.1422–1491). Ironically, Moore was no scholar but an Episcopal bully who plundered the libraries of his clergy to bolster his personal standing as a patron of learning. Oxford, by contrast, suspected of Jacobite sympathies, had its garrison reinforced.
George I’s actions prompted a famous exchange of versified insults between the two ancient universities. Joseph Trapp (1679–1747), Oxford’s first Professor of Poetry fired the opening salvo:
The King, 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.
Sir William Browne (1692–1774), an eccentric but wealthy Society doctor, riposted on behalf of Cambridge:
The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse,
For Tories own no argument but force;
With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent
For Whigs admit no force but argument.
Not really as good, is it?
The royal windfall provoked discussion of an ambitious building plan, which was entrusted to James Gibbs (1682–1754). Best known for St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, Gibbs was the first British architect to have received professional training in Italy, under the eminent Carlo Fontana. For Cambridge, Gibbs proposed a major complex of library, printing press, senate house and other buildings to constitute a state-of-the-art administrative and ceremonial centre. In the end, only the Senate House was built (1722–30), the first university, as opposed to collegiate, building since the 15th century. Inside is a statue by John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770) of Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset (1662–1748), Chancellor of the University for almost 60 years, memorably described as ‘a well-meaning man of slender understanding’.
Apart from Gibbs’s work, little of architectural note was accomplished in the half century after Wren. At Emmanuel the south range of First Court was rebuilt between 1719 and 1722, renamed Westmoreland Building and refaced with ashlar, as the Old Court at Pembroke had been in 1712 and Trinity Hall would be in 1728–42. Pevsner took this as evidence of a complete lack of appreciation for medieval architecture during this period, and of a preference for face-lifts over innovation or expansion.
The Fellows’ Building at Peterhouse (1736) by gifted amateur architect Sir James Burrough, FSA (1691–1764), Master of Caius, is a notable exception to this generalisation. His Peterhouse project, for which he received £50 and a piece of plate, is praised by Pevsner as ‘a building in the Palladian style purer than any other in Cambridge.’ At Sidney Sussex Burrough was responsible for the bijou classical arch (1762) which now stands in the north-east corner of the garden but was once the main entrance to the college. He also designed the chapel (1763–9) at Clare College, which was completed by his protégé, James Essex.
Addenbrooke’s
Dying in 1719, not yet 40, John Addenbrooke, MD, a Fellow of Catharine Hall, with a reputation for dabbling in necromancy, left £4,500 ‘to erect and maintain a small physical hospital’ for the benefit of Cambridge. Addenbrooke’s Hospital, however, only finally came into being in 1766. Barring the infectious and the incurable, in its first year it treated 106 in-patients and 157 out-patients. Half the subscriptions for its maintenance came from college fellows, who thereby acquired the right to treatment. Local Cambridge stationer and bookbinder John Bowtell (1753–1813) bequeathed a further £7,000 to enlarge the hospital. An enthusiastic and expert bell-ringer, Bowtell also compiled a mammoth history of the town of Cambridge but failed to publish it.
Addenbrooke’s Hospital
Addenbrooke’s hospital was rebuilt in 1864–5 by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877). By then it was being transformed from a merely local facility to a centre of excellence, thanks to two men, both eminent in their profession, the university and the town. Sir George Paget, FRS (1809–1892), a physician at Addenbrooke’s for 45 years, was responsible in 1842 for instituting bedside examinations as part of the medical degree, thereby establishing the UK’s first regular clinical examinations. In the same year Sir George Humphrey, FRS (1820–1896) became the youngest hospital surgeon in Britain. Humphrey was also the first surgeon successfully to remove a tumour from the male bladder and in 1866 established the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology. At 60 he also wrote an excellent guidebook to Cambridge.
The Cambridge poet of today is generally the Oxford Standard Author of tomorrow.
