Cambridge (England) -- Pictorial works; University of Cambridge -- Pictorial works
The chapel is the original conventual church[200] as rebuilt by Alcock.
It contains xii century work, and represents the transition from Norman
to Early English. The character of the college has been consistently
evangelical in spite of the fact that Bancroft the Laudian archbishop
before Laud, was here, and that he migrated here from Christ’s on
account of the latter’s reputation for Puritanism. Cranmer was scholar,
and fellow until his marriage, and was readmitted fellow when his wife
died a year later. Archbishops Bancroft and Sterne, Laurence Sterne,
Bale Bishop of Ossory, Strype, Fulke Greville, Fenton, Fawkes (the
poet), Hartley, and S. T. Coleridge were members. The college which was
founded for 6 fellows and 6 scholars, now maintains 16 fellows and some
20 scholars. The statutes
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF JESUS COLLEGE]
were indited by James Stanley Bishop of Ely, stepson of Lady Margaret,
and modified by his successor Nicholas West. Jesus College scholars were
commended by the founder to the perpetual tutelage of the bishops of
Ely, who when they lie there are said to lie in their own house.[201]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Christ’s College A.D. 1505.]
Ten years later a most interesting foundation was made. A college called
God’s House had, as we have seen, been founded in the reign of Henry VI.
and was appropriated by that monarch as part of the site of King’s
College. The foundation was a far-off echo of the plague in the previous
century, and when the king took possession of the site he appears to
have intended to endow a considerable college in its place in the parish
of S. Andrew where he erected another God’s House.[202] It was this
design, left unfulfilled (for the house only supported four of the
sixty scholars whom Henry VI. had himself proposed to maintain there)
that John Fisher, chancellor of the university and Bishop of Rochester,
brought to the notice of Lady Margaret Beaufort, daughter of the first
Duke of Somerset, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the wife of Edmund
Tudor and mother of Henry VII.; and on the site of God’s House she
erected her own Christ’s College, and made John Sickling its Proctor
first Master. The quadrangle was encased in stone in the xviii century,
but the gateway with its statue and armorials of the founder, and the
oriel over the entrance to the Master’s lodge recall the founder’s time.
Facing the gateway are the hall, the old combination room, and the
lodge, and above were a set of rooms reserved for the founder’s own use;
a turret staircase led therefrom to both hall and garden, as was the
custom in a master’s lodge. On the east of this “Tree court” is a
building in the renascence style, thought to be one of the finest
examples in England, and to have been the work of Inigo Jones (1642).
The gold plate of the college was a bequest of Lady Margaret’s and there
is none finer in the university. Christ’s is also noted for its gardens.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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