By Stan/Ey French the History of DOWNING COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
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The History of DOWNING COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE by Stan/ey French The History of DOWNING COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE by Stan/ey Fre11ch DOWNING COLLEGE ASSOCIATION 1978 CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE MARRIAGE 7 CHAPTER 2 UNBREAKABLE BOND 15 CHAPTER 3 THE OLD MAID 23 CHAPTER4 THE GRASS WIDOWER 31 CHAPTER 5 THE LAST OF THE LINE 43 CHAPTER 6 INTO CHANCERY 51 CHAPTER 7 WICKED LADY 59 CHAPTER 8 INDEFATIGABLE CHAMPION 67 CHAPTER 9 UPHILL ALL THE WAY 77 CHAPTER 10 THE IDEAL AND THE REAL 82 CHAPTER 11 FRANCIS ANNESLEY AND HIS COLLEAGUES 89 CHAPTER 12 OPENED FOR EDUCATION 95 CHAPTER 13 TROUBLE IN ARCADY Ill CHAPTER 14 STAGNATION AND PROGRESS 124 CHAPTER 15 ACHIEVEMENT 132 THE FOUNDER'S FAMILY TREE 142 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 143 PRINCIPAL SOURCES 144 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Cover: Sir George Downing, third baronet, founder of Downing College, Cambridge. (From a miniature owned by Capt. G. D. Bowles.) 2. Frontspiece: Francis Annesley, Master 1800-1812 without whose persistence Downing College would not have been founded. (From the copy in the Senior Combination Room, Downing College of the portrait by A. Hickel at Reading Town Hall.) 3. Sir George Downing, first baronet, founder of the Downing fortune. (From a copy of the portrait at Harvard.) 13 .,. 4. Lady {Mary) Downing, n~e Forester, wife of the third baronet. (From the portrait at Willey Hall; photograph given by the late Lord Forester.) 25 5. Lady (Margaret) Downing, nle Price, wife of the fourth baronet. {From the portait in Downing College Hall.) 63 6. Downing College as it might have been. (From an engraving at Downing College, of an illustration in Le Keux, Cambridge, 1862.) 85 7. Downing College Hall, circa 1890. (From a composite picture published by Beynon & Co. and drawn by H.Hill.) 119 8. Downing College, Senior Combination Room, circa 1890. (From a composite picture published by Beynon & Co. and drawn by H. Hill.) 125 9. Downing College gates in Downing Street, and lime avenue, circa 1890. (From a photograph by J. Palmer Clark.) 129 10. Downing College, Upper Room above the Senior Combination Room, which was used as a Chapel from 1821 to 19 51. (From a photograph taken by the late Canon G. F. Woods.) 135 11. Downing College before "Graystone". (From a photograph by Scott and Wilkinson.) 137 2. Francis Annesley. Saviour of the Downing Cause and first Master. CHAPTER l THE MARRIAGE The foundation of Downing College, Cambridge, in 1800 was the consequence of the marriage of two children a century earlier. The wedding took place so quietly that we do not know the exact date or where the ceremony was performed. What we do know is that on a February day in the year 1700 a pretty little girl of thirteen named Mary Forester was the bride of her cousin, George Downing, who was two years older. They both lived at Dothill Park, near Wellington, Shropshire, the home of Sir William Forester, who was Mary's father and George's uncle by marriage. Mary's mother, Lady Forester, and George's mother Lady Downing were sisters, the d·aughters of James Cecil, third Earl of Salisbury. Mary Cecil was happy in her marriage with Sir William but her sister Catherine was so badly treated by her husband, Sir George Downing, the second baronet of East Hatley, Cambridgeshire, that when she died in 1688 the gossips said it was his conduct which killed her. Her younger son James had died in 1686. His brother, christened George after his father and grandfather, was only three at the time of her death. The widowed baronet did not wish to bring up his son'himself, perhaps because he realised he was not well-fitted to do so, and quickly accepted Lady Forester's offer to take George under her wing with her own children at Dothill Park. As Sir George was much wealthier than Sir William he probably entered into an agreement to pay for his son's support, and to show that he did not intend to disinherit George when he was out of his custody he made a will shortly after his wife's death leaving nearly every thing he owned to the ·boy. This meant that in due course George would inherit the greater part of the fortune left by his grandfather, the first Sir George Downing, whose career was succinctly but uncharitably described 7 by the diarist Evelyn as that of a man "who had been a great traitor against his Majesty (Charles 11), but now insinuated into his favour and from a pedagogue and fanatic preacher not worth a groat had become excessive rich". That career began in