587
HERTFORD COLLEGE.
588
considered "half-cracked," announced that he had
"nominated, constituted and admitted himself Prin-
cipal " ! At this time the place was all but deserted.
It became a sort of no man's land, in which a score
of " strange characters " (" as if being ' half-cracked '
were a qualification for admission ") squatted rent
free. Eventually the University took upon itself to
close the building. In 1820 the building adjoining
Cat Street actually fell down "with a gieat crash
and a dense cloud of dust."
Magdalen Hall (on this site) 1820- 1874.
On January 9th, 1820, a fire deprived Magdalen Hall of its local habitation . . In 18 16 the Pre- sident and Fellows had procured an Act of Parlia- ment transferring the site and buildings of Hertford Society to Magdalen Hall, i.e. technically, to the University in trust for the Hall. With part of the small property of the College, the Hertford Scholar- ship was founded : the rest passed to the Society of Magdalen Hall, which in 1822 took possession of its new home. A word must be said as to the traditions of which Hertford College thus became the inheritor.
It was in this Hall that the Ultra-Protestant tradi- tions of Magdalen lingered after they had died out in the College itself. It had been within the walls of Magdalen Hall that the English Reformation had its true beginning in certain meetings for Bible-reading started by William Tyndale, afterwards the translator of the Bible ; and in the seventeenth century, when the Laudian movement had got the upper hand in the Colleges at large, it became a refuge for the oppressed Puritans. At one time it boasted three hundred members. In 1631 its Principal, John Wilkinson, and Prideaux, Rector of Exeter College, were summoned before the King in Council, at Woodstock, and re- ceived " a publick and sharp reprehension for their misgoverning and countenancing the factious partie." Soon after, Oxenbridge, one of its tutors, was " dis- torted " for his Puritanism. In 1640, Henry Wilkin- son (also of the Hall) was suspended for preaching "in a very bitter way against some of the ceremonies of the Church. " But the day of vengeance came. When the Parliamentary Visitors came to Oxford, the sus- pended tutor, Henry Wilkinson, senior, commonly known as " Long Harry," was the most prominent and zealous of the Visitors. The students of Magdalen Hall and New Inn submitted to a man, and the places of the ejected Fellows and Scholars were largely recruited from their number. A very large proportion of the eminent Puritans of the seventeenth century came from these two Halls. A few of the distinguished Magdalen Hall men, whom Hertford College now claims as a sort of step-mother, may be added — John L'Isle, President of the High Court of Justice ; John Glynne, Lord Chief Justice of England under Crom- well ; William Waller, the Cromwellian poet (after- wards at Hart Hall) ; Sir Matthew Hale, the most famous of English judges ; Sydenham, "the English Hippocrates"; Sir Henry Vane; Pococke, the Ori- entalist ; and Dr. John Wilkins, the mathematician (afterwards Warden of Wadham, then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Chester). Few Colleges in the University ever sent out so many distinguished men within so short a time. But the greatest name that Magdalen Hall can boast figures oddly in this list of Puritan worthies. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, entered when not quite fifteen, in 1603, and went down in 1607 with the B.A. degree. Clarendon was also a member of the
Hall for a short time while waiting for a demyship at
Magdalen College. Swift, whose undergraduate life
was passed at Dublin, took his Oxford B.A. from
Magdalen Hall in 1692, and proceeded M.A. a few
weeks later, during which interval we may perhaps
assume that he resided in the Hall.
A word must also be found for the distinction given to the last days of this famous Hall by the long Frin- cipalship of Dr. Macbride(i8i3-i868) the well-known evangelical leader, and the Vice-principalship (1832- 1848) of William Jacobson eminent as a patristic scholar and afterwards Bishop of Chester. During this period, the Hall became once more one of the largest societies of the University. Thorold Rogers, Delane of the Times, and "Observer" Johnson — a prominent figure in the early annals of Tractarianism — were amongst its most distinguished members.
Hertford College, founded 1874.
The last of the many vicissitudes which this vener- able site has experienced remains to be recorded. In 1874 the defunct Hertford College was recalled to life by the munificence of Mr. T. C. Baring, M. P., who endowed it with seventeen Fellowships, and thirty Scholarships of £100 per annum, mostly limited to members of the Church of England. An Act of Par- liament gave the new foundation " All such rights and privileges as are possessed or enjoyed or can be exercised by other Colleges in the University of Oxford ; " and Dr. Richard Michell, the last Principal of Magdalen Hall (who, indeed, had already introduced into Parliament a bill for the transfor- mation of the Hall into a college), became the first Principal of the present Hertford College.
While future ages will feel towards the name of Baring all the loyalty that is a Founder's due, it is a fortunate circumstance that the accidents which have been related enabled him to give to his new founda- tion the only thing which money could not buy — a slight flavour of antiquity. The existing foundation is substantially the creation of Mr. Baring, but enough remains of its predecessors — the Elizabethan Hall now transformed into a Library, the Jacobean Common-rooms which represent the pre-Newtonian Hart Hall, Newton's Chapel with the adjoining "Angle," the plate and pictures of Magdalen Hall and its ten Scholarships — to give us a link with the past, a not uninteresting past, of which, however glorious its future, the College need never be ashamed. In one sense, notwithstanding the newness of its foundation, the College belongs to the past more than its more venerable sisters. It is untouched by recent legislation, its Statutes are constructed upon the old model, and it still rejoices in Fellowships which are tenable during life and celibacy.
H. RASHDALL, M.A.
This notice is abridged from a chapter by the same writer in The Colleges of Oxford, ed. by Rev. A. Clark, M.A., London, 189 1 (by kind permission of Methuen & Co.).