Advertisement, Deighton Bell’s bookshop, 1951
This boast is not without substance – consider Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542, St John’s); Edmund Spenser (c.1552–1599, Pembroke); Robert Herrick (1591–1674, St John’s/Trinity Hall); Andrew Marvell (1621–1678, Trinity Hall); John Dryden (1631–1700, Trinity); Matthew Prior (1664–1721, St John’s); Christopher Smart (Pembroke); Christopher Anstey (Trinity); Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883, Trinity); Siegfried Sassoon (Clare), Rupert Brooke (King’s)and Ted Hughes (1930–1998, Pembroke). Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986, Corpus Christi) is not chiefly remembered as a poet but was sent down for answering Tripos questions in limericks and blank verse. And then there were these chaps …
‘Something understood’
Unrestrained in his flattery of royalty, would-be courtier George Herbert (1593–1633) of Trinity craved the post of University Orator, attained it and was hailed by James I as ‘the jewel of the university’. Disillusioned by experience, however, Herbert resigned in 1627 to restore a decayed church in Huntingdonshire, become an exemplary country parson in Wiltshire and die of tuberculosis at 40. Herbert’s poetry was all published posthumously, some in the form of typographical conceits, forerunners of ‘concrete poetry’, where the arrangement of the words conveys meaning. ‘Easter-Wings’, for instance, is laid out on the page as a butterfly – sideways on. Herbert’s recurrent theme, the soul’s attempt to engage with God as ‘something understood’, has given the title to a long-running BBC radio programme of reflective verse, music and prose. Lines composed by Herbert are engraved on the glass doors through which visitors enter Little St Mary’s:
A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth through it pass, and then the heaven espy.
‘Fame is the spur’
Entering Cambridge at 16, shy, slightly built John Milton (1608–1674) was soon nicknamed ‘the Lady of Christ’s’ in compliment to his delicate looks and a fastidiousness which he regarded as ‘a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness’ – not entirely unjustified for an accomplished organist and a better-than-average fencer, already competent in Latin, Greek, French and Italian and knowing some Hebrew. Milton studied diligently but was openly scornful of the surviving medieval tradition of scholastic disputation in which his personal tutor excelled – which may explain why, in 1626, Milton was briefly rusticated, and may even have been beaten. He returned to take his BA in 1629, the year in which he gave a foretaste of his talent with ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, a talent confirmed in 1631 with ‘l’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. By the time of his MA in 1632 Milton had renounced plans to enter the Church in favour of a literary career. He would become nationally notorious for writing a pamphlet advocating divorce and producing the classic defence of free speech, Areopagitica. He then became a man of great consequence under Cromwell as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, before blindness and obscurity provided the discomforting context for his masterpiece, Paradise Lost.
Gray’s anonymity
‘Far from the madding crowd’, ‘destiny obscure’, ‘useful toil’ – originally neither book nor film titles but all phrases first turned by Thomas Gray (1716–1771) in his best-known work, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, one of the most anthologised of English poems. The Elegy speaks also of ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ and ‘some mute inglorious Milton’ and warns that:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Son of a City of London scrivener (violently abusive) and a milliner (long-suffering), Gray was the only survivor of 12 children. Despite a humble background, he went to Eton and Cambridge, where he had family connections. Enrolled at Peterhouse, Gray pursued his own intellectual interests, rather than the prescribed ones, leaving, without a degree, to accompany Horace Walpole (1717–1797), son of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), on a European Grand Tour. Gray proved an unusually conscientious ‘Tourist’, making careful, detailed notes on churches, antiquities and works of art. While Gray’s mother retired, doubtless gratefully, to rural seclusion in Buckinghamshire, Gray returned to Peterhouse. Ostensibly studying to follow his father into the legal profession, he actually devoted himself to Greek literature. Professing to dislike the university, Gray was reconciled to Cambridge by its libraries, its cheapness and its indifference – ‘I have a sort of reluctance to leave Cambridge, unamiable as it may seem; ’tis true Cambridge is very ugly, she is very dirty & very dull; but I’m like a cabbage, where I’m stuck I love to grow.’
