The dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. and the confiscation of their great estates naturally created a sense of foreboding in the universities that it would not be long before the College estates shared the same fate. There were not wanting, we may be sure, greedy courtiers prepared with schemes of collegiate spoliation. If we may trust, however, the testimony of Harrison in his "Description of England,"[80] the hopes of the despoiler were effectually checked by the King himself. "Ah, sirha," he is reported to have said to some who had ventured to make proposals for such despoilment, "I perceive the abbey lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge to ask also those colleges. And whereas we had a regard only to pull down sin by defacing the monasteries, you have a desire also to overthrow all goodness by a dispersion of colleges. I tell you, sirs, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than that which is given to our universities; for by their maintenance our realm shall be well governed when we be dead and rotten." These are brave words, and we may hope that they were sincere. They may seem, perhaps, to receive some confirmation of sincerity from the fact that that munificent donor of other people's property did himself erect upon the ruins of more than one earlier foundation that great college, whose predominance in the University has from that time onwards been so marked a feature of Cambridge life. It is the opinion of Huber,[81] that the uncertainty and depression caused in the universities by these fears of confiscation did not subside until well on in the reign of Elizabeth. * * * * * In the year 1542, however, four years before the foundation of Trinity College by Henry VIII., the spoliation of the monasteries was turned to the advantage of the University in a somewhat remarkable manner. On the further side of the river Cam, "cut off," as Fuller describes it, "from the continent of Cambridge," there stood an ancient religious house known at this time as Buckingham College. "Formerly it was a place where many monks lived, on the charge of their respective convent, being very fit for solitary persons by the situation thereof. For it stood on the transcantine side, an anchoret in itself, severed by the river from the rest of the University. Here the monks some seven years since had once and again lodged and feasted Edward Stafford, the last Duke of Buckingham of that family. Great men best may, good men always will, be grateful guests to such as entertain them. Both qualifications met in this Duke and then no wonder if he largely requited his welcome. He changed the name of the house into Buckingham College, began to build, and purposed to endow the same, no doubt in some proportion to his own high and rich estate."[82]