Dr. Caius himself became the first Master of his new College, a post which he accepted with a reluctance which proved only too well justified, for he himself was a devout and pious man of the old school, and wholly out of sympathy with the militant Protestantism which was then fast becoming the dominating spirit at Cambridge, as in England generally. He has left in writing his lamentation over the sad depletion of the University which was the first result of the Reformation.[75] The wholesale destruction of ancient works of art--beautifully illuminated service books, and elaborately embroidered vestments--by which the votaries of the new religion sought at once to express their loathing of the older faith and to make its revival the harder, did but recall to him the like policy pursued by the Pagan antagonists of Jehovah in the days of the Maccabees. And he did what in him lay to stem the tide, rescuing here a Missal and there a Chasuble from the iconoclasts, till he had accumulated in his Lodge quite a little store of these sacred objects. But the times were too hard for him. He was denounced as a reactionary, a sympathiser with Popery; a riot broke out among the College students; the Lodge was stormed; the Papistical relics thrown out of the window and burnt in the midst of the Court;[76] whilst the Master and Founder himself was expelled from his own College and (as he had spent upon it all he had) ended his days in penury and exile. He was, however, allowed a grave in the chapel, which bears the touching inscription FUI CAIUS ("I _was_ Caius"). [Footnote 75: "To the Universities," Froude (our most ardent Protestant historian) tells us, in his _History of England_, "the Reformation brought with it desolation.... They were called Stables of Asses--Schools of the Devil.... The Government cancelled the exhibitions which had been granted for the support of poor Scholars. They suppressed the Professorships and Lectureships--Degrees were held anti-Christian. Learning was no necessary adjunct to a creed which 'lay in a nutshell.' ... College Libraries were plundered and burnt. The Divinity Schools at Oxford were planted with cabbages, and the laundresses dried clothes in the School of Arts." At Cambridge Dr. Caius gives a long list of University Hostels, filled, within his memory, by zealous students, which, when he wrote had become wholly deserted and taken possession of by the townsfolk.] [Footnote 76: The pillage was actually presided over by the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Dr. Whitgift, Master of Trinity, whose Protestant zeal raised him later to the Archbishopric of Canterbury.]