to such treatment, was soon harassed and scared into helpless agitation. When other academicians who were more capable of defending their cause attempted to speak, they were rudely silenced. "You are not vice-chancellor. When you are, you may talk. Till then, it will become you to hold your peace." The defendants were thrust out of the court without a hearing. In a short time they were called in again, and informed that the commissioners had determined to deprive Pechell of the vice-chancellorship, and to suspend him from all the emoluments to which he was entitled as master of a college, emoluments which were strictly of the nature of freehold property. "As to you," said Jeffreys to the delegates, "most of you are divines. I will therefore send you home with a text of Scripture, Go your way and sin no more, lest a worse thing happen to you.'"*

These proceedings might seem sufficiently unjust and violent; but the king had already begun to treat Oxford with such rigor, that the rigor shown toward Cambridge might, by comparison, be called lenity. Already University College had been turned by Obadiah Walker into a Roman Catholic seminary. Already Christ Church was governed by a Roman Catholic dean. Mass was already said daily in both those colleges. The tranquil and majestic city, so long the stronghold of monarchical principles, was agitated by passions which it had never before known. The under-graduates, with the connivance of those who were in authority over them, hooted the members of Walker's congregation, and chanted satirical ditties under his windows. Some fragments of the serenades which then disturbed the High Street have been preserved. The burden of one ballad was this:

"Old Obadiah

Sings Ave Maria."

When the actors came down to Oxford, the public feeling was expressed still more strongly. Howard's Com

* See the proceedings against the University of Cambridge in the collection of State Trials.

mittee was performed. This play, written soon after the Restoration, exhibited the Puritans in an odious and contemptible light, and had therefore been, during a quarter of a century, a favorite with Oxonian audiences. It was now a greater favorite than ever; for, by a lucky coincidence, one of the most conspicuous characters was an old hypocrite named Obadiah. The audience shouted with delight when, in the last scene, Obadiah was dragged in with a halter round his neck; and the acclamations redoubled when one of the players, departing from the written text of the comedy, proclaimed that Obadiah should be hanged because he had changed his religion. The king was much provoked by this insult. So mutinous, indeed, was the temper of the university, that one of the newly-raised regiments, the same which is now called the Second Dragoon Guards, was quartered at Oxford for the purpose of preventing an outbreak.*

These events ought to have convinced James that he had entered on a course which must lead him to his ruin. To the clamors of London he had been long accustomed. They had been raised against him, sometimes unjustly, and sometimes vainly. He had repeatedly braved them, and might brave them still. But that Oxford, the seat of loyalty, the head-quarters of the Cavalier army, the place where his father and his brother had held their court when they thought themselves insecure in their stormy capital, the place where the writings of the great Republican teachers had recently been committed to the flames, should now be in a ferment of discontent; that those highspirited youths, who a few months before had eagerly volunteered to march against the western insurgents, should now be with difficulty kept down by sword and carbine, these were signs full of evil omen to the house of Stuart. The warning, however, was lost on the dull, stubborn, self-willed tyrant. He was resolved to transfer to his own Church all the wealthiest and most splendid foundations

* Wood's Athenæ Oxoniensis; Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber; Citters, March, 1686.

of England. It was to no purpose that the best and wisest of his Roman Catholic counselors remonstrated. They represented to him that he had it in his power to render a great service to the cause of his religion without violating the rights of property. A grant of two thousand pounds a year from his privy purse would support a Jesuit college at Oxford. Such a sum he might easily spare. Such a college, provided with able, learned, and zealous teachers, would be a formidable rival to the old academical institutions, which exhibited but too many symptoms of the languor almost inseparable from opulence and security. King James's College would soon be, by the confession even of Protestants, the first place of education in the island as respected both science and moral discipline. This would be the most effectual and the least invidious method by which the Church of England could be humbled and the Church of Rome exalted. The Earl of Ailesbury, one of the most devoted servants of the royal family, declared that, though a Protestant, and by no means rich, he would himself contribute a thousand pounds toward this design, rather than that his master should violate the rights of property, and break faith with the Established Church. The scheme, however, found no favor in the sight of the king. It was, indeed, ill suited, in more ways than one, to his ungentle nature; for to bend and break the spirits of men gave him pleasure, and to part with his money gave him pain. What he had not the generosity to do at his own expense, he determined to do at the expense of others. When once he was engaged, pride and obstinacy prevented him from receding; and he was at length led, step by step, to acts of Turkish tyranny, to acts which impressed the nation with a conviction that the estate of a Protestant English freeholder under a Roman Catholic king must be as insecure as that of a Greek under Moslem domination.

