Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe LibrarySmith, Goldwin
History
Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library
Smith, Goldwin
University of Oxford
Yonder to the south is Tom Tower, where hangs the great bell, which,
"swinging slow with sullen roar," was heard by Milton at Forest Hill. It
was tolled a hundred and one times for the hundred and one students of
Wolsey's House. The Tower, or Cupola, was the work, not of Wolsey but
of Wren. Around the great quadrangle over which it rises are seen the
lines for cloisters which were never built. The balustrade on the top of
the quadrangle is an alien work of modern times. The Church of St.
Frydeswide's Monastery does duty as the College Chapel, in place of the
grand Chapel in the perpendicular style, which, had the Founder's plan
taken effect, would have stood there. Moreover, that which should have
been wholly a College is made to serve and to expend a part of its power
as the Chapter of the Diocese of Oxford, lending its Chapel as the
Cathedral, a niggardly arrangement which has been productive of strained
relations between occupants of the See and Heads of the College. Ample
and noble are the courts of Wolsey. Worthy of his magnificence is the
great Hall, the finest room, barring Westminster Hall, in England, and
filled with those portraits of _Alumni_, which, notwithstanding the
frequency of pudding sleeves, form the fairest tapestry with which hall
was ever hung. But it all falls short of Wolsey's conception. Had
Wolsey's conception been fulfilled, Ipswich would have been a nursery of
scholars for Cardinal College, as Winchester was for New College, and
Eton for King's College, Cambridge. The Cardinal was an English Leo X.
in morals, tastes, perhaps in beliefs; a true Prince, not of the Church
but of the Renaissance. For him, perhaps, as for Foxe, it was a
refreshment to turn from public life, full, as it must have been, of
care and peril for the Vizier of a headstrong and capricious despot, to
the calm happiness of seeing his great College rise, and gathering into
it the foremost of teachers and the flower of students. But in the midst
of his enterprise the sky of the Renaissance became overcast with
clouds, and the storm of religious revolution, which had long been
gathering, broke. Forewarnings of the storm Wolsey had received, for he
had found that in opening his gates to the highest intellectual activity
he had opened them to free inquiry and to heterodoxy. Himself, too, had
set the example of suppressing monasteries, though he did this not for
mere rapine or to gorge his parasites, but to turn useless and abused
endowments to a noble use. Wolsey all but drew his foundation down with
him in his fall. The tyrant and his minions were builders of nothing but
ruin. Christ Church, as at last it was called, was threatened with
confiscation and destruction, but was finally spared in its incomplete
condition, appropriated by Henry as his own foundation, and dedicated to
the honour of the king, whose portrait, in its usual attitude of
obtrusive self-conceit, occupies in the Hall the central place, where
the portrait of the Cardinal should be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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