All the Queen's Men (25 page)

Despite his intellectual prowess, William Camden remained a modest man and he declined the Queen's offer of a knighthood. Yet he inspired universal admiration coupled with great affection, and when he finally died at the age of seventy-two, Camden was honoured with an impressive funeral at Westminster Abbey. The Camden Society was formed in 1838 in order to commemorate and maintain his indisputable academic prowess.

Elsewhere in Europe, Galileo, the Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist, had developed the astronomical telescope and extended the revolutionary theories that had been first advanced by the Polish astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus, which propounded that the earth revolved round the sun rather than vice versa as had been previously thought. Predictably, these radical concepts were regarded as heresy by the notoriously conservative Catholic Church: Galileo was brought before the Inquisition in Rome and forced to repent his visionary yet unwelcome ideas in order to avoid being burnt at the stake. When the English poet John Milton later undertook the Grand Tour to Italy and met Galileo, he found him to be a broken man. Galileo was, however, more fortunate than the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake in Rome because of his heretical views at the end of the sixteenth century. Bruno had lived in England between 1583 and 1585 during which time he had written some of his most influential work. His presence in the country had benefited English scholarship in the same manner as Erasmus when the Dutch scholar and humanist had come to England on a number of occasions earlier in the sixteenth century, during which time he had become friendly with Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII's one-time Lord Chancellor.

Ironically, one of the few positive side-effects of Queen Mary's disastrous reign had been that a considerable number of English intellectuals had fled the country in order to avoid religious persecution and gone into exile in continental Europe. Here they had become directly involved with the ‘New Learning'. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 and restored the Protestant faith, they were able to introduce this ‘New Learning' into England after returning from such places as Hamburg, Basle and Geneva, places that were brimming with radical new concepts and stimulating new ideas.

Had Protestantism not been restored, these exiles would have been unable to return and it would have been doubtful that England would have benefited from their newly acquired knowledge. Elizabeth's arrival on the throne did much to stimulate the nation's intellectual vigour, accelerating the progress of science, law, philosophy, theology and medicine. Conversely, the Catholic faith elsewhere in Europe was usually far more conservative in outlook, where challenging perceived wisdom could quickly be branded as heresy. Indeed, the final period of the High Renaissance in Italy was severely curtailed by the Counter-Reformation that was gathering pace in the second half of the sixteenth century, when most of the new thinking was developing in Germany, Scandinavia and other Protestant areas.

In England, the two long-standing universities, Oxford and Cambridge, had been in slow yet relentless decline. Oxford had once been one of the foremost universities in Europe but had progressively lost its ascendancy to continental rivals such as Paris and Padua, as the Renaissance gathered momentum in Europe while England was slow to respond to the winds of intellectual change. Initially the nation had been preoccupied with the Wars of the Roses, followed by two decades of internal rebuilding during the reign of Henry VII, after which his successor Henry VIII did little to encourage a movement that was perceived to centre on Rome.

Fortunately, in the wake of the Queen's enthusiasm for scholarship and her belief in a religion that was not only tolerant of intellectual advancement but positively encouraged it, Elizabethan England witnessed a considerable acceleration of academic skills. During the Queen's time on the throne, Jesus College was founded in 1591, the first Protestant college at Oxford, while other colleges such as Queen's greatly increased their student numbers. Thomas Bodley, a wealthy retired diplomat and scholar, was to restore the derelict Duke Humphrey's Library in 1599. By the last years of Elizabeth's reign it housed more than two thousand books and manuscripts, including the original of Bacon's ‘Essays' annotated by the Queen, together with her own translation of Cicero. It was renamed the Bodleian Library in 1602, the penultimate year of her reign.

At Cambridge University, three new colleges came into existence in Queen Elizabeth's lifetime. Sir Walter Mildmay, her long-serving Privy Councillor and able Chancellor of the Exchequer, founded Emmanuel College in 1584, primarily for the specific training of a better calibre of clergy; ‘. . . it should be a seed-plot of learned men for the supply of the Church', Sir Walter wrote at the time, the study of theology at university having been in serious decline in the mid-sixteenth century. The Queen accused her philanthropic Councillor of potentially instigating a hotbed of Puritanism and as so often proved the case, Elizabeth was not far wrong. When Archbishop Laud attacked the college for religious irregularities in the reign of Charles I, some three dozen former students of Emmanuel, who all held strong Puritan beliefs, departed England for the New World. Among them was John Harvard, whose generous endowment on his death in 1638 led to the foundation of Harvard University, destined to be the first American university in a town which is today also called Cambridge. Emmanuel College was built on the former site of a religious house once occupied by Dominican friars which had ceased to function after Elizabeth's father had dissolved the monasteries, the original friar's chapel being converted into the student hall.

Magdalene College had been established in 1542 on a one-time monastic site that had been acquired by Lord Thomas Audley, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The mellow red brickwork of Magdalene's First Court remains virtually as it appeared in Elizabeth's lifetime. To this day, the Master is elected not by the Fellows of Magdalene, but by the descendants of its founder, whose coat of arms is displayed above the doorway leading to the college hall, still lit only by candlelight at night.

Sidney Sussex was the third Cambridge college whose foundation dates back to the Elizabethan era. It is also built on a site that had become available as a result of Henry's dissolution of the monasteries, in this particular instance a thirteenth-century Franciscan establishment, the student hall being in the monk's former chapel. Lady Frances Sidney, the Countess of Sussex and the wealthy widow of one of Elizabeth's prominent Privy Councillors, Thomas Radcliffe, the Earl of Sussex, had bequeathed a substantial sum of money derived from her estate to found Sidney Sussex College. Building began towards the end of Elizabeth's reign after the site had been acquired from its previous owner, Trinity College, to whom it had been given by Henry VIII. The Fellows of Trinity had used much of the stone from the friary in order to extend their own college and it was at this time that the colleges either side of Trinity were being radically extended. At St John's, a second court was under construction while Dr Caius, who had founded Gonville and Caius College the year before Elizabeth came to the throne, was building a court whose imposing Gate of Honour is an early example of Renaissance architecture in England, doubtless introduced as a result of the learned Dr Caius's earlier visit to Italy. It was not very long before Sidney Sussex was to house a young student who never did take his degree but was destined to become one of the most famous figures in English history – Oliver Cromwell.

It was in the late sixteenth century that some of the most important developments within the whole of Cambridge University were to take place at Trinity, entirely due to the arrival of a dynamic new Master, Thomas Nevile, appointed by Queen Elizabeth in 1593. This was to prove to be one of Elizabeth's many characteristically shrewd and significant appointments. Formally Dean of Canterbury, Nevile was a favourite of the Queen and had originally been a student at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and later Master at Magdalene, before becoming Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University in the year of the defeat of the Armada. Nevile was a confirmed bachelor, dedicated to the university and extremely wealthy. The new Master, therefore, combined two very useful attributes, a reverence of scholarship and considerable riches, to put his altruistic ideas into practice. Nevile immediately set about the immense task of pulling down the muddle of medieval buildings that still remained after Henry had founded Trinity by amalgamating the ancient King's Hall and Michaelhouse nearly fifty years earlier. In the words of G.M. Trevelyan, a twentieth-century Master of Trinity, ‘If Henry VIII founded Trinity, Nevile built it.'
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He constructed the Great Court virtually as it appears today, the largest court in either Oxford or Cambridge. Its huge central fountain was also introduced by Nevile. The Great Court features a tower, created by Nevile, bearing a statue of Elizabeth I. In the twentieth century, while a student at Trinity, HRH the Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II, occupied rooms adjacent to the tower. Nevile went on to build a second court that was to be named after him which features an elegant semi-classical cloister in the Renaissance tradition; the court was originally three-sided, being open to the river at the far end until Sir Christopher Wren built the library which is widely considered to be one of England's great architectural masterpieces. A considerable amount of this massive extension to Trinity, which remains Cambridge's largest college, was financed by Thomas Nevile out of his own pocket. No wonder that Bishop Hacket who had been at the college with this highly energetic and generous man was to write, ‘He never had his like for a splendid, courteous and bountiful gentleman.'
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It was a highly significant moment for Trinity, Cambridge University and English scholarship as a whole, when the Queen appointed Thomas Nevile as Master. To this day the sovereign still appoints the Master of Trinity, one of the world's most outstanding centres of learning, whose members have collectively won more than twenty Nobel prizes. One of the college's distinguished Fellows was the renowned twentieth-century philosopher, Bertrand Russell, a descendant of Francis Russell, the 2nd Earl of Bedford, a distinguished Privy Councillor during Elizabeth's reign.

