The next point in the history of Queens’ is its acquisition under Dr William Mey of the Carmelite house which lay between the college and the present site of King’s. This house was surrendered to the society in 1538, just before the dissolution; but the interference of the Crown delayed the completion of this transaction till 1544. The ground which thus came into the possession of the president and fellows was the foundation of all their future building. Dr Mey was deprived at the accession of Queen Mary, but was restored in 1559. He lived for only a year afterwards. His next successor but one was Dr William Chaderton, of whom Fuller has preserved some curious anecdotes. He is reported to have said one day in a wedding sermon “That the choice of a wife is full of hazard, not unlike as if one in a barrel full of serpents should grope for one fish; if (saith he) he ’scape harm of the snakes, and light on a fish, he may be thought fortunate, for perhaps it may be but an eel.” The ingenuity of the comparison is very characteristic of our Elizabethan universities, and is not a little in the manner of Fuller himself. Fuller, indeed, received most of what he would have called his “breeding” at Queens’, and, here and at Sidney, he picked up that curiously miscellaneous knowledge which has made him one of our most entertaining prose writers. He was essentially a Cambridge man, and in all his books, however distant they are from the purpose, we trace a certain appeal to his university. He was not less positive as to its antiquity than Dr Caius, although he went less far back for its origin. His _Church History_ records the foundation of Cambridge as an University by Sigebert, King of the East Anglians, and in the sequel punctiliously refers to the foundation of every college as an important event in the history of the Church. He did for Cambridge, in a more limited area, what Anthony Wood did for Oxford. His politics were of an undecided kind, and he fell into disfavour with both Parliamentarians and Royalists, but he was, in fact, a moderate partisan of the King. There is a story that he was to have been made a bishop at the Restoration, but he died before the offer was made.