EXETER COLLEGE.
117
repayment ; it was valued at ^750, the pound weight
of silver plate being reckoned as worth £3, and of
gilt plate somewhat more. This, of course, allowed
nothing for the workmanship. The only part of its
old plate which the College now possesses is an egg
set in gold. The College also paid some of the
King's foot soldiers for a month at four shillings a
week each. Several of the fellows became officers in
the Army, such as Matthias Prideaux, son of the
Rector, and Digory Polwhele, who, when expelled
by the Parliamentary Visitors is termed a "scandalous
person and a man of blood. " He was one of the last
of those who held out for the King in Pendennis
Castle. The College had also contributed a very
eminent officer to the Royal cause in the person of
Sir Bevil Grenville, one of the leaders of the Cornish
force, which won victory after victory for the King
till Grenville fell at the battle of Lansdowne near
Bath and with him the western army lost its onward
impulse.
The ejection on S. Bartholomew's
Day deprived Oxford and the Church of some of their best men, and was quite contrary to the spirit of the union of the two great parties which had brought about the Restoration. Twice in successive genera- tions, in 1662 and 1689, the Church of England lost some of her best sons. She suffered on either hand. By the ejection of 1662, through the too stringent nature and enforcement of the new act of uniformity, she lost the services of some of the most devoted of her Puritan sons, men whose views were no way dis- tinguishable from those which had been held without rebuke by some of the most honoured Bishops of Elizabeth's time. By the ejection of the non-jurors in 1689 many high minded men of a different order of thought were driven, if not from her communion,
at all events from her ministrations. She lost suc-
cessively some of the most earnest and disinterested
upholders of the Protestant and Catholic elements of
her constitution, and this partly accounts for the
spiritual deadness of the eighteenth century, though
there were also more general causes at work all over
Europe to produce that deadness. An attempt was
made by John Walker, a fellow of Exeter College, in
his famous book called " The Sufferings of the Clergy
in the Great Rebellion " to justify the ejection of 1662
by showing how many royalist clergy had been ejected
previously, so that the Act of 1662 might be considered
a sort of legitimate revenge. But the Royalists did
not return in 1660 after a victory over their enemies.
They returned by virtue of a union between the two
great parties analogous to that which had closed the
Wars of the Roses ; and though the Declaration of
Breda reserved the whole of the religious question
for the consideration of Parliament, yet that Declara-
tion was certainly not carried out fairly when the
ministry and the bishops used their influence in Par-
liament to prevent any toleration. The King himself
complained of the conduct of the bishops and other
leading churchmen in this matter. The result of
their action was disastrous in the University as else-
where
A revival of interest in Academical studies is shown by some new foundations. In 17 10 Meriel Symes, of Somerset, founded an exhibition for a poor scholar at Exeter College. In 1715 Dr. Hugh Shortridge, acting for Dame Elizabeth Shiers, founded two new fellowships for Herts and Surrey, though it was not until 1744 that they were actually created. Short- ridge also gave the Library the best part of its existing funds, and founded a fund for buying advow- sons for the College. Dr. John Reynolds founded
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