Magdalene College at Oxford, founded in the fifteenth

Burnet, i., 697; Letter of Lord Ailesbury, printed in the European Magazine for April, 1795.

century by William of Waynflete, bishop of Winchester and lord high chancellor, was one of the most remarkable of our academical institutions. A graceful tower, on the summit of which a Latin hymn was annually chanted by choristers at the dawn of May day, caught far off the eye of the traveler who came from London. As he approached, he found that this tower rose from an embattled pile, low and irregular, yet singularly venerable, which, embowered in verdure, overhung the sluggish waters of the Cherwell. He passed through a gateway overhung by a noble oriel, and found himself in a spacious cloister adorned with emblems of virtues and vices, rudely carved in gray stone by the masons of the fifteenth century. The table of the society was plentifully spread in a stately refectory hung with paintings and rich with fantastic carving.

The service of the Church was performed morning and evening in a chapel which had suffered much violence from the Reformers, and much from the Puritans, but which was, under every disadvantage, a building of eminent beauty, and which has, in our own time, been restored with rare taste and skill. The spacious gardens along the river side were remarkable for the size of the trees, among which towered conspicuous one of the vegetable wonders of the island, a gigantic oak, older by a century, men said, than the oldest college in the university.

The statutes of the society ordained that the Kings of England and Princes of Wales should be lodged in their house. Edward the Fourth had inhabited the building while it was still unfinished. Richard the Third had held his court there, had heard disputations in the hall, had feasted there royally, and had mended the cheer of his hosts by a present of fat bucks from his forests. Two heirs-apparent of the crown, who had been prematurely snatched away, Arthur, the elder brother of Henry the Eighth, and Henry, the elder brother of Charles the First, had been members of the college. Another prince of the blood, the last and best of the Roman Catholic archbish*This gateway is now closed.

ops of Canterbury, the gentle Reginald Pole, had studied there. In the time of the civil war Magdalene had been true to the cause of the crown. There Rupert had fixed his quarters; and, before some of his most daring enterprises, his trumpets had been heard sounding to horse through those quiet cloisters. Most of the fellows were divines, and could aid the king only by their prayers and their pecuniary contributions. But one member of the body, a doctor of civil law, raised a troop of under-graduates, and fell fighting bravely at their head against the soldiers of Essex. When hostilities had terminated, and the Roundheads were masters of England, six sevenths of the members of the foundation refused to make any submission to usurped authority. They were consequently ejected from their dwellings and deprived of their revenues. After the Restoration the survivors returned to their pleasant abode. They had now been succeeded by a new generation which inherited their opinions and their spirit. During the western rebellion, such Magdalene men as were not disqualified by their age or profession for the use of arms had eagerly volunteered to fight for the crown. It would be difficult to name any corporation in the kingdom which had higher claims to the gratitude of the house of Stuart.*

The society consisted of a president, of forty fellows, of thirty scholars called Demies, and of a train of chaplains, clerks, and choristers. At the time of the general visitation in the reign of Henry the Eighth, the revenues were far greater than those of any similar institution in the realm, greater by one half than those of the magnificent foundation of Henry the Sixth at Cambridge, and considerably more than double those which William of Wykeham had settled on his college at Oxford. In the days of James the Second the riches of Magdalene were immense, and were exaggerated by report. The college was popularly said to be wealthier than the wealthiest abbeys of the Continent. When the leases fell in-so ran

* Wood's Athene Oxoniensis; Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy.