All the Queen's Men (26 page)

Another centre of learning in London that did flourish greatly during Elizabeth's reign were the four Inns of Court together with the nine Inns of Chancery located in an area between Temple Bar and the River Thames. Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, the Middle and Inner Temples all thrived in a period of greatly expanding requirement for legal expertise in the extremely litigious Tudor world. Christopher Hatton, Walter Ralegh, Anthony and Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney and John Donne were just some of the eminent Elizabethans who acquired their scholarship here. These illustrious legal establishments were much more than merely a place of study: considerable extramural activity took place. It was at a masque conducted at the Inner Temple that the Queen first encountered Christopher Hatton in 1561, the year
Gorboduc
, the first blank-verse English tragedy, was introduced there. Shakespeare's plays were performed in the Middle Temple during the last years of her reign, Elizabeth being an avid supporter of the theatre. These events normally took place during the joyful period of celebration that ran between Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night, carefully orchestrated by the Master of Revels appointed by the Queen. It was her custom to attend these festivities with leading members of the Royal Court and the legal profession, who were seated around the highly impressive newly constructed hall of the Middle Temple in a carefully arranged order of precedence.

Throughout Elizabeth's kingdom, education was becoming more accessible and broad-based. Long gone were the days when the only way that most men could acquire an education was to enter a monastery. Indeed, the dissolution of the monasteries was to have little detrimental effect on education in England, for by then monastic establishments were no longer the eminent seats of learning that they had been in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the closure of these medieval foundations were positively beneficial as the university colleges in particular inherited their sites, the buildings and in some cases even the revenues. In turn, the Renaissance and Reformation both gave a massive boost to scholastic activity in England. The Queen was as well educated as most in her kingdom; this factor, coupled with the intellectual qualities of so many of her Privy Councillors and other members of her Court, meant that scholarship and education were highly respected activities, ones to be actively and energetically pursued.

The Queen's acknowledged enthusiasm for education, coupled with the growing realization by her subjects of the necessity for more widespread schooling to meet the growing demands of an increasingly more sophisticated and enlightened nation, led to an explosion in educational facilities, as both the gentry and an expanding middle class required better schooling for their children. Eton, St Paul's, Shrewsbury and Westminster were all well-established schools by the time Elizabeth ascended the throne; they were to be joined by public schools such as Harrow, Tonbridge, Merchant Taylors, Charterhouse and Uppingham, all were founded in the Elizabethan era. There were also more than 350 grammar schools in existence throughout England by the end of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth did not found a university college or even a single school herself, but she did give a considerable number of scholarships to both schools and universities while the majority of her courtiers were very well aware that they were much more likely to gain royal approval by being seen to actively support scholarship in a meaningful way. Most importantly the Queen created a climate in which scholarship was an important strand in the fabric of the Elizabethan society, thereby encouraging intelligent people to acquire an education, and others of lesser academic ability to give material support. Elizabeth made education fashionable and scholarship a status symbol so her reign represented an age of scholastic achievement of the highest order. Elizabeth's constant encouragement and approval of intellectual excellence ensured that England no longer remained a cultural backwater on the edge of Europe.

I
n the drawing room of the Master's Lodge at Cambridge's largest and most powerful college, Trinity College, hangs a portrait of Elizabeth I, thought to have been painted towards the end of the sixteenth century by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. This painting portrays a full-length, life-size figure standing on a red-covered step before a throne and is said to derive from the
Armada Portrait
by George Gower which currently hangs in Woburn Abbey. This fine portrayal of Elizabeth symbolizes a long and continuing connection between Cambridge and the Queen that had profound implications for this ancient seat of learning. Cambridge was to consequently benefit very considerably from the interest in its fortunes displayed by Elizabeth and the many powerful members of her Court who previously had been educated at the university.

Cambridge's connection with the Tudor Court had begun well before the reign of Elizabeth, when Erasmus had paid a number of visits to the university during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. The great Flemish humanist, whose reputation had spread throughout Europe, resided at Queen's College while he fulfilled the posts of Lady Margaret Reader in Greek and Professor of Divinity. The tower in the south-west corner of Old Court, where he is said to have lived, is traditionally known as Erasmus Tower, while the nearby President's Lodge is an excellent example of early sixteenth-century architecture. Erasmus much approved of the pretty girls he found in the town, but complained bitterly about the poor quality of the college beer and the penetrating cold and damp of the East Anglian climate. He became friendly with Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, and the presence of someone with such a distinctive reputation in theological studies helped to set in motion the rise of the Protestant faith in England. The seeds of the Reformation germinated at Cambridge in places such as the White Horse Inn, an unlikely meeting place which became a hotbed of Protestant debate, where enthusiastic students such as Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer came to listen and learn about the new doctrine. In time, the fortunes of the university prospered considerably amid the rigorous climate of the Reformation, whereas Oxford was to go into relative decline as numerous Catholic scholars scurried abroad into self-induced exile, subsequently finding employment in such Catholic centres of learning as Louvain, Douai, and the English College at Rome. Many of these former scholars from Oxford were destined to become Jesuits; some, such as Edmund Campion, eventually returned to England and became martyrs, dying for their cause at Tyburn.

Today, Cambridge contains a considerable amount of Tudor architecture while Oxford remains predominately medieval in appearance. Erasmus noted that the ‘New Learning' flourished at Cambridge, a fresh approach to scholarship born of the Renaissance, wherein medieval concepts were replaced by more modern thinking, a discipline which was wholeheartedly embraced by Elizabeth while still a young princess. The ‘New Learning' centred on St John's College, Cambridge, where there resided a particularly brilliant group of intellectuals, among them Sir John Cheke, the leading Greek scholar of the day, Roger Ascham and William Grindal, both destined to become tutors to the impressionable young Princess Elizabeth. This was the time ‘when the great scholars of St John's taught Cambridge and King Edward, Greek'. Cheke also had William Cecil as a pupil who was later to marry Cheke's sister, Mary. As a young student Cecil had been so keen on his studies that he paid a college servant to wake him every morning at four o'clock, even in the darkest depths of winter. William Cecil sent his son Robert to St John's, and his three young wards, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Southampton, were enrolled next door at Trinity College, where Nicholas Bacon had once studied and where he in turn sent his two sons, Anthony and Francis, to study law.