Gray’s celebrated Elegy was crafted over eight years. Finally published in 1751, it went through four editions in two months. Gray let the publisher take all the profits, receiving not a penny for the poem that made him instantly famous.
Reclusive and melancholic, Gray harboured a morbid fear of fire. When he had a rope ladder installed in his room, however, the temptation to practical jokers proved irresistible and he was startled awake by mischievous cries of ‘Fire!’ The college dismissed the incident as trivial but Gray left Peterhouse for good and crossed the road to Pembroke.
A year later Gray declined the post of Poet Laureate, despite assurances that he would never have to compose anything. In the same year, 1756, Gray’s The Progress of Poesy and The Bard became the first works from the private printing press set up by Horace Walpole at his neo-Gothic palazzo at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. The first was an essay towards a never completed history of English literature. The second was inspired by the Cambridge concerts given in 1755 by a blind Welsh harpist.
In 1759, just before his daring night cliff climb to assault the French stronghold of Quebec, General James Wolfe (1727–1759) read a sixpenny copy of the Elegy, a parting gift from his fiancée, and told his (doubtless startled) comrades that he would rather have composed the poem than take the city. Fate having decreed otherwise, Wolfe took Quebec the next day – ensuring that henceforth Canada would be British, not French – and was killed in the hour of victory. In his copy of the Elegy, now in the archives of the University of Toronto, Wolfe had underlined Gray’s admonition that ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’.
Sparse in his poetic output, Gray devoted himself to self-indulgent pastimes, ranging from botany and heraldry to the harpsichord and the mastery of Italian, Icelandic and Welsh. He travelled widely throughout Britain, writing appreciatively of its natural beauties and lauding the Lake District a full generation before Wordsworth, inadvertently staking a claim to be the first of ‘the Romantics’.
In 1768 the Professor of History and Modern Languages broke his neck falling from his horse while coming home from a dinner drunk. Three days later Gray was appointed to replace him. As the duties were non-existent, sightseers were advised to seek him out, not in the lecture hall, but at the Rainbow coffee-house. Gray died three years later and was buried in the same vault as his mother at Stoke Poges, the country churchyard which probably inspired his most famous literary legacy, although it may have been St Lawrence’s, Upton, which has now been swallowed up by Slough. A full century after Gray’s death the fund launched in his memory by friends financed a major rebuilding programme at Pembroke.
Romantic reactions
The Lake District, with which he is indelibly associated, provided the true education of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), but the poet’s Cambridge years were still remembered with fondness in his autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude. In Book III he described the transformation which overcame him in the whirlwind days after his arrival:
Questions, directions, counsel and advice
Flow’d in upon me from all sides, fresh day
Of pride and pleasure! To myself I seem’d
A man of business and expense, and went
From shop to shop about my own affairs,
To Tutors or to Tailors, as befell,
From street to street with loose and careless heart.
I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roam’d
Delighted, through the motley spectacle:
Gowns grave or gaudy, Doctors, Students, Streets,
Lamps, Gateways, Flocks of Churches, Courts and Towers:
Strange transformation for a mountain Youth,
A northern Villager. As if by word
Of magic or some Fairy’s power, at once
Behold me rich in monies, and attir’d
In splendid clothes …
Arriving at St John’s in 1787, Wordsworth occupied rooms (‘a nook obscure’) above the college kitchens and thrived on pedagogic neglect, learning Italian, French and Spanish, filling his idle hours with riding and sailing and making a sentimental pilgrimage to Milton’s rooms at Christ’s, where he got drunk toasting to the poet’s memory but still made it back in time for chapel. He also took half of his final year off to tour revolutionary France and dip into Switzerland and Italy, but managed to bag a BA without honours.
The poet’s scholarly youngest brother Christopher Wordsworth (1774–1846), by contrast, was appointed Master of Trinity in 1820 and served twice as Vice-Chancellor. As Master he arranged for New Court to be built as extra undergraduate accommodation and tried to raise academic standards by founding new college prizes, but his pettifogging enforcement of college regulations, especially chapel attendance, roused opposition which blocked further efforts at reform.
Coming up to Jesus in 1791, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was depressed by ‘the quiet ugliness of Cambridge’ and the ‘sixteen colleges that look like workhouses’ and disgusted by having to attend chapel twice daily on pain of a two-pence fine. This led him to become, as he confessed, ‘remarkably religious upon an economical plan.’ A promising career in Classics foundered as Coleridge became diverted by French revolutionary politics, a failed love affair, debts and heavy drinking. He dropped out to enlist in the 15th Light Dragoons under the alias of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. His brothers used an insanity clause in King’s Regulations to buy him out, but despite returning to college, he left without a degree. Realising later that the college had treated him very leniently, Coleridge retained a lifelong affection for Cambridge.
As an aristocrat, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was under no pressure to study when he came up to Trinity in 1805, which was fortunate as he had absolutely no intention of doing so. He informed his mother that ‘the mode of going on does not suit my constitution, improvement at an English University to a Man of Rank is you know impossible, and the very Idea ridiculous.’ Byron later informed his tutor in writing that ‘I certainly do not feel that predilection for Mathematics, which may pervade the Inclinations of men destined for a clerical or collegiate Life … To bewilder myself in the mazes of Metaphysics, is not my object’. As for his recurrent disappearances back to London – ‘I have other Reasons for not residing at Cambridge, I dislike it’, and, to clinch the matter, ‘I was originally intended for Oxford’.
Lame since birth, Byron asserted his manliness by reckless riding and ferocious boxing. Above all he excelled at swimming, where his powerful upper physique offset his disability. Almost a century after the poet’s death, another poet, Rupert Brooke, paid tribute to his prowess and the name of Byron’s Pool at Grantchester:
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Learning that college statutes forbade keeping dogs, Byron exploited their silence on other species and kept a bear. As might be expected, he accumulated massive debts to tradesmen. His initial order of drink on arrival consisted of ‘4 Dozen of Wine, Port – Sherry – Claret & Madeira, one Dozen of Each.’ In his first four months he also ran up college bills of £231 – about the annual stipend of a country vicar.
In the summer of 1807 Byron explained to a friend that he was delaying his end of term departure to fit in ‘3 Oratorios, 2 concerts, a fair, a boxing match & a Ball.’ Appropriately, his first collection of verse, published that year, appeared under the title Hours of Idleness. Thoughts Suggested by a College Examination, and gave the dons a well-aimed kicking:
Where on Cam’s sedgy banks supine they lie,
Unknown, unhonour’d live, unwept for die:
Dull as the pictures which adorn their halls,
They think all learning fix’d within their walls:
In manners rude, in foolish forms precise,
All modern arts affecting to despise;
Yet prizing Bentley’s, Brunck’s or Porson’s note,
More than the verse on which the critic wrote:
Vain as their honours, heavy as their ale,
Sad as their wit, and tedious as their tale.
Byron determined to return, however, for another year on the grounds that his College rooms were ‘finished in great Style’. In Hints from Horace (1810) he later sketched the undergraduate life with indulgent cynicism:
Fines, tutors, tasks, conventions threat in vain,
Before hounds, hunters and Newmarket plain.
Rough with his elders, with his equals rash,
Civil to sharpers, prodigal of cash;
Folled, pillaged, dunned, he wastes his term away,
And unexpelled, perhaps retires MA
After Byron’s death fighting for Greek independence his admirers commissioned a statue from the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844). Carved in Rome in 1831, it was rejected by its intended recipient, Westminster Abbey, on account of the poet’s scandalous personal life. Trinity College finally accepted it for the Wren Library in 1845. The poet is shown holding a copy of Childe Harold, following the publication of which he ‘awoke and found myself famous’.