Elizabeth took a keen personal interest in both universities and visited them on a number of occasions, the most notable time being her visit to Cambridge in 1564. When invited to say a few words, Elizabeth, without hesitation, delivered an eloquent 600-word oration in Latin to the assembled throng at King's College Chapel, a building that had been completed previously by her father. Several of Elizabeth's leading Privy Councillors were university chancellors at different times, Sir John Mason, the Earl of Leicester and Sir Christopher Hatton at Oxford, and Lord Burghley at Cambridge, where Archbishop Whitgift had once been vice-chancellor. Characteristically, Burghley was to take his appointment at Cambridge particularly seriously. Overall both the universities benefited greatly from the attentions of the Queen and those of her Privy Council, many of whom had attended university.

However, it was by no means necessary that students at either Oxford or Cambridge should necessarily be drawn from the ranks of the nobility, or even the rapidly increasing number of gentry that were coming into existence as a result of growing prosperity across Elizabethan England. A considerable number of student places at the universities were taken up by members of the poorer classes, often in a category known as sizars or sub-sizars, students who paid no fees but undertook various menial tasks such as waiting at table in exchange for tuition, but in all other respects enjoyed the same privileges as other more wealthy students. One of Trinity College's most eminent members, Isaac Newton, had first entered the college as a sizar. Undergraduates normally went to university at a far earlier age than today; both the Earl of Essex and Francis Bacon were not even in their teens when they joined Trinity. However, attendance at the university was often for a far longer period than in modern times, a length of seven or eight years prior to taking a degree not being uncommon. No women were to attend either university for many centuries to come.

The multi-talented and idealistic courtier Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother to Sir Walter Ralegh, had conceived the idea of an academy in London, an embryonic London University for the teaching of ancient and modern languages, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, physics, engineering and chemistry. Sir Humphrey was an eloquent man and attached particular importance to the development of the English Language, both written and spoken. ‘The choice of words, the building of sentences, the garnishment of figures, and the other beauties of oratory,' Sir Humphrey enthused.
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Unfortunately, like so many of Gilbert's innovative ideas, this visionary scheme never developed any further. The Queen had expressed some initial enthusiasm but as usual was waiting for somebody else to provide the money for its development. Then Gilbert was tragically drowned at sea and the whole concept sank out of sight.

In London, a new seat of learning was established during Elizabeth's reign with the creation of Gresham College, which resulted from the generosity of Sir Thomas Gresham, the greatest financial expert of the Elizabethan age, who had previously established the Royal Exchange. Gresham had originally considered founding a college at either Oxford or Cambridge but in the end decided to provide a splendid house in Bishopsgate, together with sufficient revenue to maintain a number of professors drawn from Oxford and Cambridge, three from each university, the most eminent of which were later to be Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. The subjects to be taught at Gresham were astronomy, divinity, law, rhetoric, geometry, physics and music. The last post was filled at the Queen's own personal recommendation by her chapel organist Dr John Bull. As Bull spoke no Latin, he was given permission to conduct his classes in English. Founded towards the end of the sixteenth century, initially the college flourished and might well have developed into a full-scale university given more favourable circumstances. However, in the reign of George III, the City of London inexplicably took the decision to hand the site over to the Crown, which resulted in Gresham College becoming sadly neglected and run down. Today a limited number of lectures are the only events to take place in this once enlightened and much utilized institution which seemed to have so much potential when it was originally founded by Sir Thomas.