Massachusetts, where his father Emanuel Downing, the son of an Ipswich headmaster, was an influential settler and his mother Lucy the sister of the first Governor, Adam Winthrop. In 1642 George's name appeared in the second place on the first list of graduates from Harvard College. He remained at the College for two years. teaching and preaching, then left Boston for the West lndies, where he preached. He then returned to Britain, where he made his way with such success that from being a chaplain in the regiment led by Colonel Okey he became Scout Master General in Cromwell's army in Scotland, member of Parlia ment for Edinburgh and the husband of Frances Howard, the lovely sister of an influential aristocrat, the first Earl of Carlisle. About 1657 Cromwell sent him to the Hague as his Resident representative, with a salary of £1000 a year. In that office George Downing appears to have played a double game, paving the way through contact with Charles II for his admission into the Royal service after the Restoration. The King knighted him in I 660. In I 6n he was the King's representative in Holland and dispatched a force to Germany to arrest three of the regicides, including his former commander, Colonel Okey whom he sent to England for trial and execution. The following year George Downing was rewarded with a baronetcy and the grant of land in Westminster on which he built a street which was to become world-famous - Downing Street. He played an important part in Governmental financial affairs and was the initiator of the Parliamentary practice of the appropriation of supplies. Samuel Pepys, who served under him, described him in his diary as "active and a man of business and values himself upon having of things do well under his hand". Whilst helping to look after the nation's nJoney he took good care of his own interest and was reported to have made £80,000 as a servant of the Crown, in addition to what he acquired during the Protectorate. When he died in 1684 he left estates at Wrestlingworth in Bedfordshire, in Cambridgeshire at Gamlingay, Croydon, East Hatley and Bottisham, in Suffolk at Cowlinge and Dunwich, and in Westminster. This fortune was probably increased by the second baronet as from 1681 to 1690 he held the lucrative sinecure of Teller of the Exchequer previously held by his father. The heir to all this wealth, and to a baronetcy as well, was the sort of husband any parents would welcome for their daughter. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries business arrangements between the parents of young couples were as often the reason for a marriage as was love. 8 Jonathan Swift was expressing a widely-held view when he congratulated a young lady on her marriage to a "person your father and mother have chosen for your husband ... a match of prudence and common good liking, without any of the ridiculous passion of romantic love". It is not surprising therefore that the Foresters used their special position to get their eldest daughter married to their nephew as soon as they could. They had no reason to hesitate because of the extreme youth of Mary and her cousin. The legal minimum marrying age for a boy was fourteen and for a girl twelve and bridegrooms and brides of those tender years were not unknown. If the Foresters wanted precedents they need look no farther than Lady Forester's own family: her eldest brother, the fourth Earl of Salisbury, a gross man "whose sluggish body was the abode of an equally sluggish mind" had married a girl of thirteen. Why did they keep the marriage secret? It can have been only because they were afraid some one might get. it annulled on the ground that the children were the victims of a fortune-hunting conspiracy, as in a recent case concerning a ten-year-old girl, Hannah Knight. Perhaps the person they particularly wanted to remain in ignorance of his son's committal to wedlock, with all that entailed, was Sir George Downing. He seems to have been completely ignored, on the ground that he was, it was said years later, "of unsound mind". While his son was being married he was probably far away in his manor at East Hatley, presumably contented with the company of Priscilla Payne, the woman with whom he was "living incon tinently" in 1695 when he was ex-communicated for immorality, and by whom he had a son. Whilst Mary's parents did not think her too young to be joined with her cousin for life in the sight of God and the service of Mammon they thought her not yet old enough to consummate the marriage. When, therefore, after the ceremony the bride and bridegroom were, as was the custom, "put to bed in the day time, and continued there'S little while" it was "in the presence of the company, who saw that they did not touch one another".