The majority of the key members of the Queen's Privy Council, such as Sir William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Thomas Smith, had all studied at Cambridge, as had her major financial adviser, Sir Thomas Gresham, a former undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, while the two greatest Elizabethan lawyers, Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, had been at Trinity at the same time as the Earl of Essex, who was also a member of Elizabeth's Privy Council. No wonder the eminent twentieth-century Elizabethan historian A.L. Rowse was to comment that the Queen could be regarded as a ‘Cambridge figure'
¹
– and Rowse was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford!

Nearly all the most prominent figures in the Church throughout Elizabeth's reign eminated from Cambridge University rather than Oxford. This influence had originally begun with John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who was later to be executed by Elizabeth's father for speaking out against Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his traumatic break from Rome. Fisher had previously been Master of Michaelhouse, a college which Henry was to combine with King's Hall in order to form Trinity College. Fisher had been instrumental in persuading Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry's grandmother, to found St John's College and later Christ's College as well. Her distinctive coat of arms with their dramatic mythical beasts remain above the main entrance of both colleges today. Fisher's presence at Cambridge had begun a trend of leading clerics occupying key posts at this university; Bishop Nicholas Ridley had been an undergraduate at Pembroke and was later to be elected a Fellow of that College. Thomas Cranmer studied at Jesus College and John Whitgift was Master of Trinity as well as Regius Professor of Divinity and Vice-Chancellor of the University. Edward Grindal was Master of Pembroke. Thus all three men who the Queen successively appointed as Archbishops of Canterbury during her reign came from Cambridge: first Parker, then Grindal, who had previously been Bishop of London, and finally Whitgift, who was by the Queen's side when she died at Richmond in 1603.

Cambridge was at the very heart of the new religious doctrines sweeping across Europe, firstly Protestantism, then the more extreme beliefs of Presbyterianism and Puritanism. These radical theologies were to have a profound effect on all those Cambridge men who later occupied such influential positions on the Queen's Privy Council. They in turn influenced the political and religious thinking of the English Queen and were to have considerable effect on the development of the Church of England. Cambridge had also provided the initial battleground in the ideological war between Protestantism and Puritanism. Feelings often ran high between over-excited rival groups of students: all the windows of Trinity College Chapel, a place of worship originally founded by Elizabeth's half-sister Mary, were smashed by Puritans in 1565. At this time one of the most influential men at Cambridge concerning religious issues was Thomas Cartwright, a Fellow of Trinity College and a fanatical leader of the Presbyterians, who advocated the abolition of both the bishops and the prayer book service.

Thomas Cartwright was vigorously opposed in these extremist views by John Whitgift, at that time the Master of Trinity. Their intense debate became so ferocious that at times it represented a form of single-handed combat; their titanic struggle ended with Cartwright losing his Fellowship and Whitgift being summoned by the Queen to be appointed firstly Bishop of Worcester and subsequently Archbishop of Canterbury. Cartwright lost his position as a Fellow at Trinity because he refused to take Holy Orders, at that time a mandatory requirement for all Fellows of the college. Fellows were also not allowed to be married and were required to remain celibate, a condition that continued at Trinity until Victorian times, although Isaac Newton was permitted to marry by Elizabeth's successor James I. G.M. Trevelyan, Master of Trinity between 1940 and 1951, was later to say ‘that the great struggle of Anglican and Puritan, in which a man from Sidney Sussex was one day to take a hand, may almost be said to have originated, certainly to have been rehearsed, in the chambers and the chapel of Trinity'.
²
The man from Sidney Sussex was of course Oliver Cromwell and a student at that college at the age of seventeen.

The next great Master of Trinity was Thomas Nevile, formerly Dean of Canterbury. He was appointed by an ageing Elizabeth to the Mastership in 1593. Nevile instigated the massive building programme that made the college into what it is today. His Great Court, begun towards the end of the sixteenth century, remains one of the most spectacular sights to be seen in the whole of the university.

Elizabeth selected Matthew Parker to be her first Archbishop of Canterbury and entrusted him with the vital task of putting into practice the religious principles that would establish the Anglican Church of England. To assist him in this venture Parker in turn appointed a considerable number of new bishops, most of whom came from Cambridge. Thus the twin pillars of Elizabeth's kingdom, her Council and her Church, were dominated by the men of Cambridge and policies and practices of the nation were heavily influenced by the current philosophies of that university. In Henry VIII's time, the two most powerful men in the kingdom, Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, had both come from Oxford University, as indeed had Queen Mary's Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Pole, who, conveniently for Elizabeth, died at the same time as the last Catholic monarch to occupy the English throne. In Elizabeth's time, Cambridge was firmly in the ascendancy and relatively few of the influential men of that era emanated from Oxford.

Cambridge's influence on the Queen and her kingdom multiplied as the power brokers who had once been members of the university tended to favour their own kind: Grindal succeeded Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury largely because he had been recommended to the Queen by William Cecil and it was Cecil who persuaded Elizabeth to appoint Francis Walsingham as her Principal Secretary in the Council. When Walsingham died, Cecil convinced the Queen that his son, Robert, like his father a former law student at St John's, should be Walsingham's replacement as Secretary of State.