Robert Eglesfield was almoner of the good Queen Philippa, wife of
Edward III, and, like Adam de Brome, the founder of Oriel, he, too,
commended his college to a royal patron. Ever since his time, the
"Queen's College" has been under the patronage of the Queen's consort
of England, and the connection has been duly acknowledged by many of
them, especially by Henrietta Maria, the evil genius of Charles I,
and by Queen Caroline, the good genius of George II. Her present
Gracious Majesty, too, has recognized the college claim. The Queens
Regnant have no obligations to the college, but Queen Elizabeth gave
it the seal it still uses, and good Queen Anne was a liberal
contributor to the rebuilding of the college in her day; her statue
still adorns the cupola on the front to the High.
[Plate IX. High Street]
No doubt it was the royal connection which brought to Queen's, if
tradition may be trusted, two famous warrior princes, the Black
Prince and Henry V; though it is at least doubtful whether the
Queen's poet, Thomas Tickell, Addison's flattering friend, had any
authority for the picture he gives of their college life. He
describes them as:
"Sent from the Monarch's to the Muses' Court,
Their meals were frugal and their sleeps were short;
To couch at curfew time they thought no scorn,
And froze at matins every winters morn."
The College has an interesting portrait of the great Henry, which may
be authentic; but that of the Black Prince, which adorns the college
hall, is known to have been painted from a handsome Oxford butcher's
boy, in the eighteenth century. While we condemn the lack of historic
sense in the Provost and Fellows of that day, we may at least acquit
them of any intention of pacificist irony in their choice of a model.
Queen's has had better poets than Tickell on its rolls, but, by a
curious chance, the two most eminent--Joseph Addison and William
Collins--were both tempted away from their first college by the
superior wealth and attractions of Magdalen.
The old local connections which were such a marked feature in the
statutes of founders, and which so profoundly influenced Oxford down
to the Commission of 1854, have been almost swept away at other
colleges; but at Queen's they have always been strongly maintained.
It has been, and is, emphatically, a north-country college. Not the
least important factor in maintaining this tradition has been the
great benefaction of Lady Elizabeth Hastings, fondly and familiarly
known to all Queen's men as "Lady Betty." Steele wrote of her when
young, that to "love her was a liberal education"; this may have been
flattery, but her bounty, at any rate, has given a "liberal
education" to hundreds of north-country men, who come up from the
twelve schools of her foundation to her college at Oxford.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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