In memoriam
Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) initially found Trinity a bore – ‘the country is so disgustingly level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so uninteresting’. Already a published poet, he nevertheless found Cambridge a liberation from Lincolnshire, and in Arthur Hallam (1811–1833), the son of an eminent historian, found a friend who was ‘as near perfection as mortal man could be’. Recognising Tennyson’s gifts, Hallam introduced him to the ‘Apostles’, toured the Pyrenees and Rhine with him and became engaged to his sister, Emily. Tennyson meanwhile won the Chancellor’s Prize for Heroic Verse by recycling a poem about Armageddon to fit the set subject of Timbuctoo. Left responsible for a large family following the death of his father, the poet was then devastated by the sudden death of Hallam, who forever remained a haunting presence in his mental life.
Tennyson then endured a decade blighted by financial catastrophe and a thwarted engagement to emerge as the nation’s greatest living poet, his living secured by the grant of a Civil List pension. In 1850, In Memoriam, a long, complex, elegiac tribute to Hallam, crafted over the course of 17 years, appeared anonymously; but no one doubted its authorship. Within the year Tennyson was at last married and created Poet Laureate. The poem, greatly admired by Prince Albert, became Victoria’s greatest consolation following her husband’s early death. In 1869 Trinity made Tennyson an Honorary Fellow. The 1909 statue of Tennyson in the ante-chapel at Trinity is the work of the eminent Hamo Thornycroft, RA (1850–1925); his name is near the carved laurel wreaths, which also contain Tennyson’s clay pipe – a supposed reference to the then Master, Henry Montagu Butler, who hated smoking. As the plinth proclaims (in Latin), the statue was the gift of a Trinity Man, Harry Yates Thompson (1838–1928), sometime editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, a pre-eminent collector of medieval manuscripts, whose many other gifts included a library for Newnham College and, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the illuminated masterpiece known as the ‘Metz Pontifical’.
More than a Shropshire lad
A star student at Oxford who failed his degree, A E Housman (1859–1936) worked as a clerk in the Patent Office until in 1892 he was offered the professorship of Latin at University College, London. In 1896 Housman published, at his own expense, his best-known work, an evocation of an English Arcadia in language of sublime simplicity, which has never been out of print since.
Into my heart an air that kills,
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highway where I went
And cannot come again.
A slim volume of 63 poems, easily carried in a pocket or knapsack, A Shropshire Lad, after an indifferent reception, sold steadily, attaining its peak of popularity during World War One, when many soldiers found it variously a refuge, a solace and an inspiration.
Housman came to Cambridge in 1911 as Professor of Latin and a Fellow of Trinity, and stayed until his death. Fundamentally uninterested in teaching, he yet quivered with emotion when reading Latin poetry aloud. An exacting textual scholar, he devoted his magnum opus to a five-volume definitive edition (1902–30) of the Astronomia of the obscure Manilius, a verse rendering of the mathematics of Roman astronomical knowledge.
Housman regarded his own poetry as a product of instinct rather than intellect, once famously describing a poem as ‘a morbid secretion, like the pearl in an oyster’, provoking F R Leavis to complain that this pronouncement had set back literary criticism by a decade. ‘Shropshire’ to Housman was an idea, not a place, and criticisms of topographical ‘errors’ in his poems simply proved that the reader had missed their point. The poet was, in any case, not a Shropshire village boy, having been brought up in the industrial town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire.
Homosexual, reclusive and acerbic, Housman once told his publisher to reject a proposed interview on the grounds that ‘the wish to include a glimpse of my personality in a literary article is low, unworthy and American … some men are more interesting than their book … my book is more interesting than its man.’ Housman nevertheless found compensation in gardens and in the sybaritic side of life at Trinity, once pronouncing playfully that ‘Malt does more than Milton can, To justify God’s ways to man.’